JACK FIELDS’S FIRST novel took him five years to write, and it left him feeling reasonably proud but exhausted almost to the point of illness. He was thirty-four then, and still living in a dark, wretchedly cheap Greenwich Village cellar that had seemed good enough for holing-up to get his work done after his marriage fell apart. He assumed he’d be able to find a better place and perhaps even a better life when his book came out, but he was mistaken: though it won general praise, the novel sold so poorly that only a scant, brief trickle of money came in during the whole of its first year in print. By that time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much—not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet his alimony payments—and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.

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.

On Monday morning, sore-eyed and jittery from lack of sleep as he drove her back to Edgar Todd’s office, he began to be afraid they would never have such a good time again. All future days and nights might wither under the strain of trying to recapture this first weekend. They would discover unpleasant, unattractive things in each other; they would seek and find small grievances; they would quarrel; they would get bored.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jill said in a light, teasing voice. “Maybe; maybe not. But don’t you think it’s a delightfully wicked idea?”

“I think you’re out of your mind,” Sally told her.

“Oh, I think so too,” she said with an attractive little wrinkling of her nose. “I think Cliff is too. Isn’t that what it means to be in love?”

Later that night, when Jack and Sally were alone, she said, “I don’t even want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it or think about it or anything, okay?”

“… And then today,” he said, “today everything on the set had to stop dead—cameras, sound, everything—while he took me off in a corner and sat me down to discuss what he called Dramatic Theory, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of a playwright named George Bernard Shaw. You think anybody’d believe that? You think anybody in America’d believe how dumb the son of a bitch is? Christ’s sake, this year he’s discovered Shaw; three years from now he’ll discover the Communist Party.”