Jones as a blonde was more unnerving than anything I could have imagined, as if someone had pasted her supernatural eyes over a magazine glamor photo. She came to the foot of the stage, where the House of Marvels gathered itself in a monstrous, claustrophobic semicircle. Posing so the footlights reflected off her tiara, she said to Moscow's back:

" we define ourselves by the things we save. What does that say about you?"

In the center of that elegant clutter, an indoor junkyard of wheels, jars, phony mummy cases, Moscow turned his face into the blue light, and we all saw the scar for the first time.

It was nothing more than an inch-long dab of plastic above his left cheekbone, a moment's work, a scratch. But it was something he had never worn before, not for the Professor; it stood out like a lurid Karloffian thing, lent him the air of a runaway mobster.

"Fool," Templeton said in the darkness at my side. His neck and shoulders were stretched out so far that I thought his shoes must be nailed to the floor. "Motivating again. Why doesn't he just think about the words he's saying? Why doesn't he just listen? Idiot."

When I looked at him in the afterglow his face was almost scarlet. At first I thought it was only the colored gel that Lon had used in the overheads. Then I remembered the things that he sometimes said when the company gathered for meals in the little diners, or around the rug in midnight rooms. "Connie," he would say, leaning over his plate, wearing something very close to a leer. "Connie. How's your tempo-rhythm today, Connie? How's your psycho-technique?" And I remembered the way Moscow gripped his silverware in reply.

"Why Connie?" I asked Lon the first time I heard Templeton say it. It was an awful, rainy day, and he was walking behind the rest; I had fallen back and was counting on the water to cover our words. "His way of ragging on Moscow," Lon said, hands in pockets, not lifting his eyes from the damp sidewalk. "Thinks he took his name from the Moscow Art Theater. But Moscow just likes the way that it sounds."

I still did not understand. "Constantin," Lon said. His feet had started to squeak. "Connie. Stanislavski."

Now, for the first time, I knew what it was all about. Templeton stood rooted at the corner of the scene, jabbing at his cheek with a finger. "Trying to get the character's soul onto his face," he said, making the word sound like something loathsome. "If he'd just learn to act" Onstage, Jones's skin had turned pale blue. She halted in mid-sentence, and for a moment her face was vacant as if she could not make up her mind whether to stay in character or to step out. Then she smiled. "Um," she said to Moscow. "That's that, that will have to go."

Which might have been the end of it, if Templeton had only waited long enough to hear. Moscow frowned, ripped the thing off of his cheek, leaving a white line of unpainted skin gleaming at the edge of his face. "Fine," Jones said. She licked her fingers and worked at the spot until his make-up blended. But by then Templeton had vanished into the back, stirring up dust and a cloud of noise in his hurry to get off the stage. Lon watched him go. He looked up at me from behind the control panel, moved his lips without making a sound. "Watch this," he said.

At first I thought that he meant Jones and Moscow. They started again from the top of the scene, Jones coming down into the gloom. The way she held her body made it seem like I was looking at her through a curtain of heat. "I told you no more flowers," she said, in a whisper that rose and penetrated throughout the building. Moscow stood with his fingers curled where the scar had been. He had changed shape somehow; his weight seemed to have shifted itself along the frame of his bones. Slowly, so that an audience might not have noticed, Lon let the overheads bleed one into another. In that accretion of light that formed around him (at first I thought it was an illusion), I saw something crawl across Moscow's face, something that did not belong to him; anguish. The only sound in the theater was the rasp of his shoe leather against the stage floor. As I watched, the Professor took on flesh before my eyes.

It was not the Svengali Moscow had been rehearsing for the last three weeks. It was the thing I had set on paper, a showman at the end of his career, betrayed by his own fantasy, his own heart, but clinging to the remains, hoping, hoping

It was like looking upon the ghost of a person who had never existed. "Look," I said. "Look." Moscow touched Jones's freezing body with a tenderness, a frailty that I could not believe, that couldn't have been buried anywhere inside of him. "Not him," I said. My mouth had gone dry. Then Mary's fingers touched mine. "He can still feel it there," she said softly. "That's all that matters. A wet spot on the edge of his face. Sometimes the strangest things help him to find it"

Moscow said his lines; Lon crept back to the board to bring down the dark. There was a silence that lasted eight or ten seconds. At last, out of absolute blackness, Jones said, "Great. Do that every night and we have a show."

Lon switched on the worklights. He and I went out at once, as quickly as if it were an actual performance, and began to break the set into its component pieces. "Wear it, if it helps," Jones said over her shoulder. She gathered up the sequined folds of her gown, lifted the cloth free of her legs as she came down out of the scene and turned into the cool of the wings. "Just see that it's gone by the time you come on. The professor doesn't strike me as the kind of man who gets into knife fights."

