“I miss you too,” I assured him, as I took a sip of Paul's champagne. “I can hardly wait till you come home.” But I regretted it as soon as I said the words, Paul looked so hurt. And with a look of apology, I blew him a kiss. But he left the room as soon as I did. I suspected he was jealous, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

“It won't be long,” Peter promised. “Just make sure Paul behaves himself. I want to have a life to come home to when I get back … and you.”

“You will,” I promised. He was, after all, the reason all this had happened. But it was Peter I was in love with. At least I was sure of that much.

“I'll call you tomorrow night.” He sounded more relaxed by then.

I missed him more than ever when I hung up the phone, but Paul accused me of being maudlin again, and reminded me that that was why he was here.

“To keep your spirits up, Steph,” he said lovingly, as I joined him in my room. The kids had gone to bed, and now it was our time. Paul put some sexy samba music on, and lit candles on either side of my bed. “Forget about, him.”

“I can't do that,” I explained. “You can't just forget someone you love, it doesn't work like that.” But it was something he knew little or nothing about. He had wires instead of a heart, man-made mechanisms and computer chips where his brain would have been. As Peter had reminded me, he was entirely manufactured and man-made. It was an extraordinary feat of engineering, as was the double flip, as he did it again and again and again, late into the night. And Peter seemed as remote and unreal as if he had been on another planet. I wanted to keep him in my head, to believe in his reality, to know that he was coming back, and remember how much I loved him. But as Paul made love to me again and again that night, quite brilliantly, I found that Peter in his khaki pants and Oxford shirts was becoming a dim memory much faster than I would have thought possible, and only the Klone seemed real now.





Chapter Six

The first two weeks I spent with Paul Klone were the most extraordinary in my life, and in a way, it is almost impossible to explain. I had never had as much fun with any man, or laughed as much, or been as happy, not even with Peter. I talked to him in California regularly, but he was beginning to sound remote. Every time he asked what we were doing, and I told him, he got upset. It was hard to believe by then that sending me the Klone had been his idea. He was constantly annoyed about him, although I had never again mentioned our sexual endeavors to him. But in spite of my discretion, I think he knew Paul too well, and suspected what we were doing, though he no longer asked me directly.

Paul took me out to dinner almost every night, to ‘21,’ Cote Basque, La Grenouille, Lutece. And after he actually conquered the quadruple flip, he bought me an incredible emerald-and-diamond bracelet. He bought it at Harry Winston, with a ring to match, and an emerald necklace at Bulgari two days later, “just because he loved me.”

“How do you know?” I teased him, as he put the necklace on me. “That you love me, I mean.”

“I know because my neck hurts.” It was a sure sign with him. The other things he felt were either due to wire stress, or problems in his mechanism that he was promising to have fixed as soon as he went back to the shop, once Peter was back. But that was a moment in time neither of us could bear to think of. We lived each day to the max, and tried to convince ourselves it would last forever. We never talked about Peter.

Paul had lunch often at Peter's club, when we didn't spend the day in bed, and I had to do errands or keep appointments. It was hard having an affair with him, and keeping the rest of my life in order. And out of a sense of sheer obligation, every few days, he went to Peter's office to make sure everything was all right there. He loved it. I didn't question why he went, although I suspected it made him feel important. People bowed and scraped and catered to him, just as they did to Peter when he was there. It was heady stuff for a simple Klone. And he loved running his meetings, and making corporate decisions at random. It was hard work for him, he mentioned more than once, but he felt he owed it to Peter to put in an appearance for him. After all, initially that was why Peter had built him, although Paul admitted to me sheepishly his business systems weren't complete yet. But he said coming home to me after a hard day at the office made him feel nearly human. He loved being with me, and I with him.

Amazingly, the kids adjusted to him remarkably, and seemed suddenly to have no problem with the idea that he was sleeping in our guest room. After Charlotte's earlier vigilance about our “doing it,” she no longer seemed to care now and asked no questions, perhaps because she knew what the answer could be and didn't want to hear it. I continued assuring them that we were sleeping separately, though I'm not sure even Sam believed that anymore, but neither of them objected. And I forced Paul to go back to the guest room every night after our long sieges of passion. It was usually four or five in the morning before he got there, and a mere two or three hours until I had to cook breakfast. I didn't get a lot of sleep while he was there, but it was a sacrifice I was more than willing to make, considering what the rewards were.

