...And Never Let HerGo

her alone and away from everything, for . . . four days . . . we went [there] to work on our relationship.”
    Tom repeated a pattern that Anne Marie had seen many times before. He had been insistent that she should go to Virginia with him, but a night or two before they were supposed to leave, he abruptly took back the invitation. He was very solemn when he told her why he had decided against going. And once more he said that he thought it was time for her to move on without him. “Therefore, I told her we should not be going to the Homestead,” he recalled. “We had a major discussion and she was very tearful, and she cried and cried and cried on my shoulder, [and said] that she wanted us to go and wanted us to work on our relationship.”
    His perceptions may have been skewed; Anne Marie was already thinking that it was time to move on. It’s questionable whether she really cried. She
was
an emotional woman, who might well have wept over the end of an affair. But as it turned out, it was not the end. Tom changed his mind again and they went to the Homestead after all.
    Tom remembered that they had had an idyllic time during their four days there. He said he had taught Anne Marie to play golf, and that they had massages every day and strolled around the grounds. He had prevailed upon her to dance with him, because he loved to dance, although she hated it. She didn’t think she was graceful enough and she felt foolish, but he got his way as he usually did.
    On the drive back from Virginia, Tom took the long way home—even though she hated car trips. “She said herself she wasn’t very good company in a car,” he said. “She liked to look at the scenery . . . and on the way down, we really didn’t talk much. We just played tapes.”
    On the way back to Delaware, they
did
talk. Anne Marie carefully pointed out how many things they differed on. It began with something as prosaic as the fact that she liked Pepsi and Tom drank Coca-Cola. She began to write down their differences, calling it the “Coke/Pepsi list.” He thought it was all in good fun, and it may have been. It may also have been a very subtle and safe way for Anne Marie to show Tom how ill suited they were for each other.
    In retrospect, she was probably trying to ease out of the hold Tom had on her. The list covered everything from food preferencesand sleep habits to his being Italian and her being Irish. She was a Gen-Xer and he was a baby boomer; money bored him, and she was very conscious of every penny. For three pages, Anne Marie wrote down their differences in her distinctive hand with round letters and fancy capitals. And somewhere, hidden within the dozens of unimportant things, she noted
very
important things.
    “She wrote down that I’m academic,” Tom said, reading from the list a long time later as he was questioned by a friendly inquisitor. “She was nonacademic. . . . I was observant, and she described herself as ‘spacey.’ She wrote that I had a double standard and that she did not have two standards. I
do
have a double standard. I think there are things men should do and women shouldn’t. It’s that simple.”
    Anne Marie put down the thing about Tom that bothered her the most, sheltering it between the silly things. “She wrote down quite correctly that I’m a homebody,” Tom said. “I don’t like to travel and she loves to travel. She wrote down that I’m a control freak. She was in control of the
pen,
so she wrote that,” he said with a laugh.
    Tom was asked: “She didn’t write down anything opposite, under her name?”
    “No, she didn’t, which is interesting. . . . I remember getting into sort of a jocular argument about [that]. ‘How can you say I’m a control freak when you usually do everything you want?’ And she never wrote anything—I might have made some suggestions, you know, to complement that—but she never wrote anything down, and that’s odd, so to speak.”
    Anne Marie bent her head over the pages as Tom drove his Jeep Grand Cherokee toward Wilmington. She noted the things they
did
have in common: “Bread (from DiFonzo’s), Sinatra, music in general, National Public Radio, pasta, Italian food, movies on the VCR, reading, restaurants, finer things, children, wine, people . . .”
    It wasn’t nearly enough.
    And Tom’s memory of their trip as being idyllic warred with what Anne Marie told Kim Horstman. “She said it was a disaster,” Kim recalled. They had fought for most of the