Above the fireplace, in a space plainly meant for some heavy old portrait or landscape, there hung instead a small painting on black velvet, in harshly bright colors, showing the face of a circus clown with a melancholy expression; the artist’s signature, so prominently written in white that it might have been the title, read “Starr of Hollywood.” It was the kind of picture you can find on the walls of third-rate bars and lunch counters all over the United States, and in the airless waiting rooms of failing doctors and dentists; it looked so foolishly out of place in this room as to suggest that someone had stuck it there as a joke—but then, so did The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book, which now lay displayed alone on a coffee table that must have cost two thousand dollars.