Moscow said nothing. He waited with his shoulders set hard, the sweatstained top hat clenched under his arm, until Lon set down the chairs for the next scene. Without looking at him, Moscow took three careful steps, no more, swirled around in his coat, and sat. That was when Lon said, "Listen. Here he comes."

From out of the back I heard a faint, horrible sound, thud drag thud, like a leper clumping around behind the flats. It grew louder and more elaborate until even Moscow had to notice. It was perfect; Moscow looked around

and Templeton came onto the stage. He looked as if he'd been hit by a truck and dragged a few hundred yards. His face was painted an unnatural grey, his hair stuck out in threatening points; the highcollared Amish suit that was his usual costume had been twisted all out of shape by a large hump set between his shoulders. He had a crutch jammed under his right arm, a prop cast wrapped close around his left. On his left cheek, a livid, blood-red gash ran in a ragged line from just below the eye to the corner of his mouth.

"Hah," Templeton said. "How do you like my new make-up? I think it adds to my character's character, don't you?"

Moscow sat with his legs crossed, his fingers folded in his lap. He turned his face without taking his eyes off of Templeton, so that Templeton could have seen the once-scarred cheek, if he had been looking.

But Templeton had set his mind on making the presentation. Perhaps it was the lawyer coming out in him again; perhaps it was just that he'd wanted the professor for himself. He jittered and shook. One by one he offered his wounded parts up under Moscow's nose for inspection. "My character's had a rough life," he said. "I want to show that on the stage. Now, this helped me find his subtext. It was self-inflicted. He leapt into traffic in a fit of Romantic Angst; I'll bet you didn't think he was capable of something like that. This helped me find the through-line. I'm afraid he was born with it; it symbolizes the burden we all have to bear, just by living life. But this" Templeton brushed the scar so carelessly that red paint came off on his fingers "this will help me to send out rays. It came out of a long-ago swordfight. You didn't know that my character was a swordfighter, did you? Well, he was pretty bad at it"

"Your character has only one line," Moscow said.

Templeton smiled. "Just my point. I want to make him real. I want to lend irony to the line."

"Ho," Moscow said. "A hit. A very palpable hit. But I heal well."

For the first time, Templeton bent to look at his cheek. A terribly pinched, scowling look came over him, as if he were auditioning for a gangster movie. The simplest of words would not come to him; he stared down at Moscow under the heat of the light, the crutch creaking under his arm, and Moscow sat as motionless as a man in a painting staring back. At last Templeton gave out a long shudder of breath and turned away. He took up his position halfway down the stage, just off-center. "Well," he said in his stage voice, and in his stagey manner so that he might almost have been running over his dialogue from the scene. "Took it off, then. Good. Good. Looked damned silly."

"And how do you look?" Moscow said.

Just then Jones said, "I think he looks terrific." She came rustling on in a blue waitress uniform that clung tight around her thighs. Her heels went clak-clak-clak over the boards. As she neared Templeton she laughed out loud, something that I had never heard her do before, that must have come as much from the character, from the wig, as from Jones herself. Templeton winced. Moscow's face went slack, and so, I suppose, did mine. "Like a corroded old statue with stigmata," she said. "A good Futurist image. But not what we need for this play." Then with a harsh, red-painted smile unlike her own, her voice so blurred that the words became vaguely obscene, she added: "Here. Let's get those things off of you."

Templeton pulled the stuffing from under his coat, while Jones stood by in silence, holding his crutch. When he had cleared it all out -- the bunched-up workshirt, the socks, the lumpy, understuffed pillow -- and could stand up again, he gave a smile of apology all around and pulled a handkerchief out of his sleeve to wipe at the smear on the side of his face.

"No, leave that," Jones said. "I like it. The Wounded Amish. If it improves your performance as much as Moscow's did for him, than it ought to be worth something, hey?"

Templeton glowered at her, but Jones never saw it. "Just this," she said, unsnapping the cast from around his arm. Little flecks of plaster dropped out of it to the stage floor, a delicate shower of white dust. She fastened it again so that it wouldn't fall apart in her hands, then gathered up the crutch and the pillow, the shirt and socks all into her arms and offered them to me. "Take these and lose them somewhere, please," she said. "Tell Lon lights out."

But Lon heard it for himself; the stage vanished before I could even make it into the wings. It was stuffy back there, and wet. It felt as if the air was full of cobwebs strung from canvas to brick, rope to flat, holding everything together. Sylvie gave a small, pointed laugh out of the dark and was quieted by a word from the stage. As my eyes began to adjust themselves, Mary's face came swimming out of the gloom. She was wearing a simple gingham dress; her auburn hair rested in a wavy length against her neck. "Excuse me," I whispered. "Got my hands full." She gave me the sweetest smile and held herself out of my way. As I squeezed by, the lights came up onstage and I saw that her left eye had been blackened.

