“We couldn’t help notice that you were sitting here, drinking alone,” he said. “We thought you might care to join us.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Do you think you might care to? Join us?”

There was a moment’s hesitation. The brown eyes blinked, softened. The slightest smile formed on her thin-lipped mouth.

“I think I would like to, yes,” she said. “I’d like to.”

They sat at a small table some distance from the bar, in a dimly lighted corner of the room. Susan-and not Patricia or Alice, as it turned out-ordered another Chardonnay. Jessica stuck to her martinis. Will ordered another bourbon on the rocks.

“No one should sit drinking alone three days before Christmas,” Jessica said.

“Oh, I agree, I agree,” Susan said.

She had an annoying habit of saying everything twice. Made it sound as if there were an echo in the place.

“But this bar is on my way home,” she said, “and I thought I’d stop in for a quick glass of wine.”

“Take the chill off,” Jessica agreed, nodding.

“Yes, exactly. Take the chill off.”

She also repeated other people’s words, Will noticed.

“Do you live near here?” Jessica asked.

“Yes. Just around the corner.”

“Where are you from originally?”

“Oh dear, can you still tell?”

“Tell what?” Will asked.

“The accent. Oh dear, does it still show? After all those lessons? Oh my.”

“What accent would that be?” Jessica asked.

“ Alabama. Montgomery, Alabama,” she said, making it sound like “Mun’gummy, Alabama.”

“I don’t hear any accent at all,” Jessica said. “Do you detect an accent, Will?”

“Well, it’s a regional dialect, actually,” Susan said.

“You sound like you were born right here in New York,” Will said, lying in his teeth.

“That’s so kind of you, really,” she said. “Really, it’s so very kind.”

“How long have you been up here?” Jessica asked.

“Six months now. I came up at the end of June. I’m an actress.”

An actress, Will thought.

“I’m a nurse,” Jessica said.

An actress and a nurse, Will thought.

“No kidding?” Susan said. “Do you work at some hospital?”

“Beth Israel,” Jessica said.

“I thought that was a synagogue,” Will said.

“A hospital, too,” Jessica said, nodding, and turned back to Susan again. “Would we have seen you in anything?” she asked.

“Well, not unless you’ve been to Montgomery,” Susan said, and smiled. “The Glass Menagerie?. Do you know The Glass Menagerie?. Tennessee Williams? The play by Tennessee Williams? I played Laura Wingate in the Paper Players’ production down there. I haven’t been in anything up here yet. I’ve been waitressing, in fact.”

A waitress, Will thought.

The nurse and I are about to kill the plainest waitress in the city of New York.

Or worse, we’re going to take her to bed.

Afterward, he thought it might have been Jessica who suggested that they buy a bottle of Moët Chandon and take it up to Susan’s apartment for a nightcap, the apartment being so close and all, just around the corner, in fact, as Susan herself had earlier pointed out. Or perhaps it was Will himself who’d made the suggestion, having consumed by then four hefty shots of Jack Daniels, and being somewhat bolder than he might ordinarily have been. Or perhaps it was Susan who invited them up to her place, which was in the heart of the theatrical district, right around the corner from Flanagan’s, where she herself had consumed three or four glasses of Chardonnay and had begun performing for them the entire scene in which the Gentleman Caller breaks the little glass unicorn and Laura pretends it’s no great tragedy, acting both parts for them, which Will felt certain caused the bartender to announce last call a full ten minutes earlier than he should have.

She was some terrible actress.

But oh so inspired!

The minute they hit the street outside, she raised her arms to the heavens above, her fingers widespread, and shouted in her dreadful Southern accent, “Just look at it! Broadway! The Great White Way!” and then did a little sort of pirouette, twirling and dancing up the street, her arms still high over her head.

“My God, let’s kill her quick!” Jessica whispered to Will.

They both burst out laughing.

Susan must have thought they were sharing her exuberance.

Will guessed she didn’t know what lay just ahead.

Or maybe she did.

At this hour of the night, the hookers had already begun their stroll up Eighth Avenue, but none of them so much as lifted an eyebrow to Will, probably figuring he was a John already occupied twice over, one on each arm. In an open liquor store, he bought a bottle of not Moet Chandon but Veuve Clicquot, and they went walking up the avenue together again, arm in arm.

Susan’s apartment was a studio flat on the third floor of a walk-up on Forty-ninth and Ninth. They climbed the steps behind her, and she stopped outside apartment 3A, fiddled for her keys in her handbag, found them at last, and unlocked the door. The place was furnished in what Will called Struggling Young Actress Thrift. A tiny kitchen to the left of the entrance. A double bed against the far wall, a door alongside it leading to what Will supposed was a bathroom. A sofa and two easy chairs and a dresser with a mirror over it. There was a door on the entrance wall, and it opened onto a closet. Susan took their coats and hung them up.

“Mind if I make myself comfortable?” she asked, and went into the bathroom.

Jessica waggled her eyebrows.

Will went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and emptied two of the ice cube trays into a bowl he found in the overhead cabinets. He also found three juice glasses he supposed would have to serve. Jessica sat on the sofa watching him while he started opening the champagne. A loud pop exploded just as another blonde stepped out of the bathroom.

It took him a moment to realize this was Susan.

“Makeup and costume go a long way toward realizing a character,” she said.

She was now a slender young woman with short straight blonde hair, a nice set of jugs showing in the swooping neckline of a red blouse, a short tight black skirt, good legs in very high-heeled black pumps. She held dangling from her right hand the mousy brown wig she’d been wearing in the bar, and when she opened her left hand and held it out to him, palm flat, he saw the dental prosthesis that had given her the over-bite. Through the open bathroom door, he could see her frowzy brown suit hanging on the shower rod. Her spectacles were resting on the bathroom sink.

“Little padding around the waist thickened me out,” she said. “We have all these useful props in class.”

No Southern accent anymore, he noticed. No brown eyes, either.

“But your eyes…” he said.

“Contact lenses,” Susan said.

Her real eyes were as blue as… well, Jessica’s.

In fact, they could pass for sisters.

He said this out loud.

“You could pass for sisters,” he said.

“Maybe ‘cause we are,” Jessica said. “Sure had you going, though, didn’t we?”

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Let’s try that champagne,” Susan said, and swiveled into the kitchen where the bottle was now resting in the bowl of ice. She lifted it, poured into the juice glasses, and carried back into the other room the three glasses in a cradle of fingers and thumbs. Jessica plucked one of the glasses free. Susan handed one to Will.