The movie was at Fifty-seventh and Third. The theater had only a scattering of people in it, since it was the middle of the afternoon. The story was about a woman who was haunted by the gravelly voice of her dead lover—a younger man who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. She was a gorgeous woman and went through a sequence of affairs, breaking up with each new lover after the voice of her old, dead one pointed out their flaws to her, or distracted her while making love. It really was funny. Sometimes, though, it made Harold edgy, when he thought of the young lover Janet had had before him, who had disappeared from her life in some way he, Harold, did not know about. But several times he laughed loudly.

And then, toward the end of the movie, her lover reappeared, apparently not dead at all. It was on a quiet Paris street. She was out walking with an older man she had just slept with, going to buy some coffee, when a black Honda pulled up to the curb beside her. She stopped. The driver pulled off his helmet. Harold’s heart almost stopped beating and he stared crazily. There in front of him, on the Cinema-scope movie screen, was the huge image of a youngish man with sandy hair, a brown sleeveless sweater, blue shirt, Adidas. The man smiled at the woman. She collapsed in a faint.

When the man on the motorcycle spoke, his voice was as it had been when it was haunting her: gravelly and bland. Harold wanted to throw something at the screen, wanted to scream at the image, “Get out of here, you arrogant fucker!” But he did nothing and said nothing. He stayed in his seat, waiting for the movie to end. It ended with the woman getting on the dead lover’s motorcycle and riding off with him. He wouldn’t tell her where he lived now. He was going to show her.

Harold watched the credits closely, wanting to find the actor who had played the old lover. His name in the film had been Paul. But no actor was listed for the name of Paul. The others were there, but not Paul. What in God’s name is happening? Harold thought. He left the theater and, hardly daring to look around himself on the bright street, flagged down a cab and went home. Could a person hallucinate a character into a movie? Was the man at the bank in fact a French movie actor? Twelve years of drinking could fuck up your brain chemistry pretty badly. But he hadn’t even had the D.T.s. His New York psychiatrist had told him he was badly regressed at times, but his sanity had never been in question.

In the apartment he was able, astonishingly, to get back into the painting for a few hours. He made a few changes, making it spookier. He felt spookier now and it came out onto the canvas. The painting was nearly done. When he stopped, it was eight o’clock in the evening. The workmen across the street had finished their day hours before. They had packed up their tools and had gone home to Queens or wherever. The building, as always, was unchanged; its doorways and windows gaped blankly. There was a pile of rubble by the plywood entry platform where there had always been a pile of rubble.