A young woman in a not quite immaculate evening gown leaned over the table, her back to me, cranking a pencil sharpener. Her body swayed, pulsated, as if in a self-induced trance. Power flowing from the engine of her hand pumped the piston of her arm, then cascaded through the drive shaft of her naked shoulder, generating torque to the torso and onward, to the axis of rotation: a turning, twisting, dreamlike perfection of an ass, fluid, mind-boggling. It was the most vivid ass I had almost ever seen, an ass designed for undulation.

She gathered up her pencils and turned, and lightning struck. For an epochal instant we stood like prisoners in the gloom of that concrete cage, stunned by some smirking humorless force that ordained our personal histories. I was stunned, at least, and she was—well, she was more Val than ever.

“What are you doing here?” she asked mildly. “In New York, I mean.”

“Working,” I stammered. “I’m a young urban professional.”

“You work?” she seemed dubious.

“I’m with Resource Analysis and Technology,” I assured her.

“You into kinky flicks?”

“I’m into upward mobility. Somebody in my office wants a picture for a party.” I gave her one of Grady’s slips.

“I’ll have to find it,” she said, squinting at the immaculate type as though it were written in Urdu. “It might take some time.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Or you want to come back in like an hour? We wrap at six.”

“You’re free at six? Would you like to have a drink?”

She hesitated. A voice boomed from behind the door marked PRIVATE. “Valerie!” it summoned. Val’s face went grim. “Got to go,” she said. “It’s Mister B, and he’s the whole shirt, Captain Zero Cool.” She stepped toward Captain Zero Cool’s sanctum. “See you at six,” she threw over her bare shoulder.

I walked out of the office, hanging a right at Frankfort, cut back to Park Row, circling. Val Valerie Val Val Val. Had I detected, along with the soupçon of easy elegance in her red velvet gown, an additional spark of assurance and animation that had ignited the old languorous witchery? It wasn’t yet five; I had an hour to think about it, among the clotted crowd. Somehow, I felt, I had been favored by God, who in His infinite wisdom had seen fit to renew this fateful conjugation. A last chance? Could I snatch the dream out of the satchel and polish it up again, put a burnish of reality on a lost but insistently lingering fantasy? My mouth was dry.