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bloodlust and an aptitude for duplicity, both of which served me well during several pretty hairy undercover assignments.
    All told, I guess we know that bin Laden’s life wasn’t much affected by my efforts in the Global War on Terror. But there are several Saudifinanciers who are right now wondering how the hand of Allah guided them to Kazakhstani prison camps.
    I never went back to school, and five years of such quiet victories garnered me Susan Mercer’s contact information. Which proved to be worth a quadrupling of my salary upon joining Red Rook Security.
     
    I found myself well suited to my new job and advanced rapidly. But my pleasant routine was again swamped by romance. I managed to meet and hang on to a lovely girl named Erica, a whip-smart redhead brimming with levity. Though a member of the class two years below mine at school, she’d already made vice president at a stylish record label. We spent long nights at outer-borough rock clubs and abused the flexibility of our work schedules with endless mornings of canoodling sloth. Last winter I tendered a big diamond on a Balinese beach under an almost unrealistic canopy of stars. We’d been very happy.
    Six weeks before our wedding, I walked into my study to find Erica leaning over a series of pictures spread out on my desk. I prepared a guilty cringe, thinking of the palliative measures my friends had recommended for when the fiancée discovers your porn stash. But as she turned, I noticed that the photos had been scattered with wet blotches.
    She regarded me red-eyed, evaluating. And I realized how bad this was. Which pictures she’d found. I stayed silent for a moment, thinking, I’m not that awful. It’s not as terrible as it seems .
    “You know there’s really nothing you can say.”
    She was right.
    I’d often marveled at the way my peers tended to date bad women. Bossy drunks and fashion monsters. But the peril of living with a brilliant and marvelous lady is that she’s hard to fool, and the guilt is crushing when you disappoint her.
    The images would look almost innocuous to most people. The surprisingly tasteful artifacts of an intimate photo session between two young lovers. But the model was a slender collegiate woman with long blond hair. You’d have to call her willowy. Her only adornment in the last of them: a string of pale scarlet pearls. I was always amazed that Blythe had let me photograph her, and I savored those demonstrations of her trust.
    “James, I just can’t ever be her. I’m sorry.”
    I wanted to explain. Not to defend myself; I’d have gladly swallowed a puffer fish if I thought it could magically draw away her pain. I wanted her to know that I’d kept those pictures not as fetishes to creep in and venerate late at night, but rather as proof that I could bear thinking about Blythe. That it was safe to revisit those moments. In the same sense that former smokers always say, “You haven’t really quit until you can walk around for a month with a pack in your pocket.” The fact that I hadn’t pulled them out in years proved that I was cured.
    But the last stage of beating cigarettes is when you tire of carrying around that stupid box and finally discard it. Erica had said to me at the beginning, “Creature, I know what she meant to you back then. I know how intense young love can be. So I need to know, once and for all: you’re not still holding on to any of that, are you?”
    And now she’d run the numbers and come up with the only logical answer. Weaselly quant that I am, I fought to suppress the protest that numbers are just symbols and thus are infinitely malleable. Two and two doesn’t always equal four. But normal people view those who make such arguments with even greater contempt than the ones who can’t do the arithmetic to begin with.
    The undeniable fact of the matter remained: when I bought the ring, those pictures had to go into the fire.
    Classy to the end, Erica departed without hysteria. She left