We were alone, until we were not.

I woke suddenly one Sunday night and there it was, something, looking down at me. I was not drunk, but I had been very deep asleep, and now, Jesus, there was, at the foot of the bed, a whatchamacallit, a creature dressed in a pearly gown. Then it was a man, tall, handsome as a movie star, with heavy-lidded eyes and lips so bluish violet, they must have really been bright red. What I had thought a gown then became a suit or shirt covered in dry-cleaner's plastic and this membrane caught and held the moonlight like a floating lethal thing in an aquarium.

"Olivier?"

Who else would have a key? He sneezed, a sudden noise like ripping curtains, and there was a crumpled rush of light, and in a moment the front door had slammed and I heard his oddly unhurried leather soles descending the stairs.

Ten years earlier I would have made a big bloody scene and even now I was inclined to wake his wife, but it's no good getting old if you don't get cunning, and after a tumbler of Lagavulin, my nerves settled and my outrage sub sided. I woke with the incident fresh in my mind but then Hugh burned his socks while attempting to dry them on the toaster and I saw that Olivier Leibovitz was too big a subject for this kitchen. I collected my thermos and my sandwich, saying I would change her lock that evening when I returned.

Marlene was cleaning the injured toaster but she paused, clocked me with those transparent eyes, rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist, and nodded.

"OK," she said.

We both thought we knew what the other meant.

Indeed, in bed that night, she began to tell me how she met Olivier Leibovitz in New York and she lay with her lovely small head on my chest and stroked my head. The lock produced the story, that was clear to me.

When she met Olivier Leibovitz on Third Avenue she was only four years out of Benalla, that is she was just twenty-one years old, and she had never tasted French champagne and certainly had not the least bloody idea of who Olivier was, nor had she ever heard of his father or Miro or Picasso or Braque or even Gertrude Stein who is reported to have said of the newborn Olivier, "I don't like babies but I like this one."

All the evidence available at McCain Advertising—from the size of his office to his place in the distribution list of the conference reports—made it very clear Olivier Leibovitz was no-one of particular importance. He looked after a decidedly peripheral group of Garment District advertisers and had only one real national client, a family business based in Austin, Texas, whose executives, Mr. Tom, Mr. Gavin and Mr. Royce, exhibited both slavish respect for their grandfather's ugly pink packs of dental adhesive, and a creepy fascination with Olivier, their international Jew. But as I said, she was only twenty-one, and from Benalla. She had never met a Jew before. All she knew was that he was very cute and he kept a horse in the Claremont Stables on West 89th Street and rode it on the bridle path in Central Park each morning. So there was always this lovely perfume about him, beneath the talc, the smell of horse, which to her mind was aristocratic, a word she might have also applied to Cary. Grant, an impression strengthened not only by Olivier's physical grace but his clear separation from the general desperate ambition which marked McCain Advertising then and probably still does now that it has become McCain, Dorfman, Lilly. But Marlene, of course, was Australian, and Olivier's refusal to push harder than was absolutely necessary never seemed lazy, the opposite, something on the very, very acceptable side of arrogant.

She herself was absolutely no-one, an assistant to an assistant, a typist with a hot red IBM Selectric, its entire font contained in a dancing ball that spun and slashed at those pages headed CONFERENCE REPORT. She wore Bill Blass blouses and Paco Rabanne shoes with fuck-me heels but she lived in a hot stuffy walk-up on the scary edges of West 15th Street, bathroom in the kitchen, number 351, only four houses away from Ninth Avenue, and she stayed in the office in the evenings because it was cooler and no-one was urinating on the stairs or anywhere but where you might expect. Olivier Leibovitz often worked late, and once, having gone to steal Finepoint pens from the McCain art department, she discovered him operating a Lazy Lucy, one of those huge tracing machines worked by wheels and pulleys, which enlarged and reduced images in the days before computers.

Only later did it occur to her that he was an account executive and therefore had no more business being in the art department than she did. At the time she registered his embarrassment as a puzzle.

"You didn't know I was an artist?" He raised an eyebrow and smiled. He had the most charming accent, not French, but not American either.

She took a step toward him, but only to hide the box of sixty black Finepoints behind her back. I won't tell, she smiled back.

"Here, look. I'll show you."

He moved aside so she might step up on the low platform and then they both poked their heads through the curtained hood, like a couple making funny faces for an instant picture at Penn Station. What did she expect to see?

"Dentures," she told me. "Denture adhesive."

There was a sheet of illuminated tracing paper, and—breathing that very heady smell of talc and man—Cary Grant would surely have smelt just like this—she saw projected on the paper the most unexpected thing. It was, in fact, an image of Chaplin mecanique, from the collection of the Musee Leibovitz in Prague.

All this she would learn later. Now Olivier, as artful as a tennis coach, leaned carefully around her in order to rack up the flatbed a notch. It was August 1974 and Marlene Cook had never really seen anything even vaguely like the tumbling cans, the shimmering pearly pyramids, the scary charming moustached child beaming in the window frame. It was an angel or the devil, who could know or tell?

"It's nothing," he said. "I'm just cropping it."

"Is it modern art?"

He looked at her quickly, with a peculiar sort of attention.

She frowned, feeling foolish, but certainly not only that, something stubborn and excited too. For this was clearly, totally, in no way fucking nothing. Later she would discover that she had an Eye, but even now she had something which told her that this was immense. Of course she did not know what to say, and her confusion, and her embarrassment at her own ignorance, got mixed up with his smell and the feeling of that arm brushing against her while it slowly turned the wheel of the machine.

"Do you really have a horse?"

He turned to her, the pale palette of Chaplin mecanique washing across his cheek, reflecting in his eyes.

"Indeed I do."

"Oh."

"And do you ride?"

"Not very well I suppose."

Outside the black velvet curtain he appraised her very frankly and confidently, and she thought, We Australians are really shit.

We know nothing. We are so bloody ugly. Almost everything about him was perfectly proportioned, and the things which were not, like the heavy eyelids and the slightly thicker lips, were what gave his face its extraordinary distinction, made it both surprising and familiar, something one wished to return to again and again.

"Have you eaten?"

"Not really."

"We could go to Sardi's. Do you like Sardi's?"

"The Sardi's?"

"The Sardi's," he said, returning with amusement to his machine.

She pushed the Finepoints away as if she were simply making room to sit on the filing cabinet. After a few minutes, he turned off the machine, retrieved a very small rather scratched transparency and, holding it up to the light, showed her how he had traced its tiny heart, so he could wrap a part of it—the grinning maniacal boy—around a coffee mug.