No beer in a bar, much less sex in my car, but just the two of us perched on the top step outside her one-bedroom prefab townhouse with a cheese pie so succulent it rendered us speechless for minutes at a time. She had said that, lifesaver though I was, if I attempted anything wacky or even suggestively satanic, she’d go succubus on my ass—she had studied ninjutsu and Descartes and knew how one enhances the other—“so don’t get snaky,” she said—and I warmed with admiration. Here was a gal with gumption, sangfroid, with a Virginia voice that might melt wrought iron. In the driveway slept her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the face of a whopping flower painted on the hood and testifying to goodness.