The Trouble With Eden

Nine

Tannhauser’s was located on the western bank of the Delaware three miles south of New Hope. A large Colonial mansion had been converted into a restaurant, with the entire eastern wall replaced by a picture window. The results of this renovation were much to the advantage of Trude Hofmeister’s patrons, who were afforded a panoramic view of the river. The view was better from the inside; across the river, New Jersey residents called Tannhauser’s “that abortion.”

Born in Bavaria two weeks to the day before Sarajevo, Trude grew up with a passion for hearty food and equally hearty music. She moved to Vienna when her schooling was completed and at the time of the Anschluss had indulged both appetites generously. A mezzosoprano, she appeared regularly in Wagnerian opera at the Vienna State Opera House. Her affection for Wagner was matched by her enthusiasm for Viennese cuisine, and her figure more than conformed to the standard for her profession. By 1938 she had acquired a strong critical reputation and a not unattractive corpulence.

She had also acquired a husband. Gunther Loebner was a respected journalist, a boulevardier, a coffeehouse habitué, a man of immense courtly charm and elegant manners. He was also a Social Democrat, and a vocal one. The day the Anschluss was signed he put his wife in a first-class compartment of a train bound for Paris. He would not be persuaded to share the ride with her.

“I have work,” he told her. “It will not take long “but it is essential that it be done. Perhaps a week, hardly more. In less than ten days I shall be with you in Montparnasse.”

“In less than ten days you will be in prison,” she said, but she did not speak the words until the train had pulled out of the station, and no tears showed in her eyes while she waved good-bye.

She was wrong. Loebner was never in prison. Two days after her arrival in Paris he was shot dead by two flint-eyed young Berliners. The official announcement had it that he had died while resisting arrest. In forty-two years Gunther Loebner had resisted any number of things, but arrest had never been among and his sole weapons of resistance had been his pen and his tongue.

In the years immediately following, the international audience for Wagnerian opera declined dramatically. Its popularity remained at peak within the Third Reich — indeed, little else was ever aired on German radio — but opera buffs in other countries seemed curiously to have lost their taste for it.

For a time Gunther Loebner’s widow lost her taste for singing in general. She canceled her engagements and spent most of her time by herself. Two months after her arrival in Paris, she was approached by a young man attached to the German embassy. He explained that he brought condolences for the death of her husband and that it was hoped she would return soon to the Fatherland. The Führer owned all her records and had several times watched her perform, both in Vienna and in Munich. It was hoped a Berlin performance could be arranged.

She said only that she had ceased to sing. But this was impossible, he told her. One could appreciate that she was bereaved, but time would end her bereavement, and she would perform better than ever.

“If I sing again,” she said icily, “I shall sing in Paris.”

He flashed a superior smile. “They sing little Wagner in Paris, Fraulein Hofmeister. Return to Berlin. In two years’ time you shall sing Wagner in Paris and it would not do to be out of practice.”

She walked into the kitchen and he followed her, talking persuasively. There was a wedge-shaped chef’s knife on the kitchen counter. For a moment she was very near to using that knife to open up his corset-flattened belly. She saw it all in her mind, the mechanics of the act, even the story of attempted rape which would satisfy the sympathetic French police.

But no. There were too many of them and they were all like this one. If one stroke of the knife would do for all of them — but it would not.

For the next few months she remembered his prediction. In two years’ time the German Army would be in Paris. She tried to forget the words but every sign and portent assured her they were true. In the spring she sailed to New York, and that September Hitler’s tanks crossed into Poland.

She spent the war in New York. She sang, but never opera. She sang Kurt Weill, and her most successful number was “Pirate Jenny” from Three-Penny Opera. There was a room in Hitler’s Museum of Decadent Arts where Der Dreigroschenoper was played continually from morning to night. It was the most popular room in the museum; it was the only place in Germany where you could hear the music.

She gave up singing professionally shortly after the war, married a wealthy German Jew who had left the country early enough to get much of his wealth out with him. He was a widower with grown children and he told her she made him alive again. He was also a great fan of Wagnerian opera; neither its political implications nor the racial theories of its creator, he insisted, had any influence on the way it sounded to him.

They spent nights listening to records together. In his company she learned to love again the music she had always loved. But she would not sing it for him. Twice he asked her, and the second time she told him of her conversation with the German attaché in Paris. He listened without comment and never repeated the request.

He died in 1956. He was hospitalized for six weeks after a heart attack and was recovering slowly but surely when his kidneys failed. She had just returned home from the hospital when the phone rang. It was the doctor, the son of close friends of her husband, telling her to come back immediately. Outside his door they told her it was a matter of an hour or so. He was not in pain, he was conscious, and there was nothing to be done.

“Leave us,” she said.

She stood at his bedside and held his hand. When she was with him an hour ago his face had life and now it was a death’s head. She said, “David? I will sing for you.”

She sang Wagner. She sang in full voice while her husband’s doctor stood outside the door with folded arms, fielding one complaint after another. She sang one aria after the next, everything she could remember, and her memory that day was unimpaired. For two full hours she sang without a break, his hand in hers. Nurses moved in and out of the room and she sang uninterrupted. She was still holding his hand and singing when a hollow-eyed nurse took her arm and told her, he was gone.

She traveled. She bought presents for his grandchildren. In 1961 she bought the present Tannhauser’s from the creditors of the man who had tried to turn it into a restaurant. He had decorated it in an American Colonial motif and matched the decor with a basic American menu. She kept the decor but substituted a Viennese menu.

She supervised every detail of the operation, bought the produce, greeted guests on arrival and departure. She even did most of the baking. Her chef, with her from the beginning, was excellent, but he could not match her sachertorte, her pfannkuchen, her strudel. She had been too busy to bake for Gunther Loebner, but David Wolf had never ceased to praise her strudel.

She had opened the restaurant as so many persons opened Bucks County establishments, hoping to enjoy themselves without too great an operating loss. At the end of the first year she was astonished when her accountant reported a net loss of less than two thousand dollars. That first year was the only time Tannhauser’s was ever in the red, and each year her net profit increased.

On weekends a pianist played old standards in the cocktail lounge from ten until one. Sometimes late at night she could be talked into a song. Something of Weill’s perhaps, or an Edith Piaf song. Never anything operatic.

Many patrons, including some who came back often, called her Frau Tannhauser. She answered to that name as well as to any other.

On the first Saturday night in June, Hugh handed his car keys to the parking-lot attendant and led Linda Robshaw up flagstone steps and into Tannhauser’s. It had rained off and on through the day, but by late afternoon the skies had cleared and now the night air was cool and refreshing. Hugh himself felt cool and refreshed. His beard was properly trimmed, its few gray hairs vainly plucked out. His cheeks and neck were clean-shaven and freshly anointed with Russian Leather.

His suit was a dove gray double: knit he had bought impulsively the previous October in New York and had never worn since he tried it on. He’d been back to work when Wallaeh’s delivered it, hitting his stride in the last stretch of his first draft, and he took it from its box and hung it in his closet without noticing what it was. If they had shipped him an evening gown by mistake he would have put it on a hanger and put it away without complaint.

Tonight he came across it in the closet, tried it on, and found it flattered him. The cut was younger and more fashionable than his usual style. On his way out the door Karen made a great show of approval. “You look fantastic,” she told him. “If Linda Robshaw isn’t here for breakfast tomorrow morning, then there’s something wrong with her. You really look great.”

He looked great and felt great. He had planned to take a week or ten days away from the book, and it had been three and a half weeks since he covered his typewriter and he had not yet uncovered it, nor did he intend to for another five days or so. He was not working and it did not bother him in the least. He looked great and felt great and he was taking a bright and charming and damned attractive young woman to dinner, and he was happier than he had been in months.

“Hugh, Hugh Markarian!” Trude boomed his name, then followed her voice across the room with arms outstretched. She hugged him furiously. “I saw your name on the reservation list and was so pleased. And you look so good! And is this Karen? Liebchen, I have not seen you—”

“This is Miss Robshaw,” he said. “Linda, this is our hostess, Trude Hofmeister.”

“Miss Robshaw,” Trude said. “But it is so difficult to distinguish between beautiful young women. Hugh, I have a table for you by the window. It is a such a beautiful night for the view.”

They went to their table and ordered drinks. Linda said, “When she drops a brick she certainly picks it back up in a hurry. Her face didn’t show a thing.”

“She’s pretty good. I doubt that she’d recognize Karen if she stepped on her, but she must have heard she was in town and came to the obvious conclusion.”

“Do Karen and I look alike?”

“Only insofar as it is zo difficult to distingvish betveen beautiful young vimmen,” he said, his accent a good imitation of Trude’s. “Does it bother you being taken gar my daughter?”

“No. Should it? It’s slightly flattering, but I own a mirror and I know I don’t look — how old is Karen? Eighteen?”

He nodded. “I’m still old enough to be your father.”

“Well, you’re not my father, and he’s almost old enough to be your father, as far as that goes. Are you feeling very conscious of your age or is it that you’re getting a kick out of my youth?”

“Well, it can’t be the first, because I haven’t felt this good in I don’t know how long. I should have gone back to work on the book a week ago and I haven’t even set foot in that room. Excuse me, I went in there the night before last to look something up in the dictionary. And walked on out without even glancing at my desk.”

“And it evidently doesn’t bother you.”

“I couldn’t care less. It’s not as if I were stalled on the book, trying to get back to it and unable to get anywhere. But it’s fine, it’s coming fine and sometime next week I’ll start working again. Meanwhile I’m getting to know my daughter. It’s an exhilarating experience, getting to know an eighteen-year-old girl who happens to be your daughter. Girl. I was going to say eighteen-year-old woman: Neither word is right. An eighteen-year-old female?”

“That sounds like something in a statistical abstract. The percentage of eighteen-year-old female dope peddlers in Elyria, Ohio.”

“Girl-woman would be the word if it wasn’t so precious. What were you like when you were eighteen?”

She thought for a moment. “Not a girl-woman, certainly. Just a girl, I’m afraid. What’s Karen like?”

“You’ll have to meet her sometime, and then I can ask you the same question. I’ve been spending my time trying to learn the answer myself. It’s — what did I call it before? An exhilarating experience. Very enjoyable, but also something of a challenge in a way. Oh, here’s Robert. I almost didn’t recognize you with that mustache, Robert.”

“I’m not sure if I’ll keep it or not, sir.”

“Well, you want to give it a chance before you decide. Did you want to order, Linda?”

“Yes, I’m starved.”

It was an exhilarating experience, getting to know an eighteen-year-old girl-woman who happened to be your daughter. It was exhilarating and it was a challenge. You could not pretend that she was not your daughter because there were ghosts in every room that held the two of you. You had seen her in the nurse’s arms before they had a chance to clean her up, still filthy with the detritus of the delivery, and that ghost was present along with the ghosts of all the other vivid moments of the twelve years she had lived under your roof.

Of course she had shocked him. A dropout in her first year of college, living with a man, not even a man but several men. She had smoked marijuana; she had probably tried other drugs she had not told him about. She had become pregnant, perhaps without knowing who the father was, and had made the question of paternity academic by obtaining an abortion.

(“One piece of advice,” he told her. “How much or how little you tell your mother is between the two of you, but if you have any sense you won’t tell her about the abortion. She may have left the Church when she was younger than you are now, but parts of her are more Catholic than you may realize.” She said it hadn’t kept her mother from divorcing him. “No, but it once kept her from getting an abortion. No, not you, for God’s sake. No child was ever more desired than you. But she became pregnant when you were ten or eleven, and the turn our marriage had taken, a new baby was the worst possible idea. She had a miscarriage and did everything but light candles in gratitude, but that was already after she had ruled out getting an abortion. So don’t say anything to her, will you?” She said, “Oh, hell, she still thinks I’m a virgin.”)

She had shocked him with the first revelations and she shocked him intermittently thereafter, not with new facts but as he increasingly discovered her as a person. It was not that she was a shocking person. Had she been the daughter of a friend he would have found wholly admirable the very aspects that kept disconcerting him now.

And he had to suppress this shock. It was not only that he keep it hidden from her. He had to do more than that; he had to educate himself to avoid seeing her in a harsher light because of what she was to him. Oh, it was a challenge. Here he was with a woman a quarter of a century his junior, and of course there was nothing wrong with him dating a woman that age and nothing wrong with Linda for going out with him. But if his daughter went out with a man as much older than herself as he was than Linda, he doubted he could view it with equanimity. There was nothing necessarily objectionable about a relationship between a girl of eighteen and a man of forty-three. He had picked up a stenographer at his publisher’s office when he was several years older than forty-three, and the stenographer had celebrated her nineteenth birthday less than a month before.

They had both been aware of the age difference, it would have been impossible not to be, but it never occurred to them that it made it wrong for them to have dinner together. He had thought no less of her for dating him. Later that evening he went to her apartment and spent the night with her. They had both enjoyed themselves immensely, and he had in no way considered her foolish or immoral for having casual sex with a man his age. Their relationship never went any further because neither of them had wanted more from it than a night of good company and good sex. But neither thought of it as exploitative or unsound for what it was. He could not judge Karen by a harsher standard than he had judged the girl. More accurately, he could not presume to judge Karen — any more than he made that presumption with others. Intellectually he accepted everything about her as normal, even specifically desirable; for a girl her age. It was better for such a girl to have healthy sexual experience than to remain a virgin, better to try marijuana than not, better to drop out of a deadening college situation than to hang in and grimly play the game. These were positions he had taken years ago, and he was certainly not going to repudiate them now that his daughter was old enough to live out what he had endorsed in theory. Inconsistency had always irritated him, and it was never more irritating than when he recognized it in himself.

She moved into his house with the understanding that each of them was a free agent. They told each other this and joked about it. Yet neither entirely believed it. Throughout the first week she kept testing the waters, dropping elaborately casual remarks and darting sharp glances his way, looking for a reaction. He, too, was looking for a reaction; his role in the game seemed to be one of catching and squelching it before she was aware of it.

She said “fuck” a lot. The first time she used the word he was amused at his own sudden prudery, though he doubted it showed. He tried to think of anyone he had known well in the past five years who did not use the word for emphasis. Women he met at Manhattan business lunches always seemed to make a definite point of fitting the word into the first five minutes of conversation, as if it put them on an equal footing, established them as hip and tough and gutsy and to be taken seriously. There had been an undeniable revolution in speech patterns, he knew, and what it amounted to was the whole country was talking as enlisted men had talked during his days in the service. You said “fuck” a lot in the service, he remembered; you used the word as punctuation: So this fucking guy, he was walking down the fucking street, when he fucking runs into this broad—

He fed the word, and others, right back to her. In the beginning his speech was as artificial as her own, but within a week they had accomplished something; they were both talking in front of each other as they would have talked were they not father and daughter but merely friends.

The candor took a variety of forms. She went out with an apprentice from the Playhouse and told Hugh not to wait up for her — “because I might spend the night.” He told her to feel free. He was reading in the living room when she returned a few minutes after one. “He wanted to ball me,” she reported, “but I didn’t really relate to him that way, and I figured I had the right to feel free not to as far as that goes.”

Over coffee Linda said, “That’s the best meal since I came here.”

“It’s probably the first meal you’ve had in New Hope. The first decent one.”

“In a restaurant, yes.”

“You’re a good cook?”

“I’m not terrible. Why does that surprise you?”

“It doesn’t, really. I think I’m going to have a brandy. Would you like one?”

“Yes, I would.”

“One thing I can’t get used to is the fact that the kids don’t drink. I can’t conceive of, the college experience untempered by tidal waves of draft beer.”

“You went to Penn.”

“Wharton. Not entirely the same thing.”

“No, so I hear. That’s an unusual background for a writer, isn’t it? A business school?”

“It was a logical background for a stockbroker. Which seemed like a logical profession. It’s funny. I can’t remember the person I was in college. I remember what that person did but I can’t remember being that person.”

“It changed everything, didn’t it? The war.”

“Yes. it did.”

She was holding her brandy glass and looking off over his shoulder. She said, “I wonder if it takes something that dramatic or if small things can do it. Changing a person’s life completely so that you can point to one moment and know that you were a different person ever after.”

He reached for his pipe, changed his mind and got a cigarette. She took one and he lit them both.

She said, “Before, you were saying that it was odd talking with me about Karen, because I was closer to her in age than I am to you. But that’s not so. The numbers don’t mean anything. It’s a question of identity. It may be a function of age but you don’t measure it in years.”

“It’s what you’ve been through.”

“No, it isn’t. I almost said that but it’s not it. She’s been through pregnancy and an abortion and I haven’t been through either. I’ve been through a marriage but that didn’t make any difference. It made a difference but not the difference I’m talking about. It may be what you go through that does it, but what makes the difference is who you are.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not saying this well because I’m working it out as I go. Karen’s your daughter.”

“So?”

“No, that wasn’t preamble. It was definition. Karen’s your daughter, that’s who she is. In terms of identity. In those terms I’m not my father’s daughter or my mother’s daughter. I’m me. I’m not anybody’s daughter. And I was for a long time. Through a marriage and afterward.”

“Were you very close to your parents?”

“We were never close. I don’t think it has anything to do with closeness. It’s involved with perception. You stop being a child when you stop being somebody’s child.”

“And become an adult.”

“I guess that’s the word for it. It’s like joining a club, isn’t it?”

“The membership requirements aren’t very strict.”

“But the dues are high,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette. “And you keep on paying them, don’t you? I hadn’t known that. I thought you could buy life membership, but it doesn’t work that way.”

He remembered the girl she had been when he first asked her out. That had been little more than a week ago and yet she seemed to have changed in a fundamental way.

It was not just her mood that had changed. He had met her on Wednesday and asked her out on Thursday, and after she turned him down he found it impossible to shrug it off. Over breakfast Friday he recounted the incident to Karen and they laughed about it. She had wanted to know if he intended to pursue the girl. He had said he didn’t think he would bother.

Friday he walked past the mall but kept himself from going in. Saturday and Sunday he carefully avoided going to town, and Monday he drove in purposely to see her and the store was closed, all the stores were closed. He returned Tuesday late in the afternoon. He had the scene already blocked in in his mind: He would visit the shop and they would talk, and he would leave without attempting to date her. Then he would return Thursday or Friday and perhaps she would have coffee with him. If not he would ask her one more time the following week, and if she turned him down then he would say the hell with her.

So he walked into the Lemon Tree Tuesday and she greeted him with a huge smile and came out from behind the counter. “No business at all today,” she said. “How would you like to buy me that cup of coffee give me an excuse to take a break?”

A cup of coffee Tuesday, with effortless conversation as an accompaniment. Thursday he dropped over to the shop at six and had the uncanny feeling that she had postponed her break and expected him. They had coffee and sandwiches and he asked her to dinner Saturday night. “I’d like that very much,” she said.

Something had happened to change her mind. One day she had decided to discourage him and a few days later she did precisely the reverse.

Without intending to he said, “How come you’re here?”

“You invited me.”

“I know.”

“How come I accepted? I ought to invent something plausible but I can’t think of anything offhand.”

“Then let me withdraw the question.”

“Oh, I’ll answer it, if you’ll let me be cryptic. I’ve been in the stages of something, and it seems to nave run its course. Or part of its course.”

“That’s cryptic, all right.”

“I decided you were safe. Unthreatening. Easy to handle. Like that better?”

“Bitch.”

“More of a bitch than I ever knew. You seem to bring out the bitch in me, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Could we go, do you think?”

He raised a hand for the check.

He drove slowly, disliking the feel of the heavy car. He was driving the Buick. For the past half year he had barely driven it enough to keep the battery charged, but Karen preferred the VW so he had used the Buick since her arrival. He pulled into the driveway. The lights were on in Mrs. Kleinschmidt’s quarters over the garage. He pressed a button on the dashboard and the garage door swung up and back.

He stopped the car in front of the garage. She asked him what was the matter.

“The Volks is gone,” he said. “That means Karen’s out”

“I thought you were busy not playing the heavy father?”

“That’s not the point. I brought you here to meet her.”

“And now it looks like a setup to get me to your lair.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“That’s exactly what it looks like, except I saw your face when the car wasn’t in the garage, and you couldn’t have faked such a complete look of where-do-we-go-from-here? without acting lessons.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“Can I say I’d like to see your house without dragging myself into your lair? I’d like to see your house.”

He showed her the house. In the office she gestured toward the desk. “Does anyone ever get to read novels in progress? Or do I have to wait until it comes out?”

“You have to wait until it’s finished.”

“Nobody gets to read it until it’s finished?”

“Anita used to. My wife. Ex-wife. At the beginning I almost forced her to. She was very helpful then; she saw weaknesses that I wasn’t aware of. But then she kept on like that and in the meantime I had learned more about the craft of writing, and I knew more than she did. So she would offer criticism and it drove me crazy. Ultimately she learned to keep her mouth shut. Now nobody reads the stuff until it’s done.”

“Even if they promised to keep their mouth shut?”

“Even then. A book sort of grows, and it has to belong to its author until it’s done.”

“And then it’s nobody’s child anymore and it can join the club.”

“You know, that’s out of left field but it makes a certain amount of sense. Would you like to hear some music? What would you like to hear?”

They listened to music but did more talking than listening. It was a relaxing and comfortable evening but he was not relaxed and did not know why. After three records had played he got up to turn the stack over. When he returned she was on her feet, and before he knew what was happening she was in his arms and he was kissing her.

The kiss was long and thorough. When it ended she stepped back and let out her breath. He extended his arms for her, but she shook, her head so decisively his arms dropped at once to his sides.

“I really am a bitch, aren’t I? I’m sorry, Hugh, I really am. Would you take me home now?”

“If you want me to.”

“What I want — never mind. Yes, please take me home.”

They drove all the way in silence. He worked out conversational openers in his head, a great variety of them, but none of them seemed worthwhile. As he pulled up in front of the Shithouse she said, “I owe you an explanation.”

“Nobody ever owes anybody an explanation.”

“I wanted to find out if we had anything for each other. No. I knew we did but I wanted to prove it to myself. And I did, and then I also knew that I didn’t want to do anything about it. Yet.”

“You’re not a bitch, but if you were—”

“—I’d be a good one. I know. I certainly don’t want to be a cockteaser.”

“I can’t remember the last time I heard that word.”

“I can’t remember the last time I used it. If I ever did. I don’t think I ever did. Hell. All of a sudden I wanted to be home.”

“You’re here.”

“Yes.” She opened the car door but made no move to get out of it. “Maybe it’s that I’d like to have my clothes on the first time I meet your daughter. What’s so funny?”

“On my way out she said she’d look forward to meeting you at breakfast tomorrow.”

“She said that? I’m sorry to disappoint her. And to disappoint you. But I have the feeling that you didn’t particularly want to go to bed with me tonight, did you?”

“Of course I did.”

“But not overwhelmingly. Oh, forget it, I’m not making any sense. I enjoyed myself, Hugh. Thank you.”

“When will I see you?”

“Are you sure you want to? I don’t know. I’m really impossible, aren’t I? Give me a couple of days.”

“All right.”

He drove home trying to decide whether he was pleased or disappointed with the way the evening had

Somewhere in the course of it he had lost control of the situation, if he could ever have been said to have been in control.

She had wanted him physically, and that was good. And he was getting to know her and sensed that she would take a great deal of knowing. It was more important to know her than to make love to her, although the two did go hand in hand to a degree. She was right — his interest in her was not that specifically sexual. Had she not attracted him sexually he would never have thought to want to know her. That was at the bottom of it, it was always at the bottom of it, but here it played a secondary role. She had told him she was afraid of involvement, and now, despite the obscure changes she seemed to have undergone, she still seemed hesitant.

He was ready to get involved and wondered how much of this was attributable to the girl, this particular girl. She seemed very right. Yet he knew himself rather well and for long had subjected himself to motivational probing and analysis not unlike that he leveled upon the characters in his books. He had been looking for someone. He had not known it then, but he had been looking for someone.

