John D. MacDonald

S*E*V*E*N

QUARREL, THE ANNEX, DEAR OLD FRIEND, and DOUBLE HANNENFRAMMIS originally appeared in Playboy Magazine

© 1967,1968, 1970 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.

The Random Noise of Love

“I got to tell you what this flippy husband of mine pulled tonight, Irene. I’ll wait till Joe brings the drinks in. Well, hey! The booze is here already, huh? Here’s to it. If you get to it and can’t do it, and so forth. Cheers. Joe, what I wanted to tell you and Irene was what Marty pulled tonight that made us a little late getting here. Anyways, he gets all ready, see, and we’re at the door, practically, and I get a look at the necktie he has on and I told him it’s all dirty around the knot, so he should go change it. What he does with a necktie, like a nervous habit, is all the time tightening the knot and they get cruddy looking all the time, and guess who has to go through them every so often and weed out the cruddy ones to send to the cleaners. So he goes back to change to a clean tie, and I wait and I wait and I wait, and finally I go charging in to find out what’s holding him up, and you know what I find? You wouldn’t believe it! Here is this nut I’m married to, sitting on the side of the bed in his underwear. It’s like he’s some kind of go-to-bed machine. When he takes off the tie it starts the machinery. Tie, shirt, shoes, socks, pants. So he looks up at me with this kind of dumb look on his face, and I ask him is he maye going to come over here to see our good friends Joe and Irene in his underwear? He gives a kind of a jump and looks at himself and looks around, and then he has to get back into his clothes again. Isn’t that the limit? On the way over here I say to him, boy, it’s really going to kill Joe and Irene about why we’re late, and he says to me, he says, ‘Glad, what’s the point in telling anybody?’ So I say to him, ‘Jesus, Marty, you got to have a sense of humor, haven’t you? When something funny happens what’s the point in not telling your practically best friends?’ I always say if you can’t laugh at yourself you’ve had it, brother. Right? Right?”

When I push the button for her apartment, her voice comes over that tube thing. It makes her voice sound whispery and hollow and strange. “Yes?” And I seem to always just catch myself in time and say, “It’s Martin.” It sounds strange on my mouth to call myself Martin. It makes her glad for me to call myself that. And the way she says it, it becomes a different name. Mar-tin. Martin Harris. She says she doesn’t know any Marty Harris at all. She says she would not be in love with any Marty Harris. But she is in love with Marrr-tinnn. There are sweet little curves of the mouth, and she keeps her lips apart so that I can see the pink point of her tongue touch up there behind her upper teeth to make the t, and then drop to make the vowel sound, and then go back up again and flatten itself against the space behind her upper teeth to make the long nnnnn, the way she drags it out, in a kind of teasing, teasing in her own special way I never knew before. Like saying my name that way, over and over, after we have had love together, over and over, with a smiling look in her eyes, so that I know, just from her saying my name, that she wants us to do it again, as soon as I am ready, as soon as I can.

“Hey, you guys. Listen to this one. Yeah, right from the same place as always. Honest to Christ, I don’t know where that old joker out there gets hold of so many new stories alla time. Way the hell and gone out at the other end of Queens, the furthest account I’ve got and maybe the smallest. Marty, you used to cover that area, din’t you? You remember that Crandall that’s got the stationery store and looks like some kind of dignified bishop? Din’t he always have a joke every time you go check the tape and post his books? You know, I even wonner if that old bastid invents them. Somebody has to make up jokes. Anyways, here’s the one he tells me yesterday. There is this guy in a bar bragging to his buddies he can tell how old a woman is and what color hair she’s got even blindfolded. So they put up some money and he covers it and they go over to a cathouse and explain the bet to the madam. She goes along with it and they blindfold the guy and they bring in three hustlers, a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. The blonde is twenty and the brunette is thirty and the redhead is forty. They line them up without a stitch on. So this guy goes to the blonde first and gives her a good grope and... Hey, Marty! You heard it maybe? Where the hell are you going? Marty? Couldn’t you anyway answer me, you son of a bitch? You see that, you guys? What the hell is the matter with him lately. Should a guy just walk out on a joke, even if he has heard it? Shouldn’t he answer or apologize or something? What should it cost him. I tell you, I am getting goddamn tired of the way he’s acting lately. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah. The blindfolded guy, he gives the blonde a good feel, and then he says...”

Sometimes with Andrea, when we have made love solemnly and slowly, making it all last, when it is a second time, soon after the first, gentle, not so hungry, making it go on and on, there can be that feeling that right now, right here, you know all there is to know. You have found the secret to the whole thing. It is the way you wake up in the night sometimes with the answer to everything so clearly in mind you know that if you can write it down, it will change the world. But it fades away before you can capture it.

Sometimes it is like last Friday, when I figured that if I worked fast enough and hard enough I could cover every account on my sheet for that day, and get to her place by one thirty, and have from then until ten after five, the latest I could leave and still get back to the office in time to turn everything in.

But on the third from the last account they had put that new girl on the cash register. She had screwed up the tape and the department symbols and the totals. Even working through without lunch I didn’t clear it until after two o’clock. There were two more places to cover, and so I said the hell with it, and I saw a cab with people getting out, so I took the cab and I was holding Andrea in my arms at two thirty, saying her name and, for some fool reason, feeling like crying.

Last Friday, in all that dreamy gentle on-and-on of the second time, it wasn’t as if I were doing anything, or we were doing anything. It was like being in some kind of small boat on little waves in a long dream. While it was going on I could hear the whole city out there, all the nearby things, trucks and horns and things like that, and then things farther away, like sirens and airplanes and steamship horns. Under it all I could hear that great soft sound that is under all the other sounds, that muffled humming droning sound of some kind of a giant machine down there under all of the city. It had always been there, I guess, but I had never listened to it.

Then all of my hearing turned back inward, away from the drone and the far things and the near things, back to the nearest thing of all, all the sounds of our gentle loving. Martin and Andrea. Andrea and Martin, making their magic thing. A little padded, secretive creak of bed and bedding. A small gritty sound of strands of her long blond hair caught between her cheekbone and the edge of my jaw as I rubbed my face across hers seeking her mouth. Bump of hearts. A humming of my blood in my ears, as when you listen to a seashell. A tiny husky whispery sound of the caress of her hands on my back. When she shifts slightly, a moist sound, repeated twice, as if her other lips are also kissing, also greedy. Then in a cant and change and deepening and reaching of her stroke, and in a harsher and faster huff-sigh, huff-sigh of her misty hot breath, she tells me that soon she will come.

Last Friday, as her arms tightened, as her breath began to reach and catch, over and over, I decided that this time it would be all for her alone, and I elbowed myself higher to look down upon the changing, growing strangeness of her small face, her eyes wide-staring, turning from side to side, mouth agape, tongue curled up and back, breath now snorting and whistling, her fingers digging small and hard into my back, thighs rolling farther open, knees higher.

I could feel my mouth smiling, and it was a great glory and a pride to bring her into it, to make her feel such a torrent of pleasure. I was a part of the great engine of the city, and I took her through all of it, through the ultimate clenching and bursting and kitten cries, and down into the softness that changed her sweaty face, back to the awareness of here and now and me, so that she looked into my eyes and whispered, “I love you so much. So much. So much.”

“Marty, honest to Christ, you are going to drive me out of my skull! Din’t you hear one word I was saying? Great! Maybe you recall the name Debbie. It means something to you? Good! Congratulations! Debbie is our daughter. I knew you’d remember her if you tried, Marty. In three days she’s fourteen. What she wants is a wiglet. A good one. From human hair, yet, hand tied. There’s a special sale. Thirty-two fifty plus tax. What I was asking when you had your ears turned off, I’ve got twelve fifty out of the house money. Can you come up with twenty more for this daughter you can hardly remember seeing around the house? Marvelous! Real generosity from practically a stranger to us all lately. Honest to God, I don’t know what’s happening to you lately. Last month you go to take off your necktie and you take off everything. Wednesday night you don’t come to bed and you don’t come to bed, and finey I come out to wake you up. But do I have to? No. There you are in your lounger chair, eyes wide open, and what are you watching? You are watching a big snowstorm and listening to a big loud hiss because the channel was off the air maybe almost an hour. Marty, you sit around here like a big lump of dead meat. If I tell you maybe the kitchen is in flames you would nod your head and smile and say ‘That’s nice, Glad.’ Can you talk to me? Do you want to talk to me? Is it trouble on the job, Marty? Is maybe that McCracken leaning on you again like two years ago over something that wasn’t your fault? Do you feel sick or anything? You should get a checkup. You eat and you don’t know what you’re eating. Do I hear you laugh anymore? Like never! Do you want to go anywhere, do anything? Excuses. Too tired. Honey, there is something wrong with your energy. We’re seventeen years married two months from tomorrow. You’re forty. I’m thirty-nine. That’s the prime of life, right? Hah! Are you still listening? Do I still have your attention, sir? Good. Thank you so much. You want to know how many times you come over into my bed in the last four months? Want to guess? Three times! I keep track. I put marks on the calendar. Such a great lover! What a big treat for me those times you do me a favor. Climb on, fall off, and the next minute a big snore. Listen, damn you, Marty, I am a normal healthy woman and I got normal healthy sex urges, and I am not about to retire from being a woman all of a sudden just because you stop being a man. Something has got to be wrong with you. All of a sudden you are a nothing, a lump. You are not even here anymore. So go to a doctor, because there are only two answers. I am not stupid, baby. I think it better turn out that you are sick, because if you’re not, then you are getting it someplace else. You turned forty years old six months ago. Seven months ago. So men get funny ideas when they’re all of a sudden forty years old. And it’s the springtime of the year. But don’t think I am going to be sweet and understanding if it comes out you’ve got yourself some cheap juicy little piece of ass maybe half your age you met servicing one of those accounts of yours. I swear before God and all the angels, Marty, if I found out you’ve been banging some young kid, I am going to show you what hell on earth is all about. And you better believe it. You hear me? You listening to me, Marty?”

Another strange and special part of being with Andrea is the feeling of being like one of those... I can’t think of what they call them. A long word. They go way off someplace and live with some native tribe and write down everything about customs and so on.

It is so magical and strange just to watch her, to watch all the woman-things she does. It is as if I’d never married Glad, never been married at all, never been with a woman at all, and had no idea of all the little things they do. Somehow, watching Andrea is like watching a little girl having a pretend party, filling little tin teacups with sand.

I got to her place at three yesterday, and she had to leave at four thirty for a get-together of a bunch of her girl friends from the place where she used to work. She said if I didn’t want her to go she wouldn’t. But I told her to go ahead. She should get out more, I think. What kind of a life is it for her, waiting around to see if I can finish up early enough to come by and make love with her before I have to turn in the day’s stuff at the office? Besides, she had already arranged to take that night off from her job where she works from six until two in the morning, cashier in an all-night cafeteria. That neighborhood is getting rougher. She has only one block to walk to the subway. Smart guys are always making a pass when they pay their tab. One of them could be sick in the head and wait outside for her. Or maybe some punks could come in and try to knock off the place, all zonkered up on speed, and she doesn’t open the cash drawer fast enough. And girls get raped on the subway. You keep reading about it. I keep thinking about those things and wish she didn’t have to work.

But I couldn’t swing it. I have enough trouble coming up with the sixty-five a month for the half of the rent that the girl she shared the apartment with used to pay. I don’t know why it seems strange to me that she should work. People work. When I was twenty-two I felt grown up. I was grown up. But she seems to be playing at being a grown-up. She’s a kid in a lot of ways. She’s got no sense of time or money. She is dumb especially about money, always running out before pay day. So she hits me for five or ten, and a few times it’s been twenty. She was trying to pay it back for a while, four dollars a week, but there was no point in taking it because she just ran out sooner.

Yesterday, I stayed there in her bed propped up on both the pillows against the headboard, with a comer of the sheet pulled across my middle. I watched her as if I was taking notes and taking pictures, getting it all down because it was something precious and rare and would never happen again.

When she came out of her shower to get ready to go and be with her friends, she was naked and all dried off. She took her hair out and gave me a little smile that said she was glad I was there and watching her. She sat on the bench in front of the dressing table, and lighted up her mirror. It is one of those mirrors with little frosted bulbs all the way around it, like actresses have. I bought it for her to celebrate two months of being in love.

Being in love started in that way nobody ever believes until it happens to them. She was new on the day shift at the cafeteria. It is one of the accounts I service. So she was just another blond girl in the city. Just there. On that account I pick up the old tapes and take a reading off the tape in the register and mark it with a check mark and my initials. You have to lift a little gate to expose the tape. I had to crowd into the little space with her and wait until she took the checks and money from a short line of people leaving, hitting the changemaker. I watched her hands on the keys. Small hands, very smooth skin, and short quick fingers. She smelled fresh and sweet. I could see the shape of her cheek, how glossy-smooth and straight her hair fell, with a kind of heaviness about it, like that thick silk that costs a lot of money.

Then there was no money to take for a little while, and I lifted the gate and initialed the running total and wrote it down. She didn’t know what I was doing, and she thought maybe it had something to do with her. She said, “Am I doing it wrong, mister?”

I turned, kind of leaning around her, and looked into her girl eyes for the first time, girl eyes about eight or ten inches away. Strange color eyes, not brown, not green, some crazy bronze color in between. Something moved somehow behind her eyes, maybe like a second pair of eyes behind them, suddenly opening to look out at me. It is something happening, like the world turning over and stopping at an angle you didn’t know about. She had asked me something, and I didn’t know what she had asked me. “What did you say?”

“Just... I guess is everything okay?”

“Yes. It’s okay. Fine.”

Like being trapped there, like our eyes got caught somehow, and I couldn’t move away.

“Girlie,” a voice said, “you going to give me some change sometime today?”

So that broke it and I went away. And work went slow that day. I kept coming up with bad totals. Her eyes looked up at me out of the column of figures. The next day I went way out of my way to go back there to eat lunch, so it was an hour and fifteen minutes lunch instead of twenty minutes I always take. I didn’t know what I ate or how it tasted, from watching her. I waited until there was nobody ahead of me or behind me when I paid. I had the right money, but I gave her a ten to make it last longer being close to her.

“When,” I said. I didn’t know where to take it from there. “When do...” The words got clogged up. Some idiot.

“Four o’clock,” she said. “Across the street?”

She did not let me see her eyes. Her face was pink, sort of. And I went roaring through the rest of the accounts. God, I was fast. But not fast enough. Sixteen minutes after four when I got there, and I had to walk-run, walk-run the last blocks, leaving the cab that got tied up in a crosstown mess, all the horns yammering. She was gone, I knew. But she wasn’t. She stood a little shorter than I thought she’d be. Smiled like I met her right there every day for years, and we went walking slowly together in the direction she turned.

There was one of those new mini-parks and an empty bench in the sun because the day was cool. I said my name, and she said she knew it because she asked. “Andrea,” she said. “I get called Andy, but I don’t like it much.”

“Then I don’t use it. What I want to say... Look, I’m getting bald. I should lose fifteen pounds, maybe twenty. I got a wife.”

“I saw the gold ring.”

“I got a daughter, closer to your age than I am.”

She laced the small fingers between mine. “So I should get up and walk away. Right? I know that. You should get up and walk away. Go ahead, Martin. Just try. Like I tried not waiting anymore when you were late. Just one more minute and I’ll go. Just one more minute after that. And then there you came, out of breath. Can you walk away?”

“No.”

“So something happens, and I don’t know what it is. I know it was too late to stop it the minute it started.”

“I’m a nothing. I’ve got this job a long time, scuffling around, keeping the books for little businesses. It’s all I know how to—”

“You got to stop knocking yourself, Martin. You knock yourself, and you hurt me somehow. I’m not so much you got to apologize.”

“Andrea. Andrea, I’m forty.”

“Let’s walk some more.”

“I got to go right now to get back in and turn in all this stuff.”

“How about after?”

“Where will you be?”

“Across the street from wherever you go to turn it in.”

“It could take an hour to settle up.”

“So?”

It was that day we counted, and so I gave her the makeup mirror on the two-month anniversary of the day it happened to us, when we got caught in it and couldn’t ever get out.

So now from the bed I can see the back of her and also the front of her at the same time in the mirror. She combs her hair first, biting her lip when she has to tug the comb through snarls. Both hands high, elbows out to the sides, one hand combing, the other holding the hair close to her scalp. It lifts her breasts when she reaches high. They are small breasts, but the part around the nipple is big. It is a color that isn’t pink or orange or tan, but like those colors mixed. I had forgotten about all the colors in the world, but since Andrea I see colors everywhere, as if they had washed the world and made it brighter.

She sits very straight to comb her hair, so that it makes the small of her back hollow. In the crease of her back just above the hollowed part I can see the little knobs of her spine. Lower down there are two dimples, one on each side. I see the small muscles slide and change over the smoothness of her shoulders and back as she combs her hair.

In the mirror I can see that her young belly is almost flat, just gently rounded. She sits so straight it makes her waist look even more slender than it is. That is because of the contrast to the white smooth weight of her hips and her behind, I think. The shape is as if you take a ripe pear and stand it upright on the heavy end, and then slice the stem end right off, about an inch down from the stem. That cut would come right at the narrowest part of her waist.

I look at her, memorizing her, looking across this ten feet of afternoon light, and seeing such a total ripeness, all the hip-ripe, breast-ripe, mouth-ripe, thigh-ripe warmth and moisture and smoothness of her, all so totally woman, that it is strange to remember how, such a short time ago, thirty minutes maybe, after we had made love in a hungry, grinding, straining way, she had slowly sagged into a total drowsy relaxation, and I had studied her hand and arm where they lay in the window light, thinking that the slack resting fist was a child’s hand, resting after play. The wrist had looked so small, so touchingly fragile. And the forearm was slender as a child’s, all the tiny golden hairs so fine fine fine, lying in a perfect pattern.

Her body is very fair, and the places the sun has never touched are the impossible marble white of the natural blond. On all the rest of her there is a faint overtone of gold, a memory of all the summers and the swimming. Often when we are quiet, when we are asprawl with hearts and breathing slowing, I have looked down the length of our bodies, seeing my coarse-textured, swarthy, hairy, flabby ugliness next to the glory of her, and felt shamed and humble that such an animal could be allowed to give her pleasure, that that short, thick, sallow worm down there, soft and dead in its nest of harsh dark hair, could have been welcomed so many times in all its thick, vulgar, arrogant, throbbing rigidity into the sweet, tight, flowing depths of her.

So I count the flaws in her perfection, looking for a confidence, a justification. Pale freckles on the tops of her shoulders from a time when she got too much sun. Three moles. A small brownish one centered on the back of her left thigh, perhaps two inches below the crease of the overhang of the left buttock. One smaller and quite black, an inch below her belly button and off to the left. A small tan one on the inside of her right elbow, on that very satiny skin texture near where the funny bone is. Two scars. A little white triangle below the left corner of her mouth, where a stone struck her when she was nine years old. She was riding her bike. A truck threw the small stone from its big tires. A little white ridge of appendix scar. On both feet the smallest toe is pinched in and malformed by the pinch of pointed shoes, the forward pressure of high heels. A crooked eye tooth, slightly gray in contrast to the others because the nerve is dead or dying.

She has told me of other imperfections, of things she cannot change. She would like to be taller. She thinks her neck is too short. She does not like her earlobes. If she does not work at it all the time, her scalp gets too dry and there are little flecks of dandruff. She yearns for slightly larger breasts, smaller hips and thighs. She wishes her upper lip were fuller, to match the underlip. She wishes her eyelashes were thicker and longer.

I cannot see these imperfections she lists, and the little things I have counted are more endearing than a total flawlessness would be. In one of the inventories of love, sometimes I count each one of the ten flaws with my lips, in solemn order, kissing each one, and then going backward through the list to end at the crooked tooth.

Her skin is so fine that the blue veins show through it at wrists, temples, the inside of the elbows, backs of the knees, ankles, undercurve of breasts — the veins of the left more visible than those of the right one. And these blue veins are another inventory to make, exactly as the first one is made, though sometimes incomplete because she becomes too greedy to wait for all of it, to wait through the slow ceremony of it, insists that we couple and begin the heavy rocking rhythmic ride toward the place where the world goes blind and loud.

So now she has put the comb aside and has picked up her hairbrush. There is a burring, whisking sound as she makes each long stroke, holding her head tilted sidelong, dipping it into the beginning of each stroke. It gleams under the brush strokes, a healthy glossiness of healthy female creature. Then she picks up a spray can, and with quick little pressures on the valve — hish hish hish — moving the can to and fro, she sprays her hair. The next spray, for under her arms, makes a longer hisssssh, one for each armpit, changing the can from hand to hand, the free hand high, with graceful tilt of wrist.

She leans closer to the lighted mirror, pats at her hair, pulls her lips away from her teeth in a grimace of inspection. She stands up, gives her hair another little shake, and smiles toward me, but it is an absentminded smile, turning at once to a small thoughtful frown, and I know she is wondering what to wear. When she turns in profile to go over to the chest of drawers, the mirror lights shine through her hair, turning it from pale blond to silver. And below the slope of her belly the same light shines through the springy little tuffet of pubic hair of a coppery-tan color. She walks at a slight angle away from me toward the chest of drawers, and I watch the complex working of the interwebbed fatty muscles of her small buttocks, the right side clenching as the hips swing to the right and the right leg takes her weight, the left softening as the slender leg swings into the next padding step. She pulls a drawer open and with her tongue she makes the little tick-tick sound of her annoyance.

She lives in a welter of small confusions, of a careless disorder. She lives amid coffee cups, cigarette bums, forgotten laundry, food drying on the dishes, clothing tossed onto chairs and tables and onto the floor, shoes heaped in a closet pile so that when she finds the one she wants she has to kneel and dig through the heap for the other one, the mouth making that tick-tick sound of frustration.

She finds the panty hose she wants to wear, tucks them between her knees, and holds them there while she paws through the drawer and finds a yellow bra. She goes back to the bench and puts the panty hose on the bench while she puts her arms through the bra straps and bends forward from the waist to hammock her breasts into the delicate fabric, her pale hair swinging forward. She straightens and cranes her arms back to fasten the bra snaps, one hand reaching down from above, one up from below. Then she rolls and works her shoulders like a boxer to settle the feel of the bra upon her. She sits on the bench, shakes out the panty hose, turns it in the right direction, and bends over and works her feet into the stocking feet. She pulls each leg up carefully, and when both stretch legs are smooth and taut to above her knees, she stands up and pulls it up the rest of the way, doing a little swing and grind of her hips, snapping it at the waist, smoothing it with her hands.

She sits on her heels at the closet door and makes ticking sounds until she has both matching shoes, a pair of tall yellow shoes. She slips them on there and takes a shift from the hanger and comes walking back toward her dressing table. Her heels make a solid clacking sound on the worn boards of the floor, a muffled sound on the dusty rug. She puts the shift on, careful about the way she gets her head through. It is a fine-knit weave, a yellow more pale than her shoes but darker than her hair. It has a white shawl collar in a coarser weave. She works her shoulders again, pats at herself, thumbs the heavy spill of her hair back. She sits again on the bench and looks at herself in the mirror. With the spray can she fixes a place at her temple.

She bends forward, and using the fingertips of both hands, she rubs a cream of some kind into her face, rubbing so strenuously she pulls the flesh of her face this way and that, like the funny faces a child makes. She wipes the residue of the cream off with tissue. She paints her mouth silver pink, using a little brush and two shades of lipstick. She opens a little flat tin and, using her fingertip, rubs a faint blue green smudge onto her upper lids. With a little brush and careful strokes she thickens and darkens her lashes. With a special pencil she darkens her brows and makes little up-slanted marks at the outside comers of her eyes. She touches herself then with the stopper from the perfume I bought her. Socket of her throat, behind her ears, insides of her wrists and her elbows, between her breasts, the backs of her knees.

She backs away and looks at herself intently, turning her head this way and that. She makes a social smile. She turns and looks back over her shoulder at herself, smoothing the back of the short shift down over her hips with the backs of her hands.

“Will I pass, Mar-tinn?”

“Beautiful. Lovely. Gorgeous. Fantastic. Pick any word, honey. Take them all.”

“You know what you are? Easy to please, huh?”

She bends over me and holds her cheek against mine. She does not want to kiss and spoil her lipstick. She makes a little humming, purring sound in her throat and, in mischief, walks her fingers down my chest and belly, slips her hand under the corner of the sheet.

“Hmmm. You better save that one for me, mister.”

She moves back out of my reach. Looks at her watch. “Late already. Hey, try the door to make sure. Sometimes it sounds like it locks when it doesn’t.”

So she is gone, but the scents and tastes of her are still in the apartment. All the things she touches and uses. Dear things, because they are hers. I get up after a little while and pick up the things she dropped and forgot, her woolly old slippers, one of them so far back under the bed I had to kneel and look under to find it. The little pink robe she was wearing when she let me in. I pick up other things, put them away, tug the rug straight, turn out the lights around the mirror.

I go in and take a shower, sudsing away the small acids and oils and pungencies of lovemaking, rinsing away the distinctive and personal odor of her. The shower curtain is yellow, her favorite color. It is plastic, with drawings of big wide-eyed green fish on it. There is a rip in the shower curtain, mended with tape that has begun to peel off. I use her oval bar of pale blue soap, finding a single hair, long and thin and fine, imbedded in it. I use her damp bath towel, watching myself in her steamy mirror, and when I am dry I hang it neatly on the towel bar, squaring the comers, making the ends come out even.

Soon I have my clothes on. It is time to leave. Time to pick up the thick scuffed dispatch case with the weight of the adding machine in it and go turn in my accounts. But I sit for a little while on the bench in front of the dressing table mirror. I do not turn the mirror lights back on. I have the feeling that I am not there, that the bench is empty, that I can see right through where my body should be and see the wall over there. It would be like this if you came back from death to visit a certain place.

I left and tried the door. It had not locked. I slammed it and it locked. I went down the three flights of stairs and out of the foyer onto the sidewalk. For one strange and almost frightening moment I did not know which way I should turn to walk to the office. But how many times have I done that in the past four months. Fifty? Sixty? Turn left and go to the comer and turn left again...

“Come right in, Harris. Sit down. No, in this chair right here. You been with the company nineteen years. Know what that means to me and to you? It means I’m talking to you. If you were a six-year man or seven, or even ten, I wouldn’t call you in here. I wouldn’t talk to you. You would have been out in the street on your ass two or three weeks ago. I got to find out if you think maybe this is some kind of civil service job, you put in nineteen years and coast the rest of the way. Do you think that’s the way it is?”

“No sir. I...”

“What we provide our clients with is total service, Harris. Total bookkeeping, accounting, and tax service, and it isn’t like a franchise. It isn’t like a monopoly. There are a hundred other outfits out there doing the same thing and trying to do it as good as we do it. They are trying every day to pick off our clients. If we don’t do the job they expect, we lose them overnight. I admit freely, openly, willingly, I was wrong two years ago about you. Those records were doctored after they left your hands, and thank God we could prove it, or we’d still be scuffling around with the I.R.S. This time is different, Harris.”

“I want you to know that—”

“Shut up! When I want to hear you talk, I’ll ask a question. You’re dogging it. You’re turning in garbage. I ask the girls. They say it used to be a pleasure, practically, to cross-check what you turned in, it was so clean. Now going over your crap gives them such a pain in the ass they try to duck you and work on somebody else. More and more you are making stupid, stinking, dumb-ass mistakes in simple arithmetic even. Two weeks ago somehow you left out two whole tape totals on Acme Star. All of a sudden their gross is down by a third from what it has been running month in, month out. How could you keep from noticing it on the totals and in the summary? Why the hell didn’t you check back and find out what was wrong? No. Don’t talk. Those are not questions I want answered. This goes all one way. I talk and you listen. Harris, all of a sudden you’re too important for the little things in life. What does it cost to say hello? To use a man’s name? To smile, maybe. To ask about his kids? Three times I’ve had to take Harry off soliciting new accounts and send him to kiss the ass of one of your clients because you pissed somebody off. Harris, they don’t like it, a man comes in at a dead run, wants all the figures right now, races through the job, and runs out like a thief. You don’t talk to anybody around here anymore. No smile. No time for coffee.”

