One night when I couldn't hold it back anymore I went out for a walk, taking with me a few loose pages that I thought might come in handy as an excuse. I told myself that I didn't know what I was doing and didn't care, but it was just another fish story. I told myself to turn back, but there wasn't any chance of my doing that, either. There was a light at the end of the block, and another at the end of the block after. It was a simple thing to follow the lights all the way down into a neighborhood where no one lived, where no cars broke the darkness, only the silhouettes of empty storefronts and the hum of a factory in the distance. I didn't stop until I came to a low brick building with catwalks and a fire escape in back like exposed ribs. On its left side, facing the street, was an unpainted metal door, dented in three places where someone had tried to kick it in. A plastic holder mounted over the buzzer had a piece of paper wedged inside. It said, in the ghost of faded ink:

Darwin.

The whole city seemed to be giving off steam. It felt like the longest night of the year, like a horrible Norwegian night that had been going on for six months. I hugged myself in the frozen air; somewhere far off in the lower blocks a machine was working overtime, banging methodically on a hunk of metal. Nothing happened when I pushed the buzzer. I waited for a long time. "Go back," I said to myself. "Take a shower. She doesn't want to be bothered. Not by you."

The front of the building had 707 carved out in granite characters over a boarded-up window. Up on the second floor, orange light hit the panes of a sloping casement. As I watched, a shape appeared against the glass in slow, oblivious motion.

When I went back to try it one last time the door was standing ajar. Darkness from inside seeped out into the street; the handle burned my fingers. I stepped through into a grey-walled stairwell that was as hushed and still as the empty theater. At the landing the same orange glow spilled through an arched doorway, between a pair of secondhand curtains. Beyond this proscenium, center stage in a circle of light, Jones paced back and forth at the end of a long black cord. Behind her the wall was dotted with painted faces: animals and men, Polynesian demons, blue-eyed goddesses, samurai and demigods. I recognized the hierophant Templeton had worn for the Halloween show, and the badly shattered child-face that she had found during the summer. They regarded me with disdain and caution, welcome and hostility. They dared me to come inside.

It was a studio occupying the entire top floor. She had partitioned it off into arcane nooks and crannies with a series of folding screens, some made of wooden panels patterned in blue leaves, mystical symbols, painted stars and moons, others of simple black or green cloth stretched across a ramshackle frame. In the largest open space a woven runner stretched into and back out of the light. Jones was using it as a track, vanishing and reappearing, the receiver cradled between her chin and shoulder, the cord twining snakelike around her ankles.

After a time she caught sight of me beside the curtain. She wasn't in the least bit startled or surprised; she waved and settled onto the rug in a smooth melting motion like mercury falling that ended with her cross-legged in the exact center of the apartment. She talked for a minute more with her eyes lifted unblinking to mine, but for all I caught of her words she might have been speaking in Cherokee. There was something that needed to be made clear; whether to me or to the man on the other end of the line I wasn't sure. At last she lowered her eyes and said into the mouthpiece: "All right. Yes, you too. Goodbye."

Jones held the receiver out for me to take. She gave me a sort of tolerant smirk as I lifted it out of her fingers. I thought: This is it. Say something.

It took me some time to find the telephone, off at the end of the cord, resting on a low table in a corner made from screens. She was still sitting, facing the hall, when I came back onto the long rug. "Isn't it past your bedtime?" she said, not turning. "What brings you out?"

"Characters," I said. "They were making an awful racket under my bed. They wanted me to dress them, but they didn't like what I had in my closet."

"And you came to look in mine? Well. Did they follow you over?"

"What do you think? They're in here." The new play didn't have a name yet; it didn't even have a shape. It was twenty pages of feeling around in the dark, moving paper figures aimlessly across a paper stage. Just now it was stuffed all anyhow into a leather folder Mr. DeLodges had given me three years before. "Wouldn't forget my pretext," I said, and offered her the whole mess.