Back in his living room he made himself a fresh drink and picked up a half-finished detective story. Around three he realized he had been waiting for Karen to come home. He closed the book, annoyed with himself, and went upstairs. The stairs seemed steeper than they had for the past week. He was a long time falling asleep and did not sleep well.

He made his own breakfast. Mrs. Kleinschmidt had Sundays off, and before Hugh awoke her daughter-in-law had come to take her to church. She would spend the day with her children and grandchildren. Karen’s bedroom door was closed when he passed it. He did not knock, but before putting up coffee he went out and checked the garage. The VW was still gone.

He was on his second cup of coffee when he heard her turn into the driveway. She came directly into the kitchen, pert and bright-eyed, neat and trim in faded jeans and a striped T-shirt. She said, “Shit, I missed breakfast. I hope there’s coffee.”

“A full pot. What do you want? I’ll fix something.”

“I think I’ll just have toast. Have you got a cigarette? I’ve been smoking mentholated ones and I can’t stand them.” She sat down, poured coffee and smoked one of his cigarettes while the bread toasted. “It was late and I was too stoned to drive home,” she said. “A combination of tired and stoned, actually. I wasn’t that stoned. I was hoping I’d have breakfast with you and Linda.”

“Linda didn’t stay over.”

“Karen did. She was here then, huh? Or you wouldn’t have said it that way.”

“As a matter of fact she was. I brought her here to meet you but you weren’t here.”

She grinned. “That’s a fresh approach. I guess it worked out well enough, didn’t it?”

“You could say so.”

“Well, I told you she wouldn’t be able to resist you. Not in that suit.”

She took it for granted that he had made love to Linda. To correct that impression he would have had to say more than he wanted to say, so he let it stand. She assumed an act had taken place and seemed pleased, even proud of him, and he told himself there was no harm in his enjoying her admiration even under false pretenses. A child, he assured himself, ought to be allowed to cherish certain illusions about her father. Even if they were not the orthodox ones.

They spent the afternoon walking in the woods. She talked at length about various people she had known at Northwestern. College had been a great change for her and he wondered if she could appreciate how radically different the environment had been. Anita and her husband were determinedly modern parents, desperately enlightened, but their automatic liberalism and furious sincerity had not altered the fact that a middle-class white suburban high school in Arizona was more than miles away from a large Midwestern university. Karen’s recent visits to him in New Hope were better preparation, in a way; she told him how the people she had met on campus reminded her of street people she had run across on earlier vacations in the village.

They ate fried chicken and drank root beer at a road-place on 202. Back at the house he made them each a drink. A drink together, generally before dinner when Mrs. Kleinschmidt was home to prepare the evening meal, had become an unannounced ritual for the two of them. “If you’re going to drink at all,” he’d told her, “you ought to do it properly. You don’t like straight whiskey, and it’s a bad idea anyway until you have a fair idea of your capacity. Learn to get used to it with water or soda. One advantage of soda is that it’s consistent. You can’t get a drink of scotch and water in a town where the water’s bad, not any more than you can get a decent cup of coffee.”

He put on the radio and they listened to an FM rock station. As she finished her drink she announced that she would be going out; she’d promised to meet “some people” in town.

“You can bring home anyone you like, you know.”

“So you can meet him at breakfast?”

“I suppose I could stand it if he can.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wonder,” she said.

“If he could stand it?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s funny.”

“What is?”

“All of this. The process of getting used to each other, I guess. If Mother had any idea. She already knew I wasn’t going back home for the summer. We had that out long ago. She didn’t quite say it, not in those words, but she’s glad I’m here where at least you can keep an eye on me.”

She had said it in precisely those words, to Hugh if not to Karen, but he had not reported on the conversation. Karen tended to make a game out of the two of them combining to deceive Anita, and he did not want to encourage this.

He was vaguely disappointed when she left. He picked up the detective story he had given up on the night before but it did not engage his interest. He tried other books with the same result. He was lonely, he realized, and restless. He could not sit still and his hands fidgeted with pipes and other small objects. He thought of Linda. “Give me a couple of days.” Yeah, he thought, but what about tonight? And smiled at the old joke, the inconsolable widower on the night of his wife’s funeral, the friend gently trying to ease his bereavement. “Time heals all wounds. In not too many months you’ll be over the shock, you’ll go out and socialize, you’ll meet a woman, in a year or two you’ll be married again.” “Yeah, but what about tonight?”

Well, what about tonight? He walked toward the bar then changed his mind. Drinking would fit his mood, but solitary drinking would be a bad idea. He had to be among people.

He drove the Buick across the bridge and parked across the street from a tavern in Lambertville. Liquor could not be sold in Pennsylvania on a Sunday; the old law was still on the books, although each year there was word it would be repealed. This was no great hardship for New Hope drinkers, given their access to taverns on the Jersey side, all of which consequently did almost as good volume Sundays as Saturdays. Several Lambertville restaurants would only sell drinks to dinner patrons on Sunday, but the bulk of the taverns had no such restriction.

Hugh ordered a scotch and soda and drank it at the bar. Two men a few stools away were discussing baseball, and neither seemed to be paying any attention to what the other said. One reminisced about the great Yankee teams of his youth while the other went on about what was wrong with the Phillies this season. Someone played a Tammy Wynette record on the jukebox. His restlessness did not dissipate. He stayed at the bar for half an hour, then left it and walked around the corner to another place. After two more drinks and a little less than an hour he was ready to get moving again. He bought a fresh pack of cigarettes from a machine, lit one, and walked out into the cool night air.

Yeah, but what about tonight?

He could go to Trenton. There were bars there where people on the prowl were apt to run across one another. He did not know Trenton well, but he knew of a few places downtown off State Street that had that sort of reputation.

But he had never liked Trenton, and didn’t feel like driving that far now. He had already had several drinks, and although he was by no means drunk neither was he entirely sober. The drive to Trenton would be no problem in and of itself. He was in decent shape to drive. If he went, though, he would have several more drinks in Trenton, probably one or two in each of the bars he would go to. At that point it would be no pleasure to drive home, and might not be safe.

Nor had he ever been much good at picking up strangers. Even on the rare occasions when he had done so successfully, the evening had never been what he had hoped it might be. He always kept a part of himself guarded, nervous that his partner might suddenly turn out to be insane or criminal, that a husband or lover might turn up at any moment, either genuinely jealous or in some prearranged variant of the badger game. If the woman was interested in simple uncomplicated emotionless sex, he either suspected her motives or felt himself degraded by the experience. If she showed some personal interest in him that extended beyond the arena of the bedroom, he couldn’t help worrying she would try to trap him into something he did not want.

Lambertville was unlikely territory for pickups. Unescorted women were rare in the bars and cocktail lounges. Trenton was not all that far. He was a safe driver, and drink never made him abandon safe habits; if anything, he drove more slowly and carefully when aware he had had too much. And one never knew what one might find in a downtown bar, and if nothing else the drive there and the barhopping and the drive back would burn off some of the nervous energy that ran through him.

He walked almost to the car before changing his mind. No, he decided. Not tonight.

He walked back to the main drag into the bar of the Lambertville House. The place had been a hotel since Revolutionary times. It was now largely residential, renting the bulk of its rooms inexpensively to pensioners. The public rooms downstairs were comfortably and attractively furnished, and the restaurant did a brisk lunch business through the week. The bar, modern and not too brightly lit, was less crowded than he had thought it would be. He stopped briefly at a table to exchange a few words with two couples he knew slightly, sloughed off an invitation to join them, and made his way to the back of the bar. The bartender had just placed his drink in front of him when someone spoke his name.

He turned. There was a woman in the corner booth looking his way. She looked familiar but he could not

place her. He picked up-his drink and carried it the booth.

“You are Hugh Markarian, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you. I don’t think we’ve met, but you were pointed out to me once or twice. I’m Melanie Jaeger.”

“How do you do?”

“Sully Jaeger’s wife.”

“Oh, Sully’s wife. The name didn’t register at first. I gather you and your husband are put scouting the competition.”

“No, I’m alone,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I’m not sure where Sully is,” she said. She pushed a strand of light brown hair out of her eyes. “I felt like getting out on my own for a change. I think people ought to do that now and then. Don’t you, Hugh?”

“Why not?”

“Of course it gets lonely sitting by yourself.”

“May I join you?”

“Do you think you’d enjoy it?”

He looked at her. There was a feline quality to her face, the pointed chin, the sharply arched eyebrows. She ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip, her eyes holding his as she did so. He tried to remember if he had heard anything about Melanie Jaeger. Sully’s wife. Not only Sully but Sully’s wife must be above suspicion—

“Yes,” he said levelly. “I think I’d enjoy it.”

“Then sit here next to me. These booths are small. I sort of shoved the table that way to give myself more room.”

“People need all the room they can get.”

“I know. I try to give myself all the room I need. You didn’t recognize me at first, did you? Of course not, since you never met me. Of course someone may have pointed me out to you, the way you were pointed out to me.”

“No. I would have remembered.”

“Because you have a wonderful memory?”

“Because you’re wonderfully memorable.”

She turned toward him, smiled — warmly at him. She was wearing cocoa brown hot pants and a matching top. Her midriff was bare, and her skin looked to have the texture of velvet. She was slender and compactly built, and her breasts looked disproportionately large for her frame.

“I’m not wearing a bra,” she said.

“I didn’t think you were.”

“I saw you looking and I thought you might be wondering. But I’m not. See?”

She leaned against him, her breast pressing against his upper arm. The warmth of her flesh was delicious.

He began talking, hardly sure what he was saying. Something about the town or the weather, something meaningless. She put her hand on his thigh and squeezed, and he stopped in mid-sentence.

“It’s silly for us to waste time talking to each other, isn’t it? We don’t have anything to talk about, really. No, I don’t want another drink. I didn’t really want this one. I didn’t come here to talk and I didn’t come here to drink. I already found what I came here for.”

“Oh?”

Her hand moved, cupped him. He felt himself growing under her touch. He was staring hard at the opposite side of the booth. He couldn’t speak.

“I don’t want people talking. They will anyway but there’s no point encouraging them. Where did you park your car?”

“Forsythe Street. Just across from the funeral parlor.”

“What kind of car?”

“A Buick. A white Buick.”

“Sit in your car and wait for me. Give me five minutes. All right?”

“Sure.”

She gave him a little squeeze, bounced her breast a second time against his arm. “Five minutes,” she said.

He sat in the car with the lights out and the motor running and felt like a Hollywood spy. “I don’t want people talking.” He thought of Mrs. Kleinschmidt: Tongues will wag. Not only Sully but Sully’s wife—

God, what a forward little piece she was. Hello, you’re Hugh Markarian, let’s fuck. A firm pillow of a tit against his arm and a greedy little hand between his legs and give me five minutes. He would slip into her, and could imagine nothing more comfortable than that.

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. He told himself that he did not expect her to show up. When people came on that strong they were likely to be more interested in the game than anything else. It was unlikely that she would deliver. It was not as if he been singularly dynamic, charming her off her feet into his bed. Nor had she come looking for him. For someone, yes, but not for him. She had as much as said that she had come to the Lambertville House specifically to find a man. He had been in the right place at the right time, that was all.

He thought of Sully and smiled. If ever a man deserved to be cuckolded, Sully was the man. And maybe that was the motive, for that matter. Maybe Melanie had finally found out that her great hairy bear of a husband was running all over town screwing everything with a hole in it, and had decided to get some of her own back. Which was understandable, but it still left room for. her to get cold feet and change her mind.

He saw her turn the corner and let out his breath. He’d been unaware he was holding it. He blinked the lights once at her and saw her smile. He drove up, stopped for her, and she hopped in beside him and drew the door quickly shut.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” he said.

“I came, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And not for the last time, either. I think there’s going to be a lot of coming tonight.”

Her hand found him again. “That’s dangerous,” he said.

“It is?”

“When I’m driving it is.”

Her hand did not withdraw. “Oh, I’m not worried,” she said. “This is turning you on—”

“You better believe it is.”

“—but not in a way that’s gonna make you lose control of the car. You don’t lose control of things. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

“How do you mean?”

“Because I think we both want the same thing out of the next couple of hours.”

“What’s that?”

“Some nice yummy fucking without any hassles. We’re a couple of strangers. I’m from Maine and you’re from California and we just met in a bar in Toledo.”

“Nobody ever met anybody like you in a bar in Toledo.”

“You never know. Where are we going?”

He was driving onto the bridge, slowing the car to the fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit. “Where do you want to go?”

“It doesn’t matter. Your place or a motel, whichever you’d rather.”

“My place, then.”

“I left my car in New Hope. Drop me and I’ll follow you out there. Then you won’t have to take me home. That’s if I can park the car where it won’t be seen from the street.”

“There’s a big driveway, and you can’t see anything from the street.”

“Then let me get my car. If we were going to a motel, I wouldn’t want to take it, but what’s the sense of you having to get dressed and drive me home?”

He dropped her a few blocks from her house and waited with the engine idling until she backed her sports car out of the driveway. He overtook her and she followed a half block behind. All the way there he kept glancing in his rearview mirror to make sure she had not turned off.

When they were in the house he took her in his arms and kissed her. She was considerably shorter than he was and stood on her tiptoes, clinging to him with her arms around his neck. She was wearing a great deal of perfume. He had not noticed it as much in the restaurant, or even in the Buick. He wondered if she had put more on before getting in her own car.

He kissed her again and they moved over to the couch and sat down clutching at each other. “I’m glad we’re not in a motel,” she said. “Just a bed and a dresser and a chair, and all you can do is get out of your clothes and get down to business. Let’s take our time, okay?”

“Why not?”

“Let’s fool around like kids and get each other so hot we can’t stand it, and then we’ll go to your bedroom and fuck like crazy.”

They kissed. Her mouth was eager, demanding. He put a hand on her bare midriff and stroked her. Her skin was as soft as it looked and stroking her was like petting a kitten. He dipped a finger into her navel and she moaned and writhed against him.

When he reached to unclasp the halter top she shook her head. “You don’t have to take it off,” she said. “Just pull it up. See?”

She pulled the top up and her breasts popped into view beneath it. They were large and perfectly firm. He stroked them and she purred, and he lowered his head to kiss her breasts.

“See? It’s sexier with clothes on.”

She was right. He did not know her age but knew she could not be more than twenty-five; Sully’s wives were never older than that. In speech and manner she was younger still, and this urgent clothed lovemaking made him feel he was in high school again. He kissed her breasts and put a hand under the band of the hot pants. The skin on the inside of her thighs was the same perfect velvet as the rest of her.

“No panties.”

“I didn’t think you’d be wearing them.”

“I was before. They’re in the glove compartment. I took them off as soon as I got in my own car. They were already wet by then. God, you’re good. You know just what to do to me.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“Oh, are we gonna fuck. You’re getting me so hot. Anything you want to do. What’s that?”

A car had turned into the driveway, and for a moment his heart froze. He could see Sully coming through the door with a gun in his hand. Then in an instant he recognized the unmistakable sound of the Volkswagen.

“It’s all right. It’s my daughter.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“She’s spending the summer here.”

She sat back, brushed her hair out of her face with her fingers. “You want to go upstairs before she comes in?”

“There’s no need.”

“Well, you want me to go upstairs?”

He shook his head. “We have a fairly open living arrangement here.”

“Well, open or not, you don’t want me sitting around with my tits hanging out.” She tucked herself back into the cocoa brown halter. She started to say something but stopped when the key turned in the door. He lit a cigarette and settled himself on the couch next to Melanie. He was taking a second drag when Karen and the boy came into the room. There was a glow in Karen’s cheeks and a firm smile on her face.

She said, “Dad, this is Jeffrey. Jeff, my father, Hugh Markarian. And you must be Linda.”

“That’s right,” Melanie said.

“I’m Karen, and I’m glad to meet you. Dad’s said a lot about you.”

“Well,” Hugh said. He got to his feet, shook hands with the boy. “You kids like a drink?”

“I think we’ll just go upstairs,” Karen said. “We wanted to listen to some records.”

There was no record player in Karen’s room. “Enjoy yourselves,” he said. He turned to put out his cigarette in an ashtray, and when he looked up again they were already on the stairs.

“Control.”

“How’s that?”

“What I noticed about you right away,” she said. “You stay in control. You don’t get rattled.”

He smiled. “Why should I get rattled?” He sat next to her and let his eyes note the rich young body, let his hands remember the feel of the rich young flesh.

“It didn’t bother you?”

He shook his head. “I told her she could bring people here. And that I would bring people here if I wanted.”

“Like Linda. Right. It would bother most fathers.”

“It didn’t bother me.”

“It didn’t upset you that he was black?”

“No,” he said, reaching for her. “Why should it?”

Ten

When Sully heard her car in the driveway he stayed where he was. He sat in his chair in the living room and did not move when her key turned in the lock and she entered the house. She said, “Honey? I’m home,” and he made no response. He sat in his chair and looked at nothing. There was a glass of applejack in his left hand and a cigarette in his right, but he was neither smoking nor drinking. He had poured the drink over an hour ago and had not yet taken a first sip of it. The ashtray beside him was filled with cigarette butts. He would light one and hold it until the heat of it warmed his fingers, then put it out and light another.

She came into the room and dropped down onto his lap, reaching out a hand to touch his ear and rub the back of his neck. “I’m home,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Miss me?”

“You cunt.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to stop telling you about it?”

He couldn’t look at her.

“No.”

“I won’t tell you if you don’t want me to, Sully.”

She settled herself on his lap, her arms around his neck. The smell of her was heady, intoxicating. She waited, silent, and he knew he would tell her to speak and hated himself for it.

He said, “This fucking game we play.”

“You want to stop playing?”

“Shit. I do and I don’t.”

“It’s up to you, baby.”

He put out the cigarette. He raised the glass of applejack, looked at it thoughtfully, put it down untasted on the small mahogany table.

He said, “Who was it?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

Part of the game, part of their ritual, all of it carefully evolved during the past weeks by an elaborate system of trial and error. It was more exciting when he knew. He hated himself more, hated her more, but it was more exciting and that was what seemed to count in the long run.

“Tell me” he said.

“If you’re sure.”

“Tell me.”

She licked her lips. Anticipation glowed in her eyes. This, he knew, was what she lived for. She would go out and enjoy her adventures, but they themselves were spiced by her expectations of returning home to tell him her story. She would come home with her dirty little stories and she would tell him everything in as tantalizing a manner as possible. And then he would take her, and that part of it was what she lived for. What they both lived for.

“I went to the Lambertville House,” she said. “I took a corner booth and just waited for somebody to come in.”

“Who was it?”

“I had quite a wait. There were a lot of men who gave me the eye, but I wanted just the right one.”

“Who was it?”

“Hugh Markarian.”

“Christ.”

“I remembered you pointing him out to me. He comes to the Barge a lot, doesn’t he?”

“Christ.”

“I groped him right there at the table. He was very cool about it. It got to him in a big way but he was very cool about it.”

She went on, giving him the story an inch at a time. The words did not excite him now. That wasn’t how it worked. He would listen all the way through, feeling nothing but a slight sense of nausea, his whole being deadened by the flow of words. That was the pattern they had established. And then, as she neared the end of the story, something would happen within him that he did not begin to understand.

“Talk about cool,” she was saying. “His daughter walked in then, see, and she’s hanging on the arm of a big black nigger.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And she takes him upstairs. And he tells me she’s free to bring friends home if she wants. Right? And he says why should it bother him if it’s a nigger. Just as cool as ice he said that, but he didn’t know I saw his face when he first caught sight of the nigger. He went white, Sully. He went absolutely white. But just for that instant, and the kid never saw it, and from then on he’s Mister Cool again.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought it would throw him off, you know? Not being able to get it out of his head. I mean, we went upstairs to his bedroom. And a couple doors down the hall is her bedroom, and she’s in there with the black, and he’s her father and how can he get this out of his head? But I guess I took his mind off it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“See, I really got him hot necking. With our clothes on and everything like kids in a drive-in. And by the time we were upstairs we were so hot for each other that nothing else mattered. Do you want to know what we did?”

“You know what I want.”

“Yeah. And I know what I want, too.”

“Tell me about it.”

His expression did not change while she spoke. Her eyes on him, she constructed her description of what had taken place at Hugh Markarian’s house, constructed it skillfully and deliberately. From time to time she was purposely vague, forcing him to ask questions. She never invented, never exaggerated, but stayed strictly with the exact truth as she perceived it.

After about a quarter of an hour she had finished. She thought there would be more questions from him, he seemed on the point of asking something, but he remained silent, and they sat together for several minutes without talking.

Then he said, “I guess I’ll get some sleep.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Uh-huh.”

He got heavily to his feet. She followed him up the stairs. Her hands were trembling, she noticed, and her mouth was dry. She recognized both anticipation and fear within herself, anticipation of his lovemaking, fear that what had worked before might by now have lost its magic. She had read nothing in his face but defeat and exhaustion, both of them now echoed the slump of his shoulders as he mounted the stairs.

It might not work this time. Worse, it might provoke not lust but loathing. And that could be very dangerous for her. She looked at the size of him and remembered his strength. He had never struck her, but if he ever did— God, he was strong. It would be so easy for him to kill her with his hands.

She shivered at that thought. And wondered, fleetingly, whether there was more than fear in what she felt. The possibility was a shade more frightening than the fear which had occasioned it, and she made herself stop thinking about it.

In bed beside him, both fear and anticipation mounted while she waited to see if it would work. She wanted to reach for him but knew not to. It would be he who would reach for her. Or not reach for her.

When his hand settled on her thigh, her entire body sighed. Breath drained from her lungs and tension from her muscles. She had not realized that she had been holding her breath, nor had she been aware of the taut knots in her calves and forearms. She closed her eyes against the glow of false dawn and surrendered to the hand upon her thigh. Her mind filled with a picture of that hand. She could see it so clearly, the hairs on its back, the fading scar on the index finger. The hand moved to touch between her legs, and she gasped. Her arousal was instant and total.

He played with her for a long time. Idly, undemandingly, using only his hands. Once, as he reached for her breasts, she felt his cock press like a bar of hot iron against her leg. She wanted it in her. She felt it against her leg and saw it in her mind and ached with her own emptiness. But her hand did not reach for him. She waited.

And when he took her — and who knew how long it was, seconds or minutes or hours, who knew, who cared? — When he took her it was with strength and fury and power that took her completely out of herself. It was frightening to be fucked like this. And more frightening to think of living without it. All the women he had had, and none of them had ever been possessed as he possessed her. Oh, it was worth it. It was worth anything she had to do, anything at all.

She woke around noon, showered, dressed, put up a pot of coffee. While it was perking she heard him upstairs in the bathroom. She set two places at the breakfast room table, broke eggs into a frying pan. Then she remembered how he liked pancakes. She hadn’t made them for him in ages. In fact they rarely had breakfast together anymore. She would fry eggs for him and sit with a cup of coffee while he ate, then make herself something after he left. It wasn’t that much trouble to make a real breakfast. She’d just grown out of the habit.

She had to hunt to find the box of pancake mix. It had been in the cupboard half-empty for more than a year but it seemed to be all right. No worms in it. The chemicals kept it from spoiling and rendered it unfit for insect consumption. Only human beings could eat it.

Apple pancakes — he loved apple pancakes. She found apples in the refrigerator and sliced them into the batter. By the time he came downstairs she had a stack of pancakes on both their plates and two mugs of coffee poured.

He said, “Well, what do you know? What’s the occasion?”

“Just breakfast.”

“You picked the right day for it. I got an appetite like I don’t know what. What’s the expression? ‘My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’ What did you put, apples in the coffee? I’m tasting apples from the pancakes. You put applejack in the coffee.”

“Well, I figured what wine goes with apple pancakes and I figured why not. If it’s no good, I’ll get you another cup.”

“When I finish this one you can get me another cup exactly the same. What got into you?”

“You did.”

“Yeah.” He grinned, then let the grin fade. “I guess we got things to, I don’t know, talk about. But—”

“Oh, let’s just enjoy breakfast for the time being.”