“That’s because—”

“Don’t you listen to anything? I don’t want to know about any ‘because.’ I don’t want to hear any personal problems. What I pay for is your time on the job. Off the job you can paint yourself blue and run about naked. On my time you perform. I don’t care what your problem is. I don’t care if you are supporting a bookie, or you got three wives, or you’re writing a Broadway play, as long as it all happens on your time. If you got any kind of ideas about seniority, you can forget all that shit. You got no contract and no union. You are getting just one break, and listen close while I spell it out. Starting tomorrow you are going to give me one perfect month, Marty. One single complaint about anything and you are out on your ass. And when that month is over, I am going to ask for another perfect month. Then someday I will tell you when you’ve earned the right to make one very small mistake and still stay on the job. If I shove you out on the street, I am not going to write a jerk letter saying how great you are. Anybody asks me, I’ll say you turned into dead wood and we sawed you out of the tree. I run this thing hard-nose. I pay good, and I push hard. I don’t want any comments. Just pick it up out of the chair and take it out of here, and keep telling yourself you got a last chance you sure as hell don’t deserve, the way you’ve been fucking up.”

Her hand is under the nape of my neck. I am looking at the ceiling. Her face is shoved into the nape of my neck. I feel the slack weight of her thigh across my stomach, and the weight of her right arm on my chest, the relaxed fist resting on the black, matted hair of my chest. She makes small hiccup sounds from time to time. They are the little dry sobs that remain from all the tears.

I want to get up and go over to the kitchenette and move the pan, or whatever it is, out from under the dripping faucet. Ploik, ploik, ploik, ploik.

Maybe it is better to think about the faucet than it is to think about twenty-five hundred dollars. Probably two ploiks a second, a hundred and twenty a minute. So ten minutes would be twelve hundred. Twenty minutes would be twenty-four hundred. Twenty minutes and fifty seconds for twenty-five hundred ploiks.

There is another way of not thinking. I stroke her back and turn slightly toward her. But she pushes herself up. She is between me and the wall. She kneels and sits back on her heels, staring down at me. Her little face is puffy, blotched red and white from all the crying. She snuffs and wipes the back of her hand across her nose and lip.

“My brother isn’t kidding me, Martin. He wouldn’t do that. He loves her too, because she was our grammaw and she brought us up, the four of us kids. Now she’s got the arthritis so bad she can’t even dress herself or feed herself. Joe’s wife has to do it, and now she’s going to have another kid. So like he said on the phone, he went out to the state place for old people like that, and it made him sick, it was so bad. He won’t put her out there. He’s found this place where if we come up with ten thousand dollars, they take her into this rest home for life. Like an annuity or something. He can scratch up twenny-five hundred and so can Ruthie out in California and so can my brother Lew. If I can send twenny-five hundred then she can go into the rest home. And if I can’t, then I got to go back there and take care of her, for as long as she lives, and the seventy-five hundred gets set aside for expenses, for me and my grammaw to live on. But I can’t face going back to that cruddy little town, not after dreaming about getting away from there forever.”

“I know. I know.” _

“Do you know? That rotten wind comes down out of Canada and turns you blue. The best place to shop is Sears catalogue. No movie, nothing. Oh Jesus, Martin, I gotta send that money.”

There’s no good way to tell her that five months ago I could have come up with twenty-five hundred dollars. I could have taken it out of joint savings, hoping Glad wouldn’t find out. But the five months of us, of little loans and gifts and half the apartment rent, have nibbled it down and down. I know the balance by heart. $744.21.

She knee-walks to the foot of the bed and steps off. No sound of her bare feet on the rug. But a pat-flap sound on the boards, and then the creak of the bathroom door closing, click of the latch. Sound of water running. Then a sound of flushing. Silence. Ploik, ploik, ploik.

She comes out in her robe. She has scrubbed her face and tied her hair back. She stands by the bed looking down at me.

“Martin? You said everything would be okay for us, didn’t you? You said you could take care of us. No matter what. Didn’t you say that?”

The words come sliding out of my throat, oiled words, too easy. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the money. You don’t have to worry. I can get it.”

Her smile starts, then fades into skepticism. “When? I’m sorry, but I’ve got to know when. I’ve got to see the money. Going back there is like dying. When are you going to give me the money?”

“Soon.”

“Tell me what day!”

“Real soon, Andrea.”

“I guess you better go now. You’ll be late.”

Leo acts strange and uncomfortable. He says he wants to talk to me after I’ve finished the check-out. He says we can go down the street for some coffee. Familiar place, but a long time since I had been in there.

He lights a cigarette and puts a lot of sugar in his coffee and says, “The bookkeeper at Kash-Way called up at two o’clock. Myra says if she’d taken the call she could have covered. But that Pritchard bitch took it and went running to the old man. What Kash-Way wanted to know, how long do they have to wait before you show.”

I think back. I am confused. It takes me a little time to remember. It was supposed to be done over two weeks ago. But I couldn’t finish up that day. I went to see Andrea. Then when the girl went down my list I told her Kash-Way was changing their reporting period. I turned the folder in and forgot to add it to the list the next day and the next. Forgot it entirely.

“He pulled the file and sent Walker out there.”

“Was he sore, Leo?”

He reaches into his pocket and takes out the white sealed envelope with my name typed on it. M. Harris. “Jesus, Marty, I’m sorry as hell. He ran the final check for you. It’s in here, with all the deducts. It goes through the end of the week, through tomorrow.”

I tear off the end of the envelope, blow it open, peer down into it and read the amount. Not enough. Only one check.

“What about the pension thing? Don’t I get back just what I put in if I get fired? No matching funds or anything and no interest. But it’s mine, what I put in.”

“The way it reads, you get the check at the end of the quarter following the quarter in which employment is terminated. It’s an escrow thing, with the money invested. It should help out. Maybe four grand or five even, the years you’ve been covered.”

“Leo, you want to buy my pension money?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Three thou. We draw up a legal contract. It’s got to be five, anyway. It’s a big return for four months. You swing a loan and you come up like roses.”

“What’s the matter with you, Marty? Aren’t you listening? After nineteen years you got fired.”

“I know.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Was what worth it?”

“The blond piece of ass from the cafeteria. Young stuff. Rothstein seen you with her once and followed you back to her pad.”

“Bug off, Leo. Drink your coffee and go.”

“We’ve been friends a long time. Look, you got to get yourself sorted out. I mean it. It can happen to anybody, getting all hung up on some twenty-year-old quiff. Like the little dog in the freight yard, and the train nips off the end of his tail and he yelps and spins around and it cuts off his head. Never lose your head over a piece of tail.”

He looks at me and then he gets up quick and moves back. It showed on my face, probably, how much I wanted to smash his mouth and his eyes. “You poor bastard,” he says, and he leaves.

“Marty, honey, I’m sorry! You’ve got to try to have some understanding, too. Look at me. I’m a housewife and a mother, and the whole thing, everything I am, kind of hangs on you and your job. And there should be some trust between people married so long, right? So what you should understand is that when I find out you got fired over a week ago, and I find it out like by accident, who should blame me for going up like a rocket? Marty, darling, I said terrible things to you. Don’t you understand it was because I was upset? I was scared, darling. I’m still scared. I can’t help it. You know what my old man was like, the way we had to live because he was a bum. So a job is important, sure. But we can always make out somehow. People always make out somehow. Do you see anybody starving to death on the street lately? Marty, my God, look at me at least. And listen. There’s more, isn’t there? More than just the job. So all right. So we can put everything back together again, you and me, like the old days. Marty, I don’t care what it is, but if you just keep sitting there like that and not telling me anything, and the tears running and running down your face, Marty... my heart will break right in two. Right in two.”

I am sitting in an old wing chair, part of the furnishings of her furnished apartment. She is wearing a man’s T-shirt with a ripped shoulder and with some kind of college or high school seal printed on the front of it, in blue that is now so faded it cannot be read. She has fastened her hair back out of the way with a wide red rubber band. She missed some pale strands, and when they tickle her cheek, she blows out of the corner of her mouth at them.

She has taken the drawers out of the chest of drawers and put them on the bed. She is selecting the things she wants to keep and putting them in her two suitcases and in two cardboard cartons I am to ship for her.

It is a gray day, thick, hot, with a taste of acid and oil in every breath. The room lights look orange against the gray. Her arms and legs and face are sweaty, so that there are highlights on them from the window light or the light bulbs.

She looks at a pleated tan skirt for a long time and then drops it onto the discard pile near the foot of the bed.

“When you’re not sure,” I say, “make another pile. I can send those along too.”

“Good old Marty. Nothing is too much trouble.” The “Marty” is punishment. We both know that. But I have not called her Andy in retaliation. She looks over at me. “You can do anything except get me that money.”

“I tried to find a way.”

“Sure. I know. You tried.”

She continues sorting and packing. We had said goodbye. I had stayed there with her all night and the night before. The bodies had said good-bye to each other, very sweetly at first, and then in a straining, sweaty bitterness, demeaning each other.

She straightens up from sorting her shoes, wipes her forearm across her forehead, and frowns at me. “I didn’t know you were going to lose your job. I didn’t know you were goofing off. I didn’t know you were running here to screw me when you should have been working. I wouldn’a let you do that, Marty. I thought you were a man. I thought you could handle things. You come through to me now like some kind of puppy-sick kid. What happened to you, Marty?”

It is a good question. Why should everything that means anything in all the world narrow down to a hundred and ten pounds of bare girl, to the blindness that lasts ten seconds when she spasms and gasps and leaps? Why should I be forty blocks away from her and suddenly have such a twisting, shifting thing happen in my gut, like a fountain of steaming oil, turning me weak and dizzy, making everything around me so unreal that I have to come across those forty blocks as quickly as I can, moving through the paper city, up the cardboard stairs, right to the only reality left, the warm, smooth, young flesh under my hands, the sweet breaking mouth hungry under mine, the girl eyes dazed and glazed with all her wanting?

It is a good question and I have no answer I can give her. She is still frowning at me when the telephone rings.

She sits on the comer of the couch, legs crossed, picking the phone up from the end table. “Yes? Oh, Velma! Hey, I thought it would be the phone company about turning off the service. Yeah. I told them. I’m packing, sure. What else? It leaves at three fifty. An express bus. It’ll drop me off at Milwaukee sixty miles from home, but my brother Joe is driving over to meet me. What’s on your mind, Vel?”

I watch her face as she listens. She looks over at me, and there is for an instant the evasive look of the guilty child, and she hitches herself sideways on the couch, pulling her legs up, facing away from me.

I listen. I am an international spy, cleverly putting together the small secretive comments she makes as she listens.

“I didn’t want that you should... Okay, okay, so you did... Sure, I knew. I mean if you got the picture, I couldn’t hardly miss it... You’re kidding!... What made you think he’d go for it?... Oh Christ, so I’m a movie star already... No, dear. I’ll tell you one thing. Promises don’t mean a hell of a lot... If it’s for real, why the hell not? What could I lose?... Yeah. The ticket is good for thirty days or something. I can’t get Joe now, but I could get him early in the morning before he leaves... When would all this... Well, you are some great little arranger, aren’t you, honey?... I know where it is... If you wouldn’t mind, yes, I’ll see you there... Of course, I’m nervous! What do you think?... Vel? Thanks, honey. From the bottom of my heart. What?... No, I mean whether it works out or doesn’t, thanks for the try... Sure... See you.”

She hangs up and sits very still, looking into a comer of the room and nibbling at the edge of a thumbnail.

“What’s up?”

“Maybe I’ll take the bus tomorrow instead.”

“Who’s Velma?”

“A girl. She used to work at the place I used to work. I ran into her last week and told her my sad, sad story. Then she was in the place the night before last, my last night working. I’m meeting her later on today.”

“Why?”

“She’s got a friend that maybe can loan me the money to send Joe.”

“A man?”

“You shouldn’t ask so many questions, Marty.”

“And when she came in the other night she had the man with her?”

“Look. It’s my problem, right? You couldn’t do anything about it. So you don’t get to ask questions about how I take care of it.”

I am standing directly in front of her and she is looking up at me, her eyes wide and startled. Suddenly she stands up into my arms. I hold her. She trembles and makes a single coughing sob.

“Tell me!”

“No. I’m not going to tell you, Martin.”

“Please. Please.”

She turns out of my arms and moves away, turns toward me, fists on her hips. “What you want most in the world is to have me stay right here. I think maybe I can. I sort of love you. You know that. Not like before. If you don’t ask me about anything, I think it will be okay if you come here. You could get some kind of a job, maybe. It wouldn’t have to be so much. You could stay here with me, even. I could sort of... take care of you. If it all works out. But don’t ask me about things, okay? Not ever. Not where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Okay, Martin? Okay, honey?”

I know it is the same day but I am not sure how much later it is, and I do not know why I have walked over to Tenth Avenue to Speedy Parcel. Somewhere in my mind I know why I am there, but I cannot remember the reason.

I go in and go back through the gate, all of it a familiar part of my life, and back to the little office in the far comer. The door is open, and Floss is behind her old oak desk. Eight years of working this account, coming in once a month, kidding around with Floss and with Mr. Baum. She is in her fifties, with blue hair and a round, wrinkled little face, and a deep voice. She says funny, bitter things.

“Jesus Christ! Marty! Sit down before you fall down. You look terrible. Marty, I heard they fired you. Honest, I couldn’ta felt worse about anything. You find a job yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You want a job, you gotta first shave, get a haircut, put a clean shirt on, and get that suit pressed. Cleaned and pressed.”

“I guess I haven’t been looking too hard, Floss.”

She stares at me with concern in her eyes. “What did you hit yourself with, Marty? Booze, pot, horses, broads? For the last five six months you worked us, you weren’t worth a shit. You know that, huh?”

“I know. I sort of lost control of things.”

“You want a job?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so! Meanwhile you live off your portfolio, huh? You close the country estate and fire the servants, huh? Listen, if you mend a fence here, there’s a chance. Remember how always you and Mr. Baum used to kid around every time, about who was getting balder and fatter? About getting half rates on haircuts? Then you came in like five months ago and he comes in and gives you the needle and you looked up at him like you never seen him before in your life and you told him you were busy and behind schedule. Marty, that really pissed him off. What you could do, you get yourself cleaned up good and come in and apologize, and try kidding a little bit. Careful, until you see how he takes it, and then ask him if there’s anything here. Because there is, in dispatching and route control. You could pick it up in a week. The guy we got to replace Kramer, in a lifetime he couldn’t learn how. Marty, this is for old times’ sake. Don’t try it unless you got yourself straightened out. Unless you got rid of whatever turned you into a slob.”

“Twenty-five hundred dollars, Floss.”

“What? What does that mean? You stole it? Marty, God help you, that’d cook any chance here, because people got to be bonded. You know that.”

I feel impatient with her. “No. I’ve got to get twenty-five hundred dollars. It’s very important.”

“You’ve lost me somewhere, Marty.”

I know why I have come to see her. There was never less than five thousand cash on hand in all the eight years I serviced the account. “Not any more than that. Just twenty-five hundred even.”

“Are you asking for a loan, for God’s sake?”

There is a spindle on her desk. I see my hand go out slowly and pick it up and I see my other hand pull the papers off the spindle. The round hardwood base fits against the heel of my hand. The spindle sticks out between my middle and ring finger, six inches long and sharp.

In a husky whisper she says, “Marty! No, honey. No.”

“Bring the cash box out of the safe like always, Floss.”

She sits straight and folds her hands and puts them on the edge of the desk. I look at her throat because I cannot look at her eyes. “Marty, I know you. You are a nice guy, Marty. I can loan you maybe thirty dollars out of my purse. You want to stick me with that thing, go ahead. Do me the favor, please. Because if I am so wrong about somebody I know so long, then I do not care to hang around this cruddy world. If you can do it, we’re both dead. Come on, Marty. It doesn’t take much guts to stick an old lady.”

I have been holding the base so tightly my fingers hurt. I watch my hands as they put it back on the desk and pick up the papers and put them back on the spindle where they belong.

As I am walking out I hear her saying, “Marty? Marty?” I know she is following me. After I am on the street I do not hear her anymore.

I am back at the apartment. Andrea is not there. I try the door, and she forgot to make sure it locked. It is dark. I turn all the lights on, every one there is.

The corners of the mirror in the bathroom are still misted. There are still droplets on the inside of the yellow curtain. There are humid scents of her, of perfume, sprays, lotions.

I sit on the dressing table bench and I can see myself in the mirror. Swarthy stranger with a black shadow of stubble, mild brown eyes, receding hairline, a torso city-soft under the clothing. Tie pulled down, the knot greasy. Ring of black around the collar of the soiled white shirt. Under the clothing are varicosities, a chronic chest rash, recurring problems with piles, a tendency toward high blood pressure, an increasing shortness of breath these past couple of years.

After a little while I make certain that the doors and windows are all closed. I take pieces of her clothing from the discard pile on the floor at the foot of the bed, and I soak them in the kitchenette sink and tuck them into the gaps under the doors and on the window sills. I recognize familiar things, the little pink robe, a scarf I bought her.

It takes me a long time to figure out the best way to support myself at the right position, and at last I try the dressing table bench. If I take out the center divider of the small oven and put a pillow in there, I can lay on my back along the bench with my head on the pillow. I remember to blow out the little pilot light first.

So I am comfortable, and I can hear the random sounds of the city, the random sounds of love over the nearby whisper of the burners. I wedge my thumbs under my belt to keep my hands resting on my belly. The deep constant noise of the city merges with the hissing and with other small noises, the sound of her hairbrush, the sounds of the spray cans she uses, the sound of a palm sliding along flesh in a slow caress, the rustling of bedding, the whistling of her eager breath, and her sated cozy sighings.

There is something I have forgotten. Some small thing. Unimportant. It slides into my mind and slips away, like a piece of paper fluttering down, passing through a narrowing beam of light. Unimportant. I’ll remember it another day.

Dear Old Friend

Lucy, please save this whole tape. This is a tough letter to write, and I may not get it right the first time. But I want to save any false starts, just for the record. No need to transcribe the false starts, if any. Just file the tape, after you type up the final version. The letter goes to Howard J. Faxton, at that Holiday Inn north of town. You can check the proper address. I’ll want hand delivery on it.

If I don’t get it right the first time, I’ll leave a note on the machine with the index number of the final version.

Dear Howie. You might be able to guess that after you left the house the other night, Ruthie and I stayed up a long time and talked. It was quite a shock having you come out of the blue after seven long years.

And naturally we were very upset to hear that Annabelle passed away over a year ago. Ruthie was quite hurt about your not letting us know. Remember, she gave up writing when Annabelle wouldn’t write back. After all, the gals were the best of friends. But I suppose there comes a time when a woman has to be loyal to her husband. And it was pretty obvious at the time you and I split up that Annabelle had the strange idea that I’d given you a raw deal. You know that is not so, and I know it, and so does Ruthie.

All three of us had a little too much to drink the other night, and we finally started saying things that none of us really mean. The evening shouldn’t have ended on that note.

Ruthie and I did some reminiscing, and she remembered a lot of things I’d completely forgotten, after you left. I’d forgotten how scared and edgy and insecure you and I felt back there in nineteen fifty-six when we cut ourselves loose from Win-Tech and all that nice job security and set up as Ray-Fax Associates, Inc.

One crummy little cinder-block building out on Route 181, eight grand working capital, two employees — four if you count Ruthie and Annabelle. Those gals worked like dogs for no pay at all.

Those were the fun years, Howie. How many times did we nearly sink without a trace? I can count three times that first year. But then the contract from Army Ordnance got us over the hump.

I am perfectly willing to admit, anywhere, anytime, that you are the fella that made it work. You are the wizard. Win-Tech tried a lot harder to keep you than they did to keep me. I’m a backstop-type guy, hot on administration and controls. But people who can design circuits and take the bugs out of them are rare birds.

Like you said the other night, you haven’t kept up with the state of the art, but I’d think that, once you caught up with all the miniaturized advances, you could write your own ticket anywhere.

Because I’ve got confidence in what I know you can do, I’m willing to make a place for you in Ray-Fax. Our budget on R. and D. is a little slender, but the way the projected earnings look, I think I could get the Board to agree to fatten it up some.

But I wouldn’t want you to come in again feeling as if you were getting the dirty end of the stick on our option arrangement that we made seven years ago.

Let me refresh your memory, Howie. You wanted to keep the company in high-risk areas by concentrating all our resources in money and manpower on new product development. I said we had to dig in and milk the maximum return out of the Diatrex line, cut costs further, go for volume.

We argued bitterly for months before we decided to split. And then we negotiated. Right? You wanted to peddle your twenty thousand shares to me for twenty dollars a share and walk away with four hundred thousand dollars. How was I supposed to raise that kind of money? I couldn’t put up the stock, because there was no established market in it then.

I did the best I could, Howie. I scrambled up one hundred thousand dollars and that looked like all the money in the world back then, believe me. That was, as it says in our contract, an option for ten years for me to buy your twenty thousand shares at fifteen dollars a share, and you agreed to escrow the stock and give me a proxy to vote it for you.

And you went away and left me with the whole ball of wax and more fifteen-hour days and seven-day weeks than I want to count.

I can see your point on how it could seem unfair to you for me to exercise that option at this time. With the stock splits and dividends during the past seven years, your twenty thousand shares is now thirty-one thousand six hundred, which means that I would be buying for a little under ten dollars a share stock now bid in the O.T.C. market at forty-one and three-eighths, as of today. So it will cost me an additional three hundred thousand dollars to pick up shares now worth $1,307,450.

I am not promising anything, but maybe we can get together and work something out. We both have to take any kind of chip off our shoulder and talk, man to man, the way we used to be able to.

I only wish that...

Scrap that letter. Try it again, dammit

Dear Howie. You left Ruthie and myself in a pretty bad state the other night. I think that when a man wants to amend or adjust a legal contract, it isn’t exactly smart to show up all of a sudden without warning and say some mighty ugly things.

I was so taken aback the other night that I didn’t get around to telling you some cold hard facts.

You know the shape we were in when you left. You know how the books looked, how the orders looked, how much money we were making. We’d been in the new buildings a year, and the debt service burden was heavy. Your stock interest wasn’t worth a dime more than I agreed to pay for it, at that time. Increase in value has happened since you left, and you had nothing to do with it. Right?

In a pretty unpleasant way, Howie, you brought up the fact that profits have come from the Diatrex line, which you developed and which we have fenced in with good solid patents. I want to remind you that, at the time you were working out the circuitry, we were both employees of Ray-Fax, working on Ray-Fax time, and so any developments belonged to the corporation, not to you as an individual. If you were an outsider and I had bought the Diatrex concept from you, I would imagine that I would be paying you royalties amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, even though you would hardly recognize the line these days. I have some hot young kids who are really on the ball, and they have made some interesting improvements and refinements.

I think you ought to face the fact, Howie, that you are a little bit out of touch with reality. I realize that you had a very hard time, learning that Annabelle had leukemia, and I can appreciate your going abroad where living was cheap so you could be with her for those three years, taking care of her. I can appreciate the fact that you are out of touch with the industry and that you are broke, but, old friend, three hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly a pittance.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. I didn’t force you to get out. That was your decision. It shocked me that you actually wanted to leave. I thought at that time you were my best friend in all the world.

You left me holding the bag. Okay. I went ahead with the plans you didn’t want to live with. I stayed and fought it out, Howie. So now Ray-Fax has six hundred employees, and in the last fiscal year we made an after-tax net of a dollar seventy-seven per share on the five hundred eighty-eight thousand shares outstanding.

Where do you think a record like that comes from? From my sweat, old friend. From plugging away at it for seven years. I added the value. You had nothing to do with it.

You hit the sauce pretty hard the other night, Howie. I don’t know if that has become kind of a habit with you since Annabelle passed away, but I can tell you that it made communication pretty difficult.

You make it pretty rough for anybody to try to meet you even half way on this thing. You certainly didn’t leave me with any big fat desire to bring you back into the fold and play wet nurse until you can pull your own weight again.

If you want to come to the office and offer some kind of apology for your words and actions the other night, it might give us some kind of starting point from which we could...

No dice. Try it again.

Dear Howard. If there were just the two of us involved, like in the old days, then it would make things a lot simpler. But in view of the present setup your demands and your recriminations just do not make sense. As the chief executive officer and chairman of the Board of Directors of Ray-Fax, Incorporated, I am responsible to all the hundreds of stockholders of the corporation.

How can that affect a private stock option agreement between you and me? Because we are now in registration, coming out with additional shares of common and some convertible debentures with warrants attached to finance necessary expansion. I have provided the investment banking firm, as required by law, with all the facts in full disclosure. The investment bankers are now preparing a “red herring” which will have to be approved by the S.E.C. in every particular. In enumerating my personal holdings in Ray-Fax, I naturally included the option agreement on twenty thousand shares, along with the duration of that option and the purchase price.

Were I now to even attempt to alter any portion of that agreement, the investment bankers and the S.E.C. would want to know why I had not gone through with a legal stock purchase based upon a perfectly legitimate legal...

Now I think I know which way to go with it. This should do it. Lucy, I think this better go out registered mail, return receipt. And don’t use my private stationery. Use the company bond, and make an extra copy for Mike Shanniger.

10 January 1970

Mr. Howard J. Faxton Room 34 Holiday Inn

4840 By-Pass Highway

Weston, Ohio

Dear Howard,

I am glad you were able to stop by the other evening and say hello.

Ruth and I want to express again our belated sympathy to you on the loss of your wife, Annabelle.

This letter will serve as formal notification to you of my intent to purchase from you your holdings in Ray-Fax, Incorporated, represented by those shares now held in escrow by the legal firm of Finch, Dickinson and Shanniger, under the terms of our option contract agreement dated Sept. 16th, 1963.

I have instructed Mr. Michael Shanniger to act in my behalf in this matter and to deliver to you a certified check in the amount of $300,000, and then release the certificates for registration in my name.

I am sure Mr. Shanniger will be able to answer any questions you may have regarding this contractual transaction.

Ruth joins me in extending to you our best wishes, and we hope you will find agreeable and rewarding work in the very near future.

With warm personal regards,

D. Franklin Raymond

Chief Executive Officer

and

Chairman of the Board of Directors

The Willow Pool

My name is Mabel Turner. Mrs. Ralph Turner. I guess it is my fault the girl ever stayed here on the place. We have three hundred acres of apple trees. It is land my father and my grandfather used to own. We are just about midway between Watkins Glen and Ithaca. We raised three children here. They all went to Cornell, and they are all married and live farther away than I would like. But I am ever grateful we got them through college and out into the world before all this rioting and drugs started, before they all began to look alike in their funny clothes and long hair.

A few years ago we used to have an apple stand out front by the state road. But it was more nuisance than it was worth. My husband built it the way he builds everything, very strong and tight, out of the best materials.

When we decided to give up the apple stand, I said it might make a nice little cabin. My husband Ralph jacked it up and put it on a flatbed wagon and tractored it up through the west orchard and over the knoll and down to the bank of Cold Creek, to a pretty place I picked. He built a fieldstone foundation and put the apple stand on it.

We decided that there wasn’t much point in putting a lot of money in it. It was only eighteen feet long and ten feet wide. It has a shed roof. Ralph left the big shutters on, two of them, permanently propped up, and put sliding windows and screens in the two openings. He put some panel board on the studs on the inside and built a bunk bed, put blue asphalt tile on the floor, and built three steps up to the doorway in the end, and put another window in the other end. We did not want to go to the expense of plumbing. Ralph ran a power line from the house back there, enough to run some lights and a little pump to pull water from the creek into a little sink inside. You have to put a pail under the drain from the sink.

I fixed up a kitchen with a little kerosene stove and a little electric refrigerator that’s very old but has always worked well. Ralph built an outdoor privy over at the edge of the marsh about sixty feet back from the cabin. I put up curtains, and we had some things stored in the top of the barn that made pretty furniture when Ralph spray-painted it.

I had him put it on the south bank of the creek about forty feet east of the willow pool. The creek runs through a shallow valley. There are old apple trees there, too old to bear properly, but they were planted by my grandfather and we have not had the heart to cut them down and put in better stock. The creek is spring fed. There is a deep pool under the shade of three old willow trees. Even in August and September the water is icy. It is always in shade.

