-19

Your lover? Your pimp? Oh your pimp’s in the poorhouse? Avon calling! She stuck out her tongue at herself. Then sagged. Ah, Christ, what a life! She picked up her wig box, slouched downstairs and walked out to the piquant, tree-lined street.
For a moment she paused outside the house and gulped at the morning. She looked to the right. Beside the house, a precipitous plunge of old stone steps fell away to M Street far below. A little beyond was the upper entry to the Car Barn, formerly used for the housing of streetcars; Mediterranean, tiled roof; rococo turrets; antique brick. She regarded it wistfully. Fun. Fun street. Dammit, why don’t I stay? Buy the house? Start to live! From somewhere a bell began to toll. She glanced toward the sound. The tower clock on the Georgetown campus. The melancholy resonance echoed on the river; shivered; seeped through her heart. She walked toward her work; toward ghastly charade; toward the straw-stuffed, antic imitation of dust.
She entered the main front gates of the campus and her glumness diminished; then grew even less as she looked at the row of trailer dressing rooms aligned along the driveway close to the southern perimeter wall; and by 8 A.M. and the day’s first shot, she was almost herself: She started an argument over the script.
"Hey, John? Take a look at this damned thing, will ya?"
"Oh, you do have a script, I see! How nice!" Director J. Lee Thompson, taut and elfin, left eye twitching yet gleaming with mischief, surgically shaved a narrow strip from a page of her script with quivering fingers "I believe I'll munch," he cackled. They were standing on the esplanade that fronted