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last.
    "Fine."
    "Why don't you come up to bed now?"
    She wanted to refuse. She wanted to laugh.
After what she had witnessed she was no more interested in sex than
in giving another dinner party with Anna as a guest. But far too
often these days there was a good excuse not to make love with
Owen. How long until their marriage was nothing but excuses? And
how long after that before she was a single woman again, reading
about Anna Jacquard Whitfield on the pages of Town and
Country ?
    "I'll be up in a minute," she said. "Where
will I find you?"
    "In our bed."
    That seemed significant. Owen had a room.
His room. But the bedroom she slept in each night was their room.
And where was her room? Or her life?
    She wandered the house for a few minutes,
although there was nothing to check or do. She wandered, hoping for
a miraculous end to her anger or her fears. She told herself that
Owen was waiting, and that lovemaking might breach the wall that
was fast going up between them. She had to try to win him back,
because if she didn't, she would have no marriage, no life at
all.
    But in the end, it didn't matter, because by
the time she climbed the stairs and slipped in beside him, Owen was
already asleep.
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    There were worse ways to travel than the
studio's limo. Not too many years before, Gypsy had considered
herself lucky to have subway fare. At age eighteen she had thumbed
her way to New York after discovering that her parents planned to
commit her to two years of community college and a continued life
of squalor in the Dugan insane asylum. Her mother had broken the
news with her usual tact. If Gypsy wanted a college education, she
could damned well work for it by living at home and taking care of
the rest of the Dugan brats who had followed right behind her with
rhythm method precision.
    Instead she had come to New York with
nothing in her pocket except the money she'd gotten from selling
her stereo. Actually she'd sold her parent's portable television,
too. They still hadn't forgiven her for it, even though she'd
presented them with a complete home entertainment system on their
last anniversary.
    Outside the limo's tinted windows, the
Nassau County vista was as monotonous as only suburbia could be.
There was little of interest here, but Gypsy could smell money
somewhere off in the distance, along the Sound where the Great
Gatsby and his society pals had partied the nights away. She had
partied there herself, and would again. And last week she had said
"yes" to a June houseparty in the Hamptons. As her star rose, so
did her invitations.
    She had come a long way from an overcrowded
Cleveland hovel where scenic meant a day when pollution from
neighborhood smokestacks blew west instead of east. She had no
gypsy blood. She had been born plain old Mary Agnes Dugan, and she
was the offspring of every insipid immigrant group that had grubbed
and plodded through Cleveland's factories and mills. But she shared
with the gypsies their disdain for the ordinary and their
unconventional methods of getting what they wanted. After years of
listening to her mother scream the word at her, Gypsy had proudly
taken the name as her own.
    The glass pane separating her from the limo
driver slid from view. "Miss Dugan?"
    The young man at the wheel was one of the
countless rent-a-bodyguards who materialized in and out of her life
on eight-hour shifts. He was the best-looking of the lot, with a
blond crew cut and baby blue eyes. More than once Gypsy had toyed
with the idea of asking him to guard her body in the most intimate
ways, just to see what he'd say.
    She dimpled appropriately and leaned
forward. "What is it, Randy?" She took her time with his name,
caressing it slowly with her vocal cords.
    Color rose in his clean-shaven cheeks. "I
just wanted you to know that we'll be there before too long,
ma'am."
    "That's just fine. I'm enjoying the
ride."
    The glass slid back into place. She was
enjoying the ride. She never let on, but she still