His hair dryer didn’t work. He was sure Chatterton or Grady or Daphne had extra batteries that they refused to share with him. He was denied the use of the sheik’s washing machine, and his dashing white bush jacket with trousers to match (bought in lower Manhattan, probably from some theatrical costumer) were turning yellow as the leaves of a New England autumn.

I had been lazily tracing doodles in the dirt; now as Val mentioned him I calcified.

A man has feelings that range from mild dislike to sheer loathing for the former lover of a present love; whatever the ferment, it is invariably tinged with the glacial residue of fear. There’s always the chance that some spark of affection has survived and might be rekindled into a conflagration, a terrible awareness that sexual history has the nasty habit of repeating itself. I was sure that Val remained unaffected by the proximity of that narcissistic clown, but yet… and here he was, calling on her. When I wasn’t around.

“What did he want?” I asked in a throwaway voice, flattened to stress casual disinterest.

“He’s preparing his first play,” she said. “He wanted to know if I’d be in it.”

“And you said…?”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“You said that to him?”

“I’m saying it to you, Breslau. You really believe I’d be interested? I hate plays anyway. I can’t even read them, they’re all such bullshit.”

“Comes in handy, I bet, having an elegant yet earthy, all-purpose aesthetic…”

“Come off it, Breslau.”

“…that dismisses in one word the entire corpus of drama.”

“Why don’t you go screw, all right?”

“Just don’t exaggerate. Some plays are wonderful.”

“You mean like Hamlet?”

“Hamlet and many more.”

“Well, I read Hamlet in high school. Son of a bitch stands around scratching his ass, can’t make up his mind to do a simple thing like off the louse who offed his daddy.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“Derek? I told him thanks but forget it, I got other things to do, like trim my toenails. Still,” she mused, “I’d like to know what he’s up to, wouldn’t you?”

So there we were, watching Derek squeeze a performance out of his actors as if they were so many tubes of dried-up toothpaste. When the ordeal was over, he joined us.

“What do you think?” he asked, fishing for plaudits.

Valerie stifled a tiny yawn. I nodded my head with slow approval, a solemn aficionado of the arts.

“I know we’re just blocking it out,” he said, “but did you catch the nuances?”

“It has your imprint,” I said.

“Derek,” Valerie said, “you’ve done it again.”

“What about the architectonics?” Derek asked. “I mean, doing it in the round, in the open, the interdigitation of the actors with the site, defining space, merging it with content, you know?”

“Absolutely,” I said.