“Well, far be it for me to ripple the waters around little Dora O’Dell, the scheming bitch who wrecked your life and marriage—and not because she loved you, Leon! She’s forty years younger than you!—she used you for her career.”

“You will be respectful of my wife, the mother of my child.”

Is it your child? The question trembled at my lips, but there are some betrayals you never recover from. I would not do that to him. I loved him too much. For all I knew he had guessed at her affair with Jonathan, and if he had, his pride would never let him admit it, not to anyone, perhaps not even to himself. Denise was having a baby, and Leon would love this child, be a good father. Hadn’t he helped to raise me when my own mother couldn’t stand the sight of me and my father had left the country? This child would be loved. What else mattered? As I slowly got to my feet, I considered telling him about Julia’s note forgiving him, but decided against it. He did not deserve to know he’d been forgiven. After all, he had not called me here to offer forgiveness. And then, I had to admit to myself, that in truth, I had never really forgiven him for loving Denise. Why should he forgive me for loving Terrence? I just said, “Terrence Dexter is a good man who loved me. Why should the color of his skin make any difference?”

“You sound like an imbecile. You are a stupid, reckless girl, and you will pay for this indiscretion. No one will ever look at you in the same way again knowing you have been to bed with a Negro. It’s disgusting. Your reputation will never recover.” Leon went to the desk where once a French abbé had dispensed wisdom. He stood there, and the expression on his face had sent lesser mortals scurrying for nearly forty years. “I am finished with you, Roxanne.”

“So at last I get tossed out with the other unfortunate, inconvenient people, like Julia, like Jerrold and Nelson and Simon and Max. Tell me, Leon, did you guess that Max wrote Fly Me to the Moon?” He did not reply, but his jaw went taut, and I ought to have been afraid, but I went on, taunting him. “Did you tell Denise, ‘Look! I love you more than I love J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and my pals John Wayne and Ward Bond! Pooks loves you more than he hates Communism! Think of it! For you, Denise, Leon Greene would produce a film he knew was written by a man he had destroyed.’”

He pressed his lips till they were white. “Max destroyed himself.”