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a stereo cartridge player and a twenty-three-inch remote-control color television. Keven had some things there, kept neatly in an old, clean, compartmentalized steamer trunk that stood open on its end in the corner of the bedroom. Nothing of hers hung in the closets. Not to crowd him, was her excuse. Of course, the trunk could be shut, locked, ready to be hauled out at any moment.
    As soon as they arrived at the apartment Keven went to the trunk and changed into a floor-length silk jersey at-home gown that nicely declared her lines. Hazard wasn’t subtle about watching her change. Nor was she shy although she did take his point of view into consideration. Sometimes she enjoyed having him undress her and at times turnabout was more than fair play, but usually they enjoyed this arrangement—intimate act and very appreciative audience of one.
    Hazard went to her, held her full length against him. After a brief kiss they kissed another longer one. And after it, when their mouths were still almost touching, she told him, “My tongue is thawed now.”
    She broke gently from him then, got some things from a drawer of the trunk, and went into the bathroom. Hazard could still feel the impression her body had made on his. He was always a bit amazed that she had such a lasting effect on him. He was more accustomed to turning abruptly on and off.
    Before Keven, less than a year ago, the women in and out of Hazard’s life had mostly been models from the agencies, from Ford’s or Stewart or Wilhelmena. Those taller than average, hungry-looking girls who carried their identities around in folios of photographs. They seemed to be always hurrying from booking to booking, from go-see to go-see and bed to bed. Taking off from Kennedy to work a week, a month, or to do the collections somewhere for so much. Without more than a good-bye phone call, and usually that only when a flight was delayed, they impetuously quit New York for Rome or London or Paris. They seemed addicted to change, needing constantly to alter where they were and how they looked according to fashion’s superseding phases. The most consistent thing about them was their transientness.
    Here now, soon gone. In love today, out tomorrow, or surely the day after. Hazard, at the time, found them and their ways attractive and congenial.
    When he met Keven he thought at first sight that she was another of those models. Just another. She was certainly pretty enough, with long dark hair and eyes like children’s blue marbles with slivers of silver flaws in them. Also, she had the height for a model, though she wasn’t too thin, didn’t have that starved-for-the-sake-of-fashion sort of body. Hers was a less angular sort of leanness, more feminine. Where Hazard first saw her she seemed out of place. Standing her turn in line at one of the windows of the off-track betting parlor on East 58th Street. On a summer Saturday morning.
    His approach was direct because he was sure of the type he thought she was. Would she have lunch with him?
    She ignored the invitation.
    How about dinner that night?
    Her eyes told him to fall through the floor.
    What was she doing tomorrow?
    She told him she was taking her children to the park.
    The several rings on her left hand, Hazard noted, were antique, not a legal ceremony among them. But by then she’d reached the window and made her bet. She walked away and he didn’t follow for another try because her walk didn’t ask for it and there had been that mention of her children. Anyway, she was just another, he told himself.
    But the next afternoon he rented a bike, which was unusual for him, and pedaled through the park, not really believing he’d see her but holding to a small hope he would. The park was crowded with people trying to escape temporarily from concrete and, after about an hour of it, Hazard had had enough. He started to leave via 72nd Street, and that was where he saw her. On the corner at an