“I’m afraid you’ll have to do all the heavy breathing yourself,” she said. “It’s time I got on home.”

“You could stay.”

“Oh, not tonight, Bernie.” She sat up in bed and extended her arms overhead, stretching like a cat. “I have an early day tomorrow. I’d best be off. I don’t suppose you’ve seen my panties, have you?”

“Not since you took them off. At that point I lost interest in them.”

She hopped out of bed and looked for them, and I looked at her. This was an agreeable task, because she looked absolutely splendid. She was about five-six or-seven, and quite slender, but by no means angular. Curves everywhere, but they were all gentle curves with no hairpin turns; if she’d been a road, you wouldn’t have to downshift or, God forbid, hit the brake pedal. Her hair was the color of tupelo honey, and her skin was the color of cream, and her eyes were the color of an Alpine lake. The first time I laid eyes on her I’d been struck by her beauty, and she looked a hundred times better now. Because she’d had clothes on then, and now she didn’t, and I’ll tell you, it makes a difference.

She put a dainty hand on a gorgeous hip and studied the painting on the wall opposite the bed. “I’ll miss this,” she said idly. “It’s really quite a good copy, isn’t it?”

It’s a canvas some eighteen inches square, with black vertical and horizontal lines on a white field. Some of the squares are filled in with primary colors. I asked her how she could tell it was a copy.

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, its location’s a dead giveaway, wouldn’t you say? You’d hardly be apt to find an original Mondrian here.”

“Here” was a one-bedroom apartment at Seventy-first and West End, and it’s actually a pretty decent place to live, even if you wouldn’t be likely to mistake it for the Museum of Modern Art.