“Not at all,” I replied.

“I have to. Otherwise my sciatica is too bad.”

I nodded, as Marthe tucked one leg beneath herself and stretched the other.

“This is why I quit modeling,” she said.

She pointed her toes, an activity I had never thought erotic before. She grunted, as she gripped the ankles of her elongated leg. Then she looked over at me, her face glistening with sweat.

“There’s a terrible pain in standing still.”

The comment seemed to have a hidden meaning. Her glance had a not-so-hidden one. I was meant to leave my chair and join her. Trying to avoid the terrible, entrancing power of her gaze—one she’d perfected in that shoot with the ocelot, I thought—I had to turn away.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here.”

“What?” Marthe had just switched tucked and untucked legs.

I didn’t want to mention that Clown might be headed my way; why whet her appetite, and what if it weren’t true? I also wished to be discreet about our host.

“Troy’s into bad people for something. I think he may need me a lot more than I need him.”

As if on cue, there was a sound from upstairs. A door creaked open. I heard a man’s voice. And, unless I was crazy, a woman’s.

I was about to ask if Troy had company—so soon after being beaten, he was in better shape than I thought. But Marthe spoke before I could.

“He’s not the one who needs you,” she said.

She had me; I looked her way. Marthe was sitting up, her feet splayed apart, like a rag doll or a child. One of her hands was extended to me, the fingers trembling. She looked gauche; to be more accurate, she looked painfully human.

The noises from upstairs grew louder, then softer, then stopped. I rose from the chair and flew to her, like the female vampires in Dracula. Director Tod Browning had meant to make the film with Lon Chaney but the actor died. So he cast Bela Lugosi.

“Tell me something,” she said, as I joined her on the mat.

“What?”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

I looked into Marthe’s eyes, which were glistening with interest. I knew suddenly what she wished for me to say.

“Marlon Brando,” I said, “replaced Montgomery Clift in Reflections in a Golden Eye.”

Marthe nodded, breathing deeply, and not in the yoga way. Then she blinked, very slowly, asking me to go on.

“Robert Mitchum replaced Burt Lancaster in Maria’s Lovers.”

Her breath came quicker. Marthe took down one strap of the leotard, then the other. She slowly pulled the garment to her waist. She’d been naked with the ocelot, too, and younger, but she’d never been more beautiful.

For the first time in my life, trivia was someone else’s aphrodisiac. She didn’t meet so much, as she’d said, the nerd.

“Go on,” she said.

“And …”

I racked my brain. The only problem was: I couldn’t remember a single other fact.

It didn’t matter. Marthe had laid down on the mat and pulled me to her.

“Just watch out for my legs,” she said. “They’re killing me.”

I promised to be careful. I hadn’t been with anyone since my Ambersons adventure. Marthe didn’t need to know that, though I sensed she would have understood. What she was doing was partly from opportunism—she wanted the movie, after all—but it was partly from desire, too. Thor could hardly raise his racket now.

No matter what I’d intended when I came in, I wasn’t going anywhere, not anymore. If that made me a schmuck, I had been called worse things.

“My film greek,” she murmured.

“Geek,” I whispered back.

She took the information in.

“Geek,” she repeated, unless I closed her mouth gently with my own.

Soon I didn’t care about the noises coming from upstairs.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU’RE STAYING?” DENA ASKED, THE NEXT DAY.

I found myself stammering, trying to sound resolute. “Just for a while. I think I can … you know, use things here to my advantage.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. A morning shower had failed to remove Marthe’s scent from me, and I closed my eyes, inhaling it.

“Well, okay,” Dena said, unsurely, “if you think it’s safe.”

It was, of course, unsafe. Especially considering what I now held in my hands: the Federal Express package. I was lucky it had arrived before any of my dissolute friends had gotten up.

“I’m too jazzed to even open it,” I said.

“I know how you feel.” It seemed Dena was being infected by the Clown disease, too. “Just be careful with it.”

“Believe me, I will.”

There was a longer pause. Then Dena’s tone changed once again to the unpleasantly maternal. “I sent it to you, Roy, because you’re the most knowledgeable—and trustworthy—person about this subject that I know. But if there’s something else going on in L.A. now … I wish you’d tell me.”

I sighed. I could have just fled with the tape back to New York, to familiar sources and surroundings. But I had lied to myself that there was no harm in remaining. And then I lied to Dena.

“There’s no harm in remaining,” I said.

All I could think about was the way Marthe had kicked away her leotard, sending it upon the bed we hadn’t used. I could still see vague fissures from the yoga mat on my legs, arms, and back. It was a minute before I remembered that I might have The Day the Clown Cried. And that surprised even me.

—