Later on in his room, lying on our backs smoking his herd of Camels one after another, shirtless in the dark, it could have been the Potomac Academy, or the tiny barracks at Lev’s. But those places couldn’t have contained him, Tom Cuddy is a one-man band. His questions don’t need answers, it’s hard enough just to work out what he’s asking. Who would win at arm-wrestling, Frankie Laine or Perry Como? Has Christian Dior gone screwball or hopped on the genius wagon?

“Why, what’s Dior done?”

“Took all the padding off the girls’ shoulders and stuffed it in their brassieres.”

He is thinking of leaving the gallery, the art world altogether. For advertising.

“What, to write jingles? Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco?”

“No, you egg. Art direction. Creating the Look of Tomorrow.”

“I thought the museum was what you loved. Kandinsky and Edward Hopper. Now you want to be Llewelyn Evans in The Hucksters, selling Beautee Soap to unsuspecting housewives?”

“Not soap, glamour. Sex, God and the Pa-tri-ah.” Tommy blew a meticulous smoke ring, watched it rise toward the ceiling. “On the seventh day Tom Cuddy made America. And Tom Cuddy said, Cat, that is good.”

“If I were a religious man I’d get off this bed, before lightning strikes it.”

“One day you will see, Shepherd my friend. The men campaigning for president are going to hire advertisers.”

“Tommy, you’ve lost your marbles.”

“This is no fish. Do you know how many television stations there are now?”

“Six or seven, I guess.”

“Twenty.”

“How’s your friend, by the way? The Latin Romeo with the face for television.”

The question shifted Tom’s mood, turning him petulant. Ramiro is gone, not to Puerto Rico but out of the city, far from the glamorous spotlight. Maybe selling brushes door to door. It was hard to avoid speculating on the clockwork of Tom Cuddy’s universe: Ramiro’s setting sun, the rising star of Harrison Shepherd. The long compromise against loneliness. Tom says he’ll be back here in a month, and probably more times after that. To Casheville, as he calls it. Regular assignations on expense account at the Grove Park, as long as he continues to happify the Vanderbilts as planned.

“You’re lucky you live here,” he said.

“What, in Square-o-lina? Under a quarantine.”

“Well, here, Shep, or any damned place you want. Writing what you want, with nobody watching over your shoulder. In the city we’re like ants under a lens, getting scorched in the sun.”

“Scorched ants. That’s dramatic.” I pushed myself up off the bed. It took some effort, a lot of sloe gin under the bridge, but I needed to pace the little room. Tommy’s energy came off his skin like electricity. I stood by the window, a porthole into the dark.

“I’m dramatic,” he said. “You should hear the real gory. The joes in radio and television. The producers are like those little brutes in grammar school, crowding around to watch the ant fry. Conspiracy indictments, alien hearings. Do you know how many New Yorkers are from someplace? The city’s going to be as empty as this hotel.”

In a rare turn of events, he seemed to have run out of words. I could hear the place breathing: the gasp of roof beams, the slow circulation of water through pipes.

Tommy lit another Camel. “They don’t even have to indict you. One day you just feel the heat and you know they’re up there, kneeling in the circle, watching you writhe. Your name has gone on a list. Everybody stops talking when you come into a room. You think we don’t know about the plague?”

“They’re only television producers, Tommy. Not heads of state, with secret police at their disposal. Just men who get up in the morning, put on Sears Roebuck suits, and go to an office to decide who gets a pie in the face today. It’s hard to feature how they could be so monstrous.”

“‘Hard to feature.’” Tom clucked his tongue, whether at a writer’s prose or his innocence, who could say. “Little shepherd boy. What am I going to do with you?”

September 2

The stars and planets are right again. Mrs. Brown is back, all this week, cheerful as anything today in a new peplum blouse. The Woman’s Club has let her back on the Program Committee, mainly because she kept the club running by telephone and the post during the quarantine. Most of the good ladies were flummoxed by solitude.

We’re on track to complete the novel draft by month’s end. Mrs. Brown says this one is my best, and she hasn’t even seen the ending yet. The title is another go-round, the publisher as usual wants crashing cymbals: The Mighty Fallen, or Ashes of Empire. I’d hoped for a pinch of metaphor. Mrs. Brown sat at her table looking thoughtful, holding a pencil alongside her cheek, and then offered: “Remember at Chichén Itzá on top of the temple, the last day? Everything looked bright, and then the storm came and put it in a different light. It was the same view, all the same things, but suddenly it went fearsome. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Is there a name for that?”

“Yes. J. Edgar Hoover.”

She’s asked permission to leave early tomorrow to see Truman on his whistle-stop for the reelection. He’s coming through Asheville, speaking from a platform on the back of the Ferdinand Magellan. It’s the same train the people here stood waiting for all night, when it carried Roosevelt home. But it never came.

September 15

The Grove Park is a reassuring place, all that squared-off, heavy Mission furniture with its feet firmly on the ground. The giant stone fireplaces, the carpentered grandfather clocks, even the roof, snub and rounded like the thatch of a fairy-tale cottage, with little eyebrow curves above the windows of the top-floor rooms. Tom likes those best, he feels he’s an artist up in a garret. He insists Scott Fitzgerald always took a top-floor room here when he came to visit Zelda. “Just ask the bellhop, I told you so, and I’m right. He might have written Gatsby in the very room where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“More likely The Crack-Up. If he was here in town for the reason you say.”

Tommy rolled his head in a circle. “Oh, The Crack-Up, well done!” He moves like an actor, physically earnest, aware of his better angles. Today he had a better audience: the terrace was jammed, people out enjoying the autumn sun. The tourist trade is back, all those postponed vacations must be had before cold weather hits, it’s like a rush on the bank. Tommy was playing dissect-the-guests.