When in the summer of 1941 I told this part of it to Bill Schor, with whom I collaborated on the screenplay of The Crime Annihilator, he gave me an astonished look and said "Gone? Just like that? And you let her go?" I had to laugh. "Let her?" I said. "Billy, you haven't been listening to me at all."

The light booth at Valenciennes was nothing more than a six-by-six cage overlooking the stage floor. Like every other part of the building, it was jammed with dusty boxes and gels and junk, leaving barely enough room for the light board and a chair to sit at. From below, no eye could penetrate its built-in defense of darkness and clutter, except during a performance when the face of the man at the board would be lit in a soft, green glow. But by then, everyone was too busy to look.

"Still playing rabbit," Lon said, climbing headfirst through the hole that served as the booth's only door. "Is it only Jones or are you mad at all of us?"

I turned away from him and concentrated on the empty pad of paper in my lap. Lon frowned. He crawled under the board and made a show of fussing with some wires, but it was nothing more than a kind of free-matinee performance, a bit of stage business while he worked up to the next line. "All right," he said at last. "You're mad at all of us. Guess I can live with whatever share of the blame you seem to think happens to be mine. Not fair to the others, though."

I got up to leave. When I couldn't squeeze past the combined bulk of Lon and the light board, I said "Excuse me." Lon only gave me a backwards look and went on doing nothing. I had no choice but to settle back into the chair, and wait.

Before long a big sigh came out of him like a steam engine slowing on the tracks. "Jones doesn't have to account herself to you," he said. "She doesn't owe any of us anything. Maybe it's the other way around."

But he wasn't going to make me feel guilty. I was determined in that. I didn't say anything.

Lon had already begun to sweat. "Okay, maybe we've had more time to get used to the idea. She was ready to leave at least a year ago. If she hadn't found herself a writer to play with she'd have been gone by the end of summer. So look at it this way: you bought us another eight months of her time."

"You're a liar," I said. "You could talk to her. You could get her to stay."

"Sheee," Lon said. "Maybe Pecos Bill could rope a cyclone. I sure as hell can't."

I hadn't liked the sound of my voice when it finally came, but now that I'd started I couldn't seem to stop. My ears were ringing. I said, "She's all that's holding it together. If she goes it's all over."

Lon cast a look back at me, then fixed his eyes on the board's underside. "There've been other Joneses before her," he said. "There'll be others after she's gone. She wouldn't have it any other way."

Three nights a week (and twice on Saturdays) we burned the stage in black flame. It never failed to catch the audience by surprise, though I couldn't understand why: Sallis painted so obsessively throughout the play's two hours, so much that I wondered how he found the time to talk, much less participate as a viable character, until there was only Rebecca hanging on the walls, Rebecca swamping the tabletops, Rebecca and Rebecca and Rebecca looking out from every corner, in oil, watercolor, chalk and charcoal, dressed and undressed, warrior woman, enchantress, ingenue and citizen, until it should have been obvious that with so much combustion going into the work a little of it must break free and take it's creator on a quick tour of the afterlife. So how could they not see it coming, I thought, when it was virtually preordained from the start?

All unsuspecting, out beyond the curtain, they watched and listened as Templeton and Moscow quarreled under the light. "I know it's only a dream," Sallis said. "A ghost of perfume rising out of an old book. But I won't put it aside. Not until I hear it from her own lips. And perhaps not even then. Because I would still have to know Why not."

"You must stop this," Templeton said. "Your early portraits of her were fine, there was no doubt but that she ignited something in you. But now you must learn to shine that light in another direction. This won't get you anywhere. You can't alter the fabric of reality itself."

"Can't I?" Sallis said. In the blue, shadowed space behind the scene, Jones made ready for her entrance, her wig and nightshirt so encrusted with paint that they crinkled and creaked as she moved. Bone-colored in her fresh coating of make-up, she already looked like a ghost; it was my job, and Mrs. Templeton's, to make her look like a nightmare.

She took her place without a word or a sign, empty of expression, her hands crossed over her breasts, her eyes shut tight. There were three trays of paint resting on a stand at her side. Mrs. Templeton and I each had a brush, fat things meant for house work. Holding fast in our most professional backstage silence, we dipped them and began throwing paint into Jones's face.

"Watch me," Sallis said. Grabbing up his palette and brush, he attacked the canvas with such violent strokes that the whole set began to shiver. "I'm conjuring her now. Freezing her place in reality. In my reality."

"That horrible thing," Templeton said. "That isn't her. It's the work of a madman."

