I kept Terrence’s Royal typewriter on the table, beside the pictures of Julia and the music box. Sometimes I put my fingers over the keys, hoping to feel something of his presence; sometimes I put my arms around the typewriter, my head down, and breathed in the smell of ink and metal and ribbon. At night, I put the framed snapshots of the two of us under my pillow. I wore the gold bracelet day and night. I walked on the beach for miles, wearing dark glasses and a floppy hat. The Wilburs chained their dog up, and I could hear Bruno yelping. They kept him on a leash when they walked, and they always went south, away from me. I did not have to speak to them again. I missed their funny, eager dog.

I went to matinees, if not matins. At least in the movies I could step away from loss and failure. I sat through cartoons and newsreels, coming attractions with their blaring voices and gaudy music. I watched Poverty Row’s offerings, including monster flicks by clients of mine and one of Art Luke’s gangster films. But I also saw The Searchers, and even if I didn’t like John Wayne, or John Ford, for that matter, I recognized an achievement when I saw it. I endured The Man Who Knew Too Much, and had “Que Sera Sera” etched on the brain. I saw Rock Around the Clock, and noted with some morsel of satisfaction that black and white musicians were actually playing together on the screen. That felt like a first.

I waded into the ocean every day, not swimming, not exerting my body against the sea, just letting the swells roll over and around me, fling me toward the beach, and cough me out on the sand. One afternoon I encountered a fierce riptide that carried me far to the north. I fought it, swimming vainly toward the shore that I could see but could not reach. I wondered if I was going to die out there, carried out to sea. Though my energy flagged, I struggled, and I was absolutely spent when I could finally stand up in the waves, only to be knocked down again and again as if the sea itself wasn’t finished beating me up. Breathless and weakened, grateful to have escaped a watery death, I found myself on all fours, foam pooling around my hands and knees, remembering Terrence and the riptide, and how I had splashed into the waves, and we had rolled over and around each other, and how I had laughed to think of the rolling-on-the-beach scene in From Here to Eternity, and how at last I knew that experience. I wasn’t laughing now, but blubbering with heartache and exhaustion.