“So you will understand why I’d prefer to get some rest before my flight to Rangoon,” I said.

He nodded. He understood.

It was a lie, of course. The stewardess, who did not appear to be of mixed ancestry, had indeed been extremely attentive, bringing me an unending stream of drinks and snacks and hot towels and peppermint candies and cups of strong coffee. But if sexual services were part of her repertoire, you couldn’t prove it by me.

I figured Suk would believe me. It was the sort of thing a man would want to believe, because if it could happen to me, then someday it could happen to him, and the possibility, however slight, would make him approach every flight from now on with a feeling of anticipation. It might even move him to shell out big bucks and fly business class.

In the meantime, it would give him a fantasy to enliven his own visit to some over-the-hill twelve-year-old hooker. And it would make him feel a lot better about life in general – and Evan Tanner in particular – than the truth of the matter.

Which was that I hadn’t been to bed with a woman in twenty-five years.

Now that’s the sort of statement relatively few men can make, aside from those who are otherwise inclined to begin with. There are Catholic priests who might equal or surpass my record – though perhaps fewer of them than we used to think – and the Buddhist world has no end of monks whose vows forbid them to touch or speak with a woman, let alone have it off with her.

I would argue, though, that the first twenty-four and a half years of celibacy were none of my doing, and didn’t really count. Take any man, freeze him into suspended animation, and tuck him away in a sub-basement in Union City (or anywhere else, come to think of it) and the guy’s not going to get a lot of action. I don’t care if he’s Errol Flynn. I don’t care if he’s Warren Beatty. I don’t care if he’s a former governor of Arkansas. The guy’s going to have a very easy time keeping it in his pants.

The last six months are a little tougher to explain.

For openers, I was incredibly busy. I had a whole lot of current events to catch up on, and the computer age to enter into. That really did occupy me night and day, and it kept me almost too busy to think about sex, let alone get out and go after some.

And when I did think about it, I didn’t even know where to start looking.

For one thing, I didn’t know anybody. Before the Great Ice Age, I’d been slightly involved with a couple of women. I’d had a long on-again-off-again affair with Kitty Bazerian, but that wasn’t really going anywhere, and the other women I saw from time to time were just casual friends and equally casual bedmates.

Remember, this was 1972. This was before herpes, never mind AIDS. People slept around without having to devote a whole lot of thought and advance planning to the matter. If you picked up something, well, it was no worse than a bad cold, and, unlike a cold, a shot of penicillin could cure it.

Sex was wonderful, and sometimes it was a big deal, but the thing was it didn’t have to be. There were girls who stayed over at my place because it was late and they didn’t want to take the subway at that hour, or squander ten bucks on a cab all the way out to Forest Hills. There were girls I made a pass at because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, and girls who went along because they didn’t want to hurt mine. And why not? It didn’t cost anything, it didn’t hurt anybody, and it felt good and was good for you. Why keep it in your pants when there were so many better places to put it?

By the time they thawed me out, the world had become a very different place. All changed, changed utterly, all right.

I didn’t go out looking to meet women, I was really too busy for that, but when I circulated for other purposes women occasionally appeared, and I wasn’t too brain dead to notice them. One Sunday afternoon in a church basement in the Bronx I joined a dozen Albanian monarchists to discuss the prospects of King Leka, son and rightful heir of the legendary King Zog. (Zog had ruled the Balkan kingdom for eleven years before fleeing Mussolini’s invading army in 1939. The communists took over when the war ended, and Zog died in Paris in 1961, although he lives on to this day in crossword puzzles.)

The meeting was a good one, and the movement’s prospects were pleasing – Leka, every inch a king at six-eight, had drawn enthusiastic crowds on a recent visit to his homeland. I left in the company of a woman who was no more Albanian than I. Her name was Marina Boyadjieva, and she was Bulgarian, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Bulgarian pretender, Simeon I. We went to a bar in the neighborhood for slivovitz, and then we took the subway into Manhattan and ate at a restaurant in the Village. (The owners were Albanians, with monarchist sympathies; the menu, like that of most Albanian-owned establishments in New York, was Italian.)

We hit it off. She was a few years younger than I, having been born two months before JFK’s assassination. This made her the right age biologically, but it didn’t give us much of a common frame of reference. She was, after all, only nine years old when I got frozen. She hadn’t been born during most of my life, and I hadn’t been around during most of hers.

But that was only a problem for two people planning to spend their lives together. It didn’t matter if you had short-term goals, like taking her back to her apartment, getting her clothes off, and screwing her brains out.

The first part was easy enough. She lived alone in an L-shaped studio in the east Twenties, where she made a pot of coffee and turned the radio to a golden oldies station. (Oldies for Marina; I was hearing most of them for the first time.) We sat side by side on her sofa, and I kissed her, and things were off to a nice start.

But that was as far as they went. After some pleasant moments she disengaged herself and said it was a shame we had to stop. And she told me that we would have to go slow, and take plenty of time to get to know each other, and eventually, if we were serious about our relationship, we would go together for blood tests. And then, after we got the results, we could go to bed together. But in the meantime it was good to know that we were indeed physically attracted to one another.

Cold comfort, I’d call it. “I’ll call you,” I assured her, and, riding home on the subway, I decided I wouldn’t. Because I didn’t want to go to bed with this woman if I had to court her for six months first and then pass a blood test. Why not go whole hog and get our DNA comparison-tested so we’d know how our children would do in school?

If that was what dating in the nineties amounted to, I figured the hell with it. Still, a man has needs, whether he’s thirty-nine or sixty-four, and it occurred to me that there were ways to satisfy them that didn’t involve months of chatting up some sweet young thing who didn’t have a clue who Hubert Humphrey was. There were, after all, women who did that sort of thing for a living. The ones on the street were about as inviting as the town pump during a cholera epidemic, but there were others, higher up on the food chain, who ran ads and took credit cards.

For some reason I didn’t seem to be interested. If love seemed like too much trouble, a commercial transaction was too cut and dried. It just didn’t seem as though it would be any fun.

And then, just to complicate things, there was Minna.

There we were, sharing the same apartment, taking turns using the bathroom, eating meals together, and just sitting around talking. She was out during business hours – she’d recently started working for a magazine publisher, in the advertising and sales promotion department, a natural choice for someone with a Ph.D. in Lithuanian history. But she was home the rest of the time, and I was aware of her presence even while she slept.