I swam there on the hottest days of summer when I was a little girl, and so did my mother. In May the little valley is full of the sweet smell of apple blossoms.

The girl came to the door of the main house in May, early May, two years ago. I saw her little red car in the driveway. An old car, I guess. Five or six years old. A foreign car. She had seen our sign about having a cabin to rent. There were Pennsylvania license plates on her car. She wore red pants and a shaggy gray sweater. She was a little bit of a thing, with long straight black hair that she kept pushing back.

I said it was empty and she wanted to look at it. She said it was just for herself. She seemed like a quiet, polite girl. I said it did not have modern conveniences, and she said that wasn’t too important to her. I wished Ralph had been there to say no. But he was at a meeting at Cornell, where they were talking about the newest thing in orchard sprays.

I asked her how old she was and then said she didn’t look twenty. She showed me her driver’s license. Her name was Elizabeth Norris Ames, and she said everybody had always called her Norrie. She was twenty, and on the driver’s license it said she was a student. I asked her why she wasn’t in school, and she said she had had to drop out of Coulter in her senior year because of illness. She said she had her books with her, and she needed a quiet place to study and catch up. She had been out since March. She said that, if she could put in a good month of work, she could go back and they would let her take her final examinations.

I walked back with her and up the hill and down into the valley and unlocked the place for her. She thought it was wonderful, but she was looking at the trees and the creek and the pool, not the cabin. I said that, because it didn’t have conveniences, she could have it for the month of May for forty dollars if she wanted it. She gave me two twenty-dollar bills back at the house when I wrote out her receipt. I told her then that I was renting it to her alone, and it didn’t include visitors. I certainly didn’t want to find a whole crowd of them living in that little cabin, carrying on the way they do these days.

By the time Ralph got home she was all settled in. He didn’t think much of the idea. But I took him back there and introduced her, and when we walked back to the house he said that she seemed like a mannerly little person. Maybe we wouldn’t have any trouble with her, but that, he said, was a case of wait and see.

She was polite, but she wasn’t very friendly. I would wave to her when she would drive out to go to the village and do her shopping, and she would wave back. When I made some brownies I took her some, still hot, and she thanked me nicely, but she gave me the feeling she’d rather I didn’t come calling. She said there wasn’t a thing she needed. I saw that she had her books and notebooks opened up all over the table, and she had some of that music they like these days playing over a little black radio standing on the shelf over the bunk bed, but not loud.

Maybe everything would have been all right if I hadn’t gone down there to the cabin that one Thursday afternoon, the twentieth day of May, as I recall. I was taking a Coleman lantern to loan her. I got a call from the power company that they had to change something or other around and they were going to cut off the power at six o’clock at night and turn it back on at six the next morning. I thought it might be scary for her to be all alone in the dark like that and not knowing what had happened, so it was a Christian favor I thought to do for her.

As I came around the end of the cabin I thought I heard a man laugh, and because I didn’t want to walk in on her if she had company, I stepped up onto a cinder block and looked through the end window. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, I’d say, and there she was, bold as brass, naked as an egg, her and the boy too, making love in a way no decent woman ever would, right on that bunk bed. I could see that he was just a young boy, maybe sixteen years old, stretched out flat on his back, and she was mounted on him, sitting up straight, or squatting, sort of, holding his hands for balance, and churning away with her narrow little hips. The two of them were giggling and chuckling. It was a dirty, shameless performance. That young boy wore his hair as long as a girl.

The boy looked beyond her and noticed me staring in and said something to her and she stopped whatever they call that trick she was doing and snapped her head around. With the two of them staring at me I stepped back off the cinder box and twisted my ankle. Not badly, but enough to give me a twinge.

“What do you want, Mrs. Turner?” she called in one of those social voices like you hear in the movies and on TV. I didn’t answer, and she called out the same question again.

By then I had an answer, and I made her hear me! I said I wanted her out of the cabin and off the property in an hour. I said when she packed and drove out she’d find an envelope in our RFD box with her forty dollars in it.

She called to me again in that same voice. “Thank you, Mrs. Tinner. You’re very kind. Good-bye, Mrs. Turner.”

Then I heard them giggling again in there.

I watched at the window and when she drove out she had the boy in her little red car beside her. She didn’t even glance toward the house. And she didn’t stop at the mailbox. I went and got the money back out and then I went down to the cabin. I have to say, in all fairness, that she left it all spick-and-span, just as nice or nicer than when she moved in.

By the time Ralph came back from the village, I had decided there was no point in going into it. It would only upset him. So I said that the girl got word from home that she had to hurry back, and she’d said to say good-bye to him too. It was easier that way. In spite of all the years we’ve been married, I don’t really see how I could have brought myself to explain to Ralph just what I saw them doing. I don’t like dirty talk.

I never thought I would ever see her again, not in my lifetime. But it just goes to show you that some people are absolutely brazen and shameless. What did she expect me to do when she came back here two years later? Hug her and kiss her? Pin a medal on her? I did what I had to do.

My name is Wyndam Harger. Dr. Wyndam Harger. I receive an annual retainer from Coulter College, the girl’s school where Elizabeth Norris Ames was a third-year student up until early March two years ago. My office is three blocks from the campus.

I was summoned on an emergency basis and arrived at the small infirmary at six o’clock on Monday morning, March third. The Ames girl had been brought in an hour earlier. I was told that one of the girls in the dormitory had been awake and had seen a car stop in front of the dormitory and had seen the Ames girl ejected forcibly from the vehicle. It had then driven off at a high rate of speed. The Ames girl had walked a short distance and had then fallen onto the grass. The girl had awakened her roommate, and the two of them had taken the Ames girl to the infirmary, awakening the trained nurse on duty and reporting to her that the Ames girl had been absent from the campus and from classes for perhaps ten days.

I examined the patient. She was semiconscious and uncommunicative. I could find no specific indications of drug abuse. I could find no indications of sexual assault or serious trauma of any kind. She was emaciated. Her color was bad, and she showed the classic symptoms of malnourishment. There were some contusions on her hips and thighs and breasts, overlapping bruises acquired over a period of time, according to the coloration of the bruises. The pattern and the dispersion of the bruises were such that I found it reasonable to assume they were the result of strenuous copulation with a male either very muscular or of sadistic tendency.

Her body was rather immature for a female of twenty. Pulse and respiration were slow. Blood pressure was down. Reflexes were below norm. There was minor anemia. The white count was within limits. Temperature was slightly subnormal.

To me the most indicative symptom of what was probably wrong with her was her refusal to answer any question, her determination to keep her eyes shut tightly, and her tendency to curl into the foetal position.

I had the choice of recommending treatment there, of asking that they call for psychiatric diagnois, that they take her forty miles into Boston to a hospital, or that they contact her parents in the Philadelphia area to come and take the girl home for all necessary medical attention.

I recommended the final course, as it seemed to me to be in the best interests of the patient. I suspected that it was an emotional disturbance, and probably severe. We have seen a fourfold increase in such disturbances among the young in recent years, and I believe that only a small percentage of that increase is due to experimentation with the mind-distorting drugs. With increasing numbers of us, there seems to be a kind of brutality of indifference, a loss of identifiable goals, a dubiousness about any kind of social or emotional ethic, which creates a climate requiring more survival strength than our more imaginative and sensitive young people possess. The pattern seems to be a sense of isolation and meaninglessness which demands of the young person increasingly bizarre behavior and eccentric social activities. Out of this identity quest comes a kind of wildness which eventually results in some deep and lasting violation of self-image. And then the next step is a fragmentation of personality and a withdrawal from reality.

A year ago at a dinner party a colleague brought up the idea that, inasmuch as the hard pesticides are in the fatty tissues of all of us to a degree which would render us inedible were we a cannibal nation, a certain amount might well get past the blood-brain barrier, enough to be revealed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of macerated brain tissue. He said that it is, after all, a nerve poison. He suggested that those of us who have achieved an emotional stability and a stable identity might be immune to the nerve-poison effects on our thought processes or might be influenced only to the point of having repressible urges to indulge in freakish, senseless behavior. The young, however, still involved in identity searches, in search of understandable and relevant ethics, might be far more susceptible to the influence of such poison. Then, of course, they would have the very human need to find a justification for their erratic, violent, meaningless acts, and would cast about and decide that their chemical-induced idiocies and self-destructive tendencies were in reality merely rebellion against the Establishment.

At the time I thought it an amusing mental game. But lately I am beginning to wonder if it might be useful to our society were a foundation grant given to explore that possibility, if only to eliminate it as a possible cause of those actions which of late are becoming even more incomprehensible to the participants themselves.

At any rate, the administration at Coulter was reluctant to send for the parents. Administrations are caught in a curious trap these days. The student body demands permissiveness because they claim a basic human right to do what they wish to do with themselves. The school takes the money of the parents and has an implied obligation to protect student victims not only from student predators but from the predators outside the borders of the campus. Just a few years ago there would have been a great hue and cry had the Ames girl been missing from her dormitory overnight. But ten days had passed without any alarm being sounded, any search instituted. When you give children the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities of adults, a higher attrition rate is the inevitable result. One need only imagine the analogy of a kindergarten group demanding the right to cross the busy highway at any time and in any manner and at any place they might desire.

The human race does not suddenly become brighter or more aware or more mature in one generation any more than would a single generation of horses, crickets, or penguins make some vast evolutionary step without warning.

These children are more glib because they have grown up in an audiovisual world. They are more articulate, because this has been encouraged in all their waking hours. A glibness, an expanded vocabulary, a knowledge through electronic transmission of what Cairo and New Delhi look like, is merely an expansion of an ability to communicate. The basics of what to communicate remains unchanged. Amplification and diversity of input can mean amplification and diversity of output. But the processing of the data is not improved. Maturation is not enhanced. The effect can be a spurious simulation of higher intelligence or earlier maturity, which then imposes the responsibilities of the fraudulent condition upon the individual. And more of them break, as did the Ames girl.

One might even argue that instant and massive communications plus an increasing compulsion to herd together might well reduce both intelligence and maturity.

I ordered and supervised tube-feeding of the patient, gave her massive vitamin injections, and dictated a note to go with her, on her departure, for the information of her doctors.

In such cases one cannot make any prognosis without a great deal more knowledge than I possessed two years and more ago. I can express a personal and unprofessional conviction, however, that no young person comes out of such episodes unmarked. They can learn to survive in the world on the basis of a series of accommodations, provided they are brought back from the dangerous area of withdrawal.

But, like soldiers home from the wars after surviving wounds that used to always be fatal, they cannot exist again on the same plane and in the same context as the rest of us.

As I am not qualified in the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology, it would be presumptuous of me to pass any opinion on the treatment she was given, on the way she was handled. I would only say this, that it is not at all surprising to me that it all ended so sadly and tragically.

My name is Amelia Ames. Mrs. Jonathan Ames. Norrie is my middle child, my only daughter. We have always lived near Paoli, my husband’s people and mine. There have been people named Norris and people named Ames in this area for two hundred years.

When the people at Coulter phoned us and told us over two years ago that Norrie was not well, that she seemed to be in a state of nervous exhaustion, I found it most irritating that I could not speak to her on the telephone. We were having perfectly horrible March weather, and both Jonathan and myself had engagements we could not easily break. It did not seem feasible to either fly to Boston or drive up.

So I phoned Corrine Hallowill in Cambridge and asked her if it would be too much trouble for her to go over to Coulter and give me some sort of report on Norrie. She was glad to do it. We were roommates at Smith, and though we do not see each other as often as we would like, we exchange letters often.

Corrine phoned me back at cocktail time, just as we were dressing to go to the club. She was hesitant at first and then she finally told me that Norrie was actually in frightful shape. But I had to press her for several minutes before she finally said it seemed to be some kind of complete mental breakdown. Why couldn’t those people at the school have told me that in the first place?

Once I learned some of the ugly details, I could understand why they were concerned only with having my daughter taken off their hands. Certainly they were quite conscious of their culpability in the whole affair. They could have kept far better track of my daughter. Apparently her erratic behavior began when she went back there after her Christmas vacation at home.

We did not notice anything out of the ordinary about Norrie during the Christmas holidays. She seemed happy. And quite healthy. I might say that we did not pay as much attention to the children that Christmas as we had in prior years. Jonathan and I were under severe emotional strain. We were trying to pretend to our friends and our relatives and our children that everything was well between us. But Jonathan had managed to get himself seriously involved with that wretched Warrington woman. Tom Warrington died suddenly of heart disease that summer, and Phyllis had prevailed upon Jonathan to advise her regarding the readjustment of the portfolio of securities Tom had left her in the marital trust. I suspect that there were more meetings than necessary. In the beginning she perhaps invented excuses for asking him to call and explain things to her. And later I imagine he came up with his share of imaginary necessities.

We had both always liked Tom but thought Phyllis a bit of an ass, quite attractive in a brassy fashion, a horsewoman of great ability, and a spendid sailor and tennis player. But inclined to have the one drink too many, to be too loud in public places, and to use the usual four-syllable words too often.

About two weeks before Christmas we were at a large dinner party at the Gordons’, and we had brought Phyllis with us and were to take her home. I happened to be looking in a mirror when Jonathan helped her on with her wrap, and I saw that kind of caress that a man never gives a woman unless he has been fornicating with her. I managed to control my reaction and waited until we were home alone before I charged him with it. At first he denied it all, being terribly indignant and hurt. But finally he confessed that for the past month he had been pouncing into bed with Phyllis Warrington at every opportunity. He said he did not know how it had started. It had just started, without warning.

I believe that at that juncture I used one of Phyllis’s four-letter words. He promised that it would never happen again. Our marriage was in real danger. We did discuss divorce, but not only would it have led to vast legal and financial complications, it would have given every mischievous bitch in the countryside enough dirty conversation to last the entire winter.

Thus when the children were home, Jonathan and I were in the process of establishing a new relationship with each other because he had defaulted on the old one. Communication is so terribly important, I think. We were both making a sincere effort to understand each other. Oddly enough, one by-product of the effort to cement the cracks in our marriage caused by his dreary infidelity was an increased physical awareness of each other, and an appetite for sexuality, which was more like the first year or two of our marriage than anything which had happened since. What I am saying is that Norrie could have been acting just a little bit oddly during those holidays and I would not have noticed it.

But I certainly would not feel we were remiss in any action we took once we knew the gravity of the situation. In matter of fact, Jonathan arranged to have Norrie brought all the way from Boston to Philadelphia by private ambulance, with a nurse in attendance. We were not actually at the hospital when she was brought in, but we were permitted a short visit after she had been settled into her room in the psychiatric wing. It was terrifying to see not the slightest glint of expression or recognition in the eyes of one’s own daughter, to see her so scrawny and lifeless.

We got the very top talent available, of course. Dr. Grenko did not try to confuse us or deceive us. He was very gentle and very honest. He said that not many years ago a young person who had withdrawn to that extent had had very little chance of ever recovering. But there were drugs now which often helped a great deal, and there were new forms of crash therapy. He would not promise he could help her. He just said that the odds were, for the first time in medical history, slightly in his favor. He said that if he could help her at least it would be a dramatic and sudden improvement.

And it was, of course. They used psychic energizer drugs to encourage communication. They put her into group therapy with other young people. They used a closed-circuit television technique to get her to understand herself. She would talk into the camera, and then it would be played back and she would watch herself.

In April she began to come home for visits, and by the middle of the month she was able to live at home and go back for treatment at Dr. Grenko’s office. I drove her until he said she was well enough to drive her own little car. The school had arranged for a student to drive it back from Massachusetts when spring vacation started, along with her personal things out of her room, and her school notebooks and texts. A lot of her nice things were missing, but I was able to control myself and not scold her. Dr. Grenko had told us to try to act perfectly natural around Norrie, with the single exception of not criticizing her.

We did our best. I think it was rude and inconsiderate of her to leave the way she did, with just that casual little note on my dressing table. I very nearly lost my patience with Dr. Grenko when he seemed delighted that she had run away. It was even more annoying when he phoned three days later to tell me that he had heard from Norrie. He said she had rented a little cottage on a farm in an apple orchard, and she seemed very happy. She told him she could concentrate on her books and catch up, maybe enough to go back in early June and take her examinations. I asked him for her address, but he said that she did not tell him where she was. I was certain he was lying to me, but I don’t know what I could have done about it.

Of course, she did not go back and take her examinations. She did not come back until September. She was brown as an Indian. She had put ten thousand miles on her little car. She had been all over the country. Her hands were a mess because my darling had actually done physical manual labor on some sort of commune thing out in Arizona. She seemed very merry and bright and gay. She did not go back to school, of course.

She did not want to stay with us, and because she had turned twenty-one and had started to receive the income from the trust, there was nothing we could do about it. She took that little apartment in Upper Darby and began to do quite well with her little pots and figurines, getting them into handicraft shows all over the area and selling them for what I thought was quite a bit of money for such strange lumpy little things.

We thought it was a blessing when she began going with Paul Warcroft and they fell in love and decided to marry. He comes from a very good family. Hazzlet and Warcroft is a very conservative and successful investment banking house. Paul and Norrie had actually been in the same dancing class when they were small. He was three years older than Norrie.

I know what happened, of course. But I cannot see where Jonathan and I were at fault. Dr. Grenko did come to see us after he had talked to Norrie, and he did say that in his opinion it would be better if she waited a bit longer before marrying. It seemed to me at the time that it was none of his business, actually. Norrie had had her trouble a couple of years earlier, and she had gotten over it nicely.

We thought it would be a blessing for Norrie to be safely and properly married to a very orderly and levelheaded young man, someone she could lean upon. And it was a lovely, lovely wedding.

My name is Kellaher Mason. People call me Kelly. I was going to Boston U. at the time I met Norrie Ames. I used to run around with some pretty heavy people. Off-campus people. I got over it. They can run you into bad trouble.

Norrie was a pistol. She was racing her motor every minute. She wasn’t on anything. She had enough energy for four people, but I didn’t really get to know her. The way it happened, two of us went out to Coulter and brought Norrie and another girl whose name I forget into town on a Friday. We went to a party late Friday night and by then I was bombed out of my skull. I had a fight with Norrie. I don’t know what it was about. Anyway, the party was in somebody’s house and it had been going on for days.

A fellow they call Mush was there. A big evil fellow. I think he had played pro ball somewhere, and I don’t know how he made a living at the time. Something about gambling, I think. He was one of the early speed freaks. If I hadn’t fought with Norrie and if I hadn’t been so smashed on wine, I probably would have started a pretty good brawl when Mush tried to leave with her. She didn’t want to go with him, particularly. But it didn’t matter to me a bit.

So they left, and it was at least ten days later I ran into Mush. It wasn’t an accident. He had been looking for me. He was upset. He said he wanted to get rid of Norrie, but he didn’t know where she belonged and he couldn’t find out. He said she was acting pretty strange. He said that he thought maybe she was dying.

It scared me because it wouldn’t be impossible for somebody to trace back and find the other girl and get a make on me as the date she had when she left Coulter. Mush took me to his place. It was a mess. Unbelievable. A cave where bears live. He said she had been talking about how the inside of her head was shrinking into a red ball with everything all tangled up inside it so she couldn’t sort it out. Then she’d stopped talking at all.

He had taken her there right from the party, and he’d been balling her for ten days and nights, going out to get food and bring it back. He had scuffed her up pretty bad. He said she hadn’t been eating much of anything. I couldn’t get any reaction out of her. I got more scared. Speed makes a person sexy. For all I knew he had busted her up inside somehow.

So we put her clothes on her and I borrowed a car and Mush carried her out after it was late and the streets were empty and put her in the front seat. I drove out to the school and let her out in front of the dormitory and got the hell out of there.

Funny thing. All the way back I was thinking of how I was going to find Mush and I was going to really pound him right down into the ground. I didn’t find him until three days later, and then I said hello and he said hello, and that was it. I’ve never seen him since. I don’t even know what his name was. Everybody called him Mush. He was close to thirty, getting a little bald. He’d lost his front teeth playing offensive guard. Six three, maybe two forty-five. I was still mad enough to take him, but I didn’t even try.

My name is Ralph Turner. It surprised me when Mabel went ahead and rented the apple stand to the little Ames girl. Mabel usually lets me make the decision on everything concerning money. I thought a single girl might be trouble, but after Mabel took me down to the creek and had me meet Norrie Ames, I decided that Mabel had used good judgment. I hadn’t expected to rent it for the month of May, so it was like finding forty dollars. She seemed like a polite little thing. She took the place on the second day of May.

It is a hard thing for me to tell what happened and how it happened. I certainly would not want Mabel to ever know anything about it. I just can’t understand what it was that happened to me that May. Let me see, I was sixty-one, forty-one long years older than that little dark-haired girl. It was an accident, I suppose.

When a person stands down there in that pretty little valley near the willow pool, there is only one part of my land you can see, other than the little ridges that hem the valley in. And that is a knoll almost a half mile west and a little north of the pool. It is almost on my property line. I left some hardwood on the knoll, some beech and birch, and on the seventh day of May — unseasonably warm it was — I walked up there to see if the wild bees were hiving in the big dead birch stub, thinking that I might get some help and try smoking them and moving them to one of my own hives down in the meadow near the house, and see if they’d take hold and settle in. I tried for a long time to spot some flying in and decided there were no hives on the knoll. I was going to go on back to the house when I remembered that some of the big old granddaddy apple trees down near the willow pool had hollow places a wild swarm might take to. So I walked on over there, and I swear I had forgotten all about the apple-stand cabin being occupied.

It was a hot day, a little before noon. I moved slowly, stopping to listen. The air was so still I thought I might hear the hum of a big hive if it wasn’t too far away from the ground. As I neared the creek I saw something I couldn’t make out for the first half second. As soon as I saw what it was, I eased back one long step so that I was behind the thick old trunk of one of the original trees. It was a girl’s legs, bent sharp at the knee, sticking up out of the grass there near the bank of the creek. The grass was maybe eight inches high but thin enough so I could see the shape of the rest of her sprawled out there in the sunshine.

I should have just moved back in a straight line, keeping the tree in the way. But I looked around the trunk, just as she sat up, looking the other way from me, and then stood up. I guess she’d had a bath in the creek, dried off, and stretched out on a yellow robe in the sunshine to get warm and get some tan.

Two years ago, that was. And I was forty-one years older than that dark-haired girl. My eldest granddaughter is about that same age. Norrie Ames stood up slow and naked not fifteen feet from me. Slim little girl, little nubbin breasts on her, but woman-built down through the slope of her belly, hips swelling out from the waist and tapering, dark-hair smudge on the little plump girl-part of her, all smooth and fine as ivory, her heavy black hair still damp, swinging as she stooped and picked up the towel.

I’ve always liked to look at young girls on the street, walking free, laughing together. They are pretty things and good to look at, like young-blooded horses, like blossoms, like all the free wild things of the world.

I was all ready to yank my head back quick if she started to turn. I told myself I was just looking at a pretty thing in the world. No harm in it. I told myself my granddaughter would look just as pretty in the sunshine standing in the green grass with the blue brook beyond and the apple blossoms all around us.

But it was a sick thing in an old man, because it was more than looking. It was wanting. It was a grinding, aching, terrible kind of wanting, because it was the way a beast wants, the way a brute wants. It made my heart thump so hard I shook with each beat. It made my breath come right off the top of my lungs so fast I had to try hard to keep my breathing quiet.

I had thought I was over that kind of feeling long ago. I had always fought to keep that feeling from rising up inside me, and at last when it stopped happening I was relieved because I did not have to have the sense of evil and shame anymore. It was not fair to Mabel to let that feeling get out of hand. She was and is a good wife to me, but she never took pleasure in the act. Maybe a little in the beginning, but not after the firstborn. I never possessed any other woman but my wife. She never denied me, but I didn’t ever want to abuse the rights of the husband, and in the spring of the year I had the habit of wearing myself down with heavy work on the place so as not to reach over to her side of the bed in the night too often, when it got to be too much for me to control.

It was a terrible thing to have it all come back like that when you think it has finally left you in peace for the rest of your life. It was a frightening thing to know that it could wake up again and be so quick and savage and needful.

She wiped her throat with the towel, and she whacked a bug that lit on the top of her thigh, and she leaned over again and picked up the robe and swung it around her shoulders. She stretched and yawned and went toward the cabin, picking her footsteps carefully because she was barefoot.

When she was gone I went back the way I came. My knees felt weak and trembly, and my body was sweaty under my clothes. I went all the way back to the hardwood knoll and found a place hidden and private and got down on my knees and prayed to the Lord to deliver me from my weakness and my sinful desires and to forgive me for lusting after the flesh of a young girl. But all the time I prayed, thinking of the words and saying them aloud, I had evil pictures in the back of my mind, of myself walking toward her and having her smile at me in a knowing way and lay down for me on the robe in the grass, spread herself for me, and take me in. I knew just how her flesh would feel under my hands, just how her sweet young mouth would taste.

So the praying did no good. I spent too long at it, and Mabel was cross about me being late to the midday meal. I guess I didn’t act like myself. I chewed and swallowed and everything had no taste. When she went over to the stove one time, she stopped behind my chair and put the back of her hand to my forehead to see if I had a fever. A lot of people had the flu that spring.

It was a kind of a fever, I guess. I woke up that night and it was all in my mind, just as sharp and clear as if I was seeing it again. In the night it scared me. Norrie was just a schoolgirl. A lot of old men get strange, and they have to put them away to keep them from harming themselves and others. I’d lived a good life, worked hard raising my kids, ran a good orchard operation. I had a good reputation all over the county and a lot of friends.

I knew I could throw it all away. The bad thing was that I wanted somehow to throw it all away. I wanted the sickness and the evil, and I wanted to take her by force. It was a feeling that was stronger than my religion and my self-respect.

I fought it as best I could. I remember at one point striking myself with my fist on the top of my thigh a dozen times, using pain to make the wanting go away. I hit so hard I had big ugly bruises for a long time, and I had to keep remembering not to limp in front of Mabel.

I had stared at the child’s naked body on the seventh day of May. The next day was overcast and windy, and the wind had an edge to it. I was grateful to God for giving me time to become strong again. The ninth of May was cloudless and cool, but there was no wind. I kept telling myself all morning that I had no reason to believe she had any set pattern of going into the pool near the middle of the day on warm days. I told myself I had the strength to stay away from there and never find out. But all that morning little electrical quivers would come out of nowhere and run up and down my body, and there would be an empty fluttering feeling in my belly. The little things I happened to see around the place would remind me of her. One smooth pale stone in Mabel’s rock garden turned into a small breast and then back into a stone. The curve of the scythe handle hanging on the peg in the shed was the same as the curve of her waist the way it went into the line of her hip. Apple branches made girl shapes in my eyes.

I told myself I would not go near the pool, and at the same time I was telling myself I had the right to go anywhere I wanted to on my own place. But at least I held off long enough, because when I looked down over the little crest into the valley I saw her in the same robe walking toward the cabin, not ten feet from the steps I built after I got it set on the fieldstone foundation.

It was like some kind of great victory to be late, to have missed staring at her flesh. But the victory feeling went away as I realized I had learned that it was her habit on the warm days to bathe in the pool. It would have been better if I had not seen her at all.

A hard wind blew all day of the tenth, so there was no victory to be won. I had to spend most of the eleventh in Ithaca with Mabel, so that did not count either. The twelfth was a hot still day, and I did not go near the valley. I started toward the valley, and I stopped and put my arms around a young apple tree as if it were a woman and I ground my forehead against the bark and sobbed and felt the tear-tickle on my cheeks. So it was a victory, and the cost of winning it was high. I felt drained and sick and old for the rest of that day.

I won again, day after day, but each time, each hot day, the margin was narrower. I had cruel dreams. I was not eating well. Mabel got on my nerves. And I finally lost my battle on the sixteenth day of May. I knew when I woke up that I was going to sneak into the valley early so as not to take any chance of missing her again. I did not care that I had become a sick, foolish, and dangerous old man. It was a necessity for me. I could not go on living otherwise.

I found the right place and moved into it at eleven fifteen. It was a nest in much deeper grass on a backslope beyond the pool. A half hour later she came from the cabin toward the pool. She was wearing the same robe. There was a boy with her, sixteen I would guess, trying without success to grow a beard. His hair was long. He wore khaki shorts. He was a slender boy, but with good shoulders and a deep chest. They were laughing and talking together. They had soap and towels.

