One afternoon, when she and I were cloistered together behind the green glass of the ticket booth (one of many that held us all through the summer), Sylvie told me that her favorite actresses were Jean Harlow and Fay Wray, because she wanted to be the one, and she identified with the other. And it was true that her hair was much the same unnatural color as Fay Wray's, and that, in the small, backward country towns where we sometimes played, hairy young men would whistle or call from the invisible crowd as she posed or giggled on the stage. But Sylvie was not the type to scream. I think Jones would almost have preferred that; it would have been something the other actors could have ad-libbed around.

"Why Harlow?" I said. "You wouldn't want to end up like her"

"She's my ideal," Sylvie said, "because she knew how to handle men." And she reached into what remained of our lunch, pulled out a carrot-stick, bit it down into a stump: crunch, crunch, crunch.

The walls of the booth were speckled with emerald light. Where the stairs passed overhead the ceiling lowered into a dusty corner; there, the girl whose job it was to sell tickets sat reading funny pages that she removed, one by one, from a cardboard box that someone had left there, sometime before. There was just enough room for the three chairs (mine with the frozen wheels that could not be budged), for Sylvie's legs and mine under the ledge of the ticketdesk. Out beyond the window Mary had set up her dulcimer in the slantwise shade. Its wistful notes came at us through the grating, a soft voice that had accompanied us all through our sandwiches and pretzels. She was playing by the display board just outside the theater, where the names of the plays, and pictures of everyone but Lon and myself were tacked into the brown wood: Sylvie at her most winsome, Templeton in a beard that did not belong to him, Jones looking out with her head cocked and her professional smile that was also a challenge. A small crowd had gathered around the dulcimer-table; one of them pointed at Mary's picture, so that she laughed and changed over from ballad to jig.

At last a lady in grey came over, lowered her mouth to the grille. Two dollars each seemed a lot of money to her, but she ended up buying three tickets. When she had gone back again to hear Mary play, Sylvie turned her face up from the yellow ticket roll. Her brows were high under a fringe of golden curls. "I was the start of a riot once," she said, and though she was trying hard, working at it, she did not now look winsome at all. "The whole dance hall was fighting over me, just a mass of men jumping around and hitting each other. There were chairs lifted up. William Nash was knocked out."

"Two for the seven-thirty show, please."

I made the change from our battered cash box; Sylvie tore off two and passed them under the glass. "There wasn't a thing I could do," Sylvie said. "I found a safe corner where there was nothing flying around and watched them all and just laughed. Then a man I'd never seen before took me by the arm. He had a hat and a moustache. Come on, he said. He took me outside around behind the hall. There was a crooked tree growing up right next to the walls of the building. He propped me up there and started kissing me on the neck. He smelled like dead corn."

The girl in the corner looked up from Barney Google. She had blue eyes set well back into her head. She looked just like a setter with its ears turned forward to catch every sound.

"You're proud of that?" I said. Sylvie didn't answer except to wrinkle her nose, and then I felt foolish for having believed her yet again.

There was a rustle of newsprint from behind us, as the girl pulled her chair up close to our backs. She hung her jaw low just over Sylvie's shoulder and asked about the man, if Sylvie had ever found out who he was, if he had harmed her, how the brawl had finally died.

But it was only one of Sylvie's stories, without consequence or beginning, that owed more to the stillness of the yellow booths than to anything like simple fact. She had been telling them for days now, since that first time, three weeks after I joined the company, when she came in from the afternoon rehearsal wearing the most flamboyant sulk, flopped down into the chair next to mine and said, "At least if she won't let me do anything she could let me out early!" Before that, the different little booths in the changing towns had been good places to work. They were so solitary, though they opened onto the street, there was light enough, space enough for me to spread out my papers. All that I had to do was look up whenever the local girl sold a ticket, and change my notation from III to IIII. Now, nearly every afternoon, Sylvie sat in her layers of black and white, in her manycolored vests unbuttoned to the waist and her soft shoes almost touching mine. She poured out tales about herself, the unblossomed Harlow waiting to be discovered, until my imagination was no longer my own, until I had no choice left but to set the plays aside.