"I've never known you to need one," Jones said. She waved the pages aside, and with both hands slapped the bare floor. "Sit down. Tell it to me."

A whole summer spent trying to sit Indian style and I still hadn't quite got the hang of it. Now I managed a reasonable fake without hurting myself, and took out page one. Jones at once covered it with her hand. "No," she said, "that's not what I mean. Don't just read it; come on! act it out! Tell it to me."

"I wouldn't know how to sum it up. I wouldn't know where to start."

"It doesn't have to be in fifty words or less. You save that for the publishers. Give me the full treatment."

"There isn't any full treatment. What I've got is the literary equivalent of pushing food around on a plate. There isn't anything to treat."

"Well, try. How many acts?"

"I don't know."

"How many characters?"

"I don't know."

Pause; a beat. Heavy sigh. "All right," she said. She took the folder, opened it across her lap and set the covering page aside. "The Bone Tree?"

"An all-purpose title. Until I find something better. It doesn't mean anything."

Jones made a sound like a whisper and read on. The pages settled one after another into the beginnings of a white mosaic across the floor. "It had to come from somewhere," she said after a time. Then she looked up. "Why don't you go look in the icebox. Get us something to drink."

I left her alone. At the end of a short maze of screens, in a corner dark enough to have belonged to another room entirely, was a grey, old-fashioned box with a pan underneath it and a lid in the top for the ice. There was nothing inside but an open bottle of red wine tilted against the back. Six glasses with long crystal stems were half buried in excelsior inside a packing crate on the floor nearby. I wiped out two of them, and went back to find Jones still reading, motionless but for her hands turning the pages, adding to the growing pool of paper.

I was standing there looking at her when she said, quite suddenly and with some excitement, "--Do you know who this is?"

"Which one?"

"The woman on the train. Helen, you call her. She appears on page fifteen and" she rifled through the remaining pages " I don't see her again."

"What about her?"

Jones looked at me over her shoulder. "You don't recognize her? 'I've come some distance, Mr. Sallis. I won't be staying long. If we're to be friends it must be with that understanding.' Think about it. Where have you met her before?"

It was a line from the new piece but the voice she used belonged to another character entirely, a female con artist named Rebecca who appeared in The Questing Season, our December play. She was nothing more than a Deus Ex Machina designed to bring about the fall of the hero -- Jones said I was hard on my heroes and I guess she was right -- but when Jones lent her form and force, audiences held their breath. They stomped on the floor, blew through their fingers and sometimes called for her to come back. Jones said it was because Rebecca had something behind her that they recognized. I just thought it was a hell of a performance.

"All right," I said. "I'm repeating myself. I'll take her out."

Jones held out page fifteen, gathered the rest of the play into a neat bundle and tossed it aside. "Don't be an idiot," she said without malice. "This is the stuff you need to take out."

I stood there with the glasses warming in my hands. "Sorry you don't like it," I said. "Do you want one of these or was that just a goose chase?"

"What do you think?" She accepted one of the glasses, took a big unhurried drink and set it down half empty beside her knee.

"I only came by to ask your help," I said, not drinking.

"Liar. You came by to force an issue. Well, now you're here. Let's see what you've got."

"You've just told me I've got a load of crap."

The tips of her fingers found page fifteen and turned it against the rug. "You've got Rebecca. Obviously you're not done with her yet, or she wouldn't be here."

"That's no help. She's a cypher."

"Yes," Jones said. "The Bone Tree. But she's riding on a train. Going somewhere. She must have a reason."

Silence came down over the room, perfect silence but for the wind outside and the floorboards squeaking under my feet as I paced around her. Jones never moved from her place on the rug. If she followed me with her eyes, I never noticed it, or felt it. Now for a change I didn't pay any attention to her, to the masks, to anything.

I saw Rebecca as a child of seven might have seen her looking back from a seat just ahead and across the aisle. She had aged a few years since The Questing Season; she looked more like Jones than ever. She was wearing a dusty ankle-length dress not meant for travel, a dusty frock coat the color of faded olives and a dusty hat encircled with straw flowers. That would have to go.