She dropped her robe in the sunny place in the grass. He stepped out of his shorts, and they came naked into the willow pool together, yelping with the shock of the cold water. They splashed and played there, leaving soap on the icy water. They were innocent and unashamed. There was no hint of lovemaking. They were like young otters. They were part of nature, both handsome and healthy young animals. And I was a saddened and smutty old man, seeing myself as they would see me had they known I was hidden and waiting just to look upon the girl’s body again. In the time they were in the pool, perhaps ten minutes, I was cured of my dangerous illness. They hurried out, chattering and shuddering into the sunlight, snatched up their towels, and hopped about, drying themselves. He put his shorts on and they lay on the girl’s robe in the sun, she with a towel across her loins. I could not hear what they were saying to each other. I heard them giggle. He got up and trotted to the cabin and came back with two opened cans of some soft drink. I wormed my way back out of their sight. That was the last of it for me.

Though there had been no caresses, I had the feeling that they had been intimate, that the boy was staying there with her. I thought of telling Mabel, but I knew what a disaster that would be. Mabel has been a good wife to me, but there is a kind of harsh virtue about her. It is intolerance. She can be cruel and will never admit she enjoys being cruel. She works herself up to it by saying it is her Christian duty. I knew that had I told her she would have marched down there and said all manner of dirty things to them in the name of God.

I could never have made her see that if those two made their love together, it would be the way young creatures are in the springtime, simple and natural, not smeared and sinful and evil. From the way they acted together they liked each other. There was joy in them, not guilt.

Then, as I walked slowly back toward our house, across our land, I realized for the first time that the sick fever which had attacked me and had so suddenly been cured was something that all the years of marriage to Mabel had helped create. She had made sex a dark and shameful act, something done swiftly in darkness and never admitted or acknowledged in daylight. She had hidden her pregnancies as long as she could and in the last months had not gone out among friends or strangers. And so it had twisted me too, bolting an iron lid down on my human needs and instincts so that the pressures had warped something inside me.

A waste of something that could have been a good part of marriage, a good part of our lives. Now that we were old I was a sick and dangerous old man, and she was an old woman full of righteousness, with a venomous mouth and a permanent expression on her once-sweet face of suspicion and disapproval.

I was surprised and relieved when I found out the girl had had to leave earlier than she had planned. Even though I had stopped my mind from touching her body while I was awake, she was still a torment in my dreams, and the sooner she left, the sooner the dreams would return to old safe patterns.

I would say it was almost three months ago that a man named Paul Warcroft telephoned me long distance and asked if he and his wife could have the cabin for the month of May. He sounded like a pleasant young man over the phone. I asked him how he knew about the cabin, and he said a good friend of his had stayed in the cabin for a time and had liked it. I made sure he knew that it does not have all the extras that city people expect.

A lot of summer people had rented it during the two summers since Norrie Ames had stayed there. I told him he could have it if he would send me a deposit. I got the deposit in the mail the next day.

When they arrived in their shiny new car I recognized the bride right away. There was no mistaking their being on their honeymoon. She was very friendly. She did the introducing, all smiling and lively.

Of course, at that time I didn’t know why Mabel was so upset at finding out that Mrs. Paul Warcroft was Norrie Ames. I could hear Mabel all over the house, setting her feet down harder than usual, muttering to herself the way she does when she is working herself up to something. I think she came close to telling me a couple of times. If she had, maybe I could have stopped her. I don’t know. I know I would have tried.

In all fairness, I know that if she had had any way of knowing what would happen, she would never have said the first word to Paul Warcroft. She feels miserable about it. I guess she always will. I know I will. We seem to have even less to say to each other these days. The days are long and quiet. We’ll never rent the cabin again.

My name is Michael Lewis Henderson, Jr., and I will be nineteen years old next week. I can give myself a good case of the horrors at any moment by just imagining what could have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to prove in a dozen ways that I spent all of last month, the whole month of May, every single day of it, fifteen hundred miles away from that crazy apple farm. I was right there at New College in Sarasota, Florida.

I know that Norrie wasn’t trying to fake them out by swearing that I did it. She really believes it. And I guess it is better for her to believe that than to believe what really did happen.

She has last month all screwed up with the same month two years ago. That was the year I dropped out, in the spring, in April. I was sixteen, about to turn seventeen in June. And it was all two hundred years ago, give or take a decade. I know the sixteen-year-old Mike. He was somebody I knew well, but he wasn’t me. You can say, maybe, he was looking for me. Or, in another context, trying to avoid me.

My people had stuck me in a very, very special school near Chicago called the Haven Institute. They take you if you have a towering IQ, no motivation, a snotty attitude, and a lot of bread. They try to motivate you by pouring it on as fast as the inputs can take it. It is sort of a tutorial system, and they believe in a fantastic amount of outside reading. For a while there they turned me on, and I went charging ahead and had them all smiling at me and patting me. But then I began to wonder if the competitive system isn’t some kind of irrelevant hang up. Look at it this way. What kind of a world do you have if everybody functions up to their peak? You have people slavering and panting to climb to the top of something or other. But in a technological world, with more and more leisure for everybody, if you indoctrinate people with this strive-strive-strive psychosis, what are they going to do with it? Compete to see who uses leisure most constructively? Then it isn’t leisure any more. It is another kind of work. Right?

So my divorcee mother-lady sent me two bills in a letter from Hawaii, and I cashed her check and bought hiking shoes, rucksack, bedroll, camping gear, and took off. I headed for the back country, small roads, farms, and so on, with the idea that I would eventually wind up at Scarsdale, where I have a pretty good uncle who sometimes understands how things are.

Also I was going to make one target along the way, and that was to stop at Ithaca and look up a girl from home going to a small girls’ school there. I was fooling around with compass courses from time to time, and so I decided to head from Watkins Glen right straight across to Ithaca across country instead of following a little state road. I forget the number of the road.

It was a pretty warm day. I crossed the fence that put me onto Turner’s land, though I didn’t know it at that time. I came down into this shallow valley, and I found that deep cold pool under those old willow trees. I don’t think I even noticed the cabin at that time. If I did, I must have decided it had to be empty.

I needed a bath. The water turned out to be twice as cold as I thought water could ever get. I stretched out in the sun after I dried off. And then Norrie stepped out from behind the apple tree where she had been watching me all that time and said, “Hey! You! You want a peanut butter sandwich and some milk, boy?” She seemed to be half-scared and half-laughing. I couldn’t make her out at all. So I said why not, and she went to the cabin and I got dressed and went to the cabin and she told me to come in.

It was what she had decided to fix herself for lunch, so she just fixed more of them. She talked more and longer than any girl I had ever met. Not that I was much of an expert on girls at that time. She was an older woman. We figured it out later. Three years, six months, and nine days older. I know now that it was nervous talk. I didn’t know it at the time. She seemed perfectly at ease, just chattering away.

She rambled so much that it was hard to keep track and put the pieces together. But finally I got it worked out that she’d left school because of a nervous breakdown and she had been treated by a shrink and got well enough to come up and rent the cabin and bring her books and try to catch up enough so she could take her examinations in June.

She laughed a lot, a sharp little bark of a laugh, and it seemed to come in the wrong places. I told her all about me, after she had run out of chatter, where my home was, why and when my folks had split, the kind of school they put me in, and the reasons I’d left. Once we had gotten all the facts and statistics out of the way, we could start to talk about ideas. The things we believed or thought we believed, or wanted to believe, or just wanted to try out on the other person to see if they would believe them or knock them down. We talked all afternoon, there in the cabin and out under the trees, and while we took a walk. Then it started to get dark, and that turned it into another kind of ball game.

We had canned chili for supper, and we drank some supermarket red wine she’d bought. There was good rock on that little radio she had. We sat on the bunk bed in the dark and talked. I had to be careful to keep my voice from cracking. I was terrified, actually. I had touched girls, but I had never made it with one. And this was an older woman, and it had gotten to be sort of obvious that sooner or later we were going to go to bed together. I liked her looks and I liked her body, but I was too scared to feel any heat.

So finally I made the desperation try. I sort of lunged at her and grabbed her and tried to kiss her. She went rigid, and then started to fight, to really fight. She got me one under the eye that hurt. I let her go. She ran out into the night, crying.

It took me a long time to find her. She was all curled up into a ball under a tree, snuffling. It seems so long ago, and so quaint, like the kid story of the two children under the tree, and the birds covered them with leaves.

I sat by her, not touching her. I wanted to get my stuff out of the cabin and get out of there. She was some kind of a flip. But you get a sense of some kind of obligation, I guess. She came around finally and talked, but not like before. Not all the chattering. And not throwing ideas at each other like curve balls over the outside corner. Closer talk.

The thing that happened to her at school was rotten, being held practically a prisoner in some gummy pad by a jock type bombed on speed, humbly servicing the big bastard because of some weird idea on her part that she had to prove she was a woman. When the shrink had started to bring her out of it with medications, she had wanted to blame her breakdown on the bad scene at the jock’s pad, but he wouldn’t let her do that because it was too easy. He said she had to understand that the original emotional damage went way back. Her folks were both cold people in a physical sense, not hugging and touching and holding. So from the beginning she tried to get approval from them, as a sort of a substitute, a next best thing. And they kept setting goals for her just a little beyond her reach. So she had no sense of herself. She was just a thing, trying to perform in such a way she’d get what she’d never had — warmth and love. This is my way of putting together what she said, and maybe if I heard it all now, it would come out different in interpretation.

The shrink told her she was trying to get approval from everybody, including the jock, and the big sex party was another substitution for the physical affection she’d never had and always needed. She had told the shrink that sex with Mush had been like what happened to her at a playground at a private school when she was five years old. She had been on the teeter-totter with a friend, and a fat older kid got on the other end. Big sport. He’d hitch back and let his end bang down on the concrete, nearly tossing Norrie off her end, and then he’d slide forward so far she would go down and hit bottom. It scared her and it hurt her and it went on and on, and she kept smiling and laughing and chortling right along with the fat kid because she knew that if he knew she was scared, he might hop off entirely when she was way up in the air.

So no pleasure with Mush, and she equated that with no pleasure with anybody anywhere anytime. Just fear, pain, and keep-smiling. The doctor told her it might be that way for her forever. Or it might turn out to be good some day. It was all part of the original hang up. He knew she wanted to be a woman in every way, and he told her not to force it. He told her that if a person has one short leg or a missing hand or bad vision, then they do not try to become an Olympic runner, or a concert pianist, or a trapshooter. He said if she would think of herself as having a permanent disability that didn’t show on the outside, life could be rewarding for her. He told her that her people would never admit that any such disability was permanent, and for her not to let them sell her on the idea that she had just had a little unimportant breakdown.

We had gone back in out of the cold night and we lay there in the dark on our backs on the bunk bed, too far apart to touch, and we talked and talked and talked.

When she got around to confession, she told me that when she had heard the wallowing and sloshing in the pool she had thought an animal was there, and she had sneaked up and seen me, and then she had stayed to look at me naked. She explained that it wasn’t that she was getting any sex turn on out of looking at me. It was because I didn’t look scary to her. She had thought of a penis as being a kind of brutal, cruel, barbaric thing, all mixed up in her mind with the sacking of cities and rape of the Sabine women and blood sacrifices on old stone altars. But I had looked sort of innocent and harmless to her. I’d looked like something she could maybe manage without terror. I’d looked like part of nature. And my being younger made it easier for her too. So instead of sneaking away she’d forced herself to move out into the open and holler to me and offer me a peanut butter sandwich, which is one brand-new way to start a program of seduction, I guess.

But when it got to the moment of truth, she couldn’t cut it. The fright came back. And mixed in with the fright I got the idea that she hated the way she looked, hated her body, hated her build, felt as if she was a scrawny, ugly, sickening mess. She was ashamed of herself in a strange way that was hard for me to understand. I had had all the strokes I needed. A breast-fed kid; both my folks big, loud, warm people who’d grab you and hug you when you walked by. That’s why I felt lost when they got divorced, and reborn when they married each other again. So I’ve always felt at home inside my skin. I don’t think of myself in any kind of critical or insecure way, I guess. I am just here, and every part of me is my own and no different than any other part. I am not enchanted with myself, understand. But I look this way and there is no changing it, so why yearn to be somebody else?

But from such separate places, we were both loners, each in a different way. The one thing I would change — that I would have changed way back then, two years ago, but would just as soon leave alone now, would be to drop that damned genius IQ down twenty or thirty points, because what it did to me was let me see what damned idiots the people around me were. I could read them too easily. And I used to let them know about it, back then. So they hated me. Hate makes hate. That’s why I took off from school that time.

It was confession hour, so I told her how scared I had been and that I finally had to either make that grab at her or run out the door and across the hills and far away. I told her that I was a virgin, and I had certainly made a couple of tries to change that status, but I had been stopped short of scoring. I rambled on and finally asked her a question, and when she didn’t answer I knew she was asleep. I covered her over with a blanket and got another for myself and went to sleep too.

In the cold cruel light of morning, which everyone talks about, she wouldn’t look right at me. She couldn’t. She went skulking around with her head down, and when she talked she didn’t move her lips much. So finally after the eggs, I said we ought to try to settle it one way or another, for both our sakes. She told me that what I should do was take my stuff and go to Ithaca. I told her we were supposed to be bright according to all the measurements, and we should go at it the way you hit a case study assignment in school.

We spent most of the day shouting and snarling at each other. In the late afternoon I talked her into an experiment called body-reading. I stripped and stretched out on the bed. She couldn’t stand the idea of me watching her while she looked at me, so I put the pillow over my face. And she read me inch by inch, front, back and sides, toes to larynx, studying this strange specimen called young male. But it took her until the next day, in the late morning, to take her turn as the book and let me be the reader. It took her a long time to get used to it and to relax. I told her how lovely she was, how sweet and beautiful every part of her was. She kept contradicting me until finally I told her to shut up and enjoy.

Weird kids with weird hang ups in that cabin, full of the* scent of the apple blossoms. You could hear the creek bubbling along, hear the bird songs. Careful progression. Simultaneous reading, and then exploration by touch. Cause and effect. Do this, and watch what happens. Do that and watch what happens. Places to kiss and be kissed. At the end of the fourth day we were ready to try it. But in the dark, under the covers. She was constantly trembling, and she was too dry. I couldn’t get into her. We gave up. At dawn she woke me up and said maybe it would be the right time to try again. It was. I had not known what a fantastic sensation it would be, the first time of pressing and then suddenly busting through and then sliding sliding sliding, all the way to the deepness, looking down into her wide eyes in that early light, seeing tears on her lashes, and seeing a funny little self-satisfied smile. She pumped her hips twice and it finished me right then and there. I was so damned ashamed and annoyed. But then the next time, maybe fifteen minutes later, it went on and on and on, until she suddenly grunted and shuddered and held me very strongly, and then relaxed. She made a purring sound and we both laughed, and it was fine.

From then on it was half serious, half games. It was as if we had broken into the world’s biggest candy store, and nobody was ever going to stop us from gorging ourselves. We fooled around with crazy ways, crazy positions. I know now that she was a good lover. Back when I had no basis of comparison I thought they would all be like Norrie was in that cabin when we lost track of days and nights. But they aren’t like that. Not all of them. Not even a tenth of them, probably. She could make it about once out of every four times we made love, and that was, she said, all she could handle. She said the rest of the time it just felt good and if it left her on any kind of edge, she said, it faded back with no problems.

I suppose that sooner or later that old Turner bag had to catch us at it. Maybe we were lucky it wasn’t sooner. I’ll never forget seeing that face in the window, and I’ll never forget how much cool Norrie had, how we stopped and Norrie turned and stared back over her shoulder at that old woman, and how after that ugly face full of envy and hate was gone Norrie smiled and picked it up right where she left off, and pretty soon we forgot her and finished it. Then we packed and cleaned the place and left together in her car. We were going to stay together forever. That’s what we said. Maybe we should have. That’s another of the things I will never get to know.

I suppose that old woman could think that Norrie was some kind of rotten degenerate, teaching some young kid fancy ways to ball her. You see something out of the eyes of another person it can shake you up, it is so different from the way it seems to you. The old lady caught us screwing up a storm, but instead of being something rotten, it was all love and fun and jokes and pleasure. It felt good, damn it. It felt absolutely great. And she was being loved and held and hugged and stroked and cherished and all that. She was being used, sure. But wanted to be, as I wanted to be. There wasn’t any sense of dirt or shame. It was just finding out if this felt better than that, if this worked quicker than that, if this way slowed me and speeded her, and that way speeded me and held her there until I could catch up. The fact that Norrie was able to start it up again after the old lady left was some sort of tribute to some kind of progress she had made, I guess. She was her own person and she was doing as she pleased. But she told me later that, for one instant, there was a terrible feeling that some great darkness had opened up and she would tumble into it and never have to open her eyes or her mouth again, to react or relate to anybody.

But I think the old lady made us aware of sin. She was our snake and our apple. Because, after that, it wasn’t ever exactly the same.

We did a lot of singing, and we drove down roads we’d never seen before and would never see again. June, July, August. Nobody knew where we were. Let them sweat it out. Worked at weird jobs, and conned food, and spent our blood fixing up that rotten car about five thousand times. We finally split after we’d been with that group in Arizona three weeks. She thought they were fine, like I did at first. But the group there — fifteen guys, twenty-four women, and nine little kids — were too damned solemn. They had to be, in order to fake themselves out. They made pots and scratched up the ground and planted stuff, and went as close to naked as the weather allowed. They made up instant Indian legends, argued oriental philosophy, compared hallucinations, wove their own cloth, and constantly laid the knock on the military-industrial power complex and the materialistic culture and all that. They made up instant folk songs about it. If every one of them had laughed once each day, I could have adjusted. But they had to be solemn because they were supposed to be dedicated to this much more sincere way of life, which, after all, was just a handy way to excuse themselves for the opportunity they had set up of balling each other, catch as catch can. I found out that the ones who left were the ones who had decided to get married and not come back. And I found out about good old Eddie. An old guy, thirty maybe. Any time they really started to starve, good old Eddie would go to Phoenix and pull a couple hundred out of his trust fund and buy a jeep load of groceries and a couple of more books on mysticism and come back like a hero, sometimes with a new chick for the encampment.

Norrie and I were cooling a little. I guess maybe because we were doing some sharing. I said I’d had it, and she said she wanted to stay. I said good-bye around, and she walked down the rocky road with me. We smiled and shook hands, and then we kissed and we cried. She asked me to stay and I asked her to come with me. We went through the same thing again, and afterwards, when I was almost down to the highway, I looked back and she was still up there, sitting on a rock, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her legs, and that big skirt dyed with berry juice spread out all around her. I made my contacts and I got into a pretty good place on short notice, and I will never again be in such great shape, I guess. I went through those courses like a madman.

I’m sorry about Norrie. It’s out of my line, but I’d guess that it is sort of like she locked a door and threw away the key. If you can ever make her understand what really happened, then you destroy her all the way. I think she’s just going to drift farther and farther out of touch, and there isn’t a thing anybody can do about it. If I was sure that I could have kept anything like this from happening by staying with her, I never would have left her. I would even live out there in solemn-town with good old Eddie keeping me from starving. I guess she wanted to honeymoon at the cabin as a kind of reassurance, maybe. Along with some defiance.

I don’t know.

It’s too bad, isn’t it?

My name is William D. Maas. I teach courses in criminology at the University of the State of New York and do a considerable amount of lecturing to police groups. I am sometimes called in on a consultant basis by police bodies to give an opinion on the progress of some specific investigation.

Lieutenant Sierma of the Criminal Investigation Division of the New York State Police asked me to give an opinion on the file regarding the murder of Paul Warcroft, age twenty-five. Death had occurred on May tenth at three o’clock, approximately, in the afternoon. I was given access to all the materials, and on June second I went to the Turner farm.

There I was able to compare the terrain and the distances involved with the widow’s statement, which I had read carefully in transcript form.

On the day of the death, the honeymoon couple had cooked small steaks for their lunch on an outdoor grill. She estimated that it had been about two o’clock when she was awakened momentarily from a nap by her husband leaving. She said he had on his swim trunks and was carrying a towel, and he said he was going to the pool. She went back to sleep and was awakened about forty minutes later by some sound outside. She said that it sounded like men’s voices raised in anger. But she could not hear a sound. She looked out the door but could not see her husband. She thought of calling him, then decided to get dressed and go look for him. She put on white shorts and a yellow top and sandals.

She said that when she was halfway to the pool, she saw a young man walking up the slope on the opposite side of the creek. She said that when he turned and looked toward her she recognized him at once as a boy she had known two years before. She was able to describe him in detail, the length of his hair, the style of his immature beard, his hiking boots, rucksack, bedroll, khaki trousers, knit sports shirt, blue baseball cap. She identified him as Michael Lewis Henderson, Jr., and she was able to recall his hometown in Illinois but not his address.

She said she called to him, but he made no response at all. She said he walked up the slope and over the ridge and on out of sight. He did not change stride, answer her call, or even look back toward her again.

As she approached the pool, she saw her husband face down on the bank, under the willows, his legs in the water. She ran to him, calling his name, and pulled him out with difficulty, as he was a man six feet one, weighing one hundred and eighty pounds, and sat and cradled his crushed head in her lap, and finally realized that he was dead. She then ran to the Turner farmhouse, and in their statements they both report her as being in such a condition of hysteria they could not understand what she was trying to tell them. They saw the blood that smeared the white shorts. Mr. Turner went back to the creek and found the body and hurried to the farm and reported it by phone.

After young Mrs. Warcroft had been given sedation, she was able to report what had happened. The description of Henderson was sent to all points, requesting he be picked up for questioning.

A careful search of the scene had produced little helpful information. The weapon used was a field stone formed of native granite, rounded by the action of the water in the creek over centuries. It had been picked up from the edge of the creek, leaving a bowl-shaped depression. It had evidently been hurled at the decedent, struck him a glancing blow, and had rolled to rest against the willow roots. There were bits of tissue and hair along with blood on a small portion of the stone which, in its curvature, was a rough match to the concave fracture of the skull of the decedent. The stone weighed 73.6 pounds.

Before I was asked to enter the case as a consultant, Henderson had been located in Sarasota, Florida, a resident student at a small liberal arts college. He was able to prove to cooperating law enforcement officers in Florida that on the afternoon of the tenth he had been at a local marine biological research laboratory assisting in a demonstration of the effects of water pollution on small marine organisms, a demonstration at which both city and county officials were in attendance.

In the transcribed statement sent north by the Florida officials, Henderson freely admitted to a close and intimate relationship with Elizabeth Norris Ames which had begun at the cabin at the Turner farm and had ended three months later in Arizona. He stated under oath that he had not seen her nor communicated with her during the intervening twenty-two months.

At the time I was brought in, it was Lieutenant Sierma’s theory that Mrs. Warcroft had seen a dangerous drifter who resembled Henderson just enough so that she believed it was he. It was in that place where she had first met Henderson, which made the incorrect identification more plausible. Sierma had gone to the spot where she had said she stood, and he had had one of his men walk up the hill at that same time of the afternoon. Sierma said that there was enough glare to make positive identification unlikely.

By the time I entered the case, Mrs. Warcroft was back in Philadelphia, under a doctor’s care.

After reading through all the statements again, I felt that Mike Henderson might be able to explain to me why she would wish to go to the same place for her honeymoon where she had apparently had a summer affair with him. As a criminologist and psychologist, I am always most interested in acts for which I can find little rational explanation.

I was at last able to reach the Henderson boy by telephone. I was pleased to find he was not the least bit guarded. He was very articulate, very concerned about Norrie, admitting a residual fondness for her. I asked him if he would mind writing up the history of Mike and Norrie and airmailing it to me. He said he would be glad to.

I was unprepared for both the length of it and the exceptional frankness of that personal document. There was, however, no flavor of lasciviousness about it. It was a story of two children trying to grow up, aware of their own handicaps. After reading it, I was able to think of Norrie as a person instead of the anonymous, tragic young widow.

Mike Henderson’s document gave me my suspect, of course. Mrs. Turner was elderly, but she was both spry and robust. And she had not mentioned in her statement that the same girl had stayed in the cabin two years before the tragedy. Again I had an act — this time of omission — which seemed senseless.

I went back to the Turner farm and I interviewed them informally and separately, the man first. I do not believe in all the trappings of formal interrogation. Conversation on an informal level is easier. And if something significant is discovered, they will always repeat it later for the record.

Ralph Turner had not been in the company of his wife when he had made his statement, and he had mentioned Mrs. Warcroft’s staying in the cabin two years before as Miss Ames.

He made a good impression in person, a stocky man with a weathered face, thick white hair, youthful blue eyes, a quiet voice and quiet manner. Yet when I asked him about the time the girl had first rented the cabin he became evasive, and he was not very deft at the game. He said he had been busy around the place and had seen little of her. I asked him if he was aware of the fact she had entertained a guest in the cabin for about ten days. He coughed and tugged at his collar and said that he had happened to see that she had a friend with her, a boy. No, he hadn’t mentioned it to his wife. It had probably slipped his mind. It didn’t seem important.

I then began to realize what was probably bothering him. Mike’s detailed story told about how, once her fear of exposing herself had been overcome, once she had become “used to her body,” Mike’s phrase, and could take pride in the pleasure capacities of her body, they would splash and play in the midday pool, sun themselves, and then have lunch, and then a long siesta of naps and love and talk. Probably Ralph Turner had seen them naked in the pool and had watched from some hiding place. It would weigh on his conscience to have stayed and watched. And perhaps he had not told his wife because he knew exactly what she would do. And there would be no chance to watch the young girl again. Mr. Turner was ashamed of himself.

So next I asked him if, after his wife had caught the young pair in flagrante and ordered the girl to leave, he had then let her know that he had seen the boy.

He stared at me, mouth sagging, and then leaned back in his chair and sighed. Then he nodded to himself. He asked me if the boy had told me about being seen by his wife, and confessed that this was the first he had heard of it. He said he knew that for some reason his wife was upset when the girl had come back as a bride, and now he knew why.

I tried to get him to discuss his wife in a critical way, but his sense of loyalty to her would not permit it. Next, of course, I talked to her before they had a chance to talk to each other.

Mabel Turner was a more difficult problem. She said that she wondered at the time if Mrs. Warcroft was the same girl who had stayed with them two years ago, a girl named Norrie Ames. Now, of course, she knew it was the same girl. But at the time people were asking questions she hadn’t thought to bring it up. She had thought that if it really was Miss Ames, then certainly the girl would have mentioned it.

I asked if she had stayed the full month, and Mrs. Turner said that the girl had left before her month was up.

Time for shock treatment. I let silence build, and then I shrugged and smiled and said, “She probably left because she didn’t like to have you prowling around the cabin, peering in the windows at her.”

She came to her feet, yelling, her face and neck puffed and red. It was a lie, a filthy lie. She had happened to look in the window once and she had seen what she had seen, and she had ordered that dirty little whore off the property at once. She would not and could not dirty her mouth by ever describing what she had seen that slut doing to some young hippie boy she had found and brought back to the cabin to use for her own sick hungers and evil pleasure. It was a long and loud performance, and when she ran down I asked her quite gently why, then, had she let such a vicious girl back onto the property.

She sat down and shook her head and explained that two years ago she had lied to her husband. She had told him the girl had left of her own free will. She had not wanted to upset him. How could she know the girl would be so callous and shameless as to come back to the very same place on her honeymoon? She recognized her immediately, of course, but what could she do about it?

I suggested that she could have quietly asked Norrie to enjoy the rest of her honeymoon elsewhere.

A flicker in her eyes. A slight smugness. She said she wouldn’t lower herself that much. She had decided to totally ignore the whole thing, to not even make any neighborly gesture. She had decided that the month would end and they would leave, and that would be the last of it.

I asked her if she had any theories about the murder. She said that, honeymoon or no honeymoon, one man was never enough for a slut like that girl. Maybe she wanted some boyfriend to move in with them and that nice husband didn’t take to the idea and so they killed him and made up some kind of a wild story. She told me that if I had seen what she had seen, I would know that girl was capable of anything — the more rotten, the better she’d like it.

