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he run anything on Jay Phillips?”
    Tim gave a dry laugh. “I asked him that this morning and he says, ‘You want to write obituaries? Write obituaries.’”
    Julie paused at the railing surrounding planet earth. It orbited gently. “Am I crazy or is Tony on a bad trip?”
    “Something.”
    She was tempted to tell him what Jay Phillips had said to her and Jeff at Sardi’s. But why lay that on Tim, besides giving herself a shabby departure if she did quit? And somehow she wanted to quit, wanted more space, deeper waters. She was in a frame of mind that was going to require examination. It could be that she wasn’t facing up. “Tim, it’s great of you to offer me coffee, but I want to go home and think this out.”
    “Look. If you want to quit, don’t. Make him fire you. Unemployment insurance, you know?” Which, though not in so many words, told Julie how tenuous a hold Tim thought she had on the job.
    She managed a smile and stuck out her hand. “Thanks, Tim, for everything. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”
    He hung onto her hand, shaking it thoroughly. He was such an odd-looking young man—big ears, a pointed chin—he looked like Fred Astaire in his Ginger Rogers days. “Julie, you’ve got no idea how many times I wanted to make a pass at you.”
    She threw her arms around him for one big hug and then got away quickly.

FIVE
    J ULIE HEADED FOR THE SHOP , not home. The shop could use a good clean-up and she wanted madly to clean up something, to assuage the galloping anxiety. It was the thought of telling Jeff that gave her the most trouble, the humiliation, the helplessness, the old dependency. His little girl again—in whom he had confidence. Like hell. It was easy to say in retrospect. She probably ought to go the unemployment insurance route. From the cradle to the grave. She’d be on welfare if it weren’t for Jeff. She could not think of a single person she wanted to see. Fritzie the dog maybe. But not Mrs. Ryan. Doctor Callahan. She ought to call the doctor and get a booster shot that would keep her on the job: gainful employment was a tenet of the therapist’s religion. She thought of the priest at St. Malachy’s who had told her to come and see him any time. Father Doyle’s best thing was prostitutes. And old ladies who kept telling him the same sins over and over. Pride and penitence.
    She pounded along Forty-second Street as far as Broadway: “Haughty, naughty Forty-second Street.” Another hunk of nostalgia. In song and dance. No pimps or pushers in this version, everybody was for everybody, especially for the understudy who was going to make it big in the Lullaby of Broadway number. A flashy young black who smelled of marijuana sidled up to her where she waited at the curb for a change in traffic lights. “Fifty bucks, doll. I got the best on the street.”
    “Blow away,” Julie said.
    “That’s my song, baby.”
    She changed directions, uptown, and crossed at Forty-fourth Street, shaking off the pusher. The lullaby of Broadway, yeah.
    The trouble with the shop was that there wasn’t much to clean unless you could start with a bulldozer. The vacuum-cleaner kept hiccoughing on bits of plaster. The walls weren’t safe even for climbing. She settled presently with a cup of tea and her notebook, which was a fat record of non sequiturs, part story ideas, part journal, part character speculations on a lot of odd types. She went through the book for past appraisals of Tony Alexander. There was a time when she had liked him, his messy vests, his smelly pipe, but she had always been a little afraid of him, and much fonder of Fran, his wife. Jeff had said they were having trouble. Maybe that was Tony’s whole problem, but she doubted it. There was a daughter whom Fran visited. Where? At school? Julie could not remember hearing of Tony’s visiting her. Nor did he talk about her. Julie didn’t even know her name. For a moment she wondered if the daughter was an invention,