I was one of the people who screamed, though I couldn’t recall opening my mouth. I knew it because I heard my voice. I backed toward the doorway. The lean-faced man shouldered past me, leered again, and with one quick snaking hand grabbed my left breast hard, and twisted, before stepping around me and slipping out the threshold. After another minute, his truck roared out of the lot, large and black.

By the time my own shock broke, the entire bar had burst into motion. The bartender blotted the injured man’s face with a towel and gently rolled him to his feet. The waitress got on the phone, calling an ambulance or the police or both. No one seemed to have noticed the groping, or if they had, they didn’t know what to say. I found myself standing in a circle of space, utterly alone. My breast and nipple throbbed. I pulled my wrinkled shirt flat, then stumbled away from my place on the wall and headed for the bathroom again. But the line was too long, and I couldn’t stand still and wait.

For the next several minutes I let the milling crowd shoulder me around the room, moving into one gap, then out to another. If people stared, I fixed my face with the look of expectation, as if I spotted someone across the way whom I couldn’t quite reach. The injured pool player staggered outside, holding his blood-soaked face. His groans were raw and guttural.

When the bartender returned to the bar, I wormed a path to him to ask if there were any taxis to Twentynine Palms. I tried to keep the choke from my voice, but it came through anyway.

“You ready to go, honey?” the bartender said, pausing with a tumbler of ice in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other. “I’ll phone a guy right now. He charges thirty bucks. Fifty if it’s after midnight.”

I felt a neighboring woman’s sympathetic eyes on me. She was at least ten years older than me, with a low-cut shirt and thinning blond hair that she teased forward toward her face. A permanent tan roughened and speckled her cleavage. “Whoever he is, he’s not worth waiting for,” she murmured.

“Thanks,” I half yelled to the bartender. “I can’t find my friends.”

The cab ride smelled of pipe tobacco, my driver silent and incurious but not unfriendly. He waited until I entered the hotel before driving off. An e-mail message from Dee popped up in my laptop inbox when I connected to the internet in my large, serene room: So sorry, Maggie, but by now you know we couldn’t make it. Janis will find you at work on Monday and explain. Hope you have an amazing time. Get room service!

I saw the screening, I wrote back. Intense.

She didn’t reply.