Theories of the Leisure Class

1.
He was the product of the cushiest schools, a software engineer who could have been a poet. She was a visual artist who could have been an attorney for a law firm specializing in international corporate litigation, but who spent half her life at artists’ residencies and the other half on earnings from Paris and New York galleries. In winter, they nested in their refurbished lower Manhattan loft; in summer, at a seaside cottage once owned by a dotty magnesium extraction heiress. So what were they doing in handcuffs, their Range Rover impounded, the cops reading them their Miranda rights? You have one call.

2.
He strode among his pastures with Nordic equanimity; she sprawled upon the velour divan munching seedless grapes, devouring with shaded eyes her well-thumbed copy of The Hours. He’d been a shipping magnate; she’d been his trophy. Once they’d traveled to the Preakness, after the Nile tour and the Bay of Naples houseboat. So what were they doing at the bottom of a ravine, blankly looking up?

3.
He’d overturned Triumphs among the steep leafiness of the Berkshires; she’d been his debutante for whom he’d cleaned up his act. Now he was a town pillar, a wild young man descended into respectability, and she his willing buttress. Their marriage made the society pages. So what were they doing at a Motel 6 on the outskirts of town, his body filling the chalk-lines of a corpulent, bloated 60 year old, her face red and streaked with unwilling tears before Dame Scandal’s flash bulbs?

4.
They were the dream couple, the objects of envy of all. He’d skipped grades and captained the football team; she’d become a psychiatrist and author. Their homes and gardens were in Better Homes and Gardens. He’d shepherded failing companies to new thresholds; she’d cured the impotent and agoraphobic with methods that were the envy of the psychiatric community. So what were they doing, one apprehended at the airport outward-bound, the other at the Mexican border? What were those offshore accounts doing with their names tattooed on them?