When I’d called Nancy in San Francisco the other day, from the same telephone booth that Gail had used to call Adeline Head, I’d been told to deposit a second nickel. I guess I’d thought Nancy was in a different zone or something. Or more likely I hadn’t thought about it at all.

But when Gail had called Adeline, she’d taken my one nickel from me, gotten Adeline’s number on Larkin from Information, hung up, gotten her nickel back, put the nickel in again, and called the number. Or, rather, a number. I hadn’t actually seen what she’d dialed. And then she’d supposedly chatted with Adeline.

Oh, Gail, honey. What have you been up to?

For either Gail had called Adeline at a number in the Berkeley-Oakland area but had wanted me to think Adeline was in San Francisco . . . or Gail had called someone else and pretended that they were Adeline.

Or perhaps she’d been talking to no one at all.

Chapter 46

46

Swing

Lovers are always “the last to know” about bad things because, of course, they are desperate not to know. I had a girl in Chicago named Lois I liked for a short time, just before I met Nancy. Kindhearted as anything, she used to loan her apartment out to a friend named Beryl who lived with her folks. Beryl was quite the man-hungry type. Whenever I blew into town, I’d find some remnant of one of Beryl’s trysts at Lois’s place: a cigar stub, men’s hair cream on a comb, the toilet seat left up. . . . It took us having a fight for Lois to finally scream at me in exasperation, “You blockhead, I don’t have any friend named Beryl!”

And parents are often the last to know about their children: that they don’t have the job they say they have, that they’re in some trouble with the law, that they’re just plain no good.

I hailed a taxi outside the Ben Franklin’s and asked the driver to take me to the Claremont. In the back of the cab, I tried for the first time to focus steadily, rather than wishfully, on all I’d tried so hard not to consider.

For someone with so much spirit, determination, and pride, Gail had certainly turned out to be a quitter. We had both worked hard on Swing. It seemed so unlike her to walk away from a challenge and actually destroy both our scores simply because the first run-through had evoked what I thought was merely nervous laughter. The audience had done far worse to Stravinsky at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. They’d whistled and catcalled; fistfights had broken out. He’d been forced to escape the theater by a bathroom window. And yet he hadn’t burned his orchestral and piano scores.