Like the rest of America on a Sunday night, I had Walt Disney’s Disneyland on the television when I heard footsteps coming upstairs to the high porch. A knock sounded at the door, and I opened it to find Thelma, and with her, to my utter surprise, was Max Leslie. He was grizzled, paunchy, and pale. His hair was too long, and his shoes were scuffed, and he was stooped in a way I did not remember. Behind his glasses his hazel eyes were ringed with dark circles, and his manner was subdued. I hardly recognized this man who had once filled Leon’s library with words, laughter, and cigar smoke, with antics and ideas. He apologized for coming, and I protested, “No, I’m so happy to see you!”

Max gave a slight laugh. “I doubt that’s so.”

“No, it’s true! I just can’t believe it’s you!!” I felt like a child, lying shrilly to avoid getting in trouble. I showed them both to the small sofa and sat across from them in the overstuffed chair. “Everyone thinks you’re in Mexico. How long have you been back?”

“Better you don’t know.” He had a long, appreciative look around the walls, taking in the framed movie posters, two of them films he wrote. “You’re looking swell, Roxanne. Marian sends her love.”

“Oh, give her mine too!” I got a bottle of Scotch and three small glasses and poured us each a splash. I noticed the briefcase at his feet. “How was Mexico?” I asked, instantly wishing I had not.

“A hellhole. By the time Marian and I got down there, all our friends who had been there a couple of years were drinking too much, sleeping with one another’s wives, rehashing tactics, the Fifth versus the First. Stalin versus Trotsky. The meaning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Was Albert Maltz’s nineteen forty-seven recant a real recant? Simon is killing himself with drink and party politics, he . . .” Max seemed about to say more, then didn’t. He bolted the Scotch.

“Where are you living? Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”

Max and Thelma exchanged glances. “Marian and I have a little rented clapboard house in an old neighborhood in Riverside, sixty miles east of here,” said Max. “Out back we have a view of the alley and the neighbor’s trash cans. Marian has a vegetable garden, and she fusses over whitefly and leaf rot.”

“And Norman?” I asked, half-afraid to hear the answer. “How is he?”

“How is he ever?” Max sighed as though pulling some sorrow up from his solar plexus. “Mexico was hell. Marian went half-mad with missing Norman. Especially after her sister died and there was no one to go visit him. Now that we’re back here, we go to see him four, five times a week. He’s in a nice place in Riverside, but it costs a lot to keep him there.”