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meaningful and lasting legacy. Now Josie embraced the name of Mrs. Elliott, whenever she could remember it, for she took credit for being instrumental in promoting Billy’s blissful third marriage.
    “Nope, thanks, Josie, but I’m going to be straight with Sally Lou. She’s just not getting the job done.”
    “Can I give you a tip? There’s one perfect way to fire people that makes it easier all around. You start out by saying, sympathetically, ‘Sally Lou, I can see that you’re not happy here.’ Then, no matter what she says after that, you just keep repeating, ‘No, Sally Lou, I know you love the office, but trust me, you’re not happy here. I know you need the job, but you’re not happy here. You’d be happier somewhere else.’ ”
    “Josie, she
loves
it here. She’s the office favorite, queen of the sorority. I’ll sound like a lunatic.”
    “That’s not important. Just get the firing over with in a friendly way. You’re concerned for her, that’s the message.”
    “I’m on my way,” Gigi said firmly. “Thanks, Josie. Buthow will I ever be able to believe anything you tell me again, now that I know how your mind operates?”
    “Well, what happened?” Josie asked Gigi when she spotted her in the company cafeteria at lunchtime.
    “Sit down and I’ll tell you,” Gigi invited, looking dazed.
    “Hard time, huh? It can be rough, but it’ll never be as hard again,” Josie sympathized. “It’s a trial by fire. Firing must be a gender thing. Men don’t have the same problems with it.”
    “Sally Lou thanked me.”
    “Say, you must have been good,” Josie marveled.
    “She thanked me for
noticing
that she wasn’t happy. She said she liked me too much to say anything, but she’s been miserable working at Scruples Two. She’s been trying to make the best of it.”
    “Why, the little ingrate! What a nerve, after all you’ve put up with.”
    “Josie, she was just being honest. She was relieved that she didn’t have to quit … she has a phobia about quitting.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “Sally Lou said, and I quote, sparing you her Bette-Davis-in-a-snit tone of voice, ‘This is a boring office. Boring, boring, boring. There isn’t a single available man around to flirt with, nobody but a lot of women, nice women, but women.’ What’s more, she’d expected something glamorous when she came here, because of the reputation of Scruples, the store, but the catalog business is repetitive. She thinks my writing is very nice but after all it’s not gripping, like ‘Dear Abby,’ and there’s an opening for a secretary at Creative Artists. Apparently the place is full of men, and who knows what it could lead to? She says her ‘people skills’ haven’t been utilized here. So she kissed me a tearful, grateful good-bye, collected her pay, and left. Now I have to get a new secretary.”
    “Why didn’t you make her stay till you’d found a replacement?” Josie demanded.
    “I didn’t have the heart to incarcerate her any longer. She wanted to zip right on over to CAA.”
    “I knew you should have let me do it,” Josie said in righteous tones.
    “Could you find me a new secretary, Josie, preferably a guy? Maybe he’d find a satisfactory social life here.”
    That evening, after work, Gigi lingered over a solitary, pre-dinner glass of wine. She’d been living alone for over three weeks while Zach Nevsky was away on location, in preproduction for a film in Montana, and he wasn’t due back for another three weeks. A year ago they had rented an old house in the Hollywood Hills, on Laurel Lane, one of the many mysterious, little-known twisting streets that rise high behind the Chateau Marmont, an utterly charming semi-ruin of a more or less Spanish-Italian-French Provencal house that had been built in 1927, with three stories that climbed the steep hill, and a view of Los Angeles from every southwest-facing window.
    The house had come furnished with a few basic pieces, and during