I parked with the house in my rearview mirror. It was a grey and white Colonial like one I'd imagined in a story several years before, a huge silent thing with a well-kept yard, a brass nameplate beside the door and windows with flowered curtains that were just heavy enough to keep me from seeing inside. "Drive on down the block," Sylvie had said. "Don't wait here." Then she went alone up the stone walkway and knocked on the door. She had been inside for almost an hour; how long did it take? When would it be time for me to start worrying?

"Watch her," Jones said. "All right? She comes down here to the rail, stands looking out over the ocean. Don't take your eyes off her." She'd been talking to the Templetons, guiding Sylvie (who was standing in for Jones herself) through a complicated floor pattern of masking tape intended to represent the nonexistent set; but now as I waited alone in the truck, I thought that she must have known, must somehow have meant something more.

They had spent the better part of the morning working together up there under the ungelled light, blocking out act one of the new play. It was not a rehearsal for character or plot; my dialogue was tossed off in a casual manner where it was spoken at all. Ranging from the front row to the back of the house to the stage itself, Jones moved them about like figures on a board, searching for the right combination of action and inaction, the certain balance that would move the story along, increase its dramatic impact and also please the eye. By ten fifteen Sylvie had disappeared (now when Jones needed someone to fill her shoes it was Mary up there, taking the calls, shifting a little this way or that), and I was far in the back of the house, sniffing the air, calling out numbers to Lon in the booth above. We'd been getting a distinctly smoky smell from the lights all morning; Lon said that my nose would stand a better chance than his of tracking it down.

"Not that," I said. "Try number twelve." Lon squinted at me through the glass, then turned down to the board. Overhead another row of lights winked out.

That was when Sylvie came back onstage, dressed for the cold in a green coat that came down to her ankles, an outdated cap and a knotted paisley scarf. At first I thought she was playing a scene, a whimsey of hers, the small frightened figure peeking around the curtainedge like a child that had just found its way in out of a snowstorm. It was a thing she did sometimes, sudden flights into fantasy, into other unnamed, unknown characters, when the process of blocking had finally and completely bored her and she could no longer stay inside the lines of tape. Sometimes I wondered why Jones allowed it, how Sylvie could get away with so disrupting a rehearsal. But whenever I asked, Jones would only say that it was just something we had to put up with. "No one else complains," she'd say. "Why should it bother you?"

Sylvie came lightfooted across the stage and whispered in Jones's ear. She had a purse gripped tight in her fingers; while Mary and the Templetons stood patiently by, she took out something that looked like a business card and slipped it into Jones's hand.

"Well?" Lon said. "Is that it?" Jones wrote something down. She handed back the card, gave Sylvie's arm a squeeze, and I sniffed the air. "Yes," I said. "Yes, I think that's the one."

Up there in the booth Lon looked like the pilot of a rocketship. He reached across a soft field of colored light, pulled down a battered old cardboard box and began to rummage through the jumble of fuses and switches and wire. I told him I'd fetch the ladder, but he shook his head no, then gave that faint nod I'd seen often enough before, the one that meant Don't look now

When I turned, Sylvie was standing in the aisle right behind me. Her hands were gloved and folded; yellow hair curled under the edges of the cap. She gave me a bright, unforced smile, and said, "Will you drive me?"

"What?" I said. Her eyes were pale blue. She was using them on me again, and I couldn't understand why. Not for a ride

"It's a dentist appointment," Sylvie said. "Jones said we could take one of the trucks if you or Lon drove."

I looked up one last time. Lon was pretending not to hear; he had turned his back to the window. "All right," I said. "Let's go."

It was a clear freezing day with the sun coming in a slanted line along the alley wall. The two trucks were standing end to end, rustcolored and empty as derelict tanks, in their places far back from the street. As we came down from the stage door the broken ground crunched under our feet. Sylvie unlocked her side and tossed the keys to me, and I pulled away the blocks that Lon kept around the wheels, just like an airplane in a hangar.

Inside, the trucks were bare and green and cold. I had never driven either of them before; the seats were adjusted to accommodate Lon, and at first I couldn't fit my long legs into the cramped space under the wheel. The seat didn't want to move, the door didn't want to close; the gearshift was a thin, yard-long rod with a bend in it and a knob on top with the numbers worn completely away. Sylvie sat shivering beside me. "Choke," she said as I was about to turn the key. She pointed to a place under the dashboard, and when I still couldn't find it she reached over and gave it a good hard tug. Then the truck coughed and roared; I watched in the mirror as the alley began to fill with blue smoke.

"It must be an important dentist appointment," I said. I pushed it into what I hoped was first and began to edge out toward the street. "If it were me she'd say take the bus. She'd say, do it on your own time." At the end of the alley the world came alive. I poked our nose out so I could see all the way down the avenue. "A company truck and two of us on rehearsal time. Your mouth must be all rotten. Right or left?"