Red, purple, yellow: the Rebecca that haunted Sallis's mind was a creature of paint, and from paint she would come to him. "Your imagination has betrayed you," Templeton said. "She doesn't love you. Not the way you want. She never will," and there I was hitting Jones with the paint, as if my hands had gone liquid, as if the colors splashing her forehead and cheeks were growing from within; actual welts, actual blood. "You could at least have warned me," I said out loud, shaking now with anger that had passed out of my control. "God. You could at least tell me why."

Jones opened her eyes. They were blue glass in a dripping mask of paint. She did not look at me. She did not look at anyone. If anything her attention was drawn inward. She said nothing.

My voice climbed in pitch and volume. "It's no good if I talk to you. It's no good if I don't. Why don't you just go?"

Mary looked up from her dulcimer. She didn't miss a note. I felt Mrs. Templeton pry the brush out of my fingers, and realized that I'd been flailing away with it all this time, long after it had gone dry. She dipped it, then dipped her own and set to work with both hands. Jones shut her eyes.

"A hazard of the profession," Moscow said. A bit distracted; he'd heard it too. He's going to kill me, I thought, the moment he walks off the stage. He'll still have Sallis kicking around inside him and together the two of them will take me apart.

It was nearly Jones's cue. Templeton had already withdrawn, helpless and defeated; all that remained was a bit of rough action in which Moscow, Sallis, smashed up some paintings, fought back the tears, and lost. We could not even see his shape against the flats; he had moved downstage into the darker light, so close to the front row that they could have reached up and touched him, had they dared. Only a moment now.

"What are they offering you?" I said weakly. "You couldn't even tell us that much." Moscow made a futile gesture of wiping his face. Still weeping, he moved upstage into the shadow of the rigged painting. He raised his brush. "Now," Sylvie hissed from the corner.

Jones turned and thrust her right arm into the canvas. It burst through under the stagelight and was met with the usual rush of gasps and whispers from the house. Mary drummed out an eerie glissando across the face of her dulcimer. "Listen to me," I said to Jones's back. I was thinking about the man on the telephone, that time in her room. I wondered if she was going to him. I wondered who he might be. "Why did you bring me out here?" I said, but she was far away; with her free hand she broke the canvas a second time, clawed the air, and began to force her way through the painting. "Hush," Mrs. Templeton said, drawing me back out of the gash of light that poured through in Jones's wake.

She guided me into the shadows like a samaritan walking a drunk around the room. My hands touched cool brick. There was an awful crash from the stage as Moscow stumbled against a worktable and fell backwards into the mess. A low sound like a cough came up out of him; I heard the canvas tearing and I heard the clatter and splash of the turpentine jar spilling its contents over the floor, the flats, everything. "Look at me," Jones said, leaking paint, "if you can remember how. Look at me. How can we dream together in this room you've made? How breathe?"

Not a sound from the audience. "Leave me alone," Sallis said. "You've ruined me." His right hand closed 'round the handle of the kerosene lantern by which he had always painted. He pitched it so hard that I could hear it cutting the air. It broke at Jones's feet and enveloped her in a nimbus of fire.

It was nothing more than a couple of shuttered spotlights, a sound effects machine cranked by Sylvie, and a fan beneath the stage that blew yard-long shreds of black and yellow crepe up and around her body. It caught and spread like real flame, the audience sometimes yelling out loud now, though never loud enough to drown out the cries that Moscow gave as the Rebecca thing, eyeless, shockheaded, a siren in paint, grasped him and held him in the blaze, in her fatal embrace. For a moment only: just enough to drive it home. Then without a curtain the scene ended in abrupt darkness, in silence that filled the house.

Before they could recover from its sudden descent the epilogue would be half over. I called it the King Kong scene, because it served the same purpose: "It wasn't the flames, it was beauty killed the beast." But by then, I thought, I'll be dead: Moscow will have come and bashed my brains out against the proscenium. For talking out of turn. For ruining his concentration. For being heard.

Instead, he walked straight past me into the dark. He did not even look angry; only tired and a little bruised after the performance, a machine winding down and badly in need of an oil change. He waited quietly at the back for the final curtain, the slow rise of applause; then he dragged himself back to the stage, walking past me again without even looking, without as much as a flicker of awareness from his owlish eyes.

All right, I thought. It will be Sylvie then. She has better reason to say it than anyone, after the talk I gave her that last time she broke character, when she used the same words I'd just given to Templeton. I thought, Now she can make me eat them. Now

But Sylvie ran off like a character in a fairy story, rushing through the woods; just a shimmer of white and she was gone. I stepped out behind the closing curtain and the line broke around me: on the other side I could hear the audience filing out, chattering to themselves in the way that always depressed me, because I could never tell if they were saying good things or bad. The company shed their characters inside our empty set, and went on about their business, ignoring me. And I thought, Well, come on! I disrupted the performance! Isn't anyone going to yell at me? You have that right.