“Let’s do that.”

The day went quickly. She found things to do around the house, did some marketing, watched television. She was watching an Errol Flynn movie when he returned home. She turned off the set and went downstairs to meet him.

“You’re home,” he said.

“Yeah. Where else would I be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You might be cooking up apple pancakes for somebody or other.”

“I bought some pure maple syrup this afternoon. It’s expensive but I figured let’s live a little.”

He reached for her suddenly, one hand on her bottom, the other between her legs. He kissed her for a long time. When he released her she was dizzy and had trouble staying on her feet.

“Just what I say,” he said. “Let’s live a little.”

“Jesus.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just you came on me by surprise.”

“I didn’t, but it sounds like fun.”

“Huh?”

“Coming on you. Feel this, will you? I been like this all day long.”

“You should of come home for dinner.”

“I never would of gone back.”

“I never would of let you. Let’s go upstairs.”

“What, and climb all those stairs? There’s a perfectly good couch in the living room.”

The next two days held to the pattern. Breakfast together, elaborately prepared and enthusiastically received, with an almost unreal warmth between them. Lovemaking at night, his potency on honeymoon level, her own satisfaction greater than anything she had ever known. And, for prelude and aftermath, more conversation than had been their custom.

And yet it was not conversation at all. It was talk, but it was not about anything.

On Thursday night she met him at the door. There was something in his eyes. She saw it immediately. He embraced her and put his hands on her but she sensed the difference in his response and in her own.

“There’s fresh coffee.”

“Good.”

She brought two cups. She thought of putting applejack in his but didn’t. He took a cup of coffee and put the cup down. “He was in tonight,” he said.

She knew who he meant but asked anyway.

“Markarian. Came over around ten thirty with a girl, took a table on the water side. Had two rounds, left a little after eleven.”

“Was that the first time since—”

“No. He was in Monday. Came in alone and had four or five quick ones at the bar. Talked with some of the regulars. Talked with me, I talked with him. Didn’t show a thing. Couple of times I’d look his way sudden to see if he’s giving me a look. But not once. Not one time. All the shitty actors in this town, I’ll tell you, he could give them lessons.”

“I told you how cool he was.”

“He was cool and I was cool. He didn’t let a thing show. And neither did I. He’s got no idea, I know. Last night, no, the night before. Yeah, Tuesday. He’s in there with his daughter. Karen?”

“That’s right.”

“Introduced me to her. Here she’s sitting with her Daddy and I’m seeing her in my mind with a black cock in her mouth. Not the point. Point is, she showed it.”

“Showed what?”

“Showed she knew it was my wife with her father the other night. I mean I sensed this from her that I hadn’t from him. Before that I had it in my mind that maybe you were making it up. Not really. I mean I knew it but I didn’t know it. You get me?”

“I think so.”

He started to say something, then lapsed into silence. She felt an undercurrent of nervous excitement moving inside her. It was not all she felt, there were other feelings, but it was there.

He said, “He’s cool and I’m cool and even the kid was cool. I never would have known anything from her if I didn’t know it in the first place. Everybody’s cool and I got something inside me that I don’t know what it is.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“Him? I don’t know. What’s there to feel? Do I want to kill him? No. Do I want to take a punch at him? No. Do I want him to walk in front of a train? No. I look at him, and I see him with you, the whole scene goes through my mind, and I don’t know what I feel.”

“Does it excite you?”

“I don’t know. Does it give me a hard-on? No. There’s excitement and there’s excitement. It does something. I don’t know what It does. The point isn’t how I feel about Markarian. Fuck Markarian. I mean he’s nothing. Unless — would you see him again?”

“No.”

“So he’s one night. One particular night he happens to be a cock with a man on the end of it. The point is not how I feel about him.”

“The point’s how you feel about me.”

“I guess. No.”

“Then what?”

“It’s how I feel about me, Melanie.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not myself.”

She put her hand on his arm.

“You hear that expression all the time but I never really knew what it meant before. I’m not myself. I look the same, I act the same on the surface, but I’m walking around wearing somebody else’s head. For years I was one particular person, and now I’m not the same man anymore. I don’t know who the hell I am.”

“Are you happier or sadder or—”

“It isn’t like that. It’s something different. It’s — Melanie?”

She looked at him. She had never seen his face so open.

“Melanie, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m afraid and I don’t know what of.”

“Are you worried about your mind?”

“You mean worried I’m going crazy? I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy already. I don’t know how to say any of this because I can’t get it right in my own head to begin with. I’m afraid of not being myself. That I’m turning into a person I got no respect for. What kind of man is it that can only be a man by hearing his wife tell him what she did with somebody else? And then I’ll think that one day I’ll wake up and everything’ll be the way it used to be, I’ll be the way I was, and all of this is just something I’m going through. A stage. And when I think that I’m afraid, that makes me afraid too. Melanie, I don’t know what I want.”

“Whatever it is, you want it, but you don’t”

“Yeah.” She brought him more coffee. When she was seated beside him again he began talking about something that had happened in one of his earlier marriages. She followed the story trying to catch the point he was making, but couldn’t. When he finished he began discussing aspects of their current situation, puzzling it out, and then switched into a reminiscence of something that had happened thirty years earlier. Then she realized that the first story had had no point, that he was not telling her stories with points. He was working back and forth through his life and trying to tell her who he was.

He talked and she listened. She brought him more coffee until he said it was giving him the jitters, and then he switched to applejack. She brought the jug and a glass. He drank, but not heavily, taking small sips as punctuation as he moved from one recollection to another.

Around daybreak he paused, and he was silent for a long while before she realized he had finished. But the conversation was not finished. He was waiting for her to give it another direction.

She said, “Sully? I don’t have to do it anymore.”

“You could just stop.”

“Yeah.”

“You had a need, Melanie. The first time wasn’t to turn me on. It was for you.”

“So?”

“So why should you stop scratching if the itch don’t go away?”

“Maybe it went away.”

“Even if you think so—”

“How could I know for sure?”

“There’s no way.”

“I know I could stop if you want me to.”

“The question’s what you want to do.”

“I want what you want.”

“No good. Suppose you could have it either way. The Good Fairy comes and gives you a wish. You can go on doing it with me wanting you to or you can stop with me wanting you to stop. See what I mean? That’s the question you got to answer.”

He was right, it was the question she had to answer, but she had to think about it first.

“I would go on,” she said finally.

“Uh-huh.”

“Because I like the things it’s doing for us. Sully, I never really knew you till tonight.”

“You mean all this talking.”

“Yeah, all this talking. You never talked to a woman like that, did you?”

“To anybody. No, I never did.”

“So nobody ever knew you. And nobody ever knew me. And all the girls you’ve had, none of them ever got to you the way I do. That’s not a question either because I know it’s true. The past few nights. You never had that with anybody else.”

“You’re right.” He looked at her. “You know something? Another thing that scares me. All my life I see a girl, and I want her. Like you turn a faucet and water comes out. Lately nothing. The other night Markarian’s in with his daughter, and thinking about her and the coon and about how Markarian was with you it occurs to me it would be like turning the tables if I got to his daughter. He screws my wife so I screw his daughter. Poetic license. No, that’s not it. Justice. Poetic justice.”

“So.”

“So you saw her, you know what she looks like. And here I’m having this thought and I look at her and it comes to me that I don’t want to. Poetic or not, I got no urge at all for the little bitch.”

“You wouldn’t want to have her?”

“Not in the slightest. You would want me to have her?”

She licked her lips. “I would want me to have her.”

“Did you ever—”

“No. I never even wanted to until just now. I never even thought about it until just now. Lately I’ve been having all kinds of new thoughts.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“The thought excites you, doesn’t it? Me with her.”

“Yeah, it does. Why the hell is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You with her excites me. Me with her doesn’t. Why the hell is that?”

“Well, me with Markarian does, as far as that goes, and—”

“That’s something else worries me.”

“That you’re—”

“Not that I am. Not exactly. I mean I never felt anything that way. For another man. I can’t imagine it. But the idea that this business of being turned on by what you do with someone else, that it’s a fag thing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, skip it. I don’t understand it myself, it’s just a feeling. Just something for when there’s nothing else to worry about, and there always is. Melanie? This I got to say because I can’t talk myself out of it. You could meet somebody you like better.”

“No.”

“It could happen.”

“It could never happen.”

“Again, even if you believe this, how can you know?”

She said. “Jesus, I’m so tired.”

“Yeah, we’re wearing ourselves out. Let’s go to sleep, huh?”

“It’s necking,” she said.

“Huh?”

“How I know it could never happen.”

“You lost me.”

“Remember with Markarian? Necking in the living room, going through a long buildup? The whole thing was necking. Fucking him was necking.”

“I don’t—”

“Even having an orgasm, part of me wasn’t there. It was in the future.” She shook her head, impatient with herself. “Jesus, I’m so exhausted I can’t put words together. What made me hot with him was thinking how I would tell you about it. And what we would do afterward. If I’d of come home and we didn’t do anything, I’d of been ten times as frustrated as if I never left the house in the first place. Oh I want to do things, baby. Freaky things I never used to think about. Girl things. Group things. But to go out and do them and then come on home, because that’s the important part. The other is necking. What’s so funny?”

“They would lock us up. The both of us. If they could take off the tops of our heads and look at what’s inside, they’d lock us up. No question. We’re a pair of weirdos.”

“Yeah.”

“They’d lock us up,” he said.

“Just so they put us in the same cell.”

“Yeah. And just so they let you out once in a while, huh? Oh, God, am I tired. I am so tired.”

Eleven

That Friday morning, at about the time Sully and Melanie Jaeger headed upstairs to bed, Hugh Markarian went into his den and uncovered his typewriter. He put a fresh sheet of paper in place and typed “119.” at its top. He looked thoughtfully at the number as if waiting for it to tell him something. It occurred to him that it ought to tell him something. If nothing else, it ought to give a short nod of recognition. It was not as if he and “119.” were meeting one other for the first time. Just renewing old acquaintances.

He had first typed that particular number almost a month ago, at which time one might say it had told him something, told him it was time to take a week or so off. Then, two days ago, he had typed it again. And again yesterday morning. And now today.

He thought now of his conversation with Linda at Tannhauser’s, his buoyant assurance that he was extending his leave from the book because he was enjoying the free time, but that within a few days he would return to it with no trouble at all. One day he would simply be ready, that was all.

And true to his word, he got out of bed Wednesday morning knowing that this was the day. Even before he reached his den his fingers were anticipating the feel of the typewriter keys. Then he’d typed the damned number at the top of the damned page and waited for something to happen, and nothing did. Nor had anything happened yesterday when he repeated the performance verbatim.

Nor was anything extraordinary happening now.

Perhaps “119.” had numerological significance. Perhaps it was some sort of jinx. He couldn’t remember that the number had played any prior role in his life. It had never been his address, for example. Was it a prime number? He got a pencil and played with the number. No, it was not a prime; it was the product of 7 and 17. They in turn were both primes, but it seemed likely that a great many numbers, numbers of pages which had presented no difficulty, could make much the same statement.

Suppose he just skipped on and wrote “120.” And came back and wrote “119.” later? No, by George, because it would be more than a little trick to write a page with no idea of what might happen on the one preceding it. And if he just omitted “119.” forever, it looked to be cheating, like skipping from twelve to fourteen when numbering hotel floors. If one really wanted to be safe, one would build a hotel with a thirteenth floor and not put any rooms on it. Now, insofar as the pages of a book were concerned, on the other hand—

His mind went on playing along these lines until he told himself to stop. This was silly. There was a point to working, and there might be a point to not working, but he was deliberately thinking along unproductive lines.

He skipped down a few lines from the top of the page and typed: “Reasons why this book is not getting written.”

And below, in outline form:

(1) Other things on my mind.

(a) Karen.

(b) Linda.

(c) Melanie.

(2) Problems with the book.

(a) Too much time away from it and lost the handle.

(b) Worried about writer’s block has indeed brought on writer’s block.

(c) The book stinks.

(3)

But he stopped there, because there was no third category, or if there was it didn’t really apply. All of the elements he had listed were valid but only one of them mattered. He did have other things on his mind, and they inevitably included Karen and Linda and might be said to include Melanie if one thought of her more as a metaphor for sex in general. And he had been too long from the book and had lost his feel for it, and blocking itself was its own cause, operating much like impotence; if you worried about your ability to write or to make love, the worry intensified the inability.

But the last item was the important one. The book stank. Or he thought it did, which came to more or less same thing. It was very difficult to go on with something in which you had to be totally involved if the suspicion kept gnawing at you that you were creating garbage.

Was it bad?

He hefted the manuscript, knowing he would have to read it again, knowing he didn’t want to. Of course he had read it Wednesday. He had thought he might be able to jump right back into it that morning, but when his fingers froze on the keys he knew he would have to read the book through and pick up its tones and highlights before he could go on. It hadn’t seemed bad then. It had pleased him. There were lines he did not remember having written, lines and exchanges which he knew were damned good. But after having read its 118 pages, he was still no closer to writing the next page.

He moved the typewriter to one side and centered the manuscript on the desk in front of him. However good or bad it might be, he was going to hate what he read today. He’d read the thing just two days ago and on this go-through he was sure to see only the weaknesses. Still, he had to do it Something might strike a spark, something might put him back into the book. And that was what it was all about, after all. You had to be inside what you wrote.

At first the process of reading was difficult in and of itself. His eyes scanned the pages but his mind kept slipping along other paths of thought. There were, indeed, many things to think about.

His coupling with Melanie Jaeger had been imaginative and intense, his responses sure and strong, his control certain. But it might as well have been happening to someone else. His body performed, experienced, fulfilled itself. His mind, blocked and frozen, was utterly remote. By the time her little red car pulled out of his driveway the details of their lovemaking were already receding from memory.

He went back to his bed, a bed now pungent with Melanie’s scent. He did not expect sleep would come but surprised himself by falling asleep almost at once. He slept fitfully, time after time pulling himself awake out of eternal variations of the same dream. Each time he dreamed of heights — a window ledge, a mountain precipice, a long steep endless flight of stairs, an idiot over an abyss. In each dream he would be paralyzed by fear but would force himself to edge his way along the window ledge, to descend the staircase a hesitant step at a time. He would reach his destination only to find that one window ledge led only to another, that still another flight of stairs confronted him. And then, as vertigo seized him and he was poised, about to fall, he would fight his way back to consciousness, sitting up in bed with his heart violent in his chest.

He had had these dreams for as long as he could remember, and only rarely would he recall dreams that did not have something to do with heights and falling. Sometimes the dreams held no terror and the endless descending of stairs was merely annoying and frustrating and slightly uncomfortable. On other nights, like this one, the terror was acute. And the fear would persist during the period of consciousness immediately following. If he ever fell in the course of a dream, if he ever failed to rescue himself in time—

He was not sure what the dream meant and rarely worried about them. Heights did make him uncomfortable, in or out of sleep, and he suspected that the dreams merely provided a mechanism for the unconscious expression of fear, any fear at all. Fear of death, fear of failure, any of the justified or irrational demons that curl in the corners of men’s souls.

When he awoke for the final time, the dream had no sooner receded than he thought of his daughter. She had been in several of the dreams, he seemed to remember this, although he could not recall what role she might have played. He remembered seeing her face, and that there had been a particular expression on it, but he could not remember anything about that expression.

He passed her room on the way downstairs, noting that her door was open. He paused on the stairs. The prospect of confrontation unsettled him, yet he never considered postponing the moment. He merely wanted to steady himself for a moment so that he would handle this well. It would be important to handle it well. Nor was it just a matter of handling things; at the same time he would have to be honest, and he was not entirely sure what words and attitudes on his part would constitute honesty.

She was alone at the kitchen table. She raised her eyes at his approach, and in the instant before she smiled he saw an expression on her face he had never noticed before. It struck him later that it might have been the face she had shown him in his dreams.

She said, “Hi. Is Linda coming down?”

“She didn’t stay.”

“Neither did Jeff.”

“Sleep well?”

“Okay. You?”

“Oh, not too bad.”

“She wasn’t quite what I expected.” The words came out less casually than she intended. “Linda, I mean.”

“How?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“She also wasn’t Linda.”

“Huh? You introduced—”

“No, you did, actually. You introduced yourself and told her she must be Linda, and she agreed with you.”

“Oh, wow! I just took it for granted—”

“No harm.”

“I mean that was pretty stupid of me, wasn’t it? I just thought — except I didn’t think.”

“Forget it.”

“Anyway, I’m sorry.”

She reached for her coffee cup, and he could very nearly read the unvoiced question in a comic strip balloon over her head. Then who was she?

He said, “Her name is Melanie Jaeger. She’s married; her husband runs the Barge Inn. I never spoke to her before last night. We ran into each other in Lambertville, and she came back here with me. It wasn’t anything important to either of us. It was uncomplicated and physical and we both seemed to require it.”

He couldn’t read her face. He wondered if he’d said too much, or if he ought to elaborate on what he’d told her. Why did he feel he had to justify himself?

She said, “I guess that’s why she wasn’t the way I expected Linda to be.”

“Why?”

“Oh, that it wasn’t important, that it didn’t mean anything. I got the impression — this is silly, what’s the difference what impression I got?”

“No, I’m interested.”

“Well, I had the feeling you and Linda had something heavy going on. And then meeting — what was name?”

“Melanie.”

“Well, I didn’t see her as your type, I guess. Don’t ask me why. And the general vibes. You know, it felt more casual than — oh, I don’t know.”

“‘Heavy,’” he said. “That’s a good word.”

“I probably overuse it.”

“You did get that impression about Linda and me? I didn’t know I’d said that much. You’re right. At least I think you might be. There’s a feeling of possibility between us.” He was not looking at Karen now, was talking as much to himself as to her. “I think I might be ready to... get involved. I’m not sure. And it’s questionable whether she’s ready for any sort of involvement. But what happened last night was certainly very light by comparison. Not heavy at all.”

“This is so far-out.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She suddenly grinned at him. “A different woman every night. I thought men your age were supposed to slow down.”

He drew a blank for a moment. Then it dawned on him.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No, no. You made an assumption and I let you hang onto it. Linda and I never had sex.”

“But—”

“I brought her here. Primarily to meet you, as a matter of fact. Then sex did seem a possibility, but she decided she wasn’t ready for it. So I drove her home. You assumed I’d been to bed with her and it seemed easier to let it go at that than to get into an awkward conversation. Though it could hardly have been as awkward as the one we’re in right now.”

“I know. It’s so weird how we keep learning how to relate to each other.”

“Yes, it is. I’m enjoying it, kitten.”

“So am I.”

The conversation shifted to easier areas when Mrs. Kleinschmidt made an appearance. Over breakfast they talked easily, with Mrs. Kleinschmidt ultimately joining the conversation and, inevitably, taking it over. Hugh was grateful, glad to let the old woman take up the burden of filling time with words.

Jeff.

The black boy.

Man, he supposed he meant. Only Caucasians could be referred to as boys. At what age, he wondered, did blacks bridle at being called boy?

The same afternoon he was in the living room reading a magazine. He looked up when the front door opened. She bounced into the room, asking if she was interrupting. He told her she wasn’t.

“Untrue,” she said, gaily. She dropped into his lap like a child and memories clutched at his heart. “Of course I’m interrupting. What I meant was do you mind awfully?”

“I do not mind a bit.”

“Good. What were you reading?”

“Article about blood banks. Commercial blood banks.”

“What’s there to say about commercial blood banks besides yecchhh?”

“That’s about what the article said. How drunks and junkies sell their blood and it spreads hepatitis and other unpleasant things.”

“And that’s what you were reading? I don’t think I feel at all guilty for interrupting. Actually I have an ulterior motive.”

“Oh?”

“See, it’s a beautiful day, I was thinking it would be fantastic to take a walk in the woods, but suppose there are bears there? I mean, I wouldn’t feel safe unless I had company.”

“I see.”

“And I’m sure you would never forgive yourself,” she said, “if I were eaten by a bear.”

“How well you know me. If you get up, then I could get up.”

“Deal.”

And in the special stillness of the woods, she said, “I was thinking about a habit I have. Of jumping to conclusions. The only way to avoid it is to come out and ask, isn’t it?”

“Ask what?”

“Well, you did have sex with Melanie, didn’t you?”

He started to laugh, then assured her that he did. A few steps farther she said, “I didn’t.”

“Oh?”

“With Jeff. What you didn’t do with Linda, I didn’t do with Jeff.” She turned from him, bent to pick up a dead branch. She straightened up and punctuated her speech with little slaps of the branch into the palm of her hand. “By the time we got upstairs I realized what I was doing. I mean I realized all along in a way but I didn’t see how rotten it was. I was doing a number.”

“We’ve both been feeling each other out a lot, kitten.”

“But this really sucked. It was like I was saying, ‘I’m testing you by bringing home a spade, and if you can handle this one, tomorrow I’ll bring home a kangaroo.’ And I was using Jeff. I wasn’t even using him as a person, I was using him as a spade. Which is a racist thing.”

“Well—”

“It is. I was trying to show that you were a racist, or that you weren’t or... fuck it, I don’t know what I was trying to prove, I honestly don’t. But I was into a racist thing myself in doing it.” She slapped the branch harder against her palm and it snapped. She stared at the piece still in her hand, then opened her hand and watched it fall.

She said, “I wonder if he knew what I was doing. He didn’t say anything but he must have picked up on it. Maybe he didn’t care. You know, anything to get laid. Do men really have that attitude?”

“Some of the time. Most of the time, maybe. More than women, certainly.”

“That’s kind of depressing, that he could see what I was doing and still want to ball me. But when I saw, I don’t know, I just couldn’t do it. I don’t know what it was exactly but I couldn’t. I knew I had to get out of it without being horrible. I told him — what was it I said? I told him I couldn’t do anything with you in the house, that it just made me clutch completely. He wanted me to go somewhere else but I wouldn’t.” She stared at him suddenly. “I wonder if I told him the truth without meaning to! Maybe I was uptight about that without knowing it.”

“It’s possible.”

“I just thought of that. What I thought after he left was that maybe I was a racist in another way, that once we were upstairs there I was all alone with this black guy and I couldn’t go through with balling him because he was black. I never made it with a black person before. It’s so hard to know why you do things and what’s good and what’s bad. Sometimes I—”

“Kitten.” His arm encircled her. “Just let it go. You don’t have to keep picking at scabs.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I think so.”

“Maybe. Could we sit down for a minute? Because I’m getting tired.”

“Sure.”

They sat with their backs against the trunk of an oak. A breeze was blowing, and he watched the dancing pattern of sunlight filtered through the leaves overhead, bright green dots dancing on the dark green forest floor. She settled her head on his shoulder. He patted his pockets, searching for a pipe, but he hadn’t brought one. It would have been pleasant to smoke a pipe now while watching the sunlight pattern and enjoying her presence beside him.

“No bears,” she said.

“Hibernating.”

“This time of year?”

“I snuck into their dens in January and turned off their alarm clocks.”

“When will they get up?”

“As soon as they stop hibernating.”

“Daddy? Can I ask you something?”

“About bears?”

“No. Heavier than bears.”

“Bears are pretty heavy.”

“Daddy?”

“What is it, kitten?”

“I just, I don’t know — I say that all the time, don’t I? ‘I don’t know.’ I never realized I did that until the psychiatrist pointed it out. But I still say it.”

“When were you seeing a psychiatrist?”

“At school. I got... oh, things bothered me a lot. Or I thought they did. I saw him three times. No, four. He said I was all right. Daddy?”

“What?”

“Does it get easier?”

She was so vulnerable, so soft and open and vulnerable. He said, “Do you mean sex or love? Or both?”

“I mean the whole thing. You know. Life. When I was a kid I always thought when you grew up everything was perfect, and I’m eighteen years old, and I always thought eighteen was when you got to be grown up, and then, I don’t know.”