I had the feeling she was holding something back. I didn’t know in which direction to look. At last, by a kind of psychic triangulation, I made a guess at it and tested my guess by saying, “You sound as if you thought Paul Warcroft was a nice young man.” She said he seemed very nice. It was a crime and a shame the way a sly, meek-acting little whore could snare such a fine young fellow. Then I said, “I would think then that it was your Christian duty to at least give young Warcroft some clue as to what he had gotten himself into. Why didn’t you?”

The smugness again. “I didn’t say I didn’t.”

“Then you did?”

“Sometimes you have to face up to it, Dr. Maas, and find the courage to tell somebody something they don’t want to hear.”

“What did you tell him?”

“When they drove out they were always together. Then he drove out alone. That was the day before the poor boy died. It was in the afternoon. I was doing some weeding in my flower beds, and like a fool I left the old wheelbarrer right in the driveway where he couldn’t get past it when he came back. So I went and apologized about it. And I asked him if he knew his wife had stayed in the cabin before. He said of course, and that was why she wanted to honeymoon there, because it was so quiet and beautiful and she had wonderful memories of the place because she had found it by accident when she needed it the most. I guess I must have snuffed some and looked strange and maybe I laughed, because he asked me what was the matter. And I said it certainly was strange how a wonderful memory for one person wasn’t exactly such a pretty memory for the next one. He wanted to know what I meant, and finally I said that being her husband he had a right to know. I said I’d had to throw her off the place the last time. I said she had a nasty habit of picking up boys and bringing them back to the cabin and doing filthy things to them. I said I warned her but she kept it up, and as my husband and I don’t hold with that kind of thing, I had to tell her to get out. I said we were decent people and we’d raised decent children and led a decent life, and even with the changing times and all, it seemed to me a kind of a nasty tricky thing to do to have your honeymoon right in the same bed where she’d been copulating those scruffy-looking hippie boys. He didn’t say word one. He just drove away like a bat, and a piece of gravel hit me in the leg and stung like fury. I did my duty, and it wasn’t an easy thing to do, believe you me. I always say the truth will out. Whatever you do in this life, you pay for.”

By then, of course, all the signposts were up. I made an appointment with Dr. Grenko and flew down and had a long talk with him. A very able man. Very human and very concerned. At first he did not think it could be possible. But the more he heard, the more uncertain he became.

A week later, on a warm Sunday afternoon, he met me at the Turner farm. He had left early in the morning and driven up with Norrie. She knew what was expected of her. She was to help us with the investigation of Paul’s death.

Grenko was very good with her. She had a childish earnestness about her. She was smaller than I had anticipated. One hundred pounds, probably. Almost pretty.

Grenko and I had worked out our little tableau, our clinical demonstration. It did not take long. I explained to her that we were trying to get a better line on Mike Henderson’s motives so that he could defend himself properly in a court of law. I stood on the shady bank beside the pool. Grenko took her ten feet away, beyond the replaced stone. He told her that he thought that Paul had probably said something to Mike which made Mike furious enough to kill Paul.

“Mike is very fond of you, Norrie,” I told her. “Maybe Paul insulted you somehow, said something bad about you in front of Mike.”

“But Paul wouldn’t have done that!”

“What if he said that...” I paused, continued. “You are a cheap slut. You wanted your honeymoon here because you were here two years ago, screwing some stupid kid, until Mrs. Turner threw you off the place.”

She was motionless, and her face had a slack remote look. Then she grunted and pounced. I heard her hands clap against the stone. She gave a cough of effort as she swung it up, and with eyes blazing, mouth agape, took two running steps and launched it at my face. I sidestepped it and it thudded onto the bank, rolled down, and splashed into the willow pool.

She was staring at the opposite slope, a hand shading her eyes. “Mike?” she said. She turned to Grenko. “That’s what he had to do, you know. When Paul said that, there wasn’t anything left for Mike to do but kill him. Everybody should be able to understand that. It’s not all that hard to understand? But I don’t know why he didn’t come back. I don’t know why he kept walking. I guess he was scared. Maybe he was ashamed, too. Because Paul and I loved each other very dearly. And we weren’t married long.”

What do you do with it? Where do you go when there isn’t any place to go? Those were the questions Grenko and I covered when I saw him again last week. We didn’t cover them. We went over them and around them and under them.

Who killed Paul? Norrie’s people killed him. Mush killed him. Mike killed him. Mabel Turner killed him. Hundred-pound girls can’t lift and throw rocks that size.

Grenko says the question is academic at best, because he is losing her. She is moving away from us all, into a world she can more easily endure. Contact is ever more tenuous and uncertain.

“And,” said Grenko with a kind of ironic despair, “she keeps getting prettier and prettier. Maybe one of these days she’ll be as pretty as her mother always wanted her to be.”

Quarrel

After knowing crazy Kaberrian seven years at least, last Sunday I got my first good look at him. In the park. I would have walked by the bench except he said, “Hey! You! Noonan!”

So I stopped and the way I looked at him made him laugh, and from the laugh I knew it was crazy Kaberrian sitting there in the sunshine with a girl in a green suit. The laugh was the same. Everything else had been changed. With that twelve or so pounds of shiny curly black hair chopped away and shaved away, underneath was a very ordinary-looking type person, like the uptown subways are full of five evenings a week, like come and take away things people don’t make a payment on.

Always he had all those odds and ends of clothes fastened with string, the jump boots, wrapped sandwiches stashed here and there, little signs pinned on about how to live, and always in a couple of pockets those plays of his, such a terrible mimeograph job nobody could read them but him. I had not seen him in months, and this type in the store-window suit and shined shoes was not the crazy Kaberrian I would never see again, I knew.

I put my nose level with his, five inches away, and shook my head and wanted almost to cry. “A sell job,” I said. “A fink-off. You squared it, huh, baby?”

So they both laughed, just as if there wasn’t any guilt at all, him and the pretty little basket in her green suit, and Kaberrian said, “Noonan. You got Buckley aboard?”

“Like forever.”

“Noonan, this is Ellie. Noonan, Ellie should meet Buckley.”

Buckley was napping in the side pocket. I got him out and he blinked in the sunlight. He is gold color. A truly Great Mouse, and she put her hand out and Buckley didn’t freeze up so I put him into her hand. No flinch, no baby talk, no kissing noises. She just said, “Hi, Buckley,” and stroked the top of his head with a thumb and gave him back and I put him back in his pocket and pretty soon heard the little crackling as he got going on one of the peanuts. So then the Ellie basket looked at her watch and gave Kaberrian a little housewifey smacko and went off, and he looked dreamy as he saw her depart, and it is worth admitting that she walked very girl in every way.

“Museum,” he explained. “Front desk. She drew the Sunday trick this week.”

I sat down beside him and said, with maybe a little creak in my voice, “What happened, Kaberrian? What happened to you?”

So he told me he got married. He told me they had an apartment, even. He told me he had a job. In a store. Selling high-fidelity schlock. Tape recorders certainly. Those years crazy Kaberrian spent trying to use tape recording to make accidental plays the way painters get accidental paintings, he learned enough he could tell Ampex which way to go.

It hurt me. So I explained how everybody has this terrible tendency to give up the fight, man. Square it out, and fink off, and start dying of conformity and plastic coffee. But when he started yawning I had the idea I wasn’t getting to him.

“So I know what happened, Kaberrian. So now tell me how.”

So he yawned again, looking sleepy, happy, and sold out in the park in the sunshine, and he talked about months and months ago in that walk-up pad he had on Twelfth Street, a room ten by twelve maybe, and so full of electronics one guest at a time was absolute tops, and then it had to be a very friendly guest. An empty room on each side of him.

“On the same day, Noonan, into one moves this Ellie bird, and into the other moves her buddy, this Geoffrey Freeman, playwright. It is always Geoffrey the whole name, and he has never got past a second act on anything but calls himself a playwright, by God.”

“The inner reality is the truth by which we—”

“Shut up, Noonan. What it is, I find out as soon as I breadboard me a rig with some sensitive induction mikes, is love. She will not exactly live in the same room with him, but she is the only one earning bread, and she pays both rents, cooks, cleans, everything. I think finally I got the play I’ve been looking for, on account of it is a comment on everything. You cannot believe how square is that little bird. She has such a deep belief in all the old-timey values, it could make you lie down and cry your eyes out for the pity of it all, or make you laugh yourself to sick. They do not get along so great. The playwright is using the little bird. If he finishes a play it will be crud, so the safest way is never finish one.

“I think that the fights are going to give me a stack of half-mil four-track thirty-six hundred feet tapes, I’ll have to scrounge the whole village to keep up, and I think that sooner or later they are going to say everything anybody can say about the lousy man-woman relationship. I am going to call the play Quarrel. I am going to edit so they are always answering each other on different levels. Nice resonance, Noonan, baby. The shape of it is he fakes up this hurt pride on account of being supported, and then she gets all humble, and then he calls her a peasant who can’t understand like the delicate fiber of his creative soul, and so on and so on. So I get me five ugly sessions, I think three in her pad and two in his. You know what? Halfway through number six I kill the tape. It is the same quarrel! Every time the same. A couple of little switches here and there. Not enough to matter. I tape onto tape and try editing and keep coming up with nothing. Speed changes, echo effects, nothing.

“One time I am just listening, trying to figure out a route, and I get a burr in the pickup, he sounds like a rusty baritone sax. So all of a sudden I’ve got it! A new approach to the whole schmear. I am going to call it Duet. Remember Snake? What he can do with that clarinet when he’s on just the right amount of pot? I put together the best hunks of all the quarrels, made forty minutes of it, then got Snake up to listen. He dug it twice through, and then the third time around he got the idea of how to do it, and I had him play right with her each time she talked, and recorded it on an empty track. Man, he did that crying part at the end just perfect! Snake dug up a type named Walker, who needed gin instead of pot to warm up, and Walker did the playwright lines on an English horn.

“Noonan, it took me three weeks of work to get that thing mixed and retaped and edited and smoothed out just the way I wanted it. Duet, a tone poem for voice, clarinet, and English horn in three movements. First movement I started with straight voice, Ellie and Geoffrey chewing on each other, and I faded him out and brought up the horn to take over for him. Walker made that horn bleat and moan and grumble just like the playwright. Second movement, voices again, but with her fading out and the clarinet coming up to take over for her. The third and last was the great one. I faded both voices out and it turned into an instrumental duet, and in the last five minutes I’d bring in him instead of the horn, and then her instead of the clarinet, and I found a way to wind it up just right. I had one place where she said, close to tears, ‘Why do you hate me so?’ So I put that on repeat, and when she said it the third time I mixed in the clarinet for that same phrase. Three together, and I faded them just a little bit and brought him up, saying, ‘You’ve never understood me.’ I had that on repeat, and they took exactly the same time, so I overlapped for a counterpoint effect, brought up the horn to go along with him and then — get this — I mixed the clarinet with his line, and the horn with hers, and brought up the gain to all the tape would take, and suddenly chopped it off into dead silence, and, man, it would make for the blood to run cold indeed.

“Noonan, everybody was nuts about it. But you know what the real test had to be. Sure. So one night I nailed them in the playwright’s pad and said I had something they should hear on tape, and when they were trying to brush me, I said they were on the tape, so she turned pale and he tinned red and they let me set up my good portable I built most of and bring in two of the speakers Marty built for me that time, and I set it up and kicked off. They were on the couch. The first couple of minutes he kept trying to jump up, yelling about suing and invasion and degenerates, but she’d hush him and yank him back and listen with her head sideways and her eyes narrow and her lips sucked white.

“They got real still, and all of a sudden after about the first two minutes of the straight instrumental duet, the little bird threw her head back and she started roaring with laughter. It was the biggest, gutsiest, happiest laugh you ever heard come out of a little bird like Ellie. Then he was trying to shush her, and he couldn’t and he missed the end because he went running out and banged the door behind him. The end broke her up the rest of the way. She laughed so hard she cried. Not hysteria. The other kind of laugh-cry. Me too. Laughed until we hurt. She doesn’t call it the time we laughed. She calls it The Cure. Once you laugh that hard with a bird, Noonan, all you can do is marry it. Which I did.”

“What, what, what?” I said.

“The beard got smaller the more she kept putting on buttons instead of string, so it’s gone all the way. Man, we laugh a lot. Ellie and me, it’s all a swinging place for us. We start to fuss some, and either she says, ‘Why do you hate me so?’ or I say, ‘You’ve never understood me,’ and then we both say ‘Poor Geoffrey,’ and we laugh.”

We stood up, and I had given up on him. Crazy Kaberrian was no more. This was a happy, laughing sales-talk clerk, buttoned up and bird-happy, like nobody could have guessed would be his future. He asked me how things were at Columbia, and I said I was auditing the Oriental Religions thing again, the same course Kaberrian and I had audited maybe seven years ago together, which is how we met. I said they had changed it a little, but it was still stimulating.

So I asked him if I could maybe stop by his place if he’d give me the address, and I would like to hear that tape. The last masterwork of Kaberrian.

“Oh, one night a month ago I got up in the middle of the night and I dug it out and put it on the box and erased it clean.”

“Why, why, why?”

“In it my Ellie too many times is telling that clown how much she loves him, when she found out later love is something a lot different. We both found out, man.”

I sighed. Shook the head. Stuck my hand in the Buckley pocket and rubbed his head a little. “Maybe it could have made a fortune, you crazy Kaberrian.”

“A fortune!” he said. “Off Ellie, like that way?” His eyes looked like the Kaberrian of old, the one who expressed revolt one time by running onto the “Today Show” when it was live and holding up in front of Lescoulie a sign saying “Fink Capitalist Stoolie.” Kaberrian’s eyes had that old gleam. “Noonan, you fink off your way, and I’ll fink off my way.”

Off he went. That’s the last we’ll ever see of him. Who’s going to keep up the good old traditions if we keep on losing the Kaberrians one at a time? Who can laugh in a world like this one?

Woodchuck

When the diffused brightness of direct sunlight no longer made a blue green glow through the closed draperies in front of the sliding glass that opened onto the beach-front bedroom terrace, Mr. Aldo Bellinger got up from the broad bed and padded naked across the thick tufted pile of the aqua rug and parted the draperies a few inches and looked out. The sun had slid below the Caribbean horizon, and the sea lay gentle against the broad beach of the island.

He thumbed the latch down, slid the door aside enough to step out onto the walled, second-story terrace, and closed the opening behind him, the draperies falling back into place.

A small wind came out of the west, not enough to raise surf, but enough to bring the sea scent, and the slap and sigh of the small waves, adrift on the thick moist tropic air. The darkening room behind him was all cool blue-and-green hush of ducted air from the faraway compressors and fans.

He leaned forearms on the broad top of the four-foot wall, big brown hands loosely clasped, and looked out at the coarse brown sand of the wide beach, at the shadings of the sea, green over the shallows, a deepening cobalt over the deeps. Far out, a pod of bait sparkled and thrashed, ripped from below by the savage rush of toothy predators, harassed from above by the circling, diving, squalling terns, their excited playground voices just audible over the soft sounds of small waves.

You put the package together, he thought, and it is never quite equal to the original vision. But this Club de Playa comes as close as any of them. Construction compromises, the result of haste, rising costs, availability, always degrade the concept. Such as the construction of the terrace wall on which he leaned. White pierced decorative block, a commercial pattern instead of the custom design that made the architectural rendering so handsome. And so, from now on, the Club de Playa would be graced by the tiresome vulgarity of the fleur de lis pattern in alternate blocks in all the walls of all the apartment terraces.

But if you did not ride herd, if you did not put the clamp on them and tell them to make the compromises necessary to meet the deadline and cost projection, you could lose your ass to aesthetics.

You had to heed deadlines, because you had to stay a little bit ahead of the other predators involved in resort projects. The money goes to the lead runners, in delicious abundance. The farther back you are in the pack, the less the margin, the more dangerous the risk. And the ones in the rear copy too late and lose it all.

This was the condominium concept applied to resort apartment-hotel living. Own your own vacation apartment directly on one of the world’s greatest unspoiled beaches, and let management rent it for you when you are not using it. See brochure for special tax advantages available to U.S. citizens on this friendly tropic island.

So he had scrounged for the necessary risk capital in a tight-money market and put up the hotel portion and the first two wings, forty apartments per wing, of the projected eight wings. Seventy-one apartments sold thus far. Take it far enough to prove it works, then unload it. Four days now of dickering and maneuvering with Larssen from Stockholm, who arrived backstopped by his quartet of four cool-eyed young Swedish specialists.

Good to be outnumbered, he thought. Just me and my secretary and Lee Rountree, the large young man who had styled, and followed through on, the promotion program that had sold off seventy-one of the eighty so quickly and easily to good-risk customers. Not a lawyer or an accountant on our resident team. Left them on standby in Miami. Roy can slam the Lear over there and have them back here in one hour total flying time, plus the red tape at Miami International.

He could feel the last of the residual tension going out of his neck and shoulders and jaw muscles. At ten this morning they had been one hundred thousand Jamaica dollars apart. Larssen had suggested in his sleepy voice they split the difference. Aldo Bellinger had said they had already, in effect, done that. Long silence.

Aldo had finally said, “I guess I won’t get up and walk out, because there is a good chance we might do business again some day. And the next time I might not have an alternate buyer. Phone Kinkaid in Nassau and tell him I authorize him to tell you the top and final offer his clients made. If he gets too cautious, put me on the line. It comes to... let me do some conversion here... about twelve thousand Jamaica dollars more than my final offer to you. I’ll pay that premium to do business with you, Larssen, but not a hundred and twelve.”

It had taken the usual half hour to get through to Nassau. Aldo Bellinger had gone down to the pool. One of the young Swedes had come and got him and taken him back to Larssen’s apartment. Larssen had known Kinkaid would not lie. Everybody knew that, fortunately. So Larssen had shaken hands, told his people to go to work on the papers, and told them that he and Mr. Bellinger were going to spend some welcome time on the beach.

Bellinger could feel the residual heat of the sun under the brown hide of his thick shoulders and muscular back. The light from the departed sun flared on white high clouds, turning them salmon pink, and the beach and the sea turned a golden pink under the bright glow of the clouds. He saw a woman walking slowly along the beach on the wet packed sand left by the receding tide. She was coming toward him. He realized that it was Anne Faxton, his private executive secretary. Seven years of extraordinarily efficient, discreet, and loyal professional service. And in the last four years of the association, it had expanded into an emotional-sensual dimension as well. Nothing he or she had sought.

One of those tritenesses typical of the rich years of the old movies, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer prefabricated romance. Executive and secretary flying to important meeting. Airport closed by floods. Land at alternate airport eighty miles away. Too much in a hurry to wait for bus arranged by airline. Rent car. Have to take a detour. Heavy rains. Drive slowly through what appears to be a wide shallow torrent across highway. Front end drops into a washout. Lightning illuminates dark farmhouse behind them, on high ground. During break in rain, grab baggage and trudge through mud. Nobody home. Force porch window. Saturday. Evidence that family went to city to shop, probably cut off by rising water. No electricity. Phone out also. Fireplace. Candles. Kerosene and lantern in rear shed. Smashing rain and whistling wind and constant lightning. Secretary scared of thunderstorms all her life. Night gets colder. Sit on couch in front of fireplace. Loud crack of thunder makes her lunge, shuddering, into his arms. Extreme close-up, two shot, for kiss illuminated by dance of firelight. Storm and mood music on sound track. Camera angle on floor by couch, as one by one, sweater, blouse, skirt, bra, panties drop onto pile.

It had all seemed quite different by the bright morning light of the next day, the sky a high and cloudless blue, power and phone restored, a wrecker on the way to lift the undamaged car clear, the flood waters rapidly lowering.

Adult conversation. We shouldn’t have. It isn’t good practice. Can’t maintain efficient business relationship, employer and employee. Can’t afford to lose you, Anne. Depend on you for too many things, businesswise. Adult agreement. Go on as if it had never happened.

Would have been possible, he thought, if it had turned out to have been merely an average experience, or even a little better than average. But he had found himself tapping an entirely unexpected store of sexual energy and vitality in that narrow, brunette, small-breasted body. Wiry, limber, and demanding. Strong demands create strong responses. So it had been a lot better than very good.

So after the second violation of the pact, the tired old vow of going on as if it had never happened seemed idiotic. New agreement in order. Never never will the boss use the sporadic physical relationship as any kind of duty-hours leverage, and never never will the secretary take equivalent advantage. If it is there, and good, why waste it when the occasional opportunity presents itself? Don’t create opportunity. Let it happen in the course of business. Everybody is grown up. We’re not hurting anybody. And the usual risk was nonexistent, because his wife (now divorced) — after one experience of childbirth — had insisted he have a vasectomy. In fact, a welcome release of commercial tensions. Nothing wrong with affection. Under the circumstances, the only concession was the fifty-a-week raise which at first offended her so deeply he thought he had blown the whole ball bame. He asked Miss Faxton if she enjoyed the increased responsibilities he had given her in the operation and administration of his several corporate ventures. She said she did indeed enjoy them. He pointed out that he had given her raises commensurate with her increased duties because, enjoying the greater demands, she performed well. He pointed out that in this new area of mutual personal gratification she gave every impression of enjoying herself, and he could certify that her performance was excellent. Also, it did consume time which otherwise would be her own to use as she wished. She had stared at him, narrow-eyed, then wide-eyed, then suddenly guffawing in that genuine, open-throated, bawdy way that only the sensuous woman can properly carry off.

She came along the beach, stopping to stoop and pick up a shell from time to time. She took a deep tan readily, and she wore a navy blue bikini with narrow trim of white lace.

When she was near he waved his big arm in slow signal to her. She did not pretend not to see him. She looked up at him and then looked away, and continued her slow pace past the small sailboats pulled far above the high-tide line.

Can fix, he thought. Will have to fix, or really lose her this time. Get this over and get the banking arrangements put through, and have Cramer make the transfers and put the after-tax proceeds into high-rated municipals with a good yield. Would figure out at probably sixty-five thousand income-tax free, after paying the preference income tax. Nice liquidity while I go shopping, taking my time, because the money squeeze has to loosen up. February next year would be a good time to go to Montevideo and check out the project Perez outlined. It’s summer then. She likes summer, likes the heat and the sweat of it. Too far in the future, though.

Something real quick. Hell, I should have remembered Winkler’s sloop. Perfect. Use it any time, Aldo. Feel free. It just sits there. Crew of three. Marvelous area, the Virgins, to just cruise around aimlessly. Swim and fish and loaf.

So I can send Lee Rountree and his big wife back to Miami aboard the Lear with Roy, and Miss Faxton and I can take a little feeder flight from here to St. Thomas. She will be very cold, distant, disapproving. And one night under the right moon at the right anchorage, we’ll sit on the deck and I will tell her how, at precisely five thirty on this day, I remembered my grandfather and the woodchuck. I will tell her the story and she will understand a little more about me, maybe, that little bit more I think I understand today.

She had understood the first part of it too quickly, he remembered. He had checked over the details of the trip with her, the papers they should bring along. They were in his tower suite of offices in the new bank building in Tulsa, and the rest of the staff had gone home an hour ago.

“Can you think of anything I’ve forgotten? Larssen is a very thorough guy.”

She said, “Can’t think of a thing. Four days you think it will take?”

“Minimum three, maximum a week. Should give you some good beach time and sun time while that sleepy Swede tries to steal half my equity.”

She smiled. “I can use it, Aldo. After too many ten-hour days.”

“Know something? It might be a good chance to reward another job well done. Lee Rountree really did one hell of a promotion job on moving those units.”

She looked skeptical. “And so?”

“He could tell the Swedes the methods he used, the kind of media that got the best results. He and his wife could fly down there with us. Give you some girl-type company on the beach.”

“Aldo! God’s sake!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t need girl-type company or girl-type talk. She’s just a kid, Aldo.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Item: You had it all set to give the Club de Playa promotion to Newcomb. In fact, I think you had started briefing him. Item: You happened to run into Lee Rountree when he was accompanied by his wife of one year at that time, of a year and eight months now. Item: Lee is a very nice big amiable diligent guy six foot four, age twenty-six. Mrs. Lee Rountree, Elizabeth, known as Liz, is at least five foot ten and a half in her bare feet. She is a big, merry, jolly, happy blonde, age twenty-two, lively and bouncy and beautifully stacked, and she assumes everybody is a perfectly wonderful human being until proven otherwise. Item: You suddenly give the Club de Play a promotion to Lee Rountree instead of to Newcomb. And with Lee, it’s such an earn-as-you-learn bit, you have to wet-nurse him personally until he gets far enough along to handle it on his own. Item: This involves dropping in on the happy couple quite often, even after he is all straightened away and doing well. Item: They have no kids. Item: You are the big kindly boss-fellow giving the young husband the big break. Item: If your ex-wife had been delivered of a daughter one year after you married her, the daughter would be the same age as Liz Rountree. Item: I have watched the same game a lot of other times. Remember? Item: All of a sudden you think I need a girl companion.”

“That’s quite a presentation there, Miss Faxton.”

“Just don’t give me injured innocence. Okay?”

“What is it? Jealousy all of a sudden?”

She had not gotten angry, as he thought she would. Instead she had frowned, looking beyond him, her lean face thoughtful. “No, Mr. Bellinger. It isn’t that. I think really it’s a problem of my own self-respect. I am involved in a relationship with you. We have no exclusive claims on each other. I guess I just want to believe that I could not willingly keep on giving myself to a man who... is not merciful.”

“Merciful!?”

She shrugged. Sad, sour little smile. “You’re a clever man, Aldo. And you are watchful, patient, and as charming as you decide to be. You understand people and what motivates them. But I wonder if you have any mercy. She loves him, you know.”

He smiled. “Then there’s no cause for alarm, is there? If she loves him, she’s invulnerable.”

“Then you are taking aim?”

“It’s just a little coincidental maneuver, Anne. No confidence at all I can swing it. But thinking about it keeps my eyes clear and my mind sharp and my waistline under control. If it looked easy, I wouldn’t be interested.”

“Know bow you can show mercy, sir?”

“How?”

“All you really want, you know, is the ego satisfaction of knowing you can lay her if you stalk her properly. But what will that do to her if you do? And to Lee? If you could create the opportunity, make sure you can, then back off from it in the name of honor and decency and all that, then it would be an act of mercy.”

“If the chance ever arises, I’ll give your suggestion some thought, Anne.”

It had been an improvisation. One makes do with the materials at hand. After Larssen had agreed to the price, Aldo had found Roy and told him that he would probably be going over to Miami the following morning and bringing Cramer, Hollister, and Keyes back. Roy said the replacement parts for the aircraft were probably in Miami by now and suggested he run it over and get the work done, stay over, and bring the three men back in the morning. He said he’d feel better about the reliability of the communication equipment when it was fixed up and checked out.

Aldo Bellinger said he approved. He said he would find Lee Rountree to drive Roy out to the airfield, so he could bring the car back. And he had some notes he wanted Roy to give Cramer to study before going over the draft of the agreement. He got the notes out of his room first. He found Lee in the lobby waiting for Liz to come down. As they walked toward the car the improvisation began to take form. He waited until they had backed out of the parking slot and then decided to ride out with them.

At the airfield, he suddenly decided that Cramer and the others might have some questions not covered in his notes. He asked Lee if he would mind taking the notes to Cramer, and because Lee had followed the negotiations from the start, he could answer questions Cramer and the others might have. Lee jumped at it. Another fragment of the big chance. “Sure, Aldo. Glad to do it. Explain to Liz, huh? I can pick up a toothbrush at the Miami airport. Should have thought of it myself. See you tomorrow morning.”

As he drove away, Aldo saw Roy pull the aircraft up into its steep angle of climb, turning toward the northwest, white aircraft with a shark mouth and a high whining roar of power.

So he explained to Liz in such a way that she was grateful for the expression of confidence in her big husband. He spent some beach time with Larssen and then came back and saw Liz in the pool. He changed to swim trunks and came down and joined her. He bought two rounds of planter’s punches, and they went walking on the beach, came back and swam in the pool again, and had a light late lunch under canvas shade on the patio by the pool. He bought two more punches over her protests, picking them up at the thatched bar on the beach, making one a double. Gave her the double. Talked about her husband, about how well he would do, given the chance. Saw her adaze, aglaze with sun and rum and heat, told her there was something he wanted to show her in confidence, a plan for a future project involving Lee. Carried their drinks upstairs, down the long tiled corridor, into the muted cool green blue country of his apartment.

