Adventures! Adventures with Jane. We had to eat. After the maintenance man finally let us out of my hotel room, we were both famished and found an all-night Automat on East Forty-second Street. It was like entering a Hopper with a Petty girl on my arm. Escorting Jane into any restaurant felt luxurious. We never phoned ahead—I didn’t like fencing with the fruity, accented voices at the name places, La Côte Basque and so on—but New York abounded with half-empty no-name restaurants where they were happy to see you; the maître d’ beamed at the sight of Jane, in her miniskirt and falling cedar-red hair. I remember a pricy Swedish smorgasbord in the East Fifties, and a steak place with Texas decor and big windows overlooking Third Avenue, and a fish place with wooden tables somewhere south of Washington Square. Broadway plays took too long to waste our precious time together on, but she did lead me to an “underground” movie somewhere in the dreary Thirties, and to a play in the Village about a group of dope addicts sitting around waiting for their “connection” to show up. I kept hugging her during the play; its message of hopelessness, of addiction, seemed to be directed at us, and to enlist us in the scattered troops of rebellion in those pre-Vietnam years. But she pointedly did not respond, as if asserting, while her straying hair tingled against my cheek, that my romantic sense of it all let me off too easily.

The art movie had no plot that I can remember; there was a lot of grainy slow panning and some jumpy surrealistic collage, including a quick, repeated act of fellatio that caused Jane to exclaim softly at my side, “Uh-oh.” The act was faked with photographs of a dildo and a young woman’s face, not matter-of-factly enacted for the camera as it would have been a few years later. For the time, it was daring, as was Jane when, in bed, not without awkwardness, she startled me by suddenly dipping her head to touch her lips to the tip of my erection, like a small girl yielding to the impulse to bestow a kiss on the bald head of a favorite doll. The kiss was quick and light and seemed to startle her as much as it did me; it remains in my mind an isolated moment, lit by a flower-shop glow—the moist sheltered intimacy, the expectant soft petals. I didn’t press her to repeat the gesture; it had derived from an overflow of feeling I was in no position to force. I could take, but I couldn’t demand.