“No,” I said. It was my first lie to her. She seemed a little off-center, right from the first, but Imogene could talk banjo, and here in this city of block-long buildings and charcoal suits that was as welcome to me as borscht and salted cucumbers would have been to that homeless KGB colonel, locked out forever as a traitor from the land he loved.

“I loved,” this Imogene was saying, “the licks you took on ‘Heavy Traffic Ahead.’ And the repeat an octave higher on ‘Walking in Jerusalem Just Like John.’ ”

“It wasn’t an octave, it was a fifth,” I told her, settling in and lifting two bourbons from a silver tray a kindly Negro was carrying around. I saw that this was going to be a conversation. Banjos were getting to be hot then, what with that Beverly Hillbillies theme, and I didn’t want to engage with any shallow groupie. “Do you ever tune in,” I asked her, “WDBJ, out of Roanoke? And tell me exactly why you think this Bobby Thompson is the future.”

She saw my hurt, with those hot bright eyes that looked to be all pupil, and hastened to reassure me in her hurried, twitchy way of talking that I was the present, the past, and the future as far as she was concerned. Neither of us, I think, had the habit of drinking, but the trays kept coming around, brought by black men in white gloves, and by the time the reception was breaking up the whole scene might have been a picture printed on silk, waving gently in and out. The Iron Curtain experts had drifted away to their homes in Bethesda and Silver Spring, and it seemed the most natural thing in the free world that little Imogene, to whom I must have looked a little wavy myself, would be inviting me back to her apartment somewhere off in one of those neighborhoods where they say it’s not safe for a white man to show his face late at night.