"No," I said. "I keep thinking about Wade. I'm sure he would be hurt if he knew about all this, no matter what he pretends. It doesn't seem right to be such a tease, anyway," I told her. I didn't care if she accused me of being a prude, or being too much under the influence of the nuns at my orphanage.
"Oh, Wade," she said, sighing deeply. She looked away for a moment. When she turned back, I saw there were tears in her eyes.
"You think I'm just some tease, some sick flirt, just like Basil says I am, is that it?"
"I don't feel comfortable doing it with you, Ami," I admitted. "I'm sorry," I said, "but I do have the experience to know enough that men call women names like tease when they do what you're doing and what I'm doing when I'm with you.
"I mean it's like someone putting her finger close to a candle flame and pulling back just before it gets burned. First, you tell me to be extra cautious, and then you bring me to places like this and attract all sorts of men to us, just to shoo them away. I'm sorry," I said, realizing how harsh I sounded. My heart was thumping, too. Maybe she would just throw me out of her house now.
She looked at me long enough for me to realize she actually was making some major decision. Did she want to send me back to the orphanage, tell me I was hopeless after all? I girded myself for rejection. It was, after all, something I had lived with ever since I had been brought to my first orphanage. I was no stranger to it. At times I thought we were old friends, in fact.
"All right," she said, "I'll tell you something. It's my biggest secret, and I wanted to wait until we were even closer, but I'll rely on your promise to keep everything between us locked in your heart. Can I?"
"Yes," I said, holding my breath. Was she going to tell me she was having an affair? What would I do if she did, and what would I say? How could I hide that from Wade? He'd see it in my face for sure, I thought.
She sipped her drink and sucked in her breath. Then she straightened up and looked at me hard.
"The reason I was late picking you up that rainy day was because I ran over my time with my therapist. That's right, I see a therapist. We were making significant progress, according to her, and she didn't want to end it even though my hour was long over. I was so involved in what we were doing that I didn't pay any attention to the clock.
"Anyway, these nights out alone, this flirting I do, it's all part of my therapy," she claimed.
"What? How could this be therapy?"
"I know you'll find this hard to believe. but I've always been quite bashful and introverted. I didn't tell you the truth exactly when we first met. I exaggerated and made things up just so you would think more of me and we could get to be friends faster. I didn't really have that arm-long list of boyfriends. Actually, they were my wish list of boyfriends."
I shook my head in disbelief.
"I can see you don't believe me because I know so much and I'm so good at what we do now, but it took a lot of therapy to get me to be this selfconfident. I do this flirting just to reinforce myself. It's really harmless, but it boosts my ego and reinforces my self-image."
"I don't understand. Why would you need to boost your ego?" I asked. "You know everything about style. You know you're beautiful. Men are always looking at you."
She laughed.
"Right, now they do. I was quite a thin and gangly girl growing up. My nice features didn't develop until late in my adolescence, and my mother did little to help me develop any self-confidence. She had this stupid expression, 'You have to play with the cards you're dealt.' That was like telling me, You're not pretty. You'll never be pretty. Boys will never be interested in you, so face it and live with it. I didn't go out on a real date until I was a senior in high school! Well, you can just imagine what effect all that had on me. I told you how my father always called me Mon Ami, as if I was a friend and not a beautiful daughter.
"I saw the way other fathers doted on their daughters, treated them like little princesses and told them how beautiful and precious they were every chance they had. That wasn't my father's way. Between the two of them, I felt like your famous ugly duckling."
"But didn't you tell me you were a debutante?"
"Yes, and that was some disaster. The only reason my mother insisted I do it was to get herself on the society pages. We actually had a hard time filling up the guest list. I hated every moment of it. Wade wasn't aware of all this when we first met, and as he wasn't exactly a lady's man himself, it was easier for me to put on an act. To this day he believes I was the most popular girl at school. It's all right. Your husband should have some illusions and fantasies about you."
"Does Wade know you're in therapy now?" I asked.
"Yes. It was actually his idea," she said.
"But . . . I don't understand. If he still believes you were so popular, why would he want you to be in therapy?"
"There's more to my story," she said, waving the waiter away as he started to approach to see if we wanted anything more. "Because I was so desperate to be accepted and wanted, I let myself have a very bad experience."
"What kind of experience?"
"It's complicated," she said. "I've confused you enough, and you've been exposed to enough nittygritty in your life. Just know you can stop worrying about Wade. Worry about me or. . . actually, you don't have to worry about either of us. We're both fine. I'm fine," she insisted. "I hope you don't think that because of my own insecurity problems, I don't know what I'm talking about when I give you advice. One thing has nothing to do with another. It's like teachers often say, 'Do what I teach
, not what I do.' And besides, I have learned so much in the process of becoming assured and confident that I really can give you the benefit of great wisdom. Understand?"
I didn't, but I nodded.
"It's all right. Believe me. I'm fine now. I have a wonderful therapist. She's brought me a long way. It wasn't easy being the way I was and living with Wade and having Basil around. You can imagine how Basil would treat a woman with my kind of insecurity."