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Anne suggested with faint malice.
    “As meaningless. As a word belonging to false consciousness.”
    “It doesn’t have a moral. This … condition. Not of the kind you’re comfortable with.”
    “Evil,” Lionel agreed, “is not the sort of term I’m comfortable with.” He raised his spectacles toward the overhead light and inspected their surfaces. “How extraordinary that the thing should be metabolic. Like gout.”
    “An undigested bit of beef,” Lu Anne said, “like Jacob Marley’s ghost. An underdone potato.”
    Lionel slapped the back of his neck so savagely that Lu Anne started.
    “Here I am, see, a specialist in medical practice. In my specialty there are two, maybe three basic pathological conditions. For Christ’s sake,” he cried, “maybe just one. I can’t heal it. I can barely treat it. I don’t even have a fucking insight into it.” He released his neck and stared wildly into the mirror. “I should go about with a bowl of leeches. I should have become a bloody palmist.”
    She went to him and touched his cheek. “To each his doctor,” shedeclared. “This is mine.” She felt him fighting off tears; somehow he always succeeded. She herself had begun to cry.
    Wise as he was, he could not cure her. A part of her rejoiced in that as freedom; the part, she had no doubt, that was mad, bad and dangerous to know. It rejoiced in refuge from his mastery, his shrewdness and compassion. There was a wood through which he could not pursue her with healing arrows and a dark tower of retreat.
    “So,” he said after a moment, “I’m supposed to leave in the middle of a picture while you go off your medication. What happens then?”
    “I’ll hassle it.”
    “Will you indeed?”
    “Lionel,” she told him, “it’s like trying to work behind any drug—grass, Valium, cocaine. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re like.” His heavy-browed stare did not seem unsympathetic. “I mean,” she went on, “I can’t use my eyes. I feel like a droid. It might be neat for having tea with Alan Cranston, but as for work—well, why hire me? They could have anyone. Plenty of people can give a lousy performance without the use of drugs.”
    “I see your point,” he said impatiently.
    “What about tardive dyskinesia? Have we talked about that?”
    “Lu,” Lionel said, “don’t worry about tardive fucking dyskinesia.
    Worry about flipping out. Worry about a second Vancouver.” He stood up and paced the bungalow. “I mean, actual straitjackets, right? Actual padded cells. Want to try it Mexican style?”
    “I want to stop,” she said wearily. “I want to go to work like a normal human actress. I would like to try a little cautious experiment along the lines of … trying to do without it … for a little while.”
    “I can’t let you do it while I’m away,” Lionel said. “The risks are too high. We’re away from home. You could have a very bad experience.”
    He sat down on the bed beside her. She took his hand and looked into his eyes.
    “We always agreed that a time would come when I would have to try it alone,” she told him. She swallowed and licked her lips, mannerismsshe had drilled away, never to be used except intentionally, in character. Well, she thought, I am acting for him now. Perhaps she always was, day in, day out. Perhaps away from the shadows and the Long Friends it was all acting. There was no Lee Verger after all.
    So dreadful and frightening was the thought that she doubled her grip on his strong lean hand.
    “This is the time,” she said. “While the kids are with you. While I’m doing something that I feel so strong about. Man, I want to put my pills aside and be that woman and be me.”
    Lionel said nothing. She gripped his hand but did not look at him.
    “Trust me, love. Trust me and I’ll make you proud. It’ll be me and it’ll be beautiful.”
    Something in his continuing silence troubled her.
    “I mean,” she said,