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upscale community. Even the smaller houses and condos in Brentwood had drifted into the sea sailed by millionaires. Of course, every resident’s initial cost depended on when his home was built and sold. John said there were old homeowners sitting on millions in capital gains. There was a rapidly diminishing number of building lots and square feet still available, which kept the prices up.
    John wasn’t a very wealthy man when we first met. He had a good salary, but his parents had signed over some significant stock assets to him. Some of them poured out significant additional income, and some he sold at an opportune time. In fact, he had doubled his portfolio before we were married.
    When my parents learned that John and I were getting serious, they were pleased, because it was easy to see that he was very intelligent when it came to financial planning. After all, this was his career, his life’s work and interest. A girl’s parents are almost more interested in their future son-in-law’s economic prospects than they are in his personality, even his passion for their daughter.
    Here was this man, John Clark, handsome to the point where he could be compared with movie stars or classic statues and paintings, who also had a stability most parents fantasized about when it came to a daughter’s future. Why shouldn’t my father and mother gush over him to the point where I would be embarrassed? While we were dating, I was always making excuses for them, and John was always understanding.
    “If and when I’m like your father, I’ll think along the same lines, especially if I have a daughter,” he said.
    “But you won’t behave like he does when your daughter brings home a boyfriend you approve of.”
    He just gave me that knowing, self-confident smile and gently jerked his head to the left, a small gesture that made me smile, too. When you first find yourself falling in love with someone, you are so tuned in to his or her every gesture. I loved the way John poured my glass of wine at dinner, for example. He would never reach over to do it but would first take my glass, pour the wine, whirl it in the glass, and then hand it to me. Little things like that made me feel special. I couldn’t help lavishing compliments on him, subtly or otherwise. Rather than thank me, he would kiss me, almost like a royal stamp of approval. But our relationship was far from one-sided.
    John never picked me up for a date without telling me how beautiful I looked. They weren’t simply appropriate comments or words of praise that one of my girlfriends could call “good come-ons.” I knew he was sincere because of what he appreciated. He was truly impressed with my attention to style, to choosing clothes that flattered my figure and favoring colors that heightened the beauty of my complexion and my eyes, a shade of blue he swore he had never seen. Those sorts of things were important to him, and he would no sooner be attracted to a ravishing, sexy beauty who paid no attention to them than he would to a female ape.
    “I love the fact that you know yourself so well and know that less is often more,” he told me, referring to how I wore my makeup, how much jewelry I put on, or how I styled my hair. It was important to him to be comfortable with a woman. As trite as it might sound, I knew he really believed it when he said we were a good fit.
    Besides looking good together, we could have intelligent conversations. I knew enough about economics, the stock market, and business to understand the things he said and add substantively to the discussion myself. I never tried to be someone I wasn’t or put on airs, and neither did John. Whatever hesitation, walls, and guarded language a man and a woman have when they first meet was diminished with every subsequent date John and I had, until we were naked and exposed, every fear, quirk, and dream revealed.
    Trust has to come before love. Maybe that was why John didn’t believe in the “at first