“I am being serious. If certain things didn’t happen, you and I could have been on our way to the mortuary tonight. But neither one of us wanted to die, and we didn’t. We’re alive, Retta Mae! In some strange way our slates have been wiped clean and we have a whole new life ahead of us. So let’s make the most of our good fortune. See! We’re two of a kind in more ways than one. So let’s get married. What do you say? Worst comes to worst, it won’t work. But at least we’ll have given it a shot. Each of us felt something powerful toward each other in that green room, didn’t we? Well, I did. And I think you did too. Whattaya say, Retta Mae? So?”

“So what, Linus?”

“So let’s get married.”

“Shee-it, man.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means okay.”

Billy Constable speed-walked out of studio 6E.

He didn’t stop at the green room for Rosie or Jimmy Joel but kept walking down the hall, ducked into a stairwell, took the steps two at a time for two flights, then left the stairwell on the fourth floor. He waited for an elevator to the ground floor, patting his pockets to make sure his wallet and money were there, while his eyes watched for a red light. When he arrived at the lobby he literally ran out of the elevator, out of the building, and through the crowds standing outside on the pavement in front of the entrance to the National Broadcasting Company. When he was in the clear, he ran east on Forty-ninth Street heading toward Fifth Avenue. Billy stopped running when he came alongside the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

An unusually cold October wind blew across the city. It felt as though an early snowstorm might be coming. The ice-skating rink was filled with skaters. Billy stood behind a waist-high cement wall and watched the happy people below going round and round. Some did figure eights. Some held hands and skated in pairs. Others played crack the whip. Quite frequently someone slipped and fell down, stood up, and wiped his or her bottom.

“At least none of them skaters saw me miss my question,” said a shattered Billy Constable to himself. “And what kinda question was that? It was unanswerable is what it was. They slipped it to me at the last minute. That damn producer didn’t want me to win. He wanted to get rid a me. He wanted the old lady to win. I’m sure a that. I never did like that bastard producer. He’s an evil man. Maybe I shoulda complained. Maybe if I complained to the NBC company, maybe they’d a slipped me some cash to keep me quiet. Maybe they’d a gave me the four hundred thousand dollars I need to pay off Sanseli and Eddie. Maybe the TV people’ll give me the money just to shut me up. But how can I prove they changed the question at the last minute? No way I could prove that.”