CLARICE RICHARDSON CAME around her desk and shook my hand when I entered her office.
“Come in,” she said. “Sit down. I’m glad to see you.”
I looked around.
“No campus cop this time,” I said.
“You’ve charmed me into submission,” she said.
“Happens all the time,” I said.
“I assume you are still chasing Goran,” she said.
“I’m trying to figure him out,” I said.
Clarice smiled.
“You, too,” she said.
“You mentioned when we talked last that when you were intimate, he seemed very strong.”
“Yes,” she said.
She smiled and looked away from me out at the now wintry landscape of her college.
“I attributed it to passion,” she said.
“Susan suggested that it hints of sadism,” I said.
“And she thought you should ask me about that?”
“She thinks you’re the only one intelligent enough to understand your experience.”
Clarice nodded.
“But not intelligent enough to have avoided it.”
“Nobody gets out of here alive,” I said.
She nodded.
“I didn’t think of it at the time, but perhaps there was something… I’m not sure sadistic is exactly right… but vengeful, perhaps.”
I nodded.
“Can you give me an example?” I said.
She blushed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I made this bed, so to speak. If I have to lie in it, I have to lie in it.”
I might not have chosen that metaphor. But maybe if I felt guilty…
“He would say things,” she said. “When he was… in me, he would say things like ‘Got you now, don’t I?’ ”
“Say it often?” I said.
“Things like that,” she said.
“You think he had some animosity toward women?” I said.
“I never felt it,” she said. “But in the circumstance, I was not at my most analytic, I fear.”
“None of us is,” I said. “Why do you suppose he had an affair with you?”
Clarice smiled.
“He found me attractive?” she said.
“Almost certainly,” I said.
“And available,” Clarice said.
“Were you wearing your wedding ring?” I said.
“I was,” Clarice said.
“Even though you were, ah, trolling?”
“Maybe I was ambivalent,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself I was trolling. Maybe I didn’t want to look like an old maid.”
“Fat chance,” I said.
She smiled faintly.
“Thank you,” she said.
“So he knew you were married,” I said.
“But not to wealth,” she said.
“Maybe the wealth was an afterthought.”
She nodded.
“The thing is,” Clarice said, “in an odd way, Eric and I owe this man a great deal. If I had not been with him, and if he had not tried to blackmail me, I don’t think either Eric or I would have found the strength to get help with our problems… nor to solve them.”
“But you did,” I said.
“Yes.”
I stood.
“I won’t bother you again,” I said.
And I left.