“Only in about half of them. About fifty-fifty,” he said modestly. “You know—primitive man emerging in the modern world, and a modern man groping his humble way among the primitives. Quite a nice balance, don’t you think?”

“Quite.”

Lipgloss leaped on the word. “Then you will take it on?”

I thought about it. I hadn’t escaped graduate school only to drown in a pool of Lipgloss’s disintegrating notebooks. On the other hand, I needed to show Grady something more than my bedsheet of a burnoose, and these cryptic scribblings at least resembled research—maybe there’d be something about the BRITs in there. I scooped up some notebooks and Lipgloss beamed.

“Banshah!” he called to the soft fat girl in the other room. She slithered through the door, holding the deck of tarot cards. She lay down before him in sections, like an elephant entering a mud bath. He shuffled the cards on the bulge of her ass, and that’s the way I left him.

The theater was a craterlike depression in the earth.

“Energy!” cried Derek. “Otto, give me some energy!”

The actor called Otto looked stunned.

“Leo!” Derek shouted. “Remember the subtext!”

Leo blinked and regarded him blankly.

“All right, Gilda,” Derek said to Daphne. “Take it from the top. And this time let’s shift into high.”

Something sounded vaguely, disturbingly familiar, like a sudden onslaught of déjà vu.

Daphne said, “Okay, but, Jesus, where the hell’s Ernest? How can I play the scene without Ernest?”

Nobody knew where Ernest was.

Derek said, “Okay, just do it. I’ll feed you Ernest’s lines.”

Daphne bowed her head, then shook it wildly. She breathed deeply, in, out, and whirled to face Derek. In a fruity, relentlessly Oxonian accent, “I’m sick of this studio,” she lilted. “It’s squalid! I wish I were a nice-minded British matron, with a husband, a cook, and a baby.”

“Oh, shit,” I whispered in Valerie’s ear.

“What’s the matter?”

“He’s doing Noel Coward. Design for Living.”

The previous evening Val and I had been sitting outside with a couple of beers and watching the world go by. Carefully she put her bowl on the stoop beside her. “I heard from Derek today,” she said. “He dropped by when you were out.”

I had seen little of him since the night of the welcoming bash—God, could it have been a month ago? Once we met on the street for an interminable ten minutes devoted to his complaints. His hut was too small, too dark, too uncomfortable, too accessible to the sounds and smells of pedestrian traffic. He objected to spellbound people in a noisy trance or coupling at all hours before his entryway; like most rakes he was excessively conventional.