In any event, he was abjectly loyal to her. He loved and feared his idea of Mrs. Graham the way Emil Larkin loved and feared his idea of Jesus Christ. He was luckier than Larkin in his worship, of course, since the invisible superior being over him called him up and wrote him letters and told him what to do.

He actually said one time, "Working for Mrs. Graham has been a religious experience for me. I was adrift, no matter how much money I was making. My life had no purpose until I became president of RAMJAC and placed myself at her beck and call."

All happiness is religious, I have to think sometimes.

Leen said he would talk to us one by one in his library. "Mrs. Graham didn't tell me about your backgrounds, what your special interests might be — so you're just going to have to tell me about yourselves." He said for Ubriaco to come into the library first, and asked the rest of us to wait in the living room. "Is there anything my butler can bring you to drink?" he said.

Clewes didn't want anything. Edel asked for a beer. I, still hoping to blow the dream wide open, ordered a pousse-caf?, a rainbow-colored drink that I had never seen, but which I had studied while earning my Doctor of Mixology degree. A heavy liqueur was put into the bottom of a glass, then a lighter one of a different color was carefully spooned in on top of that, and then a lighter one still on top of that, and on and on, with each bright layer undisturbed by the one above or below.

Leen was impressed with my order. He repeated it, to make sure he had heard it right.

"If it's not too much trouble," I said. It was no more trouble, surely, than building a full-rigged ship model in a bottle, say.

"No problem!" said Leen. This, I would learn, was a favorite expression of his. He told the butler to give me a pousse- caf? without further ado.

He and Ubriaco went into the library, and the rest of us entered the living room, which had a swimming pool. I had never seen a living room with a swimming pool before. I had heard of such a thing, of course, but hearing of and actually seeing that much water in a living room are two very different things.

I knelt by the pool and swirled my hand in the water, curious about the temperature, which was soupy. When I withdrew my hand and considered its wetness, I had to admit to myself that the wet was undreamlike. My hand was really wet and would remain so for some time, unless I did something about it.

All this was really going on. As I stood, the butler arrived with my pousse- caf?.

Outrageous behavior was not the answer. I was going to have to start paying attention again. "Thank you," I said to the butler.

"You're welcome, sir," he replied. Clewes and Edel were seated at one end of a couch about half a block long. I joined them, wanting their appreciation for how sedate I had become.

They were continuing to speculate as to when Mrs. Graham might have caught them behaving so virtuously.

Clewes mourned that he had not had many opportunities to be virtuous, selling advertising matchbooks and calendars from door to door. "About the best I can do is let a building custodian tell me his war stories," he said. He remembered a custodian in the Flatiron Building who claimed to have been the first American to cross the bridge over the Rhine at Remagan, Germany, during World War Two. The capture of this bridge had been an immense event, allowing the Allied Armies to pour at high speed right into the heart of Germany. Clewes doubted that the custodian could have been Mrs. Jack Graham, though.

Israel Edel supposed that Mrs. Graham could be disguised as a man, though. "I sometimes think that about half our customers at the Arapahoe are transvestites," he said.

The possibility of Mrs. Graham's being a transvestite would be brought up again soon, and most startlingly, by Arpad Leen.

Meanwhile, though, Clewes got back on the subject of World War Two. He got personal about it. He said that he and I, when we were wartime bureaucrats, had only imagined that we had something to do with defeats and victories. "The war was won by fighters, Walter. All the rest was dreams."

It was his opinion that all the memoirs written about that war by civilians were swindles, pretenses that the war had been won by talkers and writers and socialites, when it could only have been won by fighters.

A telephone rang in the foyer. The butler came in to say that the call was for Clewes, who could take it on the telephone on the coffee table in front of us. The telephone was black-and-white plastic and shaped like "Snoopy," the famous dog in the comic strip called "Peanuts." Peanuts was owned by what was about to become my division of RAMJAC. To converse on that telephone, as I would soon discover, you had to put your mouth over the dog's stomach and stick his nose in your ear. Why not?

It was Clewes's wife Sarah, my old girlfriend, calling from their apartment. She had just come home from a private nursing case, had found his note, which said where he was and what he was doing there and how he could be reached by telephone.

He told her that I was there, too, and she could not believe it. She asked to talk to me. So Clewes handed me the plastic dog.

"Hi," I said.

"This is crazy," she said. "What are you doing there?"

"Drinking a pousse- caf? by the swimming pool," I said.

"I can't imagine you drinking a pousse- caf?," she said.

"Well, I am," I said.

She asked how Clewes and I had met. I told her. "Such a small world, Walter," she said, and so on. She asked me if Clewes had told me that I had done them a big favor when I testified against him.

"I would have to say that that opinion is moot," I told her.

"Is what?" she said.

"Moot," I said. It was a word she had somehow never heard before. I explained it to her.

"I'm so dumb," she said. "There's so much I don't know, Walter." She sounded just like the same old Sarah on the telephone. It could have been Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five again, which made what she said next especially poignant: "Oh, my God, Walter! We're both over sixty years old! How is that possible?"

"You'd be surprised, Sarah," I said.

She asked me to come home with Clewes for supper, and I said I would if I could, that I didn't know what was going to happen next. I asked her where she lived.

It turned out that she and Clewes lived in the basement of the same building where her grandmother used to live — in Tudor City. She asked me if I remembered her grandmother's, apartment, all the old servants and furniture jammed into only four rooms.

I said I did, and we laughed.

I did not tell her that my son also lived somewhere in Tudor City. I would find out later that there was nothing vague about his proximity to her, with his musical wife and his adopted children. Stankiewicz of The New York Times was in the same building, and notoriously so, because of the wildness of the children — and only three floors above Leland and Sarah Clewes.

She said that it was good that we could still laugh, despite all we had been through. "At least we still have our sense of humor," she said. That was something Julie Nixon had said about her father after he got bounced out of the White House: "He still has his sense of humor."

"Yes — at least that," I agreed.

"Waiter," she said, "what's this fly doing in my soup?"

"What?" I said.

"What's this fly doing in my soup?" she persisted.

And then it came back to me: This was the opening line in a daisy-chain of jokes we used to tell each other on the telephone. I closed my eyes. I gave the answering line, and the telephone became a time machine for me. It allowed me to escape from Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven and into the fourth dimension.

"I believe that's the backstroke, madam," I said.

"Waiter," she said, "there's also a needle in my soup."