I waited and waited and nothing happened. Finally Mary came by and rested her hand on my shoulder. She squeezed me, smiled and let go. Is that all? I thought. Has it come to that point? Am I speaking for us all?

That night when I climbed up to my apartment, Jones was there waiting for me. I was fumbling for my key when I heard a motion like breath against the walls; then her voice came out of the corner, as from an empty stage. "Help me out here," she said softly. "Give me something. One of your purple images."

When the overhead light came on I saw her posed at the farthest edge of the landing, legs crossed at the ankle, the collar of her greatcoat turned up for no reason at all. "Not me," I said. "I'm past it. All it ever gets me is grief."

Her hands appeared out of bottomless pockets and floated at waist level, palms up in a gesture of innocence. "Nothing up my sleeve. Thought I'd save you the walk to my place."

It had been nearly a month since I'd been to the room behind her casement window, that window that glowed orange and held silhouettes like a shadowplay screen. It surprised me to realize that I had no intention of going back. Looking at her there, at her face under the light, her neck framed by the coat and a mass of dark hair, I knew that it was not because I wanted her any less. But I was too upset; and by the time it had passed over I felt she would be gone.

I turned my back to her, pushed open the door; Jones rustled past me into the little room beyond. She circled for a moment without speaking, parted the curtains with two fingers and peered out into the black yard. "You kick like a mule," she said then. "Slow to wind, but when you finally get good and coiled look out."

From the hall a narrow oblong of light cut the room into unequal halves. "I don't want you to go. No one does."

"That can't be helped," Jones said. She drifted around the foot of the bed, her shoulders squared, hands sunk into her pockets. "It's long past due. Time everyone got a change. Time for you to stand up and walk on your own two typing fingers."

When I didn't answer, she took my hand by the fingers and shook it playfully. "I can't help that, either," she said. "Come on. I'm not leaving because of you or anyone. I'm just moving on."

"To what?" I said. "Everyone seems to know but me."

She fell silent. In those rapid moments I could have believed that the apartment house, the city outside, and the world outside the city had all dropped away from around us. Some elemental passion, some fireball, soared and sparked behind her mesmeric eyes, yet on her face there wasn't the tiniest stir or ripple, only the stillness of silvered glass, her own, her perfect Jones calm. "Venice," she said, unblinking, her voice level and serene. "It's not an acting job. I'll be doing restoration work. As an apprentice."

Whether by instinct or design, she had taken the best dramatic advantage of the room and its light: the moon falling through the window framed her head and shoulders in a soft backglow, while the hall light brushed her left cheek, leaving half of her face in darkness. 'So you see there's nothing to be jealous of. What you imagined would only have been a step to one side. I won't be leading anyone, for the moment. I have too much to learn."

She had kicked the stool out from under my anger, and I knew it; still, the only thing I could think of to say was, "We need you here."

"You need a Jones," she said. "It doesn't have to be Margaret Darwin. That's the other reason I'm here. To make you an offer."

She floated over to my writing table and clicked on the lamp. From an inside pocket she withdrew a long, cream-colored piece of paper, folded into thirds. Gently, as if the paper were a thousand years old, she smoothed it out under the light. Without looking back, she said, "You ought to recognize one of these."

Did I not. It was a Bill of Sale, written out in india ink, in her own graceful hand, and adorned like a college diploma with a purposeless red ribbon affixed with sealing wax. Of course it would have to be theatrical, I thought. It offered up Valenciennes, its contents, the Jones Company and all of its property for the purchase price of one dollar.

"It will mean changing your name," Jones said. "At least in spirit. But I'm prepared to sign it over to you now."

I stopped breathing. Out came the silver-capped fountain pen that she carried over her heart. She held it up against the light. "One buck," she said. "And your John Hancock."

And I suppose a part of me wanted to grab and sign fast, before she changed her mind. But not a very large part of me, and not the part that mattered. Vaguely, I felt as if I'd seen a car wreck about to happen. "Put it away," I said softly. "Go on. I can't do this."

Jones looked straight up into my eyes. "It's the right choice. For everyone. You know it is."

"No," I said. "Sorry. But I'm not interested."

Something turned over behind her eyes, then sank again beneath the surface. She leaned forward in the chair, as though trying to reach me with her mouth. "Just imagine. Not having me reshape your ideas for you. Not having to write in some gaudy part for me to play. You'd be master of your own imagination, with a full company of players at your disposal. Consider that."

