“A drink is in order, dear. We have privacy here.”

“If you want a drink, Mr. Kechel, we could have a drink in the Monkey Bar.”

Juliana had meant to sound playful. Realizing belatedly that Mr. Kechel probably had no idea that the hotel bar was called the Monkey Bar.

He’d prefer up in his room, Kechel said curtly—“I’m waiting, dear.”

Juliana laughed, annoyed. Why should she come upstairs?

There was a pause. Had Kechel hung up the phone? He had!

Juliana felt her cheeks smart. She would take an elevator to the fourth floor, but maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t go shopping with the old man for an engagement ring after all.

Upstairs, Juliana saw that the door to Kechel’s room was ajar. On the doorknob a sign—DO NOT DISTURB.

“Hello?”—Juliana pushed the door open. She was prepared to be amused, to laugh.

The room was indeed spacious, with a small adjoining sitting room, a wainscoted ceiling. The blinds had not been opened. The furnishings were opulent, stately; the look of the room slovenly. The king-size bed was enormous; a heavy satin bedspread had been pulled up negligently over rumpled bedclothes. Breakfast things on a tray, and on a sideboard an opened bottle of whiskey. From the minibar, Juliana supposed.

From the left, as Juliana entered the room, Norman Kechel approached her quickly, silently. Without a word of greeting, he gripped her shoulder, pulled her farther into the room, shut the door. His mouth plunged at hers, hard, sucking like a pike’s.

Kechel was unshaven. Shoeless, barefoot—shorter than Juliana recalled. His breath tasted of whiskey but was sour, not sweet.

“Good morning, Julie—Juli-an-ya!”

Pushing her against a bureau. Juliana’s back against the bureau. She was laughing, trying to laugh, this was so absurd, such an assault, a man so much older than she, what was he thinking? She did not actively resist, though she was certainly not compliant. Thinking—I am not really here. Does he think that I am here? Not me!

She felt both incensed and yet gay, giddy. She might have been drinking with the old man, just the two of them, through the morning. She might have been explaining herself to Gordon, or to any observer. The raffish atmosphere of the Mon ey Bar had spilled out into daylight and prevailed now everywhere: nothing mattered, or could be made to matter. Monkeys cavorted, monkeys were laughable. Against the insides of her eyelids, a seductive-red glow of neon.

She’d wakened that morning with a faint, dull headache. The hanging-over it was, of a pleasurable high.

What is a hangover but a kind of memory, deep in the brain.

Kechel seemed to be assessing Juliana with a low growl of approval. He was one who liked to bestow such words upon women—beautiful, gorgeous. Juliana understood that it was thrilling to him, the man, the elder, doling out such compliments, assessing. For he was the one to assess others, he himself would not be judged. He gripped Juliana’s shoulders harder, taking possession. He began kissing her, harder. This time he forced her mouth open, the intention was to overcome, to hurt. She might have shoved him away—an elbow in the fatty chest—in the very heart that is the heart of the beast—but she did not.