We were so close that I could feel her breath on my face. She was still smiling. "Mary," I said. There was no swelling, though she held her eyelid low enough to suggest it. She touched the bruise, then showed me her fingers. "You see?" she said. "It's an old wound. Don't say anything"

The crutch slipped out of my fingers. It was Mrs. Templeton who caught it before it could hit the floor; when she straightened again I saw a mark on her face, though it was hardly noticeable, a chaste thing almost, just a tracery of blue watercolor above her jaw. Sylvie was laughing again. There were dark welts on her cheeks, as if she had been struck with a cane. She was painting Lon's forehead in the glow of the electrical console, adding bloodcolored marks to an incision that ran from temple to temple, like the stitches in a patchwork quilt. She gave me one of her triumphant looks, then came around and showed me her wrists

Now Jones and Moscow sent their voices drifting back to us from the stage. Mary took her cue; she patted me twice on the arm, set her face into a businesslike mask. Templeton lifted his eyes to meet her as she stepped out. He said his one line, saw her, and could not suppress a chuckle.

It was a low, wistful sound that warmed me to his nameless character in an unexpected way, simple utility made human at last. Jones did not even stop the scene. For the smallest moment she allowed Constance to drop away, just long enough for us to catch a whisper of satisfaction as it passed across her face. Then Constance was back, resurrected behind her eyes, setting down plates of rubber food, moving along from table to paper-covered table

Moscow was sulking when he came offstage, and I knew that it was more than just personal hurt. It was not like him to lose a character once he had hold of it, but I had watched the entire act, and I saw the Professor escape him, line by line, until midway through the parade of scars Moscow dried up completely and was raised, empty handed and aware of that emptiness, that vacancy, from his actor's trance.

So that now he was like a drunk who just had to kick something, barreling into the wings with his face turned down, his hands jammed into the pockets of the greatcoat, the scenery billowing and trembling as he passed. Though looking down, he still managed to stumble over the pile of rags and props that I had set down well out of the way, next to a coil of rope. Even then he did not stop. He cursed once, caught himself with his palms against the metal door that opened into the halls beyond. Then, without violence and without care, he pushed through and was gone.

I caught up with him in a grey intersection of passages, where the fan blew stale air from the alley with a sound like steady drizzle falling indoors. I meant to tell him that I admired what I had seen, that I thought he had done a good job, more than a good job, that he had brought the professor to life and that in all likelihood he would do it again. But instead all I could do was whisper his name, and dissemble, and say in a voice not loud enough to be heard out on the stage, "You had him! You had him there and you let him go! Why, what -- what? They were just having some fun."

"Shut up," Moscow said. "You just shut up." Moisture dripped from the hem of his greatcoat, forming clear splotches on the bare unvarnished wood. He turned until he could look over his shoulder into my eyes, and I saw that his face was melting, thick black beardstubble showing through the basecoat of orange paint, a dark smudge in the place where the scar had been. He had left the beaver hat onstage somewhere, or lost it; his hair was soaking wet, curling thick and dark in the air above his forehead. He stood looking at me with his blacklined eyes half closed, his lips pulled back, his arms straight at his sides. His voice was soft and very low. "What do you want?" he said. "You'd better know just exactly what it is you want."

Jones was laughing softly to herself when I came to her dressing room an hour later. "Like a horror show out there tonight," I said as I put my head in the door, and she looked up into the mirror and grinned. "Regular Dwight Frye stuff," she said. "'Mathter, pleeth let me act'"

She had taken of f the wig and changed into her own denim shirt and dungarees, so that now she was recognizably Jones again, beautiful and dark and a little tired around her naked eyes. I came in and sat with her; we talked about the afternoon and laughed about it together, there alone in that freezing, cluttered, greasepaint-smelling little room.

"The funny thing is," Jones said, "Moscow hasn't read a word of An Actor Prepares. Claude's the reader, he's been through all of the books. You're lucky not to have known him then, he was mad all the time. He knows there isn't much of Stanislavski in what Moscow does. But it doesn't matter. He takes the straightest route. Moscow takes the long way around. They're both traveling through the same forest, they both come out at the same point. But they fight like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Over the process."

"What's your process?" I said.

Jones gave me a smile that I did not understand. She shook her head. "I think not. That would be telling everything."

Now Jones pulled herself out of the cracked mirrorglass, drawing her chair so close that her knees pressed between mine. She lifted my chin into the light. Neither of us spoke. With my face in her hands, Jones looked at me as if she had caught me out in something. Then the chair creaked under her. She dipped her little finger into a pot of rouge, bent and kissed me gently. As her mouth touched mine I felt the tip of her finger cold and wet against my temple. "There," she said. "Now you start to fit in."