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relationship?”
    “You are. I’m not having sex with these other women.”
    “What’re you doing?” I asked although not wanting to know.
    “Kissing, touching their breasts. That’s it.”
    He turned to me, looking embarrassed, to see how I was taking the news.
    “That’s enough for me. Who says you’ll stop there? You’re like a kid in a candy shop and that’s fine for you, but I can’t just be one of your many goodies,” I said.
    “I have to think about this. By the way,” he added, “these women tell me I’m a great kisser.”
    Eighth grade all over again.
    “I still want to make love with you tonight. Don’t know what you’re thinking or will be thinking. But one more time?” he asked.
    “Might be the last time.”
    “I’ll call you tonight with my decision,” he said the next morning.
    What would the master negotiator, the brilliantly successful man who had been involved in scores of deals say? Len had told me he never backed down, the king of manipulation in any deal.
    That night I lay sprawled out on the leather couch in the family room, enraptured by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera . The room was my cocoon, cozy and comforting, with a floor to ceiling brick fireplace, built-in oak bookcases and large windows looking out to a wooded knoll. The phone rang at ten.
    “I thought about it and I think that there is only one option. I want to have one-night stands and sleep around. We can keep dating,” Len said.
    It didn’t take me a second to respond.
    “That’s fine for you but it won’t work for me. I’m not interested in a man if that’s what he wants. If I’m not enough for you sexually, then I’m out,” I said.
    Dead silence.
    “I need more time to think.”
    “I’m going to Atlanta for work on Monday and will be back on Thursday. Why don’t you think about it and call me then?” I said and hung up the phone.
    My colleagues and I were back at The Oasis on Monday for lunch with my flight scheduled to leave for Atlanta at four that afternoon.
    “Would you feel awful if it’s really over?” Rachel said.
    “Well, the sex isn’t very good. He doesn’t have a clue yet how to please a woman.”
    My friends laughed.
    “Is he teachable?” Zoë asked.
    “I’m not sure. He’s very tender when he kisses me but after that he wants me to please him. He could be a real project. Not a big loss at this point.”
    “I wonder if he had affairs during his marriage. Men don’t have sex twice a year,” Rachel declared.
    “Maybe he sublimated all of that sexual energy into his work and that’s why he’s so successful,” Bonnie said.
    “He swears that he never cheated on Judy. He’s always bragging about what a loyal guy he is.”
    “How could he have had affairs if he’s so inexperienced in bed?” Bonnie asked.
    “Because women serviced him. He’s probably never had to please anyone outside of work,” Zoë said.
    “Can you believe that I thought I was in an exclusive relationship and sleeping with him while he’s still reading and responding to the personals in New York magazine?”
    Atlanta was rainy and miserable. The relationship appeared over. We’d had sex dozens of times and he said he had reveled in the intimacy. Although not the sex of which fantasies are born, I liked him. Maybe because he had that veneer of power and strength that had been absent from my life after Jake’s death. But if he wanted other women’s bodies, I knew it was the end for me.
    He called promptly Thursday night.
    “Hi,” he said in a soft, sweet, maybe conciliatory voice.
    “Hi.”
    “I want you to know that I sat down this week and made a list. Since Judy died, I’ve thought about what I wanted in a woman in my next relationship and you have every quality on that list. You realize we’re entirely compatible?”
    He paused.
    “And I don’t want to sleep around, that’s just what my guy friends told me I could do now that I’m single and, you know, in my