Listening to Billie
obviously too bright for that. He produces them. Ted says he has tons of money. And some he’s even written and directed.” Peggy named a couple of movies that Eliza thought she had heard of, had not seen.
    “Well, if he’s so terrific maybe I’ll run away with him. We’ll elope,” said Eliza.
    Peggy laughed again, and moved away.
    Eliza began to talk to some other people who were near her elbow, people whom she had met before and almost forgotten. They were talking about skiing, which is what they all had done the previous weekend, at Sugar Bowl. And Eliza, who did not ski, imagined white spaces of snow, and frozen blue lakes, as vividly as she had earlier pictured hot beaches in Mexico.
    In fact, the huge windows of that expensive house were lashed with rain, rattled with violent and unremitting wind. It was a winter storm that seemed to promise to remain forever, with no warmth or light, no spring.
    Someone was saying, “The intro could just be a shot of that window, with water streaking down it, and the clouds. Some heads bobbing around in this room, giving the sense of a party. Party clothes, animated faces. And then after the titles and credits, all that junk, a cut to the beach at Ixtapanejo. Plane trips are all the same, unless you crash, and that’s a kind of exploitation film that doesn’t interest me. Any more. Anyway,the beach—and a couple lying there alone in the sun. Who’ve just made love. Or maybe not—that would be up to you.” And Harry Argent, who was speaking from Eliza’s other, non-ski-talk elbow, looked at her with a sort of friendly inquiry.
    Everything about him was so outrageous that she laughed, but at the same time she was glad to see him back.
    He took her arm and guided her expertly between people and furniture to a corner near the window; he asked, “No draft? You won’t be cold here? Well, tell me a little about yourself. Just a little, really. I’m not a good listener. You know, your current status, aside from being unemployed.”
    “I’m divorced.” She always said this. Never: I’m a widow.
    Impatiently he said, “Of course you are. Divorced. Only interesting if you’d done it five or six times, and at your age that’s pretty unlikely. Any kids?”
    “One. Catherine. She’s ten.”
    He was quick to say, “We could take her along. That would be a whole other trip. It might be interesting.”
    “At the moment she’s in Boston, with my mother. Spring vacation. At her school what they call a ski break.”
    “Jesus, a ski break. Some schools these days.” Berlin had become heavier in his voice.
    “Oh, well, it’s probably simpler this way. Two people. Grownups.”
    “Look.” Eliza faced him and laughed. “You can’t possibly think I’m coming to Mexico with you? To some preposterous town I’ve never heard of?”
    “Well, why not? Look,” he said to her, “I’m not divorced, not quite, and my wife has been giving me a pretty hard time. I’d like to talk to a pretty, intelligent girl who has an imagination. I can see all that in you; I have an infallible instinct for friends, unfortunately not for wives. And I talk best on beaches, and Ixtapanejo is not preposterous. It’s there, and it’s really beautiful.”
    •  •  •
    “Plane trips are all the same, unless you crash.” This sentence revolved in Eliza’s hollowed head as the plane lurched, jolted sideways, and, beside her, Harry Argent peacefully slept, smiling slightly at whatever vision occupied his sleeping mind. And Eliza thought how strange that she should die with a man she didn’t know at all.
    For distraction she concentrated on the two people across the aisle: an almost middle-aged and getting-fat couple, in cheap and garish Hollywood clothes; sleepily affectionate with each other, they exchanged words in accents that Eliza believed to be Australian. But what were they doing in those clothes, why going to Acapulco? What in life did they do? And why were they not afraid? Why was

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