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couldn't
take my eyes off Paula. Unfortunately , she wasn't in the market.
She'd gotten married recently, and it hadn't worked out, so she was
in the process of getting an annulment. Of course, from where I
was sitting, that was a good thing.
That's when my housekeeper came into the room and signaled
to me. I couldn't understand what she was doing. Couldn't she see I
was in the process of falling in love with this gorgeous creature? I
got up and went over. “What?” I said.
“There's a woman upstairs, in your bedroom,” she said.
Shit! I'd forgotten all about Miss Hawaiian Tropic. I told the
housekeeper to have her come down, and she did, and of course
Paula and my friends were there, and it was a little awkward. But
    what could I do? We had another round of drinks, and I showed
my guests to the door, and then Miss Hawaiian Tropic and I
retired to the bedroom. That was the night I began life anew as a
single man.
Of course, the next day, I couldn't stop thinking about Paula,
so I called her and we began to see each other, but not romantically.
She wasn't ready for that yet—she had that annulment to get
through—and I didn't mind. I just felt good being around her: This
was the kind of woman a man would wait for. We went out as
friends for about a month, and it was a real clean period in my life.
I wasn't drinking, and I'd stopped eating meat for a while, and I felt
physically pretty good—except for the arthritis, and my knees,
which were both banged to hell from the years of football. Paula
was also into clean living. She never had anything stronger than a
glass of wine, and she was serious about staying in good shape. She
had to be: She was a model, and a very successful one at that.
Strangely enough, this was the first time in my life I'd been out with
a woman who worked. I liked it, to be honest. Maybe it made her
more interesting to me, maybe it gave her more substance—I'm not
sure—all I know is that every time I saw her I liked her more.
It was during this period that Nicole's phone calls started
becoming more and more frequent, even obsessive, you might say.
She would begin with some news about the kids, as she always did,
then get to talking about her various personal problems—whether
it was with friends, with Kato, or even with this guy she was sup-
posed to be so damn crazy about. The constant phone calls got to
be a little much, frankly, especially since Paula and I were beginning
to get more serious about each other, so most of the time I ignored
them. I knew that if it was about the kids, and it was urgent, she'd
call Cathy Randa, my assistant, and Cathy always knew where to
find me.
Thankfully, I was actually pretty busy during this period. I
went down to New Orleans for about ten days, for the Olympic tri-
als, and spent most of July in Barcelona, covering the Olympics.
When I got back, I did some traveling for Hertz, and for a few
other corporate clients, and in the fall I returned to New York to
cover football. I came back to L.A. from time to time, of course—
once to do a story on the Los Angeles Raiders, and a couple of times
to shoot scenes for the Naked Gun sequel—but I hardly ever saw
Nicole, and I liked it that way. In fact, whenever I had to pick up
my kids, I usually asked Cathy Randa to fetch them for me. I didn't
want to get into anything with Nicole—not about the kids, not
about her love life, and not about my own love life—and I thought
this was the wisest course of action.
Then the calls began again, but this time they were less about
her various problems and more about the issue at hand—specifi-
cally, the divorce proceedings. This was when she informed me that
some of her friends had been advising her to exaggerate my so-
called violent tendencies. She had told them what I'd said right after
the 1989 fiasco—that I would willingly toss the prenuptial agree-
ment if something like that ever happened again—and apparently
they thought she should try to use that to get a