“LET ME START this way,” she said. “Let me start out with unpacking, and wondering about whether I’ve made a mistake and all, and then I’ll throw myself on the bed and call out to you, and you’ll come in and persuade me to stay—you beg me to stay, like this, just like this, and I’ll let you talk me into going through with it.”

“WHAT A THING TO ASK! Be yourself! Over the course of my little lifetime I had put a lot of effort into trying to become someone else. Myself was the last person I wanted to be. There wasn’t anything Denny could have asked me to do that would have been harder. I had no self. There was nothing at the heart of me.”

AS THE NIGHT approached, her first night on stage, her first night on display, she realized that she felt unprepared. She was astonished to find that she was nervous about this—her debut—her exposure.

“MY FIRST MOMENT ON DISPLAY came the next day. I waited till around noon to go back to the warehouse. When I got there, Denny was hard at work. He worked in an odd, disorganized way, jumping from one thing to another, never finishing one job before he was distracted by the next.

THE WAREHOUSE was full of seats. They were stadium seats, and they could have been from Ebbets Field. At the back of the warehouse, Denny had set up living quarters for himself.

IT WAS A SLOW NIGHT at Corinne’s, so when Denny came in, Ariane was pleased to see him. She hadn’t seen him in a long time, and she hadn’t had anyone to talk to all evening.     “Hey, stranger,” she said. “Where have you been?”

SHE PAUSED for applause, and in the pause I applauded her myself. I also grinned and shook my head, making a little pantomime out of it, using a set of gestures to indicate that I was impressed by her performance. I was aware, of course, that I was performing, too. Let’s face it: I was hamming it up.

     “Now we come to Greg himself,” she said, and added her middle finger to the tally. “As I said, you’ll get no false modesty from me, so here is my immodest claim: next to myself, Greg Tschudin is my greatest creation.”

     She walked behind the sofa and patted the top of my head, then delivered her next speech standing there, with both hands on the back of the sofa, leaning over me, facing the audience.

“I’VE TOLD THAT STORY so often,” she said—and there she paused, with a twinkle in her eyes, to telegraph the approach of the punch line—“that I almost believe it.”     There was laughter. She had them.