Now I had my own emergency: the empty straight streets stretched to vanishing points all around me; a mugger—did we call them muggers then?—could have been waiting, switchblade ready, in any of the upright dark doorways, behind any of the brownstone stairs. But an all-night drugstore gleamed two blocks away, and fits of traffic animated the avenue. Within a minute or two, a taxi materialized with its roof light signalling rescue. The driver and I were usually chatty on these returns to my hotel; he was pleased to have a fare and my tongue was oiled by sexual triumph and a sense of escape. Those rides through the almost deserted city had a clean, clicking feeling: I was back on track. Pulling up at the hotel, paying the cabdriver, walking in my warm dishevelment past the noncommittal desk clerk, into the elevator, down the windowless corridor, into the still, expectant room, I rejoined a self who had been here all along. The bed was cool and tightly made, with a mint on the pillow.

Sometimes Jane came to my hotel. Once, when I had left the room dark in anticipation of her arrival, she asked as I let her in, “Is this where the orgy is?” Another time—the same time? how many times were there?—we couldn’t open the door when it was time for her to leave. It was absurd and frightening; an invisible enforcer had trapped me with the living evidence of my crime. This was after 2:00 a.m., long past time for Jane to leave the orgy and to send the babysitter home. A woman in the apartment below would sit for her at short notice. A sisterhood of single New York women existed, egging each other on in the long-odds mating game. Men—useful, unattached, heterosexual men—were scarce, scarcer here than in the hinterlands; Jane taught me this to her disadvantage, for I rarely worried, in the months between my trips to the city, that she would not be there for me, as glamorous and game as ever.