She told about her escape from the heartland in a freight car on the longest, black-wheeled train she had ever seen; how she waited in the dark, in the long grass, to wake the next morning beyond Wichita with straw in her hair, smoke and sun in a narrow line along the wooden floor of the boxcar. She told about swimming naked in a wood-shadowed quarry, joined by some local boys who told her that the pool was bottomless, that the bones of murdered children had drifted down and settled into the rocks and silt. She told how they touched her, under the surface of glowing, moon-patched water, how they were caught toweling each other dry when the game warden turned his headlights down into the gully. And I sat in the booth, in silence, and listened to it all, and half believed.

Now Sylvie grew tired of the ticket-girl's questions. She hadn't wanted them in the first place, not from her, not when the answers turned the stories too uncomfortably on their backs. "Five tickets," Sylvie said into the cash box, and the girl must have felt herself vanish, traceless as decomposed ash, into the air. She dug her heels into a crack in the floor, rolled back to the boxes and her blue and red waterstained pages. "Five tickets," Sylvie said again, "in the last twenty minutes. There's hardly any point. Jonesy should have me out there, then you wouldn't even be able to keep track. That music puts me to sleep."

"What would you do?" I said. The only things in my notebook now were scribbles, stick-figures, a few Porky Pigs drawn badly into the margins.

Sylvie tilted her head at me. "Don't you know?" She grinned and stood in the cramped booth, pushed her chair back hard until it bumped into the knees of the ticket girl, who looked up again and glared. Sylvie ignored her. "Watch," she said. "See? This."

Sometimes now I wonder how she saw herself, trying without luck to set her skirts awhirl, raising her hands awkwardly, such an odd youthful figure in her ancient clothes, dancing and failing to dance in that faraway booth. Dust rose into the green light. The ticket girl tried not to watch, and I tried to keep from looking away. From beyond the window the dulcimer music came so wistful and fine; Sylvie kicked up her heels out of step, out of time, whispering her own interior tune. She offered me her hands, fingers splayed, elbows straight, and I would have had to join her, but for a man who came to the glass. He bought some tickets, stared, turned away. Sylvie pretended not to notice.

"You'd draw them, all right," I said, when with a show of breathlessness Sylvie pulled the chair back up under herself. "But somehow I don't think they'd be the kind of crowd Jones is looking for."

She had seemed pleased with the dance, the stamp and flourish that had ended it, but now Sylvie colored and turned her chair away. Windowlight fell in triangle shapes across her cheek. The ticket girl rolled her eyes at me. After a time the music stopped outside; we sat in the booth in perfect silence, until a new face came to the grating, then another and another. Beyond where they waited, afternoon shadows moved soft against old brick. At the end of the line Mary appeared, the dulcimer in its case with the strap over her shoulder, the table pressing its folded legs against her skirt. She waved, and pointed at her watch.

"Hey," she said when she had reached the window. "You all look so grim."

The glass twisted her face into green waves. "I was trying to be funny," I said. Sylvie still would not meet my eyes. "I said the wrong thing."

"It couldn't have been that bad," Mary said. "Not from you." She rapped on the window under Sylvie's nose. "Time to go in," she said. "And you," -- to the girl with the funnies spread in a bright pool across her lap -- "Does your boss drive a blue Ford? He just turned into the alley"

The girl came to her feet all in a rush, sending a flurry of paper heroes into the air. They twisted, danced, and finally fell; Sylvie batted them away. "You two have fun together now," she said, passing under the storm. The ticket girl only frowned. "Go break a leg," she said.

Mary had already gone. The girl snapped up her scattered sheets from the floor, the desk, the chair, stuffed them away without care, then took her seat at the window, arranging the cash box so that the faces looked down. "Better not turn your back on her," she said. "She'll eat you alive. Eat you up and spit out the seeds."

*

Only the week before, Lon had taught me the proper way of drawing the moon across the sky. Now in the low haze of blue-and-purple light that filtered back through the scrim, I worked the control lines, marking my time by the voices on the other side, by the stilted music that came from the shadows nearby. It was Mary, sitting in the backwash at the battered upright piano that the theater had supplied us, a thing so badly abused that some of its notes struck uncontrollably two at a time, others sounded off-key, and still others refused to strike at all; even so, Mary still managed to do the music a kind of witched, drunken justice. Soon there would be trolls in the wings, rushing to button the last of their skins. Nothing more to worry about, I thought, until then.