Coming off the train she had the manner of a woman who didn't care where she was so long as she did not have to go any farther. She walked with the bearing of a lady, head up, eyes roving, carrying with her an expensive calfskin bag. Her free hand held the coat closed at her breast. She ignored me, and went instead to question another man. He pointed down the street to a pawnshop squatting at the corner; she shook her head. What, then? The lady could not say. Wouldn't say because what she really needed was a mark

"How about this," I said at last. "She's tired. She doesn't want to move around anymore. But there are too many places where she's known, and the places where she's not known aren't very likely to welcome a woman with her background. So she has to re-make herself. That works; she has all the skills. But she can't do it alone."

Jones frowned. "As a subtext it's fine, but that's all it is. It's not anything more than re-stating the title."

"What title?"

"The Bone Tree," Jones said again. For a moment I had the uncomfortable feeling that she had already written the play, had it mapped out clear in her mind, and was only prodding me along, waiting for me to catch up with her. "She's something of an actor. She does what an actor does: pack flesh onto an empty framework, a different set of bones each time. She doesn't deceive her victims so much as enter into a conspiracy with them. A conspiracy of imagination"

I thought of Jones offering her hand to Mr. DeLodges, in that dim, well-ordered office where she had seemed so out of place, and so at home. I'm your tenant player, she had said. I thought of his words to me: If I was your age, I would already be lost.

I said, "Like us."

Jones let it go by. She turned page fifteen against the floor.

"She'd have to find herself someone well off. And frustrated. So that she could be the bomb, ready to drop on him."

Jones said, "I still don't see any drama in this." She felt through her pockets for a cigarette, found one, and tossed it away with the discarded pages of the first draft. "You're still thinking about her effect on the man. What about the man's effect on her?"

"Does he have any?"

Jones waved that one aside. "Think about their marriage. She'd have to marry him, in your scheme of things. The ultimate con job, because he'd be making of her something that she isn't, and for a while at least she'd have to be a willing participant. I give it two years, at the outside. Then watch the fireworks."

I stopped my pacing. Jones and I looked each other in the eye. "Act one," I said.

"Two years later."

"Something to chew on."

Around and around, watching Rebecca grow in my mind. The floor went on complaining every time I passed over a spot mid-way behind her. I should leave now, I thought. A gentleman would: mission accomplished, inspiration restored. No excuse to remain. No pretense if I do. In the end, the only thing I can do is nothing. Constipated from not wanting to make the wrong move, not knowing how to make the right move, nor even if the time for moves has come. Go, write. Get back to the typer. No, stay.

It felt like I had lost the script, like the lines had been written for me and I had neglected to learn them. I said, "That's some Santa get-up Templeton has. Does he do that every year?"

Jones looked up and smiled and shook her head. She said, "You always do everything the hard way, don't you?"

I said I guess I did, and sat down cross-legged on the rug opposite her. I said it wasn't something I was proud of, but after all you can't fight genetics. That got me another smile. I gave myself a pat on the back.

Light fell through her glass, spilling red circles on the MS. She tilted her head in what might or might not have been a calculatedly wistful angle. "What am I going to do with you?" she said. "I can't make up your mind for you. You're going to have to write this thing yourself. You want me to open the door to a golden room. All I can do is dump fertilizer on your head. I shouldn't even be doing that."

I leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. She didn't kiss me back, but she didn't pull away. I took that as a sign of encouragement. She smelled of cake make-up and powder. I opened my eyes enough to see that hers were closed; that encouraged me more. I took hold of her by the arms. Her wine glass floated between us, cradled in her unmoving hands.

