“Care for a different drink?”

“Thank you, no,” she said, then took a small sip. “I always order gin and tonic. It saves me a decision.” She gave me a beguiling smile. “What do most of your women prefer—a draft?”

I didn’t reply. Let her worry about my other women.

The remainder of the evening was devoted to walking the fragrant streets of Little Italy, reveling in the improbable intimacy that arises between a couple when they are alone in a crowd. We held hands, listening to the Neapolitan love songs filling the soft, slate-blue air, passing boys hawking miniature plastic saints out of cigar boxes, stopping to eat lemon ices and to watch children ride the Ferris wheel. As we approached the corner of Mulberry and East Houston, a teenage girl, dressed in a jersey that was the green, white, and red of the Italian flag, blew by us on roller skates, her ponytail flying behind her.

“One of my favorite summer jobs,” Glenna said.

“You were on Italy’s roller derby team?”

Glenna grinned. “Very clever, funnyman. But, no, not a roller-skating team. I was a carhop at a drive-in outside Burlington. The summer after my freshman year at UVM. Never dropped my tray once.”

“That’s the summer I worked at the Laurels Hotel in the Catskills.”

“What’d you do?”

“Won a trophy for dancing the cha-cha.”

“You were a dance instructor?” Glenna asked.

“You sound skeptical.”

“Only a little.”

“Okay, I was a busboy. But a group of grandmothers came up from Miami Beach. They’d paid for dance lessons, and since most of them were widows, the social director recruited busboys to be their partners. Eva Cohen and I took first place in the cha-cha. Want me to show you?”

“No music.”

“Follow me,” I said.

Under the streetlights, I’d spotted a plum-colored Cadillac with Batmobile tail fins parked at the curb. The top was down, and the heavyset guy behind the wheel must have been hard of hearing because he had WINS cranked up like he was broadcasting the news to Brooklyn.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said.

He lowered the volume on the radio. What was left of his salt-and-pepper hair was combed back in a duck’s ass, and he was wearing a Yankees warm-up jacket over an undershirt.

“Yeah?” he asked.

I said, “My friend here doesn’t believe I can do the cha-cha and—”

“Gordon, I didn’t say—”

“And,” I said, “I need some music to show her.”

He looked at Glenna, who was giggling, and stared at me as if I’d recently dropped in from Mars.

“Make it quick,” he said. “I’m waitin’ for my wife. She comes out and sees you two playin’ Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, she’ll be hustling me over to Roseland Ballroom.”

After cranking up the volume, he jabbed a radio button, and we heard, “More music on seventy-seven WABCeeeee!” and Cousin Brucie was on the air, sending out a song for Gus and Lorraine in Astoria, an oldie from Jay and the Americans, “Come a Little Bit Closer.”