You can have it all sorts of ways in my city: loud or hushed, crowded or lonely, concrete or green, new or old, high or low; if you are lucky enough to have Madeleine Loveliness as your companion for the night, you can have the city all these ways in one night. Let’s say that it is 7 o’clock of a lovely summer’s evening on Friday, and that I have called you up because ML and I are going out for another of her adventures–her adventures, I say, because she always surprises me: she’ll bring over a lamb dinner for us to consume on a blanket in Foothill park under the magnolias, for instance, and then take me club-hopping until midnight, when she’ll insist that we drive aimlessly around the streets in her convertible as she tells me stories about her ancestors in medieval France; do I believe those stories?