Halfway through the scene she lifted her eyes from the keyboard and gave me a warning look. At first I thought that the moon-globe must have stopped, that I had crossed the lines or allowed it to come out of the light. "No," Mary whispered. "Sylvie." On the downbeat she raised and lowered her chin, pointing that way out across the stage.

I could see what she meant. In the opposite dark, Sylvie floated on an invisible stool, one leg bent, knuckle in mouth, the silver gown hiked up along her calves, waiting for her entrance line. Her face was turned towards the fusebox, her eyes unfocused, as if in her nervousness she could look straight through the wall, into the night beyond.

Mary swiveled in place, changed over to the dulcimer set high against the blue glow at her side. The music snapped back into key, soft enchantment as she struck at the wire. "Whistlers," she said, not looking up. "She's going to do it again"

And as I watched, Sylvie jumped down, took three steps out under the light, and said nothing.

It was just as if she had worked it out in advance, cued it with someone, some idiot in the middle of the house with a drink or two inside of him and all the brains of a tapeworm. Because this time she actually paused, where no pause was called for or desired. She canted forward at the waist, widening her eyes, forming her mouth into a little 0. The silver gown rode and clung in the right places. With her right hand she lightly brushed her lips; then the whistle floated down high and strident from beyond the fifth row. It brought some laughter, some whispers, a lot of shifting and craning about in the house. Sylvie grinned. She gave a small movement of her shoulders, a melting, implicit thankyou, before she went the rest of the way and at last said her words.

Mary had closed her eyes. Her hands went on striking automatically at the strings of the dulcimer; she lost Grieg, twisted some notes around, found her way back. Even then she would not look up. Neither of us spoke.

It was a corker of a scene, once Moscow got it going. I should have taken that as a warning. But when Sylvie came back again into the wings I was busy minding the ropes, and so all that I saw was his hand coming off after her, chasing her, catching her by the arm. As the glass globe landed cool in my fingers Moscow thrust his face into the dark. He slammed her back hard against the naked brick. "Forget them," Mary said. "Push." She came up all in a rush from behind the piano, so that the grey cloth hanging behind her stirred and began to wave. "Stop it, stop it!" Templeton said. We counted three, then turned the scenery around one third, melting the forest away, raising mountains in its place. "Bitch," Moscow said. Lon had changed the backdrop and was tying it into place. "Stop it," Templeton said. By the time I turned around it was almost done, it looked as if they were dancing, except that Templeton in the whiskers and coat was still trying to come between them. Then Sylvie got her right hand free. She hit Moscow hard across the face, her fingers closed into a fist, her eyes all pinched and squinty as if she were fighting back tears. Mary flopped back into her chair, didn't waste time trying to get the sticks into her hands; she punched out a chord on the piano instead. Moscow stepped back. The blow had smeared his make-up. He touched his cheek, glowered at Mary, turned away. The following scene had already begun. He went onto the stage without missing a beat, as if nothing had happened.

Sylvie shrank against the wall, ignoring Templeton when he bent to whisper something in her ear. She looked across the burning perimeter of light into the opposite wings, where Jones stood waiting in her usual trance, one arm curled around the awful doll that represented Moscow's bastard son. By then Jones had switched over from company leader to actress; the only words that concerned her were the words of the woman in green. Had she seen it? Had she heard? Jones's eyes were the only part of her that moved. They tracked Sylvie until she passed out of sight, then flicked back to the motion of the play. From her stage face, there was no way to tell.

Midway through the first intermission I found Sylvie sitting half in and half out of the building, her back propped against the stage door, her left leg stretched bare in the nightdark of the alley. She might have been waiting outside of all time, still in Ingrid's silver gown when she should have changed into a troll along with the rest. "Hey Fay," I said. "Are you all right?"

Sylvie turned her head under the yellow light from the bulb above. It rode across her face until it was only a streak along the edge of her brow. "Jones sent you? Why not do it herself?" She sucked in her cheeks, knit her brows in an imitation of Jones that wouldn't quite come off; her face would not allow it. "'You can stay here,'" she said. "'You have one line in the next act and I can just as well give that to someone else.' She's done it often enough before."

Then I saw that she had something in her hands. It made a flickering sound when she opened it across her lap, a small brown book with the spine ripped completely away and a metal latch in front that held the pages together. One by one they flipped out from under her thumb, into the alley light: ghostlike photographs of fierce Victorian women, of men in beaver hats, stiff youths with faces like Poe, girls with vacant eyes dressed all in black, children trussed up in lace and bows. "Is that your family?" I said. "No," Sylvie said. "I just like them. Jones got it for me. It was the first month I knew her."