The transition from the innocence of public sunlight to the siesta silence of the apartment had to be made at precisely the right time. To wait too long would spoil the chance. The rum would have become a depressant instead of a stimulant, and all her sense of fun and joy and holiday would have dulled into sleepiness. Had he taken her upstairs too quickly, the privacy and shadowy intimacy of the apartment would have triggered all her warning systems, made her too conscious of all the lovely bikinied flesh exposed, made her constrained and formal and inaccessible. He felt as if he had watched her the way, in the old submarine movies, the captain would watch the depth gauge and level the vessel at the precise reading he wanted.

So when he had unlocked the apartment and taken her in, she brought with her the leggy, careless insouciance, her gigglings, music of the ice in the tall strong drink. He had closed the door and gone striding ahead through the living room into the big bedroom, taken the roll of maps and drawings out of the comer of the closet, rolled the rubber bands off, unrolled them, and carried them over to the broad bed and spread them out on the bed.

“This is going to be your husband’s project, all the way, but don’t give him a clue yet. Come here and hold this side down, Liz.”

She came from the doorway and held the left side of the drawings, one knee on the bed, drink in her right hand. “What is it, Aldo?”

“A joint venture with a Uruguayan named Roberto Perez, on one hell of a great piece of beach twenty miles up the coast from Montevideo. I shouldn’t be telling you this, Liz. Maybe you can’t keep a secret from Lee worth a damn.”

“Pooh! I can so. Gee, it looks big in the drawing.”

“Three times the size of this deal. You two will be living down there quite a while, honey. How’s your Spanish?”

“Like nada.” She laughed in excitement “Wow! It’s fantastic, Aldo.”

“Let me get this top drawing off and show you the map.” He tried to point out detail on the map but had to release his end, and it kept rolling up. As he had hoped, she said, “Here. Let me free up another hand.” She finished her drink, leaned, and put the glass on a night stand. He pushed the sheaf deeper onto the bed, so that she could then stretch out prone, braced on her elbows, and hold the sheaf of drawings and maps flat against the bedspread. He leaned close, his sun-warm flesh against hers, shoulders touching, as he reached in front of her to show her detail on the map.

He casually put his left arm across her back, big hand on her left shoulder. Slowly, slowly, during the eight months he had known her, he had conditioned her to the casual, meaningless, friendly touch, the quick kiss of greeting and parting, affectionate. He had developed the relationship of mutual liking. She was the helpmeet. She and the marvelous boss helped guide the destiny of the splendid young husband. He had deliberately created a flavor of conspiracy. Little ways she could help Lee improve his performance, suggestions that could come more easily from her than from the boss.

“Here’s the secret I don’t think you can keep, woman.”

She turned and looked at him through a tousle of hair, their faces close, her eyes happy and mocking. “You say! Come on, Mister B. Secret like what?”

“Two secrets. On the operating budget I worked out with Perez, my resident representative — the guy who will do the pushing — is in there for about five thou more than Lee gets right now. Not quite five. Forty-seven hundred.”

“Hey! Hey, now!”

“Wait. That’s only part of it. We set up the joint operating structure on a bonus-and-profit-sharing basis. Perez and I get the king-size slices, but Lee would be on the eligible list for seven percent.”

“Of what?”

“Shrewd question. If he goofs, seven percent of nothing is nothing. If he brings it in on schedule, and the payout goes the way Perez’s study indicates, it could be seven percent of three mil.”

She frowned. “Twenty-one thousand dollars!”

“You are a very pretty lady and you are a rotten mathematician. It would be two hundred and ten thousand.”

Her eyes went wide wide wide. “Holy Maloney,” she whispered. He changed the pressure of his hand on her far shoulder very very slightly. It was essential that she not notice it, yet the slight pull had to suggest to her an impulsive response. One does not as quickly terminate an act one has begun. She had to lift her right shoulder out of the way to give him the kiss of gratitude and excitement. That meant taking her right hand off the roll of drawings and maps. They rolled up into a loose cylinder, and in the kiss he settled onto his side, bringing her down too, so that they lay in each other’s arms, face to face on the bed. As soon as he felt her mouth tighten and change, rather than continuing the pressure, he broke his mouth away from hers and said, “You won’t be able to stand it, you know. You’ll tell him. You’ll hint around until he pries it out of you.”

“I won’t so!”

“You will.”

“Won’t!”

“You will, you will, you will. Shouldn’t have told you.”

So, as he had hoped, in an instinctive effort to affirm her reliability, her trustworthiness, her gratitude, she kissed him again, and he shifted quickly to hold her more strongly, to adjust his body to hers, flesh in contact from knees to lips, right arm under her neck and around her, forearm clamped across her back, left hand in the small of her back, pulling her close.

The crucial question now was whether he could move her quickly enough through the period of alarm, realization, fright. Her whole body had tautened with the sudden and surprising awareness that somehow she was in a man’s apartment, on a man’s bed, nearly naked and locked in close embrace, a mouth hungry and demanding pressing against her lips. He had to maintain the embrace long enough to get the deep engine of her healthy sensuality started, fueled by the rum and sun and swimming, primed by his cautious and indirect conditioning over eight months. Her hesitation would be caused by her guilty realization that she had initiated the first kiss, and the second also.

When she tore her mouth free and craned her head back, he kissed her throat. “No,” she said. “Oh no. Please. Please don’t.” There was an edge of panic in her voice. He found her mouth again and she let it continue for two long seconds before she pulled away again. “Stop now,” she said. “Please stop, Aldo. Please don’t.” But the edges of the words were slightly blurred and softened, her voice huskier, and it was easier to find her lips again and hold them longer. She pushed at him with less emphasis, almost sleepily.

At the proper time, in proper sequence, he moved his left hand down from the small of her back, up the mounded hip and buttock, and little finger first, worked the edge of his hand under the taut upper edge of the bikini bottom. When he rolled his hand, it forced the narrow clinging band of fabric downward an inch or so.

She stiffened again and clapped her right hand onto his, hooked her fingers around his wrist, and pulled his hand away. “We can’t,” she said in a groaning voice. “Oh please don’t any more.”

He put his hand back on the small of her back. It all comes down to this, he thought. Eight months. All the processes of friendship, creating trust, taking Lee Rountree under his wing, improvising the trip to Miami, plying her with drinks, bringing her up here at the right time and working her into the right position, it all came down to whether or not a couple of ounces of coral fabric could be moved far enough to become loose, to encircle a narrower dimension of her young ripe body. After the long stalk, the prey was now in perfect range, motionless in the sights, and the task was to pull the trigger by slowly squeezing the whole hand. Because once it was done she was lost, and she knew it. And it would be done only if she wanted to lose — not in the brain, in the loyalty, or in the heart, but only in the yearning body.

When he moved his hand precisely as before, she put her right hand on his hand to hold it still but did not pull his hand away. A hungry kiss had been going on for a long time. He moved the band of fabric slightly. Her hand finned each time to stop him. Then it was down far enough for him to cup the abundant, firm, velvety buttock in his big hand and pull her closer. Her right arm lifted and slid around him, and he felt the stub and pull of her fingertips in the muscle of his back, felt rather than heard the sigh of want and resignation she made against his mouth.

The moment of mercy, he thought. Groan and shove her way and show abject remorse. Guilt. Despair. And it will take her fifteen seconds to yank that bikini bottom up and be off the bed and out in the living room, sitting in a chair, knees pressed tightly together, her breath and her body quieting quickly.

No bullet when you pull the trigger. Just a click and a beautifully exposed Ektachrome transparency to project on the screen in the little lab in the back of the mind. Specimen of employee wife, brought right to the point of inevitable copulation and then, out of charity, released to dart back into the thicket of marriage, far warier than before, never to be caught again.

But she was too sweet, too close, too promising. And there was all the roving and rambling to be done, all the newness to be explored. For a matter of perhaps fifteen minutes one portion of his attention stood aside, involved in a cold objective observation of all physiological phenomena, directing, altering, varying his actions so as to flood her sensory inputs. It was a feedback system, precisely aware of the moments when there was a dim and distant alarm within her that dropped her back to some prior degree of mounting tension, so that he could then lift her back up beyond her previous high before risking the next necessary interruption. Lost ground, carefully regained, after the small disruptive acts of tugging the band of fabric off over her feet and dropping it aside, of swiftly and deftly baring her breasts, of hitching and moving around to a head-and-foot orientation with the bed, of peeling his own trunks down and dropping them on the floor, of coupling for the first time, establishing the unmistakable finality of it with a few long heavy strokes before disengaging. Because the objective was not merely the taking of her. That was only a qualified possession, far more easily achieved than the total possession which could come only from turning her face ashen, her lips icy, her expression to agony, from making her breathe like a runner, making her body burst with a sudden sweat, making her go into her hard, deep contractions.

During the second fifteen minutes of her, because all of it took only half an hour from the moment her slow arm went around him and her fingerpads dug into his muscles to the time when she faded slowly down and down into a drugged relaxation when she had ended, the watcher part of him had slowly moved closer and finally merged with his immediate sensual identity and had stopped the weighing and measuring and planning. It was no longer necessary. There was nothing else remaining to set her back. It was all a broad delicious road from there right up to release, knowing his would be all the greater by holding back until her body made its primitive, insistent demand.

Now, leaning on the patio railing in the dying light, he turned his head and saw that Anne Faxton was so far down the beach she was a stick figure, unrecognizable, still walking slowly. I did remember about being merciful, he thought. But too late. Too late for me. Too late for her.

He straightened, slid the door open quietly, parted the draperies, and closed the door. He went to the end of the draperies and found the right cord and pulled them all the way open. All that was left of the day was an ember band across the horizon over the black sea. He turned the small desk lamp on and went over to stand by the bed and look at Mrs. Lee Rountree in her sleep. She lay on her side, facing him. Her palms, pressed flat together, were under her cheek. Her sun-harshed hair spilled across her face, some blond strands stirring with each long exhalation of deep sleep, an exhalation from lips apart. Her leg underneath lay straight toward the foot of the bed. Her left leg was hiked up, knee sharply flexed, the round of the knee braced against the crumpled terrain of the pale wrinkled sheets.

He eased gently onto the bed to sit near the foot of it, turning so that he could look at her. Certainly a great quantity of lovely lady. Close to five eleven in her bare feet, he estimated. Possibly a hundred and forty to a hundred and forty-five pounds. All the creamy tidy luxuries of her were as perfectly in scale and proportion as with some of the remembered women, the few miniatures he had known, a foot shorter, fifty pounds lighter, yet not more delicately and tenderly constructed than this resting Amazon.

And once again he remembered the woodchuck, and the obsession he and his grandfather had shared during most of one of those endless Indiana summers when he had been seven years old. There had been some kind of trouble at home that he had been too young then to understand, and they had sent him out to the small farm for the summer. His grandfather had a bald head with spots on it and a bristling white moustache and a deep scar on his forehead. His grandfather was short of breath, and his left arm stopped midway between elbow and wrist, ending there in a leather thing like a round hoof with a threaded hole in the middle of it into which he could screw different attachments to suit different kinds of work. His grandfather had been wounded and gassed in a war long ago in the history books. The government sent him money every month. There was only one milch cow in the big cobwebby barn. She was brown and her name was Hilda, and she was family. There was a chicken yard with Rhode Island Reds. His grandmother took care of those. His grandfather said they were dumb, nasty cannibals.

There was a kitchen garden, almost an acre, that was the only part of the farm his grandfather worked. The rest grew up to grass, and men came and mowed it and stacked it and carted it away.

“Show you something, Aldie,” his grandfather said the day after his father left him at the farm. They walked a long way up the dusty farm road, at least a mile, and then over to a grassy bank, and his grandfather pointed out the great big round hole with the grass-grown mound of dirt beside it, a hole slanting down on the first uprise of the bank into fearful blackness.

“Right down in there lives the biggest son of a bitch of a woodchuck in creation, boy. Now don’t you say son of a bitch in front of your grandma, you hear?”

“I won’t.”

“We’re going to get him, Aldie. We’re going to by God get that smart old son of a bitch.”

His grandfather planned the campaign carefully. He found the only place where they could lie in wait, a shady little ridge where there were alder and witchhopple and the smell of dampness under big beech trees. It had a clear view of the rich green grassy flat where the woodchuck would come out and graze in the early morning or at last light.

“He’s old and he’s big because he’s so damn smart, Aldie.”

They made precise measurement of the distance from the ridge to the grass flat. It was a hundred and forty yards. Back near the farm, his grandfather found a place where there was exactly the same distance to shoot at exactly the same downward angle. They tacked white paper to a pine board and painted a target on it and staked it on the range. His grandfather rested his Springfield .30 on a feed sack half full of sand, lay prone, and squeezed off ten slow shots. The gun oil and Fourth of July smells, and the wicked crack and distant echo, were all very exciting.

He ran out and pulled the paper target off the board and came running back. His grandfather studied it and spat. “Throwing low and left,” he said. “Pretty good group, but low and left.” So he adjusted the sights, and the second group was even with the middle of the target but still a little bit left. The third group was off to the right. The last group was centered.

The next day his grandfather painted a crude picture of the woodchuck life-size on white paper, lifted up on his back end, muzzle high, front legs in the air.

Aldo squatted near the old man, who took a long time before he squeezed off the first shot. Aldo waited for the next one but his grandfather said to go get the target and bring it back, because there was going to be time for just one shot. The hole was centered right in the head of the painted woodchuck.

“Now we’ll get him for sure, boy. He stays so close to that hole of his, I got to get him perfect or he’ll go deep on us. And you haven’t got enough size yet and I haven’t got enough arms or wind to dig him out.”

So they began the vigil. They would get up at the first gray of false dawn and trudge up the road in the morning chill, go around behind the ridge, and sneak up to the prepared place, and his grandfather would rest the rifle on the sandbag, the muzzle sticking out through the leaves.

Twice, as the sun was coming up, there was a clear shot, but the wind was blowing hard from left to right, and his grandfather explained that so much wind could move the slug a couple or three inches off. Once Aldo had seen him first and had whispered, “There he is, Grampa!” And the old chuck had lumbered quickly to the burrow and disappeared.

“Boy, he’s got ears like a bat and eyesight like a buzzard. He heard you just as good as I did.”

Another time his grandfather forgot to work the bolt action beforehand to jack the bullet into the chamber. At the cautious snickety-clicking sound, the chuck disappeared, and his grandfather said bad words for a long time.

Aldo began to be afraid, in late August, that they would take him back to the city to start the second grade, and he would never be there to see his grandfather get the old son of a bitch.

One night it rained and the road was damp, and they were in position when the first pale gold of the sun began to shine through the misty morning sky. Aldo saw the old woodchuck come out and stop eight feet from his hole. He held his breath. The chuck sat upright, sniffing at the morning air. The crack of the rifle made Aldo jump, and he saw the chuck moving toward his hole. His grandfather jumped up faster than Aldo had ever seen him move, and Aldo had to run hard to catch up with him. The woodchuck was half in and half out of his burrow, back legs sprawled. His grandfather, wheezing and gasping, grabbed a rear leg and yanked the old woodchuck back out, let go quickly, and moved back.

“Right... through the head,” his grandfather said. “Even so, the old son of a bitch nearly got underground.”

“Right through the head,” Aldo said.

His grandfather rested the rifle against the slope and looked quietly down at the dead animal. He was getting his breath back. Finally he said, “Sheee-yit!”

“What’s the matter, Grampa?”

“Nothing, Aldie. Nothing.”

“Why are you acting so cross?”

“I’m not cross, boy.”

“Are... you sorry for him?”

“Sorry? No. I’m not sorry.” His grandfather looked down at him, frowning. “What I’m thinking about, the old son of a bitch is no longer up here to come git. No reason anymore to think about how I’m going to get him because... it’s all done and over.”

Mr. Aldo Bellinger looked at the sleeping wife of Mr. Rountree and knew that sometime within the next week, aboard Winkler’s sloop, he would tell Anne Faxton how, as he saw Liz sprawled beside him, fading down into sleep, that same wistful regret had come into his mind with the remembered weary sound of Grampa’s voice saying “Sheee-yit!”

He looked down at himself, torpid between the thick tough thighs with the hard weave of muscle under the curly sun-scalded hair, aware of the beginning now of the first thickening of new tumescence. Twenty-five visits a year to Marburg for the tests and measurements, and the sophisticated changes in the level of the dosages of steroids, cortisones, supplementary testosterone. Five thousand a year to Marburg to keep the sexual clock set back a dozen years. So get full value, Bellinger.

He eased himself carefully close, moved a pillow to the right place for his head, then gently slid his left arm under her, under her neck and around, to place the flat of his hand against her back. With the fingers of his right hand he tenderly combed the blond hair back away from her face, feeling the slight sweat-dampness that still remained near the roots.

She opened unfocused eyes, befuddled, uncomprehending. He moved his right hand down to the steep soft cleft of her waist. He saw her pale blue eyes come into a sharp focus of recognition. He saw the memory and awareness hit her, a savage impact. Pam, guilt, shock, shame. She tried to twist away from him, pushing at his chest with her hands, straining to free herself and roll away from him.

“No, Liz,” he said gently. He held her firmly.

Her effort weakened and faded away. She covered her face with her hands and made a snorting noise.

“Don’t cry. Please, honey.”

“Just let me go. Let me go.”

“We have to talk about this.”

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

“And go where?”

“Back to my room.”

“In a bikini, back to the other wing?”

She spread her fingers, and a damp miserable eye stared at him. She lifted up and looked over him toward the glass doors, then fell back limply. “What time is it?”

“A little after eight. We both fell asleep.”

“Oh God. What’ll I do?”

“Is your room key in that canvas bag, or down at the desk?”

“In... that bag of mine, I think. Yes.”

“Good. I can wander over there and pick up what you need in my dispatch case and bring it back here.”

“Then that makes everything all right? Oh God, Mr. Bellinger, I wish I was dead. I really do.”

He felt such a great warmth and affection and sympathy for her that it made his eyes sting. Not an Amazon at all. Just a scared, heart-sick, troubled young girl, looking unexpectedly small beside him. It pleased him to think of how he would and could raise her spirits. It had worked before and would work every time, whenever there was enough guilt and enough shame.

“Can you ever forgive me, darling?” he asked.

“Forgive you!”

“For a long time I lay just like this, with my arms around you, watching you sleep, trying to understand how it could have happened. I had no idea of anything like this happening when I asked you to come up here. I just wanted to... see your eyes sparkle and see your smile when I told you about my plans for Lee. And then I... oh God, Liz, I’m so sorry. I just didn’t realize the sun and booze and... It was all my fault.”

She rubbed her tears away with her thumb knuckles, snuffed hard. “Oh boy. Sure. All your fault, Aldo. I stretch out on your bed in a bikini and start kissing you. What the hell did I expect you to do? I was asking for it. And I got it. I really got it. I was going to go through my whole life never cheating on Lee, and it wasn’t going to be any kind of big character thing either. I never had any reason to cheat. I never thought I even could. I thought I’d vomit if a man other than Lee put his hands on me even.”

“We were both smashed, Liz. Drinks and sunshine and fun and jokes. We’ve always enjoyed each other, liked each other. But I’ve always... been aware of you in a sexual way. I’ve wanted you and been absolutely certain I’d never have you.”

She gave a little nod. “I know. But I guess if it wasn’t like that, there’d be something wrong with both of us.”

“What kept bothering me before I woke you up, dear, was wondering if I really had sort of planned this, sort of trapped you. After all, I did spread the drawings and maps out on the bed.”

“No. Even smashed I’d have known right off if you were trying to set me up. I mean I can’t help the way I look, and ever since I was thirteen men have been trying to set me up, and I know the smell of it. No, honey, you were so anxious to show me the project, and if that roll of stuff had been in the living room, you’d have spread them out on the coffee table. But they were in here and the bed was closest and handiest. Anyway, what the hell difference does it make? I felt so damned happy about everything. And I felt very grateful to a very wonderful guy. So I started kissing him, damned near naked, on his bed, hugging him. I could have stopped you.” She frowned. “You know, there’s a funny way a person lies to themself. In my mind I had this little voice going on and on, saying it wasn’t really going to happen because it just couldn’t possibly happen. Then, like it happened all of a sudden, I thought it was your hand touching me, but you slipped into me all the way and that crazy little voice in my head started screaming, ‘It’s happened already! It really happened! It’s too late!’ Then no little voice any more. What am I going to do? I just can’t hide it from Lee. He’ll know right away. What’ll I do?”

He shook her so roughly it startled her.

“You are going to stop trying to punish yourself, Liz!”

“You hurt me then, damn it! Leaving black and blue marks isn’t going to help a bit.”

“When I bring you your clothes and cosmetics and such, I am going down to the dining room and you are going to come join me.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Too many people may have noticed we both disappeared for too many hours. You have to be strong. You have to be strong enough to be perfectly casual, normal, relaxed. We have to be seen together acting just the way we always have.”

“There’s no point. I can’t hide it from Lee. So there’s no point in playing games.”

“You have every reason in the world not to trust me, Elizabeth. But I wish you would. I wish you would trust me and believe in me, because I think I can tell you something about yourself. Let’s talk about Lee.”

“Lee? Oh, he was that dandy husband I used to have.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass child, please. I have been looking for a Lee Rountree for several years. I damn near didn’t realize I’d found him. Know why?”

“Not really.”

“He hangs back, Liz. He doesn’t push. I narrowly missed finding out just how very damn good he is.”

“I know what you mean now.”

“Liz, if he leaves me and goes to work somewhere else, nobody may ever again see his true potential. He will spend the rest of his life in the small time, way down the list in the minor leagues. Liz, I need that guy! Badly.”

“You are not alone,” she said bitterly.

“But out of childishness, selfishness, total self-involvement, you are perfectly willing to destroy him. Yet you claim you love him.”

“Mr. Bellinger, you goddamn fool, I have destroyed him, and myself, and one very good marriage.”

“Only because you want to.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Let me ask you something. You must answer honestly.”

“Go ahead.”

“You have an image of yourself as a certain type of person, capable of certain acts, incapable of others. You believe that Lee shares that image of you. Now, don’t you have the little feeling in the back of your mind that if you explained very carefully, in complete detail, exactly what led up to your getting screwed—”

“Jesus!”

“Shut up. You have the feeling that if he could really comprehend every part of it, then your mutual love is strong enough so that he could eventually forgive, really forgive, and even forget. Isn’t that true?”

“He couldn’t ever—”

“He’s too small? Too intolerant? Has no understanding, and damned little genuine love?”

“No!”

“Then you do have the little suspicion he might forgive you?”

“I... I guess so.”

“And you want to be forgiven, don’t you?”

“It would be the most wonderful thing—”

“Liz, you were absolutely confident you could keep our secret about his big chance in Uruguay.”

“Yes. I know I could have. But this other thing is—”

“Listen to me. You are so anxious to be forgiven, to be understood, you are going to clue him some way, somehow, just enough so that he’ll pry and pry until he gets the whole story. Confession to not only lessen guilt, dear girl, but to create such a terrible series of scenes, you will be punished for your transgression, and then, finally, after many acts of contrition, there will be the forgiveness. Sell it to daytime television, kid.”

“Damn you!”

“I want you to act like a grown-up in a grown-up world, dear.”

“And how do I do that?”

“By measuring and weighing alternatives. Do you think that after he knows what we did in this bed, he’d go on working for me?”

“On no! Never. He just couldn’t.”

“But you have to let him know about us, just because you want punishment and forgiveness?”

“I won’t be able to hide it from him! I told you that!”

“You won’t be able to hide it because you are sure that the act is forgivable because there were so many extenuating circumstances. Liz, my darling, the only way to show your love for your man is to make sure you don’t ever dare give him the slightest clue.”

“How do I make sure of that?”

“You have to do something you know he couldn’t ever forgive and forget. That is a safety device. Then you can’t ever reveal any part of this. It will keep you from cutting him down to the point where he can’t ever know or reach his real potential in the world.”

Her stare was very puzzled, thoughtful. As she started to speak, he moved his right hand with rough, shocking, brutal directness into the most intimate of caresses. She gasped, started violently, pried his hand away. “What the hell are you doing, Aldo?”

He pitched his voice high. “Lee, darling, I’ve got to tell you a terrible, terrible thing. Somehow I got a little drunk and I got reckless and affectionate and I got laid by Mr. Bellinger. Well, darling, I slept and then I woke up in his bed and we decided as long as the harm was done already, we might as well have an instant replay.”

“Aldo! For the love of God!”

“If we do, honey, then you can’t ever tell him any part of it.” He tugged against her resistance, tucked her head into the hollow of his shoulder. “It’s the only insurance you can take out, Elizabeth. Believe me. It’s the only way to protect your marriage and his future from your subconscious wish to have him make you confess. You have to make the whole situation so unforgivable and unconfessable you’ll fight like a tiger to rid his mind of any little suspicion he might get.”

She lay quietly, making no attempt to pull away from him. “You’ve sort of got me confused.”

“Then just think it all out, darling. Think it through. And be honest with yourself.”

“Don’t... touch me or anything, huh?”

“I never will again, unless you give me permission. While you are thinking, dear, you know that there is one question, if you do confess, that he is going to have to ask you.”

“I know.”

“Did you plan to tell the truth about that too?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’d lie a little. Either say I didn’t at all, or it was a real little one.”

“You and I know better than that.”

“God, yes!”

“So the confession itself would be a little dishonest.”

“I guess so.”

“Then you’d make it just to gratify yourself. At his expense and mine.”

“Don’t talk any more. Let me think. I’ve got to figure it all out. It’s so important.”

After a long time she said, “It’s pretty cold-blooded.”

“It has to be, to be unconfessable.”

A minute or so later she sighed and he felt the warmth of her breath against his chest and throat. “I guess technically it doesn’t make a hell of a big difference. Done is done, whatever number of times. I mean faithless is faithless.” Mirthless laugh. “Screwed is screwed.” She sat up slowly, sighed again. “I just don’t know. Be right back.”

She hitched to the edge of the bed and got up. She looked down at him. Her smile was sad and sardonic. “Don’t go away.”

She was in the bathroom about ten minutes. He heard the toilet flush, heard water running. She came back and knee-walked near him and folded down into the same position as before. She had the faint aroma of his special bath soap from Neiman-Marcus.

“Well... don’t expect any reaction this time, Aldo. I feel all tired and dead and dumpy. It’ll be just going through the motions. But I guess that will count. He could forgive once, I think. Not twice. I guess it’s probably better if I’m real dead this time.”

“Permission to go ahead.”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“This is a deliberate infidelity, remember. You have decided, all things considered, that you want me to make love to you again.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up. Please. Just do it.”

He soon confirmed his suspicion that she had decided that she would not let herself feel any pleasure. But she was a strong and healthy young woman. Her nap had rested her. He had given her a rationalization and justification for making love. She made just a few whining complaints, and then she began to let herself be carried along. After a time she began to move ahead on her own momentum, and when he recognized the plateau condition, he began holding her back to give all her tensions time to build to a good peak. When finally she began to pull at him with frantic strength, arching impossibly wider for him, he moved her into it.

When they were both ended, and he lay still between the slack, sprawled bounty of her long handsome legs, and when his head had drowsed heavily downward to within the range of all her soft little blurred kissings, her voice saying a word in half whisper, “Darlee, darlee, darlee, darlee,” he had another memory of that day his grandfather had shot the woodchuck. His grandfather had cut a short sturdy length of branch, and they had tied the back feet of the giant groundhog together and then inserted the stick between his legs. They picked him up that way and carried him back down the road to the farm. Aldo had carried the rifle, and they had each held one end of the stick.

The morning sun had, by then, turned the early dampness of the dirt road back to pale fine talcum dust. As they walked, Aldo saw thick drops of blood fall from the muzzle of the dead beast. They would strike the dust and roll into strange dark little dusty balls, almost perfectly round.

It was on that walk that he suddenly knew, with terrifying finality, that everything and everybody had to die, without exception.

