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repeat the word “No,” her face a mask of disconcertment.
    “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?” he asked. “It means he’s probably changed his mind.”
    “You really think so?” asked Cassandra. For a moment there, she sounded almost optimistic; about what I had no idea—but then you already know the sum total of my knowledge of events transpiring: zero.
    Harry gestured as if to comment,
Why not?
    “Babe, he could have said ‘no’ on the phone,” he told her.
    When she failed to respond, he added, “Why ask me all the way up here just to turn me down?”
    She remained unconvinced; that was easy to see, even for a head of lettuce.
    “I’m sure that’s what it is,” persisted Harry. He assumed his “serious” mien. “What
about
Vegas, babe?” he asked. “Can he handle it?
Even with you?”
    “I don’t know,” she murmured. I could tell she was conversing with him and dealing with her thoughts at the same time, a skill she’d carefully developed.
    “Was Baltimore as bad as I heard?” he asked.
    She was back now, in control; it hadn’t been a serious unhinging. She looked at Harry with an expression of deep distress; it almost seemed real—
was
it? “You can’t imagine,” she told him quietly.
    Harry put his arms around her and she leaned her forehead on his shoulder. He stroked her back and told her he was sorry. “It must have been a nightmare,” he said.
    What is this?
I wondered.
    “God,”
Cassandra sobbed, and damned if it didn’t sound perplexingly genuine. “To stand there on the stage with him, watching him
drop
things.”
    Oh, now wait a second
, my mind protested.
    “Watching him miss verbal clues … visual clues—
obvious
ones,” she went on. “Watching him bungle hand manipulations he could do in his
sleep
a few years ago. Flounder through his performance.
Flounder
, Harry! Him! The Great Delacorte! The most gifted—”
    She began to cry harder.
    If I hadn’t been already speechless, I would have been speechless.
    Could this be true?
    Max
floundering?
Bungling hand manipulations? Missing clues? My son, Maximilian,
The Great Delacorte?
    It had to be impossible. I didn’t think I could endure the pain of it being true.

    Harry obviously felt helpless before her grief. (I felt helpless myself; it seemed so
real.)
All he could do was pat her clumsily on the back and murmur, “Easy, babe, easy.” “It broke my heart to watch him,” Cassandra said, able tospeak once more. She drew in a lengthy, trembling breath, then raised her head and shook it slowly. “Followed by three long months up here, watching him sink a little deeper into despair every day.”
    I felt myself swallow. Max
had
seemed very gloomy in the past few months. His attentions and words to me had been dispensed with enervated melancholy. I had equated it with his unhappy marriage.
    But his
career?
    Now Cassandra clutched at Harry’s arms so tightly that it made him wince.
    “You’re his best friend, Harry,” she told him. (There she lost me.) “You’re his
only
friend.” (Lost me double!) “If you can’t talk him into this …”
    She sobbed, began to cry again. If it was an act, it was of Tony, Oscar, and Emmy caliber.
    “Easy, babe,” he said. “I think he’s changed his mind, that’s why he asked me here today. It’s gonna work.”
    She looked at him uneasily. “Did he say anything in particular that makes you think that?” she asked.
    “No, but why else would he ask me here?” he counter-questioned. “Like I said, if he wanted to say no, he could have done it on the telephone.”
    “I suppose.” She still didn’t sound convinced.
    “Has he been to a doctor?” Harry asked.
    A
doctor
, for God’s sake? Now what were they talking about?
    Cassandra’s sigh had been a heavy one. “He won’t go to a doctor,” she said.
    “You think he’s afraid of what he might find out?” Harry asked her.
    She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
    Harry grimaced. “He’s not