Well, it was one thing to have a sleepover and see my grandfather’s ghost. I’d learned that you couldn’t predict exactly how (or in what state of mind) the diaper man might appear. It was another thing, entirely, when the woman with the baby carriage just showed up. Was she a fictional character? If so, in certain ways, she was not in character. She never tried to shoot me; she didn’t do anything. She never showed up with the baby carriage, or with the shotgun—at least not in the Front Street house. If she was that woman from The Wrong Car, she didn’t act like her—or like a ghost.

Besides, what would the ghost of the actress who played that character want with me? Why would she show up in the Front Street house? Was it a kind of casting call? The woman with the baby carriage was always a walk-on. If she was auditioning, she didn’t appear to want a speaking part. She never spoke.

I would wake up with a feeling that someone was there—a feeling I was familiar with, in the attic bedroom of the Front Street house. The woman with the baby carriage, as I would always think of her—even without the carriage, and always without a baby—would be sitting at the foot of my bed. She was looking at me, but with no expectations. Maybe she just wanted me to know she could have shot me, if she wanted to, but she didn’t appear to want anything.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said, the second or third time I woke up and saw her sitting there. But I could not compete with her insouciance. The woman with the baby carriage was more indifferent to me than I could ever pretend to be to her. In this respect, she was consistently in character. You couldn’t match her at being noir. When I woke up and saw her, she couldn’t be bothered to disappear. The woman with the baby carriage just got up from the bed and walked away.

I wrote her into my screenplays; even as a walk-on, she seemed too important for a minor character. I was influenced by Jules et Jim, not the devastating love triangle but the third-person, voice-over narration. There was nothing New Wave about my first-person, voice-over character—as close to Jules et Jim as I dared.