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developer had been removed from the project (via a clause in the boilerplate of the contract she had never bothered to read, and would not have understood if she had) and was setting up still another office paid for by still another studio, all the while realizing but never quite admitting (in her quaint Spanish-style apartment off Laurel Canyon with the high-tech sound system and the frig filled with cranberry juice for her chronic cystitis, and in the garage the BMW 315 whose payments she could not quite manage) that the reason she was being sponsored by her economic and, in Hollywood terms, social betters was that occasionally she be available to service someone more important on The Industry food chain, with an itch and no one to scratch it.
    “Hello,” I said after a moment. It was Lizzie who had told me that cranberry juice was a cure for cystitis. Nurse info. And further nurse info (dubious though I thought it was) that cunnilingus exacerbated it. This imparted after a drinks party in one of those Laurel Canyon apartments when she asked if I had ever gone down on the hostess when I was seeing her between marriages. I pleaded the Fifth, my psyche being insufficiently robust to sustain the weight of being a cystitis exacerbator on top of my many other derelictions. The party and the ambient noise about start dates and back-end money and negative pickups and most-favored-nation clauses had so bored her that she had gravitatedto the kitchen on the pretense of getting some ice and while there had taken a stock inventory of the refrigerator. “Anyone home?”
    Still no response.
    “Here’s something I bet you didn’t know.” Pedantry, oddly enough, was one way I could always get her attention. “When the Germans occupied France during the war—”
    “What war?” Lizzie said, turning slowly away from the window. What I called pedantic she called patronizing. Lizzie always claimed that when I did not wish to communicate, as at that particular moment I most certainly did not, I would fill the silences with bits of arcane information—that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand, or that William Howard Taft weighed 352 pounds. Once she bought me a book called
Little-Known Facts
, and on the flyleaf she had written “Here are a few things I bet you don’t know.” In fact I hadn’t known it was illegal to hunt camels in Arizona, or that it never rained in the town of Calama in Chile’s Atacama Desert, or that in the year 1221, in the Persian city of Nishapur, Genghis Khan killed 1,778,000 people in one hour, or that in France, in 1740, a cow was found guilty of sorcery and hanged.
    “World War Two,” I said. “Anyway, the Germans liked the guillotine so much, they often used it to execute people rather than hanging them or shooting them. But they added a little wrinkle of their own.”
    I waited for Lizzie to respond. Of course this was not what she wanted to talk about, but what she wanted to talk about I was not about to talk about, and I was playing for time.
    “You see, when the French topped somebody, a certain delicacy prevailed, and they let the accused kneel face down. But the Germans, the Nazis, they turned the poor bastard around so that he was looking straight up at the blade, and then they taped his eyelids open so he couldn’t shut his eyes. The last thing he saw was that mother coming down.” Lizzie was staring out the window again. “Fuckers played rough.”
    “We have to call Lois tomorrow, and Miranda, too, and getthe taillight on my Volvo fixed, and I suppose the hoses, too, I mean, you should get them all replaced when one gives out,” Lizzie said finally as we pulled over the rise on Sunset, just east of Anita, and then the Fiat Spider hit us.
    Lois and Miranda were the lawyers she wanted to represent her in the divorce.
    Which is what I hadn’t wanted to talk about.

    I am he. Him is me.

    They told him in the emergency room that Lizzie had been killed instantly, as had the boy in the