"Why do you try to disappoint her?" I said at last.

Lon turned out the lights from the main box beside the stage. I felt Sylvie move in the dark beside me, her curls glowing yellow, the gown rustling thick and loud as she came to her feet. She hissed at me in the dark. Her voice was not like Harlow's or Wray's or anyone else's that I'd ever heard. "I know you want her," she said. "Everyone knows. So why don't you just fuck off." And she brushed past me, a blur of silver and blue, all in a rush as if she had just remembered the costume change. I heard her snaps popping as she passed into the green room. I heard her kick off her shoes.

"Now isn't the time," Jones said to her reflected face. She pulled off an eyelash, then looked at me out of the mirror. 'Or the place. We have Henrik to concern ourselves with."

I had caught her mid-way in the transformation from the princess of trolls to the seductress Anitra. The talons were already gone from the ends of her fingers, as were the squaretoothed dentures that made it almost impossible for her to speak; when her face came into the glass it was partly one thing and partly another, a face without age. "Maybe if we knew why," I said.

She lined up the eyelashes on her make-up tray, between a spidery pair of false eyebrows and six rubber warts. "Oh, I know why she does it," Jones said. "I've tried to give her some business to cover it. But she panics and forgets."

"So what can we do?"

"Live with it." She chose a brown pencil and lifted it to her face. "Sylvie's a natural actress, not a skilled one. If she were more disciplined she wouldn't be any use to me."

"But what about --"

Jones turned in her chair so that I had a double view of her profile. "Leave it alone. If you want to do something, keep an eye on the stage door after curtain. I have a feeling about this." She untied her hair so that it fell dark and loose around her shoulders. "There," she said. "Presto change-o."

In the alley I felt as if I was the one being punished. I sat alone on the middle step, scuffling my feet around in the gravel, making toy highways with my shoes. The rest of the performance had come off without a hitch, but the thought remained that Sylvie had used her anger at me as an excuse to stop the show. Why does she think Jones keeps her in supporting roles, I said to myself. At the mouth of the alley, distant couples crossed under the lampposts to the parking lot beyond. The whistlers never came.

When I stepped back inside, Sylvie was nowhere to be found. I had a little play that I wanted her to hear, about three drunks in plaid suits who'd come down the alley calling for her, "that Harlow one," and how it had taken Lon with a lead pipe and me with a two-by-four to scare them away. I wanted to say that if the lights hadn't blinded her, if she'd known what she was grinning at, maybe she would have thought twice. I wanted to tell her that she'd damn near started another riot. I thought it would make her laugh. But she wasn't in her dressing room, she wasn't in the green room, she wasn't helping out on the stage. I didn't find her until I went out front to check the booth, and then I regretted trying.

The lobby doors were locked tight, the shades all drawn, the lights turned out for the night. When I stepped onto the invisible tile a vast, quiet sound rose up in the gloom, like a sigh in the dark of a hidden cavern. I stood there for some time, not because I liked the stillness or the lines of moonlight that came through slitted shades, though I liked both. I suppose that I had been hearing it for several seconds before I knew, before the foot-echo died completely, leaving the other sound unmasked at last.

In the booth the shades were down halfway. There was a faint stirring behind the darkened glass, a motion like black smoke congealing into mud, rising and falling. Cloth rustled against cloth on the other side of the grate. Breath in the empty air.

"Come on," Sylvie whispered. Her voice came through the grate and carried along the length of the tiled walls. "Shut up," Moscow said. I heard something rip. "Oh," Sylvie said. "Oh."

I came closer to the glass. They were a mess of rumpled clothing, bare hands floating disembodied in the air behind the counter. Moscow pulled at her bodice and then at her hair. Her throat was bent back against what remained of the light. "Uh," she said, and Moscow clamped his hand down hard over her mouth, so hard that when it came away I could still see the yellow imprint of his fingers on her cheek

I met Mary on my way out through the back. She looked tired and rumpled in a light summer raincoat, the basket that she used for a purse looped over one shoulder, a fresh bottle of wine poking out of the corner. Her face was clean and bare. She said, "Did you find her?"

I shook my head. "No," I said. "Not her."