I was about seventeen years old.
One Saturday afternoon, I decided I'd go find Nora's bookshop. It was near GW and not hard to find. I reminded her who I was and looked at the books for a while. They were selected to satisfy her own obsessions rather than to appeal to her customers. There wasn't anything I really wanted, but I picked one to buy just to be polite. (One was all I had money for.) I would have left then, but she started a conversation which turned out to last all afternoon. A couple of GW students came by and asked for some books Nora didn't have. Finally it was closing time and we went to dinner at some small restaurant.
Much later we wound up going to an old stone house in Georgetown, where Nora had a room in the basement. As we let ourselves in, Nora's two landladies appeared for a moment at the end of a long corridor. They must have been at least seventy years old (or so it appeared to my seventeen-year-old self), and their make-up looked like it was an inch thick. Nora told them that I was only stopping in for a few minutes, explaining to me later that she wasn't supposed to have any overnight guests, so I'd need to be very careful when going down the corridor to the bathroom.
One of the things that seemed the most remarkable to me was that even in her room, Nora never took off her high heels. I think that after I got to know her better, I discovered that she didn't even own a pair of flat shoes.
She gave me sheets and blankets so I could sleep on her couch. She had a screen to change behind, but of course I slept in my clothes since I had nothing else with me. I wasn't even thinking in terms of sex, since she was so much older than me. (I guess she was twenty-five at that time.)
I'd never been in the same room with a woman sleeping before. I woke up about eight or nine the next morning, and lay there watching her sleeping, and I found it rather strange. After a while I got bored, though, and tried waking Nora up by mental telepathy, which didn't work at all. Eventually I went back to sleep myself for an hour or so. It was about noon when she finally woke up.
I was worried about what kind of reception would be waiting for me when I got home Sunday afternoon, but my father just quietly said to me, ``Don't let your grandmother know that you were out all night.''