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woman. It happened quickly, as they drank and talked and glanced at menus. It lasted for months, weeks, sometimes days. He touched Susan’s cheek and said: “Maybe I should court you. Bring you flowers. Hold your hand in movies. Take you to restaurants, and on picnics. Kiss you good night at your door.”
    “You’ve got about twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five.”
    Lying beside him, using the ashtray he held on his chest, she wanted to feel what she was feeling, had wanted to for a long time, this rush of love, pulling her up the three flights of stairs to her small apartment, into the bathroom for the diaphragm she had used often this year with different men, but now her heart was full, as it had not been for over a year, and she was not certain whether it was love that filled her or so wonderfully being Lucile and ending that work with this strong man with sad eyes and a bad knee and a history she could feel in his kiss. When they made love, she could feel the war in him, could feel him ascending from what he had seen, what he had done; from being blown up. Her heart knew she was in love. She said: “I like you a lot.”
    “But what?”
    “Nothing. Am I going to see you again?”
    “Has that happened to you?”
    “Of course it has. I’m easy. So are you.”
    “You’ll see me a lot. Let’s have dinner tonight. French—for the play.”
    “That you missed.”
    “We weren’t lost. We drank too much. We talked too much.”
    “And you both got lucky.”
    “I think I got more than lucky.”
    “You did. I wish you had seen me.”
    “So do I. I’ll see the next one, every night.”
    “It’s at the Charles Playhouse. We start rehearsals in two weeks.” He moved the ashtray to the bedside table and she put her hand on his chest and looked at his eyes. “After that I’m going to New York. Last month I got an agent.”
    “Good. It’s where you should be.”
    “Yes. I want all of it: movies too.”
    “New York is just a shuttle away.”
    “I hope more than one.”
    She kissed him; she held him.
    He ate lunch with Nick. They wore suits and ties. He had slept for two hours, waked at seven to Susan’s clock radio, turned it off before she woke, phoned for a cab he waited for on the sidewalk, gone to his apartment to shower and shave and dress, and then walked to his office. At nine o’clock he was at his desk. Nick came forty minutes later, and stopped at Ted’s door to smile, shrug, say: “Lunch?”
    At lunch Nick ordered a Bloody Mary, and said: “I hate Monday hangovers. You don’t have one.”
    Ted was drinking iced tea.
    “No. I was drunk when we left the party. But I didn’t drink again and I was awake till five. By then I was sober.”
    “We drank.”
    “I don’t drink for a hangover anyway. I cure it with a workout. Susan’s going to New York.”
    “Permanently?”
    “Nothing’s permanent. She’s an actress.”
    “New York’s not far.”
    “Hollywood is.”
    “How do you know she’s that good?”
    “A hunch.”
    “What happened?”
    “I spent the night with her.”
    “But what happened? Two weeks ago you said you wanted a girlfriend you saw on weekends. You may even have said
some
weekends. Even if she gets Hollywood, they take her out of thousands of pretty young actresses, that sounds like a weekend to me.”
    “I want her to get Hollywood; I want her to get Broadway. And I want her.”
    He was with her every night and, before her rehearsals started, they met for lunch and drank martinis and he was out of his office for two hours. On weekends he made picnic lunches and drove with her to the ocean. The water was cold, but the sun was warm and they wore sweatshirts and sat on the beach. At night they ate in restaurants and they made love and slept in her apartment or his. When she started rehearsals, she did not have time for lunch, and all day as he worked, hewaited to see her. “I’m easy,” she had said, and when he imagined her living in New York, working as a waitress,