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that even if lawyer Bob hadn't warned him about it — and there was only so much he dared do before the divorce was complete. He could date Isabelle, have dinner with Isabelle, but sleep alone, or
not
sleep, but alone, night after night.
    Sometimes he got up and read, sometimes he got up and drank, sometimes he got up and watched a tape, but usually he just lay in bed and worried or raged or felt sorry for himself. Sometimes the sleeping pills worked, and then he would get up in the morning feeling fine, almost his old self. Sometimes they didn't work. Tonight it wasn't working.
    And tonight he had a fresh worry to rasp and grate inside his brain, claw at him in the dark. What stupidity it had been to make that offer to Wayne Prentice! How could he have exposed himself that way, made himself so vulnerable to somebody he barely knew, didn't really know at all?
    What if Prentice talks? What if he were to go to Lucie? What if he were to decide the way to kick his career back into life was with publicity, telling everybody in the world that Bryce Proctorr had offered him half a million dollars to kill his wife? The theory of rocketry: you go up by pushing down. Wayne Prentice goes up by pushing Bryce Proctorr down.
    It was as though he'd been plotting a story, making something up he could use as part of a book; but not a very good book. Prentice must have thought he was insane, and maybe he was. This sudden little scheme pops into his head, and he acts as though it's
real,
for God's sake. Plays out a scene. Behaves as though fiction could ever be fact. Leave that stuff in your office, he told himself, but it was too late.
    Could he deny it? If Prentice went public, could he say, 'What a stupid idea. I'd never make a suggestion like that, and certainly not to somebody I don't even know, haven't seen for over twenty years. The man's just a publicity hound, that's all, and if he repeats his accusations I'll have to make a complaint with the police.'
    Be stern, be confident, be outraged.
I'm
the star, he told himself. Who is Wayne Prentice? Nobody. Less than nobody. Not even Tim Fleet any more.
    When the clock read
5:04,
he got up and roamed around the apartment, turning on all the lights. From the spacious living room, decorated by Lucie and Bloomingdale's, he could look out and down at Central Park, and the buildings of Fifth Avenue over on the other side. The dining room, at the south-east corner of the apartment, had the Central Park view as well, but also had the terrace on the south side of the building, fifteen stories up, looking down toward midtown.
    He stepped out there, dressed only in his gray robe, barefoot, but there was a mean wind coming over from New Jersey, and tonight he didn't like the sense of height, the proximity of empty air hundreds of feet above the pavement. If I ever kill myself, he thought, I'll do it here, dive over that rail.
    He wouldn't kill himself, he had no need to, he never would, but tonight he could feel that draw, almost tidal, the tugging on his arms, the gentle push in the middle of his back. You'd sleep, he found himself thinking, and went back inside.
    It was very bad to be this alone, for this long. It made him afraid of himself on his own terrace, a place he normally loved. It made him blurt out foolishness to a stranger, leaving himself open to God knows what.
    The 'study' was what he called the room that was part library and part entertainment center. His big-screen TV was hidden behind antique-looking mahogany doors, flanked by shelves of books, but the giveaway was the leather sofa against the opposite wall. Bryce wandered into the study, after coming in from the terrace, and opened the mahogany doors. Then he stood dull-eyed awhile, exhausted but not sleepy, looking at his dim reflection in the TV screen. Finally, he stooped to pull open one of the drawers under the TV where the tapes were hidden, and chose
Singin' in the Rain.
    Part-way through, he fell asleep.
     
     
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