It was after 5:00 but the company was at least partially open twenty-four hours a day because of the international money markets. The guard came to the locked glass doors and let me in without resistance. I’d been to the offices pretty often because my good friend, Jackson Blue, was senior vice president in charge of both data processing and general planning.

“How can I help you, Easy?” the guard, Philip Channing, asked. A gray-headed white man who was almost retirement age, Phil was part of corporate security and therefore well aware of me.

“Asiette in?”

“Still up in her office, I think.”

When I first met Asiette Moulon she worked in a small office behind the first-floor admissions desk. She was in her early twenties. Now, just a few years later, she had a big office at the end of a long hall on the third floor. She was in charge of all admissions, with more than a dozen people reporting to her.

Asiette stood five three in stocking feet with black hair that further accented her shocking violet eyes. A Frenchwoman from Burgundy, she would be considered lovely in any language or clime, class or time.

That day she was wearing a bright orange minidress that flared out a few inches above the knee.

“Easy!” she squealed, then ran to my arms and kissed me on the lips.

The first time she ever did that I almost pushed her away. I’d known black men in Texas and Louisiana who’d been lynched for even puckering their lips upon seeing a white woman.

But times were changing and Asiette and I had been seeing each other on and off for the past year.

“How are you, honey?” I asked.

“Come on in,” she said.

She led me into her bright yellow office and pulled me until we were both sitting on top of her strawberry-colored desk. She took my hand and laid her head on my shoulder.

“You ’ave come to see me?” she said to our hands.

“I came to see the security boss but I’d never drop by without saying hello to you.”

“Just hello?” she said, pouting only a little.

The late sixties were the cream-filled center of the sexual revolution. Asiette and I had done things together, and with others, that I would never have imagined just five years earlier.

“It’s a job, baby,” I said. “You know we all have to pay the rent.”

“Do you want to take me home after the rent?”

I was forty-nine at the time. And so I knew that a question like that was never just about tonight.

“It might not be till tomorrow,” I said. “I mean, if you’re not busy or anything.”

I expected the reply to get her to smile, but instead she frowned and stood.

“I,” she said to my knee, and then she looked up. “I’ve been seeing a man.”