"Left," Sylvie said, and added, "Rotten is right." She showed me her perfectly even rows of teeth. "See? I may need falsies. Seems I've got something that has to come out"

It was a long drive across the bright, heavycoated town. She guided me straight out toward the suburbs, but would not give me the address. We had been gone for maybe fifteen minutes when Sylvie drew her purse up close against her belly and unsnapped the clasp.

Inside was the book that Jones had given her, the tattered album filled with tattered photographs of tattered people, spectral families she had never known, in whose faces Sylvie seemed to find inspiration. It was not that she studied them, or used them as models: Sylvie was not that conscientious an actress, and in any case the ingenue parts that she played for us bore no resemblance to the people in the book. It appeared most often in the nervous moments before a show, or when she had lines that needed to be memorized quickly, or when she'd had an argument with Jones or Moscow, and could not get her own way. Now, as we left the last cluster of warehouses behind us, Sylvie drew the book out of her purse. She held it tight, unopened like a bible, in her gloved fingers.

The sign in the shadow of a leafless maple said MD. With the truck paused at the gate and Sylvie climbing down to the street, I'd made a point of looking at that strip of brass: MD in curled letters cut deep into the metal, not DDS. For half a moment Sylvie stood unmoving in the street with her hand on the doorframe. She looked up at me from under the edge of her cap. "I'll probably be a while," she said.

I nodded. "Will you be all right?" I said in the rumble of the engine. "Is it -- do you need help?"

Sylvie pushed hard on the door until it clicked, stood with her face framed in the window. She gave me her best ingenue smile. "You can, if you want," she said. "You can hold my head"

She had waved with the hand that held the book. She had turned her back. Drive on, she had said. Don't wait here. Now I sat alone in the truck with my shoulders hunched against the cold and my knees pressed together, and hated her for the whole affair; for the necessity of it, and for dragging me into its midst. In the cracked glass of the rearview mirror a patrol car came slowly down through the neighborhood. They passed me at a crawl, the blue-suited men inside turning their faces up to mine. They had long, cleanshaven jaws and eyes like broken glass set well back under their brows. They looked up at me as if they knew it all, as if they thought I was the one responsible.

Shortly after one there was a fluttering behind the iron gate. She appeared at last at the bottom of the yard, standing with her feet in the leaves and the edges of her coat stirring against the cold air. From a distance she was unchanged. She waved as I fired up the engine; I backed into someone's driveway, spun the wheel around, and Sylvie waited on the white sidewalk. She lifted her eyes as I brought the truck looming over her. She was trying not to look wistful, and failing.

I was so foolish; I knew so little. I half expected to see blood running down her ankles. At the very least, I thought, the color will have drained from her face. But in the afternoon light she looked fresh and just a little bit pale; she even laughed when I raced around the front, around the warming grille, and offered to help her up. "Star treatment," she said. "I like that." She pulled herself up over the running board, into the cracked seat, her hand sliding down over my forearm until the tips of her fingers rested lightly in the palm of my hand. "Well now, Jeeves," she said. She looked down at me, bit her lip and took hold of my index finger. "'D'you think we could stop somewhere on the way back? D'you think you're up to buying a girl a strawberry frappe?"

I would have agreed to anything to get out of that neighborhood. The houses all seemed to have black glass in the windows; apart from the police car nothing had stirred but the leaves beyond the silent yards. It reminded me of home.

We found a white-fronted pharmacy on the edge of the city that had a soda fountain in back, past rows of patent medicines and cheap celluloid toys hanging from hooks above the dusty shelves. In a corner by the restrooms was a poorly installed booth that we took even though the counter seats were empty. They had strawberry ice cream, so Sylvie was happy. I'd been hungry when we left the theater; now I only ordered a cola.

"You're kind of quiet," Sylvie said when our glasses came.

"I think doctors are the most frightening things going," I said. I hadn't really thought about it before, and wasn't sure if I meant it, but I had to say something. "Was it very frightening?"

Sylvie licked around the edge of the froth, swirled thick reddish ice cream around her spoon, tasted it and made a face. "Nothing compared to forgetting your lines," she said. At first I thought she was trying to keep up the charade, the non-existent dentist appointment that kept things nice and did not fool anyone. But there was none of her usual coyness in the way she said it, nothing of the happy distraction that signalled one of her fantasies, her wanderings. She sat with her fingers curled around the ice cream shaped glass, her eyes sometimes averted, sometimes not, and talked to me as if she was not even an actress, as if I was not even male.