After a moment he said, “I was trying to remember what it was like when I was eighteen. It’s hard to see your own past with any real clarity. I was much less mature at your age than you are. I didn’t really get around to the kind of growth you’re going through until after the war. The war had something to do with it but not everything. Kids grow up much faster than they did. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.”

“Neither am I.”

“Does it get easier? That’s a good question. I don’t think it gets better. But in a way it does get easier. Because you learn things. You learn how to handle it. And it doesn’t hurt as much.”

She had taken his hand in both of hers. Now she squeezed it hard. They sat awhile in silence before heading back toward the house. He was happy, very happy, and very close to tears.

On the way back she said, “You got me out of my mood. I just wish—”

“What do you wish?”

“Oh, that I thought more of myself. I don’t think I’m a very terrific person.”

“I think you’re an utterly terrific person.”

“Well, you have to. I’m your daughter.”

He said, “If I weren’t your father, and if I had a daughter, I would give anything to have her turn out like you.”

She began to cry. He took her in his arms and held her close. She looked up at him, beaming through her tears, “You always know just the right words,” she said. “You ought to be a writer, you know that?”

The book didn’t stink.

He gathered up the manuscript, squared its edges, set it on the desk top. He had read it carefully all the way through, expecting to hate it, and it simply wasn’t awful. It was taut, spare. The characters sounded real. The scenes had life.

But it wasn’t quite right, either.

He lit a cigarette, leaned back, watched the smoke crawl toward the ceiling. This reading, he decided, had been worthwhile. He knew what was wrong with the book. It was possible that the book’s flaw was not what had mired him on its hundred and nineteenth page, but he knew that the resolution of that flaw would be enough spur to get him going again. If he could figure out what to do about it.

The book was thin. There wasn’t sufficient substance to it.

It was, very simply, the story of a woman’s life as shown in the three years before and two or three years after the death of her husband. Other parts of her life would be included in flashback and reminiscence, so that the book in total would present the woman’s entire life.

Was she a remarkable woman? He did not know that yet, and would learn only by writing her story. But he did know that her life was not remarkable. He did not know all its details — these would emerge as he wrote — but he knew that she was born on an Eastern Pennsylvania farm, went to New York to be an actress, married a boy who was killed in the war, took a second husband shortly after the war’s end. Her second husband was an advertising man in New York, who then took a job with a Philadelphia agency. They moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, had a daughter, grew toward middle age in a marriage that was neither good nor bad.

In the book’s first chapter the husband suffers a coronary thrombosis and lives through it. Over the next several hundred pages he would have two more coronaries, the last of which would kill him. And after that — well, he knew very little of what would happen after that. If the book took proper form, he would know the story’s ending when it was time for him to write it.

Somehow it lacked dimension, and he did not know exactly how or why.

A little later he put part of it together. Part of the problem — it was the wife’s story, but it was the husband who was doing the dying. So in a sense she was along for the ride, but you never saw him from the inside, never saw him except through her eyes. And yet it had to be that way; she absolutely had to be the viewpoint character.

He sat for a long time, turning the problem over and over in his mind and looking for ways out of it. His fingers never went near the keyboard, and “119.” stared back at him, along with the musings he had typed on it earlier. But he did not mind. He was working now whether he put anything on paper or not. His mind was on his work. While he looked for solutions to the problem he found various scenes sketching themselves out, heard in his mind exchanges of dialogue which would fall into place as the book progressed. He didn’t write them down. He had learned over the years to let them stay there, tucked somewhere in the cupboard of his mind. Some would be bad ideas, superfluous scenes that would only pad the script. Some would be inconsistent with the ultimate plot. The worthwhile ones would stay alive and would drop into place when the time came. When he emerged from the den, late in the afternoon, the problem itself remained unsolved. It was the man’s story and had to be, and the woman’s eyes had to be the window to his soul. He could write it that way. He could sit down and finish it, with no more worries about blocking. But there ought to be a better way.

Perhaps he’d know it the next morning. Sleep often solved that sort of problem. Unless it was too much disjointed by cliffs and ledges and endless flights of stairs.

Karen was in the living room. She said, “Mrs. Kleinschmidt said to call her when you wanted dinner. I said you might want to eat out, but she said to call her and she’ll cook for you.”

“What time is it?”

“A little after seven.”

“That’s at least four hours later than I would have guessed. I thought it was the middle of the afternoon.”

“You must have gotten a ton of work done. Should I call her or what? She made supper for the two of us, but I’ll keep you company.”

“I may just go get a hamburger. I’m not very hungry. What I am is thirsty.”

“You sit. I guess I know how to mix them.”

She brought him a drink and sat down across from him, waiting for his approval. He sipped, smiled. “El Exigente is satisfied,” he said.

She heaved a great sigh of mock relief, then drank some of her own drink. “It must be a great feeling,” she said.

“What must?”

“To be so involved with something that you lose all track of the time.”

“Oh, it is. Even if I didn’t write a word today.” He smiled at her expression. “The book had a problem,” he explained. “I spent half the day figuring out what it was and the other half looking for a way to solve it.”

“And you did?”

“No, but I will. I’m seeing it the right way now.”

“I can’t wait to read it.”

“Have you ever read any of my books?”

“All of them. Does that surprise you?”

“You never said anything.”

“Well, you never asked. And I never knew what to say or anything, so I didn’t.”

“I wonder if I ever thought of you reading them. I don’t think so. Isn’t that strange. Well? Pretty bad, huh?”

“I think they’re wonderful.” Such a heavy feeling in his chest. “I can’t judge books. I’m not that kind of a reader. All your books — I get completely wrapped up in them until it’s as if I’m not reading. I’ll think about trying to know you through your books but I just get caught up in the story and — Daddy? Did I say something wrong?”

Of course. That was the way to do it. The husband’s life, seen through other eyes. But not just the wife’s. The wife’s and the daughter’s.

The two women in his life. The two points of reference from which the man’s life could be triangulated and transfixed.

Of course. Two women knew him, and in the two ways in which a woman might know a man. He would have to scrap a great deal of what he had written. Most of it could be reworked, at least. But it would work. It would work beautifully, and if he handled it properly it would do a great deal more than reveal one man’s life.

It might be... important.

“Daddy?”

“You just solved my problem.”

“I did?”

“You damn well did.” He was standing, his drink abandoned on the coffee table. “I’ve got the whole opening now. I have to start over on page one but it’s all, right there.”

“You’re going back to work?”

“I can’t let it cool off.”

“But you already worked all day—”

“All I did was sit in a chair. I didn’t even move my fingers.”

“Do you want anything to eat? I could bring it to you.”

He shook his head. “You could bring me a thermos of coffee, though. Just don’t be hurt if I ignore you.”

“I’ll tiptoe. You won’t even know I was there.”

She did tiptoe, but he wouldn’t have noticed if she’d stamped her feet. It was all there, just as he’d said, and it flowed. At four o’clock he pushed himself away from his desk with thirty-two pages written and huge chunks of the rest of the book etched vividly in his mind.

He had made it a rule for many years now not to do more than twenty pages a day. But it was absurd to keep to that rule in a situation like this. The sooner he got it all down, the better it would be.

Thirty-two pages, and he didn’t have to look at them to know they were good.

And the dedication page was no longer blank.

Twelve

When Gretchen Vann strode into the Lemon Tree, Linda did not notice her immediately. It was a Friday night. The weather had been good all day, the sky clear and the sun not too hot, and the town was packed with tourists. The Lemon Tree had been getting its share all day. Now, while Olive was in the back room showing Central American wood carvings to a rather intense young couple, Linda was at the desk watching a long-haired boy contemplate shoplifting. There was a bracelet of polished bits of rose quartz which he kept picking up and putting down, and she was certain he was trying to decide whether or not he liked it well enough to drop it in his pocket.

She decided to approach him. Once it was in his pocket there wasn’t much she could do. Olive had told her not to bother much about minor pilferage; it wasn’t worth the nuisance of running for a policeman, and while she was thus engaged other more ambitious browsers could empty half the store. She had learned, though, that it was easy to stop most shoplifters in advance. If you just went up to them and gave a sales pitch for whatever you figured they were about to steal, it generally routed them from the store without making a scene.

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

The words, spoken sharply and bitterly, came just as she was about to step out from behind the counter. For an instant she thought she had said them herself, and the long-haired boy evidently had no doubt they were meant for him; he straightened up, dropped the bracelet back where it had come from and walked nervously away from it.

“You think you’re fooling me, don’t you?”

She turned toward the voice and saw Gretchen. The woman’s drab blond hair hung flat and lifeless, framing a face that was drawn and haggard. Her skin had the dull sheen of wax fruit. Her eyes were unlike anything Linda had ever seen, wide and wild, slipping in and out of focus, madness gleaming in them.

“You and Peter are not fooling me, not for one moment. You treacherous cunt.”

Conversation died throughout the shop. Some customers began edging toward the door. Others stayed to watch the show. In the hallway outside, a crowd began to gather.

“Gretchen—”

“First it was just you, and then you managed to steal Peter away from me. You trapped him between your legs.” She thrust a forefinger in Linda’s face, shook it vigorously at her. The nail had been chewed ragged halfway to the cuticle. “And now the two of you are conspiring against me. But what you don’t realize is that I’m on to you. I know!”

Out of the corner of her eye Linda saw Olive McIntyre halfway down the aisle, a questioning look on her face. But no, she thought, I ought to be able to handle this myself.

“There’s nothing to know, Gretchen,” she said reasonably. “There’s nothing between Peter and me. I don’t think I’ve spoken two words to him in the past week. We’re friends but it’s never been more than that.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It happens to be the truth.”

A peal of harsh laughter, rising hysterically at the end.

“Gretchen—”

“Pretending to be working at the theater. But I know he’s with you instead. Do you know something?” She leaned forward, clutching her hands together, making nervous washing movements with them. “I could live with that. But not what you’re trying to do next.”

“What are we trying to do, Gretchen?”

“As if you didn’t know!”

“Tell me.”

Her voice dropped to a conversational tone. “You’re trying to take Robin away from me,” she said. “You see, I do know, don’t I?”

“What makes you think—”

“Peter can’t take her from me. He’s not her father. He may try to poison her mind but I won’t let him. Do you know what Robin means to me?”

Very little, as far as Linda had ever been able to determine. But she said, “No one will ever take Robin away from you, Gretchen.”

“They can’t!”

“Of course not. Now—”

“Because I’m going to tell you something that very few people know. Robin did not have a father.”

“I see.”

“I was never with a man for the entire year before Robin’s birth. I purified myself. I thought temptation for an entire year. And then Robin was born.”

“I see,” she said again. The shop was virtually empty now, the performance evidently too embarrassing even for those who had been delighted spectators at the onset. Olive stood with her hands planted on her solid hips, rolling her eyes expressively heavenward.

Gretchen said, “I suppose you know what that means.”

That there was a bright star over Bethlehem, Linda thought. Or, at the very least, Allentown. But she said, “I’m not sure I understand, Gretchen.”

“Oh, you think you’re so fucking smart.”

“I—”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s part of the plan, isn’t it? You had to try something when the poison didn’t work. Oh, it would work if I took it. But I know better than to eat anything Peter cooks for me. I’m not a fool. So the next step is to get me locked up in an insane asylum where they can burn out my brain with laser beams.” She put a hand palm down on the counter, sighed. “I don’t blame you for this. It’s Peter’s doing, isn’t it? He’s managed to convince you I’m crazy.”

“Peter loves you, Gretchen.”

She didn’t seem to hear the words. “What I told you before. About Robin?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you remember what I told you.”

“Yes.”

“I know what you thought. That I meant that my daughter was fathered by the Lord God. Right? Right?”

“Well—”

“Do you really think I’m crazy enough to believe such a load of shit? Oh, Peter has poisoned your mind me, hasn’t he? Let me explain. It’s very important you get this straight once and for all. Robin is not the Christ child. And I am not the Virgin Mary.”

“I see.”

“There was a time when I wondered. After all, no man fathered Robin, so what was I to think? But then I worked things out in my mind. You know why the Lord God is not Robin’s father?”

“Why?”

“Because Robin is a girl. And the Lord God don’t want no daughters. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not many people do. The Lord God wants a son in His own image, right? The Lord God’s a man, right? The Lord God’s got a cock, right? Well, figure it out.”

“I see.”

“Oh, you’re bright, aren’t you? I can tell that. I don’t have to draw pictures, do I? You know something? You and I are a lot alike. I think we’re going to be very good friends.”

“I’d like to be your friend, Gretchen.”

“And when I die, that will give you a chance to be with Peter.” A bark of laughter. “He didn’t used to have a cock, either, you know. But I got one for him at the hardware store and screwed it onto him. Please don’t take it away from him, Linda. He needs it.”

She never knew how long the conversation might have continued, or what turn it would have taken next, because at that point Olive put an arm around Gretchen’s shoulders and steered her toward the door.

“You have to get home now, Gretchen,” Olive was saying. She went on talking as she led her first from the shop itself and down the hall to the mall entrance. The voice she used was the sort men use when gentling horses.

Linda was fumbling for a cigarette when Olive returned. “I hope I didn’t interrupt something you were enjoying,” the older woman said. “I thought it would be better to send her on her way while she was calm and friendly, and I didn’t suppose she’d stay that way too long.”

“Olive, look at me. I’m shaking.”

“Clem keeps a bottle in back. You’re going to have a little glass of whiskey.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Don’t argue. No one ever got anywhere arguing with an arrogant old woman and you won’t be the first.”

The drink did seem to steady her. She drained the glass, stubbed out her cigarette. “I’ve never seen her like that before,” she said.

“Well, I’ve seen that particular bit of bad news in some pretty strange situations, but I’ll have to go along with you. I think that’s about as far around the bend as she’s ever been.”

“Do you think she’s dangerous?”

“I think she’s been dangerous from the day she was born. The first time I set eyes on her I knew I was looking at an accident looking for a place to happen; and she’s been happening all over the place ever since. God knows she picked the right place for it. She can live here and nobody thinks anything of it. Anywhere else in the world they’d have the presence of mind to lock her up.”

“But do you think she could be violent?”

“Now that’s harder to say. I would think that anybody who’s that far out in left field might turn violent for lack of knowing what was going on. I certainly wouldn’t be inclined to sell her a gun. Are you thinking she might come after you?”

“I was afraid of that while she was in here. I didn’t know what she would do next. I kept my hand near the ashtray so I could hit her with it if I had to.”

“Well, I had my hand wrapped around one of those alabaster owls, ready to pitch it at her if push came to shove. Which I’m glad they didn’t, as I’d have likely brained you instead of her. I used to have a good throwing arm but you lose your touch over the years. I don’t suppose she’s too likely to do anything violent. Her little performance tonight sounded like a pretty clear example of paranoia, but she didn’t have one particular fantasy to stay with. She kept shifting around. Still, I’d give her a wide berth. Goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

“I just hope she’s not dangerous to Robin.”

“Dangerous or not, she’s plainly unfit to care for her. If they don’t lock Gretchen up they should at least take the child away from her. And God pity Peter Nicholas if she decides to take back the penis she thinks she gave him.”

“Oh, God!”

“You’d think a man would get involved with her and then turn queer afterward instead of the other way around. But he went and leaped out of the fire and into the frying pan. There’s no place on earth like New Hope for being a ragbag of cripples. Well, here’s a piece of advice for you. From now on draw the shades and lock the door before you hop into bed with Peter.”

“What do you—”

“Now don’t tell me that lunatic had a kernel of truth to work on. I thought Mr. Wealthy Writer was taking up the bulk of your time. You don’t mean to say you’ve got time left over to rob Gretchen Vann’s cradle, do you?”

She fought a blush. “No, of course not. Peter and I are friends. We became very close because he needs someone to talk to.”

“I suppose that’s as good a way as any for it to start.”

“Oh, stop, Olive. I could never feel that way about Peter. Or vice versa. And lately I’ve hardly even seen him at all.”

Olive rubbed the point of her chin. “Now if I were guessing—”

“There’s nothing to guess.”

“—I would have to guess that you’ve already been to bed with him. But you haven’t.”

“No.”

“And, since I know for a fact that you’re clearly incapable of falsehood, that’s the end of the matter. But there’s one thing I’ll tell you. The older I get, the more certain I become that there’s only one thing that’s sufficient cause to keep a person going. And that’s the pleasure of laughing your head off from time to time, and the only thing worth laughing at is the goddamned incredible things people find to do with their lives. The average human being is miles funnier than all the monkeys in the circus.”

“But sometimes you can’t laugh.”

“The older you get, the more you have to.”

After the show that night Peter stopped at the Raparound for a Coke. The girl who brought it seemed on the point of saying something but walked away without speaking. He looked after her, wondering. Probably stoned, he decided. Which struck him as not a bad idea at all. Head back home, blow a couple of jays, and slide inside of his skull to find out what was happening.

He hadn’t smoked in weeks, not since the day after That Night. The night with Linda. And smoking had turned out to be a bad idea then, taking him places he did not want to go.

Had the night with Linda been a bad idea, too? He didn’t know. There had been such magic that night. He could close his eyes now and bring every bit of it back, every inane word either of them had spoken, every bit of shading and nuance. It had been the best thing that had ever happened to him and he hoped the memory of it would stay as vivid for the rest of his life.

He made circles on the table top with his glass, a row of overlapping circles like penmanship exercises. A perfect night, and he treasured it, but since then his relationship with Linda had changed. As of course it had to change.

They were wary of each other now. They talked warmly when they met each other in the hallways or on the street. Now and then she watched Robin for him. On slow afternoons he might drop in on her at the Lemon Tree. But they held back, and if they did not consciously avoid each other, still their long conversations were less frequent, and not as long as they had been.

Neither had spoken of That Night. But it was there, it existed, it had happened, and now it constituted a barrier between them. He sensed she regretted their love-making, and the thought saddened him. It—

“Peter? Got a minute?”

It was Anne. “Oh, hi,” he said, and she dropped into the chair across from him. There was a film of perspiration on her forehead and her waitress uniform was visibly damp under the arms.

She said, “God, what a night.”

“Rough, huh?”

“Danny’s lucky I’ve got tomorrow off, because otherwise I’d quit. How are things with you, Peter?”

“Oh, no complaints.”

She picked up his glass, sipped some of his Coke. “I guess I’d better tell you, then. Gretchen had a couple of bad hours tonight. No, everything’s all right now; home, Robin’s all right, everything’s all right.”

“What happened?”

“I got all this second hand. Or maybe tenth hand.”

“Meaning everybody’s talking about it.” So his waitress hadn’t been stoned, just off-balance. Though of course she might have been stoned too. “Shit,” he said. “Fuck all of this, anyway.” Tourists at the next table turned at his words, and he glared viciously at them until they looked away, embarrassed.

“Fucking busybodies,” he said softly.

Anne didn’t say anything.

“I guess you’d better tell me.”

He propped his head on one hand and listened while she gave him a sketchy but reasonably accurate account of Gretchen’s behavior. She had paced back and forth on Main Street for awhile, talking to herself, obviously disoriented. Then she went to the Lemon Tree and confronted Linda. After Olive McIntyre got her back on the street again, she began accosting passersby and demanding that they help her find her son. Someone finally called one of the local cops, who couldn’t make up his mind whether to take her into custody or leave her alone. While he was still thinking about it, the woman at the candle shop took Gretchen inside, gave her a glass of water, and calmed her down.

“And then she snapped out of it,” Anne said. “She just got herself together and said that she had to get home and take care of Robin. She evidently was completely rational again.”

“They let her go home?”

“A couple of people walked her back to the place. They made sure that the kid was all right and that Gretchen had really settled down.”

“And they left her there?”

“Somebody’s staying with her until you get back. I don’t know who.”

“Whoever it is can stay there forever. I just want to get on a plane and get the hell away from all of this. I wish those clowns would stare at me again. It would be such a pleasure to hit somebody.”

“You okay, Peter?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. He got to his feet, put money on the table, pushed his unfinished Coke over to Anne. “Sure I’m a fucking tower of strength,” he said.

The woman who was keeping Gretchen company was stocky and fiftyish, with something of the look of a jail matron about her. At least they’d had the sense to post someone there who could handle her physically. Not that Gretchen looked hard to handle now. She was sitting on their bed, legs crossed, shoulders slumped, her arms folded over her breasts. She did not look up when Peter entered.

The other woman started to explain the situation, but Peter cut her off, saying he had heard all about it. He was being curt and knew it but didn’t much care. He just wanted the woman to go away.

“Well then. Mrs. Vann is fine now.”

“Is she.”

“She’s been resting, and—”

“And she’s fine. She’s getting ready to be the poster girl for the National Institute for Mental Health.”

“I guess I’ll be going, then.”

Then go, he wanted to scream. But he made himself mumble something vaguely thankful. She left and he closed the door after her.

“They tell you what happened, Petey?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m rational now. I didn’t need that old battle-ax standing guard over me, but the only way to get rid of her would have been to talk to her, and I couldn’t hack it. So I sat here while she put Robin to bed and then she sat over there and I sat here and I pretended I was alone. She talked, but I didn’t listen.”

She had her chin on her chest now. She had not met his eyes since he walked in. Her pose reminded him of photographs of Hindu mystics, and her bony gauntness was consistent with the image.

“I don’t know what happened. It’s all very vague in my mind. I’m completely rational now. I just came out of it all at once and I was standing in the candle shop drinking a glass of water. It was like waking up from a dream, but instead of being in bed I was in the candle shop.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“The way you remember a dream. I threw a big with your girl. I remember that much.”

“She’s not my girl, Gretchen. But you go ahead and believe whatever you want.”

“No, I’ll believe whatever you tell me. It’s easier that way. Petey, I am a jigsaw puzzle all taken apart again. I’m a box of jumbled pieces but they won’t put the cover back on. I don’t know what happened.”

“Do you know why you flipped out that way?”

“The Devil made me do it.”

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, shit, so am I. I was not behind a fucking thing if that’s what you mean. I’ve been a wreck lately, and I haven’t taken so much as an aspirin in days. You know the Yoga trippers and their big shtick about how you can get high without drugs? They’re absolutely right. You can also freak out without drugs. I’m glad I’m dying because I can’t take much more of this.”

“Oh, come on, Gretchen.”

“‘Come on, Gretchen.’ I am too dying.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

She looked up at him for the first time. “Right,” she said. “Nothing wrong with me. Picture of fucking health. I mean who are we kidding. Who are we kidding.” She plucked at the skin on her thighs. “Glowing pink complexion. Firm muscle tone. Here she is, ladies and gentlemen — Miss Dachau of 19—”

“That’s because you don’t eat.”

“So I’m dying of not eating, Petey.”

“That’s not a disease, for God’s sake. All you have to—”

“All my teeth are going to go. I’m losing my teeth.”

“That’s not what the dentist said.”

“He’s my fucking dentist, I ought to know what he fucking said. He said—”

“He said you have great teeth and sound gums but you have to take care of them or you’ll have problems. That’s not the same as saying you’re going to lose your teeth.”

“It’s exactly the same because I am not going to take the vitamins and have the balanced diet, so what do you mean it’s not the same thing?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Also I think my hair is getting thin.”

“It is not.”

“I really think it is.”

“All right, you’re dying, and your teeth and hair are falling out. Whatever you say.”

“When I’m dead you can marry Linda and adopt Robin and you’ll have everything you ever wanted.”

“You’re completely rational.”

“That’s right.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever you say.” He got out of his clothes, used the bathroom, returned to the bed.

“Are you going to sleep now, Petey?”

“That’s exactly right.”

“You’re tired, huh.”

“Right.”

“Okay. I’ll sleep too.”

He stretched out, closed his eyes. After a few moments he said, “Why don’t you lie down, Gretch?”

“Yeah, in a minute.”

“I mean you can’t sleep in the lotus position.”

“Don’t you think I know that? Just don’t rush me, will you? I’ll lie down in a minute.”

“All right.”

“It’s a question of working up to it.”

