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waiter held her chair. “Ken spoke of you often, Gev.”
    At close range her features had that flavor of boldness typical of entertainers. She was no longer a shy child singing tender for the people. Entertainers are a separate breed. They have their own language and customs and tribal mannerisms. Any other person is enough to form an audience. I often wonder what they do when they are completely alone—or if they ever are.
    “It was nice of you to come over.”
    “I sing the words other people write, Gev. It doesn’t leave me any of my own to tell you how terribly sorry I am about Ken.”
    “Thank you, Hildy,” I said, and my tone may have been a bit stuffy. “You sing other people’s words very nicely indeed.”
    She tilted her head a bit on the side. “Thank you. I guess you’re a lot like him, aren’t you? You’re kind of standoffish right now. Looking at me as if I were ‘the other woman.’ ”
    Some re-evaluation of Hildy was in order. “I don’t know what my reaction is to you, Hildy. Mostly I don’t know exactly what to say. Joe said Ken was troubled. I thought maybe—”
    “Some of the trouble was me? I don’t think so. He was a friend. We talked. If he’d wanted to put us on a different basis, I don’t know what I would have said. It just never came up.” She smiled a bit bitterly. “Which can be called a new experience for Hildy. Being given no chance to say no, I mean. I don’t know yet if I liked it. I guess I did. He needed somebody around who didn’t make any demands.”
    “That doesn’t fit so well. Ken was never a moody guy.”
    “I never saw him otherwise, Gev. Something was nibbling him. I tried to get him to talk it out. He talked, but not enough. Ever.”
    “Did you ever get any clues?”
    She had a pleasant trick of raising one eyebrow. Her arms were round, and her skin had that golden tone. “He carried his drinks pretty well. Too many drinks. One night he went over the edge a little too far. That was the night he told me dead men didn’t have any troubles. You know the way a drunk talks. He said it like it was a big discovery. I told him he was being morbid. And he said that he could tell the medical profession what it felt like to be torn in half. That didn’t make much sense to me. I got him into a cab and sent him home. The next night he was worried about what he might have said to me. He acted relieved when I told him he hadn’t said anything I could understand.”
    “Torn in half. Funny thing to say. The only way it makes sense is if you think of it as being some decision he had to make and couldn’t make. Like Solomon threatening to chop the baby in two hunks.”
    She drew on the table top with her thumbnail and stared at the little paper tent which advised us to order a Gardland sour. “I read once a out a lab where they trained rats to find their way out of mazes. Then they’d put them in a maze with no way out. The rats would finally lie down and chew their own feet.”
    “Was Ken about to do that?”
    “Something like that. A guy with no way out. I wanted him to talk it out. I thought it would help. But he seemed to like just being with me, and he wanted me to stay in type. Sweet, dumb little songstress. So that’s what I was, most of the time. When I stepped out of character it bothered him.”
    I reached over and put my hand on hers. “I’m glad you were around, Hildy.”
    She pulled her hand away slowly. “Don’t, please. You’ll make me cry and I don’t want to. Let’s get back to our guessing game, Gev. Was it wife trouble? I know there was trouble at the plant, but it didn’t seem to bother him that he wasn’t running the show out there.”
    I thought of Niki leaving me for Ken. And then, perhaps, leaving Ken for somebody else. I thought of her voice on the phone. It didn’t seem possible. And yet, the night before I had found her with Ken, she had been all eagerness in my arms. All soft words and sighs. Maybe neither of us had known