I promised to read them and get back to him. I walked them outside, said good night, and watched them go down the steps. I stood there for a while longer, watching the waves roll in and fling themselves on the moonlit beach like true believers fling themselves into causes lost before the tide changed, ebbed, and went elsewhere.

Chapter Eleven

Despite its sexy name, Clara Bow Drive was an uninspired residential street of houses that all looked alike. The sole grace was a line of still-spindly jacaranda trees lining the parkway between street and sidewalk. Between the sidewalk and the two-bedroom stucco house we rented there was a thick line of six-foot oleander bushes that shielded us from view. Once you walked inside, the eye went directly to the modern art I had all over the walls. Big, clean bands of color, work by artists I’d met at Casa Fiesta who lent me paintings that would otherwise be stacked in their studios. The rented furniture too was clean and modern. On a more utilitarian note, the house had a washer in the back porch and a clothesline in the backyard. Thelma and I both did our laundry at work.

Thelma’s office was the front room, and she looked up from her typewriter when I walked in late Monday morning. “Well?”

“I loved them both.” Max’s scripts were witty Empire comedies in the best tradition. Fly Me to the Moon was about a highly intelligent young woman lab assistant, Maisie, who falls in love with her boss, the brilliant scientist Dr. Bleeker, who is so completely wrapped up in his work, he has no thought or care for anything or anyone else. Clever Maisie invents a series of electronic signals so that Dr. Bleeker thinks he’s getting messages from the moon, and Maisie helps him “translate” them. Love and hilarity ensue. You Make Me Feel So Young was Miracle on 34th Street without Santa. “They’re both fine, frothy pictures. Amazing that Max can write something so sparkling under the circumstances.”

“Oh, Roxanne, this will make Max and Marian so happy!”

“Did the songs come first, or the stories?”

“Max said he had notes for these stories for a long time. But when he heard that song, ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ the whole thing came together in his head, and he wrote it in a couple of days. He wrote them all longhand, like he always does, and I typed them for him. I knew we could trust you.”

“Of course I can be trusted. Max and Marian have been dear friends since I was just a kid.”

“Who will you offer them to?”

“Empire. We’ll offer them to Empire!”

Thelma’s face fell. “Are you feeling all right, Roxanne? Got a fever? Food poisoning? PMS? Empire is not what Max had in mind.”