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one, Randy.” He hurried off obediently.
    The music started. It was alive in the room. Clear and perfect. It made the back of my neck tingle. She adjusted the volume, frowned at the panel board, then clicked a switch labeled “Terrace.”
    She said, “You lose something if you try to operate too many speakers at once. This one is the best one here. I’ll turn it off so we can get the most out of the terrace enclosure. Don’t try to answer any question Judy might ask you about the program.”
    The abrupt change caught me off balance. I had the stupid idea she meant the program of music. And then I realized she meant the television program we had sponsored until Judy went off for the summer.
    “I can’t answer any questions because I don’t know the answers, Wilma.”
    She patted my cheek. “That’s a dear.” She was standing quite close to me. There is an odd quality about her. When you are close to her you are so very conscious of her physically. Her mouth looks redder, her skin softer; her breathingseems deeper. It is an almost overpowering aliveness, and it has a strong sexual base to it. It is impossible for any normal man to stand close to Wilma and talk to her without having his mind veer inevitably toward bed. It is, perhaps, the same quality that Miss Monroe had. It fogs up your mind when you want it to be clear. And she is perfectly aware of that.
    We went back out on the terrace. She frowned. “Randy, it’s just a tiny bit too loud out here. Be a dear and run in and turn it down just a shade more.”
    Randy went buckety-buckety into the living room. Noel looked down into her glass.
    Judy appeared on the terrace at the head of the steps. “The sun is gone, people,” she said. “Judith turns blue. Feed the girl rum. Hey there, Paul, Mavis. How do you like the gilded wilderness?”
    I like Judy. She got her start singing with a band. She didn’t have much voice, but what she had she threw around with abandon. When her face is in repose, which is not often, you realize with surprise that she is quite a pretty blonde. And when she stands still, which is equally seldom, you see that her figure is trim and good. But when she is in motion, with that rubbery mercurial face, with all her calculated awkwardness and grotesqueries of stance and movement, you see merely that clown, that Judy Jonah, that crazy gal.
    But I feel sad, watching her, because I know television has devoured her, and I know she knows it. The last forty weeks of Judy, the half-hour show that we sponsored until she went off in June for the summer, slipped in the ratings, week by week. There is a limit to the amount of straightcomedy the public will take from one person. Situation comedy has a longer life. Judy’s was straight. And almost inevitably, she duplicated routines. I knew that Wallace Dorn, the account executive at Fern and Howey who has the Ferris account tucked neatly under his wing, had been scouting around for a new fall show, new talent for Ferris. So I wondered what Judy was doing up here without her agent. I suspected that Wilma had clubbed her into it. It would be so easy to trade on Judy’s uncertainty. “Don’t bring that horrible man, darling. We won’t talk business, believe me.”
    The music masked the sound of the last car coming in. We didn’t know Wallace Dorn had arrived until he walked around the edge of the terrace. He wore his country tweeds and an ascot. He is an ersatz Englishman. There seems to be a constant supply of them in New York. The military mustache, the carefully gobbled enunciation with the ends of sentences falling off into “d’y’ know.” Much talk of the club, no ice in mine, please, and, on occasion, a silly little stick to carry. Veddy, veddy country, old Wallace Dorn. Bachelor, sportsman, school-tie type.
    It was another hour before we were all collected on the terrace, Judy and Gilman Hayes back in clothes, José in a far corner standing behind a little bar on wheels, standing with