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relationship, over the long years and through many different encounters, has always been strictly asexual.
    Practically always.
    There was a moment, years ago, when the air between us as we considered endless charts of data and evidence, alone late at night in his office, was suddenly charged with electricity. When we each became uncomfortably aware of the other, when a casual brushing of hand against sleeve, the accidental eye contact, had a strange, tense and unanticipated significance.
    There had been an isolated fragile moment, caused by great exhaustion from hours of uninterrupted overwork, when we were surprised by the power of the awareness we both experienced at exactly the same time.
    We kissed. Just once. Just our lips touching. No hands, no embrace, no fumbling. Just a rather cool meeting of our mouths that formed both the question and the answer at the same time. Then we both experienced a great sense of relief.
    Without either of us saying a word about it—ever—we knew the moment had come and gone and we were in no danger whatever each from the other. Our relationship would continue along its professional, asexual course.
    “Lynne?”
    Who is this Sanderalee Dawson? I am exactly the right person to answer his question in depth and for a particularly shallow, silly, embarrassing reason.
    Sanderalee Dawson and I were born on the same day of the same year, within fifteen minutes of each other. This information came to me when we found ourselves sharing a dais, guest speakers about to inform our intense audience of women-achievers how it was for us: how each of us had taken her place in the man’s world and succeeded and widened the spaces around us for others to follow. During a break in a totally nauseating luncheon—something greenish and shimmering beneath an ugly, glutinous yellow sauce, which neither of us tried to penetrate—she turned to me and absently asked, “What’s your sign?” Taurus, I told her, and her face lit up.
    I am nearly forty years old. I am actually thirty-eight years old, but for the last two years I have been describing myself as nearly forty, so that when I am in fact forty, I will be used to the whole idea of it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and, for a frightening moment, I hear my own voice say, “I’m ten years old. Little undersized Lynnie, ten years old. How come I can get away with it, fooling all these people who think I’m someone else? Can’t they see I’m ten years old and scared of the dark?” I get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say to my tired face, “Hey. You’re nearly forty years old.” And I believe it. The kid got lost somewhere in the dark.
    Of course, I never told Sanderalee Dawson any of this. I just looked at her and wondered how she could so easily pass for twenty-five, twenty-six at the most, when we were to the hour what she called astrological twins.
    And so I have had a rather proprietary if passing interest in her career and life. After all, sharing an exact birth moment with someone is something of an intrusion.
    Sanderalee Dawson’s publicized background was Hollywood-romantic, though how much of it was true I wouldn’t know. A girl from the Deep South, sent to live with an aunt in New York City, she had been “discovered” at the age of eighteen by the well-known French director Jacques Gerard, who had been filming in Harlem as a background for his classic three-continent study of youth in the early sixties. She had been a typist in a storefront insurance office on 125th Street when Jacques and crew spotted her and from then on: fairy tale.
    Under the guidance of Gerard, to whom she was later married, Sanderalee Dawson became the most popular, highest-paid fashion photographer’s model in Europe.
    Her features were as delicate and mysterious as those of an Egyptian princess. Her cheekbones caught light and shadow in extraordinary ways. Her eyes were an astonishing shade of pale green, the slight upward