I got off at the twelfth floor and walked to her door. It opened as I approached it. She stood framed in the doorway, all blonde braids and blue eyes and cheekbones, and for a moment I could picture her carved on the prow of a Viking ship. “Oh, Matt,” she said, and reached to embrace me. She was just about my height and she gave me a good hard hug and I felt the pressure of firm breasts and thighs and recognized the sharp tang of her scent. “Matt,” she said, drawing me inside, closing the door. “God, I’m so grateful to Elaine for suggesting I get in touch with you. You know what you are? You’re my hero.”

“All I did was talk to the man.”

“Whatever you did, it worked. That’s all I care about. Sit down, relax a moment. Can I get you anything to drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Some coffee?”

“Well, if it’s no trouble.”

“Sit down. It’s instant, if that’s all right. I’m too lazy to make real coffee.”

I told her instant was fine. I sat down on the couch and waited while she made the coffee. The room was a comfortable one, attractively if sparsely furnished. A recording of solo jazz piano played softly on the stereo. An all-black cat peered cautiously around the corner at me, then disappeared from view.

The coffee table held a few current magazines—People, TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, Natural History. A framed poster on the wall over the stereo advertised the Hopper show held a couple years back at the Whitney. A pair of African masks decorated another wall. A Scandinavian area rug, its abstract pattern a whirl of blue and green, covered the central portion of the limed oak floor.

When she returned with the coffee I admired the room. She said she wished she could keep the apartment. “But in a way,” she said, “it’s good I can’t, you know? I mean, to go on living here, and then there’d be people showing up. You know. Men.”

“Sure.”

“Plus the fact that none of this is me. I mean, the only thing in this room that I picked out is the poster. I went to that show and I wanted to take some of it home with me. The way that man painted loneliness. People together but not together, looking off in different directions. It got to me, it really did.”

“Where will you live?”