“Doesn’t matter. A woman has to choose. It’s the one important life choice we get to make, so it had better be good. Gordon was the best-looking and the most persuasive man I’d ever met. We wanted the same things. I knew I could count on him to fulfill for me what I couldn’t do for myself. Look around you, Roxanne. This is all Gordon’s success, and I get to bask in it.” She gazed out over the vast, shady garden, the pale-blossomed crepe myrtle trees lining the paths, the palms, the pool where the screaming three-year-old twins twisted in Josefina’s arms, struggling, flailing with pudgy little fists.

“How can you let the twins do that,” I asked, “and not tell them to stop?”

“I don’t want to undermine Josefina’s authority.”

“Well, I pity Josefina when your next one is born.”

“Oh, save your pity. We’re hiring her sister to come when the new baby is born. They’re happy to have the work. I can’t deal with the kids.”

“I been through your closet, Miz Conrad,” said Eudonna the housekeeper when she brought us two lemonades. “What’ll I do with all the red dresses? Some of them are mighty nice. I don’t think the people who come to the Salvation Army will be wearing Chanel.”

“Keep them, or give them away, I don’t care. Just get them out of the house.” After Eudonna left us, Irene lowered her voice. “Gordon said I had to throw out all my red clothes. You walk into a party in a red dress, and it makes you look un-American. People whisper about you.”

I glanced at the table beside the chaise, where Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead lay, its spine cracked open. “You’re not reading that, are you?”

“I told Gordon, ‘Isn’t it enough that I sat through the movie?’ But he says no.”

“All the characters are insufferable. You wouldn’t want to ride an elevator with them.” I leaned to the side and stuck my finger down my throat.

“Thank god Ayn’s gone back to New York now, but she still lingers here like the smell of an intellectual fart. After you left for Paris, Leon used to host dinner parties for the Motion Picture Alliance people, and Ayn Rand and Hedda Hopper were constantly competing for the most dramatic woman in the room. Exhausting, even just to watch them.”

“Hedda Hopper, America’s basset hound,” I grumbled. “Did you read her long screed about Max in the paper this morning?”

“Someone should have told Max an actor is supposed to deviate from the script, not a writer.”