With Austin Wakely it was easy for me to keep my interest to a minimum. I had no curiosity at all about Austin, either before or after he became one of my players. He had a good strong chin and gleaming teeth. If he had been born with a red, white and blue mole on his back, a mole in the shape of a flag, it still would have been his face that I put before the camera.

Carol sat in the armchair, eyes closed, working her way out of one thin atmosphere into another. The scene had been by far her easiest and yet she seemed exhausted. I went over to the window. A man put a coin in a parking meter and walked around the corner. It was just turning noon and the street was fairly crowded. The shoestore was having a sale. A car stalled at the light.

"I've just realized how few black faces I've seen since I got here."

"Even the bibles in this town are white," she said.

"The kind of town this is I'll bet they don't even know what's going on all over the goddamn country."

"They see it on the box. It's like watching the moon through a telescope."

"Everything's going on but it's still boring," I said.

Her eyes remained closed. I almost moved toward her. I remembered the bench in the park in town, the ego-moment of our bodies barely in contact. We sat that way, chair and windowsill, for a long time. Nothing that was good, even temporarily good, even for a slow second, could happen between us. I didn't know why I was so sure of that. Maybe she was just too far inside. It was at times the way I liked to think of myself and maybe I felt nothing could be stolen from her in return for what would have to be surrendered to get at that private awareness. Besides I didn't know what she thought of me. Not knowing that, I couldn't know what form we'd take together. Then there was the fact that her eyes were closed.

"You seem tired," I said.

"It's this weather, so full of life and sweet smells. It's a struggle to get through weather like this. I like to plot my existence on a fever chart in my head. In New York in the humid weather it used to rise and once in Montana at twenty below it nearly jumped off the chart and I thought I would die of too much life. I guess that sort of thing is mostly autosuggestion though. I can talk myself into almost anything. When I die I'll talk myself into another womb and start all over. That's what they do in Tibet-people who couldn't even get into Princeton entering fresh wombs like crazy."

"Through a womb-door."

"That's right," she said. "And there are good wombs and bad wombs."

"I didn't know that."

"Absolutely."

"Are you hungry?" I said. "I'm hungry. Let's get something to eat."

"I have rehearsals to get to."

"Do you have to leave right away?"

"I'm afraid yes, David."

"We haven't had much of a chance to talk since the night of the summerhouse."

"There's less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn't contagious."

"Pandemic is more like it. I wish you'd open your eyes."

"Is there anything to see?"

"Maybe not."

"Even the bibles are white," she said. "We used to go over to the Gansevoort Street pier at sunset. Those humid evenings in that barren part of New York when I lived almost beyond living. And Roy said to me once now I know why New Jersey's where it is and not next to Alabama where it probably belongs. So the sun can go down over it."

Drotty wore black silk and pale green corduroy. He was a dagger of a man, a small jagged bad mood glinting in a corner. Yet he smoked his cigarette almost tenderly, every movement of his hand a soft and highly deliberate piece of orchestration. I hadn't expected him to be so young. In fact I hadn't expected him to show up at all. But he seemed perfectly willing to go along with what must have seemed to him an incomparably casual, if not barbaric, form of theater. This script was not bound; this hotel room was not soundproof; this director had little to say; this tape recorder was a sociological curse; this movie was doomed. Drotty mentioned none of these; he merely smoked and moved softly now about the room in black Spanish boots, a certain shrewish violence attaching to every step. His face, his small face, worked hard at being blank.

"I guess Austin and Carol have told you they've been part of this thing since the beginning."

"I don't mind if my people moonlight as long as it doesn't interfere with their work at the theater."

"I hope it hasn't."

"It hasn't," he said. "They seem intrigued by what you're doing. Perhaps I should be jealous."

"They seem a lot more intrigued by what you're doing. They talk about you all the time."

"They're getting bored. The regional theater bores everybody in the end. People come out of a sense of duty. We try to shock them but they've been in a state of shock for years. Do you know something? In five years the entire American theater including what's left of Broadway will be a government-subsidized semi-religious institution. Not unlike Yellowstone National Park. do not litter signs will be everywhere."

"Cool boots," I said.

"These were given me by a lady professor of romance languages whose only copy of her seventh unproduced play was burned in my fireplace by an Afro-American who said his name was Abdul Murad Bey. I dreaded telling her about it but when the moment arrived she seemed relieved and it wasn't too many weeks later that she presented me with these boots. Recently I heard that Abdul Murad Bey was partly responsible for the burning of Philadelphia, an unproduced play in its own right."

He finished this anecdote by tightening his features and going even more blank than before. I didn't know whether I was supposed to laugh or not, so I merely sent some air down my nostrils, trying to make the sound a cheerful one. I realized that neither of us had yet called the other by name, first or last. This oversight haunted the beginning and end of every remark. Of course it wasn't just an oversight.

We discussed his lines. He placed the cigarette in an ashtray and walked slowly to the armchair and sat down. I had to put out the cigarette for him. Then we were ready to begin.

"Film must leave an emotional residue. The retentive aspect is the one true criterion. What do I take away from a film and of that what do I keep? Something more than underwear, I would hope. I think that what you've got to do at this point is stretch your aesthetic. My task is to help the more serious of my students develop some sort of cinematic lifestyle. I do admit to finding a marginal interest in your movie. It appeals to the child in me. I like silliness. I like silly ideas. Many great movies are basically silly and the movie hero is almost always a dope. Brando for example has portrayed dope after dope. So has Belmondo, so has O'Toole, so has Toshiro Mifune. It's all a question of levels. Preminger's vulgarity is postcollegiate; yours is still matriculating. Since this is our last meeting, I think total candor is in order. I dislike you very much. I've always disliked you. You have evinced little or no respect for me. Time and again, in the presence of female students, you have attempted to undermine my position as teacher and human being. You want very much to know about my relations with a certain young lady of our mutual acquaintance. You crave bad news, defeat, punishment. Defeat is always glorious on film. The loser is ennobled by suffering and death. No camera can resist the man going down to defeat. He commands every mechanism and the attention of every mind. Perhaps you see yourself as a wide-screen hero. I've totally forgotten what I'm supposed to say next."

Glenn Yost's wife was a large friendly woman who probably started wearing a housecoat when she was three. She was a toucher and kidder, obviously well loved by the two Glenns, the kind of woman who excels at picnics-laughing and telling jokes, slapping men's backs, pinching the kids, matching bosoms with the ladies, a vast warm-weather front moving across the plains. I didn't like having her around.