"Not long after I had hung up, the phone rang. I thought it was going to be my friend Maria. She's always calling me. She bugs me incessantly with her personal problems. But it wasn't her." Janet looked in David's eyes. She smiled. "It wasn't Maria. You know who it was?"

"The woman you had just hung up on?"

"Yes. It was her. Jeff's wife. As soon as I picked up the phone, she started yelling at me: 'Who are you? Why do you keep hanging up on me?' I hung up on her and the phone immediately began ringing again. I picked up the receiver and put it right back down. It rang again. I thought the phone was broken. I mean, I panicked. It kept ringing and ringing, pointing a finger at me, accusing me of being a home-wrecker. I honestly thought it was broken. I cried, 'Another goddamn bill to pay - for a broken phone!' I already had too many bills. And now this."

David laughed. Janet, on the other hand, grew increasingly serious and agitated. "I even thought of yanking the phone out of the wall. I wanted to throw it at a GTE executive and scream, 'Why don't you warn people about this?'"

"She must have pressed Star-69." David sought to calm her down by this explanation.

"I know that now. What a number! What does GTE mean by it?"

"I don't know." David leaned back in his chair. He laughed. "That's funny. That's extremely hilarious."

"Not at the time. Sometimes I think I'm too clever for my own good."

"What did you do when you found you couldn't stop the phone from ringing?"

"Well, I got in my car. I left my apartment and went out and got in my car and just drove. I drove as fast as possible. It's amazing I didn't get a speeding ticket. Thank God there were no cops out on Pacific Coast Highway. That's the only luck I had that day."