I did. The idea frightened me, but that wasn't what held me back. I could have done those things that the Jones needed to do. Given time, I could even have learned to do them with finesse. But I couldn't see myself providing the glue needed to hold the various members of the Jones Company together. I couldn't see myself replacing Margaret Darwin.

I turned away. There were no stars in the window, and the moon had passed behind a cloud; all I could see there was a reflection of the room, of my own shadowed face, and of Jones at my back. "'Get your mind fermenting,'" she said. "'Give your imagination free play; and invent the real limit of human daring. Show us how to fly to the moon; direct the way to Mars; point the signboards down the roads of human daring. And I for one will go.'"

I could hear the quotation marks around her words, but couldn't identify the source. "What's that from?"

"Not a play. Octavie LaTour said it once in an interview. You wouldn't know of her. She looped the loop in a circus act. Defied gravity. What about you?"

There were several things I could have said to that, but I didn't like any of them. I kept my mouth shut.

"Don't think that by turning it down you can force me to stay," Jones said.

"I wasn't. I wouldn't. I'm not an idiot."

There was a long pause from her corner of the room. At last her reflected image stood up and flowed ghostlike towards me, turning the bill of sale gently in its fingers. When it spoke again, it wasn't quoting anyone. "Listen," it said. "Just now we can go along pushing our hopes ahead of us, into the future. But at some point we'll start looking back, and find that our hopes have slipped past us. I don't want that to happen to me. And I don't want it to happen to you."

I felt like saying, If you're so concerned with my dreams then why are you going? But it wouldn't have done any good. Lon was right about that; you can't argue with a cyclone. The best you can hope to do is stand firm, and hang onto your hat.

"I'm grateful," I said. "But I won't change my mind."

Jones bowed her head and gave me a sad smile. "No. Well, I didn't think you would." Her hand passed over my shoulders, paused, and withdrew. She folded the paper away into her breast pocket, alongside the silver pen. Her shape broke into the doorlight. She said "Good night," and went through without looking back. Her footsteps descended into the building. The vestibule door opened and shut. Then I was alone.

I didn't bother about closing the door to my room. Still in my shoes and socks, I flopped down onto the bed and lay there with my feet spread, my head propped up and one hand draped over my mouth. There was nothing in the room worth staring at. I sat there frozen in time, and felt Jones moving away in the night.

When I told all this to my friend Bill Schor he frowned and would not meet my eyes. At forty-seven, Bill was a paunchy, balding man working his way down through the studio ranks; two years before he had co-scripted a feature for Ernst Lubitsch, and now he was writing serials. I didn't know why this had happened to him, but I knew he could always be counted on for an honest answer.

Which is why I can still feel the difficulty of it, looking back at him from a distance of seventeen years as he scooped a cigarette out of the remains of what had been a fresh pack just an hour before, shook his head and at last gently said, "I gotta tell you, bud, I think you made the wrong decision."

At the time I did not know how to answer him. If I had to answer him now I probably still wouldn't be able to come out and just say it, just the simple "Of course now I think you're right. But at the time it was the best I was capable of." Instead, I'd probably answer him in the style of the Ancients: indirectly, and with a further puzzle. "You know," I'd say, "much as I couldn't talk about anything except in euphemisms or symbols, I think Jones was the same way. It's the reason why everything she said had three or four different meanings. I guess it's the reason I loved her."

And Bill would say "Oh Christ" and turn back down to his work. But then in Hollywood terms I was still just a kid. I brushed his words aside. "Now you sound like Lon," I said. "Only Lon understood the why of it, even when he lit into me."

"Maybe Lon didn't know what you were going to trade it in for," Billy said.

Our office at Republic Pictures didn't look out on anything, because it didn't have any windows. Under a yellow ceiling lamp we sat with our desks pushed together, facing each other across our typewriters and piles of paper and pens. Sometimes we banged out forty pages a day between us, other times we did next to nothing. When we weren't actually writing we made diagrams of the characters and the places they had to go, charts of their progress to paper the walls. It had been exciting work for the first three months, but even at its best I wouldn't have called it glamorous. I never saw the actors, except at a distance, and then they seemed more like automata than anything I would have recognized as actors: they worked only in fits and starts, wind them up and let 'em go for a fleeting moment, repeating their stock motions seven or fifteen or twenty times from five different angles; they never had to sustain anything for more than five minutes at a time. And yet it was a skill. Jones couldn't have done what they did. It would have driven her mad.

