Once, in the space of quiet between two strenuous shows, I asked Mary if she could tell me what an actor sees. She didn't have to guess at what I meant, but she wouldn't tell either, not right away. She didn't get back to me until after the second show, and then I had the feeling that she needed to say it in a hurry, before she forgot the answer. She said that the myths about actors losing their sense of reality could never have come from anyone who had done the job, that the illusions of the stage were never complete; flat sets only worked from one perspective and when you were inside them, in costume, they would never let you forget that it was all a repetitive play, at best a dream, and so impermanent. But she said that when she looked at an actor's face under colored light and paint, the actor and the character did sometimes seem to merge, to blend into a third creature partly real and partly fiction, the face of Moscow or Ruth or Sylvie or Jones transposed over a well-rehearsed and mutually agreed upon fantasy. Even that, she said, did not last beyond the closing of the curtain.

There were curtains in my apartment, but when I closed them it did nothing to change the Jones that I saw in my mind. Dreaming had become my stock in trade, an occupational hazard, abetted by the sense of unreality that had never left me since those first days seven months before, by the exhaustion I would never have admitted to, by the success we were having, and, perversely, by my parents with their weekly calls urging me back towards respectability. It was only natural and expected that I should get notions of all kinds; the one that occupied me all through that Christmas didn't raise any eyebrows when I finally turned it loose before the whole company. It was a strange notion indeed, and should have been tossed out with the other strange ones that came every once in a while. I wouldn't have bothered with it if it had not come equipped with an angle. But in the angles there is light and hope. The idea, and the danger, is that they will lead you on to attempt something greater. Angles, Jones said, must always be explored.

Stacatto tapping in a quiet room. Only by running it through the Underwood, a black-faced, steel-gutted device, can I see it for the comedy it is, not high comedy certainly but a kind of emotional slapstick, played matter-of-factly by the book like the long, straightfaced battles between Stan and Ollie and Charlie Hall. We turned onto a silent, wintry street bordered on both sides by cast iron fences. Two and three-story brick houses loomed behind the gates; they had broad flat roofs and cupolas buried in snow. "Do they really live here?" I asked Mary. Because I knew pretty well what their income from the company amounted to; it would not have been enough to buy even the smallest house in that crisp, historybook place.

"Just the top floor," Mary said. "Can you manage with that box? It's a bit of a climb."

The Templeton's house fronted on a yard dotted with half a dozen bare-branched trees. Candles burned in every window, a wreath edged with frost hung from the front door. The walkway, shoveled maybe half an hour before, was already covered with a dusting of snow deep enough for us to leave a muddle of tracks. Jones had Moscow by the arm. They moved side by side as in slow motion, falling back through the Company until they lagged well behind, framed in winter and treeshadow, wavering some against the blue wind. "Remember," she said to him. "You promised to be good. No Scroogery. No scenes."

I thought about that. Under the canopy of pine, it occurred to me that the kind of marriage I wanted so much was, to a certain extent, already mine. I saw my jealousy for what it was; I saw the fool that I had been playing all morning. It didn't change the way I felt. It didn't change anything. But it helped me to understand the thing that she said next.

"You've been going around with a long face for more than a week," Mrs. Templeton said one afternoon during a matinee of The Questing Season. It was not a casual encounter, though she was careful to make it seem one; Mrs. Templeton knew the play as well as any of us, knew where I could be found at any given moment, knew to the instant the amount of time we would have alone before the end of the scene. She came straight back to me from the stage, dropping her character not all at once but in bits and pieces as she handed over her handbag and parasol. She was wearing her standard stage face and a gown that looked like silk under the stagelight, though it was really painted muslin. It crinkled as she moved. "You mustn't think that you have to hold it all in," she said softly. "If something's wrong you just let it out for some air."

I said I was fine, but Mrs. Templeton went on ahead as though I hadn't spoken. She unscrewed the Thermos, poured out two mugfuls of stale coffee. As she passed mine over she gave a furtive lowering of her head. She looked as if she'd caught me out in something. "Could it be difficulties with your Muse?"

"Not at all. The new play is going fine. Duck soup. Writing itself."

"Well that's good to know," Mrs. Templeton said. "But it isn't what I meant. I meant your Muse. The one who leads you on. Margaret."

Just then the audience laughed at something Moscow said, something I'd written a month and a half before, far enough back so I could no longer remember whether or not it had been intended to get a laugh. The sound came back to us from beyond the proscenium, a faraway thing that made me feel once again like the detached arm of the Company.

"Relax," Mrs. Templeton said. "I think it's charming. Not many men take a mythological approach to love. She does have that quality. I'd be surprised if you weren't taken with her -- I was taken with her myself at one point. I think our Mary still is. So it's nothing to be ashamed of. Eventually you'll find that she can't read minds or walk on water; the powers she does possess are formidable enough."

Neither of us had touched our coffee. "Why are you saying all of this?"

Mrs. Templeton pushed her mug aside and made ready to go to the stage. The scene was about over. "You're fretting so because you've seen how its all going to end up. That's good: forewarned and all of that. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't see it through. Keep after her anyway. The pursuit itself will raise you."

I had to hand it to her: her timing was perfect. She picked her way back through the muddle of props, and was in the wings when her cue came out to her from the boards.