Of course he saw her back in New York. Every day that she was free he would go to her place at lunchtime. Then one Saturday he, Phoebe, and Nancy were walking down Third Avenue when he saw Merete walking on the other side of the street with that easy, upright, somnambulant gait whose feral assuredness always slayed him, as if she were not approaching the Seventy-second Street light carrying a bag of groceries but serenely traversing the Serengeti, Merete Jespersen of Copenhagen grazing the grasses of the savanna amid a thousand African antelope. Models didn't all have to be needle-thin in those days, and even before he spotted her by her glide and saw the sheaf of golden hair down her back, he identified her as his very own treasure, the white hunter's prize, by the weight of her breasts inside her blouse and the light heft of the behind whose little hole had come to afford them such delight. He displayed neither fear nor excitement upon seeing her, though he felt extremely ill and had to get to a phone alone to call her – getting to the phone was all he thought about for the rest of the afternoon. This wasn't ravishing the secretary on the office floor. This was the raw supremacy of her creatureliness over his instinct for survival, itself a force to be reckoned with. This was the wildest venture of his life, the one, as he was only faintly beginning to understand, that could wipe out everything. Only in passing did it occur to him that it might be somewhat delusional at the age of fifty to think that he could find a hole that would substitute for everything else.

A few months later he flew to Paris to see her. She had been working in Europe for six weeks, and though they spoke secretly on the phone as often as three times a day, that wasn't sufficient to satisfy the longing in either of them. A week before the Saturday when he and Phoebe were to drive to New Hampshire to bring Nancy home from summer camp, he told Phoebe that he would have to fly to Paris for a shoot that weekend. He'd leave on Thursday night and be home by Monday morning. Ezra Pollock, the account executive, would be going with him and they would meet up with a European crew over there. He knew that Ez was with his family until after Labor Day, unreachable on a tiny phoneless island several miles out to sea from South Freeport, Maine, so far from everything that seals could be seen socializing on the ledges of the rocky island nearby. He gave Phoebe the name and number of the Paris hotel and then reconsidered ten times a day his risking the chance of being discovered by her just so he and Merete could spend a long weekend together in the lovers' capital of the world. But Phoebe remained unsuspicious and seemed to be looking forward to picking up Nancy by herself. She was eager to have her home after a summer away, just as he was dying to see Merete after a month and a half apart, and so he flew off on Thursday night, his mind on that little hole and what she liked him to do with it. Yes, fixed dreamily on no more than that all the way across the Atlantic on Air France.

What went wrong was the weather. High winds and blustery storms swept through Europe, and no planes were able to take off all day Sunday and into Monday. Both days he sat at the airport with Merete, who had come along to cling to him until the last possible moment, but when it was clear that there would be no departures from de Gaulle until Tuesday at the earliest, they took a taxi back to the Rue des Beaux Arts, to Merete's favorite swank little Left Bank hotel, where they were able to rebook their room, the room mirrored with smoked glass. During every night ride they took by taxi in Paris, they performed the same impudent playlet, always as though inadvertently and for the first time: he'd drop his hand onto her knee and she'd let her legs fall open just far enough so that he could reach up under her silk slip of a dress – nothing more, really, than a piece of deluxe lingerie – and finger her while she adjusted her head to look idly out of the taxi at the illuminated shop windows and he, leaning back in his seat, pretended to be anything but riveted by the way she could continue to behave as if no one were touching her even as he sensed her beginning to come. Merete carried everything erotic to the limit. (Earlier, in a discreet antique jewelry shop down the street from their hotel, he'd adorned her throat with a stunning trinket, a pendant necklace set with diamonds and demantoid garnets and strung on its original gold chain. Like the knowledgeable son of his father that he was, he'd asked to examine the stones through the jeweler's loupe. "What are you looking for?" Merete asked. "Flaws, cracks, the coloring – if nothing appears under a ten-power magnification the diamond can be certified as flawless. You see? My father's words issue from my mouth whenever I speak about jewelry." "But not about anything else," she said. "Not about anything about you. Those words are mine." Not while shopping, not while walking the streets, not while taking an elevator or having coffee together in a booth around the corner from her apartment, could they ever stop seducing each other. "How do you know how to do that, to hold the thing-?" "The loupe." "How do you know how to hold the loupe in your eye like that?" "My father taught me. You just tighten your socket around it. Rather like you do." "So what color is it?" "Blue. Blue-white. That was the best in the old days. My father would say it still is. My father would say, 'Beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable.' 'Imperishable' was a word he loved to savor." "Who doesn't?" Merete said. "What is it in Danish?" he asked her. "'Uforgængelig.' It's just as wonderful." "Why don't we take it?" he told the saleswoman, who in turn, speaking in perfect English and with a touch of French – and with perfect cunning – told the young companion of the older gentleman, "Mademoiselle is very lucky. Une femme choyée," and the cost was about as much as the entire inventory of the Elizabeth store, if not more, back when he was running one-hundred-dollar engagement rings of a quarter or a half carat to be sized for his father's customers by a man working on a bench in a cubbyhole on Frelinghuysen Avenue circa 1942.) And now he withdrew the finger sticky with her slime, perfumed her lips with it, then pressed it between her teeth for her tongue to caress, reminding her of their first meeting and what they'd dared to do as strangers, an American adman of fifty and a Danish model of twenty-four, crossing a Caribbean island in the dark, transfixed. Reminding her that she was his and he hers. A cult of two.

There was a message from Phoebe waiting for him at the hotel: "Contact me immediately. Your mother gravely ill."

When he phoned he learned that his eighty-year-old mother had had a stroke at five a.m. Monday, New York time, and was not expected to live.

He explained to Phoebe about the weather conditions and learned that Howie was already on his way east and that his father was keeping vigil beside his mother's bed. He wrote down the telephone number of his mother's room at the hospital, and Phoebe told him that as soon as she hung up, she would be heading over to Jersey herself, to be with his father at the hospital until Howie arrived. She had only been waiting for him to call her back. "I missed you by a few minutes this morning. The desk clerk told me, 'Madame and monsieur have just departed for the airport.'"

"Yes," he said, "I shared a cab with the photographer's rep."

"No, you shared a cab with the Danish twenty-four-year-old with whom you are having an affair. I'm sorry, but I can no longer look the other way I looked the other way with that secretary. But the humiliation has now gone too far. Paris," she said with disgust. "The planning. The premeditation. The tickets and the travel agent. Tell me, which of you romantic cornballs dreamed up Paris for your sneaky little undertaking? Where did you two eat? What charming restaurants did you go to?"