And it was on one of his trips back to what we now called “his room,” that Paul ran into Sam at five o'clock in the morning. I hadn't noticed when he left me that he wasn't wearing the now familiar G-string, but had opted to make the brief walk back to the guest room naked. Had I seen that, I would have strenuously objected, in case he ran into Charlotte. But at that hour, he had been fairly sure that they were both sleeping. And covering his body was not always something he thought about. Since all the parts were interchangeable, and apparently he changed them regularly, he felt less intensely private about them than you or I would. I had to remind him more than once to wear clothes to breakfast, as he prepared to breeze from the room without so much as his G-string. He seemed to view his collection of Versace as aft more than an obligation to be decent.

In any case, he ran into Sam at five A.M. in the hallway. Apparently, Sam had had a bad dream and was on his way to find me, but ran into Paul instead, sauntering happily toward the guest room. I heard voices through the haze he'd left me in, and I peeked through the door to see my son looking up at Paul, who stood there, smiling at him, naked.

“How about a game of Monopoly?” Paul offered valiantly, as Sam stared at him in amazement. They played for hours, much to Sam's delight. The rest of us hated it, and Sam was so relieved to find someone to play it with him, he didn't even mind the fact that Paul cheated each time they played it. Sam beat him anyway, but this time he only guffawed at the offer.

“Mom would get real mad at us…. I have school tomorrow.”

“Oh … what are you doing up then?”

“There was a hippopotamus under my bed,” Sam explained with a yawn. “It woke me.”

“feah. That happens to me too sometimes. You've got to leave salt and half a banana under your bed. They hate salt and bananas scare them.” He said it with complete authority, as I debated whether to leave them alone or enter into the conversation. But I didn't want Sam to know that I was up, or that we'd been together.

“Really?” Sam looked impressed. He'd had the hippopotamus dream for years. The pediatrician had told me he'd outgrow it. “Mom says it happens if I drink too much soda before I go to bed.”

“I don't think so …” Paul said thoughtfully, and then looked at him with concern. For a minute, I was afraid he'd offer him a bourbon, but he'd been pretty good about not doing anything like it so far, although he drank enough of it himself to refloat the Titanic. “Are you hungry?” he offered instead, as Sam pondered the question and then nodded. “Me too. How about a salami sandwich, with pickles, and peanut butter?” It was a concoction they had devised together, and Sam's eyes lit up at the suggestion. And with that, Paul put an arm around him and began heading for the kitchen.

“You'd better put some clothes on,” Sam suggested helpfully. “My mom might wake up and come to see what we're doing, and you'll scare her if she sees you like that. She doesn't like anyone walking around naked, not even my dad when he lived here.”

“Okay,” Paul said, and disappeared into his bedroom for an instant, only to emerge in a fuchsia satin bathrobe with purple tassels and yellow pom-poms that even Gianni Versace would have balked at creating.

And with that, I saw them turn the corner in the hall and disappear toward the kitchen. I left them alone, satisfied that they would share a private moment over the salami sandwich they made. It was good for Sam in a way to have a man to talk to, even if he was bionic. I felt certain that nothing untoward would happen, and went back to bed to catch up on the little sleep still left to me before I had to make Paul's favorite waffles for breakfast. And in the morning I inquired innocently about the salami rinds in the sink and the open jar of peanut butter on the counter.

“Did someone get hungry last night?” I asked, as I put a plate of bacon between Paul and Sam. As usual, Charlotte was still dressing.

“Yeah, we did,” Sam confessed easily. “The hippo was back under my bed, and Peter made me a sandwich. He said to leave half a banana under my bed, the hippo'll be scared of it and he won't come back.” Sam sounded in control of his fear of it for the first time I could remember.

“And salt … don't forget the salt,” Paul reminded him, “it's the salt they're really scared of.” Sam nodded thoughtfully, and then smiled up at him for a long moment, as I watched them.