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“if anything goes wrong because I’m off the pills, won’t there be warning signs?”
    She heard his dry, bitter laughter. Gently he disengaged his hand from hers, stood up and went to sit in one of the wicker rocking chairs the kids had dragged in from the porch. The chairs were props, strictly speaking, but so comfortable that everyone who could misappropriated them.
    “I’ve been seeing the warning signs all week,” Lionel said.
    “You never told me.”
    “I hoped …” he began. “I knew you’d stopped. I hoped.”
    “And were you wrong?” she demanded of him. “Were you wrong to hope?”
    He shrugged. “What do I know?” He leaned back in the rocker, his sandaled feet on the bed, his eyes closed. “I hoped.”
    She went and knelt beside his outstretched knees. He had fallen silent again; it seemed the silence held a message for her but she could not make it out.
    “It was a miracle we didn’t blow it all in Vancouver,” he said at last. “A miracle we kept it under control. They could have been reading about it in every supermarket line in America.”
    “I was mostly drunk,” Lu Anne said contritely.
    “I was there,” her husband told her. “You were drunk and off your medication.” He kept his eyes closed and wiped his brow. “That goes together with you.”
    “You have to trust me,” she said. “This is the time.”
    More silence. Then he took his legs down and stood, raising her gently beside him.
    “Do you think that your performance has improved since you stopped taking those pills?”
    She smiled. “I think that’s one of the signs you’ve seen. You’ve been going to dailies, Lionel. You know it has.”
    “Christ,” he said.
    “I don’t want to give it up,” she cried at him. “I’m on top of the world. I don’t want to take them anymore.” She turned away weeping. “And be a slave and lose my work and our sex life, a zombie. I don’t want to, Lionel.”
    “It’s true,” he said. “Your performance has changed.” His voice was soft and remote as though he were speaking to an observer or to himself. “You look different in the rushes.”
    She laughed and turned on her heel.
    “I photograph alive now! I have feelings and I can get them out there. I mean, it’s so hard with just a camera, Lionel. But I’m doing it now. Acting, it’s called. Acting and sort of acting.” She exchanged another secret smile with Rosalind in the lighted mirror. “Sometime,” she said, “you should get Blakely to show you his collection of old-time rushes. He’s got a trunk full of tests and dailies from the old times—the golden age stuff, the old-time stars. Man, if you want to see people working ripped, tranqued and wasted, get him to show you them. Like Monty Clift. The junkies and alcoholics and the controlled crazies.” She touched her breast like a penitent. “It’s fascinating, Lionel, but it’s not pretty.” She had been speaking with her back to him; when she turned around he was gone. But he had only stepped out on the veranda. The dusk had given way to starry night. They had lighted the tiki torches along the perimeter of the beach.
    Clenched-fisted, his jaw set, he stood with his back against the adobe wall.
    “I have an odd superstition,” he told his wife. “I keep thinking that one day I’ll look over my shoulder—or turn a corner—and one of those things will be there, waiting for me. One of the things you see.”
    “They have a name,” she said. “To neutralize them.”
    “Don’t say it.” He cut her off quickly. “Never utter it.”
    “All right,” she said. She looked at him and suddenly understood what the silences had meant, the quick slides from anger into resignation, from obsessive possessiveness to indifference. “Dr. Kurlander told me the same thing. To not say it out loud.”
    He was going to walk. The surgical touch that passed for tenderness, the shifting moods—that was what they meant. He was tired and he was through with