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me drily that she was named for her grandmother, and that was our first great laugh together. She and I shared a mocking despair over the impossibility of most of the young men about us.
    The boys I had really liked until now were as shy as I was, and the sexual exploring we had done had not really roused me beyond curiosity and some clumsy experimenting. Still, I had done enough so that I was not exactly a virgin, although there had not yet been any sex that swept me away. Until now. And this wasn’t even sex, I didn’t think, at least, not yet.
    But even if this, with Rand, wasn’t sex, I was still ready to collapse into a sensual heap after his two kisses, the last one so long and wonderful that I would not have cared if that were my final moment on earth. I loved it.
    The car pulled to the curb in front of a great luxury apartment building, old-fashioned in its brown stonework and broad shoulders, unlike the sleek towers in other parts of the city. I knew this area. Bredon had lived just north of here briefly, before buying the penthouse further uptown where he now lived.
    I managed an empty-headed phrase in a voice that did not shake too much. “Your apartment is here?” Of course it was. We surveyed the rich exclamation point of the entrance canopy at one side. A discreet carriage drive circled the other side of the long front of this massive edifice, whose quiet stone calmly hid all the great wealth of its interior.
    “My family management corporation owns this building,” he said quietly, as we got out of the car. He was amused that I obviously did not know how rich and important he was. But I did know that his was one of the player families in the great economic scrambling and dueling of the city and its overseas connections. It all seemed so unimportant as long as he might give me another of those kisses, though my knees would probably buckle if he tried it right now.
    Tom made sure we were well clear of the car before he droveit away, probably to the judiciously hidden garage at the side of the building, entrance by special radio code. The rich often hide their opulence under bland or unseen entrances, a way to avoid the envious, the stalkers, the protesters, the criminals who would rob or even kidnap. My brother had shown me all the secret ways to seem to disappear in a car into the side of a building like this, and enter the interior with its great inner courtyard open to the sky, a mini-city of affluence guarded by the concierge, doormen, porters, and quiet but stern security men in plain suits. To newcomers, the security men looked like visitors waiting for someone to come join them.
    “Would you like to come in?” he asked. And then, unexpectedly shy, he said, “Or would you rather we just went to dinner?”
    I did not know if he had some strange moral code about women – you never knew what played in men’s minds, especially rich men who could have women at will, or who could have their fantasies played out for a fee. I was not naïve about such things. Rand seemed to have escaped that Freudian morass, or at least he
seemed
to be free of it. But I had not yet even asked him
the
critical question. “Are you married?” I blurted.
    “No!” He almost boomed the answer, laughing now. “And I haven’t been.”
    More relief. No baggage – I hoped – of ex-wives and step-kids, re-wiring each other’s psyches into knots of love, deprivation, hurt, cruelty, or depression. Lately the rich were more likely than even middle class people to marry, to marry later, to stay married and have a couple of kids who then became their obsession. This is what I saw among the longtime richer people; it might be the future even for Bredon and his fiancée. Maybe it was different for the newer rich people, as it was for the celebrities, new to luxury, tempted by all the things that destroy, especially alcohol, especially drugs.
    Rand went back to my question. “Were you burned by datinga married man?” he