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she was going to, but instead she let her eyes roam, looking at the clear open space surrounding her. “I love it.” She squeezed her shoulders together. “I’m from the suburbs and these New York apartments make me claustrophobic.”
    “This isn’t like a suburban home. In fact, I can’t think of anything more typically New York than a converted loft. The whole city is full of ex-rag-pickers who have entered the middle class. I know it’s all scrubbed but this still doesn’t feel like a residence to me. Can’t you see them”— he stretched out his arm and pointed to the empty space, between two of the columns, that bridged the living and eating areas—“the immigrant women in their caps, under rows of those big globe lights, sewing their garments?”
    Patty liked this dramatic gesture and poetic idea. David had seemed sour at the party: a stiff, slightly obnoxious young man who believed he knew everything. That also attracted her. She liked to win the good opinion of difficult people, but this blushing and fanciful David was even better. Patty believed sensitive men were easier to go to bed with, because, though their performance was sometimes problematic, they made more lenient judgments. Patty looked at the empty space and tried to imagine David’s scene. She couldn’t. The dazzling floor, those delicate columns, the beautiful peacock-colored rugs, all spoke to her of money, ease, self-assurance; things that had eluded her since she came to New York. She had grown up in this kind of comfort in suburban Pennsylvania and, so far, no one she knew in New York had it. No, for Patty, this loft was not haunted by immigrant women.
    She turned herself toward David, kicked off her shoes, and put both feet under her. This made her into a small package that David could easily imagine carrying to his bed. “I don’t like to think of them,” she said looking sad.
    “My grandmother was one of them,” David said quietly.
    “She worked here!” Patty’s eyes opened in alarm.
    “No, no,” David said, laughing. “She worked in a sweatshop in the city. I don’t know where.”
    “Maybe it was here,” Patty said, her eyes scanning the loft as if she might find David’s grandmother in the shadows.
    “No, I doubt it,” David said. He thought this last remark of Patty’s impossibly dumb. His penis had begun to warm and swell in his pants (he could feel the tip press outward, like mercury rising to show fever) but this one dizzy comment chilled his passion. “Do you want more wine?” he asked. She nodded. He leaned forward to get the bottle. As he did, their bodies were now touching, and Patty’s hand landed on his thigh next to the thermometer of his lust. He almost tipped the bottle over, though her touch was gentle.
    He steadied his grip and carefully poured her more wine. Her hand now crept onto his penis and passed down and then back up its length once, like a blessing. He tried to think of something to say. A casual remark. But nothing was in his mind other than the sensation of his rapidly rising mercury. Heat, growth, his pants suddenly tight: a clatter of feelings that pleasurably shouted down any thought.
    He fought it off (he didn’t want to show pleasure, he never liked to) and managed to finish pouring and replace the bottle without letting a moan of smoky joy emit from the furnace below. He turned his head toward her, ready to say something noncommittal, but when his eyes met hers, he discovered she had leaned toward him, and now his lips were only inches from her wet and fluted mouth.
    They kissed.
    While they did, her hand covered his groin. She gripped him as if his penis were a handle with which she could pick him up and carry him anywhere. He felt intensely excited by this dominated sensation; that she was ruthlessly feeling the merchandise, ready to squeeze for a reward or depart as a punishment.
    Now, as their mouths opened and flattened and pecked, he was growing, growing so hard that she