“Are you hungry? Would you like to go out to dinner or would you prefer I cook for you? Or are you full on Cheez-Its, Oreos and Diet Coke?”

He gives me that friendly sort of nothing smile, but its effect is the opposite. I am quaking like a leaf now. How does the attendant manage to look like he doesn’t hear us? And why is it embarrassing to me that he’s listening to us discussing dinner? Really, Chrissie, that is too lame. We are talking about dinner.

I shake my head.

Alan frowns. “Is that shake: I’m not hungry or I don’t want to go out or I don’t want you to cook for me?”

The shake is I don’t want to talk about food. I am here. I can do this. Dammit, can’t we just get it done and out of the way so I can feel comfortable again?

I stare up at him. “Whatever you want so long as it’s not Chinese takeout delivered would be fine with me.”

He laughs. “I think I can do better than that.”

Oh my. He’s put just enough in his laughter to make me tremble. I look at the attendant. Is he smirking? It’s hard to tell in the split mirror tiles.

The doors open. “Come.” He has my hand again. It is warm inside, dimly lit, a giant open space with glass on the far wall, overlooking a terrace and the New York skyline.

I can feel my eyes widening and I don’t want them to. Music’s most self-destructive bad-boy has an apartment that is elegant and one of the most magnificent homes I’ve ever seen, with its tastefully decorated rooms before a stunning expanse of the city. Alan knows art and Alan has style. I wander into the open space living room, with its lustrous hardwood floors, where there is a remarkable collection of pre-Columbian pottery that I only recognized because I’d studied some similar pieces in an art book last semester. On a far wall, an eclectic collection of art: A Picasso, a Warhol, a Monet and a Salvador Dali, all original, somehow arranged with a collection of Americana that pulls the pieces together and gives them a sense of cohesion.

The furnishings are plush and graceful, every surface spotless to the point that it looks as if no one lives here. I think of his plane, the traveling trashcan. So many contradictions. Most definitely not what I expected. Not this symmetry. This precision. This tasteful luxury that screams of old money.

I turn to find him still in the foyer, standing beside a polished table with a high-neck crystal vase filled with the stems of daylilies. I missed that before. I smile.

“Who changes the daylilies?”

Alan smiles. “I don’t know. If you get up early in the morning you can watch her.”

In the morning. I tense. “Do you have a phone?”

Alan laughs. What a stupid question, Chrissie. You couldn’t have phrased it more stupidly.

He steps into the living room and sinks on a sofa. The room is so perfect I’m afraid to step into it. “Unfortunately, in every room,” Alan says. “I hate the telephone. I don’t know why I have one in every room.”

“Really? Why do you hate the phone?”

“I never want to talk to who’s on the other end. Usually the press, even though it seems like they change my number every week or so.”

“Really? What a pain. I’ve had the same number since I was five.” I make a little face. “May I use one of your too many phones?”

“Why?”

“I haven’t checked my messages today.”

He gestures with an arm toward a stunning mahogany table. I can feel him watching as I dial the number to the answering service. Shit, there are ten messages from Rene. All day I waited for her to call, and once I left for the park she called ten times. Good one, Rene. Where were you when I really needed you?

I click down the receiver without calling her back.

“Everything OK?” Alan asks.

I nod. “Rene. Ten calls. She doesn’t want to wear fuchsia to her dad’s wedding, but number thirty-seven insists.”

“Thirty-seven?”

“That’s what Rene calls her soon-to-be stepmother. Thirty-seven. She counts her father’s girlfriends. This one is number thirty-seven. So that’s what we call her.”

Jeez, why did I tell him such a childish thing? Please laugh, Alan. I’m nervous as hell.

I move to the far corner of the room and the full-size shiny grand piano. I lift the lid. I touch the keys lightly with my finger so they don’t make sound.

“How many girls have you been with? I bet it is more than thirty-seven.”

I turn from the piano to find his eyes on me, his expression enigmatic. I can hear the sharp sound of my own breathing in the intense quiet of the room.

It seems like neither of us talk, neither of us move, forever. I can’t tell if he’s angry, insulted or amused by the question.

“I don’t keep count,” he says finally.

“Ah, probably not. Why would you? Did you care about any of them?”

Those black eyes burn into me. “No,” he says, slowly, softly. “It doesn’t mean that I haven’t kept some of them around for a while. But did I care about any of them? No, Chrissie. I didn’t. Is that the answer you were looking for?”

Heck, no. I wish I’d never asked it. “If you didn’t care for them, why did you keep them around?”

“I meet lots of girls. Some of them later become friends. Some of them I still sleep with. Some of them are just sex. Lots of girls, Chrissie.”

“So what kind of girl am I?”

“I thought we were already friends.” He gives me a smile that makes me suck in air.

“Why am I here?”

“I want you here.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.”

He rises. He crosses the room to me. He leans into me and kisses my nose, the gesture silly and unthreatening, deliberately so, I think. He doesn’t kiss my mouth, but I am tense from head to toe and my heartbeat is soaring anyway.

Alan smiles. His eyes are stunningly bright. “I want you to stay with me here while you’re in New York. Do what you want. As much or as little as you want. Let’s keep this simple. Stay here and do what you want.”

Simple? Nothing could be further from simple. I don’t know how to do any of this.

I need time. Time to process this new, more confusing wrinkle. He just asked me to stay with him the rest of my spring break. It’s crazy. Why would he ask me such a thing?

I move from the piano into a small sitting area with a full wall entertainment system. On a table is a neatly stacked tower of tapes, and as I sort through them I realize that they are all first run movies currently in theaters or soon to be released. Some of them have handwritten notes on them from studios, directors, or actors.

He notices my preoccupation with the tapes. “Do you want to watch a movie?”

A movie. Yes. A little bit of normal. Perhaps that will take the tension and premeditation out of this.

I pick up one. “This looks interesting. It has John Candy in it.”

I turn it over. Uncle Buck. The promotional cover makes me laugh.

“There are two dramas in there that are supposed to be good. One with Robin Williams and another with Daniel Day-Lewis. Have you seen them?”

“First run movies not released? Of course not. That would violate Jack’s commitment to proletarian normalcy. I go to the theater when they are released like everyone else. I’d like to watch a movie. Do you want to watch this? Even though I’m sure it’s lame, I bet it’s funny. John Candy can be so funny.”

He takes the movie and reads the jacket. “Americans have no taste in cinema.”

I laugh. “Cinema? My, we are so British proper when we are in our fancy penthouse where the world can’t see.”

It was meant to be a silly joke, but those black eyes sharpen on me.

“Yes, I’m so proper I’m standing here imagining what it would be like to boff during the opening credits.”

I blink twice and stare at him. There was an angry edge to his voice that I didn’t expect, certainly didn’t like, and definitely didn’t want. That pissed him off and I haven’t the first clue why.