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in front of Phil, that time is overtaking her, that everything is moving away from her slowly and her last moments will be spent in this chair. She forces herself to shift, then gets up; a peculiar disorientation comes over her; she thinks she might faint but she stands in front of him, slightly disconcerted but in control. “I’ll just be going along,” she says. Vaguely, she recalls some phrases from prior unsuccessful job interviews. “I appreciate your time. It’s been very interesting. Thank you very much for talking to me. It’s very nice of you to see me.” Saying this, listening to herself as if from some distance, she moves toward the door, poises against it for a moment trying to frame some line that will enable her to depart from Phil in perfect grace. Then she sees that he is no longer looking at her; that, indeed, his eyes have fastened with a moist glaze to the telephone. It occurs to her that as far as Phil is concerned she has already left the premises. He sits there in stasis, one arm poised toward the phone, his shoulders in mid-shrug, no movements across his face. Susan opens the door and leaves. Halfway down the hall she hears horrid sounds coming from the vicinity of Phil’s office, sounds which seem like metal striking against rotating machinery, high shrieks but at the dead-center of all these sounds she believes that she hears a human voice. It is many octaves higher than Phil’s but then again one never knows. She resolves not to think much more about this and leaves the building hurriedly, moving into the midday crowds that circulate through Times Square. She wonders what any of them might think if they knew what she had been through and what she was going to do but, she decides that they are, in one sense or another, very possibly in the same business and she drops the whole issue, spending the rest of the morning investigating strange stores that sell nothing but ties for a dollar forty-nine, others which are going out of business momentarily and making clearance sales, and book markets where the majority of Timothy’s competitors for the diminishing hardcover market can be observed on sale for a dollar ninety-eight, seventy-nine cents, and thirty-nine flat, depending upon their value and relevance to the current social situation.

CHAPTER XVIII
    That night she receives a phone call from a man with a strange accent who says that he is the director of the film in which she will appear. He has obtained her number from Phil since he wants to talk to all of the cast before they assemble. “What I am particularly interested to know,” he says, “is your knowledge of American history; we are going to be concentrating in the modern era and also upon some of the major political events and I would like the actors to come to this with a certain familiarity. I would like to suggest that you do some reading immediately; you will want to read Theodore White’s books on the making of presidents and you should read Samuel Eliot Morison’s history of the American people. All of these are out in paperback. Also I would like you to do some reading in the formal American comedy and drama just for background of course; any standard text will do. Do you have any particular familiarity with this era?” Susan says that she has a reading knowledge of some American history. She is, after all, a college graduate, and, for some reason, the man on the phone begins to stutter with rage, becomes even less coherent. “They think, these goddamned people, that just because this is a dirty film we will sacrifice all style and scholarship but this is never to be! We will reconstruct art in the face of the void. Enough of exploitation which even within a rigid format can become a framework of artifice and beauty,” he says. He has been at work on the script all day and on the phone all night. “This script is absolutely miserable; we will have to improvise,” he says. “It seems to have been written by an