He gave me the name of an herbalist down in Hollywood—highly recommended by the Yellow Emperor—who could provide the highest quality of this element, and other essentials in his regimen. He handed me a list of ingredients the Emperor had written out on blue paper.

“Do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Go alone,” he said. “Just you. I don’t want Johnny involved.”

––––––––

My brother caught me on the way out, my purse in hand, and when the taxi came, he slid into the backseat alongside me. I could have told him no, or made some excuse. I could have said I was going shopping and would be hours in the dressing rooms. Or that I needed, after all these weeks, please, a few hours alone. I could have told him something like that—but I don’t know that he would have believed me. I had a choice to make. It was the same old choice.

I gave the address to the cabbie.

“The apothecary?” asked Johnny.

“You know everything.”

“I know his medicine cabinet. In Rome, I ran these errands.”

“He wanted me to go.”

“You’re his wife. He trusts you.”

The taxi took us up the canyon through the careening scrubland and rock-scuttled hills toward Route 101. We didn’t sit next to the car windows but more in the center of the seat, like we used to do when we were kids. Johnny took my hand, trying to make up for his peevishness the evening before. It was pleasant sitting next to him, enjoyable in a thoughtless, family kind of way. There was an undercurrent of the sort there always was with Johnny. The taxi clattered over the pass through Calabasas, then plundered down 101 through the Hollywood Hills. The herbalist’s place was off Hollywood Boulevard, down in the used-up part of town, in a little yellow bungalow with a yucca out front and bars on the windows. My brother leaned up toward the cabbie.

“Next corner,” he said. “Take a right.”

He had the cabbie take another turn after this, then stop in the middle of the block. I didn’t understand. It was a beat-up part of the boulevard with nothing much to recommend it, empty except for a middle-aged couple in shorts and an old man on his knees holding a rag and a can of polish.

“It’s the Walk of Fame,” Johnny said. “The stars. Their handprints.”

“No handprints along here. Just stars,” said the cabbie. “The handprints are over at Grauman’s.”

“That’s fine,” said Johnny. “This is exactly where we want to be. Just keep the meter running. In the meantime, here.”

Johnny handed the cabbie some cash.

“Isabella,” he said. “She’s over there.”

“I thought. . . . “

“It would be a more glamorous? . . . That’s what everybody thinks . . . It’s just a piece of cement on a sidewalk.”

“That’s not why we’re here.”