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synthesizers, the music was turned up to a level that made it impossible to hear others speak unless you were all bent far into the centre of your table.
    Two young women at the next table, Hepburn thin in their sleek dark dresses, bobbed their elegantly made-up heads as they glanced mutely around the room. Their men leaned in to each other, mouths open wide to get their big loud words into each other’s ears, oblivious to the women in their company. I resented them for it.
    My gaze turned back to Petra and Andrew, but because it was so hard to hear any conversation we tried to make, I did more observing than normal. Though perhaps that’s a lie. I have been accused, in the past, of sitting back, busily thinking up pithy descriptors that I might later use in an article. To some people this is the behaviour of a scavenger. Others like to have a witness on hand—it gives them a feeling of importance and security. Besides, in a way I was working.
    I searched her face that night, looking for joy, an irrepressible spark of glee that she was in New York City with a man who was married to someone else.But her smiles conveyed more diplomacy than pleasure. I scanned the lover too, hoping to catch sight of—I don’t know what—some keening sense of inevitability? Some suggestion of a trapped man who, though dutifully maintaining his role back home as husband and father, was tormented by the fact that his one great love was actually here, hiding out with him in the extreme public of Manhattan.
    They did not hold hands; I saw no surreptitious brushing of fingers or feet. I saw no sign of their sultry need for each other. He seemed merely cordial.
    Andrew had what was, to my ear, an unusual accent for a German. “My mother was a Londoner, you see. I spoke English at home first, and then, of course, German,” he explained. “I consider English my mother tongue.”
    He seemed proud of that fact. His father spoke Swiss German, which, he said, had no formal grammatical rules and was not even a written language. “Only standard German is written,” he said.
    My eyes drifted down his starched shirt to his manicured fingernails.
    “And you are from Vancouver,” he confirmed. “What a coincidence.” It turned out his wife had Canadian citizenship as well as German—her mother lived in Vancouver. “My wife is also perfectly bilingual.”
    I didn’t know where to look for a moment. My wife.
    Then he mentioned that his wife had just taken their two children to Vancouver. “They are there right now.”
    My gaze moved to Petra, who casually sipped a martini, her expression inscrutable in the dim light.
    I ordered another drink, deciding that I too would be impervious.
    “Lila, my honey,” she said suddenly, “I have a proposal for you. Andrew and I, we will be making a trip the day after tomorrow and I am thinking it would be very nice for you to stay in our suite while we are gone.”
    I stared and leaned in trying to hear better. “Did you just say that you’re leaving town?”
    “Ya. It’s unexpected. And the suite will be empty for two days. Do you like to?”
    I was disappointed and a little stunned. On the other hand, when would I ever get a chance to stay at the Waldorf again?
    After dinner, the three of us went to The Campbell Apartment, a bar off the west balcony of Grand Central Station. The big room, once a financier’s private office, apparently looked just as it had in the ’30s and ’40s, like a room in a palace, furnished with Italian tables and chairs, a Persian rug on the floor, others on the walls, flowered vases, and a massive Florentine desk on which financier John Campbell once conducted his affairs.
    When we arrived at the entrance, Ella Fitzgerald’s “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)” smoothed into our ears. The hostess gave us a blandly welcoming smile, her caramel-coloured mosquito-arms poking out of the capped sleeves of a blue jersey dress that advertised small hollows beside each hip and