The keycard’s already old fashioned, with little circles punched out in patterns, and a drawing of a key in the middle for those unclear on the concept. There are arrows on each end with ELEVATOR running across the top and ROOM the bottom. On the back’s a diagram to further clarify, followed by five sentences of very small instructions repeated in Japanese, English, Spanish and French.

Obviously I’ve studied the damn thing quite closely, back in the room and just now riding the elevator, turning it over in my hands, clutching it as the possibility of my entry into what? More than just Pam’s hotel room anyway. She’d given it to me when I told her I really needed to talk to her tonight, saying there was no need for me to disturb the whole floor with my knocking.

I look at my watch – eight exactly. The card slides in and out smoothly, a green light winking as I turn the handle and push forward. Pam’s at the computer, pivoting toward me as I walk in, her usually ebullient smile a little flat as she speaks my name, an ambiguous sign, granted, but hopefully also an admission of the gravity of the moment.

She stops, half turned, her elbow on the back of the low desk chair, her hands in her lap, her legs crossed, thigh over knee.

So, she says as I settle on the corner of the bed, What did you want to talk to me about?

I meet her eyes as she narrows them, the way she does when she’s focusing her attention, but all the time I’m more than aware of those legs down there, exposed as her skirt rides up, swinging lightly with an unmistakable gravity of their own, and in fact you could say that her legs are entirely responsible for this heavy moment. Oh sure, I can’t help but admire her wealth of shiny chestnut hair, her elegantly spare body, not to mention the keen intelligence and genuine enthusiasm with which she, as “team leader,” has dispatched all the crap we’ve faced the last ten days – all these things strike me, albeit with resistable force, within reasonable limits, able to be contained in a way that would never disturb the outward tranquility of our quotidian business and personal relationship.

No, it’s simply those legs that have hung me up on their cross, twisting everything, causing the fabric of our once comfortable collegiality to wrinkle provocatively, kind of like the way the hem of her skirt is lying across her smooth as glass thighs at the moment.

See, I’ve known Pam forever, even back when she was gauche and ungainly, the extra girl at the table, her expensive clothes hanging awkwardly on an angular frame. But while the high school beauties who obscured her have chafed and tarnished with the years, Pam’s only grown more comfortable, making the utmost of every asset, decades of immersion in wealth and privilege affording her an easy grace, lightly plating her with this luminous, slightly brittle gleam of glamor, her meticulously made up face framed in waves of expertly cut and colored hair, gold earrings and pearls glittering in strategic punctuation, her business drag of short skirt and long jacket ideally showing off those legs, molded into elastic, taut perfection by a lifetime of tennis and running, encased in subtly shining hose.

In public she always presents a bright and polished face to the world, but now I need to know more – to explore her dark side, to penetrate the private shadows.

I…we’ve been spending a lot of time together lately and I just wanted to say that I’ve really grown to appreciate what a terribly attractive woman you are…

And? She smiles indulgently.

Well, you know I’d never want to do anything that would embarrass either of us….

This morning while I was sitting in my hotel room, already well on my way toward the possibility of such mutual embarrassment, I’d read an article in the science section of my complimentary copy of the Times which seemed to crystalize the whole thing for me in a weird way. It was about the theories of an obscure Russian scientist who, in my understanding (or more likely misunderstanding), had posited that the universe is composed of numberless rotating systems, all of them spinning madly, spitting out streams of energy, and when these atomic tornadoes inevitably crash and collide, they produce knots of space and time so intensely concentrated that they form the objects we perceive as the physical universe. The overriding force at play in the universe is therefore torsion, the twisting of existence like a crumpling can between two powerful hands, and I feel now as if I’m in the midst of an irreducible clot, a unique radioactive current flowing between Pam and me, the two sole inhabitants of a universe of desire created by the supple cross and curve and bend of her legs, an unstable system inhospitable to husbands, wives and children, one that will pop like a soap bubble at check out time tomorrow, but in the meantime seems as if it might very well destroy us if we don’t fully inhabit it tonight.

And I’d never want to jeopardize our situations back home. I realize I’m still holding the key card and toss it on the bed.

But? At least she’s still smiling.

But, I say, cupping her knee in my palm.