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most lucrative investments often are.”
    Updike traded glances with the other directors and then with Alexander MacFarlane. “Could you excuse us briefly, Dr. Raymond? …”
    Briefly turned out to be nearly an hour. Updike had taken the chair at the head of the table when Karen reentered the room.
    “Fifty million, Doctor,” he said, somewhat reluctantly, as she faced him. “That’s the best we can do.”
     
    Karen Raymond left the boardroom physically and emotionally drained. It seemed as though a great weight had at last been lifted from her shoulders, a lifelong struggle coming to an end.
    She had been struggling against something for as long
as she could remember. First there was the struggle to get the best grades in high school to win a scholarship to college. But when Brown University accepted her, she couldn’t say no even though their financial aid offer came up significantly short of what she needed. Her next struggle became working to help support herself. As an undergraduate this meant several school-sponsored jobs, but as a graduate student she was offered a position as a teaching assistant to help her make ends meet.
    Karen did her doctoral work at Columbia, and that was where she met Tom. She had been so lonely and starved for affection for so long that she must have worn her vulnerability like a collar, because he leashed her hard and fast. He was finishing his final year in the school of film when they met, certain that a brilliant future as a screenwriter and then as director lay before him. He was undeniably brilliant, but equally mercurial. His disordered thinking, the wonderfully creative chaos of his mind, drew Karen to him instantly. He was her antithesis, and that allowed him to bring alive in her a part she had forgotten could exist.
    Karen fell hopelessly in love.
    She did not lose sight of her work and career; she simply had something else in view as well. When Tom graduated a year ahead of her, she agreed to move with him to California and enrolled at UCLA. Its program wasn’t Columbia’s, but it would do. Besides, Tom was making good money doing freelance work: selling some options and a few television episodes. Making the right contacts. Seeing the right people. They lived spartanly enough in a nice studio apartment in Westwood, and on Sundays they would sometimes stroll about Beverly Hills trying to pick out the house they would someday buy. They got married six months into their life together. Making it big, all the way to the top, seemed inevitable. For Karen the constant struggle at last seemed on the verge of ending.
    Instead, the most painful struggles were just beginning. Not long after their wedding, she returned home to find Tom cradling himself in the middle of the living room
with a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s between his knees. She had just come from the doctor’s office, where he confirmed she was pregnant. She was thinking of putting off school for a while anyway. The timing couldn’t have been better.
    Or worse, as it turned out.
    The truth emerged as Tom sat there rocking on the rug. He had not sold a single script or been paid so much as a dollar since they had come to Hollywood. All his achievements had been fabrications and lies. The money he brought home came courtesy of a trust fund left him by a grandparent. The parents he had tearfully told her had died years before were only estranged; they had thrown him out and cut him off years before. The trust fund had got him through school and financed his honest attempt at building a writing career. But now it was gone, all gone.
    In retrospect, Karen should have ended things there and then. Except there was the baby to consider and, more, her own romantic ingenuousness. In spite of everything, the lies and tales, she convinced herself that Tom Mitchell was still the man she had loved and married. Her need for affection, coupled with the fear of being plunged once more into a life of aloneness, made her