“What are you drinking? Lunch is on me.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to get paid.”

“That you are.” I had brought a blank check. “Dry Rob Roy,” I said to the waiter. The menus were already on the table.

“Congratulations,” Arnie said.

“For what?”

“I believe you got married.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Miranda wouldn’t have told him. She was as cozy with information as Cosa Nostra. “How do you know?” I said.

“How do I know? Heck, there was a spread in every newspaper.”

“Yes, there was, wasn’t there?” My drink arrived and I drank it, quickly.

And so we went home to our bridal suite and there she said, “Martinis. And I’m making.” She opened the liquor cabinet. “Excellent ingredients here. And a jar of olives and a jar of pearl onions, but I don’t like either. No lemons.”

“I though you weren’t special for Martinis?”

“Except on special occasions. Do you think we ought to call down for lemons?”

I didn’t quite relish the idea of calling to Room Service from the bridal suite in the middle of the night for a couple of lemons.

“I’ll go down and get them,” I said, and when I returned, after my curious excursion to the kitchens below, there was a tall shaker with frosty Martinis sitting and waiting.

“Coffee?” he said to his wife. The tall silver urn was doing small business. The big business was at the Champagne coolers.

“Wine,” she said.

“Had you better?”

“Taittinger 1921,” she said. “You bet I had better.” She smiled at me with large white teeth. “Which means I have never had better. Taittinger ’21. The best.”

We drank Champagne, ate, chatted, and ate and chatted and drank.

Sturgeon and Champagne. Ah, the sweet life.

We danced all through it, comfortably and close. We drank brandy from big Napoleon glasses. The music got hot. The place filled up, got warm and noisy.

“Peter,” she said, inhaling smoke through a long holder with a finger loop, “I’m beginning not to like it here. Can’t we go somewhere else where it is quieter?”

“Do you like Sibelius?”

“I adore Sibelius.”

“I have Sibelius in quantities on wax discs and I have a lovely fireplace and I have oil paintings that cost me much, and I have a book of pornographic studies dating back to the fifteenth century. No etchings. But I have Pernod.”

“Sibelius and Pernod. You are a wicked man”

I came back and I asked, “How about some of the finest Sidecars ever concocted?”

“If you let me watch.”

“Why not?”

She trailed behind me. I turned and pushed her against the wall of the kitchen and kissed her hard.

“That for inspiration? she gasped.

“That’s for nothing,” I said.

I went to work with lemons and Cointreau and Cognac.

We brought the mixer into the living room, and in no time at all, fleece gathered.

‘Now,’ she said and she produced rye and bitters and cherries and olives and gin and two kinds of vermouth, dry and sweet, and then she backed up against a table and put her hands behind her and clasped the edge of the table and watched me, her body tight against her dress.

I mixed drinks. And set them up on the washtub and I looked at her and she didn’t move and I looked again and I don’t know which of us was breathing more heavily.