"Look at yourself," she said when I let her go. "You could be the mascot of yearning. You could be its prophet." Her face had not changed; it was fixed in that same feline expression, the disclaimer, behind which anything she said could be truth or fancy, take your pick. She emptied her glass, turned it sideways in the air. Then she raised herself in one easy motion, leaving the folder lying there flat across the moat of paper. "Come on. It's getting pretty thick in here. Let's you and I walk it off"

Jones beside me was nothing more than a shadow, a black ghost wrapped in her bulky sailor's coat, the collar turned up to conceal all but her eyes. We went along an iron fence slanting back from the sidewalk, black lines across the blue snow, snow-covered obelisks growing out of the opposite ground under leafless branches. Inside the cemetery the snow was three feet deep, covered with a thick crust that made sounds like muffled gunshots under our feet. It was the only sound for miles and miles.

Jones told me about another Jones, who on Twelfth Night produced a masque recreating the structure of the entire Cosmos. She told me about seeing Venetian and Dominican revelers going masked in the streets, about a Swiss festival she'd heard of in which whole towns reenacted events from history, about a family of puppeteers and the cycle of plays that took them seven years to perform. She told me about a greek actor named Polus who carried his son's ashes in a production of Electra, parading his genuine grief before an audience that suspected only craft. Not very professional, Jones said. But who could argue with that kind of dedication?

We came up through the churchyard under trees folding their fingers across the luminous sky, past stone angels with wreaths of dead vine looped around their ankles. An uneven row of raised humps bordered the grounds like mosscovered igloos. A few of the saints were missing their hands. In a narrow alley beside the chapel we paused to admire a row of cast-iron markers. Above the names, Jones's flashlight picked out the Angel of Death, a black skull spreading black bat-wings. "There you go," she said. "Put your tongue to that."

I said No thanks. We went on to a rock wall that ran across the rear of the yard; Jones climbed up onto it and laughed and said nothing. "All right," I said when she offered her hand. "I'm all bleary-eyed. That doesn't make me stupid."

She gave the laugh again that could have meant anything, a sound not much more than a whisper or a sigh. On the other side of the wall the sidewalk was clear and dry. We continued along without speaking, straight to the end of the neighborhood and then out past a row of clubs that were just closing down for the night. Their colored lights flickered out one after the other, as if Jones was drawing off their current and diffusing it in her wake. When we had passed them all, and entered into another neighborhood of silence, I looked at her and said, "Mrs. Templeton thinks I should stop worrying myself about endings."

"She's right," Jones said. We walked with our shoulders almost touching, and I waited for her to deliver the killing stroke. That it didn't come was no consolation; there was always another time. "I see why it worries you, but endings are a writerly thing. The essence of theater is in the process of arriving. It's in the doing."

"But endings are important. It's where every line has to be focused. It's what gives the characters purpose."

"No," Jones said. Smoke came out of her and rose up under the lamps. She made a fist and knocked on her chest. "Their purpose comes out of here. The ending is what happens when all the conflicting purposes and cross-purposes are put into action. Rebecca wanted security, but the security frightens her. What does she do? Her husband fell in love with the gypsy in her, but in marrying her he's bled the gypsy out of her. How does that make him feel? For two years this has been building up. Now something's going to happen. The ending is just an effect."

"What about playing out all the different endings we can think of -- and let the audience decide?"

"We'd be there all night. Anyway you're jumping the gun. Hadn't we ought to get the cast in place before we start to think about endings?"

I knew what we had to work with, and approximately what was needed. I improvised: "I see Templeton as the husband. A man named Record. And -- Moscow as Sallis, the man she was talking to in those pages you trashed."

"How does he fit in?"

I thought about that. I didn't like the answer. "He's Rebecca's lover. He's a painter; Record hired him to do a portrait of his wife, that's how they met. This was maybe six months before the start of the play, a year and a half into the marriage. You can't say there isn't any drama in that. The irony is"

"Go on," Jones said. "A little irony is never a bad thing."

"The irony is that taking a lover was probably her attempt to hold the marriage together"

"And Ruth?"

"Sister of the husband. Who finds out about the affair, and takes her knowledge no, to Rebecca. That's, I guess that's pretty ordinary stuff."