He let that one pass, gave up, willed everything out of his mind. She was still sitting with folded arms and legs when he dropped off to sleep, but when he awoke in the morning she was lying at his side, one thin arm draped across his chest.

“It’s actually quite simple,” Warren Ormont told him. “On the one hand, you have to take Robin away from Gretchen. On the other—”

“I don’t see how I can do that.”

“Exactly. That’s precisely what’s on the other hand. On the other hand, you cannot take Robin away from her. Gretchen is the child’s natural mother — and if that isn’t a semantic absurdity I’ve never encountered one. Unnatural mother is rather more like it.” He waved a hand impatiently. “Neither here nor there. Gretchen is Robin’s mother. You are not Robin’s father, whose name seems to be legion. Or God, if Gretchen’s most recent outburst is to be believed.”

“She didn’t know what she was saying.”

Warren sighed. “No, and she rarely does. Still, she is Robin’s mother. Which gives her certain rights, the most among them being that of custody of Robin. If you took the girl and vanished into the wilderness, you would be guilty of kidnapping. I doubt you’d have to worry seriously about criminal charges but you would have to worry that at any point Gretchen could have you arrested and retrieve Robin, none of which would come under the heading of positive experiences for impressionable young female children. So as things shape up—”

“Suppose I had her committed?”

“Yes, you could do that. It’s more than possible you ought to. If it weren’t for Robin, that’s exactly what you ought to do.”

“Gretchen gets completely paranoid if I so much as mention a psychiatrist.”

“She’s had bad experiences in that area.” Warren hesitated for a moment, then shook his head shortly. “No, that’s not even a consideration, is it? To hell, for a moment, with what Gretchen wants or doesn’t want.”

“If it would help her—”

“To hell with that, too. I think it’s illusory to think of hospitalization as potentially helpful. In cases like Gretchen’s, the rate of failure is beyond belief. No, the important question is the effect not on Gretchen but on the rest of the world.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Life is for the living,” he went on. “It’s the survivors who have to be considered.”

“And?”

“If Gretchen were committed, that doesn’t mean you would get custody of Robin. In all probability, Robin would be made a ward of the court. Which would probably entail internment in an orphanage or something of the sort. Placement in a foster home, perhaps. No, you see, commitment might be a good idea if Robin were not in the picture.”

Warren went on talking, explaining what Peter had to do to ensure Robin’s safety within the existing relationship. Peter nodded along, barely able to concentrate on the flow of words. There was little that Warren was saying now that other friends had not recently said, little that had not occurred to Peter himself. Robin could not be left alone with Gretchen. Gretchen could not be counted upon to assume any responsibility. And Peter, in the course of this, had to go on working, had to go on living his own life—

“There’s one thing I could do,” he cut in.

“What’s that, pray tell?”

“I could marry Gretchen.”

“Do that and I’d personally sign commitment papers. And not for Gretchen, dear boy. For you.”

“I’m serious.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I wouldn’t want to do it. I could marry her and then adopt Robin legally.”

“Ah, I’m beginning to see.” Warren ran a hand through his hair. “And, as adoptive father, claim custody of the child. I doubt it would work. It might in a short-term sense, but at any point Gretchen could decide to be sane again, hire a lawyer, and sue for custody. And probably get it — the silver cord tying mother to child has a powerful grip on the American judicial imagination. But even if this were possible, Peterkin, it’s a hell of a bad reason to get married. I don’t know of any overwhelmingly good ones, but that’s worse than most. There’s a limit to how thoroughly you can fuck up your own life on Robin’s behalf, you know.”

“I’m not sure it can be fucked up much worse than it already is.”

“No.” Warren shook his head. “No, things can always get worse. That’s how one sustains oneself in this vale of tears, Peter my lad. With the knowledge, that bad as things are, they can get worse.”

But how much worse could they get?

Gradually he began to organize his life so that Robin was protected from Gretchen. Whenever possible, he kept the child in his own company. When he had to work, Robin would wait at the Lemon Tree, or at the Raparound, or with Tanya or Linda or Anne. Once he took the girl to the theater with him. Robin kept remarkably quiet, but Tony Bartholomew had not been amused and Peter was given to understand that he could not baby-sit and light a show at the same time.

“You know,” Tanya told him, “it’s sort of a nice feeling, isn’t it? I mean it’s tragic and all, but if you look at it a certain way, it’s like Robin is being brought up by the town of New Hope. And it gives me a kind warm feeling, if you know what I mean.”

Later he reported that conversation to Anne. He had come to collect Robin after a show and was sitting over a cup of coffee, postponing as usual the return to the apartment and to Gretchen. Anne fixed her large dark eyes on him, then suddenly erupted in laughter.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I can see it now — a title in a true confessions magazine. ‘I Was Brought Up by the Town of New Hope.’ Talk about unfit parents. This whole town is an unfit mother.”

Yet it was working out. And each time he returned to the apartment, each time he returned to Gretchen, he recalled Warren’s words. Things could always get worse.

The thought did not sustain him. Rather, it terrified him. Because things would get worse. They had to get worse. It was inevitable. Things were working out for the time being because Gretchen was inactive, silent, acquiescent, a human vegetable. She never interfered with his caring for Robin, never left the apartment, never attempted to break the living pattern he had established.

“Someday you’ll come home and find me dead, Petey.”

He could not open the door to the apartment without that shadow passing over him. She would not literally starve herself to death; in her current passivity she accepted enough of the food he prepared for her to sustain her life. But she might kill herself. She talked about it occasionally, and the threat of finding her there, hanging or wrists slashed or dead through any of the devices that his imagination constantly provided, was on his mind whenever he stood before that door with Robin’s small hand clutched in his.

“I wish you would kill me, Petey.” That was a number she got off on one night, stringing it out endlessly until he managed to shut her up. “I want to die but I’ll never have the nerve to do it myself. But you could do it for me. You always do things for me, Petey. You could do this for me. I would help. We could make it look like suicide. We could figure out a plan. You’re good at plans, Petey. You could come up with a good plan.” And she went on telling him how much better it would be for everyone if she were dead. Better for her, because this was no way to live, no way to go on. And better for him and better for Robin and better for Linda, because he and Linda could get married and Robin could be their little girl and everyone could devote themselves to forgetting that Gretchen Vann ever lived.

Until one day, as he walked alone along the Towpath, he realized something.

He wanted her dead.

The thought caught him, sent a chill through him. He tried to get it out of his mind by force of will but it echoed in his brain and would not go away. In his mind he heard his own voice, cold and brittle: I want her to die.

Thirteen

Warren put his car in the driveway, walked to the front door of his house and fitted his key in the lock. As he opened the door, he heard Bert at the piano. He smiled and eased the door open slowly, silently. He padded softly across the plush powder-blue carpet and stopped at the archway leading to the living room.

“Night and Day.” “Always True to You in My Fashion.” “You’re the Top.”

He took deep silent breaths and let the music wrap itself around him. Usually he arrived home before Bert, but tonight he had gone with a crowd to the Barge Inn, had put himself outside of a half dozen cognacs, and Bert had finished his gig at the Carversville Inn and had come home still full of music. Bert had had classical training, and had spent many drunken evenings weeping over his wasted life, sure that he ought to be playing Mozart and Chopin on recital stages. But Warren knew that his special magic was with the material he performed routinely while people drank and talked over the notes he played. Cole Porter, Rodgers, and Hart, Harold Arlen — Bert’s fingers (not long and graceful, not at all, rather short and stubby but so sure of themselves, so certain at the keyboard) gave standards and show tunes a special grace.

Bert played for him, and often. But it was moments like these that Warren particularly treasured, when Bert was unaware of any audience. He liked to stand in shadow and listen. It was Cole Porter tonight, one song after another. “Anything Goes.” “Let’s Do It.” “Begin the Beguine”—

Finally, as a song ended, he cleared his throat and stepped into the room where Bert could see him. The dark head raised itself from the keys; the long saturnine face was creased with a smile. Warren applauded furiously and Bert lowered his head in a brief bow.

“Magnificent,” Warren said reverently.

“Devil. How long were you hulking there?”

“I don’t hulk. Since ‘Night and Day,’ I think.”

“Enjoy the concert?”

“More than I can say. If you would sing in public and if you were black, Bobby Short would have to find other way to make a living.”

“I doubt that he’s trembling at the prospect. How did, it go tonight?”

“It went. I was brilliant. The rest of the company was reassuringly adequate.”

“How comforting for you.”

“One lives for small triumphs.”

“Why don’t you make us drinks to honor the occasion?”

“When I arrive home first,” Warren said, “I see to it that drinks are waiting upon your return. Yet on those rare occasions when your return precedes my own—”

“I greet you with a concert.”

“A good point,” he conceded. “Better a concert than a Cognac. One understands.”

“I’d make the drinks now, but I’m playing the piano.”

“A noble cause. A noble savage. Odets, where is thy sting? You persist in the notion that the martini is a civilized drink at this hour.”

“There is no clock on my palate, love.”

“I shall do the honors, such as they are. Martinis and music. If they be the food of love, play on!”

In the kitchen, he poured Bombay gin into a pitcher, added ice and a drop of scotch. The scotch, he had established, was better than vermouth at masking the sharpness of the gin. He stirred the mixture gently with a long silver spoon.

He strained the martinis into a pair of large stemmed crystal goblets, added a slender shaving of lemon peel to each glass. The house was Warren’s, and all its furnishings, with the exception of Bert’s piano and a writing desk that had belonged to Bert’s mother, had been carefully selected and purchased by Warren. The house itself was unprepossessing enough on the outside, a small frame house on the northern edge of New Hope that differed little from its neighbors on either side. Inside it was a refuge, with every object within its walls carefully chosen to reflect Warren’s taste and provide his life with a framework of order and dignity. It was, indeed, a refuge he rarely sought; he preferred to spend his time in the company of others, over drinks or cups of coffee. But when he did come home it was important to come home to something perfect.

The house had been Warren’s before Bert entered his life, and the years Bert had spent there had had precious little impact upon it. A few objects had been shuttled about to accommodate his Regency desk and his Gulbrandson spinet (a grand piano would have dislocated things badly, and Warren thanked sundry gods that Bert was content with an upright), but otherwise things stayed as they were, with Bert appreciative of pleasant surroundings but generally indifferent to them. It was Warren’s special shelter from the storm, and it would continue to shelter him when he and Bert parted company and Bert moved elsewhere. Not that Warren specifically anticipated such a parting of the ways. It was entirely possible that they would live out their lives together under this roof. But it was also possible that they would not, and Warren had learned over the years always to be prepared for such contingencies. He did not believe that heterosexual marriages were inclined to be any more permanent than homosexual alliances. But marriages had that illusion of permanence. They were bulwarked by children, reinforced by judicial recognition, predicated on the assumption that no man or woman should tear their bond asunder. They were as apt to deteriorate as any other relationship, yet when they did so it was generally a considerable shock to the participants. They hadn’t expected this, they had quite believed the till-death-do-us-part number, and they were thus unprepared. Homosexuals expected that things would ultimately go to hell, and were more inclined to be surprised when they didn’t.

When he brought the martinis into the living and placed Bert’s upon the piano, Bert was singing:

He broke off with a quick embarrassed smile and reached for his drink, smiling again in appreciation at the first sip. Warren moved up behind him, placed his hands on Bert’s shoulders, kneaded the fine muscles.

“You should sing more,” he said.

“You always say that.”

“No doubt I always shall. You have a fine voice, but it’s more than that. You bring lyrics to life.”

Bert’s fingers worked on the keys. “You’re too kind.”

“I’ve told you all this before.”

“I know. It’s funny, though. I can’t sing to a roomful of people. It’s not just that it’s a mental block because I do it from time to time but it doesn’t work, I can’t really get into it. And as a result I don’t sing well.”

“Couple of acting classes might help. Some version of psychodrama. Teach you to get out of yourself.”

“That’s possible, I suppose. The odd thing is, though, that I can’t sing when I’m completely alone, either. I embarrass myself for some odd reason. I can only sing” — his hands punched out a descending chord progression — “when I’m singing for you. Odd, no?”

Warren bent, nuzzled Bert’s ear, planted a row of kisses along his throat.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Aren’t I, though,” Warren murmured, continuing. “It’s not odd, though. You love and trust me.”

“It’s odd that I love and trust anyone, don’t you think? Damn. It’s going to be hard to play this piano with an erection.”

“Doubt it’s ever been done before. Most pianists use their hands. A good idea, though. A little outré for television, but in the right club in the Village—”

“Devil. What do you know about a girl called Melanie?”

“She misses all the notes but I still like to listen to her, though I must admit I don’t know why. One gets on her side and cheers for her, I think. One hopes that, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, she’s going to make it all the way through to the end of the song.”

“Not the singer. Melanie Jaeger, I think her name is.”

“Sully’s wife.”

“Oh, is she? I never made the connection.”

“Why?”

Bert was playing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

“Tossed a pass my way tonight.”

“Melanie Jaeger? Where was this?”

“While I was working. Pretty obvious pitch.”

“Who was she with?”

“No one. Came alone, sat at the bar, and cruised the room like a piranha. She made her drinks last a long time. She wasn’t there for drinks or music. She was looking for someone to go home with. Found someone, too. No one I ever saw before, but she scored and took him right on out of there.”

“I’ll be damned. Melanie Jaeger. You’re sure she wasn’t meeting someone?”

“Not a chance. Nice little bit, too. Predatory cheekbones, and something special in her eyes.”

“One begins to visualize certain possibilities.”

“Just what I thought.”

Warren’s voice dropped an octave. “Why don’t you stop abusing that piano,” he murmured, “and abuse me a little instead.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

A month after Bertram Ryder LeGrand’s second birthday, his father put the family Buick into a curve at seventy miles an hour. The car left the road and stopped abruptly when it came to a tree. The steering column crushed Jack LeGrand’s chest and killed him instantly. The girl who had been on the seat beside him went through the windshield and bled to death from a slashed jugular vein. The first state trooper on the scene had never seen a car so utterly demolished. The only undamaged object was a pint bottle of corn whiskey which had somehow survived the impact. There was an inch left in it, and after a look at the car’s two occupants, the trooper felt the need to finish the bottle himself.

Bert had no true memories of his father, but it seemed to him that the ghost of Smilin’ Jack LeGrand was always present in the brooding Victorian house in downtown Charleston where he grew up. It was his grandmother’s house and he lived there with his mother and grandmother and was nourished on the stories his mother told of his father. Smilin’ Jack had been an athlete, a hard drinker, at once a man’s man and a ladies’ man. Sarah Ryder seemed as proud of his faults as of his virtues. He had been the first man in her life and was to be the last. She had loved him quite completely, and yet it seemed to Bert in later years that his abrupt death must have been a relief to her. She was a shy, timid girl, and it could not have been easy for her to be the wife of such a man. It was infinitely easier to be his widow.

She raised him in his father’s shadow and at the same time did everything she could to ensure against his growing into a copy of Smilin’ Jack. She protected him, smothered him, kept him at the piano while other boys were on the ballfield, and while she did this she told glowing stories of his father’s accomplishments. “You’re a Ryder,” she told him often. “Your father was a LeGrand, he had all the strengths and weaknesses of his blood, but you’ve always favored my side of the family. You’re a Ryder to the core.”

It was a hollow core for the first seventeen years of his life. When he looked back on those years he found he could remember very little besides music and books. At first he practiced the piano primarily to please his mother, but as time passed he could shut out the rest of the world effortlessly by sitting on that flat bench and letting his fingers work upon the keys. His training was all classical, and he practiced his classical pieces diligently, but when he had finished he worked at pop tunes, picking out melodies and figuring out harmonics by ear.

All through those years he existed in a social vacuum, friendless and unnoticed by his classmates. “I would have been gay then,” he said years later, “if anyone had taken the trouble. I was such an ugly skinny kid it never occurred to anyone to make a play for me. God, all the ingredients were there. The introverted kid with the protective mother and the dead idealized father — it was all there, but I wasn’t bright enough to figure it out for myself and nobody was interested in educating me.”

Throughout high school he dreamed of girls and never dared date one. He told himself that his entire life would change when he went away to college. He would emerge from the cocoon; he would be bright and witty and charming and debonair; he would have all the women he wanted and would want every woman he saw. He told himself all of this, and he could not make himself believe a word of it, and he graduated from high school and went to William and Mary on scholarship and was astonished to find that the dreams came true.

It never ceased to astonish him in retrospect. The caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor was inescapable, except that it was not so much changes in himself as changes in his environment; the poise and assurance that he instantly acquired were taken on in response to his altered environment. What had been faults in a Charleston high school classroom were suddenly strengths. He had grown into his long, thin face, and what he’d thought of as ugliness was now seen as interesting and commanding, a face with character and presence. His intellect, which he’d willingly submerged before, was now respected and admired. Boys liked him. Girls were drawn to him. Even his piano playing, merely a curiosity in Charleston, was of social value now.

He was accepted, and discovered he thrived on acceptance. He pledged a good fraternity and found among his fraternity brothers the first friends he had had in his entire life. His classes were provocative as high school classes had never been. He wore the unofficial campus uniform, white bucks and chinos and button-down oxford cloth shirts, but he wore his hair long and carefully combed, a distinguishing characteristic in a swarm of shaggy crew cuts. Even as a freshman he was noticed, and noticed favorably.

But it was with girls that his success most astonished him. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get them and how good he seemed to be at the whole business. He appeared to have a natural aptitude for the game. The easy banter came automatically to his tongue, and he intuitively struck the attitudes which would have the proper effect. The first girl he kissed had no idea of his inexperience. The first girl he had intercourse with would have been astonished to know she was claiming his virginity.

“I gather it’s different now,” he once told “The college kids have a much more mature attitude toward sex than we did. More mature, and at the sand time more idealistic. There’s this emphasis placed on honesty. Open and honest relationships openly and honestly arrived at. The only honesty I remember in sex at college was that you were supposed to tell the truth when you talked to your buddies about it afterward, Maybe the girls had the same code among themselves. I don’t know. But there was certainly no honesty between male and female. The guy was out to get as much as possible from her with the minimum emotional commitment, and the girl was looking for a fraternity pin or an engagement ring or a Mrs. degree. Even if all she wanted was a friendly fuck, she had to pretend differently. She might be laying a different guy every night of the week, but each time she would pretend she just got carried away and never expected to wind up with her knees pointing at the ceiling.”

He dated extensively, and most of the girls he dated obligingly ended the evening with their knees aimed skyward. The first time was in the fraternity house after a dance. He had taken his own girl home, petted furiously with her, and returned to the house. Another brother had passed out and his date was waiting around in the hope that he might get sober enough to take her back to her dormitory. Bert took her upstairs to a vacant bedroom and began necking with her, waiting for her to tell him to stop. There was a point when he realized that she was not going to stop him, and a great surge of triumph went through him — he was going to reach that impossible goal. It was going to happen; it was happening now.

None of the fears associated with the magic moment ever materialized. He was fully potent and able to sustain the act effortlessly. He brought her easily to orgasm, then erupted himself, emptying his passion into the warmth of her.

Afterward there was a heady glow that lasted for several hours. For some moments, alone in his own room, the girl mercifully gone, he managed to convince himself that he loved her. The notion passed rather quickly and he laughed at the thought of it. She was just a tramp, he decided. Her own date had passed out on her so she screwed the first person who asked her.

There were other girls, a great many of them. It was easy once you knew the moves. And, as the novelty of it wore off, so did much of the excitement. He never felt himself drawn to any of the girls he had sex with. They were vehicles for his own pleasure, and once he had used them he had little desire to see them again. He was not compulsive about this; there were girls he saw more than once, but he would withdraw from them completely and shut them out of his life once he sensed they wanted an emotional commitment from him. There was a danger in their moist warmth; it could capture a man by his private parts and suck him in like quicksand.

“It doesn’t mean all that much to me,” he said one night to a friend. “All through high school I walked around with a hard-on dreaming about what it would be like to get laid. And now it’s sort of a letdown, you know, discovering that that’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, come off it. Mr. Nonchalance.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Well, you can afford to say it, for Christ’s sake. I mean, the amount of action you get.”

“All it is is action.”

“Bullshit. Then how come you’re chasing it as much as you do? When’s the last weekend you weren’t out there going after a piece?”

“I’m not saying I don’t like it.”

“White of you, LeGrand. Let’s hire a skywriter — ‘LeGrand doesn’t dislike pussy.’ Christ on a crutch.”

“I mean, it beats doing without. Or jerking off.”

Except that it didn’t, not really. There were times when he would masturbate in his room, touching himself while he listened to music, timing his strokes to the music, purposely delaying the orgasm as long as possible. Often he would refrain from orgasm, stimulating himself to the very edge of it time after time, then letting his passion ebb unfulfilled. His fantasies at such times were abstract and diffuse. Sometimes there were no fantasies whatsoever, only the physical fact of his manual manipulations.

And it was often better than what he achieved with girls. He did not require it as compulsively as he seemed to require girls. He was not driven to it. But there was something he could give himself which girls could not give him. He did not understand what it was or he could not deny its existence.

There was an uncertain point where his perception of the sex act shifted. At the beginning he saw it as an act in which the female was exploited, used for his pleasure by the male. He felt no guilt over this exploitation, rather, it seemed to him that the male role had to be asserted in such a fashion, that women were designed by a bearded God to be tricked and used. The idea was not uniquely his but was rolled out time and time again at bull sessions. The more intellectual brothers quoted Nietzsche.

But as time passed, his vision of who was the exploiter did an about-face. He began to regard the girls with whom he slept as bottomless pits in which he had to plunge himself forever. They took from him, they drained him, and all he got out of it was a momentary feeling of relief backed by the illusion of conquest.

It was hard to look back on the way he had been in those college days, those Don Juan days, hard to believe that he never felt an impulse toward homosexuality. Warren found the whole thing inconceivable.

“Of course you repressed it,” he said, “but you must have felt it. All those late-night gabfests, all that beery intimacy. Sweaty young bodies in the locker room—”

“I never saw a locker room, Warren. You don’t get sweaty bodies over a bridge table. The only sweaty bodies I came across were female.”

“But you must have had a yen for someone now and then. Pushed it out of your mind, of course. Natural enough under the circumstances. But I can’t believe you were that utterly unaware of the whole idea of it.”

Yet he had been just that unaware. There were a few men on campus who were generally presumed to be homosexual. A botany professor, an assistant in the psychology department, a couple of effeminate students. If Bert had spared a moment for a thought of any sort about any of these men, he could not recall it.

Then, the summer before his senior year, he found out who he was.

He was spending the summer at Virginia Beach as a bellhop in a resort hotel. The hours were long but the work was easy and pleasant enough and the tips were fairly good. There were girls — waitresses at his hotel and college girls on summer vacation. There were also older women, wives whose husbands left them there all summer and commuted from Richmond or Charlotte for the weekends. The older women were better in bed than the girls and less demanding out of it, but there was one very bad moment in the aftermath of sex when his partner’s face had become, for the briefest instant, the face of his mother.

One hot night in mid-July he wanted to be by himself. He had found himself in this sort of mood lately, wanting only to go somewhere dark and quiet and listen to the jukebox and drink. He never drank too much but managed to drink enough so that sleep would come quickly when he returned to the hotel.

In the third bar he hit there was a piano player, and when Bert sat at the bar and listened to the music the rest of the world went away. The pianist had light-brown hair receding in front and a quick, elusive smile, as though aware of a bitter private joke. His hands were large and strong, their backs hairless. He played good cocktail piano and sang along in an easy bouncy style that reminded Bert of Bobby Troup. He was taking requests, and after awhile Bert called out a couple of numbers. Each of his requests was greeted with a quick smile and a raised eyebrow.

During his break the pianist came and sat on the stool beside him. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “It’s a rare pleasure to have someone who’s really listening.”

“Well, it’s a rarer pleasure to hear someone who knows how to play. And what to play.”

“Do you play yourself?”

“I haven’t been near a piano all summer. I’m toting hags at the Ocean View.”

