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only way to stop him without publicly involving the first girl. If he’d called my bluff, I didn’t have a fallback position because I’d told the first girl I wouldn’t expose her.”
    “So you
would
have killed him.”
    “My daughter is thirteen.”
    “Well, that covers discretion. What about wit?”
    “Up to you,” I said. “What am I going to do, tell you I’m smart? Want to see me do calculus on my fingers?”
    She pushed her lower lip out and looked down into her wine. Then she looked up at me and then past me, letting her eyes float around the room until they came to rest on something, and once again I had the urge to turn around. She nodded. “I see,” she said. “Do I see?” She waited a moment and then nodded again, and her eyes came back to me. “Yes, I see.”
    I said, “Can I have a vote next time?”
    “Why not?” she said. “It’s not really like I have a choice. There’s Winnie, up there in the clouds pulling the strings, and he’s probably checking his watch right now, wondering how far we’ve gotten. A million years ago, Al Hirschfeld—do you know Hirschfeld?”
    “A caricaturist, right?
    “You might say that. He was a genius, but he was a caricaturist, too. Anyway, he did a poster for
My Fair Lady
, the Broadway version, of George Bernard Shaw peering over the tops of clouds and manipulating two puppets representing RexHarrison and Julie Andrews. That’s the way I think of Winnie sometimes, although Shaw was more benign than Winnie is.” She held out her glass, which was empty. “Top me up, please.”
    I picked up the bottle and poured. “I once knew a con man,” I said, “a gay guy, probably the biggest
My Fair Lady
fan on earth, who told me that poster was the first modern representation of God he’d ever seen, and he always visualized Shaw when he thought of God.”
    “There are probably worse gods than Shaw, if you don’t mind relentless rationality. Me, I’d prefer some mysticism, even some quirkiness.” She drank and put the glass down, hard. “We really
are
all over the place, aren’t we? Here’s what you came to find out. Do you want a pen and some paper?”
    “I’ll remember it.”
    “Fine.” She reached up to the microphone-ear-piece rig and pushed a button. “No reason to tell those adorable Korean boys downstairs all my secrets.”
    “Is that what that thing is for?”
    “Partly. My cleaning people come in once a week, not that they do much, and I use it to talk to them, too. I don’t get up very easily these days. Mostly, though, it’s to let the boys downstairs know I’m still breathing.”
    “I interrupted you. You were about to tell—”
    “The tale of me. I was born in a trunk—not really—in a year that was not numbered, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. One of America’s rust capitals. I was a pretty child, and my mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, et cetera, et cetera. You can fill it in. She finally made it out here with me in her suitcase when I was sixteen and she hauled me to every agent in town until one of them looked at me and saw in me precisely the kind of young woman after whom one of the moguls of the day, Max Zeffire of Zephyr Pictures, perpetually lusted. And I mean insatiably.If he’d been offered nine of me before breakfast he’d have done all of us and still made it to the table before his eggs got cold. So I entered womanhood, so to speak, on Max Zeffire’s casting couch while my mother remained demurely in the outer office, talking race horses with Max’s receptionist.”
    “How did you feel about it?”
    “I was sixteen, dear, what did I know? It hurt, but it would have hurt exactly as much if I’d given it up to some pimply Scranton boy destined to die in a coal mine at the age of twenty and abandon me to a cold little house full of black dust.” She tipped back the glass, and once again her eyes searched the room behind me. “Instead, I got into the movies, a much better deal. Through Max and some