"We'll work on it."

"How about this: Mary as the housemaid, this crazy housemaid who keeps stealing things right out from under their noses: candlesticks, silverware, flowerpots, mirrors, anything she can get her hands on until finally all that's left in the place are a few sticks of furniture and the painting of Rebecca! And everyone too preoccupied to notice!"

Jones laughed. "All right. That leaves Sylvie."

"Another complication," I said. "A student of Sallis's. In love with him, of course. That ought to be drama enough for anyone."

Jones's boots clacked against cold pavement. Her hand pressed into the small of my back, then withdrew. "It's coming along," Jones said. "That's what I hired you for. When you're needled enough, you begin to think fast."

We rounded another corner, and I saw that we had come in a wide circle back to the building with the catwalks and the casement window. Jones drew up beside the battered door and stood with her hands in her pockets. "You'd be fine, if you ever learned to relax," she said. "Have you ever bothered to notice the change since you started? You're not running around pestering us anymore about how the performance went. You're not asking them what kind of parts they want to play. They're asking you."

I looked at my feet. I thought of Shakespeare and the others who made it look so easy, whether through intervention of the gods or natural magic, just a few graceful words, and then the CURTAIN at the bottom of the page, underlined in black ink. I felt so heated in the cold air that I thought sure I would crack and break open. At any moment she would say goodnight and disappear behind her door. In my confusion of hope and despair, inspiration and writer's block and lust, there was nothing I could think of to stop her.

Jones drew her key out under the blue streetlight. "It's not how I want it to end and it's not how you want it to end," she said. "It's how it ends. Now, are you ready to go in?"

Halfway up the stairs our silhouettes appeared on the wall beside us, tilted crazily like a scene from a mystery play. There was still the rejected MS lying all anyhow in a wedge of darkness; Jones threw her coat down in the midst of it and disappeared into the maze of screens. "Do you want anything in your hot water?" she said from the back. I said a little tea would be good.

I settled down without taking off my jacket, and turned over the pages to use their backs. Rebecca Painting Sallis, I wrote. I drew a heart shape, crossed it out. I bent to the paper.

I had scribbled five pages by the time Jones came back with a pair of mismatched cups, trailing steam. She had changed into a black robe that fell to her ankles. Her feet were bare. She settled onto a small trunk resting against one of the room's few genuine walls. "Hard at work," she said.

"Don't think you're going to like it."

"Maybe not." She sipped from her cup without lowering her eyes, studying me over the far rim. "Let me see."

"It reads a little melodramatic," I said. Jones didn't answer. "Handwriting's kind of messy. Can you make it out?"

"Mmm. Fine."

She read it through in silence, then turned back and read it again, faster this time, but pausing more often as if to confirm something she already knew. "So?" I said when she had finished.

Jones ignored me. She rested her chin in the palm of her hand, the little finger curled against her mouth. "Recite," she said.

"You are old Father William"

She fought that one, but finally relented and grinned at the floor. "No," she said, pointing with her foot. "I mean that. Take Record."

"Starting where?"

The voice that answered me belonged to Rebecca. It was more remote than I'd ever heard it before, almost hollow in the way it picked over my words. "What are you doing home?" it said. "What have you done?"

She had started about mid-way through the scene. I found the place, cleared my throat, and made my attempt at something resembling a dramatic style. "I've just come from the Board of Directors. They've agreed to --"

"No," Jones said. "No. This isn't Major Bowes. Just read it in a normal tone of voice."

"Sorry. They've agreed to grant me an early retirement. Tomorrow we'll go down to the Agency and register this house. We'll put everything up for sale. Then we'll go. It will be a new life for both of us."

