I wasn’t sure what the correct male etiquette was at this point, so I stepped a discreet distance away and ran through the entire chart of “Soup du Jour” in my head.

Three minutes later, Gail came over to me. “Well, that’s nice,” she said drily. “Ada’s eloping with a fellow from Nob Hill whose parents don’t approve of her.”

“What do Ada’s parents think of him?”

She winced. “Nothing, I’m afraid. Ada lost both her parents in high school. She was brought up by an aunt in Alabama who liked everybody, especially vacuum cleaner salesmen, it’s rumored. Ada is running out on her apartment with a month’s rent due, and guess who’s been elected to break the bad news to the landlady one hour from now, after Adeline has flown the coop?”

“You.”

“Me.” She grimaced. “Well, I’ll see if I can get this fellow I know in Emeryville to spell me on the carillon. I’m not going to give up all of my afternoons, not when that’s the only time I can work with you.”

She asked me with a hopeful look if I’d like to lend her some moral support when she broke the bad news to Ada’s landlady, and I said I’d be glad to drive her there—but then remembered I had to allow myself time to pick up Larry Vance at his home on my way to the Claremont. I told her this, saddened that we’d have to call it quits for the day and elated that she looked equally glum about it.

I did walk her down to the landing at the Berkeley pier. She started to ask a few questions about me, but I’d developed lots of effective ways to duck that dread topic over the years and was able to smoothly steer the conversation back to Swing, explaining that my job, in part, would be something like that of the person who colors the Sunday funnies. “The cartoonist draws the comic strip in black and white, but an ink artist adds the tints. I’d try to do that for your piece, adding brass and reed colors to your existing notes. The trick is to get to know you well enough that I can shade the orchestration the way you might have done it yourself, if you had both the time and the expertise.”

Gail cast me a jaundiced eye and a barely hidden smile. “And if we were to, say, socialize, would that better help you to capture the pigmentation of my personality?”

I flushed with embarrassment and rushed to assure her, “No, I hadn’t meant it like that,” not knowing if I had.

“Oh,” she said, looking downcast. “Well, can we socialize anyway?”

“Absolutely,” I replied before she had even completed the question.