Both these parts of the woodchuck story would have to be told to Anne Faxton, so that she would understand. And there was that final part, of trying to eat the woodchuck stew that evening, then suddenly running out through the pantry into the back yard, bending over in the sunset light under the apple tree and vomiting, then suddenly feeling his grandfather’s only hand on his back, and hearing him say softly, “There, boy. There, now.”

He had managed to so intensify the big girl’s release that she was a long time in softening and fading into her total relaxation and lethargy. He thought of the terrible swiftness of himself, when every bit of consciousness, awareness, identity had turned and folded inward toward the deep hot ecstasy of sensation, demand, and spending. Too swift, too much like the cracking flight of the rifle slug. He lay, awaiting the thong around his ankles, the insertion of the lift stick, the long swaying, head-down journey down the long dusty road for the dead beast.

He gradually became aware of the way her breathing had changed. It had deepened into the unmistakable cadence of sleep. He had known a few others who reacted the same way. They would come tumbling off the edge of climax and fall all the way down into total sleep, automatic and inevitable.

Bellinger carefully disengaged himself, edged over to the side of the bed, swung his legs out, and stood up slowly, yawning, scratching the sweat-moist hair of chest and belly. Liz Rountree lay sprawled in deep sleep, on her back, head lolled to the side, toward him, hair thatched partially over her eyes. Her hands were slack fists, the left resting on her belly, moving to each breath, the right on the inside of her out-turned right thigh. In the glow of the distant desk light every softened convexity of her body had a highlight sheen of exertive moisture.

He picked up the blue-gray spread from the carpeting at the foot of the bed and floated it out, drifted it carefully down to cover her. Each inhalation began with a small rattling sound, and each exhalation made a small puhhh sound as pressure forced her swollen lips apart. He smiled sadly down at her. Sweet wistful affection and gratitude. A large lovely troubled child, and just as wonderfully orgasmic as he had guessed she might be. They were a fine couple, Lee and Liz. He would take gentle and understanding care of both of them. It was the least he could do.

He took a quick shower, noting once again the slightly unpleasant chemical odor of the water and the hardness that inhibited proper sudsing. But now it was Larssen’s problem. He turned out the bright fluorescence before opening the bathroom door.

He dressed, putting on oyster-white slacks, a pale blue juayabera, his Mexican sandals. In her sleep she had rolled onto her right side, pulled her knees up. He took her small canvas beach bag over to the desk and found the key to 18-B. He emptied his dispatch case of reports and documents and hung the do not disturb sign on the outer latch when he left the room.

He had to go down and cross the bright area between the pool and the long window wall beyond which was the shadowy, busy bar and lounge. He went into B wing to the far end, let himself into 18, and turned on the lights, pulled the draperies across, and then made a careful selection of what she would wear. Fresh, fragile underthings, white sandals, a crisp-looking shift in broad horizontal awning stripes of blue, green, and white.

He packed the cosmetics, lotions, sprays he thought she might need. He found her hairbrush in the bathroom, and it reminded him to put in her toothbrush and toothpaste. The two toothbrushes hung side by side on little porcelain clips inside the medicine cabinet. Symbol of sweet and homely domesticity. He felt another warm flow of affection for both of them. A fine young couple. Gentle people. The one with the ivory-colored handle and the black bristles was masculine gender. The one with the transparent pink handle was feminine. Eye makeup kit. Yes. Anything else? Inventory in order, sir. All necessities accounted for.

He turned out the lights, let himself out, started down the corridor, and saw Anne Faxton coming toward him, wearing a yellow canvas beach coat over her bikini. She was walking oddly, carefully.

She stopped, bare feet planted wide apart, fists deep in the big pockets of the beach coat. She looked at him, at the dispatch case. “Well, by God, whaddaya know! The old marksman himself.”

“Are you tight?”

“Possible, fella. Possible. I stopped off down there at the bar and I had two double Gibsons. Pow, pow. Celebration.” She swayed and he reached to support her. She yanked her arm away, tottered back, and half fell against the corridor wall, with a solid impact. She was dazed for a moment, shook her head, then stood there, well braced. She gave him a crooked grin. “Have yourself a nice romp with that big sweet kid, boss?”

“Settle down, Anne. Look. I want us to get away from the whole bit for a while. Fly down to St. Thomas and cruise around for a week or so on Winkler’s sloop.”

“Too late. You tore it. Din have any mercy, did you?” “We said from the beginning, honey, no exclusive claims.”

“You set her up pretty good, huh? Took your time. No sloop, sweetie. No soft talk. No sympathy. No special private overpaid personal ’xecutive secretary anymore either. Resignation in effect.”

“Anne, believe me, she doesn’t mean that much.”

“Aldo, baby, no hard feelings. Nobody means much. That’s the point. What I am celebrating is freedom. No. Celebrating a narrow escape. You know, I damned near fell in love with you? Awful close, sweetie. Wow! Real close. My mind was clouded. I nearly mixed up two different things. Screwing and love. Took me four wonderful years to find out I don’t get along so good on the first without the second, no matter how big you turn me on. It’s like... the beautiful color pictures of food in the magazines.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“You already have. Face it.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“We’ll never really talk again, you and me. This is the last of it. I had a great idea for you when I was walking on the beach. Know those life masks? What you do, after you score and before you cool off... How long will it take with big ol’ Liz? That Lee is going to see a lot of the world, the way you’ll be sending him off looking at stuff and making reports. Where was I? Oh, before you cool off, you get the gal of the month to sort of sit into a kind of shallow pan you got full of plaster stuff. Then after it sets she gets up and then what you do is pour that kind of rubber plastic into the impression. Follow me? Then you take it out after it sets and you fasten it to a big kind of walnut plaque and color it with the right kind of flesh tint, and put a little brass plate under it that’ll have the initials and the dates, and then you hang it up with all the others in a nice paneled study. Now mine would be kinda scrawny and not very impressive, so you can hang mine in a dark corner.”

“Anne, for God’s sake! Don’t. I need you.”

She pulled herself together with an effort, pushed herself away from the wall, and gave him a truly tender and loving smile. She patted his arm and kissed him on the mouth. “Good-bye, my dear Aldo. Parts of it were nice. There were some sweet times. Good luck. Good hunting.”

She brushed by him and went on along the corridor, walking carefully, humming a timeless little song of freedom.

He went back to his apartment and let himself in. She still slept. He unpacked her things, laid out her clothing, put the toilet articles in the bathroom.

Before he woke her, he stood and looked at her for a long time. He knew that they would have a late supper together, and he knew that by then he would want her again. He knew she would make token objection to coming back up here with him, but she would succumb to the same argument he had used on her before, because now she was conditioned to an expectation of pleasure which made her willing to grasp at this handy new rationalization.

He could even hear the sound of his own voice saying the words that would work.

He put one knee on the bed and shook her awake, saying, “Liz? Liz, honey.”

She rolled over and looked at him, her sleep-blurred face firming up as she came awake. “Hi,” she said.

“I brought your things, dear. Your clothes are over there and the rest of the stuff is in the bathroom.”

She pushed herself into a sitting position, yawned widely, then stretched, fists near her breasts, elbows out to the side, lifted high. She looked over at the shift he had laid over the back of a chair.

“That’s fine,” she said. “Thanks.” She worked her way to the edge of the bed and swung her legs out. She tossed her hair back and gave him a rueful smile. “You sure know how to put me to sleep, darling.”

“My pleasure.”

“What time is it now?”

“Almost ten thirty.”

“Gee, isn’t it too late to get anything to eat?”

“I checked. We serve steak sandwiches in the cocktail lounge from ten until midnight.”

“Hmmm. Will you serve me like about seven of them?”

“Growing girl.”

She stood up. “Growing older, Mr. B. Growing wiser, maybe.” She stood in front of him, close to him, hooked her two index fingers around his belt. Her eyes were almost on a level with his, not more than half an inch lower. She looked into his eyes, one and then the other, her pupils making a little back and forth motion, swift and searching. “Who are we, my darling?” she asked softly. “Tell me who we are. Please.”

“Aldo and Liz. Friends. Lovers.”

“I know. Lovers. Can a person love two people very much, for different reasons, at the same time?”

“It can happen. Can you handle the situation with Lee when he comes back tomorrow morning?”

“Yes. Because I know it’s important to you. We weren’t trying to hurt anybody. Not the first time. We gave and took pleasure. The second time was to keep from hurting somebody else. You were right.”

“I’m glad.”

“I would have thought... if I thought about it at all... you’d be too old for me, way too old. But you’re not at all. You’re so awfully damned good about making love to me it scares me. Both times it was so much it scares me. It makes me love you. Is that what you want?”

“As long as we can handle it, honey. Without hurting anybody.”

“Stay near me. It will sort of help.”

“Will do.”

“I want to sort of trust you, Aldo. You know?”

“I know.”

She tugged, kissed him lightly on the lips, released him and said, “You will be the man sitting at the bar and I will be the girl who comes in and says, ‘Why hello there, Mr. Bellinger! Gee, what a surprise!’ ”

“And how are you this evening, Mrs. Bellinger?” “Confused, sir. Confused all to hell.”

She walked over to the chair and picked up her underthings, and turned slowly and walked toward the bathroom. She passed close to the desk lamp and turned and smiled at him. She was on conscious display for him, her figure smooth and rich and lovely. She disappeared into the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind her.

The pattern as expected. The pattern as before. Submissive, dubious, troubled, curious. They always wanted the reassurances. They always had to label it and justify it and ask the question with their pretty eyes, and wonder if it would be the same if it happened again, when it happened again. They had to be provocative to make certain it would happen again. The familiar syndromes of the married mistress, not yet knowing how soon she will feel contempt for the man she has chosen to lie to.

He felt such a wrench of regret when he thought of Anne Faxton that it was like physical pain. He opened the corridor door and paused before shutting it behind him and looked through the living room and bedroom, at the closed door to the bathroom.

Aldo wished with all his heart that he would never have to look at her again, kiss her again, fondle her again, mount her again. But he knew he would, many times. Because she was of trophy caliber, deserving of plaques and awards, and of a secure place high on the list of all the memories.

Double Hannenframmis

He came in alone on the executive jet, Gus and Kelly up front. First time he had ever been the lone passenger. Wyatt Ross all alone, amid the leathery black luxury of the lounge chairs. Strange not to have the members of the strike force along. Geri Housner, incomparable executive secretary. Stanley Silverstaff, knowing ratios and leverage and cash flow. Stannard on legal. Haines on systems analysis, product mix, production potential. Nucleus of the team, other experts added as needed.

Tried to read over the transcript of the last hearing, looking for hidden tricks in the questioning, looking for inconsistencies in his own answers. Slowed his skilled speed-reading down to minimum, down to subvocal level, but comprehension still fractional. Put it back into the dispatch case. Concentration will be impossible until this thing is settled, solved, brushed under a high-cost rug.

Pressure change in the ears. Change in pitch of jet engines and wind whistle. Lazy voice on the intercom, “Coming in, Mr. Ross.”

Tighten the belt and look down at the tilting earth, at the gaudy jumble of the toy hotels of the resort city. Bright blue water in morning sun. Improbable green of the golf courses, and the endless tan and rust and solitude of the desert all around.

At rest on the apron for private aircraft, rotors whining down into silence, heat striking through the metal carapace. Gus came back and undogged the door, cranked the steps down, carried the suitcase and dispatch case out to the wire gate. Wyatt Ross waved a taxi over, told Gus to tell Kelly to count on takeoff at nine tomorrow morning.

Ross went blank at the driver’s question, felt a panic out of all proportion to the seriousness of the small lapse of memory. Felt he could as readily forget the name of the city he was in, wife’s name, names of the two small sons. Took out the black notebook. Hotel Contessa Royale, please.

Rocks and ferns, pools and fountains, upward swoop of driveway to stop in the shade of architectural redwood, and there he was handed over to doorman, bell captain, bellhop, desk clerk.

W. R. Ross. Dallas. “Yes sir, that will be 911. I hope you will enjoy your stay with us. Yes, there is one message. Here you are, sir. Desk! Take Mr. Ross to 911, please.”

Large room, tufted yellow rug, sliding glass opening onto a small sun terrace. Hushed, chilly, asceptically clean. Dressing room. Ice maker. Bidet. Color television. Many mirrors.

He kept seeing himself in the mirrors, seeing movement and turning with a start and seeing Wyatt Ross. Just like the pictures which had appeared over the past six years in Business Week, Forbes, Time, Newsweek. With the adjectives. Vital. Daring. Imaginative. Fast-moving. Aggressive.

And just like the newspaper photographs recently. Wyatt Ross subpoenaed in Senate hearing on stock manipulation. Securities & Exchange Commission launches investigation of misuse of insider information. Justice Department blocks acquisition of Kallen Equipment by Wyro International Services, Inc. Board of Governors of the NYSE suspends trading in Wyro. Attorneys for Kallen Equipment claim that Wyatt Ross, chief executive officer of Wyro, made fortune in dummy margin accounts in three brokerage houses.

He opened the sealed envelope he had been given at the desk. Feminine handwriting. Hotel stationery.

Mr. Ross:

I will expect you at eleven this morning in 938. Do not phone my room, please.

Miss McGann.

Twenty minutes. He unpacked too quickly. Once again he tried to read the transcript of the last hearing. Just words, without meaning. He prowled, not looking into any of the mirrors. At two minutes before eleven he put the five-inch reel of tape into the side pocket of his suit coat and walked down the corridor to Miss McGann’s room.

She opened the door a few inches and looked out at him, and then pulled it wide to let him in. A tall woman, younger than he had expected. Strong-bodied, big-bosomed blonde with a pretty and impassive face, cool blue eyes, careless hair, brief green skirt with a big brass buckle, yellow sleeveless blouse, yellow sandals.

“Mr. Russo asked me to check and be sure you have a good reason to be here,” she said.

“One of the men on my board lives here. Sam Wattenberg. He isn’t well. He doesn’t travel. He has a large stock interest in Wyro, and he’s very upset. I’m seeing him at his home at five this evening.”

“May I have the tape, please?”

He handed it to her. She went over to the couch. She had cleared the long coffee table and set up electronic equipment on it. Two reel-to-reel recorders. A small amplifier. A piece of laboratory equipment which looked like an unfinished television receiver. Two small speakers on the floor.

As she threaded the tape onto one of the decks, he said, “It’s just a lot of standard husband and wife talk. Russo said to just turn on that machine and make sure she talked.”

Miss McGann made no reply. She started the tape, adjusted the amplifier controls, then leaned back on the couch, arms folded, eyes half-closed. And the breakfast table voices of Wyatt and Mary Lou Ross, husband and wife, came into the room with a special clarity, a startling presence. The small routines of domesticity. The man had fixed the dishwasher but it still wasn’t working right Denny’s new tooth looked as if it was coming in sideways. Maria wants three days off to go visit her sick sister down in Brownsville. She wants to borrow the bus fare.

And then a part that made him edgy and uncomfortable.

“Darling, you look so tired. And you seem so kind of remote. I suppose it’s all this trouble with the government. They’re sort of persecuting you, aren’t they?”

“That’s a good word, honey.”

“Is it... real bad trouble?”

“Pretty bad.”

“They’re saying such ugly things about you in the newspapers. It hurts me when they say things like that. I know you’re not like that.”

“Thanks.”

“Wyatt, darling?”

“What is it?”

“It’s all a lot of misunderstandings, isn’t it? I mean you haven’t ever done anything... sneaky and underhanded, have you? I shouldn’t even ask you that. I know you better than that.”

“I’m absolutely clean, honey. Believe me.”

“I do. Then this is just something... we have to go through, and they’ll find out they’re wrong about you. I think I would just die if you ever did anything crooked. I love you and I know you couldn’t. I shouldn’t spoil your breakfast by even talking about it. I’m sorry.”

“You have a right to ask, honey. You have a right to be reassured.”

“Well, I wish it was over, dam it.”

Wyatt’s face felt hot. The conversation turned to trivialities — to invitations they couldn’t accept, to when the dog should have his shots, to what to send her mother for her birthday this year.

The tape ended. Miss McGann said, “That sounds like a nifty little wife, Mr. Ross.”

“She is a nifty little wife indeed.”

“North Carolina?”

“Until she was about fifteen, and then her family moved to Atlanta.”

“Nifty little wife isn’t going to take this very well, is she?”

“I’m paying Russo a very large piece of money to get me out from under. The deal does not include my listening to your personal appraisals, Miss McGann.”

“Correction, dearie. I’m not on your conglomerate payroll. I am a specialist, and I am damned good, and I get paid very very well. You got too confident and you got too cute and you got caught. You can lose your ass, fellow. Russo knows it, you know it, and I know it. I think your Mary Lou is better than you deserve, and I think you will be doing her a favor by dropping her off the back of your sleigh, fellow. I say what I want when I want to, and take crap from no man alive. Now tell me you’re not used to being talked to like this. And I will tell you to relax and enjoy it. Now let me get to work.”

She ran the tape back and found a place she wanted. A simple sentence. “Maria gets so all gloomy and dramatic when there’s any kind of family trouble, especially financial problems.”

“Why that one?” Wyatt asked.

“Why not?” she said.

“Look, Miss McGann. Truce. I’m in trouble. I’m humble. I need your help. My name is Wyatt.”

She studied him, head tilted, then smiled for the first time. “Sure. Call me Ruth. That sentence has the sounds in it that are going to give me the most trouble. She turns financial, for example, into a four syllable word. Fye-nance-you-wull.”

She recorded the sentence from tape to tape ten times, leaving blank tape between each repeat. She then replayed the new tape, watching the ever-changing graph pattern on the screen of the unfamiliar piece of equipment.

With a microphone, she then repeated the sentence, recording it onto the new tape in the blank spots she had left, working the piano key controls of the recorder deftly while she watched the sound pattern, the voice profile, on the screen.

Wyatt Ross felt disappointment. The imitation seemed way off, unconvincing. Ruth McGann opened a small jar and took out a wad of pink, puttylike material, broke off two pieces, thumbed them into her cheeks outside her back molars.

“Changes the amount of space inside the mouth,” she explained. “Changes the resonance. I can alter the pitch.”

She practiced for a little while, then put the duplicate tape on the first machine and a fresh tape on the second. She spoke at the same time, saying the same words, and both voice patterns appeared on the screen, becoming ever more similar.

Then she turned the equipment off and said, “Wyatt, darling, what in the world are you doing in this hotel room with this female person?”

The uncanny accuracy of it made him jump. It was Mary Lou’s voice coming out of the stranger’s mouth. She laughed at his startled look, and it was Mary Lou’s laugh.

“Now I got it, I better stay with it right along, because if I go back to being me, I’ll like lose the taste of it, dear.”

“It’s a very weird sensation.”

“Honey, we better go over the little scripts. Here’s your copies. Soon as we get to sounding natural, then we can put them on the tape.”

Russo had worked out the dialogue. Ruth McCann became very irritated with Wyatt when he could not get away from the sound of somebody reading something. Once he had the sense of it, she made him put it aside and ad lib it. Finally, by changing her own lines, she was able to help him sound natural.

They taped the first exchange and then listened to it on playback.

“You got time for more coffee, darling?” she asked.

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Wyatt?”

“What is it?”

“I think there was a Kallen girl in school with me In Atlanta. Could that be the same family?”

“Where did you get that name from, Mary Lou?”

“Well, I couldn’t help seeing it. All those papers about the Kallen Equipment Company all over your desk in the study. I don’t let Maria go in there, but somebody has to do a little bit of dusting and cleaning. I saw the name and I wondered about that girl.”

“I don’t know. The company is in Michigan.”

“That’s who you went up there to see last week?”

Listening to the tape, he could appreciate Russo’s cleverness. It back-dated the conversation by almost six months.

“Yes, but it’s strictly confidential, honey.”

“Oh! Are you going to buy that little old company? My goodness, if you keep on buying things, doesn’t it get hard to keep track of everything?”

“Not with the team I’ve got working for me.”

“But why do you want that little company?”

“Because it’s there, honey.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Well, for instance they’ve got about sixteen million dollars worth of raw land, at fair resale value, and it’s carried on their books at what it cost them way back. Eight hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow! Do they know that?”

“They sure do, honey. That’s why we might have to give them one share of Wyro for every share of Kallen outstanding, which is a difference of better than twice what their shares are worth oh the big board.”

“Now you’ve lost me, sweetheart. More coffee?”

“I better run. If you get a chance, find out about the suit the cleaner lost.”

Ruth McGann switched it off. “You’re a little wooden, but it’s good enough. Let’s get these others done.”

There was one where she pried into the profitability of Wyro until he told her that their next quarterly earnings statement was going to be about half what had been estimated, and another where he told her he had decided to break off negotiations to acquire Henderson Homes.

After she had listened intently to the playback, Ruth turned off the equipment and sighed, plucked the two wads of pink plastic substance from her mouth, and got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back she said in her normal voice, “That should do it.”

“But what happens next? How can Russo explain the reason the tapes were made in the first place?”

“There’s a lot of options. He won’t come into it at all. Somebody will show up with the tapes. In the interest of fair play and all that. Mr. Russo makes everything logical. Don’t worry about it. It will all fit together. I could make a guess, but it won’t mean much.”

“Go ahead.”

“Some woman hired an investigator to get the goods on your Mary Lou and her husband. So the investigator bugged the house, and because it isn’t exactly legal, he sends the tapes in with an anonymous letter of explanation, sends them to your attorneys.”

“That won’t be enough.”

“Not without some trimmings. Maybe a fake phone tap, Mary Lou talking to an unidentified boyfriend.” She switched to Mary Lou’s voice. “Sweetheart, I’m doing the best I can, I really am. I mean I’ve never paid much attention to all this business stuff in the past. I’ve been asking him everything you told me to ask him, lover, and I’ve been telling you everything he says, but when can we stop all this? When will you have enough money so we can go away, my dearest? I think of you every living minute of the day and night, honest. I love you so.”

He found that he was standing. And roaring. “No, dammit! I won’t stand for that!”

“Dearie, you were very shifty the way you worked those accounts. Nobody can tie you directly to them, Mr. Russo says. But he says you were stupid with the timing, because you made your moves in the market on the basis of information known to you alone. He says you were greedy-stupid, getting in at the bottom and out at the top. And you pulled the cash out in a way that it can’t be traced back to you.”

“I had to do something! Too many things started to go wrong all at the same time.”

“We all have our little rationalizations, sugar. You made your moves and you siphoned off the cash, and if you hadn’t you couldn’t afford Russo to get you into the clear. But you didn’t declare it, and you haven’t planned on paying taxes on it. And unless you can throw them some alternative, you get your pick of Leavenworth or Atlanta or some other garden spot.”

“But I was doing it for...”

Wise and crooked smile, too old for her mouth and face. “For the wife and kiddies? Come on! Any way you deal the hand, you’ve lost your Mary Lou. Best to set it up to look as if somebody was using her. Otherwise she could get clipped for tax evasion. After they play the tapes and question her, and after you testify that those are conversations you had with your wife, you think she’ll forgive and forget?”

“No.”

“If there has to be more trimmings, Mr. Russo will provide them. A motel witness. Look at it this way. In the clear you can afford to give her big alimony. If they nail you, she might have to work waitress to support those kids.”

He sat on the couch, elbows on his knees, forehead resting on the heels of his hands, shoulders hunched high. Did not know he was weeping silently until he felt the tickle of the tears. Ruth McGann was pulling out the interconnecting jacks, putting the equipment into fitted cases.

On one inhalation he made a loud and inadvertent snorting sound. She sat beside him and said softly, “Hey. Hey, now.”

“I can’t... can’t...” Voice gritty and strangled.

Strong grasp pulled the nearest hand away. Warm hand against his far cheek, turning his face toward her.

“Poor sad sorry bastard,” she whispered, her face soft. Hand still on his cheek, she ran the ball of her thumb across the wetness under his eye. “Is it for real?” she asked.

“That’s... the worst part, Ruth. I don’t know... how much I mean it... or if I mean it at all.”

“I know. So later on you can tell yourself that when it happened, you cried.”

“How do you know so much?”

“When I was fifteen I was the voice of seventeen or eighteen rotten little animals in cheap commercials, dearie. It kept me from ever having anything of my own to say.” She leaned close and put her mouth on his, her lips soft, clever, unendingly sweet.

After he had his arms around her, tilting her back, she pushed him away. She mocked herself with her smile. “Okay, so I have this Earth Mother kick. The sky fell on your head, and you are pretty rotten. Go yank those draperies across, honey.”

Then after they were in the bed, her exhalations explosive at each readying caress, her body lifting and wanting, she stopped him as he moved to enter her, her face sweaty in the half light, seen through the tumble of her hair.

Breathing like a runner, she said, “The worst part. Sure. Not knowing how much I mean this. Or. Or if I mean... if I mean it at all, dearie. Or. Or ever can.”

“Shut up. Shut up.”

“I don’t like. Don’t like either one of us, love. Is that why I’m so ready? Is that how? How I know I’m going to make it?”

“Shut up.”

“All right. Come on then, Chief Executive Officer of Everything.”

Four months and four days later, he awoke from a Sunday afternoon nap in the beachfront cabana at the new hotel in Puerto Rico. The dream had sweated him, soured his mouth. In the dream he stood small before a judicial bench so high that he could not see the face of the sentencing judge. Hollow, solemn, echoing voice. “Wyatt Rutherford Ross, this Court finds you guilty of hannenframmis in the first, second, and third degree.”

Terror. “Your Honor! Your Honor! I don’t understand the charge.”

“And sentences you to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment. May God have mercy on the soul you should have had.”

“Your Honor! I can’t even see you.”

He got up and padded into the bathroom and rinsed his mouth. He looked at his sunbrown holiday face in the mirror and said, “I plead guilty to hannenframmis in all the degrees you got, baby.”

He went back into the bedroom and found his damp swim trunks and pulled them on. Tuck the dream away. Hide it behind the well-remembered newspaper features. Ross cleared on stock manipulation charges. Executive’s wife implicated in information leak. Surprise tapes played in closed committee session. Mrs. Wyatt Ross denies love affair, says evidence is faked. Surprise witness heard in closed session. Hotel registrations subpoenaed. Wife refuses to reveal identity of mystery man, denies his existence.

SEC clears officers of Wyro International Services. Trading in Wyro resumed. Divorce action filed. Kallen acquisition plans dropped by Wyro owing to drop in price of Wyro common after release of earnings report. Wyatt Ross announces spin-off of three earlier acquisitions, concentration on the most profitable product lines and services, improved future earnings through internal growth instead of acquisition route.

Done. For half a million dollars fed cautiously into the channel that ran from New York, to Miami, to Nassau, to Zurich, and into the proper account, the number furnished by a small, quiet, dead-faced man named Willy Russo. So he’d moved his own through the same pipeline, what he had left after Russo’s bite, into the number account he’d set up three years ago, along with orders to keep the money working, make it grow. The Swiss have a talent for it.

All done. And the old strike force had dropped away, one at a time. Stanley Silverstaff first, taking the best of the outstanding offers. Then Stannard going back into private practice. Then Haines leaving to go into that think-tank mystique in California at a fifth of what he was worth in industry.

Just as well. That team had been geared to acquisition, to making the careful stalk, the daring pounce. Different ball game now. Chop away at all the costs, direct and overhead. Expand existing markets. Improve the products and services. Needed a different type. Dogged, methodical men. No noisy celebrations in the private jet on the way home from victory. In fact, no company jets at all. Dwindling need. Cut the costs.

No need for the hearty devices that create the kind of team spirit that used to be so useful. Stay remote. It is too difficult to fire your friends. Easy to fire uneasy strangers. Set the goals. Promote the men who can meet them, fire those who can’t. And keep upping the goals.

Heard the stealthy key in the lock. Door opened. Geri Housner came in. Dark blue bikini with white ruffles. Canvas beach bag. Last one left. Incomparably loyal and efficient executive secretary. Incomparably elegant lady, slender and cool and unconsciously provocative. Four years of her executive secretarial services had left him, at times, in such a rage of desire it had taken the last fragment of self-control to keep it all on the polite, affable, impersonal basis which guaranteed her continuing efforts.

She was one of the rare ones, so good at any task he gave her that he knew he would never find another as useful. And he was all too aware of the implacable rules of the game. The day you tumbled a good one into bed was the day you started to lose her. The office marriage was a transient arrangement. It might take a year, or two, or possibly three at the most. Then she would leave or you would crowd her out.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re awake, darling.”