"You've never been in a position to have it happen to you," she said, "so you couldn't know. It's the worst when you've done something a hundred times, so you think you're safe and you don't worry about it. Then you get up under that light, in front of hundreds of people and you don't remember what to say, you don't remember how to move or what to do or where to go, only you know it's your line next and you're supposed to do something. That's the worst. That's when I just bat my eyes. There's always someone out there who knows how to whistle."

There was too much ice in my drink. "So you get prompted," I said. "It's no big deal. It happens to everyone sooner or later."

"It doesn't happen to Jones," Sylvie said. "Anyway, it's how you feel before the prompt comes that counts."

She had spooned out about a third of the frappe when something dark passed over her face. "Maybe this wasn't such a hot idea after all," she said, looking down into the open mouth of the glass. She dropped the spoon clattering into her empty plate, pushed the frappe away in a long wet line across the table and fumbled in the seat with her hat and purse. Her hands and cheeks had turned white; I thought she was going to vomit all over the booth. "Can you take me home, please?" she said. "I don't feel very good"

Sylvie lived in one room on the fourth floor of a decaying old brownstone house not more than ten minutes walk from the theater. Beyond her narrow door the walls were so covered with theater programs, discarded costume sketches, magazine covers, circus posters and fragments of antique dresses that the room seemed to be made entirely of paper and cloth. In the dusty light from a single iron-bracketed window the roof made one-half of an inverted V over a childsized bed covered neatly with a black and red patchwork quilt. It was maybe three steps from the door to the bed; between them was a wooden hatstand with a dark robe on it and a man's pajama bottoms.

Sylvie looked half asleep when I sat her on the bed. I took off her cap and hung it with her purse on the hatstand, then unbuttoned her coat. She let me pull her arms through the sleeves, but she thought it made a pretty good blanket, and wouldn't let go.

She seemed better now, her color had returned, yet she was acting as though she had been drugged. I unlaced her shoes, and Sylvie hummed softly to herself with her head lolling backward at a strange angle, her hair against the curling edge of an unframed watercolor. I recognized Mary's hand in the brushstrokes; it was a swirl of maroon and purple tacked into the descending slope of the roof, a costume plan of Sylvie as a dancing Cossack.

"Stop pretending," I said. I pulled her feet out from under her, and she sank back flat onto the little bed. There was an aged, satiny pillow that crinkled as she rested her head upon it. Sylvie gave a sigh as if she were just waking from a trance, and opened her eyes. She looked like she'd never seen the room before, but decided soon enough that she liked it. Her breath came in long, relaxed whispers. "Thanks," she said, quiet almost beyond the level of hearing. "Moscow would never have helped me. He's an old poop."

I didn't like the way she was smiling. She ran her fingers along the wall of silk and textured paper, turned her head on the pillow and looked up at me from under her lashes. Something was tugging on my collar. It shunted my tie all out of place, drew me down until I could feel her breath against my cheek. The bed creaked under her. Our noses almost touched. She lifted her jaw, and still could not reach my lips. "Why are you fighting me?" she said without opening her eyes. Then her fingers came up around the base of my neck, and her tongue found its way into my mouth. She let out a sigh that seemed to completely deflate her beneath me. She tasted of strawberry ice cream.

I wanted to touch her and I wanted not to touch her. I wanted both of them a lot. I kept my hands straight at my sides. I tried not to breathe. There was a laugh and something else in her eyes when she finally let me go. I lost my balance in getting away from her, from the bed. I nearly fell over. "She doesn't love you," Sylvie said. "Not the way you want. She never will."

I looked around for my hat, realized that I hadn't been wearing one, and Sylvie remained with her head on the pillow and giggled. "I know," I said. I went out into the rank stairwell, into the cold air; I tried not to slam the door behind. I could see my breath.

The sun had already passed over when I came backing down the alley. I had to turn the lights on to keep from bumping into the truck behind. Jones was standing nearly invisible in the shadow of the stage door. "Well?" she said as I climbed down from the seat. "How did it go?"

It was so cold out now that I could not keep from shivering. Jones was only wearing a light workshirt; how could she stand it? "She wasn't feeling all that well," I said. "I don't think she'll be coming in tonight."

Jones shrugged. "I told her not to bother." She took the blocks from where I'd piled them, handed me a pair, and together we fitted them around the dirty wheels.

"Do you know what she was having done?" I said when we came into the bright, warm rooms in back. I could hear Mary singing somewhere close by; out on the stage, Templeton was practicing his lines.

"How do you think she got the address?" Jones said. "I couldn't have her going to the neighborhood butcher." She turned to me and smiled. She didn't seem to mean anything by it. "You saw her to bed?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good. Now I need you onstage. We're blocking out act two; you'll have to take Sylvie's place for now."