Silence, the script said. Jones accounted for it. There wasn't any acting in what she did; it was strictly a test of the timing involved. At the proper moment, she lowered her eyes. "Please," Rebecca said. "You've got to go back. For your own sake. You must beg them to give your job back. Please. I'm not angry, but you've done the wrong thing. If I leave, I can't have you tagging along"

"It wouldn't be tagging along. I would take you anywhere. I would adapt to any kind of life you wanted. I'm showing you that I can change. I can be everything this man Sallis is to you, and more. I can be anything you want."

"You don't know what I want. You're using me as a mirror. You look into my eyes, and see your own self reflected."

"If that were the case, I could never have loved you. You would only have bored me. When we first met you had the eyes of a wolf. I knew I had found someone who could set me free"

"It was written all over your face. I've seen it before. It's the same look Sallis gives me. I can't carry you anymore, either one of you"

"I'm not asking that. I never have. I only want you to let me in. I only want to meet the wolf, to finally meet her, after all this time."

"You mustn't try."

"But I must. I love you."

"It's not a question of love. We've painted ourselves into a corner. Now we're both working at cross-purposes, trying to get out."

Out beyond Jones's window, a car or truck sounded its horn. The sky was not so dark as it had been when we came inside. Jones got to her feet. Her eyes raked across the wall of masks, then settled on me. "I'm glad we had this little conversation," she said, and vanished.

I knocked over my cup and had to mop the spill with a dirty handkerchief. "She's not you," I said to the floor. "I didn't mean you." There was no sound. I might have been alone. "Meg. Jones. I didn't mean you. Rebecca isn't you."

Rebecca's voice came over the walls like a machine of the gods, a voice from on high. "Of course not," it said. "She's your vision of me."

I followed it to a little room at the end of the passage, furnished only with a folding bed and a cardboard bureau, strewn with clothes. An unshaded bulb hung from the ceiling. "I'm not imagining you," I said from the doorway. "There wouldn't be any point."

Jones hung her bathrobe on a closet peg and turned to face me. In her bare feet her eyes were level with mine. "I don't mind," she said. "I'd even play the part. But these things have a way of sticking to my bones. And where would that leave us?"

I stood there trying to stuff the handkerchief into my coat pocket. I felt as if she had twisted me into a knot, so that facing north I could only walk south. "To finally meet her," Record was saying, over and over again. I fought the words, and lost.

"You've had us married and divorced in your mind," Jones said. "You've had us growing up and growing old together. That's all right. 'Magician, priest, maker of myths, manipulator of signs and hieroglyphs.' That's us. That's you."

"But I must," I said. "I love you."

"Come on," Jones said. "It's after five."

When I opened my eyes an angle of sunlight cut halfway across the ceiling. I was alone in the bed, wrapped in a cocoon of sheets; outside the building there was streetnoise and motion, but in Jones's room it was perfectly still. I pulled on my pants and went from the bedroom to the kitchen. There were no notes, no dirty cups, no sign of her. It would not have surprised me to have found the room stripped bare, the trunks missing, the tent pegs pulled. I took it as a reassuring sign that everything, down to the last mask, was still in place.

I dressed while the water was boiling, and drank my coffee at her casement window, where sunlight took off the morning chill and the people below gave me something to watch. When I thought about the things I had said and done the night before, I felt like such a clown, a Chaplin tramp gone out of control, spouting a kind of brazen pathos in the streets. But the thing that shamed me most was the little voice in the back of my mind that said, hey -- it worked.

The walk back to Valenciennes took half an hour. It wasn't until I got there and found them well into a technical rehearsal for Vanishing Breed that I realized how late I was running. It didn't seem to matter; at that stage words are the last thing on anyone's mind. Mrs. Templeton was busy fitting Sylvie in a costume, Mary and Moscow were having difficulties moving a piece of scenery, Templeton sat looking sullen and neglected in the front row. Lon had come down from the booth to consult Jones about the lighting design. They stood whispering to each other at the foot of the stage, making notes in a spiral-bound planbook. If she was feeling any effect of the long night, it didn't show; she looked fresh and alert. I tried to catch her attention, but she would not meet my eye. It was like any other day.