`I couldn't use one. There's a long night ahead.'
`That sounds ominous. Make me one then. Make me a journey to the End of the Night cocktail, with a dash of henbane. Or just dip me a cup of Lethe, that will do.'
`You're tired.'
`I've been working all day. For men must weep and women must work, though the harbor bar be moaning.'
`If you'll be quiet for a bit, I want to talk to you seriously.'
`What fun.'
`Shut up.'
I made her a drink and brought it to her. She sipped it. `Thank you, Lew. You're really a dear man.'
`Stop talking like a phony.'
She looked up at me with hurt dark eyes. `Nothing I say is right. You're mad at me. Maybe I shouldn't have left Stella by herself, but she was still sleeping and I had to go to work. Anyway, she got home all right. Her father called, to thank me, just before I left the office.'
`To thank you?'
`And to cross-examine me about you and a few other things. Stella seems to have left home again. Mr. Carlson asked me to get in touch with him if she comes here. Should I?'
`I don't care. Stella isn't the problem.'
`And I am?'
`You're part of it. You didn't leave Stella this morning because you had to go to work. You had breakfast with Ralph Hillman, and you ought to know that I know it.'
`It was in a public place,' she said irrelevantly.
`That's not the point. I wouldn't care if it was breakfast in bed. The point is you tried to slur over the fact, and it's a damned important fact.'
The hurt in her eyes tried to erupt into anger, but didn't quite succeed. Anger was just another evasion, and she probably knew that she was coming to the end of her evasions. She finished her drink and said in a very poignant female voice: `Do you mean important to you personally, or for other reasons?'
`Both. I talked to Mrs. Hillman today. Actually she did most of the talking.'
`About Ralph and me?'
`Yes. It wasn't a very pleasant conversation, for either of us. I'd rather have heard it from you.'
She averted her face. Her black head absorbed the light almost completely. It was like looking into a small head-shaped area of almost total darkness.
`It's a passage in my life that I'm not proud of.'
`Because he was so much older?'
`That's one reason. Also, now that I'm older myself, I know how wretchedly mean it is to try and steal another woman's husband.'
`Then why go on doing it?'
`I'm not!' she cried in resentment. `It was over almost as soon as it started. If Mrs. Hillman thinks otherwise, she's imagining things.'
`I'm the one who thinks otherwise,' I said. `You had breakfast with him this morning. You had a phone call from him the other day, which you refused to discuss.'
Slowly she turned and looked up at my face. `But it doesn't mean anything. I didn't ask him to phone me. I only went out with him this morning because he was desperate to talk to someone and I didn't want to disturb Stella. Also, if you want the truth, so he couldn't make a pass at me.'
`Does he go in rather heavily for that?'
`I don't know. I hadn't seen him in about eighteen years. Honestly. I was appalled by the change in him. He was in a bad way this morning. He'd been drinking, and he said he'd been up all night, wandering around Los Angeles, searching for his son.'
`I've been doing a little searching myself, but nobody goes out to breakfast with me and holds my hand.'
`Are you really jealous of him, Lew? You can't be. He's old. He's a broken-down old man.'
`You're protesting too much.'
`I mean it, though. I had an enormous sense of revulsion this morning. Not just against Ralph Hillman. Against my whole misguided little life.'
She looked around the room as if she perceived the shabbiness I had seen. `I'm liable to spill over into my autobiography at any moment.'
`That's what I've been waiting for, Susanna. How did you meet him?'
`Make me another drink.'
I made it and brought it to her. `When and how did you meet him?'
`It was in March of 1945, when I was working at Warner's. A group of Navy officers came out to the studio to
