I was concerned Saturday evening when I heard the thunder and the rain, because thunder and rain do not go well with gold shoes for a DaNCe pArTY. Happily, the sky cleared in time for Jeff to come pick me up and for us to F-train it to Mathilde’s, where there were two kinds of chocolate cake, and a DJ direct from the dance-party nation that is Paris, France. Thirty flights up into the sky, the neverending twinkly pinpoint lights of New York stretching out in all directions into the night, there was singing and dancing till three. “This is all very Bret Easton Ellis,” Jeff said, “what with all the French people and the drugs and the dancing and the view.” Not having actually read Bret Easton Ellis, I could only nod and smile, and hope Christian Bale wasn’t going to come out from the bedroom revving a chainsaw.

Now, a dance party is a good thing; and a dance party where they play “ABC” and “Muddy’s Club Blues in Weinheim” and “Oye Como Va” and “Trick Me” is a very good thing; but a dance party where, at the end, you get to have a quiet dance with a sweet boy before you kiss him good-bye, well that is a very, very good thing.

Sunday morning, feeling the five hours of whirling and shimmying and general boogie-ing from the night before in my butt, the best way to unwind is to take a walk through the neighborhood and the cool autumn, visiting the cheese shop, the fish shop, the fruit shop, the bread shop.

Over dinner, Gab introduced me to the Shadoks, which are a bunch of cartoon characters that used to be shown on French TV in the Seventies for one minute every evening before the news at eight. The Shadoks are some kind of incroyable. I’m not even sure how to begin to explain. It’s a story of spaceships and a planet that is thin and flat; of a professor and a troop of Shadoks heading for earth; of containers that can hold noodles and water, or noodles but not water, or water but not noodles; of such brilliant aphorisms such as “S’il n’y a pas de solution c’est qu’il n’y a pas de problème.” and “Quand on ne sais pas où on va il faut y aller—et le plus vite possible.” and, of course, the pithy “Je pompe donc je suis.” I mean, really, who doesn’t like French people.

We went up to the roof later, opening the door to a dark sky spotted with diamond stars. Beyond the low, somber roofs and muted streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan was lit up like a birthday. We watched the planes queueing up over JFK to fly out and away over our heads. The thing is, on a chilly October night, it is less chilly when you are two.