Catherine walked into the room. Several heads turned, some surreptitiously, others more openly. She was elegant, confident, and impeccably dressed. The gaze energized her and she expected it.

When our eyes locked, I approached. After several minutes of pleasantries and exchanging business cards, we each continued to “work the room”. But before I left, she suggested that we get together when she returned from vacation.

I was more than a little surprised to receive a postcard from Scotland a couple of weeks later, with a note challenging me to a chess game on her return.

She hardly looked like the grandmaster type, so I was intrigued and accepted her challenge. That’s how it began. We met at the food court for lunch and I brought my portable chess set. Right away we had a dispute about which square to place the White Queen. That is when I knew it was not about chess.

In the coming weeks we met at various restaurants to play chess. Usually, we would set up the pieces and forget to play, distracted by our engaging conversations. Eventually, we neglected to set up the pieces, and the traveling chess set remained unnoticed on an extra chair by the table.

Catherine had just moved to Florida from California to care for her ageing, and dying, father. She was in process of divorcing her husband of two years, an alcoholic Hollywood society dentist, and hoped for a very favorable settlement. Her father was not only a miser but also an alcoholic. Catherine was hoping for a big inheritance, but her sister had her own aims.

It was easy to see why Catherine had been an aspiring starlet in her youth. The daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and an Anglo father, she was extraordinarily beautiful. Long flowing hair framed her face and her high cheekbones accentuated the small, pursed smile. The muscles on her body were taut from many hours spent in Gold’s gym. The sound of her sweet voice was like listening to nightingales. She was both coy and sophisticated, the result a lifetime of experience as the object of men’s attention. Her skill dealing with them revealed how much she enjoyed, even craved, that attention.

We began going out at night, though we would always arrive at our destination separately. She never allowed me to pick her up where she lived. Sometimes she said because her father was too strange, other times because her room was too shabby. Later she claimed that her alcoholic ex-boyfriend was stalking her, so she did not want to get me involved. It was probably all those reasons, though I never did find out for sure.

She clearly wanted to shield me from the tawdry parts of her life. Her father sounded quite insane and would spend hours stacking and restacking the canned goods in alphabetical order. Catherine seemed exiled to one small room in his house and was only too happy to find an excuse to leave. Out of that existence she tried to carve out an area where she could be free. Whenever I called, she was listening to one operatic aria or another. I asked her about it. She said that since her life was so ugly, she surrounded herself with beauty. Opera and nice clothes were the gateways to her fantasies.

She was frank and open about her life, even her self-destructive ways. One night after dinner at a posh restaurant she pulled several hand-written sheets of paper out of her pocketbook and asked if I would like her to read. She began:

I was young and had played bit parts in a few movies. But my career was going nowhere. He was an older successful director, repulsive to look at. But he was always buying me expensive things and his chauffeur would pick me up for dates.

She continued describing their courtship with exquisite and captivating detail. She related his offer of marriage which she accepted, even though their courtship had always been chaste. On their wedding night, he could not consummate the marriage. The thought of a passionless, sexless marriage overwhelmed her. The next day she moved out and had the marriage annulled.

That is how it continued. Dark, quiet restaurants, and the story of her life read from handwritten college-ruled sheets, page after page of every detail of her life. The story of her second husband in Washington. Their fights, their infidelities. The day he took their two sons and furniture and disappeared to California. The birth defect of the older son. The estrangement of the younger son who has refused to speak to her for 10 years.

It was all there, past and future. It never bored me — she was actually quite articulate and her voice would have made the Yellow Pages a scintillating experience. Finally, she pulled out another set of papers, these much more worn and wrinkled. They described her ideal man to the minutest detail, because she believed in the law of attraction. If she visualized him vividly enough, he would appear in her life. I always listened, interrupting once in a while with a question.

Strangely enough, what she desired most of all was a crystal rosary. I had one custom made for her from Waterford crystal beads with a gold crucifix and medal. It was quite beautiful. I surprised her with it on her birthday at a restaurant. She was absolutely thrilled and cried convulsively with joy. That was the only time I ever saw her happy.

She read again, this time brimming with pride as if her imaginary boyfriend were sitting in the same room with her. He would be handsome, charming and educated. He would cherish her above all else in the world. He would bring her gifts, they would travel, and share quiet moments in the country. And most importantly, of course, he would not be an alcoholic nor a recovering alcoholic, because she had had enough of that. I was seeing myself in that description.

She then described him in excruciating physical detail, his build, his hair, even down to the color of his eyes. That’s when I realized it was over between us — my eyes are brown.