"Nobody serious. The thing is, in this business, it's real — what's the word? — incestuous, you know? You can't just meet some guy at a party like anybody else. Sooner or later he's gonna ask what you do for a living. Nowadays, with AIDS and Hep B and everything, that's a way for a girl to get dropped real fast. So what happens is, you tend to just hang out a lot with other people in the business.

Date a lot. Maybe move in with a guy and finally get married. But Shelly didn't do that. There was one guy she was seeing recently. Andy... somebody. A funny last name. I don't remember. He was never over to the apartment. It seemed pretty casual."

“Could you find out his name?”

Nicole walked into the kitchen and looked at the wall calendar. She traced a pencil-written note with her finger; it made a sad sweep as it followed Shelly's writing.

“Andy Llewellyn. Four l's in his name. That's why I thought it was weird.”

Rune wrote down the name, then looked over the calendar. She pointed. “Who's that?” A. Tucker was penned in. His name appeared almost every Wednesday going back for months. “Doctor?”

Nicole blew her red nose with a paper towel. “That was her acting coach.”

“Acting coach?”

“The movies we did, they paid the rent. But she loved real plays most of all. It was kind of a hobby of hers. Going to auditions. Doing small parts. But she never got any big roles. As soon as they found out what she did for a living it was, Don't call us, we'll call you. Come here...” Nicole motioned Rune back into the living room and over to the bookcases. Her neck crooked sideways, Rune read some of the titles. They were all about acting. Balinese theater, Stanislavsky, Shakespeare, dialects, playwriting, history of theater. Nicole's hand strayed to a book. The astonishingly red nails tapped the spine. “That was the only time Shelly was happy. When she was rehearsing or reading about the theater.”

“Yeah,” Rune said, remembering something that Shelly'd told her. “She said she had some real parts. She made a little money at it.” Rune pulled a book off the shelf. It was written by someone named Antonin Artaud. The Theater and Its Double. It was dog-eared and battered.

A lot of it was underlined. One chapter had an asterisk next to it. It was headed, “The Theater of Cruelty.”

“Sometimes she'd take time off and do summer stock around the country. She said that regional theater was where most of the creative playwrights were being showcased. It was all very brainy stuff. I tried to read some of the scripts. Gosh, I tell you, I can follow lines like, 'And then they take their clothes off and fuck.' ” Nicole laughed. “But this stuff Shelly was interested in was way, way beyond me.”