She had stopped crying now and was just sitting there on the slab staring out at the sea and smiling coldly.

“There are some men like that, I suppose,” Hook said. “They’re not worth dying over.”

She laughed with quiet scorn. “Don’t worry, it’s not him I’m dying over, and not even our friend Mr. Douglas, who’s sort of the last of the line, my father’s line, at least in my life anyway. No, it isn’t any man I’m dying over, Mr. Hook. It’s as I said—I’m dying of life. I’m twenty-six. I’ve been married and divorced, and I’ve caused other divorces. I wake up with strangers, and I’ve been through analysis and drugs and travel, and I’ve tried to find it in religion and books. But it wasn’t there. Not for me.” Looking up again, she smiled disparagingly, pretending she had not drilled into bare nerve. “Anyway, it’s not important, is it? I’m just one among millions in this country right now. In fact, I’m not sure I know anybody who isn’t dying inside or at least living as if they were. It’s our contemporary Black Death. Do you have it in Illinois? Has it reached your bucolic friends and neighbors?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not the way you describe it.”

“Why is it so virulent here then? Is it affluence? Is it our fabled Santa Barbara money?”

She was playing with the subject now—playing with him too—but he went along anyway. “I would imagine that’s part of it.” He believed it was.

She studied him in silence. “But to you it isn’t serious, is it?” she said finally. “It isn’t real. I can see it in your eyes. She isn’t dying, you’re thinking. She’s just trying to evade the issue, trying to put me off. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

Hook dropped his cigarette into the sand and buried it with his foot. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Yes, it is.”

She smiled. “The man who cannot tell a lie. You’re a sort of latter-day George Washington, aren’t you?”

“Miss Madera—”

“Miss Madera,” she cut in. “It sounds so formal, so stilted. But then I can’t very well ask you to call me Liz, can I?”

“No, you can’t.”

“All right, then—Miss Madera, what?”

So this was it then, the time to make his pitch, his one last try at reaching her, and he knew just by the way she was looking up at him, all brightness and irony, that the words would not come easily or well—and that he would fail. Nevertheless he tried.

“I realize we’ve already gone over this before, that first night. But time has passed since then. He’s buried now. You’ve ‘died’ a little more. You’ve had time to think. So please—all I want is to hear it once again, here, alone, just the two of us. I want you to look at me and tell me that Chris was a homosexual, and that he said he had nothing to live for, and that he took his own life.”