The mystery of the locked room was never completely solved. The moral standards of hotel management in those years of imminent sexual revolution were obscure to me; I stammered guiltily, calling the main desk. For what seemed many minutes of waiting, Jane and I were prisoners together, fully dressed and physically weary. Finally, a black maintenance man turned the latch from the outside with a master key. He fiddled bemusedly with the obdurate inner knob and chatted with us as if we were the most ordinary, consecrated daylight couple who had ever required his expertise. We made a small society, at that odd hour; he and Jane hit it off, especially, vying in theories on the mechanical puzzle. She said, “I thought it might be like a subway turnstile—you needed a token.” It was a revelation to me, this wee-hour camaraderie of New Yorkers, and the city’s genial way of folding my adultery into its round-the-clock hustle.