‘Thanks very much,’ I said.

I started to ask her what she wanted, but she did not seem the kind who accepts questions. I jumped off the bed and offered her the only chair in the room. She didn’t want it. She looked at the chair and then at me, thoughtfully, smiling her disinterestedness in merely sitting down. Then she went around the room reading some stuff I had pasted on the walls. They were some excerpts I had typed from Mencken and from Emerson and Whitman. She sneered at them all. Poof, poof, poof! Making gestures with her fingers, curling her lips. She sat on the bed, pulled off her coat jacket to the elbows, and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with insufferable contempt.

Slowly and dramatically she began to recite:

What should I be but a prophet and a liar,

Whose mother was a leprechaun, whose father was a friar?

Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,

What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?

It was Millay, I recognized it at once, and she went on and on; she knew more Millay than Millay herself, and when she finally finished she lifted her face and looked at me and said, ‘That’s literature! You don’t know anything about literature. You’re a fool!’ I had fallen into the spirit of the lines and when she broke off so suddenly to denounce me I was at sea again.

I tried to answer but she interrupted and went off in a Barrymore manner, speaking deeply and tragically; murmuring of the pity of it all, the stupidity of it all, the absurdity of a hopelessly bad writer like myself buried in a cheap hotel in Los Angeles, California, of all places, writing banal things the world would never read and never get a chance to forget.

She lay back, laced her fingers under her head, and spoke dreamily to the ceiling: ‘You will love me tonight, you fool of a writer; yes, tonight you will love me.’

I said, ‘Say, what is this, anyway?’

She smiled.

‘Does it matter? You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.’

The scent of her was pretty strong now, impregnating the whole room so that the room seemed to be hers and not mine, and I was a stranger in it, and I thought we had better go outside so she could get some of the night air. I asked her if she would like to walk around the block.

She sat up quickly. ‘Look! I have money, money! We will go somewhere and drink!’

‘Sure thing!’ I said. ‘A good idea.’

I pulled on my sweater. When I turned around she was standing beside me, and she put the tips of her fingers on my mouth. That mysterious saccharine odour was so strong on her fingers that I walked towards the door and held it open and waited for her to pass through.