Anna Maida, in her bathrobe and slippers, gave me a quick hug and Sally a "Well hello." I had known her for a long while, from her California days at the turn of the century. A novelist, and of all things, a jazz pianist, she sat us down in a cozy book-lined living room, provided us with bottles of Corona beer, and slipped away for a moment or two. Returning in jeans and a black sweater, she tied her sneaker laces from a soft purple chair into which she sank at first before pulling herself together. "It's good to see you," she told me. "And you," I told her. "And you," I repeated.

"I've read everything you've published," Sally said, while pointing her index finger at Anna for just that second, as if it were an exclamation point.
"And I've heard much about you, Anna said."
Sally glanced at me with a smile .
"He's brought Email to soaring heights," Anna said to both of us. "How stupid of me," she said to me. "Would you like your Scotch?"
"Wouldn't mind."
Indeed, wouldn't mind. "And Sally the same."
While Anna was in the kitchen, Sally went to the window. "Can't see a thing. The snow is inconsiderate." And then, "How old is she?"
"In her forties, like you. The years of indulgent sorrow."
Sally wandered around the book cases. "Look," she said, " Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul.'"
"So THERE'S the other one," I said triumphantly, which made Sally laugh. I had always told her that her laugh resembled Audrey Hepburn's face at rest.
The laugh brought Anna out from the kitchen, bearing two Scotch and sodas. "Is this OK for you?" she asked Sally.
"But of course," I said.
"So she follows the yellow brick road," Anna said.
"Except when she doesn't really want to," Sally said
"And how often may that be?" Anna asked Sally.
"Grains of sand on the beach and still counting," Sally told her, with the Audrey Hepburn laugh.
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Dinner: lobster salad, french fries, apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and all the while Dom Perignon champagne. The women took to each other, evaporating my small concern. There was a metaphoric understanding, analogous to the yellow brick road and grains of sand.

"Would you play the piano?" Sally asked Anna, eventually."I will, of course. Thank you. But we were talking about LSD a while ago, and I wanted to tell you something that I did years and years ago that I think that you, Sally, should know about me. He knows, so he needn't listen. I should have told you a little while ago, but I held back." "Why?" I asked. "Needlessly," she said, although I felt that at that earlier moment Anna had imagined that she wasn't yet on safe ground. But now, an LSD story over apple pie some half hour later, would cause nothing but appreciation.

We were back in the living room, the fireplace aglow, just one of many mechanical talents of Sally Keeble; things like fireplaces, flat tires,
even lock picks, even stick driving big trucks "Sexy, no?" she had said, from behind the wheel of her father's immense vehicle.
"One night, many years ago, I was staying with some friends in the mountains in California. Two girls, sisters. They decided to trip. I demurred and went to bed. But I really didn't go to bed. I took off all my clothes and I put on an entire bed sheet, sparkling white. Of course I have dark skin and so, well, so I went outside. The sisters were down at the bottom of a small hill. No noise. They were quiet in their two LSD heads.

At the top of the hill, a little away from their house, I began to walk parallel to them. I had this little machine, you see, and you could make it make different sounds, like dogs barking or a baby crying, or, OR, the wailing of a woman in some kind of pain. That's the one I used. I was a vision in white on a hill. And then the wailing. The sound in the wailing of utter loss, loss loss loss, even caught me by surprise. I moved slowly across the top of the hill in a white sheet and a wailing machine. Then I switched to dogs barking. Down there the sisters, the Carroll sisters, were freaked out. They saw me, but they didn't see ME. They saw death. I continued across the top of the hill. Karen Carroll
yelled out: "Don't hurt us! Don't hurt us!" Back from the barking to the woman wailing. They couldn't move down there, they were so high. They saw a white figure of some kind above them. One of them, I think Barbara, was herself wailing and weeping, wailing and weeping." And then I disappeared into the woods behind me. Then I went home to sleep.

In the morning the sisters said not a word about what had happened in the night. Also, I didn't. What do you think of me now, Sally Keeble?"
Sally took her time, before she said to Anna, "I sit here ambivalent. I see myself on the top of the hill, and on the bottom. I don't remember that in any of your books."
"I haven't used it yet," Anna said. "Heads with acid are vulnerable, you know. Did you ever do acid?"
"Six times," Sally said. One with this guy. Six different people. They all seemed to echo the rot under the rock of our associations."
Sally's words stilled the room. After a bit I asked Anna Maida to play for us.
"Surely," she said, as she stood, and headed to her Hamilton grand.

The names in the story have been changed and some of the characters are composite.