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outside brilliantly floodlighted. Steve and Wilma played their normal vitriolic game of gin. Judy Jonah, Wallace Dorn, and I played a three-way game of Scrabble at a nickel a point. Noel Hess, pleading a headache, had gone to bed. Randy jittered around, taking care of the music, fussing with the floodlighting, rearranging ash trays, fixing drinks, kibitzing at both games. Randy kept South American music on the turntable at Gilman Hayes’s request. The light was bright on the Scrabble board, a spotlight with an opaque shade.
    My concentration was bad because I could not help being aware of Mavis dancing with Hayes. I had no cause for complaint, no legitimate cause. But the music was low, slow, and insinuating, and they did entirely too much dancing without moving from one spot. I felt alternately sweaty and cold. I could not turn and look at them. I would see them from the corners of my eyes. Fragments. A slow turn, his hand brown on the softness of her waist. An infrequent image of them in the glass. The music was full of rhythmic tickings and clackings and thumps, with a horn crying. Wilma was saying, in the other corner, “One card at a time, damnit, Winsan,” and Wallace Dorn gave a little grunt of satisfaction, then clacked the wooden tiles onto the board.
    I suddenly realized that Hayes and my wife were gone. I turned quickly and looked at the empty room. I must have started to rise. But Judy, with a quick shielded movement,pressed my arm. I looked at her. Wallace Dorn was studying his rack, chewing a fragment of his mustache. Judy made a slight motion with her head. I looked in that direction, through the glass, and saw that they were dancing on the big terrace now, in the light of the floods. They had a theatrical look, as though they were on one of those monstrous sets that the Hollywood geniuses create for Astaire. At any moment a silver staircase would unwind from the stars, and down it would come the sharp-shouldered chorus boys and a quarter ton of bare thighs.
    I looked at Judy with gratitude, and with respect that she had sensed so quickly what was going on and how I could have made a fool of myself. Her face changed into the public Judy, and she gave me a distorted wink so vast I could almost hear it. Wallace Dorn gave his warning grunt and changed “own” to “clown” in such a way that the “c” changed “lean” into “clean,” and the “c” was on a bonus square.
    After the game we both owed Wallace. We paid him. Judy yawned and said, “Not another. I know when I’ve been stomped, pardner. I am going to go stare at a star and then crumple into bed.”
    “Need help looking at a star?” I asked her.
    “You take half the light years and I’ll take the other half.”
    We went by the dancers. They seemed unaware of us. We went down the stone stairway and out to the end of the left wing of the dock. Judy kept her hands shoved deeply into the big patch pockets of her wool skirt and scuffed her heels, shoulders a bit hunched against the night chill. There were almost too many stars. The red mat she had been sunning herself on was wet with dew. I flipped it over to the dry sideand moved it near the edge. We sat down, dangling our legs toward the water. I lit her cigarette and turned and looked up over my shoulder toward the high terrace. The music was faint. Sometimes I could see them as far down as the waist when they moved near the edge of the terrace. Other times they were back out of sight.
    “Pretty fancy tumbril to ride in,” Judy said.
    It took me a moment to follow her. “How sharp is the knife?”
    “Sharp enough. People have heard it being sharpened. So I got canceled out of a couple of guest spots on summer shows. And the gang is beginning to break up. Can’t blame them. They need a warm spot come fall.”
    “Don’t you?”
    “I don’t know. I’m just so damn tired, Paul. I can always grow a new head. I’ve done it before. I’m a rough girl, Paul. I’m a fighter. So I keep