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must want to see you.”
    “I doubt it, really. And at this point I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”
    “He’s very, very handsome. But of course you don’t care about anything so superficial, do you.”
    Stella laughs. “Of course not. Whether or not they’re politically correct and are fond of Wittgenstein, that’s my sole criterion.”
    “You even say you didn’t think Liam was handsome.”
    “Well, I guess he was. Is. Sort of.”
    “Everyone else certainly seems to think so.” And Margot sniffs.
    Her history is probably the most interesting thing about Margot; most interesting to Stella is the fact that Margot once knew (or simply met: this is not entirely clear) Liam O’Gara. Also, Margot once wrote a book, a novel that was popular some years ago and is now out of print. She has been married three times (probably), once to a man with whom she lived in England for several years, which is where and when she knew (or simply met) Liam O’Gara. She also lived in Mexico City, where she posed (it is said) for Diego Rivera. She has lived in Turkey, and of course in New York. She is not a name-dropper, not really, but it does come out that she knew various important people: Stephen Spender, Balanchine, Mary McCarthy, John Huston, Jackson Pollock. Halston and Christopher Isherwood. Liam O’Gara.
    Stella has said very little to Margot about Liam, their affair, beyond the indisputable fact that she used to see him. Margot of course would like to hear much more, and continually brings him up.
    “I hardly think of Liam,” Stella now tells her. She laughs. “I might not know him either, if I saw him somewhere. Other than in the tabloids.”
    “Oh, you.” Margot sighs. “Well, I’m glad that Richard at least feels that apologies are in order.”
    “Too many. I wish he’d knock it off.”
    That is not entirely true: Richard has actually called only twice, once to apologize hastily and once to set up another meeting, for next week. What is annoying—in fact this is irritating in the extreme—is how much Stella finds that she cares. How much she thinks of him. Imprinted in her consciousness is the shadowed face of that very tall man, with his backlit halo of pale tangled hair. She thinks of that face, and of his deep troubled voice; she thinks obsessively of the room behind him, his studio. All that she could see of it that night was that it was extremely large and full of objects. Looming furniture, plants.
    She is waiting for their next contact, the interview that is to take place next Tuesday, and
no one
, especially not Margot (and more especially not Richard Fallon himself), must have the smallestclue as to the excitement she feels. Which has nothing to do with the actual Richard Fallon, Stella tells herself; it was only an accidental small fire set to her overreceptive imagination—or, also likely, to her somewhat starved libido, after an overly long stretch “between beaux,” as her Texas friend, Justine Jones, likes to put it.
    Undoubtedly, by this time next week the whole obsession, if it is that, will have vanished, blown away. And in the meantime she does not want to talk about it.
    She gets Margot off the phone (not always an easy task) and starts to work on a series of interviews with homeless people around Civic Center and a group who want to feed them.
    She manages to concentrate, to get a great deal done.
    Stella’s flat is in the nondescript, amorphous area known as the Richmond District, in roughly the northwest quadrant of the city, and the flat itself is quite nondescript, its two virtues being its size (it is roomy) and its proximity to the Presidio, the Army-owned stretch of land that is mostly woods, dark and deep and very beautiful. Stella’s windows look out to these woods; from her narrow bedroom window she sees a sweep of cypress boughs, a grassy hillock, and the black trunks of pines and hemlocks, some wind-bent cypresses.
    Her large and clumsily proportioned living room is