“How long will you be with us?” asked the spoon-faced redheaded woman behind the desk. She wore a brass name tag that read EILEEN.

“It will only seem like forever,” I promised. “One night.”

She handed me a brass key on a brass fob. Hotels had keys, in those days.

I had packed the bottle of bourbon, the apples, my cosmetic bag, but had forgotten a nightgown. Who was looking? I built my drunkenness like a fire, patiently, enough space so it might blaze.

You shall know a rich man by his shirt, and so I did. Breakfast time in the breakfast room. The décor was old but kept up. Space-age, with stiff sputnikoid chandeliers. Dark pink leather banquettes, rosy pink carpets. Preposterous but wonderful. I’d eaten there in the past: they had a dessert cart, upon which they wheeled examples of their desserts to your table: a slice of cake, a crème brûlée, a flat apple tart that looked like a mademoiselle’s hat.

I had my own hangover now, not terrible, a wobbling threat that might yet be kept at bay. I had taken three baths; my toenails were vampy red. I had watched television till the end of broadcast hours, which was a thing that happened then: footage of the American flag waving in the breeze, then here be monsters. In my other life, the one that happened outside of the Narcissus Hotel, I worked in the HR department of a radio station. I lived with voices overhead. That was why I didn’t have a television. It would have been disloyal. I’d found a rerun on a VHF station of squabbling siblings and had proceeded to weep for hours, in the tub, on one double bed, then the other. Even at the time I knew I wasn’t weeping over anything actual that I’d lost, but because I’d wanted love and did not deserve it. My soul was deformed. It couldn’t bear weight.

The rich man sat at the back of the breakfast room in one of the large horseshoe booths built for public canoodling. His pale green shirt, starched, flawless, seemed to have been not ironed but forged, his mustache tended by money and a specialist. His glasses might have cost a lot, but twenty years before. In his fifties, I thought. In those days fifties was the age I assigned people undeniably older than me. I never looked at anyone and guessed they were in their forties. You were a teenager, or my age, or middle-aged, or old.

The waiter went to the man’s table and murmured. The man answered. At faces I am no good but I always recognize a voice.

“Dr. Benjamin,” I said, once the waiter had left. He looked disappointed, with an expression that said, Here, of all places. He inclined his head to recognize my recognition. “I listen to you,” I told him.