11

Once, years ago, before everyone or almost everyone traveled by air instead of rail, I did a story on the Santa Fe crack Super Chief and rode for a day in the engineer’s cab. Doing a hundred and ten miles an hour on the straightaway, the engineer indicated a crossing more than a mile ahead of us and told me that even if he sighted a trailer truck stalled on the crossing, he couldn’t possibly stop the train, not even if he threw on all his brakes full strength. He would just have to sit in his cab and watch the train hurtle down and crash into the obstacle. That’s how I felt right now, like that engineer, and I wondered whether he would have felt, under those circumstances, the same sense of exhilaration and fear that possessed me.

I asked Millie to step into my office. When she appeared, with her ever-present pad, I asked her what she had decided about dinner.

“I’ll be hungry at seven-thirty—if you want to pick me up?”

“Good. Now we’re going to have a press conference on the subject of Andrew Capestone—tomorrow at eleven, so put Anne on it. We’ll hold it here in my office.”

She stared at me a moment and then made marks in her pad. “All right—tomorrow at eleven.”

“Add Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.”

“Does that make sense?”

“I had lunch with Rosie Krantz today and planted a small item about Capestone’s committee. Just a few lines, and not mentioning Capestone at all, but indicating that the committee would ask the support of Hollywood notables.”

“That’s pretty vague, Al.”

“I know it is. I gave her one in return. I told her that I had asked my wife for a divorce.”

A long silence. She made no notes in her pad.

“When did you ask your wife for a divorce?” she said finally.

“This morning. I asked Rosie to be at the press conference, and if we have Rosie, we have to ask Variety”

“All right.”

“We’ll eat at Chasin’s.”

“I’ll wear my golden slippers.”

“Do that.”

I went home to an empty house. My wife had thoughtfully given Clara her two weeks’ vacation, for which I was grateful. I went into the study and took Andrew Capestone’s wallet out of the pigeonhole in my desk where I had left it, and then the notion hammered at my mind that I had not left the wallet in that pigeonhole but in the one next to it. Or had I? I fell into one of those painful exercises in recollection that yield absolutely nothing. My wife had enormous hang-ups in relating to me, as I had with her. She might hate or despise me or tolerate me, but in all the years we had been married she had never gone through my pockets or the drawers of my desk. Clara? I shook my head. Clara was nasty, astringent, hostile, but honest. I went through the contents of the wallet. Everything was there—but were the papers just as I had placed them? I simply couldn’t remember, and then I put the whole thing out of my mind.