What the hell was there to say? I sat alone in my room in the Royalton Hotel, listened to the traffic below, and thought how worthless my life was. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d been the boy wonder of Broadway and the envy of everybody. Now, watching Molly, hearing about Chris’s anger, certainly directed at me, hearing about what she was contributing to the war effort, hearing about sweating Dick Harrity’s work on Yank, I felt like nothing. It had all collapsed. And now I made it worse.

I’d met a girl down the hall, in room 506—I can still remember that number. I heard her door open and close, and feeling alone and isolated and also being mad at Constance because my passion for her had cost me my family, I knocked on door 506 and found this lone girl in a similar mood—an actress out of work, with bills piling up. We tried to comfort each other. But I was impotent; I couldn’t. It seemed like the final wrong thing to do—my body was telling me that. My visit east ended on this sickening note. You’re getting what you deserve, I said to myself.