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enjoying the inside joke. The store was situated within the old Rhinelander mansion, a fabulous example of French Renaissance Revival, its insides decorated with horse and dog paintings, portraits of precious boys and athletic men, sailing scenes, candid snapshots from the club. It was enough to make any self-respecting WASP queasy if also a tad envious. We should all still live like this. But Andy hardly cared about such things. No, he was busy sitting on those church steps, smoking cigarette after cigarette, waiting for one of these mysterious New York women to stop and smile and take possession of the name Jeanie Spokes.
    He had no idea what she looked like, even after numerous Internet searches. She refused to friend him on Facebook and the only picture publicly posted on her page was of Ayn Rand photoshopped onto a beach volleyball player, her right hand powering through a self-determined spike. All he knew about her physically was her age: twenty-four years old. As he sat there the air between shirt and skin puckered with extra humidity. Twenty-four. That number came like rain down his back.
    “How will I recognize you?” he had asked during their last IM chat.
    “When you see me, your heart will skip a beat,” Jeanie pinged back.
    “That scary?”
    “Absolutely frightening.”
    “You’re not a dude, are you?”
    “Um, no,” she pinged, “I swear,” she pinged, “Really.” Her words fell in a series of seductive rows, like dialogue in a sexy comic strip. “Wait,” she pinged, “Define dude.” Jeanie Spokes had impeccable timing.
    “I’ll be on the steps of St. James, 71st and Madison,” Andy typed.
    “You sure you want me to come?”
    “You sure you want to come?”
    A pause.
    “Cum?” he typed.
    “Nicely done, Cyrano.”
    “Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking the same thing.”
    Andy waited, waited, waited, until “No cumment” pinged back.
    What was it about instant messaging that invited this kind of innuendo and pun, this straight-up dirty talk, as if a transcript of future sin? It was all very tilted, of course, in the vein of a separate identity, the Internet’s lingua franca, but sometimes the tilt straightened and a high-speed intimacy entered the exchange. Suddenly you start bouncing your innermost thoughts back and forth just to see if those feelings can be caught.
    “I can’t wait to see you,” Andy wrote.
    “Me neither.”
    “Seriously.”
    “Mean either.”
    “Circe.”
    “Man eater.”
    Andy knew only a few concrete details about Jeanie Spokes: she grew up on the Upper West Side; her mother was an architect, her father an editor at Random House; she attended Dalton, then Columbia, with a year abroad in Paris; she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in comparative literature and presently worked as an assistant at Gilroy Connors, A. N. Dyer’s literary agency; she lived in a studioapartment on Riverside Drive, the rent outrageous, but she was a Manhattan girl to the core and anywhere else gave her vertigo. Many of these details were analogous to Andy’s own biography: Trinity to Exeter; Central Park West to Fifth Avenue; Sharon to Southampton. He was, in concept, familiar with this type of girl, or woman, and that’s where the whole business got tricky: Jeanie Spokes was a full-fledged adult while Andy Dyer hovered around 83 percent in terms of development and experience and areas of skin without acne and even grades, which could ruin his chances for Yale and screw up his equivalency with this Columbia grad, dooming whatever outside chance he had beyond a mere online flirtation.
    Andy lit his sixth cigarette. He wanted her to find him smoking, that seemed important, but she was thirty minutes late and he was light-headed and almost done with his pack. Organ music murmured from behind the church doors. The previews were over and the feature was about to begin, with its cheesy special effects and tired script and ludicrous, entirely unbelievable character named