She sat there, the white of saliva at the ends of her mouth, her teeth gritted, her hands pulling at her long hair, her face fighting off a scream, but it didn’t matter; she could scream if she liked, for Arturo Bandini wasn’t queer, there was nothing at all wrong with Arturo Bandini; why, he had a passion like six men, that boy, he had felt it coming to the surface: some guy, mighty writer, mighty lover; right with the world, right with his prose.

I watched her straighten her dress, watched her stand up, panting and frightened, and go to the mirror and look at herself, as though to make sure it was really herself.

‘You’re no good,’ she said.

I sat down and chewed on a fingernail.

‘I thought you were something else,’ she said. ‘I hate rough stuff.’

Rough stuff: pooh. What did it matter what she thought? The big thing was proved: I could have had her, and whatever she thought was not important. I was something else besides a great writer: I was no longer afraid of her: I could look into her face as a man should look into the face of a woman. She left without speaking again. I sat in a dream of delight, an orgy of comfortable confidence: the world was so big, so full of things I could master. Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.

I don’t remember. Maybe a week passed, maybe two weeks. I knew she would return. I did not wait. I lived my life. I wrote a few pages. I read a few books. I was serene: she would come back. It would be at night. I never thought of her as a thing to be considered by daylight. The many times I had seen her, none had been in the day. I expected her like I expected the moon.

She did come. This time I heard pebbles plinking off my windowpane. I opened the window wide, and there she stood on the hillside, a sweater over her white apron. Her mouth was open slightly as she gazed up at me.

‘What you doing?’ she said.

‘Just sitting here.’

‘You mad at me?’

‘No. You mad at me?’

She laughed. ‘A little.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re mean.’

We went for a ride. She asked if I knew anything about guns. I didn’t. We drove to a shooting gallery on Main Street. She was an expert shot. She knew the proprietor, a kid in a leather jacket. I couldn’t hit anything, not even the target in the middle. It was her money, and she was disgusted with me. She could hold a revolver under her armpit and hit the bull’s eye of the big target. I took about fifty shots, and missed every time. Then she tried to show me how to hold the gun. I jerked it away from her, flung the barrel recklessly in all directions. The kid in the leather jacket ducked under the counter. ‘Be careful!’ he yelled. ‘Look out!’