I stood by the car, smiling from ear to ear, probably looking like a complete idiot, when a baggage porter stopped in front of me and said, “You okay, man?”

“Fine,” I said.

“You lose something?”

I shook my head. “Found something.”

“Well, good for you,” he said and walked off.

Good for me. Yes. Bad for Desiree.

You were so, so close, lady. And then you blew it. Blew it big time.

PART THREE

FAIL-SAFE

32

About a year after I finished my apprenticeship with Jay Becker, he got kicked out of his own apartment by a Cuban flamenco dancer named Esmeralda Vasquez. Esmeralda had been traveling with the road company of The Threepenny Opera when she met Jay her second night in town. Three weeks into the run of the show, she was pretty much living with him, though Jay didn’t think of it that way. Unfortunately for him, Esmeralda did, which is why she was probably so irate when she caught Jay in bed with another dancer from the same show. Esmeralda got her hands on a knife, and Jay got his hand on his doorknob and he and the other dancer got the hell out of Dodge for the night.

The dancer went back to the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, and Jay came knocking on my door.

“You pissed off a Cuban flamenco dancer?” I said.

“It would appear so,” he said, placing a case of Beck’s in my fridge and a bottle of Chivas on my counter.

“Was this wise?”

“It would appear not.”

“Was this, perhaps, even stupid?”

“Are you going to rag on me all night or are you going to be a good lad and show me where you keep your chips?”

So we ended up sitting on my couch in the living room, drinking his Beck’s and Chivas and talking about near castrations at the hands of women scorned, bad breakups, jealous boyfriends and husbands, and several similar topics that wouldn’t have seemed half so funny if it weren’t for the booze and the company.

And then, just as the conversation was running dry, we looked up and noticed the beginning credits to Fail-Safe on my TV.

“Shit,” Jay said. “Turn it up.”

I did.

“Who directed this?” Jay said.

“Lumet.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“I thought it was Frankenheimer.”

“Frankenheimer did Seven Days in May,” I said.

“You’re right. God, I love this movie.”

So for the next two hours we sat, rapt, as President of the United States Henry Fonda clenched his jaw against a coldly crisp black-and-white world gone mad, and a computer foul-up caused the U.S. attack squadron to pass the fail-safe point and bomb Moscow, and then poor Hank Fonda had to clench his jaw some more and order the bombing of New York City to placate the Russians and avoid a full-scale nuclear war.