There had been a message waiting for her at the desk when she registered. She had wired Rudolph that she was arriving in New York and had asked him to have dinner with her. The message had been from Rudolph, saying that he couldn’t meet her that night, but would call her in the morning.

She went up to the suite, unpacked, took a bath, and then hesitated about what to wear. Finally she just threw on a robe, because she didn’t know what she was going to do with the evening. All the people she knew in New York were Willie’s friends, or her ex-lovers, or people she had met briefly with Colin when she had been in the city three years ago for the play that was a disaster, and she wasn’t going to call any of them. She wanted a drink badly, but she couldn’t go down to the bar and sit there by herself and get drunk. That miserable Rudolph, she thought, as she stood at the window, looking down at the traffic on Forty-fourth Street below her, can’t even spare one night from his gainful activities for his sister. Rudolph had come out to Los Angeles twice during the years on business and she had shepherded him around every free minute. Wait till he gets out there again, she promised herself. There’ll be a hot message waiting for him at his hotel when he arrives.

She almost picked up the telephone to call Willie. She could pretend that she wanted to find out if Billy was feeling all right after his sickness on the plane and perhaps Willie would ask her to have dinner with them. She even went over to the phone, but with her hand reaching out to pick it up, she halted herself. Keep female tricks to an absolute minimum. Her son deserved at least one complete, unemotional evening with his father, unwatched by mother’s jealous eye.

She prowled back and forth in the small, old-fashioned room. How happy she had been once to arrive in New York, how wide open and inviting the city had seemed to her. When she was young, poor, and alone, it had welcomed her, and she had moved about its streets freely and without fear. Now, wiser, older, richer, she felt a prisoner in the room. A husband three thousand miles away, a son a few blocks away, put invisible restrictions on her behavior. Well, at least she could go downstairs and have dinner in the hotel’s dining room. Another lonely lady, with her half-bottle of wine, sitting at a small table, trying not to hear the conversation of other diners, growing slightly tipsy, talking too much and too brightly to the headwaiter. Christ, what a bore it was sometimes to be a woman.

She went into the bedroom and pulled out her plainest dress, a black concoction that had cost too much and that she knew Colin didn’t like, and started to dress. She was careless with her make-up and hardly bothered to brush her hair and was just going out the door when the telephone rang.

She almost ran back into the room. If it’s Willie, she thought, no matter what, I’ll have dinner with them.

But it wasn’t Willie. It was Johnny Heath. “Hi,” Johnny said. “Rudolph said you’d be here and I was just passing by and I thought I’d take a chance …”

Liar, she thought, nobody just is passing by the Algonquin at a quarter to nine in the evening. But she said, happily, “Johnny! What a nice surprise.”

“I’m downstairs,” Johnny said, echoes of other years in his voice, “and if you haven’t eaten yet …”

“Well,” she said, sounding reluctant, and despising herself for the ruse, “I’m not dressed and I was just about to order dinner up here. I’m exhausted from the flight and I have to get up early tomorrow and …”

“I’ll be in the bar,” Johnny said, and hung up.

Smooth, confident Wall Street sonofabitch, she thought. Then she went in and changed her dress. But she made him wait twenty full minutes before she went down to the bar.

“Rudolph was heartbroken that he couldn’t come down and see you tonight,” Johnny Heath was saying, across the table from her.

“I bet,” Gretchen said.

“He was. Honestly. I could tell over the phone that he was really upset. He made a special point of calling me to ask me to fill in for him and explain why …”

“May I have some more wine, please,” Gretchen said.

Johnny signaled to the waiter, who refilled the glass. They were eating in a small French restaurant in the fifties. It was almost empty. Discreet, Gretchen thought. The sort of place you were not likely to meet anyone you knew. Good for dining out with married ladies you were having an affair with. Johnny probably had a long list of similar places. The Quiet Philanderer’s Guide for Dining in New York. Put it between covers and you’d probably have a big best-seller. The headwaiter had smiled warmly when they had come in and had placed them at a table in a corner, where nobody could overhear what they were saying.

“If he possibly could have made it,” Johnny persisted, excellent go-between in times of stress for friends, enemies, lovers, blood relations, “he’d have come. He’s deeply attached to you,” said Johnny, who had never been deeply attached to anyone. “He admires you more than any woman he’s ever met. He told me so.”

“Don’t you boys have anything better to chat about on the long winter nights?” Gretchen took a sip from her glass. At least she was getting a good bottle of wine out of the evening. Maybe she would get drunk tonight. Make sure she’d get some sleep before tomorrow’s ordeal. She wondered if Willie and her son were also dining in a discreet restaurant. Do you hide a son, too, with whom you had once lived?

“In fact,” Johnny said, “I think it’s a lot your fault that Rudy’s never been married. He admires you and he hasn’t found anybody yet who lives up to his idea of you and …”

“He admires me so much,” Gretchen said, “that after not seeing me for nearly a year he can’t take a night off to come and see me.”

“He’s opening a new center at Port Philip next week,” Johnny Heath said. “One of the biggest so far. Didn’t he write you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I didn’t pay attention to the date.”

“There’s a million last-minute things he has to do. He’s working twenty hours a day. It was just physically impossible. You know how he is when it comes to work.”

“I know,” Gretchen said. “Work now, live later. He’s demented.”

“What about your husband? Burke?” Johnny demanded. “Doesn’t he work? I imagine he admires you, too, but I don’t notice that he took time off to come to New York with you.”

“He’s arriving in two weeks. Anyway, it’s a different kind of work.”

“I see,” Johnny said. “Making movies is a sacred enterprise and a woman is ennobled when she’s sacrificed to it. While running a big business is sordid and crass and a man ought to be delighted to get away from all that filth and run down to New York to meet his lonely, innocent, purifying sister at the plane and buy her dinner.”

“You’re not defending Rudolph,” Gretchen said. “You’re defending yourself.”

“Both,” Johnny said. “Both of us. And I don’t feel I have to defend anybody. If an artist wants to feel that he’s the only worthwhile creature spewed up by modern civilization, that’s his business. But to expect poor, money-soiled slobs like myself to agree with him is idiotic. It’s a great line with the girls and it gets a lot of half-baked painters and would-be Tolstoys into some pretty fair beds, but it doesn’t wash with me. I bet that if I worked in a garret in Greenwich Village instead of in an air-conditioned office in Wall Street, you’d have married me long before you ever met Colin Burke.”

“Guess again, brother,” Gretchen said. “I’d like some more wine.” She extended her glass.

Johnny poured the wine, almost filling her glass, then signaled to the waiter, who was out of earshot, for another bottle. He sat in silence, immobile, brooding. Gretchen was surprised at his outburst. It wasn’t like Johnny at all. Even when they had been making love, he had seemed cool, detached, as technically expert at that as he was at everything he undertook. By now, the last roughnesses, physical and mental, seemed to have been planed away from the man. He was like a highly polished, enormous, rounded stone, an elegant weapon, siege ammunition.