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on the guy.
    “Another thing about this little Ms. Blake,” says Simon, with his twisted, owlish smile. “I got this from her name-dropping old father, never from herself, but she had a tremendous involvement with Liam O’Gara—you know, the director. All over the world together for a couple of years. The only time she managed to impress her father, I guess. Poor girl. She must have been a child at the time. But you’d never know it to look at her. And you’d think she might have mentioned this to me.”
    “No, I don’t think,” says thin-lipped Jacob, the minimalist. Simon’s host, and lover.
    Unperturbed, Simon smiles and goes on. “At first I was surprised. After all, O’Gara’s probably the second coming of John Huston, but then when I met her and looked at her very carefully, I felt there was something, something not quite there yet but somehow present in her—”
    “Maybe she’s very sexy,” Richard interrupts, in his deepest (most Ivy) voice. “I’ve met her; it could be that. A Mexican sexpot.”
    He did not mean to sound so crude (and his words now tremble in his own ears, extremely crude). But in this pansy-Ivy atmosphere almost anything he said would have come out sounding gross. And it is not even true; he did not think Stella Blake especially sexy. Or did he? And even to say he met her is an exaggeration; it is hard to remember her at all: someone small and dark at his door, with great huge eyes, looking frightened. He remembers a thin pale face, dark, very heavy but well-curved eyebrows, those big eyes, a small nose and a long mouth. Apossibly tender face, vulnerable in the glare of his entrance light. As he concentrates he can see her entirely: the unstylish blazer, the wrong boots. The kind of woman he would never look at twice, except for something, some hint in her face—he is not sure of what. She looked intelligent but very uncertain, scared. Hard to imagine her as the heroine of some high-powered love affair, but maybe Liam O’Gara is really old and can’t get the greatest girls anymore.
    “An odd-looking woman, not exactly the great beauty her mother was,” this Simon Daniels goes on. “But she’ll change. Certain women hit their peak quite late.”
    “Such as they are,” says Jacob.
    “My dear, you are quite obsessed with this woman,” says Andrew Bacci, to Simon.
    “Well, hardly. I’m obsessed with this piece I have to write. And I hope her old man doesn’t cash in before I can see him again.”
    And that is all there is about Stella Blake. The conversation dissolves into the usual trivia, discussions of San Francisco versus New York, of weather and of restaurants in both cities.
    Homelessness in both cities.
    AIDS. Dead friends.
    Out of here
. I have to get out of here, thinks Richard. It is less a thought than a cry from his blood. I have got to leave this place
now
.
    He presses Andrew’s arm, he whispers, “Later, Dog Shoes. Got to go. Say goodby for me, okay?”
    This is the best he can manage, just before bolting out of the room. Away. Almost free.
Out of there
.

5
  Love Affairs, of Sorts  
    Margot and her friend Andrew Bacci live quite near each other on Russian Hill, but in contrasting quarters. Margot’s small, narrow rooms are filled with antiques, delicate woods, gilt frames and satin flounces, especially in the largest room, her bedroom. Lots of flounces in the bedroom. Whereas Andrew’s more spacious and much more expensive digs are sleekly “contemporary”: pale postmodern colors of wool and textured cotton and heavy, bright lacquered surfaces. Pale leather and high-tech steel.
    Andrew really looks best in her apartment, Margot thinks—and would not tell Andrew, not for anything. On a Sunday morning, in his open-necked, broad-striped blue shirt, his black curls crisp above that pale smooth brow, and a few chest hairs just visible (the shirt is unbuttoned perhaps one button too low), as he stands and leans, so gracefully, against her small