Billy's typewriter clattered into life on the opposite desk, hauling me back up out of my thoughts like a fish out of black water. I waited him out through three pages of fistfights, car chases and grim heroics; then he paused to light another cigarette, and before he could start in again I said, "The day that she left us, Moscow wouldn't even come out of his dressing room."

Billy scowled and ignored me. He threaded another page into his machine, posed his fingers over the keyboard as if to write something and then flopped back in defeat, blowing out smoke. "All right," he said. "All right. I'm going to have to sit through it sooner or later. Might as well be now."

This is what I told him, in that burning room, on studio time:

It was a Sunday near the close of May. Behind the heavy shades blanketing the ticket window I sat in my own personal spotlight, trying to count the draw, thinking only of sleep. Outside the booth the lobby was dark and silent, empty but for the painted figures hanging there, motionless, looking out of the gloom with fixed anticipation, Valenciennes presenting a closed front to the street. Three times I'd counted, and each time gotten a different total; the coffee might have helped, but by then I was so tired that I'd forgotten to drink it.

I had just put my head down when I felt Lon's shadow fall across me. He jingled his keys. "Hey," he said gently. "Better hurry up if you want to say goodbye."

I said, "What?" The clock said one-fifty. I'd been asleep more than half an hour.

Lon started to repeat himself but by then I'd left the chair and was stumbling bleary-eyed into the lobby. It had been two weeks since Jones had come to my room to offer me the company; two weeks since anyone had mentioned the possibility of her going away. In that time I'd almost managed to convince myself that it wasn't going to happen. Now here I was, roused out of sleep like a child wakened early to bid a visiting relative goodbye, only worse, because I knew the permanence of this, and knew that I'd wasted my last weeks in hope.

She was waiting for me down on the empty stage, looking like a dockworker, travelworn and a bit disreputable in her blue jacket, a lightly-packed duffel bag resting in the dust beside her. She had combed her hair and tied it back behind her neck, but there were still faint smudges of stage make-up along the edge of her brow, around her eyes and cheekbones. She didn't look sad at all.

"It's not too late," she said as I came down to meet her. "Mary would be happy to stand aside for you. She told me she's not sleeping nights."

I rested my hands on the stage floor. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing her by the ankles, in a crazy attempt to hold her there. "Come quick!," I would shout. "I've got her!" Instead I tried to raise a smile. "Anyone would get butterflies, trying to fill your shoes."

"She'll need your support."

That was something I could promise easily. Jones said that was good. She sat on her heels at the edge of the stage, and for the first time looked at me the way a lover might. Her eyes were bright and full of warmth. "It's too bad," she said at last. "In ten years you'd be perfect."

No, I thought. In ten years there would still be better than a decade between us, still that gulf of experience, and she would want something else.

Jones took my hand. She said, "Keep your eyes open. I'll be there." Then she rose, slung the duffel bag across her right shoulder and started out.

-- "And that's it?" Billy said to me. "That's all?"

"Almost all. As she walked away I asked her to keep me in mind if she ever needed a writer. I think she heard me: she turned her head. But if she said anything I didn't hear it. She went straight out into the back, into an unhappy silence. Then the stage door opened and closed. That was it. When I finally got up the courage to go back I found them huddled together like a losing team, holding each other. All except Moscow; he could weep in front of a house full of strangers but not in front of us. 'She's gone,' I said, and they opened a spot for me."

Billy gave me one of his big contemplative sighs. "Kid, if you tried to sell that one here they'd laugh you right out of the studio."

Which made me kind of angry. "If I was selling something you'd be right. I'm telling you what happened."

Billy grinned. "This is Hollywood, my friend. As such I feel obligated to point out what your story is missing. The hero has to stand up for himself. For love. He has to follow her out into the alleyway, make some speeches, win 'er back. Then she has no choice but to fall into his arms. Boom! A triumphant clinch for the fade-out. I don't understand why you didn't try."

"It's not that I didn't have it in me," I said after a time. "I did. But Jones would never have allowed it."

So now it was my turn to go through the motions of lighting a cigarette, even though I'd never learned how to smoke. I did it for the same reason Billy did: it gave me time to think. "I guess I never did find the one right word to describe her," I said when the thing was blazing away in my fingers. "Pilot, explorer, pirate, gypsy, lion tamer. She was all of those things. It wasn't sex that got her through. It was assurance; the quality of having been places and seen things that most people only dream about. The quality of Time."

"That Jones woman?" Billy said. "That Margaret Darwin?" He shook his head once again. "I still don't understand."

"No," I said. "I guess you don't."