And I remembered the day it had begun to change.

We had come through the interview dully enough. Yes, Miss Ferracci thought Stanislavski had made valid contributions to the theatre. Yes, it was a matter of not carrying anything too far. Yes, she did like the work, some of it, of the Actor's Laboratory. Yes, she did like Bart Sear's work. Yes, she did plan to get married someday. No, she did not look forward to ever going to Hollywood. No, she would not care to compare the differences between Hollywood and New York. And no, she did not own a pet.

I had closed my notebook then and just sat on her couch staring off. I hated interview assignments because I couldn't really be creative about it. I asked the questions I was told to ask and wrote them up the way I was told to write them and it went on and on like that.

It made meeting even a serious and slightly well-known off-Broadway actress like Eve Ferracci a bore. I drank the last of the coffee she had brought out earlier and stood up.

"You haven't asked me," Eve Ferracci said, "if I think the off-Broadway movement is a good thing or not. Will your editor like that?"

I felt that the beautiful, bored woman in slacks, tucked into the chair across from me, was making fun of me and my work. "No, I haven't, have I?" I said with a deliberately tart unfriendliness and started to pull on my gloves.

She had smiled at me then, not professionally, but really smiled as though my mood pleased her. Across the room I could feel relaxation flowing through her like a long sigh. "I'm glad you find this kind of interview as silly as I do."

I smiled back at her and for the first time admitted to myself that the rather sad, blue-gray eyes disturbed me, disturbed me deeply. Had disturbed me when I first walked into her living room that morning. I wished mightily to either sit down and stay forever or to rush out and never see the eyes again. I merely stood.

The woman had unfolded her legs from under her and stretched them out slowly and thoughtfully in front of her as she looked me over from head to toe. "Are you twenty-one yet?"

"Twenty-three," I said, feeling the t's as thick as pudding on my tongue and that awkwardness and self-consciousness was sweeping down from every corner of that room.

"Do you write well?"

Her questions were simple and sudden and I stood fighting for poise, feeling that whatever sophistication I had ever cultivated about anything ran away and hid from me. Then, I could feel nothing at all except that the presence of the woman overwhelmed me and that she saw it.

"I hope so." I said finally, inexplicably near tears. It all had to do with the sense of suffocation that had welled up in me when I had first come into her house that morning and seen her standing, waiting, in the black, narrow pants and the crimson shirt. In the flashing seconds it had taken me to cross from the foyer to the couch it had all swept through me: the nine empty months which had finally swirled into that dreadful, devastating mistake that was three months of release and unfulfillment of the time with Tessa. She had turned then, the actress, to greet the reporter, unknown and unwelcome and seen me. And then the dark, heavy, black Italian hair had moved on the head that motioned for me to sit down; and the promise in that hair, in the gesture, had dissolved into the abstract nothingness of the interview.

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