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success, all that seemed to be required was my heart. Fits may have been my life jacket, but I didn't have to take us too seriously. That was an education. I don't think I would have pulled out of that funk without him; I'm not suggesting I ever could have done it alone, but he showed me how to let things be what they were. Good old Fits.

    Q uickies have checked into the room below— one- or twonighters— joyriders, boisterous and looking to party. Heavy- metal rock vibrates through the floor with a pounding refrain: Let it rock , let it rock , over and over. Is someone being pounded on the bed in time to the pulsing beat? I'm guessing a dusting of cocaine residue on the nightstand. It might be a good time to hit the hotel laundry downstairs, make a dent in the pile of dirty clothes mushrooming in the closet, but, nah, the mess can wait till morning. My grandmother used to say never do wash at night; you can't see the dirt.
    Â Â Â Â The lovers must have gone out around midnight because I was kept awake until then and was asleep when Andre came in from his night location. I heard him climb into bed and held very still, careful to keep my breathing even. I don't know if we are going to make it, he and I. I'm a grass widow anyway. Andre is entwined in the undergrowth of a movie set, the miniature universe, the womb and birth and life of filmmaking. I know it firsthand. He's faithless anyway. Usually not when he's directing; the film is Andre's mistress then. But he's a director; actresses fling themselves in his path. Casual cupcakes of an afternoon, dalliances, the poor starlets: paper peeled off, icing licked, maybe a walk- on part.
    Â Â Â Â As I lay pretending to be asleep, I thought maybe my dad had named me wrong. I should have been called Retreat. Or did I desert— as in abandoned my post? A retreater finds safety to gear up and return to battle. Deserters are shot. How did my dad get out of the Ardennes alive? He was awarded the Silver Star, which is given for gallantry in battle. Gallantry? I don't even know what that word means. They didn't call it gallantry in 1945. It was simply heroism. Why the change? He was twenty and promoted to captain because they were running out of captains by the hour. He told the few men left under his young command that no one had ordered them to die in the frigid winter woods, so they aimed at anything in gray and scrammed out of there. It was a retreat; he got them out alive. If they'd planned to desert, presumably they wouldn't have gone back to whatever base camp there was. Were they gallant men? Am I a deserter?
    Â Â Â Â Andre was out cold next me. He'd throw a pillow over his head and that was that. I wondered how he could handle all the pressures and energy and concentration of directing a movie and just crash like that as soon as his head hit the pillow. He hasn't an ounce of nervous energy. I, on the other side of the California king, was wide awake, a jangle of free- floating brain waves trying to pass themselves off as thoughts.
    Â Â Â Â After I turned down the part he offered me, I learned— back when Fits and I were briefly an item— that Andre had been intrigued by my refusal to work with him a second time. He doesn't direct many movies. Producers despise what they think of as his arrogance, but his films reach a steady audience, an arty following here and in Europe and Japan, and the classier critics love him, so he gets his financing. Word is he'll do anything to get a movie the way he wants it. He's co- written two of his films but is not a writer; Joe wouldn't say so, and I would agree. He's visually brilliant, his characters never less than vivid. He's been called the poet in Godard combined with the bite of Clouzot and the careful structure of Lumet. As a director he is exacting and manipulating and doesn't allow his actors to run loose, even undermining their control over their characters— which scares most actors