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decision. She snuggled deeper into the coat and slid her hand through my arm.
    “It was cold, but I waited. I didn’t want to miss you.”
    I took her up the iron staircase and let her into the apartment. I turned on the lights. The apartment was a suite in one of those majestic French-style mansions that had been built in Porfirio Diaz’s day. The original Second Empire furniture was still there.
    “Charming,” said Sally. And then, “Iris found it, didn’t she?” She let the coat drop off her shoulders onto the floor and left it there, not bothering. Her eyes, never missing anything, rested on the two empty glasses and the ash tray with Marietta’s lipstick-stained butts. “A visitor,” she said. “A woman.” She laughed, half coquettishly. “And at the bullfight I was so sorry for you because you said you were alone.”
    She dropped onto the couch without being asked, tucking her legs under her. She had the imperial rudeness of the well-heeled Midwestern girl who assumes that it’s a privilege for any man to have such a combination of femininity and fortune in his house. I tried to remember where she came from. Pittsburgh? Chicago? And the money? Ham? Soft drinks?
    “Tequila?” I said. “I’m afraid it’s all I have.”
    She nodded. She took a long jade cigarette-holder from her pocketbook, fitted a cigarette into it, and lit it. The cigarette-holder was preposterous. But you couldn’t laugh at her. Her eyes were too alive and there was a controlled excitement in her that changed the atmosphere of the room, somehow made it dangerous.
    I pushed a glass across to her and sat down on a chair near her, holding my own glass.
    She lifted the glass to me and said, “ Salud.”
    “Salud.” I said, “Why have you come? Things didn’t go too well between us at the bullfight.”
    “I know.” She smiled a bright smile with nothing in it except that incalculable excitement. “I know. It was my fault. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about Iris.”
    “You shouldn’t.”
    “I shouldn’t have said it because it was against my own interests.” She leaned forward sharply. “You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”
    “Do we have to go into who loves who?”
    “You love her. You want her back. I love Martin.”
    “You do?”
    “Oh, you don’t believe that. You’ve been listening to them. The filthy things they say. Can’t you see through them? Can’t you see they’re only trying to make me the villain to justify themselves? I love Martin. He’s the only man I ever loved.”
    Her eyes were trying to be little-girl eyes, wide and hurt. There was a plangency too in her voice.
    “I was so good to him. I believed in his talent. I gave him everything. When I met him he was nothing, living in a filthy little room with Marietta, penniless, bumming drinks at Paco’s from the tourists, consorting with the Mexicans, the boys who work in the silver mines, the lowest type of Mexicans.”
    She turned her head. “They left England when the war started because Martin was afraid of being drafted into the Army. I think there were other reasons too. The family disowned them. It’s a good family. But they disowned them. They had no money, nothing. He wrote the book, but he didn’t make anything on it, not a cent. I wanted to save him from the awful, squalid life he’d dropped into. I wanted him to have everything he should have. And he took everything. Everything I offered he took. Why I’ve given him thousands and thousands of dollars in cash. And I can prove it. I made him sign IOU’s. I did that for his own good, to give him some conception of decency about money. I have the IOU’s. I can prove it.” She turned with a sharp movement to pick up her pocketbook. I thought she was going to search through it and produce the IOU’s to prove it.
    I said, “Okay. I believe you. You gave him thousands of dollars. You love him.”
    “I love him.” She shook the heavy gold hair passionately.