Judging from the grim, disbelieving look he gave her, it was a bad idea, maybe even an appalling one. Probably an indication that he thought she had subnormal intelligence or, worse still, no integrity. She was confident of her intellectual abilities, but she sometimes worried about the integrity issue. It had taken her a good two years of working on Dinner Conversation to get over the impulse to call in friends at the last minute and hand them a character and a script. What had finally decided her against it was not “honesty” and the even more amorphous “principles,” but the realization that people being themselves always made for a better show than people acting a role. Right choice, wrong reason. But rather than try to back out of this blunder, if that’s what it was, she stumbled on, digging the hole deeper: “I know you wouldn’t end up with the essential truth in the way you mean it, but you’d probably end up with something that’s true enough.”

You could say the same thing for the narrative she was writing in Dr. Berman’s office. It wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it was true enough to get the important points across. After all, most people, shrinks included, were more comfortable with an edited version of reality and only the most profoundly masochistic individuals look at themselves without a shade over the bulb. Look at that libelous “memoir” of Rosemary’s.

Desmond was either so horrified he couldn’t speak or, she’d rather think, genuinely stumped at how to respond. “It doesn’t work like that for me,” he finally said. “It’s a matter of sifting through the pieces and listening to everything, over and over if need be, until the truth emerges. If I were to leap at some convenient assumption or . . . well, lie, which is what you seem to be suggesting, I’d never know who the person really was. Which would end up being an enormous disservice to the subject, even if he tried to stay locked up in a closet, like Westerly.”

“I’ll leave you to your standards,” Jane said. “Which end up being a lot harder to live up to when you’re working with television deadlines. Just do me a favor, when we go in to talk with David, don’t contradict me. It’s best to present a united front. We can work out all the rest afterward.”

3.