“Don’t they have a piano?”

“Not for the help. They made that clear.”

“Yeah, those pricks would. Look, I’ve got an upright at my place. It’s a little tinny but at least it’s in tune. I play one more set and that’s all she wrote.” A flash of the private smile. “You could drop over. We’ll do in a fifth of something and you can find out if your fingers still work. How about it?”

“I’m not really all that good.”

“If you’re terrible I’ll put cotton in my ears. What say?”

They drank martinis and played for each other; talked about music and women. The pianist — his name was Buddy — said he didn’t go with women much more. He’d been divorced, he said, and was still over it Bert said he wasn’t sure how he felt about women himself. He seemed to need them, but more and more they left him feeling empty.

“I know what you mean, man. They don’t do you any good, but try doing without ’em. Dig?”

“Dig.”

“And they always want something from you.”

“That’s the truth.”

“But just try going without. Hey, will you look at me? And that’s just from talking about it.”

He looked where Buddy was pointing, saw the bulge in the man’s pants. He wanted to avert his eyes but somehow couldn’t.

“How about you, Bert? The topic of conversation having the same effect on you?”

A large hairless hand dropped casually upon Bert’s groin. The fingers moved, handling him, and something within his head vibrated like a tuning fork. His mouth was dry. A pulse worked in his throat. And he felt him self growing, stiffening, in response to the ministrations of that hand.

“Yeah, I can see you’re in the same kind of mood I am,” Buddy was saying, his voice different now. “You must be feeling kinda cramped in those pants. I know I am.”

Buddy got to his feet, began to undress. Bert began to remove his own clothes. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality to it. He felt utterly bereft of will; he could only play out his part, could not affect the outcome in any way. He disrobed, and Buddy reached for him, positioned him on the couch, knelt beside him and went down on him.

Girls had done this. Not often, and never this well, but they had done this to him from time to time. It had been nothing like this. Nothing had been like this, nothing in his lifetime. He thought God, God, and then thought stopped and he gave himself over entirely to sensation.

After, still in a dream, still without thought, he knelt before Buddy and took the man’s penis into his mouth.

As he did so a feeling of contentment filled him. He could not identify the feeling, and he realized afterward that it was because he had never been contented before.

Fresh drinks afterward, and cigarettes, and for a long time he sat wordless at the piano, playing songs he had played often before. For a long time he played and Buddy listened and neither of them spoke.

After awhile he said, “I guess you figured on this all along, huh? Back at the bar?”

“I thought we both figured on it, Bert.”

“No. I never... hell. I hate to sound like an idiot. It’s just that I’m finding out something about myself, and it’s taking time getting used to it. You thought I was queer right off, huh?”

“Gay’s a better word for it. Yeah, I thought so. Maybe I just wanted you to be or maybe I sensed something that was there. I wouldn’t have pitched you if I didn’t think it was what you were looking for. You’re crazy to waste the summer hopping suitcases. Can you use a fakebook?”

“I don’t need one. If I know a melody I can play anything.”

“Do you realize you’re ahead of sixty percent of the guys working this kind of gig? I’m serious. It doesn’t seem like an accomplishment to you because it comes naturally, it’s something you can do. There’s a club a few blocks from the joint I’m at, the guy’s looking to replace a guy who quit on him a few days ago. You don’t think you’re good enough but you’re better than the guy you’d be following. You won’t get rich but it’s a better way to spend the summer than what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know. I get my room and board and all.”

“Well, you could stay here, Bert.”

“Oh, I see.”

“No, you don’t see. You see strings attached and there aren’t any. All I’ll be doing is taking you to the club and telling the prick who owns it to listen to you, and I don’t want anything in return for that. You can buy me a drink because that’s as much of a favor as it amounts to. I’m saying you could live here because I think maybe you want to.”

“Maybe I do.”

‘Play ‘Laura,’ why don’t you? I never play it, it’s a private thing, but I like to listen to it. ‘Play it Sam.’ Yeah, that’s nice. I like that.”

The next afternoon he took a job at Bobo’s Club. He went back to the hotel and told them to shove their job, and moved his clothes to Buddy’s apartment. In September he went back to college for his final year. No one noticed any difference in him. He was very careful to behave as he had always behaved. Sometimes, but not often, he would experience urgent sexual yearnings for certain men on campus. Now and then he sensed that these feelings were reciprocated, but in any event he avoided acting on them. Instead, he dated girls as he had always dated girls, and he took these girls to bed and performed as he had always performed. There was no difficulty in performing with them. There never had been any difficulty and there was none now. As before, there was a certain amount of pleasure in the act; as before, it brought no contentment, no real satisfaction.

Periodically he would go to Richmond for a night or a weekend. He knew what he was looking for, and, thanks to the experience of the summer, he knew how and where to find it.

Warren said, “You’re sure it was Melanie Jaeger.”

“That’s the name she gave. I suppose there could be more than one Melanie Jaeger in Buck’s County—”

“It’s surprising enough that there’s one. The likelihood of two strikes me as infinitesimal. Melanie Jaeger. And she was definitely on the prowl.”

“Absolutely. She had that look in her eye that said she was out to find a man and didn’t much care who he was. And something else, too.”

“What?”

“This is just intuition.”

“Your intuition’s usually good.”

“You say the nicest things. I had the feeling she was ready to let go. That the wilder a scene was, the more she would dig it.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

Warren lit a cigarette. “We haven’t made a scene like that in a good long while, have we?”

“No.”

“I think it might be nice.”

“So do I.”

“There’s a special poetry to it, you know. Sully’s cuckolded half the married men in the county. He’s spent twenty years establishing a reputation of screwing anything with a hole in it. Trading his wives in every five years, fucking his waitresses. Hmmm. It would be very satisfying to pin a huge pair of horns on that ursine head.”

“Ursine?”

“Bearish. As in Ursa Major, the Big Bear. That’s Sully. Big old horny bear! Time to pin a perfect pair of horns on the horny old bear.” He laughed, stretched out on the king-size bed, yawned luxuriously. “I’ll have to find out more about her. I haven’t heard anything, and it’s the sort of thing one would expect to hear. But the possibilities are delicious.”

“They seem to be having an effect on you.”

“How cunning of you to notice. Do you think there’s anything you could do about it?”

“I’ll think of something,” Bert said.

Fourteen

Gretchen Vann lay awake in the night, conscious of the warmth of Peter’s still body beside her. She put a hand on his shoulder and he did not stir. She ran the hand across his smooth chest, down over his stomach to his loins. Her fingers encircled him and still he slept.

He was sleeping more lately, and sleeping very soundly. He was stealing her sleep, she thought. Taking the sleep that ought to be hers and adding it onto his own, so that each night she slept less and each night he slept more. He was a sleep thief, filching her rest piece by precious piece.

Across the room in her own small bed Robin turned over in her sleep and made a slight sighing sound. Robin, too, Gretchen thought. Another thief of sleep. The child slept like a child, Peter slept like a child, they all slept like children while she lay awake like — like what? Like an adult? No, not that. Like what, then?

There were no pills. Pills would make her sleep. However far she might be from the brink of sleep, Seconal would rush her to the edge and throw her over, blanketing her in fuzzy darkness for eight or ten hours. Of course it was never true sleep. It was merely a bandage on the wound of insomnia, a couple of stitches in time bridging the gap between tonight and tomorrow.

She had not really wanted pills lately. She found this strange and could only conclude that it meant she really did not want to sleep. Nor was she particularly restless. She did not toss or turn, had no urge to desert the bed and pace the floor or roam the darkened streets. It was easier to lie quite still at Peter’s side while the hours passed, while tonight inch by inch became tomorrow.

Except, of course, that there was no tomorrow. She thought of the song — “There’s No Tomorrow” — heard it in her brain in a rich lush baritone, and thought of the particular truth of its title. Tomorrows never existed. By the time you reached them they had become present time, and the whole concept of tomorrowness was merely a carrot held before the myopic donkey of the present.

The past, on the other hand, not only existed but with each passing day the past became a day larger and longer, another twenty-four hours more oppressive. It did not seem fair: There was no future, and the present kept turning into the past.

Not fair at all.

Her legs brushed Peter’s as she got out of bed. He slept on. She got her cigarettes, went into the bathroom. She left the door open, lit a cigarette, sat on the toilet, and let her water flow noisily into the center of the bowl. When she was done with her cigarette she put it between her legs and let it fall into the toilet. Its end singed the tips of several of her pubic hairs en route, and her nostrils wrinkled to catch the singular smell of scorched hair. Years ago she had read a description of tortures inflicted by French paratroops upon female Algerian insurgents, and still recalled how the paras had butted their cigarettes upon the private parts of the women. On occasion she had tried to make herself burn her pubic mound but had never been able to do it.

Now she remembered a man many years ago who had liked to burn her with his cigarettes. But she could not make herself remember whether she had enjoyed the experience or not. It seemed the sort of thing one ought to remember but her memory had been markedly uncooperative lately, and certainly not to be trusted.

She flushed the toilet and listened to the roar of the water. Peter and Robin slept on without noticing it. Often at times like this she itched to disturb their sleep but could not bring herself to awaken them directly. Instead she left the door open and peed and flushed noisily and clomped heavily around the room, but none of the things she did were loud enough to intrude upon their sleep.

She got back in bed, again brushing her legs over Peter’s, and lay on her back with her hands folded neatly on her flat stomach. Her eyes were wide. After a few moments she let her hands roam over her own body. She touched herself, not to excite but to explore. But her hands were barely aware of the skin they touched, her flesh barely aware of the hands that touched it. There was a partial numbness that had characterized every aspect of her life lately, as though all sensation were experienced through a veil. She could not really see or hear or smell or taste. She was not dead, but neither was she truly alive.

And around her they slept, and stole her sleep.

She seemed to remember a book, a spy novel, about a man who could not sleep. A part of his brain, the sleep center, had been destroyed, and he had not slept in almost twenty years. At the time she had read this as fantasy, but now she recalled it and wondered if it might not be possible. Of course, she was not entirely sleepless. At some indeterminate point after dawn broke she would slip under, and for a couple of hours she would be asleep. It was never good sleep, though. It was just a slightly deeper dream level than she experienced while awake.

So hard of late to know what she had dreamed and what had actually happened. To tell past events of the real world from past events of the almost as real world of dreams. Some days ago Peter had mentioned Warren Ormont in conversation, and she had gaped at him and said, “But Warren’s dead, isn’t he? He was stabbed to death; he picked up a sailor in a bar and was stabbed to death. Wasn’t he?”

Peter had had little trouble convincing her that Warren was alive. Because she had learned not to trust memory, had learned to doubt her own ability to be sure. Warren was alive, though she had dreamed him dead. Her dreams did not have the power to kill.

Perhaps she had not even had that conversation with Peter. Perhaps that too had been a dream—

She got out of bed again and crossed the room to Robin’s side. She knelt beside her daughter’s bed and listened to her steady breathing. Devil’s daughter, she thought. Spawn of the Devil, thief of sleep. How many times had she dreamed Robin dead? How often had she killed her in her dreams? In some dreams Robin ceased to exist entirely; Gretchen edited the past and killed her by an abortion. In other dreams Fate did the deed — Robin would die in a car wreck, or drown in the canal, or be carried off by a mysterious fever. And in still other dreams Gretchen bloodied her own hands, wringing that little neck, slashing the throat, going berserk and beating the little one to death.

“Oh, baby,” she said softly. “Oh baby, you know what scares me? Someday I’ll think I’m dreaming and won’t be, because I can’t tell the difference anymore. Christ, baby, don’t let me do it—”

Robin grunted softly, shifted position. Gretchen leaned over and kissed her lightly on her lips. pointed her index finger and brought it to her own lips, kissing the tip. “This is a knife,” she whispered. She traced a line across Robin’s throat with her fingertip and dreamed a fountain of scarlet blood. She snapped her eyes shut and the scarlet fountain gushed more vividly; then opened her eyes wide to calm herself with the sight of the sleeping and undamaged child.

“Oh, God,” she said.

She returned to Peter’s side and lay on her back for a few more minutes, trying to will the disturbing image out of her mind. It was difficult to do this. Sometimes they tried to take control and it was very difficult to keep them from overpowering her. She was so afraid of what she might someday do. There would come a night when; instead of believing her finger to be a knife, she would hold a knife and believe it to be her finger. And it was so hard, so unbearably hard, to know what was real and what was not.

Time to be the succubus.

She breathed deeply in and out, in and out. It was indeed time to be the succubus. She always put off this moment as long as she dared because it was the one thing that calmed and reassured her, and thus she would wait until the most desperate part of the night so that afterward she would not have long to wait before sleep saved her. But it was time now, and his sleep was deep and easy, and it was time.

Succubus. Suck. Suck you. Bus, a Greyhound, she herself lean and sleek and spare as a greyhound, the succubus.

First she touched him, her hand fastening immediately upon his penis. For a time she merely held him in her hand, held the soft harmless sleeping cock in her hand Then slowly and carefully she shifted position at his side and breathed her warm breath over him.

The succubus. The devil’s spawn, the succubus, sucking men’s souls from their bodies while they slept. Steal my sleep, Petey, and in return I steal your soul. The succubus, stealing your soul, sucking it out through your sleeping cock.

Her mouth claimed what her hand released. She took all of him into her mouth, at first just holding him for long moments in the moist warmth. There was a time when he seemed on the point of stirring but it passed and his sleep continued as before. Gradually, with her considerable skill, she began to use her mouth to excite him.

This was what she liked best. These special moments, when his body responded while his mind remained utterly unaware of what was taking place. She felt him growing in her mouth and her heart thrilled. Bit by bit he grew until his cock was rigid and pulsing in her mouth. She kept her hands from his body and inclined her head so that only her mouth touched him. She bobbed up and down, sliding him in and out of her mouth, teasing purposefully with her tongue, establishing a single incessant rhythm and matching that rhythm perfectly to the rhythm of his breathing.

Visions burned behind her closed eyelids. Visions of her teeth closing and snapping neatly and effortlessly through his column of flesh, the donkey at last catching the carrot of future time, biting him off and swallowing him and retaining him forever. Visions of her mouth clamped to his emasculated form, greedily and endlessly sucking, sucking blood and liquefied bone through the hole where his cock had been, sucking him inside out until every atom of his being had vanished down her throat to fill her bottomless vacuum.

I am the succubus, thief of souls—

She brought him skillfully to climax, gulped down his soul as it spurted into her mouth. His orgasms were never shattering when she took him in this fashion. They were pure and perfect but unlike his waking climaxes, they involved no part of his mind and little of his body, just its specifically sexual apparatus. He had never awakened at such moments and he did not do so now. He moaned in his sleep as he came and the sound vibrated magically in her ears. But the moan was quickly over and he returned to a sleep as deep as he had been in previously.

She uncurled and lay once more on her back, eyes closed now, mind more nearly at peace. She gave herself up to the taste of his seed, of his soul, the taste of him in her mouth and in her throat. At certain times — this was one of them — she even fancied she could taste him in her belly. His cells, his soul, deep within her.

She did this every night. Took him in sleep and j the soul from him. He had never caught her at it and she had never told him of it afterward. It was, she felt, a perfect unspoken bargain. Every night he stole her sleep and every night she retaliated with the theft of his manhood, his essence. His essential soul.

Now she began to feel herself relaxing, felt her body and brain finding the way to let go. It would not be a complete letting go, of course. That much she knew. Bui it would be a descent into a realm where dreams soon thoroughly overcame reality than in her waking hours. She lay still, eyes closed, hands folded on her stomach, and let herself float on the tide.

Fifteen

When the phone rang, Olive answered it. She said, “Just a moment,” and motioned to Linda.

It was Hugh. She listened to him for a few moments. Then she said, “No, don’t be silly. It’s perfectly all right. I understand. No, it’s more important. I think you should stick with it... Are you sure? Well, all right, but feel free to change your mind.”

She cradled the phone. “There goes dinner,” she said.

“The book takes precedence?”

She nodded. “But he’s definitely going to break by nine o’clock and he’ll pick me up then. In the meantime it’s going well, and he wants to stay with it.”

“What if it’s still going well at nine o’clock?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell him. To stay with it as long as he wants, but he insisted he’ll be done by nine one way or the other. And he will, because he told me to wait outside my building for him and he wouldn’t stand me up. Not after postponing it once already.”

“Unless he just gets so absorbed—”

“No, he’ll be there.”

Olive regarded her quizzically. “You don’t seem furious.”

“Why should I be furious?”

“I don’t guess you should, but not all women have your sort of cool and logical mind. You don’t mind playing second fiddle to a book?”

“No. At least I don’t think I do.”

“Hmmmm.”

“What does that mean, Mrs. McIntyre, ma’am?”

“Just ‘hmmmm.’”

“I heard the word well enough. I was curious about the punctuation. Is that ‘hmmmm’ with a question mark or ‘hmmmm’ with an exclamation point?”

“With a period. No. With three dots.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I have the feeling you’re waiting for me to pry, Linda, but I’m not entirely certain.”

“Neither am I.”

“Where was he planning to take you to dinner?”

“An Italian place in Lambertville. Not fancy but good home cooking, I think that’s how he described it. He said the name I don’t remember it.”

“That sounds like Gus and Josie’s.”

“I think that might be it.”

“Well, come on, then. You might as well have an Italian dinner bought for you. Clem said not to expect him for dinner, and I was just going to have a sandwich down the block and come back here for a couple of hours. I don’t imagine I’ll miss much business closing early.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Of course I don’t, but I want to. I hope you don’t mind walking. I feel like stretching my legs.”

The restaurant was an unprepossessing place on a side street, tucked between a delicatessen and a laundry and across the street from a funeral parlor. All but four of the twenty tables were empty. There were long fluorescent lights overhead, patterned linoleum underfoot, glass vases of plastic flowers on the tables. The service, provided by one of Gus Pucarelli’s daughters, was eager if unprofessional. The food — they both had linguine with white clam sauce — was excellent.

They shared a bottle of Soave, with Linda drinking the greater portion of it. The conversation flowed easily and comfortably but remained quite impersonal throughout the meal. When the coffee came Linda lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair.

“Prying time,” she said.

“You seem a little unsure with our Mr. Hemingway.”

“Unsure? I guess I am.”

“Unsure of him or unsure of yourself?”

Linda frowned. “That,” she said, “is a very good question. An excellent question.”

“And?”

“You know, right now is an impossible time to come to any conclusions about anything. He’s completely involved with this book. He says it’s the best thing he’s ever written, the first important thing he’s attempted since One If by Land. That was his first book—”

“I know.”

“And so he’s completely wrapped up in it. I’m not objecting to this. I honestly don’t think I resent it. In fact I’m sad. For him, and also I think it’s a way to get to know him — I would think a creative person would live more vividly while he’s creating. More intensely.”

“That would stand to reason.”

“The only thing is that sometimes we’re together and he’s not really there. I can tell that he’s not really listening. He’s hearing some conversation his characters are going to be having in the next chapter.”

“What’s the book about?”

“He doesn’t like to talk about it. So I don’t ask. I asked him the title and he said Two If by Sea, but he was joking. Of course. I don’t think it’s about the war. I don’t know what it’s about.”

“Maybe it’s about you.”

“What a thought. No, I don’t think so. I think it’s about him.”

“Isn’t every book about its author?”

“I mean that it’s a more personal book than he usually writes. He’s as much as said so. That he’s getting into, things more deeply than he ever has before. I think he means he’s giving more of himself.” She put out her cigarette. “I’ll get to read it as soon as he’s through with the first draft. I’m not sure when that will be. I’m very anxious to read it, and at the same time it scares me.”

“How?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’m afraid I won’t like it, for one thing, and then what do I say?”

“That you like it.”

“Isn’t it better to be honest?”

“No. It’s been my observation that honesty is rarely to be treasured in human relationships. Writers and artists don’t want honesty, anyway. They want praise. There are a few masochists who truly want constructive criticism, whatever that means, but they’re few and far between.”

“Suppose your husband—”

“Paints something dreadful? What do I say to him? Why, I tell him I think it’s very sensitive and forceful and effective, of course. In the first place I don’t trust my own artistic judgment enough to say otherwise, and in the second place dispassionate criticism is supposed to come from dispassionate people. Strangers. The people who love you are supposed to give you support.”

Linda considered this. “I think I’ll probably like the book, anyway, I’ve liked all his earlier work, and he’s too much a professional to like a book as much likes this one and be dead wrong about it.”

“It doesn’t always work that way, but I suspect right in this case. That’s not really what you’re worried about anyway, is it?”

“No, I guess it isn’t. I guess what it comes down to is that I want him to be finished with the book and I don’t want him to be finished with the book.”

“Why?”

“When he finishes it he’s going to ask me to marry him.” She lowered her eyes, not wanting to see Olive’s reaction. “He hasn’t said anything. Not exactly. And I may be capable of misreading things, God knows I’ve been capable of misreading all kinds of things in the past, but I think I’m right this time. There are things he’s said. Feelings I can’t help picking up. I don’t know how much of it is me and how much of it is the right place and the right time. He’s been divorced a long time and he’s ready to get married again. He’ll talk about the loneliness of that big house of his. Nothing concrete, but just a lot of remarks he wouldn’t make to me unless he had marriage in mind. He’s too conscious of the effect of words to say these things otherwise.” She thought for a moment. “I think she’s got a lot to do with it.”

“Anita?”

“Who?”

“His ex-wife.”

“Oh. I don’t think he ever referred to her by name, Anita? No, I was thinking of Karen. His daughter.”

“How does she—”

“I think he’s starting to see himself as a father, as a part of a family. I can’t explain this very well. I’m just barely aware of the pieces, I don’t know how they fit together. Or if they really do.”

“You’ve met her?”

“Several times. And I feel I know her better than I do because he talks about her a great deal. They have this very open relationship. She can stay out all night or bring boys home with her, and everything is open and aboveboard. He takes a great deal of pride in this.”

“You sound unconvinced.”

“Maybe because it’s so impossible to imagine having that kind of relationship with my own parents. Maybe I’m envious, as far as that goes.”

“Do you like her?”

“Surprisingly enough I do.”

“Why is that surprising?”

“You know, I don’t know why I said that. I suppose because it’s traditional for a daughter to resent her father’s female friends. ‘Female friends’ — what a stilted phrase. But it’s natural for there to be resentment. And vice versa. I don’t think she resents me, and I like her well enough. One thing — she makes me feel old. Not because I’m going out with her father. I don’t think that’s what it is. And not because she relates to me like a mother substitute, because she doesn’t. I think it’s just that she’s so much younger. So much less mature.”

“And he wants to marry you.”

“Yes, I’m sure he does. And I’m pretty sure he knows he does.”

“So the question is—”

“Do I want to marry him? Yes, that’s the question. And I’m not sure of the answer. Do I love him? That’s another question and I’m not sure of the answer to that one either. I enjoy being with him. I care about him. I feel... important when I’m with him. And comfortable. I don’t know if that adds up to love. I’m not sure I have the capacity for a more total sort of love. I know I’m sick of floating, of everything being temporary. It would be very secure to marry Hugh.”

“It would certainly be financially secure.”

“Yes, and I’m not sure how important that is.”

“Very important.”

“But also secure in other ways. I love his house. I love the grounds, the woods. The whole way of living. I can see myself being a part of that. Very easily, I can see myself being a part of that.”

“I gather you’re sleeping with him.”

“Not literally. I’ve been to bed with him. I haven’t slept over.”

“Because of the daughter?”

“Oh, no. She knows we go to bed. That’s part of their beautiful open relationship. They don’t have to keep secrets from each other. It works both ways. No, I go home at night so that he can go straight to the typewriter in the morning. To tell you the truth, I think I prefer it that way. The cozy family group around the breakfast table the next day, I don’t know that I’m ready for that togetherness.”

“No, I don’t think I should be, either. Suppose you married him. Would the breakfast table scene bother you then?”

