Devlin was seeing others. Always—whether he had known the woman for years, since high school, or she was an eighteen-year-old talked into a quick, post-shift trip upstairs—Devlin played as hard and recklessly as he dared. If women wanted to bullshit themselves into believing they were falling in love, that was not his problem. At a crowded party Devlin picked up a girl across the room by using sign language. When they met at the door, she put her finger to her lips. The silence lasted hours, enough time for the mystery to give way to a vision of a night-long ordeal with a demanding, insensitive compulsive who didn’t smell very good. It happened before; such nights were only the luck of the draw.

“Look—” he started.

“Get out!” she shrieked.

Which was what Devlin did, as quickly as possible. Halfway down the stairs, he realized that her silent movie had been written so it would always end the same way, with her screaming for him to get out. If he had waited until tomorrow morning, her response would have been the same. She had interrupted him that quickly. She was crazy; one step away from being locked up.

On the following Monday, his next night off, he was in Joe King’s German-American Rathskeller on Third Avenue. The G-A had catered to an affluent college crowd for years. At the bar, in the midst of a dozen people, sat a blue-eyed honey-blonde in a shoulderless black cocktail dress. She saw him at the same time he saw her; when their eyes met, they didn’t turn away. Sign language again, cutting through the noise. He wanted to go over to her and talk. She gazed off as if thinking about it, turned away—and then looked over her shoulder at him and smiled. Vivid, beautiful eyes, a wonderful smile, and freckles on her shoulders.

She was a little drunk. He had had only a couple of beers at P.J. Clarke’s, and he was still all right.

“I don’t do this,” she said, looking straight in front of her. “I don’t pick up men in bars.

“Well, figuring the age you’re starting, you were never a contender to go the distance.”

“Think you got it made, huh?”

She had a bright, chirrupy voice. “I don’t think like that. Are you ready?”

“Huh? Oh.” She peered into her glass. “No.”

“Gotcha,” he said. When he looked at her again, she was blushing. She reached for her drink; as the glass touched her lips, she lost the capacity to resist the desire to look at him. He was waiting—he loved watching women go through these gyrations—and he laughed at her.

“Oh, boy.” She swallowed. “One of those nights, huh? What are you, some kind of a salesman? Garment district, that’s it. What kind of Buick do you drive?”