“Recognize her?” Scarpelli asked.

“Certainly,” Withers said, flipping through his mental index cards for the name. “She’s Ms. Haber, your personal assistant. She escorted me in, offered me water…”

Walter thought wistfully of the days when one would be offered a civilized martini at any decent office in midtown.

Scarpelli beamed. “August 1980.”

I can’t seem to recall last Thursday and he’s playing memory games from two years ago.

Withers held his palms up.

“Miss August 1980,” Scarpelli urged. “The centerfold!”

She’s smiling at me, Withers thought, as if she isn’t the least bit embarrassed that her boss just asked me to summon up the image of her on her back displaying herself.

Withers didn’t want to tell them that he had seen Top Drawer magazine maybe twice and it had just depressed him. It had been twenty years since he had gone to bed with a woman who looked anything like Ms. Haber and he knew he wasn’t going to have that pleasure if he lived another twenty, which was unlikely. So looking at the pictures was like being broke and hungry and standing outside the Carnegie Deli with one’s nose pressed to the window.

“Certainly,” Withers said. He vaguely recalled some punch line about “not recognizing you with your clothes on” but didn’t chance it.

“I want Polly Paget in my magazine,” Scarpelli said, getting back to business.

“Well, that’s what I thought.”

“Nude.”

As if he invented sex, Withers thought. Walter himself followed the school of thought that women were more alluring with their clothes on, given the right clothes. Half the erotic pleasure of romance, if memory served, was in the gradual baring of secrets, the delicate interplay of fabric and flesh, the-

“Full frontal, if possible,” Ms. Haber chimed in.