He should have waited another semester before summoning her. He realized that only after she had quit her job as a salesgirl, packed her two suitcases’ worth of belongings, slammed the door on her ragpicker father, and moved across the country into his tiny studio apartment at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. The glamour of spotlights sweeping the night sky to announce movie premieres made her feel as if she had just fallen off a turnip truck.

She had never heard of television, and no matter how many times he explained its workings, she didn’t understand how a moving picture could be seen without a projector.

He began to make new friends and she just didn’t fit in. She was both too serious, and not serious enough. His crowd, mostly women and a few lucky fellows with 4Fs, grew up around the movie business. They spoke about the war in a way that upset her. Her war began with the Nazis rounding up the Jews. Their war had begun in Spain six years earlier, after Franco encouraged German war planes to incinerate the town of Guernica and the West did nothing to retaliate. They rallied enthusiastically in favor of a Soviet-American war effort.