The screenwriter searches for the black prostitute he was with on Wednesday night, or perhaps he should say the early hours of Thursday morning. He searches first around the sex shop then walks a couple of blocks, but he doesn’t see her. So he decides to go back and wait for her at the club. It’s still the early afternoon, perhaps too early to go cruising, but he decides to stay a while. After ordering a gin and tonic and lighting a cigarette, he thinks about the girl’s father. If the screenwriter was he, or at least had his money, he’d have the prostitute all to himself. She wouldn’t have to go out soliciting anymore. Some women can smell money on a man. Prostitutes make a living with this talent. He rests his elbow on the bar and lets his eyes dart around the room, as if waiting for someone to show up. The women are all young, are all taken. The black prostitute will show up when he least expects it, he thinks, while crushing the butt in the ashtray. Or perhaps he’s just hoping against hope she will. He hesitates to light the next cigarette, prestidigitates it between his fingers, as if waiting for someone to light it for him, but he soon bores of this game, and ends up lighting it himself. He spends a few more minutes looking at the bottles on the shelves, the lights, the stools, and the pattern on the carpet. Then he goes to take a sip from his glass, but only fishes up an ice cube. He decides against ordering another drink. He decides against finishing his cigarette. Instead, he just gets up and leaves, walks slowly out onto the street, and goes to wait for the prostitute at the sex shop, where he can rest his aching back against the shutter. He looks around at the other women, but none attract his interest. A blonde approaches him. She doesn’t say she wants a light, but insinuates by brandishing an unlit cigarette, and thumbing an invisible lighter. He obliges her, and asks about her dark-skinned colleague. She says she hasn’t seen her all day, and she returns to her post a few meters away. The screenwriter decides to enter the sex shop and have a look around, but he soon bores of this, and goes back outside to smoke another cigarette. Then he smokes another, and another, thinking all the time about the black prostitute, but it seems this isn’t going to be his day, and no one else is even bothering to ask him for a light, so he finally decides to go. He thinks about the girl’s father, who wouldn’t have spent a minute waiting on that miserable street. He’d be lying on his bed in a plush hotel room talking on the phone, arranging an assignation with the college chick. He remembers seeing something similar in a movie, but he decides to use the idea anyway. After all, it’s only a subplot. Do they really advertise college chicks as private escorts in the newspaper? Why not dispense with the scenario and think of another one? During McGregor’s shift in the Grand Central Station, the girl’s father and the chick are having dinner in a classy restaurant. They talk about all kinds of things, but the screenwriter hasn’t yet decided what they are. The day they met, they spoke about jazz, but now he’s not sure. Maybe they should’ve spoken about something else. He thinks about changing the dialogue. Then he thinks again. It’s all the same, he says, the plan of the scene is perfect, so it really doesn’t matter what they talk about. He returns to the restaurant. She’s the same age as his daughter, thinks the father, maybe a couple of years older. Not that this bothers him in the slightest. In fact, he seems to like it. It makes him feel younger. And it doesn’t even occur to him what they’re doing might be wrong. The next shot takes place in a hotel room. A far more luxurious hotel than the ones the father habitually stays in. He sees a book peeking out of the chick’s handbag, which is lying on the other side of the bed, whose title he can just about make out. He points to it, and she recites the beginning from memory. He asks her to account for the book’s having made such an impression on her. She says she remembers because she makes a hobby of collecting and memorizing the beginnings of books, all of which she records in her notebook. If they meet up again, she promises to bring it with her. She further explains that the sentences she memorizes are all the openings of famous novels, and although she sometimes misremembers, mistakes certain words for others, she can always recall the general sense of the quotation. The father decides to challenge her — not only to test her claim, but to determine the quality of the novels she reads. He asks her to quote the beginning of a certain novel. She responds, “Stately, plump. .” Satisfied, he challenges her with another. She says, “For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close. .” The girl’s father is genuinely surprised that a young escort, basically a high-class hooker, can quote with ease the beginnings of two of the greatest novels ever written, and he’s impressed that she was able to prove that she is indeed cultured, refined, sophisticated, just as she claimed. What would the author who was obsessed with jealousy and the passage of time think of a prostitute quoting his novel from memory? He’d no doubt be flattered, but the young college chick doesn’t give the girl’s father much time to think about it, because she’s already quoting another: “One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch. .” Do you know what that is? she asks. He says he doesn’t know, or maybe he doesn’t remember. That’s how most novels begin, she replies, with the author not knowing, plagued by uncertainty. As she undresses, she recites a medley of openings passages: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” The girl’s father suspects the young college chick wants to be a writer like his daughter, although he doesn’t mention this. The chick’s hair is short, styled to resemble an organized mess, according to the latest fashion. He doesn’t want to know her age, in case she’s younger than she looks. The screenwriter imagines her as young as possible without having a precise age in mind. What attracts him most about these little gamines is their youth, perhaps because they remind him of all the students he’s slept with. He thinks of the girl’s delicate skin, her wild hair, and tries to remember if his desire for these things only came after sleeping with her. He tries to think of the other students he was with, and all the women he picked up, whatever the asking price. He can’t seem to remember their faces. Memory can be fragile in certain cases, he thinks. It doesn’t matter to him whether the sex is free or paid for. Sex is sex. Besides, he thinks if he doesn’t pay for it one way, he’ll end up paying for it in another. His whole life has been a continuous drifting from woman to woman, an aimless floating from pier to pier, as a boat without oar or anchor, unable to come into the shallows and berth, to get close enough to learn more than perhaps a name. He could almost say he moves from one woman to the next as he does from one screenplay to the next. And this is how he remembers the past, for each screenplay is a climax in the chronicle of his life, each one reminds him of the state of mind he was in when he wrote it, whether he was happy or sad, in or out of love, if he was young and distinguished, or, as he is now, old and semi-retired — a part-time screenwriter who barely gets commissions anymore — whose life is an aimless drifting from pier to pier, unable to berth. He feels no one can fully understand this aspect of his biography but himself, or maybe someone like himself. He doesn’t want to think about it anymore. The screenwriter returns to his story, and imagines the next shot being of the girl’s father and the college chick making love on an elegant bed with gray satin sheets. Her firm, round breasts joggling rhythmically as she rides him, tempered only by his up-reaching hands, grasping them, caressing them. The screenwriter develops an erection as he writes. And then the college chick declaims at the top of her voice, “Stately, plump. .” and “For a long time I used to go to bed early. .” and occasionally groans, “Oedipa Maas” or “Tupperware.” She may be only simulating the groans. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s only a movie. The actress who plays her part will be simulating anyway.