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of it so I could loop it into the sleek French twist Paul liked. I then settled back onto propped-up pillows in my Julia Tuttle bed, which was an old-fashioned double—in other words, hardly more than a single—with a real headboard and footboard. All the furniture in this room could have come straight from my grandmother’s. Whatever “renovations” the owner had carried out must have applied only to the bigger rooms or those overlooking the bay, though my light blue walls did have the look and the smell of a recent paint job.
    I flipped to the back pages of the “Go, Tar Heels!” notebook and reviewed the notes I’d been collecting on recent top stories in the
Miami Star.
I don’t know quite what I expected, my first day of work: some sort of quiz, perhaps.
    Name the most important news developments of international significance in the last three months.
    Well, of course, everyone knows the Reds want us out of West Berlin and they’re threatening to spoil the Geneva Conference; and Castro’s “Robin Hood” land grabs continue to bring joy to the peasants and fury to the likes of Arthur Vining Davis; and Venezuela and all sorts of other people are arming Nicaraguan rebels. And on the home front Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column, “My Day,” scolds Washington for its lack of both imagination and breadth of world vision and declares herself frustrated by the Democratic congressional leaders’ “want of comprehension about the real needs of the world.” And Governor Earl Long of Louisiana, shouting hog calls and obscenities, is committed, released, and returned to the mental hospital.
    Also, I was hoarding for the opportune moment of newsroom repartee an AP wire story buried inside the June 1
Miami Star
about Castro’s plans to tax the society pages in Havana’s newspapers: $1 per item, $1 per adjective, $5 for each square inch of photograph of a person mentioned in a story, and $100 for each title of nobility of a Cuban national mentioned in a story.
    I could hear myself remarking casually to a fellow reporter, perhaps to the city editor himself, “Better watch my adjectives, Castro’s charging a dollar apiece for them now.”
    After reviewing these notes, I flipped back to the pristine first page of the notebook, which had been awaiting this moment, and entered the date, time, and place of composition, including my room number, 510. After announcing my arrival in Miami, I listed a few impressions, including Tess’s continued good looks and the elegant displaced Cuban family in the lobby, and gave myself a pep talk about what I intended to accomplish at the
Star.
    I then switched over into my Paul-cryptography, worked out over the past year of our secret liaison, so that should these or any similar jottings fall into an interloper’s hands, he or she would assume that the diarist was deliberately switching from reportage into the continuation of a fantasy romance between a distinguished alien from another world and the young protégée he has been sent to protect and instruct so that she can fulfill her destiny.
    In this installment, the young woman is anticipating a reunion with her alien guardian-lover and, in her impatience to be joined with him after a separation of six months, frequently crosses the line into purple prose. The interloper could either hop aboard the passion train or watch it go by and scoff, “What a caprice! Of course, this could never happen in real life.”
             
    A S I expected, Paul called from the house phone in the lobby at exactly seven, and I gathered up my raincoat and purse and went down.
    He was in on the secret of my extreme nearsightedness and had positioned himself near the elevator so I would see him without having to gawk, but not close enough so I would collide with him when I stepped out.
    I walked toward the dark blur in evening suit and tie, savoring his gradual materialization from elegant shadow into my fully focused Paul Nightingale