“Uh-huh,” I managed to say.
“He’s an investment banker and he loves me.”
“I see,” I said but Katrina heard something different, a complaint.
“You haven’t slept in our bed more than two nights in a row in half a year,” she condemned.
“I’ve been sleeping in the office. I’ve been . . . been thinking.”
“I need a real man in my life. Not a zombie.”
“When are you going?” I asked, wondering about the silence in our seven rooms.
“There’s no use in arguing,” she said.
“I’m not arguing. I’m asking you when you’re leaving.”
“Dimitri is going to stay with Andre and me until he finds a dormitory,” Katrina said, having a conversation in another dimension, with a different Leonid. “Shelly and Twill both want to stay with you.”
“But I had blood tests done,” I said from my separate reality. “Dimitri is the only one that’s mine.”
Katrina, in all her Nordic beauty and savagery, stood up from the table, knocking her chair to the walnut floor.
“You bastard!” she said and then stormed out of our apartment.
That was on a Wednesday, too. For six months I had been brooding over the corruption of my life. Katrina leaving meant nothing to me. We hadn’t loved each other for a very long time. We hadn’t ever lived in the same world.
On Monday Terry Swain announced his early retirement.
On Friday Aura Ullman put me on notice for Hyman and Schultz.
By Sunday Aura and I were lovers and I had decided that the only thing I could do was try to make right what I had done wrong. At night Aura and I slept wrapped in each other’s arms.