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just before Christmas, I was having my hair done at Churchill-Anderson, I was under the dryer and I heard her voice, Kim’s voice, behind me, she couldn’t see me, and she was telling the stylist to hurry because her father was picking her up for lunch. It just sent a chill through me, Paul, a positive chill—I can feel it now. And I watched in the mirror; I saw this father she was talking about come into the waiting room. It was Ole. It made me sick, seeing her hug him …”
    “Did you tell Helga?”
    “What else could I do? She was my best friend.”
    It was like something from an old Joan Crawford movie; I felt myself being anesthetized by Harriet Dierker’s voice, which grew increasingly short of breath as her plot thickened. But she held my attention. The story had momentum of its own and it just kept going on and on. Ole Kronstrom had refused to give up seeing young Kim, had funneled a good deal of his capital into clothes for Kim, a car for Kim, trips which Kim sometimes took by herself and occasionally with Ole. Eventually his money began to run low—it seemed incredible, but there it was—and of course Helga had left him, divorced him, and managed to come away with a handsome settlement.
    What Helga got, Harriet noted, she deserved for all those years of fidelity; what Kim Roderick did was, of course, reprehensible, typical, and utterly bloodthirsty, and who was I to argue?
    With Ole presumably on the ropes, Kim had then turned her sex ray on Larry Blankenship, who was still working for Pa (and for Ole, for that matter) but had moved from sales, through a company-financed accounting program, and into the public relations and advertising end of things. He’d had some “personality problems” and had consulted a psychiatrist but, even so, he was “a nice young man, very earnest,” and making a good salary. The sex ray did him in, however: Kim nailed him where he stood, married him, and Harriet wondered why. Love was out of the question; perhaps it was Kim’s misplaced striving for respectability.
    Pa had done everything he could to talk Larry out of it; he’d gone off his feed, spent night after night worrying about what the marriage would do to Larry. Harriet had never seen Pa take anything quite so hard, as if Larry were a son. It was about then that his health had seriously begun to fail. She could almost pinpoint it, the night he’d come upstairs to bed gray-faced, shaking; Larry was decided, he said; there was nothing left for him to say. The girl had him and Pa had fidgeted all night; a week later he’d had his first coronary. As far as Harriet was concerned, Pa was another of Kim’s victims. I wondered why Pa had taken it so hard; she offered no substantive explanation.
    So Larry and Kim were married. Pa’s health failed through a long winter, and what of Ole Kronstrom? Another peculiar facet glittered in the darkness of the story: Ole had given the bride away … and his wedding present to the happy couple was a honeymoon trip to Europe. He didn’t seem to resent her marriage, which left Harriet Dierker with only one rational conclusion. His relationship with Kim was stable, enduring, continuing.
    My head swam with the Byzantine complexity of it all. I had never looked upon myself as an innocent, but my God.
    “But Larry was blind to all that, Paul,” she said. The coffee was cold and the brioche were gone. “Self-deception. Was he happy? They were never happy, not really, I’m sure, certainly not after that first year. They had a child, who didn’t turn out right at all—not long after that, Larry left Dierker and Company. Pa tried to keep tabs on him and he moved through several jobs, never seemed able to find himself. They—Larry and Kim—stopped by one Christmas to see us; we gave them some eggnog. I just sat there—I didn’t know what to say to them—but Pa wanted to talk … But there wasn’t much to say. I don’t know to this day why they came to see us. She said almost