“To meet guys, no,” Suzanne said. “You didn’t say to blow them, did you?”

“You wouldn’t know,” said Lucy. “You were busy cruising the green room.”

“I was not cruising the . . . I was talking to . . . You tell me to do this stuff.”

“I don’t tell you to do it while I’m on TV,” Lucy said.

“Oh, it’s scheduled around your career now, my talking to guys?” Suzanne said. “Let me just tell you this one thing. You look great and I gave the guy my number. It’s been a breakthrough night for both of us. Now we can go and have some French fries and doughnuts and really live life.”

They walked out of the building and got into the limo. “What’s his name?” asked Lucy, settling into her seat, and Suzanne talked about Jesse all the way back to Hollywood, thinking the whole time, “He’ll never call me.

“And if he does, what if he’s a murderer?”

The Dating Accident

Suzanne was dreaming that she was hanging by her hands outside the window of a speeding car with her hair flying behind her. Driving down a street and flying through the air. It was frightening, terrifying, but as she sped along it became almost exhilarating. She passed through the danger into the creamy filling of Wheeeee! and then woke up, her heart beating very fast. She had the strange sensation that she actually had cried out, “Wheeeee!” but she saw Jesse fast asleep beside her and knew she hadn’t.

They had been living together for almost a year—though he’d kept his apartment—and she was still always a little surprised to find him there in the morning. She liked to study him when he was asleep—he seemed unarmed somehow without his glasses on—but she could only engage in this activity on weekends. During the week Jesse got up at seven to write. “Look at him,” she thought. “He looks like somebody you could go up to at an airport and say, ‘Could you watch my bag?’ ”

He remained curious to her. She knew she cared about him—her latest analogy to Norma was that he was a wounded Confederate soldier and she was this sweet Yankee woman who’d found him on her lawn—but she wondered why. It was as though she doubted her own judgment, which in fact she did. For years her judgment had told her to take drugs. Why should she think her logic had improved that much in just two years?