He was suspiciously nice. He had to be hiding something. “You leave him alone,” warned Norma. “He’s fine. You’re the weird one. You just don’t know what to do when there’s no trouble. You’re looking for something to fix. Watch out you don’t fix it till it breaks.”

“You sound like a bumper sticker,” Suzanne said.

“Don’t sulk.”

“Am I sulking?”

“You’re sulking because you’ve lost your favorite toy,” Norma said, “the exploding man. Now you have a nice gentle man, and you want him to explode.”

“I don’t—”

“You’re having a normal relationship,” Norma said firmly. “You don’t feel normally about it, but that’s another step.”

“I don’t wonder if he’s a murderer anymore,” she said.

“Very good.”

“I think he’s a narc.”

Jesse did the thing Suzanne had always imagined her ideal mate would do: he read the paper. The whole paper. He was stunned that she had never done this.

“That’s a guy thing to do,” she said, by way of explanation.

“I hardly think it’s the province of one particular gender.”

“So, you tell me what’s in the paper,” she said. “Like it’s gossip.” Sometimes he did. He told her what was happening in the world that he belonged to and she visited.

She postponed reading Jesse’s novel for the longest time, until Lucy finally volunteered to read it first and sort of test the waters. When she finished it, she was quite enthusiastic. “It’s real good. Go ahead and like him,” she told Suzanne. “It’s about a bunch of obsessives—one of your favorite subjects. It’s funny. Read it.”

“Is it smart?”

“Smart? Yes, it’s smart, funny, all that,” said Lucy. “It should even make a good film. I might ask you to sleep with him an extra time to get me the part of Leslie.”

So she read it, and was relieved to find that she thought it was very good. Even the Sleeping Giant seemed to like it, except for a couple of the sex parts.

She was calming down about her career. She had worked three times in the last year. She had done a small part in a movie called Mood Swing and a limited run in a Los Angeles theater of a play called I’ll Buy You a Cherimoya, and had costarred in a terrible TV movie called Cut to the Chase, which also starred Lucy’s ex-lover, Scott Hastings. (Neither of them ever acknowledged that they knew Lucy.) She felt show business was not her life now. It was becoming part of her life. Lately, there had even been times when she regretted not having studied criminal psychology, after all.