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watching them for five years in rainstorms and changes of sky. They were my moon and mountains.
    I never discussed Rosemary’s secret. Sometimes I forget it. Eleven months ago, I was in a dark mood over Anita’s firing her production designer when I passed a young girl in front of the Plaza Hotel freezing her fanny off in skimpy red satin shorts and a fake white fur jacket. She was tall and her red hair blew wild. I saw her placing one foot in front of the other like she was walking a narrow ledge. Her plump cheeks were covered with old-fashioned circles of rouge; her ankles shook. I have the same problem with high heels. When you’re a tall adolescent, nobody teaches you to walk in them.
    I almost reached out to steady her elbow as she wobbled into the crowded Jockey Club bar. I peered through thewindow while a plump man in an expensive navy suit pulled out his wallet and stumbled against her like he’d been drinking, clutching her breasts. Her eyes jumped with fright, she pushed him back, and bills fell out of his wallet. He staggered off. She looked around fast, picked up his money, and teetered out the door after him.
    I followed her, a few feet away. When she tapped him on the back, he turned, scowling, and she handed him his money. Awfully generous, I thought.
    She didn’t seem to know what she was doing. I wondered where she came from. Prostitutes fascinate me, because they take more risks than I could ever imagine. My New York life is as alien to my family as a call girl’s life feels to me. My mother’s sister once looked at me furtively, tittered, and then described a scene in a Beckett play about a man paying a prostitute. She suspected I’d had sex since my divorce. One man your whole life; if I broke her rule, I had a dangerous life with no rules at all.
    I took one last look at the girl pushing her way boldly inside another bar crowded with businessmen. I bet she didn’t know how fast she was going to get booted out of there in her red satin getup.
    I wondered if she ever found herself in a hotel room with men who reminded her of her girlfriends’ fathers or her own. Or did they resemble boys back home? Didn’t she miss necking in the back seat of cars? How many men had she been with? Did she make them wash each time? Did she keep a record? How long had she been at it? The strange colognes and sweats would make me gag.
    Right after my marriage broke up I got into purposeless sexual encounters with new men. I hadn’t had to work hard. I pumped my pelvis, I kept breathing heavily. We believed or pretended to believe we could have relationships. But this girl was not pretending in that area. Did she fake passion when she kissed strange men?
    Two weeks after I saw her, I was eating my daily tuna fish sandwich on toast and yelling into the phone at a literary agent who wanted too much studio money for a great screenplay about a spy at a secret Yale society. My secretary had quit and I was frantically interviewing candidates from the personnel office.
    But I was in a great mood because Barry and I had made up a silly fight and taken a tour of the new computer room at his Princeton lab. Spread on my knees were résumés, memos, incoming calls, and half of the sandwich.
    When she waltzed in, I knocked everything off my lap. Paper flew over the rug. She leapt down and gathered it up with one sweep of her arms. I felt sorry for her sake that I’d recognized her.
    She dropped the pile of skewed pages on my knees. I pulled the sandwich out.
    Her mouth curled up at one corner and she winked a blue eye at me. “Lunchtime?” She poked at one of my fat roses in the old oriental vase, causing a shower of petals. She looked very clean without rouge. She had the kind of broad cheekbones and high forehead above a small Wasp nose that could easily be transformed in six years’ time into one of those hostess faces on the society pages.
    But she was on a different track. I knew she was a rebel.
    “You’re lucky to