“I don’t think so. I think I could handle them now, as far as that goes, but until he’s done with the book it’s a moot point.”

“So the question is whether or not you want to marry him. Not that you have to have the answer yet, not until you’re asked, but it’s still something you’d want to settle ahead of time in your own mind. As much as you can. Is the bed part good? Because it won’t be a good marriage if it isn’t, and it’s not something that gets better with time. Either it’s there from the beginning or it never comes around.”

“It’s good. He’s very good for me that way. Am I blushing?”

“Not that I can see.”

“I feel as though I am. No, that part is good.” Her mind filled suddenly with an image, a memory, Hugh touching her in a certain way and her own electric response, and now she knew she was blushing. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

“Well, what are the other traditional tests? Would you use his toothbrush? That’s supposed to be an acid test, although I can’t see it myself. It strikes me as old-fashioned. Would you want to have his children?”

“If I wanted to have any children, which is something I’m not sure of either way. But if I did, yes, I’d want to have his.”

“Would you want your children to look like him?”

“Oh, definitely. He’s a very handsome, man. I like his looks. I’d certainly rather have my children look like him than like me.”

“Oh, Linda, that’s ridiculous. You’re a very attractive woman.”

“I’m not unattractive, I know that. And I don’t detest my own looks, but I’ve always felt I wouldn’t want to have children who look like me. Make of that what you will, good Dr. McIntyre.”

“Hmmm. Well, I make it that we ought to get the check and take a walk over the bridge, don’t you think? He’s picking you up at nine, and you’ll want time to get ready.”

The sky was starting to darken as they left the restaurant. The air was still warm but the heat of the day had passed and there was a breeze coming off the river. They walked almost to the bridge in silence.

Then Olive said, “Let me tell you a story. I don’t suppose you ever heard mention of Jimmy Doerfer. No reason why you should have. He lived with his mother a few miles the other side of Doylestown. Country people, Bucks residents for generations on both sides. Henrietta Doerfer was widowed when the boy was about six years old. An only child.

“The father, also named Jimmy, was known as a womanizer, which will give you an idea how long ago this happened. I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve heard that word spoken seriously. Well, everyone felt properly sorry for Henrietta, having to put up with this, but there’s no record that she ever voiced any objection. The point is that James Senior’s death was on the colorful side. A farmer up around Allentown caught James Senior in bed with his wife and used a shotgun on the pair of them before putting the barrel in his mouth and blowing his own head off in the bargain. All this to the immense delight of everybody within fifty miles, as it gave them something to talk about besides aren’t we going to get any rain this summer. I could tell you the farmer’s name except that it’s slipped my mind. Couldn’t be less important, actually.

“Now Jimmy Junior grew up into a carbon copy of his father. The same sort of hell raising, after everything in skirts, married or single made no difference to him, except that he went on living at home with his mother. And how she would carry on about him. All about how she wished he’d get married and settle down and leave off chasing other men’s wives before he wound up the same way his father did. And from what she said it was obvious she knew just what the boy did and where and with whom, and after you’d heard it all a few times, you got the feeling she was proud of the little rascal.

“She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five when the farmer’s shotgun made a widow out of her, but she never remarried. Her farm was a profitable one and she was a good enough looking woman, but if any man got interested, she didn’t encourage him. She lived to over sixty and Jimmy lived with her until she died, and in all that time he went on raising hell and never gave a thought to marrying and settling down.

“Then she died, and Jimmy himself was between thirty-five and forty when they buried his mother. Two months later he married a Doylestown girl, and if he ever once stepped out on her for the rest of his life no one ever heard a word of it. Worked hard, fathered four children, and spent his nights at home. He only lived another fifteen years but as long as he lived I think he would have been true to that woman. His heart finally killed him. There were rumors it was the late stages of syphilis that were responsible, that he’d had from his younger days, but you have rumors all the time in cases like that.”

They walked for a few minutes in silence. Then Linda said, “Are you going to tell me the point of the story or do I have to work it out for myself?”

“I’d tell you if I knew what it was. Stories don’t always have a point, do they?”

“I have a feeling this one does.”

“Well, I have the same feeling, but I can’t put my finger on it. Something we talked about earlier must have put it in my head, but I’d be hard put to say how or what or why. Easy enough to say it’s just another example of the strange things people find to do with their lives and let it go at that.”

“I could read all sorts of things into that story if I wanted to.”

“You could, and it might be a good idea and it might be a bad one. Well, that was a better meal than I’d have had alone, Linda. Thank you for keeping me company.”

“It’s my place to thank you, and you know it.”

“You needn’t thank me for the story, though.”

“I hadn’t intended to,” said Linda Robshaw.

When he picked her up she told him she didn’t want to make it a late night. “I haven’t felt well today,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, cramps, actually. It’s that phase of the moon. I suppose it’s not so bad, especially when I consider the alternative.”

“The alternative? Oh, I see.”

But it wasn’t that time of the month, not quite. Her period was not due for two days, and she had had no cramps. She wondered why she said she did. Because she did not want to make love, obviously. And yet she had said the words before she had consciously realized that she did not want to make love,

He asked her if it bothered her to sit in the car, and she said it didn’t, and he suggested a ride up Route 32 along the river. She asked how the book had gone, the inevitable question, and he answered that it had gone very well, which had lately been the inevitable answer. He turned north on Main and drove north along the Pennsylvania side of the river, along a winding tree-shaded road banked here and there with old stone houses.

Some twenty miles up they stopped for a drink at a Colonial tavern. They sat at a table in a dark corner and nursed scotch and sodas. He lit her cigarettes and kept his pipe going.

He did most of the talking. This night he talked not about the book and not about his daughter. Instead he was telling her a great deal about his earlier life. The vague and aimless period after the war. The first novel, and his marriage, and elements of his life that followed. She sensed that he was purposely showing her parts of himself which he habitually kept concealed, and she found herself wondering how many other women had found him as open as she did. It was impossible for her to know this, but she felt there had been few, very few. It was a conceit to think that no woman since his wife had known him as well as she herself did now, and yet although she recognized it as a conceit she could not avoid it. The thought pleased her, even warmed her, and at the same time in some indeterminate way it unsettled her.

Her mind kept picking up threads of the story Olive had told her. There was the suggestion of an obvious parallel there, but she suspected the story’s relevance might lie elsewhere. And she did not want to think about it. She knew that much, that she did not want to think about it.

He did want to marry her. She had been quite certain of this, although perhaps less certain than she had let on to Olive. His conversation tonight made his intent unmistakable.

It would be very pleasant to be his wife. He was a thoughtful man and a good lover. He would cherish her. That was a good word — cherish. No man had ever cherished her, ho man had ever thought her someone to cherish.

And it would be secure to be his wife, both financially (which Olive said was important, and which probably was) and emotionally. There would be stability in her life, and she had lived too long with too little that could be called stable. She could belong to that fine old house. She could put down roots in those woods. His home could be her home as no place had ever been home to her. And it seemed now that she had never had a home. The house in which she grew up, even that had never been her home.

Did she love him? Well, she supposed that she did. She loved him but was not in love with him — the schoolgirl distinction which somehow persisted over the years. But had she ever been in love with anyone? She rather thought not, although she had thought herself thus from time to time. Did she love him enough to be married to him? Now that was another question, wasn’t it?

She had been married once. She could review that marriage, as she so often had done. She could try to see it in the context of the love that had or had not been there, as she could review her relationship with Marc. But it was hard now even to remember that marriage, and there were times when an accurate memory of her time with Marc seemed similarly elusive. It was hard to remember what it was like at the time, hard to summon up the person she herself had then been. And whoever she had been, she was in so many ways different now.

Would she want to have his children? Yes, if she wanted to have children at all. Would she want her children to look like him? She regarded him thoughtfully, projecting his strong features onto the countenances of children. Yes, she would like to have a son who looked like this man. Or a daughter — a daughter in his image would be unquestionably attractive, she thought, and then realized that he already had a daughter in his image. Karen had his features down to the last decimal place.

Karen. Was that the problem? Was that what bothered her? It seemed to be the point of Olive’s story, certainly, some aspect of the father-daughter relationship.

He asked if she was feeling better, and for an instant she forgot her story about menstrual cramps. Then she remembered, and said that she was feeling a good deal better, that he seemed to be good for her. His smile told her she had found the right thing to say.

“But I’d better get you home,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

On the way back her thoughts turned unpredictably to Peter Nicholas. She remembered their one night and felt herself responding to the memory. How unfair, she thought, to force Hugh to compete with ghosts. Because that was what the night had been. A phantom experience, shadow rather than substance. Hugh was a better lover than Peter, an infinitely better lover for her than Peter, but the night with Peter had been forbidden, the love they shared doomed in advance. Thus there had been nothing held in reserve, no worry about where the relationship might lead because it was a foregone conclusion that it could lead nowhere.

And yet. And yet—

As they reached the outskirts of New Hope she realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted him to make love to her. She was sitting close to him, her head on his shoulder, her seat belt gloriously unfastened, and his arm was around her and the wind was in her hair and she felt the moon drawing tides in her liquid flesh. When he parked in front of her building, she kissed him with a special urgency, pressing her body to him and clutching him. He held back at first, then matched her passion. Boldly she dropped a hand into his lap and took hold of him.

“Oh,” she said.

“You’ve awakened the sleeping giant.”

“Oh, my.” Cramps, yet. Christ. “Can I do something about that?”

“It’s not necessary.”

“But I want to.”

But he was moving her hand from him, shaking his head gently. “Not here,” he said. “Not here, not now.”

“I’m sorry if I—”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll call you.”

On the way upstairs she thought of a dozen things could have said, ranging from a frank explanation of her lie to some gibberish about the cramps normally preceding the onset of her period. There were any number of things she could have said to cover herself, but they were all things she had not been able to think of until his car had pulled away.

She took a shower, washed her hair. She tried listening to the radio but couldn’t find a station she could stand. She wanted to talk to someone and there was no one she could talk to. She looked up Hugh’s number in the phone book and sat at the telephone for twenty minutes before she realized she could not possibly call him, could not possibly find anything to say to him.

She was so fucking neurotic. That was the trouble — she was so fucking neurotic. He had not proposed to her, had not begun to propose to her, and her anxiety about what she might do if he did, her stupid neurotic anxiety, was getting in the way of everything.

In bed, she could not keep her hands off herself. She tried. She did not want to touch herself. Somehow she seemed to have evolved a double standard for masturbation: It was all right in the absence of an outlet, but forbidden if there was someone you were sleeping with. Going to bed with, she corrected herself. She had not yet slept with Hugh.

She gave in ultimately, using her fingers quickly and deftly, her mind blank of fantasies, her manipulation wholly physical. She reached climax quickly but it didn’t seem to do her any good; the same tensions were still there when she had finished.

When he entered the living room Karen closed her book and got up from his chair. “Home early,” she said.

“Linda wasn’t feeling well.”

“Is she all right?”

“Uh-huh. Drinking alone? That’s a hell of a note.”

“Well, you’ve been teaching me bad habits. Is it awful to drink alone?”

“I never saw anything wrong with it. The world is filled to overflowing with men and women who seek out boring company to avoid the stigma of solitary drinking. You could mix me one, though, and that would solve the problem.”

She made him a drink and freshened her own. He sat on the couch and she took a seat beside him. “I thought you were going out,” he said.

“I drove around town but I didn’t see anybody I wanted to spend any time with. It’s all the same people and I didn’t feel like that kind of company.”

“Is it starting to get to you?”

“What? All the same people? Not exactly. Just that most of the time I’d rather sit around here. Am I getting in the way?”

“Of course not.”

“Because if I am—”

“You’re not. On the way back here tonight I was hoping your car would be in the garage. I had to take Linda home early, and I hate being alone on nights like this. I can’t get the damned book out of my head.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It’s a good sign but it’s not much fun. I’ll have scenes running through my head, whole patches of dialogue, and I can’t shut them off. Ninety percent of the time it’s stuff I’ve already got planned out well enough, or material that happens offstage, conversations that will never wind up in the book anyway. Sitting down at the typewriter doesn’t do any good. I’m already written out for the day and anything I did now would be second-rate. But I can’t get the words out of my mind.”

“It sounds like a speed high.”

“Another part of the collegiate experience?”

“Not in a heavy way. I guess there were kids who were borderline speed freaks. Just on pills, I never knew anybody who shot crystal or anything.”

“Which is crystal?”

“Methedrine. I used to take Dex some of the time. Not for a high but to study for a test. Back when I bothered studying for tests.”

“Did it do you any good?”

“Oh, tons of good. But after awhile it backs up on you. Your mind starts curving in on itself. You get hung up on trivia. Spend hours cleaning the dirt out of your typewriter keys or arranging books on a shelf. Or running one phrase through your mind and getting all sorts of different vibrations out of it, but afterward none of them mean anything.”

“I took some of your mother’s pills once when she dieting. Those would be amphetamine, wouldn’t they?”

“Probably.”

“Then I see what you mean. There was too much mental energy and no place for it to go. It’s something like that now. I haven’t had this feeling on a book in years, and by God it’s a good feeling, but I’d like to be able to close the door on it when the day’s over.”

“Oh, you had some phone calls. Mentioning Mother reminded me. She called.”

“What did she want?”

“Also Mary Fradin.”

“Again? I hope I’m not supposed to call her.”

“Just a minute, I wrote it down. No, you don’t have to call her. She thinks she has a three-book contract almost nailed down with Huber and Lazarus, whoever they are.”

“A publishing house.”

“Also she had a feeler from somebody interested in making a television movie of Caleb’s House. She’ll report on that if there’s anything definite.”

“Then why bother me with it in the meantime?” He drank half his drink. Mary had been calling far more frequently than usual lately, ever since he had spoken to her about The Edge of Thought. Evidently she had caught his own enthusiasm for the book and felt it might serve as a turning point in his career. A week ago she had reported that his most recent editor had left Hugh’s publishers for a position at another house. Hugh’s publishers had recently had an especially high turnover rate in an industry where musical chairs was a way of life, so Hugh had not been surprised.

“Well, I won’t much miss him,” he had said. “Editors come and editors go but Markarian is here to stay. The one constant in a world of change.”

“Maybe it’s time for you to be a rat.”

“And leave the ship? I didn’t know that boat was sinking.”

“I think it is as far as you’re concerned,” Mary had said. “They’ve been taking you for granted for years.”

“I’m easy to take for granted.”

“Only because they’re in a position to do it. I’ve had interest from other houses on and off over the years. I never bothered you about it because I didn’t think it was worthwhile. But right about now might be a good time. I ought to be able to get you a three or four-book contract with a healthy advance. A very healthy advance, I’m thinking in terms of six figures.”

“That’s healthy, but isn’t that just numbers? I don’t have any particular need for cash at the moment.”

“Lucky you. It isn’t just numbers. It’s an investment on their part. If they put up that kind of money in front, they have to back it up with the kind of advertising and promotion you deserve. And which you’re not getting from you-know-who. All we need is the right book to make the jump with, and I think you’re writing that book right now.”

“I haven’t even let on what it’s about.”

“No, but how long have I known you, Hugh? You’ve never been this excited about anything you’ve done. That’s good enough for me.”

“Your faith is reassuring, but—”

“Cut the crap. The only thing I have faith in is that ten percent of six figures is five figures. And this new one — damn it, I can’t think of the title—”

“I never told you the title. Nice try, Mary.”

“Why don’t you tell me the title, lamb?”

“No.”

“Jesus, give me something to play with. The title, the theme, something. You’re a pro, for Christ’s sake. You’re not going to lose the handle this late in the game. You sound like one of those baseball players who won’t change their socks while the team’s on a winning streak.”

But he had been adamant and she had stopped trying to push him. Still, she kept finding excuses to call him, dangling possible deals in front of him every chance she got. He was pleased by her enthusiasm and knew it would still be there when the book was done. As far as a switch in publishers was concerned, he had told her to use her own judgment and get what she felt were the best terms at the best house.

“You’re the agent,” he had said.

“I just wanted to make sure you weren’t constitutionally opposed to a jump.”

“Why should I be?”

“The usual loyalty horseshit.”

“What’s there to be loyal to? There’s nobody who was there five years ago. I can’t even be loyal to the corporation since that conglomerate took it over.”

“Now you’re talking. You write, and I’ll scheme, and we’ll both get rich.”

The money did not much matter. It was nothing if not professional to concentrate on the money, to take the cash and let the credit go. But money as an incentive had long since failed to stir him. He had not been poor enough long enough to take real pleasure in the simple accumulation of wealth. Thus money was of value only in terms of what it could buy, and there was little he wanted to buy.

But he could not pretend that he did not want the glory. He could tell himself he wrote for his own pleasure, or for the small circle of perceptive readers, yet he recognized he wanted to be important, to be esteemed. And recognized, too, that this was a yearning one could never acknowledge.

Now he said, “What did Anita want?”

“To talk to me, mostly. She asked to talk to you, but she didn’t seem upset that you were out. I asked her if you should call her back, but she said it wasn’t important.”

“Good.”

“She seemed worried about me.”

“How so?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You know, things like what I’m going to do next. I tried to tell her that I didn’t know what I’m going to do next. That it’s a waste of time to be hung up on what I’m going to do next. She didn’t understand.”

“No, I don’t suppose she would. She’s always been the sort to think in terms of goals.”

“So you could spend your entire life thinking where you’re going next and never concentrating on where you are now. I can’t see it.”

“I’m not sure the reverse is perfect either. Spending all your time concentrating on the present and letting the future just happen.”

She nodded agreement. “Oh, I know it. But right now, the stage I’m in. The last thing I want to do is get hung up on tomorrow.” She hesitated. “I don’t think she likes the idea of me being here.”

“Thinks I’m a bad influence?”

“No, not exactly. I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t understand her at all. I compare the two of you, you and Mother, and it’s weird.”

“How so?”

“Just weird. You’re both so different. I remember when you got divorced. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. Not the idea of divorce. Everybody’s parents were getting divorced; it was something that happened all over the place. But the two of you. I couldn’t handle it. I suppose it’s that way for every kid because you can only think of your parents as being together because you always knew them that way. For the longest time I kept thinking you would get back together again. Even after she married him I used to think that, even though I knew it wasn’t going to happen.”

“So did I.”

“You did? I thought—”

“What?”

“Oh, that it was your idea.” He didn’t say anything, and she said, “Did you love her very much?”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know her now,” he said. “I haven’t known your mother for years.”

“What I was thinking. When I was a kid, while all this was happening, I thought how perfect you were for each other. Because I saw you that way. And now I see the two of you as being so completely different. Are you going to marry Linda?”

“Where did that question come from?”

“I don’t know. I guess I shouldn’t have asked it.”

“Why not? I’ve been asking myself. I find myself thinking about getting married again. It’s something I haven’t thought of in a long time. It’s probably your fault.”

“My fault?”

“I think I’ll have one more of these before I turn in. Can I fix you another?”

“All right.”

When he returned with the drinks she said, “How is it my fault?”

“You’ve made me realize how lonely I was living by myself.”

“Is it just the loneliness, or is it something special with Linda? I guess that’s nosy.”

“I guess it is, but it’s a good question. I suppose it’s probably a combination of the two. Most things are, you know.”

“The first time I was in love, later on I realized it was because I was ready to be in love.”

“Sure.”

She grinned suddenly. “When I was very little,” she said, “I thought I would get married to you when I grew up. Before I knew you couldn’t do that. Marry your father. I guess all little girls go through that, don’t they?”

“So I understand.”

Sixteen

Ever since he and Bert had talked about her, Warren Ormont had taken an interest in Melanie Jaeger. At first this consisted of little more than finding a way to drop her name into casual conversations and see where those conversations led. The result was largely a matter of inference. No one actually came right out and said anything, but from a throwaway line here and a raised eyebrow there, Warren was able to piece things together. The conclusion was what he had hoped it would be. In a selective and reasonably discreet fashion, Melanie was offering her ass around all over the place.

On several occasions he managed to be near her, close enough to watch the way she handled herself in public. She did not flirt, he noticed, and she seemed impervious to the casual flattery she frequently attracted. Warren registered this and approved. She was not easy, then, not a mindless little cunt who could be caught on an unbaited fishhook. No, it was Melanie who did the selecting, Melanie who determined the occasions for her adultery. She was looking for something new, he guessed. Something special, something out of the ordinary. Something — if one could countenance the word — something perverse.

This, as much as her unquestionable physical appeal, particularly attracted Warren. While he frequently found women attractive, he was rarely moved to act on his feelings. As comfortable as he was with female bodies, he was rarely at ease with the minds that inhabited them. The thought of living with a woman appalled him. It was difficult enough to live with a man, even a man as temperamentally suited to him as Bert, but with any woman ever born it would have been quite impossible.

On a simpler plane, he had found that the discomfort of intimate female company generally outweighed the pleasure of occasional affairs with women. It was one thing to fuck them, another thing entirely to have them that close to you. The sort of closeness which he treasured with male lovers was upsetting with females.

The more he saw of Melanie, and the more he thought about her, the less he felt such considerations be operative in her case. She wanted thrills — he was sure of this, and no less sure because he had reached this conclusion largely through intuition. He had learned over the years to trust his intuition, had found it more reliable in most instances than reason. His intuition, given free rein, supplied him with a fairly detailed portrait of Melanie before he exchanged a single word with her.

That first exchange took place on a Tuesday morning. They passed on the street, she with a bag of groceries, he en route to the laundry with a half dozen dirty shirts in a paper bag. “Why, it’s Melanie Jaeger,” he said enthusiastically. “Warren Ormont. I believe we did meet once, but I doubt you’d remember.”

“Of course I do,” she said. “And I’ve seen you onstage at the Playhouse.”

“We’ll, I’m sure I was giving a ghastly performance, and I hope I won’t be judged on the basis of that.”

“No, I—”

“I won’t keep you,” he said. He deliberately let his eyes travel down her body, then up again to meet her eyes. She did not flush. He gave her a smile, put a little extra into it. “It’s so good seeing you,” he said.

He had been stopping at Sully’s fairly regularly. Now he made it a point to have a drink there every night, deliberately studying the man behind the bar. If Melanie’s behavior had worked any changes in her husband, Warren was unable to spot them. “He is the same old hairy bear,” he confided to Bert. “I’m told the husband is always the last to know, but it’s hard to believe he doesn’t have an inkling.”

“Maybe he doesn’t care.”

“He does tend to lose interest in his little wedded playmates. But generally he just detaches them and sends them on their way, suitably equipped with a handsome settlement. And there’s never been the slightest breath of scandal. Goodness, hear me talking in clichés. Never the slightest breath. Of course there’s no scandal with Miss Fancy Pants, come to think. I wonder just how available she’s made herself.”

“We’d better have her soon.”

“Don’t I just know it. But the waiting adds to it, don’t you think? I like to scheme, you know. I’d have made a marvelous Renaissance courtier. ‘Love is a precious thing, love is a poison ring... Getting there is half the fun, you know. Suppose you had brought her home that first night.”

“Oh, I could never have done that.”

“Why, she was cruising, for heaven’s sake.”

“Yes, but you know I’m incapable of arranging things like that. It’s your province, Warren.”

“My innocent flower. But taking it as an hypothesis that you conquered your stage fright and brought Melanie Melontits home to bed, we would have missed out on all this delicious intrigue. Do you remember that biker?”

“Of course. I don’t remember his name, but I remember him.”

“I don’t think he had a name. I brought him home and we had a marvelous trio, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t wait to get the little devil out of the house. Boys like that are divine to fuck but they shouldn’t be allowed to speak. ‘Duh, duh, um, far out, duh, outasight, duh.’ Marlon fucking Brando sans talent. If I become very very rich some day, Bert, I intend to subsidize a foundation dedicated to removing the vocal cords of motorcycle boys. I wish you would write all of this down. I don’t need a pianist, damn it, I need a Boswell. All this sparkling wit lost to the ages.”

“You’re outrageous.”

