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Now Susie asked Astrid to look in on Warren and cook an occasional meal for him. Then she had a talk with him and said she wanted to rent a funky little cubbyhole in Gramercy Tower on Nob Hill so she could have a base in San Francisco.

Warren’s tendency not to listen, to hear only what he wanted to hear, worked in Susie’s favor as she explained that she was not leaving him. They were not “separating.” They would stay married. Nothing would really change if she had a room of her own, a place where she could be herself in San Francisco. She simply wanted to surround herself with a city full of art and music and theater, she reassured him. Their lives were already on such different courses, and they both traveled so much anyway, he would barely notice the difference. With the children grown, it was time for her to tend to her needs. She told him, over and over, “We both—we both—have needs.” That part was for sure true.

“Susie wasn’t totally leaving either, that was the thing. She just wanted a change.”

In all of Susie’s travels, in her talk of buying this place or that place, it had never occurred to him that she would leave, because it would never occur to him to leave her. “Wanting a change” and “not totally leaving” were the kind of ambiguous Buffettesque statements they both tended to make to avoid feeling as though they were disappointing anyone.

And then she left.

Susie went off to Europe for a few weeks with her friend Bella Eisenberg. She returned to Emerald Bay for Christmas with the family but left to go back to Europe again, where she connected in Paris with Tom Newman, son of her friend Rackie. Susie and Tom, who would soon be joining his mother in her new home in San Francisco, became instant friends.43 Increasingly, it was clear that for Susie, having a place of her own in San Francisco did not mean renting a pied-à-terre that she would escape to for a week every now and then. Warren was hopeless at taking care of himself and Susie Jr. came back to Omaha for a couple of weeks to lend a hand. Since the Quicksilver wedding, she had spent much of her marriage calling her mother in tears. Big Susie was gently assisting her out of the marriage at the same time that she was extricating herself from many of the conventions that tied her to her own marriage. Susie Jr. tried to explain to her father that, given how much time he and her mother had been spending apart, his life was not going to be that different from before. But Warren had not previously thought of himself and Susie as living virtually separate lives. In his mind, Susie lived for him. She certainly acted as if she did when they were together. So it was a hard concept to grasp, that Susie wanted her own life and would not be there for him all the time.

Susie and Warren talked for hours and hours on the phone. Now that he understood, Warren would have done anything she asked to get her back, submitted to any conditions, met any demands—move to California, learn to dance. But apparently it was too late. He could not give her what she wanted, whatever that was. She explained it in terms of her freedom, her need to be separate and to fulfill her needs and find her own identity. She could not do that while spending all her time taking care of him. So he wandered aimlessly around the house, barely able to feed and clothe himself. He came to the office most days with a raging headache. In front of the staff, he maintained his self-control, although he did look as though he was not sleeping well at night. He was calling Susie every day, weeping. “It was as if they couldn’t live together and they couldn’t live without each other,” one person said.

Seeing her husband helpless and destroyed, Susie wavered. She told a friend, “I might have to go back.” But she didn’t. They both had needs. One of her needs was for her tennis coach to move to San Francisco. She installed him in a tiny separate apartment down the way from her own. His understanding was that this was temporary and that