She waved away how life works with a flutter of her hand. “Oh, it was simply what happens when two people worry too much about each other. Cliff was always painfully sensitive to the fact that when he was unhappy, I would become equally unhappy. So in a desperate attempt to cheer me up once and for all, he made himself extremely happy with a woman in Perth Amboy.”

She broke off a little piece of a laugh for me as if it were a corner of peanut brittle and put her head in her hands, shaking it back and forth with a cheery woefulness. “Oh, it was such a bad mistake! Anyway, about then, Sally called me . . . Sally Rand. Wanted to know if I’d like to work for her again.”

“As what?” I demanded.

She pshawed me. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Ray, not as a stripper, if that’s what you’re thinking! I handle the office work for Sally, like I used to after I had Linney, only a lot more so. She called me, begged me to come out here and do the typing, booking, haggling, pleading. Most of the time I’m hamstered away in a cubbyhole at the Music Box Theatre, but this summer I’ve mostly been at Sally’s show-place on Treasure Island—have you been out there, by the way?”

The luncheonette’s sole and overburdened waitress entered from the kitchen with a stack of plates for other customers. She was the kind of blonde only a chemist could love, with a uniform whose lumpiness was probably not entirely the uniform’s fault. I signaled to the waitress as I told Nancy that I had indeed been to the fair. I didn’t share with her that in my one visit, I’d been proposed to and seen my would-be bride’s body tragically shattered to a bloody pulp. Nancy worried about my mental state too much as it was.

The harried waitress had no time to greet us but wordlessly pulled out a pad and pencil and scribbled frantically as Nancy ordered the day’s special, along with coffee and rhubarb pie. I ordered the same. As the waitress slapped our check down on the table, I asked her if she could bring me milk for my coffee instead of cream. She looked at me as if it were the strangest request she’d ever heard, cracked her gum, pivoted quickly, and rushed back to the kitchen.

“Whatever made you pick this place to hold a job interview?” I asked Nancy.