The Los Angeles Athletic Club boasted a waiting list of every bachelor in the city who could afford its well-tended rooms. It sported the finest gymnasium, boxing ring, wrestlers’ mats, spa, and Olympic pool. For socializing, there was a chummy English clubroom whose dark oak walls positively groaned with baleful-looking game animals gazing upon a snooker table that was said to be from Windsor Castle, though it was likely that royalty’s snooker tables wouldn’t divot so easily, and anyone indisposed enough to spend time beneath it would see grease pencil noting its retirement from the Triangle Studios. Still, it was agreed upon not to discuss too harshly the charms of the snooker table.

The Athletic Club’s suites on the third floor were designed for escape, rest, and meditation. They were airy and well insulated. No music was allowed, though a recent exception had been made for violin. It was a concession on behalf of one particular bachelor, in Suite E. His violin playing was agreed upon by management and fellow boarders to be on a par with Mischa Elman, perhaps—the violinist himself despaired as much—in the same vein as their agreement about the origins of the snooker table. He was a courteous fellow, batting away compliments, preferring instead to compare golf swings or uppercuts, to speculate about marlin fishing, or risk a vague but sophisticated comment about the exquisite quality of local women. But then, always, at ten o’clock, hours before the rest had settled down, he vanished to his suite.

And in the conversations that followed, prompted by the young men who filled the game room after eleven o’clock, the questions would begin. “But what’s he like?”

“He’s nice” was the universal response, universally found wanting. “Nice” was hardly even an adjective. The round-robin comments (Is he funny? Is he conceited? Who’s his sweetheart? Has he done anything funny? I know the man who told him to make a crêpe mustache. He’s not that funny) echoed out of the game room and up the mezzanine to the second flight of stairs, where, long after he said he’d gone to bed, a small figure sat at the head of the stairs with a violin across his lap, plucking at the strings, reversed for a left-handed player, and debating with himself about whether just to go down these two flights of stairs and join everyone. He never joined everyone.