She never lost that dancer’s grace. I might be her only audience, but I was appreciative. I would catch sight of her out the window, running across the street on those slender legs—small steps, toes arched, almost prancing. It was like watching a doe cross a clearing. In the morning, I would lie in bed and pretend to be asleep, just so I could watch her put her pantyhose on. She would bend her knee and arch those ballerina feet into the toes of the pantyhose, first one leg and then the other, and pull them up slowly over her calves—still so muscular—and then past her knees, giving them a real tug to make them smooth around the roundness of her thighs and then all the way up to her waist so that they were tight and snug all over, finally turning and looking behind her in the mirror to make sure that they were straight. How could I forget Annie Baron?

Like me, she was a Californian. Her father was a San Francisco lawyer who had built himself a big house in Los Altos Hills, overlooking the bay. Somehow the money and privilege hadn’t spoiled her. It must have been the ballet, which gave her a focus other than clothes and boys and cliques. I never knew anyone who could work harder than Annie. Like so many smart women, she didn’t really know how to cut corners. She had to do it the right way. She arrived at Stanford eager, unspoiled, ready for life.

If ballet was her first love, I was her second. She came to journalism only later, when she began to realize that she was sharing me with my other obsessive passion, which was newspapering. It became something of a ménage à trois. We would go to bars where people like David Halberstam and Norman Mailer supposedly hung out, and if any such luminaries ever showed up, we would take turns ingratiating ourselves with them. She was better at it, obviously; she was a beautiful woman. But she always went home with me.

I saw her at a book party at Bob Marcus’s house, a few weeks after I started my new job. She looked lovely, as always, with those long dancer’s legs and flirtatious journalist’s eyes. But we both felt awkward. It’s never easy for people who have been intimate to carry on an ordinary conversation, but we tried. It was like learning to talk again. She asked me what Paris had been like, and I gave her a long explanation, centering on the Maurice Costa story. She listened for a while, and then began to get bored. She didn’t know anything about political corruption in France. It was an abstraction, far away.