Her job consisted of poaching articles for a conservative rag and I imagined her boiling paragraphs until the words toughened in white, rubber strips. But she was young, I reminded myself, blinking away this vision of a news harpy with crow’s feet bleeding out from her eyes like smudged words. “We are young”, she corrected, that first time she spoke to me at the bottom of the grand stairway of the Waldorf Astoria.
     She had taken a dozen steps, and hesitated, her chin lifting slightly to fix her eyes on the middle-distance, utterly still on the bottom step. Dark shining hair fell loosely about her face. Miraculous, I thought hazily as her heels clicked over to the bar in perfect time with mine. We sat at a table. She looked over the single white rose and the candle at me and beyond me to the high-ceilinged lobby.
      I missed the action in the lobby, facing the back wall like that, but I was not disappointed because I was greedy. I had caught this thing as she descended, gracefully, with a subtle nod, a touch and a kind word. I saw only her and remember thinking the way her hands moved (expressively, but not wildly) was like punctuation. Her hair was almost a part of the rich dark wood of the table, playing with the light on her cheekbones.
      She first touched me then, a hand grazing over the little candle to grip my wrist. “Be careful what you say to me.” She said in an odd voice, half-commanding but lacking any true fervor. This was not quite a warning, but the air seemed to get thinner, something had entered the air between us. Her wide eyes caught mine, and in a beat, she continued, her other hand brushing her hair back behind her ear. The right still held my jacket. “I can’t hear at all, in this ear. In here it is not too loud, but out on the street, fighting the sound of cars and buses; well, don’t count on me hearing you. Just grab me.” She gave my arm a jerk and released me. The candle flickered as her hand withdrew.
      We both privately imagined a poor deaf soul crushed under some New York lorry in the silence that ensued. I pensively smoothed my work tie, thinking her explanation to be about as ill-fitting as it, but choosing to let lie. “How can you be sure you’re getting everything, if you’re in investigative journalism? Is it hard?” I ventured, coaxing her green eyes back up to mine. “It’s easier!” She flashed a quick smile, “I lip-read. Have since I was little. The right spoken words have a texture, I know it because I repeat them to myself to make sure I’ve gotten them right. And I can catch a conversation from farther away than you could hear it- if I see their mouths moving. It’s only when men get very close and whisper in my ear, that I can’t see or hear.” She looked at me, one eyebrow arced and questioning.
      This, the third time I see her, is her fourth draft. The first, in the Astoria, was all grace, as if grace was her birthright. All elements of her confluent, word and gesture impeccably polished, she barely seemed to touch the ground.  The second I woke up tangled with, the morning after leading her raven-haired self back up the grand stair. She was a bleeding heart, hair full and not dark like a mahogany table but imbued with red, throbbing. She left the Astoria in the same dark dress, but the color of the scene was different. She stood out more, I reflected, my arm on the bannister as I watched her click away.
      The third draft was the shrew I imagined, and I constructed her from a grainy headshot on page five of a tabloid my assistant passed my way. He looked down his rimless glasses at it and slid it over, face scrunched in mild distaste, whether from the quality of the writing or the coffee I could not tell. In my mind’s eye the hair lost its luster, her shoulders rolled forward as she made frantic notes on a legal pad in a dim hot cubicle. Her hand, curling like a claw, cast away the pen and I imagined her beckoning, but in the dress, now. She wanted to clink her glass against mine.
     “Congressman, it’s nearly eleven.” Rimless glasses came off and he cleaned them nervously with a cloth from his pocket. I smoothed my tie. Same color, different material. Six, nine, then twelve reporters had their go at me. There were a few less cameras. Mentally, I rotated the rag suspiciously, feeling the print between my fingers. Sweet, easy-to-swallow drivel, and smooth to the touch, too. After the press conference, I went back to my office with its poor coffee and did exactly that.
      Her fourth draft insisted over the phone that we are young, so we met at a bar with patchy lighting and an odd alternating techno and classic backbeat.  I am old, my tired voice says over the dull roar of the bar, but not old enough to be wise. I tried to be wise with this girl, laughing over a whiskey with too much ice.
      I didn’t know then, or on the phone, that this was another revision. She told me about the smallness of growing up, rushing out to see live music in bars and clubs in high school with her dad, not telling him she could not hear or appreciate the music as well as he. His one great escape was opening for Hall and Oates at a concert the year before she was born, and though it was long gone he chased the music to venues where he could lust after that one set he played those years ago.
      At the bar she used the toe of one shoe to rub the heel of the other, the vinyl straps squeaking angrily.  There it was- refined look, but made of cheap material. Suspicion welled in me as if I had just read a bad rebuttal, boastful but weak in its delivery. Did this change the effect she had on me? I turned over the paper in my head again. The woman corrupted words for a living, why not gesture and location and demeanor, too?
      I grappled for purchase, fighting the hazy mirage of her hair, red and then raven-dark in the uncertain light. She could be manipulating all of this, spoon-feeding me drivel in just the same way she fed her bigoted readership. Just a hack trying to get inside political circles before her own streams dried up, chasing a fading ambition like her father on a dusty stage. I looked down at my tie. I always hated how this one felt against my throat. Stifling, I thought.
      Suddenly and inexplicably anxious, I reached out and touched her hair. The texture was the same, beautifully soft like in the Astoria. My hand withdrew, fingertips tingling, and crept to my tie of its own accord, loosening it a bit. We are young. This fourth revision, I believe unquestionably she is the final draft for me.