“Just about to come beach-walking, looking for you. Have a good swim?”

“Lovely. Absolutely lovely. Have a nice nap?”

“Not so lovely.”

She patted her dark hair and came toward him with a look of concern. “What do you mean? What’s wrong, Wyatt?”

“A dream. A dumb dream. Woke me up tired.”

“Poor darling.”

He caught her wrist and tugged, sat on the bed and stood her in front of him, between his knees, hands on her slender tanned waist. He grinned up at her, watched with clinical interest the way her mouth softened and sagged open, the way her head seemed to become too heavy for the slender throat. She had been so constrained, so stiff and awkward and shy, for the first week he had begun to think that her look of sensuality held under control had been ironic illusion. And then, all in a rush, she had come on, found it all, relished it all, living on that edge of readiness that needed only his touch to start the flowering.

“I should take my shower,” she said in a small blurred voice.

He pulled her across him, onto the bed, and in the lazy light of the late afternoon, peeled her out of the bikini and slowly, indolently, knowingly made love to her. In one slow, sweet, cantering pace, the time when a ubiquitous commercial song about manly cigarettes would sometimes come into his head, instead there came the Ruth-Mary Lou voice saying, “Maria gets so all gloomy and dramatic when there’s any kind of family trouble, especially financial problems. Especially fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull.” Timed to thrust and riposte.

Grab at some other nonsense phrase to drive the first one away. Like singing a song to get rid of a song.

“Guilty of hannenframmis,” he said.

“What? What, darling?” she asked, speaking up out of motion and lostness.

“Nothing.”

“Guilty of something.”

“Hush, darling. Come on, now.”

He had sensed that she was close, but his idiot phrase had shifted her concentration. She was working, but not making it back to where she had been. He knew that he could not wait, and did not want to stop, so he rocked to the side and gave her a great ringing stinging slap on her sea-salty, sweat-salty elegant haunch. So she yelped, leaped like a racing mare, clung, and came thundering home.

So later, dazed face frowning down at him, propped up on her elbow. “What was it you said about guilty?”

“Guilty of hannenframmis.”

“What did they used to call that? Double-talk. Yes. Why did you say it then?”

“It came into my mind, I guess.”

“Why would it come into your mind?”

“For God’s sake, Geri! Nobody knows what makes things come into your mind.”

“There’s always a reason, they say.”

“Okay. I don’t know the reason. It was something in the dream I had.”

“You dreamed I was guilty of... whatever that is?”

“I was guilty. I was in court. They gave me three life sentences.”

“Darling, I don’t want you to be troubled. I don’t want you to have bad dreams. I don’t want us to think about anything but us. There’s only three more days.”

“I’m not troubled!”

“You wouldn’t be cross to me if you weren’t.” She got up with quiet dignity and went into the bathroom and closed the door. Soon he heard the shower.

“Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull.” Get over it, baby. Marry well. Take good care of the boys.

He sighed and got up and went into the bathroom and made jokes and scrubbed her narrow lovely back, and she was in a good mood and wearing a pretty dress when they went up to the hotel, had rum drinks, watched the sunset, ate steaks, danced.

They walked on the beach and then went back to the cabana. He had brought a newspaper back from the hotel. While she got ready for bed he looked at the stock market reports. Kallen was in the high forties, up a point and a half on the day in high volume. She came over in sheer shorty nightgown, spicy aroma of perfume, dark eyes shining, kissed him meaningfully, told him to come to bed, kind sir. Right away, ma’am.

The lights were bright in the bathroom. He could smell her soap and lotions, and the lingering steamy-sweet odor of her body. He tried to summon desire, but there was none. None at all.

Finished brushing teeth. Examined teeth in mirror. Turned toilet lid down. Sat on it. Had feeling he was looking for something and would not know what it was unless he happened to see it. Or see something that reminded him of what it was he was looking for.

He saw his dark red robe on the hook on the back of the door. The belt was a thick white cotton rope. He got up and pulled the white rope out of the loops. He turned and looked up over the tub at the brace which held the high window open. A very sturdy brace. Well made.

So two nonsense things could be fitted together into double nonsense. “Fye-nance-you-wull hannenframmis.” It did not sound right said aloud, but he discovered he could say it inside his head effectively. Fast or slow. High or low. Loud or soft.

Slip knot. Stand on edge of tub. Wedge knot firmly into narrow end of brace. Give tug. Now keep saying it all inside your head, fellow, because big Ruthie McGann is standing back there somewhere shouting, trying to get through. And she is yelling something about meaning it or not meaning it and not knowing if anything means anything. Crap like that you can do without. So fye-nance-you-wull-hannenframmis the hell out of her. Throw up a cloud of it. Wet the rope. Makes the knot harder. Good thought. Edge of tub. Erection? Why erection when the elegant lady doesn’t do a thing for it tonight? Keep that old double nonsense coming, fellow. Loud and fast and all inside the head. Yank tight. Take step. And keep it loud and fa—

The Annex

During the last hour of the night, the charge nurse looked in at the critical in room 11, intensive-care section, coronary. She scowled and made an ugly, displeased mouth and hastened to replace the dislodged I.V. needle in the vein inside the elbow of the right arm, immobilized by the straps, the board, and the side rail of the bed. She checked the glucose drip, made a small adjustment of the flow valve, checked oxygen supply, listened to the ragged labor of the pulse, and went off and found the pretty little special drinking coffee in the treatment room and joking with the red-headed intern.

After chewing her out with a cold expertise that welled tears into the blue eyes, she herded her back to her night watch over the patient.

“I wasn’t gone three minutes, honest,” she said.

“An hour before dawn they get restless,” the charge nurse said. “As if they had someplace to go, some appointment to keep.”

When the first gray light of the morning made the shape of the window visible, he dressed quickly and went out. He guessed that they would not be expecting him to leave that room so soon after arriving.

There were shadows of night still remaining in the empty streets, so that even though he knew his way and walked swiftly, the city seemed strange to him. They were changing it so quickly these past few years. The eye becomes accustomed to the shape and bulk of structures, giving them only a marginal attention; yet when, so abruptly, they were gone, one had the feeling of having made a wrong turn somewhere. Then even the unchanged things began to look half strange.

He turned a dark comer and saw the hotel lights in the distance. A taxi came swiftly to the crosstown corner, made a wrenching, shuddering turn, and sped up the empty avenue, and he caught a silhouette glimpse of the sailboat hats of nuns in the dark interior, two or three of them.

He had not been in the hotel for years. He saw at once that it was quite changed. That certain quaintness of the lobby that once had set off the high style of the moneyed people and the women of the theater was now merely a shabbiness. He realized that he could have guessed it, because were it not changed, they would not be mixed up in this sort of thing. And his shabby assignment in an unknown room would have occurred in some other place, perhaps even in another city at another time.

There was no one behind the desk. He felt in his pocket for the identification he would have to present and felt fear and irritation when he did not find it at once. Then, among coins, he fingered the shape of it and took it out and held it in his clasped hand. As he wondered whether to tap the desk bell, he saw movement out of the side of his eye and turned and saw a man walking toward him out of the lobby shadows.

“Mr. Davis?” the small man said; and as he came into the light, his face was elusively familiar. He searched memory and finally recalled the image of the same face, a bellhop uniform in dull red and gray, big brass circle of the master key ring looped around the scrawny neck. And the name came back.

“Do you remember me, Leo? From before?”

“Sure,” the man said. He leaned against the desk and yawned. Davis knew the man did not remember him at all

“You’re the manager now?”

“So they keep telling me.”

“Come up in the world, eh?”

“I guess so.” He yawned again. “You got that thing?”

He felt unaccountably shy about revealing what they had given him. He said, “I keep telling them that they should use ordinary things. But they get fanciful. It just makes everything harder to explain when things go wrong. What kind of a sentimental nut would have a gold miniature of his own dog tag made? A grown man is supposed to get over being in a war.”

“Look, I have to see it.” Leo’s tone was patient and bored, and Davis knew the man had no interest in what he thought and very little interest in why he had come here.

He held his hand out and the little wafer gleamed on his open palm. Leo took it, glanced at it, and put it in his own pocket.

“They didn’t tell me you’d keep it.”

“The room you want is four-two-four-two.”

“Are you supposed to keep it? Did they make that clear?”

“Forty-two forty-two. Four thousand, two hundred and forty-two, Mr. Davis. OK?”

“All right. I’ll assume you’re supposed to keep it, Leo. It’s their problem, not mine. But you’re supposed to turn over the key. I know that.”

“I can’t, buddy, because the only keys here are the keys to the main house here. You should know that and they should know that. Right? What we’re talking about is the annex. Which is being tom down.”

“Then there isn’t anybody in it?”

“Did I say that, mister? Did anybody say that?”

“There’s no reason to get ugly about it, Leo.”

“Who’s ugly? Listen, they got old foops in there living there since the year one, and lease agreements and all that stuff, so about the only thing they can do is work around them until they get sick of all the noise and mess and get out. There aren’t many left now. I think maybe your party is the only one left on that floor, but I don’t keep close track. I’ve got enough to do here without worrying about over there.”

“So what do I do about a key? Am I supposed to go knock on the door, for God’s sake?”

“Mrs. Dorn is over there. She’s got a master key to the whole annex.”

“Does she know about me?”

“Why should she? Just con her a little, Mr. Davis. Play it by ear. OK?”

“I don’t have much choice, I guess.”

“Has anybody lately? Come this way.”

Leo led the way through the lobby and through a huge empty kitchen, where night lights picked up the gleam and shape of stainless-steel racks and tables. He pulled a door open and turned on a weak bulb at the head of a narrow flight of stairs.

“The regular way over there has been boarded up, so what you do is just follow the way a red pipe runs along the ceiling there, and when you come to stairs finally, go on up and you’ll find her around someplace.”

Three steps down, he turned to say his thanks in some massively sarcastic way; but as he turned, the door was slammed. There were distant lights in the vast reaches of the basement, just enough for him to make out the red pipe suspended by straps from the low ceiling overhead. There was a sweaty dampness in the basement. In some far comer, a laboring machine was making a slow and heavy chuffing sound. It made a vibration he could feel through the soles of his shoes as he walked. He noticed that the red pipe overhead was of some kind of plastic material, sufficiently flexible so that there was a perceptible expansion and contraction as the machine made its thick and rhythmic sound.

He estimated that he had walked more than a city block before he came to the stairs, where the red pipe disappeared into a wall. These were unexpectedly wide and elegant stairs, marble streaked with gray and green, ascending in a gentle curve. At the top of the stairs, he pushed a dark door open and found himself in an enormous lobby. It had the silence of a museum. Dropcloths covered the shapes of furniture. Plaster dust was gritty on the floor. Some huge beams had fallen and were propped at an angle, as in pictures of bombings.

“Mrs. Dorn!” he called. “Mrs. Dorn!” The sound did not seem to carry. It died at once into the silence.

Then he heard a click-tock of high heels, and he could not tell where the sound was coming from. “Yes?” she said. “You, there! Up here!” Her voice was musical; the tone, impatient. He looked up and saw her standing at the broad ornate railing of a mezzanine floor, looking down at him, in silhouette against a window beyond her. “Yes? What do you want?”

“Can I speak to you a minute?”

“I’m very busy. Well... come on up.”

She turned away. He looked around and saw the stairs and went up. There was a library and writing room at the top of the stairs. Several doors opened from the room. He tried them, one by one, and found they opened onto corridors. Then, close behind him, she chuckled, and as he turned, startled, she said, “It’s really very confusing. I used to get hopelessly lost when I first came here.”

She looked like someone he had known, somewhere, perhaps a long time ago. She had a soft and pretty face, dark wings of careless hair, and she looked at him in a familiar and mocking way of old secrets shared. She wore a shift of some tweedy gray substance over a young, sturdy body with a vital heft of hip and weight of breast.

“I wonder, Mrs. Dorn, if you could...”

“Just a moment, please. I missed this room somehow, and the crews will be arriving any minute, and it would be just my rotten luck if they started here, wouldn’t it?” She began to walk slowly around the room, pausing from time to time, pausing to hold at arm’s length a piece of soft yellow chalk in the measuring gesture of the artist. She nodded to herself from time to time and then would mark with the chalk a piece of paneling, or a chair, or the frame of an old painting.

At last she sighed and turned toward him with a smile of enduring patience.

“Done, I guess. As well as I can do it, anyway. They don’t really give a damn about saving anything. You have to watch them like hawks. They’ll pretend they didn’t see the mark and they’ll smash stuff to powder and then look so terribly innocent. They hate old things, I guess. And hate the loveliest old things worst of all. They just want to come in and biff, bang, crunch, and truck it away and get it over with and go on to the next job. My, how they resent me, and resent having to save things and handle them so gently and take them to our warehouse. You wouldn’t believe it.”

The mark she made each time was a D with a cross drawn through it, like a cancellation.

“What did you want?” she asked.

“They told me that you’re the one to see. You can lend me the master key.”

“Really? And exactly what room do you want to get into? And why?”

“Four-two-four... oh. Forty-two forty. It will take only a... very few minutes.”

“On the forty-second floor. Now isn’t that quaint! Isn’t that the living end!”

“What’s so funny, Mrs. Dorn? I don’t think anything is particularly funny.”

“I couldn’t possibly explain it to you. I’ll have to show you.”

“You could let me take the key, couldn’t you?”

“My dear man, so much has been tom down and thrown away and smashed, you could wander around up there for weeks trying to find a way to the right floor and the right wing. Even if I believed you, I’d have to go with you in any case.”

She led the way back down and through the silence of the lobby and to a back corridor, and into a bird-cage elevator no more than five feet square. She reached and clanged the door shut, turned a worn brass handle, and they began to creak slowly upward. He stared through the ceiling of woven metal strips and saw the sway of the moving cables and, far overhead, a pale square of gray sky.

The animation and mocking amusement had gone out of her. She leaned, sagging, looking downward, fingertips on the brass lever, and he sensed that he had no part in what she was thinking. He could look at her with that feeling of invasion one has in watching someone sleep. There was a small mole below the corner of her mouth, on the pale concavity below the soft weight of her underlip. Her lashes were long and dark. He saw the lift and fall of her slow breathing and was aware of a warmth and scent of her breath. There were two deep pockets in the gray shift. The master key would have to be in one or the other. So it could be done. There was always a way.

Suddenly he had the feeling he was being trapped in some curious way, was being led from his assignment into a plan devised for some other reason, a plan wherein his role was minor; and looking at the panel above her resting hand, he saw what had probably given him subtle warning. There were brass buttons for the floors, pressed so many hundred thousand times the incised digits were almost worn away; yet when the gray light struck them properly, he could make out the topmost numeral of the vertical row — 21.

“So that’s it,” he said. “That’s what’s funny.” He made his mouth stretch wide in the knowing grin. The girl looked at him, startled and puzzled. “There’s no forty-second floor,” he said.

Frowning, she turned and looked at the row of buttons and then back at him. “You’re serious? Don’t you know about the annex at all? You know how the transients are. Top floor. Top floor. It’s all they can think about. But the people who stay have to have private lives, don’t they? Not all cluttered up with salesmen and people coming to town for the theater and all that. You’ve never been in the business, have you? All the city hotels are just the same, you know. The elevators for the transients go only so high, just to such and such a number, and the quiet floors, where people live, are above that, always, and they have their private ways to get up to them.”

She was so very patient that he felt ashamed of accusing her and felt irritated with himself for not having guessed, long ago, what she told him. There had always been enough clues. There were always people going through the hotel lobbies, looking neither to the right nor to the left, walking by the regular elevators to some special place and service awaiting them.

But when the elevator stopped and they got out, she reached back into it, pressed the lowest button, yanked her arm out quickly and slammed the latticework door. It began to creak downward, with a clicking of pulleys and rasp of cables. She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose in mischief and mockery, saying, “Don’t look so worried. There’ll be other ways down.” He remembered that she had not told him the joke, and he was once again annoyed at her.

These were broad corridors, pale gray, with composition floors, lighted by misted glass panels set into the ceiling. He tried to walk beside her, but she kept quickening her pace, and he realized she wanted him to walk behind her, a person guided rather than a companion. Many times they reached an intersection where the corridors stretched for vast distances, and sometimes she would pause to orient herself and then turn confidently right or left.

He noticed that all the numbers had been taken off the doors. He could see the raw holes where they had been screwed through gray paint into the plywood.

She was fifteen feet ahead of him, the dark hair bouncing at the nape of her neck to her swift, buoyant stride. The coarse gray fabric pulled in alternating diagonal tensions against her rear, and somehow he knew that were she quite still and quite bare, were he to place his hands so that his fingertips were hooked around the shelf of hip socket, feeling the warm, smooth slide of membrane over bone, holding her from the rear, his hands placed as a player holds a basketball for the long set shot, then through some delicious coincidence of design, the pads of his thumbs would fit precisely into the two deep dimples spaced below her spine. He shook himself out of the erotic musing, remembering how often they had told him that assignments were mishandled too often for exactly this reason.

At the end of a corridor, she pulled a heavy fire door open and turned to give him a bawdy wink, to run her tongue tip across her lips, as though she had read his mind and his weakness; and he determined not to look at her as she climbed the stairs ahead of him, and looked instead at the steel treads set into the concrete. He lost track of the number of flights they climbed. It winded him; and when he helped her push another fire door open, he tried to conceal his laboring lungs and to seem as fresh as she.

These corridors were a pale yellow, like weak winter sunlight, and at last they came to a small elevator standing open. The fluorescence inside was harsh and there was a sharp minty odor, as though it had recently been scrubbed with some cheap, strong antiseptic. It accelerated upward with a silent velocity that hollowed his belly and made his knees bend slightly. It opened automatically on a narrower, dingy, old-fashioned corridor. She reached into the elevator as before; and when the door hissed shut and she turned to speak, he said, “I know. There’ll be other ways down.”

“That isn’t what I was going to say.”

“I’m sorry. What were you going to say?”

“I can’t say it now. You spoiled it.”

Again he followed her. These corridors were set at odd angles. The room doors were shiny dark with old coats of varnish. The room numbers were not removed and they were of tarnished brass, fluted and curly and ornate. All the rooms were in the four thousand series, but they were not in any reasonable order, four thousand one hundred and something across from or next door to four thousand eight hundred and something.

She stopped very abruptly; and as he came upon her, he heard what she had heard — the gritty sound of latch and bolt — and then, twenty feet ahead of them, an old couple, dressed for winter, came out of one of the rooms, complaining at each other, fussing, asking if he or she had forgotten this or that, dropping small packages and picking them up.

Just before the old couple turned and noticed them, Mrs. Dorn hooked her arm around his waist and forced him into a slow walk. He put his arm, interlocked, around her, and she reached up with her free hand, placed it against his cheek, chuckled in a furry way, turned her mouth up to the awkward kiss while walking, so that as they passed the couple, he heard tsks and clucks of their disapproval. “Darling, darling,” she murmured. “Dave, darling.”

Behind them he heard the old man’s voice, without making out the words. There was a harsh resonance to it and then it cracked into a high quaver and then went deep again.

He smiled inside himself, thinking it sounded exactly like Ricky trying to manage his fourteen-year-old voice as it alternately squeaked and rumbled. The fingertips of the arm that was around her waist touched the top of the pocket on the left side of the gray shift, and with sneaky and daring inspiration, he slid his hand down into the pocket, bending his knees inconspicuously to lower himself just enough, the palm of his hand against round, warm thigh under fabric, and with his fingertips he touched the cylinder of yellow chalk and then the thin edge of metal. With the metal held against the nail of his index finger by the pad of his middle finger, he drew it out of the deep pocket and worked it into the palm of his hand.

She stopped and turned and leaned against the corridor wall and, with her hands resting lightly on his shoulders, looked up at him, still mocking him, saying, “You’re just not very bright, Dave, darling.”

The old people were gone, around a distant comer of the old hallway. Suddenly, he realized that she had cleverly kept them from seeing his face, so that they would be unable to identify him later. And with a sense of disbelief, he realized she had called him by his name.

“You could have told me how much you knew about this,” he said.

“It’s better for you to guess, dear. Look at what you took.”

He opened his palm and saw the miniature gold tag. Name, rank, serial number, blood type O, meaning zero, meaning blood type nothing. The shock was enormous. He was suddenly afraid he might cry like a child and shame himself in front of her. “How did you... How could Leo have...”

“Leo? Don’t be silly. I had it all along. There were always two, you know. Don’t you remember that, even? No, keep it, dear. If I have to have it back, you can always give it to me. Without any fuss. Promise?”

“Sure, but if you could just tell me...”

“I can show you, Dave. Come along.”

She paused at the next turning and bit her lip, and standing beside her, he saw that the floor itself dipped down in a gentle curve and lifted again at another place in the distance, where it turned again. It was swaying slightly, the whole corridor, like the bridges primitive peoples wove across deep swift rivers. She told him to walk carefully and stay close to the corridor wall. She motioned to him to stop, and they were, he saw, on either side of a double door. It was room 4242. If she knew the rest of it, she would know the right number. It had been so placed that half of it was on each door, so that each was labeled 42. Even though she knew, he did not want her to watch what had to be done, watch the task assigned him; but before he could ask her to go away, to give him the key and go away, go back and wait for him around the corner, out of sight, she put a bright red key in the lock and the double doors opened inward.

Inward, but outward. They opened onto the nothing of a dizzy height, making a vent for a cold wind that came husking down the hallway behind him and pushed him a long clumsy stride to stand on the very brink. Far, far, far below, the bug shapes of city cars and trucks moved very slowly, as when seen from an aircraft. He teetered, toes over the edge, and slowly fought back the sickness and the terror, knowing he could not let her see that he suddenly realized how cynically and savagely they had tricked him. He adjusted himself to the slight sway of the corridor and rode it easily, smiling and casual for her benefit, aware of how narrowly she was watching him.

Then came a deep and powerful thud, more vibration than sound. It came welling up from below and it danced the swaying corridor, nearly toppling him out. It came again and again. He learned to ride the new motion. The girl whimpered. He looked far down, almost directly down, and said, “It’s nothing. Your friends have come to work. They’ve got some kind of a derrick thing down there and they’re swinging one of those big cannon balls against the foundation.”

He stepped back with care and reached and took her hand. Her hand was cold and hesitant. He led her past the open and windy space and back to where, once again, the structure was solid underfoot, trembling almost imperceptibly to each subsonic thud. She pulled her hand free and, after walking slowly, looking at the room numbers, chose one and opened the door, motioning him to come in. The room was in semidarkness, gray light outlining the window. She closed the door and he heard her sigh.

Reaction made him feel weak and sick. He saw the shape of the bed and moved to it and sat on the edge of it. She came to him and pushed at his shoulder and he lay back, grateful that she understood. He swung his legs onto the bed and she went to the foot and unlaced his shoes and took them off.

“We’d better not make very much noise,” she whispered.

“Of course.”

“Do you understand about the old people?”

“I know there’s something I’m supposed to understand.”

“That’s enough for now.”

She disappeared in the shadows, and then he saw her again in silhouette in front of the gray of the window. He heard her sigh, and he saw her, with a slow and weary motion, tug the shift off over her head, toss it aside, pat her rumpled hair back into order, then bend and slip her shoes off. She stood near the comer of the window, half-turned, standing quite still in silhouette, hips in relaxed and weary tilt, and he remembered one of the girls in that Degas print standing off at the side, standing in exactly the same position.

He knew she would turn and come to him but would not understand about what the weakness had done to him. He did not want to confess that kind of weakness to her.

He said, “Even when they do very tricky things, that doesn’t mean the rules are changed. We have to follow the rules, just as if everything were happening to someone else, to some people they want to keep, instead of to us. You did it their way, and you know there isn’t really any other way down from here. This is all we have left.”

“So if I knew all along?” she asked, prompting him.

“If you knew how it was going to be, then you had to know you were a part of it too.”

Not turning, still standing at the gray of the window, she said sadly, softly, “See? You keep understanding more and more of it. Sleep for a little while, darling. Then you’ll know the rest of it.”

At a few minutes past six, Dr. Samuel Barringer opened the door of room 11 in the intensive-care section. In the shadows of the room, he saw the young nurse standing in silhouette by the gray of the window, looking out, standing there with a look of wistful grace.

At the sound of the latch as he closed the door, she spun with a guilty start, greeted him in her gentle and formal morning voice, and handed him the clipboard with the patient’s chart and the notation she had made since his visit four hours earlier. He held it under the low light for a moment, handed it back to her, then reached through the orifice in the transparent side of the oxygen tent to gently place the pads of his first two fingers against the arterial throb in the slack throat. He stood in a half bow, his eyes closed, listening and measuring through his fingertips. He was a big blond bear of a man, simultaneously clumsy and deft, as bears can be.

The nurse stood, awaiting instructions. He told her he would be back in a few minutes, and he walked to the far end of the corridor, to the waiting room beyond the nurses’ station. Sylvia sat alone there, at the end of the couch by the lamp table, staring out the big window. The hospital tower was higher than the buildings to the west of it, and she could see the wide, slow river in the morning haze. Daylight muted the yellow glow of the lamp beside her.

She turned and saw him, and suddenly her dark eyes looked enormous and her face was more pale. “Sam? Is—”

“They didn’t call me back. I just came in and checked him, and I have a couple of others to check, and it’s standard procedure, Sylvie. No perceptible change.”

He walked past her to the big window and shoved his fists into his hip pockets and looked out at the new day.

After a little while, she said, “He’s been trying to take it easier since that little coronary. He really has. But you know how Dave is. He said he was going to weed his practice down to about eight very rich and nervous old ladies with minor ailments. Sam?”

He turned and looked at her, at the lean, mature vitality of her face. “What, honey?”

“What’s the prognosis, Sam?”

He shrugged his bear shoulders. “Too early to tell.” He looked out the window and saw a freighter being nudged into the channel by the tugs. He wished he were on it and that everybody on board was sworn never to tell Dr. Barringer where they were going or how long they’d be gone.

“Sam, please! That was a big one. Oh, God, I know that was a big one! Remember me, Sam? Eighteen years we three have known one another. I’m a nurse... was a nurse. Remember? You don’t have to pat me on the head, Sam.”

It was easy to remember the Sylvie Dorn of eighteen years ago, that chunky, flirtatious, lively girl, now a whip-slender matron, dark hair with the first touches of gray. Thirty-eight? Mother of Ricky, Susan, Timmy — godmother to his own pair of demons. And Dave is... was... is forty-two.

“Sam?” she said again.

He turned from the window and went lumbering to the couch, thinking of all the times you make this decision and then decide how to wrap words around it to match the person you tell. But this one was close to the past and all the years, close to the heart.

He sat beside her and took her hands and swallowed a rising thickness in his throat, blinked, swallowed again, and said in a pebbly voice, “I’m sorry, Sylvie. Dave hasn’t got enough heart muscle left to run a toy train. And there’s not one damned thing we can do about it or for it.”

She pulled her hands free and lunged against him, and he held her in his big arms and patted her as she strained at the first great hard spasmodic sob and got past it and in about two or three minutes pulled herself back to a control and a forlorn stability he knew she would be able to maintain.

She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and said, “Today sometime?”

“Probably.”

“Tell them you’ve given permission for me to stay in there with him, will you?”

“Of course. I’ll be in every once in a while.”

“And thank your dear gal for taking over our tribe, Sam. Sam? Do you think he’ll know I’m... I’m there with him?”

First, he thought, you throw the stone, and then you throw the lump of sugar. No point in telling her that death had occurred, that Dave, as Dave, was long gone and that the contemporary miracles of medical science were keeping some waning meat alive, in the laboratory sense of the word.

“From everything we can learn and everything we can guess, Sylvie, I feel certain that he’ll be aware of you being there, holding his hand.”

When the first gray light of the morning made the shape of the window visible, he dressed quickly and went out. He guessed that they would not be expecting him to leave that room so soon after arriving.

There were shadows of night still remaining in the empty streets, so that even though he knew his way and walked swiftly, the city seemed strange to him.

Content

John D. MacDonald
S*E*V*E*N

The Random Noise of Love

Dear Old Friend

The Willow Pool

Quarrel

Woodchuck

Double Hannenframmis

The Annex