Their lips parted stickily. She pulled back half an inch. “I like feeling jealous,” she said. “That’s new for me.”

“I could explain all that, you know.”

“Stop explaining. I’d bet anything Clare’s dresses are still in your bedroom closet.” She laughed. “Show me, I want to see.”

Once upstairs, she spun in place, swinging her purse, tottering just a little. “Now, this room is amazing. Your closets are bigger than my dorm room.”

He set to work on his shoes. He stripped off his socks. One, two. He started on his cuff links. Why did it always take forever to strip? Why couldn’t clothes simply vanish, so people could get on with it? Clothes always vanished in movies.

“Are these walls really white suede? You have leather wallpaper?”

He glanced over. “You need some help undressing?”

“That’s all right. You don’t have to rip my clothes off more than once.”

Six endless minutes later he lay gasping in a nest of sheets. She sidled off to the bathroom, her hairdo smashed and her collarbones flushed. He heard her turning on the bidet, then every faucet in the room — the shower, the tub, the white sink, the black sink. Greta was experimenting, running all the local equipment. He lay there breath-ing deeply and felt weirdly gratified, like a small yet brilliant child who had snatched candy from under a door with a yardstick.

She came padding from the shower, black hair lank and dripping, her eyes as bright as a weasel’s. She crept into bed and embraced him, clammy, and frozen-footed, and reeking of upscale shampoo. She held him and said nothing. He fell asleep as if tumbling into a pit.

He woke later, head buzzing and muddled. Greta was standing before an open closet door, examining herself in its inset full-length mirror. She was wearing panties, and a pair of his socks, which she had jammed, inside out, onto her narrow, chilly feet.

She held a dress before herself and studied the effect. Oscar sud-denly recognized the dress. He had bought Clare that sundress because she looked so lovely in yellow. Clare had hated the dress, he now realized groggily. She’d always hated the dress. Clare even hated yel-low.

“What was all that noise just now?” he croaked.

“Some idiot banging the door downstairs,” Greta said. She dropped the dress on the floor, in a pile of half a dozen others. “The cops arrested him.” She picked out a beaded evening gown. “Go back to sleep.”

Oscar turned in place, scrunched the pillow, grabbed for slum-ber, and missed. He gathered awareness and watched her through slit-ted eyes. It was half past four in the morning.

“Aren’t you sleepy?” he said.

She caught his eye in the mirror, surprised to see him still awake.

She turned out the closet light, crossed the room silently, in darkness, and slid into bed.

“What have you been doing all this time?” he murmured.

“I’ve been exploring your house.”

“Any big discoveries?”

“Yes, I discovered what it means to be a rich guy’s girlfriend.” She sighed. “No wonder people want the job.”

He laughed. “What about my situation? I’m the boy-toy of a Nobel Prize winner.”

“I was watching you sleep,” she said wistfully. “You look so sweet. ”

“Why do you say that?”

“You don’t have an agenda while you’re sleeping.”

“Well, I have an agenda now.” He slid his hand over her bony hip and obtained a firm, intimate grip. “I’m a hundred percent agenda. I’m going to change your life. I’m going to transform you. I’m going to empower you.”

She stirred against the sheets. “How is that weird little miracle supposed to happen?”

“Tomorrow I’m taking you to meet my dear friend, Senator Bambakias.”

Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar’s majordomo, had a grocery delivery shipped to the house at eight AM. Yosh was not a man to be deterred by the mere fact that he was hundreds of miles from the scene. He had a keyboard and a list of Oscar’s requirements, so the electric hand of the net economy had dropped four boxes of expensive shrink-wraps at Oscar’s doorstep.

Oscar set up the new air filter in the breakfast nook. This fi-nessed Greta’s allergy problem. Allergies were very common among Collaboratory workers; the laundered air was so pure that it failed to properly challenge people’s immune systems, which hence became hyperreactive.

Then Oscar tied an apron over his lounge pajamas and put the kitchen to work. Results were gratifying. Oscar and Greta tore through lox, and bagels, and waffles, with lashings of juice and coffee. When the ravenous edge was blunted, they toyed with triangled rye toast and lump fish caviar.

Oscar gazed affectionately across the table’s massive flowered centerpiece. Things were going so well. He believed in breakfasts. Morning-after breakfasts were far more intimate and emotionally en-gaging than any number of romantic dinners. He’d been through a horrid gamut of breakfasts: breakfasts that were hungover, shame-ridden, full of unspoken dread or politeness stretched tighter than a banjo string; but breakfast with Greta was a signal success. Steamed clean in a white terry bathrobe and socketed in her Saarinen chair, she was a mutant swan in freshwater.

She smoothed a black mass of caviar across her toast and licked a stray dab from her fingertip. “I’m gonna miss that cytoplasm panel.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve bought you the full set of conference tapes. They’ll ship in the morning set at lunch. You can speed through all the boring parts in the media room.”

“No one goes to conferences to watch the tapes. All the action’s in the halls and the poster sessions. I need to go back there. I need to confer with my colleagues.”

“No, Greta, that’s not what you need today. You have a higher priority. You need to go to Cambridge with me, and confer with a United States Senator. Donna is arriving any minute; she’s been shop-ping, and she’s going to do you over.”

“Who is Donna?”

“Donna Nunez is one of my krewe. She’s an image consultant.”

“I thought you left your krewe in Texas at the lab.”

“No, I brought Donna with me. Besides, I’m in constant touch with my krewe. They haven’t been abandoned, they’re very busy back there-laying some groundwork. As for Donna, she’s been devoting a lot of thought to this project. You’ll be in very good hands.”

Greta put down her toast with a resolute look. “Well, I don’t do that sort of thing. I don’t have time for an image.”

“Rita Levi-Montalcini did.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about her?”

“You once told me that this woman was very important to you.

So, I put my oppo-research people on her. Now I’m an expert on your role model, Dr. Rita. Rita was a Nobelist, and a neuroscientist, and she was a major player in her country’s research effort. But Dr. Rita understood how to handle her role. She dressed every day like a Milanese jewel.”

“You don’t do science by dressing up.”

“No, you run science by dressing up.”

“But I don’t want to! I don’t want to run a damned thing! I just want to work in my lab! Why can’t you get that through your head? Why won’t anyone let me do my work anymore? If you’d just let me do the things I’m really good at, I wouldn’t have to go through any of this!”

Oscar smiled. “I bet that felt marvelous. Can we talk like adults now?”

She snorted.

“Don’t think that I’m being frivolous. You are being frivolous. You are a national celebrity. You’re not some ragged grad student who can hide out in your nice giant test tube. Rita Levi-Montalcini wore tailored lab coats, and did her hair, and had real shoes. And so will you. Relax and eat your caviar.”

The door emitted a ring. Oscar patted his lips with a napkin, belted his dressing gown, stepped into his slippers.