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“That was fun,” I said. “When can I see you again?”

“You name it,” she told me. Okay, breathe. She’s interested.

“How about Saturday?” I asked eagerly. “We can go hiking.”

“Saturday’s not good for me. I’m moving.”

“Great, I’d be happy to help,” I lied, thinking that’s as good a way as any to get to know each other.

Diane then looked straight at me, puzzled. “I don’t think my husband would understand that.”

“Your what?” She wasn’t wearing a ring, and I never imagined that she was married.

“My husband.”

“You’re married?”

“Yes, but I’m moving out on Saturday.”

Diane was stunned as well. She thought that I had been told about her circumstances, just as she had been fully briefed about mine. She was separating from her husband for the third and final time, preparing for a divorce. It was a tense moment all around. Diane later said that I had a look of disgust on my face. But I was more nonplussed than anything else. I had moved to California to start fresh, but this was a little too fresh for me. I would never date a woman who was married or at least still with her husband. Diane realized I had no idea that her marriage was long dead. She worried that I thought of her as a loose woman, out flirting while she had other commitments at home.

I got out of the car quickly. Neither of us knew quite what to say.

“Why don’t you call me when you’re free,” I said. She was silent and nearly in tears.

That Saturday afternoon, my telephone rang. It was Diane; she had moved into a condo.

“I’m free,” she said.

The next day we took a long hike together in the Santa Monica Mountains—with two other clerks. In fact, for the first several dates I always asked another couple or friend along. I just didn’t know the right thing to do, how to reconcile my attraction to this remarkable woman with knowing that she was married. Finally, Diane insisted that the two of us have a date alone. Someone had recommended a jazz club to her. The music and the food were both dreadful, but we finally started to open up to each other. In the coming weeks, over dinners of red snapper at a beachside café we came to like or late suppers after work at a French bistro not far from the site of that fateful Halloween party, Diane described the events that led to her unhappy and even threatening marriage. I listened with both sympathy and shock.

Diane had been raised in New York. Her mother, the daughter of West Indian immigrants, was a schoolteacher who also did the cooking, cleaning, washing, and other household chores with a sense of wifely duty and determination. Her father, a master electrician and former navy man, was a model of precision and rectitude, a stickler for detail, and a strict disciplinarian. Her early years in Brooklyn and Queens were, in some ways, similar to mine. Her family lived with her grandparents and extended family. Her parents loved her though her mother was rarely outwardly affectionate. Diane was shy and diligent, a bookworm who found her greatest fulfillment in the classroom.

She was also painfully self-conscious. One morning about three weeks into her second-grade year, she was suddenly advanced to the third grade because she was so far ahead of her second-grade peers. Petite and uncomfortable, Diane was escorted by the principal and introduced to her new class. As a gesture of welcome, she was invited to lead the class in the “morning exercises”—the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and singing of the national anthem. “Morning exercises” were unfamiliar to second graders, however, so Diane misinterpreted the invitation and started doing jumping jacks in front of the class. Even the teacher broke down in hysterics. Diane ran from the classroom, mortified. She would not return until her father brought her the next day.

Only sixteen when she graduated from high school, her parents forbade her from going to college outside the New York City public university system—or living away from home, for that matter—so she enrolled