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her. Eight years of patient martyrdom and at last he was saving himself, looking after number one. And why not? she thought. It was failure all around, his and hers.
    A small electric lamp, styled like a gaslight, gave off a soft light beside their veranda door. The night sky was ablaze with stars. He never turned toward her as she watched him across the shadows.
    “I want you to stay in close touch with Kurlander,” Lionel told his wife. “I’m going to telephone him and he’ll be checking in with you every day. If you’re in trouble call him. You can’t afford to stop the medication altogether, you’ll crack up. But if you take one fifty every morning and one fifty at night you might keep things the way you are at the moment. Remember, you may experience a bad attack as elation.”
    “So,” she said, “if I start feeling too good I’m in trouble.”
    “You won’t feel good long. But don’t panic and go back to your regular dose.” He turned to the cream-colored wall and struck it. “No booze, no grass, no dope—sorry. When shooting ends, go straight back to your regular dose. In the future,” he said, reaching toward her, “who knows? They may come up with something that works as well with fewer side effects. You may stop being crazy. One of us may die.”
    “There would still be the other,” she said. “There would still be the kids.”
    “The bomb might fall.”
    “Oh, trust me, love,” she said. “Trust me and I’ll give you something beautiful.”
    Lionel smiled. “A movie.”
    “Don’t you like movies, Li?” she asked him wryly. “I tell you, babe—even if they have to take me off this set in a blanket I’m going to work.”
    He stayed braced against the wall, immobile. She stared at him, knowing he would not turn, that he was afraid of her madness. Sweet Lionel, she told him silently, I’m gonna kiss the ground behind your fading shadow. Only let me keep my children.
    “You mustn’t cry,” he said when he faced her at last.
    She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
    “Why do you stay with me?” she asked him after a while.
    “Because,” he said, “to me you are life. And I will not give up on life. It’s as simple as that.”
    For a moment she thought she must be wrong, that he would not go. Then he kissed her, lightly once and then hard on the lips, and then released her. After that she knew he was lost to her.
    That’s the way you give up on life, she thought. But you go right on living.
    “And you,” she asked him. “You’ll be all right?”
    “Oh yes,” he said.
    She nodded, knowing it was no less than the truth. He would suffer and then he would be all right. And I’ll sing your song alone,
mon cher
, she told him. If I can keep my children. One of the things gathered itself up in the dimness at the unlighted end of the veranda.
    There were four children, counting the dead, and she did. The little golden ones, Lionel’s perfections. Charles, the dead one, in custody of the Long Friends. A girl who looked like her and whom she hardly knew, who lived in Baton Rouge with her ex-husband, Robitaille, because Momma was crazy in California. She slid her hand down the inside of Lionel’s arm, tracing the warm silk, and held his hand, the hand of the man who was getting his courage up to leave her. They stood together for a while and Lionel said with a theatricalflourish: “Well! We may live in hope of our fashionably late dinner, eh? If we don’t starve to death first.”
    She was able to summon a polite smile.
    Lionel sniffed the perfumed air. “Think I’ll have a walk,” he said. “Conceal myself and spy out the preparations for the feast. I can’t even remember the way, it’s so long since we were asked together.”
    “It isn’t hard to find,” she told him. “It’s at the end of the left-hand path. At the top.”
    “Where else?” Lionel said, and went out into the darkness. “I mean dinner with Walter Drogue—we’ve really arrived,