Fucking (the word “lovemaking” offered itself, with some legitimacy) let clairvoyance thrash about a bit between us: Here I was looking out from behind her eyes when she was eight, sitting on a back stoop twittered over by leaf shadows and stinging from some giant injustice. There she was behind mine in the sunlit library— WEREWULF —at Herne House. Here was a glowering sky over a dark field with a solitary Dutch barn. Here a car showroom, light bouncing off too much glass. Here Harley lighting the evening fire and saying, Well that’s just fucking non sense. Here her feet poking out of glittering bath foam, toenails like a little family of rubies. We lived a handful of each other’s moments, or imagined we did. Coming, I gripped the soft warm hair above her nape and stared at her. She stared back. Her eyes had the cold omniscience, her cunt the hot. Her open mouth moved very slightly, a barely perceptible shape of affirmation. This and the beauty spot did for whatever Tantric resolve I was holding on to. A first climax of total dissolution, as into God or void—then the return, the humble reassertion of fingerprints, scalp, knees, tongue, heart, brain. You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.

So the six carnal hours had passed.

But passed they had. Now we lay on the bed like starfish. It’s one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex. Outside, Manhattan was chillily sunlit under a blue March sky. Somewhere back down the hours it had rained. We’d been aware of it, as one harmless animal going about its business might be aware of another harmless animal doing the same. Now the air had a rinsed optimism. To be resisted, my realist warned, because already the future was groping, like a temporarily blinded giant, towards us.

“It’s the Irish Talulla,” she said. “Not the Chocktaw one. My mom’s family came over in the 1880s. Not that it makes a difference. It’s still a god-awful mouthful.”

“Demetriou” from her Greek father, Nikolai, who’d come to the U.S. as a physics postgrad in ’67, got sidetracked by the counterculture, barely scraped his MSc at Columbia and nearly died of a mysterious stomach infection on a trip to Mexico in 1973. He’d survived, however, and emerged traumatised, presumably into readiness for love, since less than six months out of hospital he met, fell for and married Colleen Gilaley, heiress to the not inconsiderable pile represented by her father’s four delis and three diners spread over Manhattan and Brooklyn, a familial empire into which Nikolai was grudgingly (and unproductively) absorbed. In 1975 (Ford in the White House, Jaws in movie theatres, Saigon fallen, the Khmer Rouge overrunning Cambodia, Humboldt’s Gift on the highbrow shelves, Shogun on the low) Colleen gave birth to what would be the Demetrious’ only child, a girl, Talulla Mary Apollonia, now thirty-four, divorcée, werewolf.

“It happened to me in California,” she said, speaking out of the qualitatively different silence that had formed after the nomenclatural explanation. (It happened to me in California. We were talking about “it,” now. This was how it would be, I realised, these early hours would display gentle schizophrenia, the multiple realities of what there was to talk about, of what we were .) “Last summer. My decree absolute had come through and I’d taken a trip out there to visit a couple of old UCLA friends in Palm Springs. Allegedly to celebrate my new singledom. In fact I felt like shit. Sad and washed-up and ugly and sexually dead.” The divorce had been precipitated by the discovery that her ex, Richard, a high-school teacher and aspirant novelist, had been having an affair with the deputy head’s secretary. You know, Talulla had said, if it had been some nineteen-year-old twinkie with pneumatic tits I could have come out of it with a bit of dignity. I pity you, Richard, I really do. But this woman was forty-seven . You can imagine what a boost that gave me.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I got sick of things in Palm Springs and took a rental car out to Joshua Tree to lick my wounds. I stayed in a little cabana motel out on Route 62, hiked in the park during the day, drank tequila with the kids running the motel in the evening. It was a comfort, the desert. I think, by the way, we should order up some Cuervo, don’t you? I’m getting the feeling this is the calm before the storm, though what storm I don’t know.”

Lycanthropy had done things for her, licensed tangentiality, sanctioned intuition, loosened and altogether sexed-up the intelligence. She’d graduated with a degree in English and what turned out to be an insufficient interest in journalism. She started the career, but without much conviction, and after a couple of years drifted into helping run the Gilaley business. The education remained, humoured as a hopeless putz by the smut and savvy of her American trade self. I rang down for the Cuervo, half a dozen fresh limes, worried for the thousandth time Harley’s IDs were rotten, that my flight out of Heathrow had tripped a switch, that Grainer and Ellis were already hip to “Bill Morris” over at the Plaza, bunked up in luxury with his new howler squeeze.

“Then, one night,” she went on, “I wandered into the horror movie. I think it might have been the dumbest sequence of actions I’ve ever performed. For a start, I was driving alone at night in the desert. Off the main road too. I’d been out to Lake Havasu for the day and was determined to get back to my motel without the tedium of 62 West. It wasn’t late. Naturally the moon was up. Naturally the car broke down.”

The Cuervo and limes arrived. I found shot glasses in the suite’s bar and set us up. These, I knew, were the high-octane minutes, days, weeks, when anything she does can pluck the phallic string. Watching her toss back the shot. The pale female throat and her soft hair fallen back to reveal the flushed ears with their pearl studs. And this is nothing, wulf said. You wait. You just fucking wait .

“The horror movie’s always there,” she continued. “Just needs certain conditions to firm up. Mainly human stupidity. You’re driving around thinking the big thing is your poor broken heart and then suddenly the car dies and everything around you says, er, no, honey, the big thing is you’re all alone out here and your phone’s not getting a signal and you haven’t seen another car in over an hour and in any case this is America so the last thing you should be hoping for is another car to come along. Hit me again.”

I poured two more shots. Again the toss back, the taut throat, the breasts’ uplift, the pearls.