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celery from my garden salad—I’m trying to get back to where my waistline once belonged—and ranch dressing practically leapt off the fork onto my shirt. Had to make it past the hand holding the napkin, too. It was very persistent ranch dressing.
    “And it will get you publicity.”
    I dabbed at the spot on my shirt. “Is that such a crime? The theatre hasn’t exactly turned central New Jersey on its ear with popularity. What’s wrong with drawing a little attention? ” I asked.
    Sharon stared off into space as she droned, “Nothing.” Then she sat and stared some more. I knew that meant something was coming out of left field, and I braced myself for it.
    But then Sharon sighed, and now I knew it was serious . This was the way she’d acted just before she told me that she and Gregory were, let’s say, more than professional acquaintances.
    “We’ve never talked about The Kiss,” she said. The capital letters were implicit in the way she said it.
    I exhaled. “You had me worried for a minute,” I said. “I thought you were going to say you’re moving to Anchorage, Alaska, and couldn’t decide how to tell me.”
    Her eyes narrowed a little. I put down my fork. “Well, we’ve never talked about it,” she reiterated.
    I decided to act casual, and went back to spearing green things that used to be in the earth. “So we haven’t talked about it,” I said. “We kissed in my office, once, four months ago. It hasn’t happened again. What is it you want to say?”
    She glared at me for a time. “You’re being impossible.”
    “I’m not, you know. If I were impossible, by definition you’d be eating alone.”
    When you’ve known someone for ten years, and were married to her for six of them, you get to know her expressions. Sharon’s look repeated her last sentence.
    “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about the kiss.”
    “No. It’s obvious you don’t want to.” There were reasons we got divorced that had nothing to do with Gregory. Well, very little to do with Gregory.
    “Come on,” I said, now begging to participate in a conversation I’d rather have avoided. “I want to hear what you have to say.”
    Clearly, she had been rehearsing in her mind, because she dove right in: “I think the kiss meant something. I think we’ve both been trying to deny that it did, but the fact that we haven’t talked about it for all these months means it was significant. If it were casual, one of us would have mentioned it in passing. I know us; I think we need to talk about why we did that.”
    “Okay. We were in a small office, standing very close to each other, and I still find you very attractive,” I said. “We’ve been apart for almost two years. Longer, if you count the time we were still married but not talking to each other. So I slipped for a moment.”
    Sharon’s face said, “Oh, please,” while her voice said, “Come on, Elliot. It’s obvious. Both of us are trying to deflect our emotions and not dealing with the possibility that we might still have feelings for each other. We’re in classic avoidance mode.”
    I looked at her for a moment. “You and Gregory are in couples therapy, aren’t you?” I asked.
    She actually avoided my eyes. “Yes,” she said.
    “How’s that going?”
    “I’m not seeing a lot of effort on Gregory’s part to deal with his . . . jealousy.” Sharon’s second husband had behaved badly—okay, very badly—after he’d inadvertently witnessed The Kiss. He had, in fact, tried to commit violence on my person.
    “He’s blaming you,” I guessed.
    “And it’s so unfair,” Sharon nodded. “Okay, so maybe I reacted to some friction in our marriage by coming back to you for a minute , but come on! If he’d done the same thing, I wouldn’t have tried to kill the woman he’d kissed.”
    “I would have vaccinated her and given her a Purple Heart,” I said. That was probably a miscalculation.
    Sharon gave me a curdling stare. “You know, our marriage