“So what changed your mind?” I asked, bending to kiss her hardening nipple. “About tonight?”

“Who says I changed my mind?” she said. “Maybe I planned this all along. Like this is a scene in a play I’ve written.” She pushed off my jacket and started to undo my tie. “This is just what I want your character to do. Maybe you’ve got very little choice in the matter. Do you really feel you have a choice here, Gunther?”

“No.” I bit her nipple. “Not now. But I got the impression earlier on that you were playing a little hard to get.”

“I am hard to get. Only not to you. You’re the first in a long time.”

“I could say the same.”

“You could. But it would be a lie. You’re one of the principal characters in my play, remember? I know all about you, Gunther.” She started to unbutton my shirt.

“Is Max Reles another character? You do know him, don’t you?”

“Do we have to talk about him now?”

“It can wait.”

“Good. Because I can’t wait. I never could, not since I was a little girl. Ask me about him later, when the waiting is over.”

Chapter 18

18

THE CEILINGS IN THE SUITES at the Adlon were just the right distance from the floor. When you lay on the bed and blew a column of cigarette smoke straight up, the crystal chandelier looked like a remote and icy mountaintop surrounded with an ermine collar of cloud. I’d never paid the ceilings much attention before. Previous erotic encounters with Frieda Bamberger had been furtive, hurried affairs, conducted with one eye on the clock and the other on the door handle, and certainly I’d never felt sufficiently relaxed to fall asleep afterward. But now that I was looking at the lofty heights of this room, I found my soul climbing up the silky walls to sit on the picture rail, like some invisible gargoyle, and then to stare down with forensic fascination on the naked aftermath of what had gone before.

Our bare limbs still entwined, Noreen and Gunther lay side by sweating side, like Eros and Psyche fallen from some other, more heavenlike ceiling—although it was hard to imagine anything much more heavenly than what had just occurred. I felt like Saint Peter taking vacant possession of a smart new basilica.

“I bet you’ve never even been in one of these beds,” said Noreen, taking the cigarette from my fingers and smoking it with the exaggerated gestures of a drunk or someone onstage. “Have you?”

“No,” I lied. “It feels strange.”

She hardly wanted to hear about my private trysts with Frieda. Certainly not as much as I wanted to hear about Max Reles.

“He doesn’t seem to like you very much,” she said after I mentioned his name again.