I joined the luminaries in the gallery. To my right I saw Irene gazing with the calm of a blonde Buddha, and beside her, Gordon with his worried-cobra look. To my left I saw Elsie exuding the smug exultation of a woman who has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Beside her stood Denise, proud as a gilded figurehead on a full-sail clipper ship, oozing confidence as Leon addressed the gathering below, extolling the picture and all the many people he wanted to thank for its glorious success, beginning with his lovely wife. Applause. Applause. Denise blew kisses. Perhaps she was rehearsing for her Oscar moment.

And yet, as I stood there, looking across this constellation, I knew that for all their cool sophistication, their jewels, their gorgeous good looks, each man and each woman here knew that beauty wasn’t enough to crown you with success. In the fight for screen credits and star billing, for sex and swimming pools, for love and glory, as they say in Casablanca, you couldn’t be stupid and survive. You couldn’t be scandalous, or at least you couldn’t be caught. You couldn’t cling to the past, not even to past greatness. The present shone. This season’s box office. This season’s awards. And the future? I wondered if Davy Crockett and the blurry gray light flickering across American living rooms would make coonskin caps of us all.

Chapter Ten

Music blared out of the hi-fi: sounding brass, piping fifes, crashing cymbals, the roll of drums, peaking, ebbing, peaking, ebbing, then blasting gloriously forth . . . bright bells . . . no, wait. That was the phone. Great tubas resounding across vistas of marching . . . the phone.

“Charlie, that was the phone.”

“Wait, Roxanne, no, just wait, please . . .”

“I have to get the phone. In my business the missed call is the lost deal.”

“Just wait,” he panted, working hard. “Just wait, please . . . please . . . Ah! Ah! Ah!”

I scrambled out from underneath Charlie, raced out to the desk in the living room, and picked up the phone, surprised to hear Thelma’s voice on a Sunday morning.

“Is that ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ I hear in the background?”

I hotfooted it over to the hi-fi and turned it off in the middle of the march, then ran into the bedroom and grabbed a T-shirt. I couldn’t imagine talking to Thelma naked.

“Is Charlie there?” she said when I returned to the phone.

“Well, yes. It’s Saturday night. I mean, Sunday morning.”

“I have an important message for you. I’m coming over tonight to talk to you about something important, and you need to be alone. Do I make myself clear?”

“Are you a Soviet spy?”

“Roxanne, please go find your underpants and your brains, and put them both on.” And with that, she hung up.