“I suspect I am. But you do remember Hell’s Little Angel, don’t you? Now if we’d had such a much with dear Mrs. Jaeger, we’d have missed all this. Hunger makes the meal, lover. And her time shall come soon. Count on it.”

It was over a week before he managed to run into Melanie again. He was very busy, performing at night and rehearsing another play afternoons. Ultimately he did encounter her again, once again meeting her on the street.

“Ah, the fair Melanie,” he said. “Here, let me carry that for you.” He took the package from her without waiting for her reply. “There we are. Now lead, kindly light, and I shall follow.”

“My car is just around the corner.”

“Scarcely far enough.” His eyes caught hers. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee first. I have to carry this awkward bundle more than a few steps in order for the task count as exercise. And my doctor is always telling me to get more exercise, so you’ll be performing a medical good deed.”

“Well—”

“It’s perfectly safe, you know.” Once again his eyes did their trick of running up and down her body, then fastening directly upon hers. “Nothing bolsters a woman’s reputation like keeping public company with an obvious faggot. And, come to think of it, there’s nothing better for a faggot’s public image than being seen in the company of a stunning young woman. Come. We shall talk in present tenses. Do you know that song? ‘Chelsea Morning’? Joni Mitchell?”

“I don’t think so.”

He took her to the Raparound, held a chair for her, sat down opposite from her. It was a weekday morning and the tourists had not yet begun to flood the town. There were a few regulars having breakfast and conversation at the Raparound, and Warren greeted them briefly, then ordered two coffees from the waitress.

He squared his shoulders, folded his hands on the table in front of him, and beamed smartly at Melanie. “Well,” he said. “Well.”

“Well what?”

“Just well.”

She started to say something, then waited while the girl put cups of coffee before them. Then Warren lifted his cup in a toast. “To the possibilities,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

She worried her upper lip with her tongue. Again she was about to say something, and again he didn’t give her the chance. He began pitching small talk at her, theater gossip, various presumably amusing anecdotes. He was quite good at this, and before long he worked past her reserve and she was involved with the conversation at hand.

As she was finishing her coffee he said, “The final curtain is at eleven seventeen tonight. By eleven thirty I’ll have my clothes changed and my makeup removed. I’ll be at the Barge Inn a few minutes after that to pay my respects to your worthy husband.”

“I don’t—”

“At midnight I’ll ring your doorbell.”

Her tongue teased her lip again. He decided that the gesture was indescribably sensuous. She said, “You must be thinking of someone else.”

“Au contraire. I’m thinking of you.”

“I don’t know what this is all about.”

“Don’t you?” He did a number with his eyes again, then broke it off with a wide smile. “We’ll go to the Inn in Carversville,” he said levelly. “I believe you’ve been there. A friend of mine plays piano there. I believe you’ve heard him play. He plays other things beside the piano.”

She watched him, waited him out.

“His name is Bert,” he went on. “He lives with me. We enjoy living together. We enjoy sharing things.”

She was nodding, taking it all in.

“Sometimes we share a meal, or an evening in New York, or a bed. Sometimes we share a person.”

“I don’t—”

“Of course you do.”

“What I mean is why me?”

“Why, there are several reasons,” he said. “One is that I’ve attained an erection just sitting across a table from you. A rather dramatic one, actually. If you’d care to put your foot in my lap you could reassure yourself on that point. For another thing, I — oh, my. I didn’t expect you to do that.”

“You suggested it.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”

“Do you like this? Yes, you damn well like it. I could get you off with my toes.”

“You are full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“I have very limber toes.”

“You do.” He took hold of her foot and stroked it “I think we should stop this.”

“I think I’m getting as hot as you are. I thought you were supposed to be a faggot.”

“Nobody’s supposed to be a faggot. It’s not something you prepare for at a trade school. No, by George, that’s precisely what it is, come to think. I’ll come by at midnight.”

“No. I’ll meet you there.”

“The Carversville Inn.”

“Yes, I know. Warren? How did you know?”

“About you? Oh, intuition.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“I’ll meet you there between twelve and twelve thirty. It will be his last set. We can have a drink and then you can come home with us.”

“What’s his name?”

“My piano player? Bert. Bert LeGrand.”

“He has nice hands.”

“Yes, I rather fancy them myself.”

“He has very nice hands,” Melanie said. “Yes, I remember his hands.”

After he had paid the check and carried her package to her car, Melanie got into the little Alfa and sagged behind the wheel. She was trembling uncontrollably with a mixture of excitement and fear. Both emotions had begun shortly after Warren took her to the Raparound, and she felt she had held them both nicely in check. Now, alone, she could give in to them, could hardly avoid giving in.

She started the car. Instead of driving home she headed west on 202, pushing the little red car hard, using it deliberately as an outlet for what she felt. She turned around just short of Doylestown, the greater portion of her anxiety spent in the act of driving. She felt the sun on her face and hands, the wind in her hair. At a stoplight she fished a cigarette out of her bag and pushed in the dashboard cigarette lighter. The light changed. She crossed the intersection. When the lighter popped out to announce its readiness she lit her cigarette, then shook the lighter absently like a match and flipped it over the side of the car.

She had gone almost a mile before she realized what she had done, and laughter immediately overwhelmed her. She had to pull off the road, she was laughing so hard.

When Sully came home for dinner she told him about it, and broke up again recounting the episode.

“You must of had your mind in the clouds,” he said. “I can just picture that. You didn’t go back and have a look around for it?”

“No chance. I don’t know exactly where it was, and it’s all high weeds at the side of the road.”

“Well, they don’t cost much to replace. You can tell him the heating element burned out.”

“Why not tell him I threw it away?”

“Because it’s bad enough I know you’re a nut, you don’t want the whole world to know. I heard of a guy doing that with a Zippo lighter. Borrowed the lighter off a friend and then threw it the hell out the window. I wasn’t there to see it but I can picture it in my mind clear enough. What were you doing up around Doylestown?”

“Just driving around.”

“That’s what the car’s for, I guess. Just driving?”

“What else?”

He looked at her, then looked away.

“I’ll be going out tonight,” she said.

“Oh?”

“For a drive.”

“For a drive,” he echoed. “You be home by the time I close the joint?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh, a late evening, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Just gonna see what you come up with, huh?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh?”

“I have a date.”

“A date.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the lucky—”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Tell me now.”

“No.”

He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. Very softly he said, “You cunt.”

“Do you want to go upstairs?”

“Not now.”

“When I come home, then.”

“You fucking cunt.”

“Are you going? You didn’t have dessert.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Sully—”

He turned in the doorway. “I didn’t mean to call you that. It’s just — I’ll wait up for you, baby.”

“I like it when you call me a cunt.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“Good.”

The evening crawled and she could not make it hurry. She washed the dinner dishes, then went upstairs and took a long soak in the tub. The hot water baked the tension out of her muscles but new tension had taken its place before she had toweled herself dry. She wrapped herself up in a terrycloth robe of Sully’s and sat in front of the television set without paying any attention to the program on the screen.

Cunt.

That was what she was. Perhaps it was what she had always been, although it did not seem to her that this was the case. It was true that she had always enjoyed sex. She could not remember when she had first become aware of the difference between little boys and little girls, but as long as she had been aware of this difference she had been enthusiastically in favor of it. An attractive girl, an outgoing and popular girl, she had been the frequent recipient of sexual overtures from an early age. She had found all aspects of this enjoyable, from kissing games at children’s parties to fumbling adolescent petting and beyond.

But it had always been an easy enjoyment, a carefree enjoyment. This compulsion that she had found within herself was new, and although it brought her great pleasure it also frightened her. She was afraid of both what she herself was becoming and what might happen to her.

Sully was hard to understand, so very hard for her to understand. Everything she did was ultimately for him, and he knew this, but his immediate reaction each time was one of loathing and bitter contempt. You fucking cunt. She sensed that he had to despise her for what she did, that this was a part of the magic that flowed between them. So far his rage was always quiet and smoldering, never harsh and violent, but how could she be sure it would never change its form? He was a big man, a powerful man. He had always been beautifully gentle with her. If he ever turned violent, she was certain he could kill her with a single blow of one of those heavy hands.

The thought of dying beneath Sully’s rage chilled her, but she could not really make herself believe it was more than a fraction of a possibility. Thus it bothered her less than the question of the sort of person into which she herself was evolving.

Or was that really it? She frowned, challenging herself. She was becoming a swinger, a sexual experimenter, and this did not bother her in and of itself. On the contrary, she was surprised how easy it was for her to accept these changes in her own attitudes. As long as she and Sully were content with the pattern of life they led, nothing else really mattered much to her. She had no friends, and since she had married Sully she had never been unpleasantly conscious of the absence of friends.

She closed her eyes tightly, then opened them wide. She knew what it was.

What bothered her was the thought of other people knowing. What bothered her, what summed it all up, was that Warren Ormont had been able to approach her out of the blue with total assurance that she would be game for what he and his friend had in mind. She did not know Warren Ormont. And he did not know her. Yet he had known.

She positioned herself in front of her mirror and studied herself very carefully. She had examined herself in this fashion at other times in her life. When she got her period for the first time. When she lost her virginity. On each occasion it had seemed as though her face ought to reveal the changes in her body, and on each occasion she had sought such facial revelation in her mirror with no success. If there were changes they were all beneath the skin.

And now? Was there more tension in the corners of the eyes? Did the nostrils tend to flare? Did her mouth show a pout of petulance or lust or abandon? If so, she saw no evidence. Or was it in her walk, or her speech? If so no mirror could show it to her.

Either he had seen something or he had heard something, and in either case she was troubled. Of course the most obvious explanation lay in the fact that Bert must have noticed her weeks ago at the Carversville Inn. But she had gone there only once, and she had not thought her availability was quite that obvious. Even if he had reported that she had gone out looking for a man, why would that lead them to believe she was looking for far-out sex? Why?

It was this goddamned town, she thought suddenly. New York or Chicago or Los Angeles none of this would be a problem. There she and Sully could choose their friends and acquaintances from people like themselves. Or they could have no friends, could take their sexual pleasure with strangers and be utterly ignored by neighbors. But in a town the size of New Hope there was no such compartmentalization. Men with whom she slept would turn up at the Barge Inn for a drink, and she would run into their wives at the market or under the dryer. That added spice, but it also added an unmistakable element of danger.

Did everyone know? Was the whole town talking about her? Men did talk. You couldn’t expect them all to keep silent. Sooner or later it was inevitable that she would be talked about throughout the county. She wondered if she could handle that. She wondered if Sully could handle it. If worse came to worst, they could move, they had already discussed the possibility, but she did not want to move and neither did he.

And she certainly did not want to have to move.

She turned off the television set, went downstairs, fixed herself a cup of instant coffee. Then she made a pot of regular coffee so that it would be there for Sully when he came home. He would sit around drinking coffee and waiting for her while she played bizarre games with a couple of faggots. It seemed that making the coffee for him was the least she could do.

Faggots.

This puzzled her. She had never known a homosexual well, and she had always taken it for granted that a faggot was a faggot and that they only did it with each other. They were not supposed to be interested in women. But Warren had been unmistakably interested in her. She remembered the expression on his face when she had taken him up on his invitation to examine his erection with her foot. She had instantly kicked off her shoe and plopped her foot in his lap, and he had obviously never expected her to do so. His face, however, had shown surprisingly little of his surprise. Well, perhaps that was to be expected; he was an actor, after all.

Not even an actor could will an erection into existence. And that erection had been real enough, big and hard, warm when her toes gripped it.

She could have done him with her toes. The current that flowed between them then had been that strong. And she remembered his hand on her foot. He had stroked her foot as any lover might have done. There was nothing faggoty in the way he had handled her foot. And nothing equivocal in her response to that handling.

She pictured Warren now, the eyes glinting at her through the rimless eyeglasses, the high forehead, the sharp hawk nose. She heard his voice in memory, caught all the special inflections, the campy mannerisms. Everything about him proclaimed his homosexuality, and it was absurd to imagine herself responding to this proclamation. And yet she had responded and could not deny it. Part of the response, of course, was excitement over the underlying kinkiness of the situation. But not all of it, for a part of it was a response to his very definite masculinity.

There was so much she did not know, not merely about herself but about the way people behaved in general. So very much she did not understand.

Had Sully ever done things with another man? Earlier the thought would have been laughable, but now she was not so sure. How could anyone be sure of anything? If she had learned nothing else, she had learned that there was very little you could be sure of. She tried to imagine Sully with another man. She tried to picture him on his knees before another man, with the man’s cock in his mouth. But she could not bring the picture into focus.

Sully was completely male, utterly male. And she herself was utterly female, and yet she was dizzy at the thought of having sex with faggots and had been unable to dismiss the idea of having sexual relations with another woman. She even had the woman in mind. Every time she saw Karen Markarian on the street a delicious shiver went through her body, and the few times they had spoken she walked away with the feeling that her desires were reciprocated. She had done nothing about this. She could not think what to do about it, or how to go about doing it, but the thoughts would not go away. Had Sully ever had strange thoughts like this about another man? Had he ever done anything about them? She pictured Warren again and began to imagine him in bed. She tried to bring Bert into the picture but could not manage it. She did not know what they would to do, or how, and although she could imagine all of possibilities, none of them had reality because of her own ignorance.

Well, she would find out, and soon.

She could not remember what Bert looked like. She had seen him one time, and she remembered the evening well enough, the drive to Carversville, the solitary drinks, the exploration of possibilities. She remembered vividly the man she had ultimately picked up, remembered even more vividly the ecstasy she had shared with her husband afterward. But she could not remember Bert LeGrand. She did remember his hands, their assurance on the keys, the power of them, and mixed with that memory was the feel of Warren’s hand on her foot. Did a man like Warren touch a male foot and a female foot in the same way? Or was there a difference?

Again she let her mind drift to the scene at the Raparound, her foot in his lap, her toes working to excite his cock. She touched herself for an instant to heighten the memory but it was unnecessary, the memory was vivid enough without such enhancement. She found herself wrapping words around the memory, putting lyrics to its music, the words she would use when she told Sully about it.

For she would tell him all of it. From the overtures on the street to the wildness which she herself was not yet able to imagine. She would tell him all of it

Soon enough.

Seventeen

The last of the sunset glowed red in the west as Karen left the house and headed back into the woods. She had paused first at the door of her father’s study, heard the typewriter chatter, pause, then start tentatively up again. She wished he would finish the book so that she could read it. It wouldn’t be much longer, she thought. He was working steadily, working every day, and sometimes she would stand silently outside his door and hear the typewriter keys click away without interruption for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

When he was out of the house she was occasionally tempted to peek at the manuscript. Once she had entered the study in his absence but had been unable to make herself look at what he had written. It could do no harm so long as he did not know that she had read it, but still she felt it would be a dishonorable act on her part.

She walked only a few yards into the woods. It was light out now but would be dark before long, and she did not want to be confronted with a long walk in the dark. That might be an unpleasant experience at any time, and would be especially unpleasant stoned. If the grass took her in the wrong direction, she might really find herself imagining that there were bears in those woods, or that the trees and vines were actively conspiring against her.

Her fingers found the little foil packet in the pocket of her jeans. She left it where it was while she smoked a regular cigarette, sitting with her legs crossed and her back against a tree. She smoked the cigarette all the way to the filter, then carefully stubbed it out on the sole of her shoe. In her mind, Smoky the Bear frowned and shook a warning finger at her.

“Only you can prevent forest fires,” she said aloud. “Only forest fires can prevent bears.”

She took out the packet, unwrapped the aluminum foil, let the two neatly rolled joints fall into the palm of her hand. A boy in town had given them to her almost a week ago and she had been saving them. She was in the right kind of mood now and the woods seemed a perfect place to smoke. It was a natural act that ought to be performed in natural surroundings.

She could have smoked in the house. In her own room or in the living room. Her father knew she had smoked, they had talked about it, and he didn’t seem to object to grass. He had smoked himself on occasion, although she gathered he had not had any grass in a long time. Christ, everyone smoked. People on Social Security were lighting up and blowing the tops of their heads off. She had known kids at Northwestern who had turned their parents on, and one kid who had been turned on by his parents. “Families that blast together last together.” Even her mother smoked, and anything that woman could do couldn’t possibly be hip by definition.

Her mother’s words on the subject struck her as one of the most extraordinary cop-out speeches she had ever heard. “Now I know very well that marijuana is harmless, Karen. It’s probably less injurious than alcohol, although the data are not yet conclusive. A lot of testing remains to be done. And Wayne and I have experimented with marijuana. The fact remains that it is against the law. The law may be a bad one but that’s neither here nor there. It’s the law, and violating that law can lead to a great deal of sheer heartache for young people. Also, I think it’s inadvisable in any event for adolescents to become involved with a drug like marijuana before they have the maturity to handle it. It’s the same as with alcoholic beverages. In fact I very much hope the powers that be will legalize marijuana so that its use can be controlled, limited to adults. I don’t suppose I can tell you what to do, Karen, because there are certain decisions you will no doubt make for yourself, decisions you will have to make for yourself, but I would strongly, very strongly, advise you to stay away from ‘pot’ until you’re over twenty-one.”

And of course she called it pot and used pauses to put invisible quotation marks around the word.

What bullshit! What complete and total bullshit! It’s harmless and everybody’s doing it but it’s illegal, so don’t do it until you’re over twenty-one. The advice was not only bullshit. It was also a little late; she had been smoking for almost a year before she got that particular lecture.

Now she put one of the joints between her lips and struck a match. She took a long easy drag, inhaled deeply, leaned her head back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes. She got a hit almost immediately and her mouth relaxed in a smile. The boy who had made her a present of the two jays had said it was dynamite, and it had been no exaggeration. She exhaled through pursed lips, then opened her eyes and wrapped the second cigarette in the foil and returned it to her pocket. She wouldn’t need them both tonight. One would be plenty.

Why had she decided not to smoke in the house? For the same reason, she thought, that she should not have brought the black boy home. Because it was silly to lay any trips on her father. It was immature and unnecessary, and she didn’t have to play those games anymore.

It would be fun to turn him on, though. Not now, of course. His book was going well, and the last thing he needed was anything that might push his mind in a new direction before he had finished his work. When the book was done, then perhaps they could smoke together. At that stage it might even be valuable for him. A good head-type high might give him some new perspectives, so that when he went over the book, he might be able to see it from a different angle.

And it would be very heavy, too, the two of them sitting around smoking. He had taught her how to drink, and she cherished the time the two of them sat together drinking highballs and rapping. She had never understood the special pleasures of alcohol before, perhaps because she associated it on the one hand, with her mother and Wayne and their friends and on the other hand with the fraternity-type jocks and their vomitous beer blasts. Perhaps she could return the favor by teaching her father how to smoke, how to go with it and let it take him into his head.

There was a time, before she went away to college, when she had had similar hope for her mother. It was shortly after her own initiation to grass, and she had managed to half convince herself that a few tokes was all her mother needed to turn her head around. Further reflection had forced her to realize that there were certain things grass just couldn’t do, and that this was of them. By the time her mother delivered her little sermon and confessed her own “experimentation” with “pot,” Karen had more or less guessed that the woman must have tried the stuff at one time or another, and that it obviously hadn’t done any good.

She took another drag and let herself go with it. Her mother and Wayne — there were two live ones, she thought. And the most depressing thing about it was that they thought they were so fucking hip. They wore the loud elaborately casual suburban clothes straight out of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, they subscribed to Ramparls and the Free Press, they bought and read all the right books, they went to cocktail parties to raise money for Eugene McCarthy and the Black Panthers and whatever Asian country had most recently had an earthquake or typhoon or famine. They carefully salted their conversation with all the words that had gone out of style about a year ago. Christ, they were depressing.

They thought they were involved. If there was one word her mother would pick to describe herself, that would be the word. Involved. The most totally out-of-it person on the fucking earth, and she thought she was involved.

Too much.

Eyes closed, nape of neck brushing the craggy bark of the tree behind her, she flashed on something she had never put together before. The reason she had taken it for granted that her father had wanted the divorce was that she just couldn’t feature it the other way around. Why would she have wanted to leave him?

She had learned pieces of the answer over the years, and she giggled now at the absurdity of it. Mommy had left Daddy because Daddy was not involved and Mommy craved a life of meaningful involvement. She ran the thought through her brain and worked changes on it and giggled again, hysterical at the whole number. Her father was this enormously together person, doing something was very much his own particular thing, grooving with a beautiful life that all fit perfectly together, and her mother was out in Arizona in the middle of the fucking desert, wearing bells that were too tight in the ass and a peace symbol on a leather thong and running off to Esalen for encounter groups, and that made her the involved one.

And she had an involved husband, too. Wayward Wayne, boy architect. Wayne and Anita got into things together, that was what was supposed to be so beautiful about their marriage. But did Involved Liberal Anita know that Involved Liberal Wayne liked to play cuddle with Karen’s friends? A little fanny patting now and then, and when a girl named Patsy MacGowan had given him a little encouragement he’d had a hand up her skirt and his tongue halfway down her throat before the kid knew what was going down. “I was just flirting a little,” Patsy had told her, white-faced. “I thought, you know, we were just kidding around, then it turns out that he’s not kidding and I thought I was going to get raped.”

She giggled again. The tip of the jay was warm between her fingers, and she butted it carefully against her shoe and tucked it into the foil, refolded the foil and put it in her pocket. She didn’t need any more tonight. She was just about as high as she wanted to be, and with her eyes closed and her muscles loose and easy she would let herself float just a little bit higher. And what a nice high it was. The boy had told her it was happy grass. She wasn’t sure if it worked that way or not. It seemed to her that the mood you were in had more to do with what kind of a trip you took than the grass itself. She was happy now, though, loose and easy and giggly.

Anita and Wayne, so uptight in spite of themselves. She could have had Wayne herself — she had realized as much the last time she was home. There was no grabbing, no coy little tongue kissing, but by then she had learned to recognize the hints in men’s eyes, and they were all present in Wayne’s glance. The prospect held a certain appeal at the time; she’d been fighting with her mother, and the idea of taking a man away from Anita had a degree of charm to it. She never seriously considered it, though. Wayne himself was just too much of a turn-off for her to really think about going through with it. It would have to be a monumental down.

She sat up against the tree for a long time, letting the smoke work on her head, thinking her own private thoughts. At one point she unlaced her shoes and did a little dance in the soft grass. She danced herself into exhaustion, then sprawled full length on the ground. She flashed on an imaginary conversation: “Karen? Yon didn’t hear about her? Like she sold out completely, man. Lives with her father, drinks scotch and soda, even cut her hair. When she had that abortion they must have taken out part of her brain, can you dig it?”

The thought delighted her and she laughed loud and hard, laughed until the muscles in her belly ached wonderfully from the exertion of laughter. Oh, I am so stoned, she thought.

When she left the woods and walked back to the house her high was mostly gone, all but a slight buzz that she could easily control.

Did Anita and Wayne go to wife-swap parties? That would probably be just about their speed, she decided. And Anita would go for it, too — all you had to do was tell her it was the latest thing and made for genuinely meaningful interpersonal relations. That would be all the encouragement she would need.

And she could imagine those parties. Wayne and Anita and all their depressing friends. The swapping would really be pointless in that set. Like, how could you tell the difference between them?

She giggled again, but had no trouble getting control of herself as she entered the house. On her way upstairs she paused outside her father’s door. There was silence at first, and then she heard the rattle of his typewriter. She smiled.

Eighteen

At ten minutes past midnight Melanie Jaeger backed out of the driveway, drove through town and headed north along the river toward Carversville. It was a dark night and the road had little illumination once she had cleared the outskirts of New Hope. She itched to drive fast, just as she had itched to leave her house a full hour before she did. She forced herself to drive slowly, just as she had forced herself to delay her departure as much as possible.

She pulled into the graveled parking lot of the Inn, killed the headlights, turned off the ignition. She unrolled the window and sat behind the wheel smoking cigarettes. She watched several couples leave the Inn and drive off into the night. A car arrived and another couple went into the Inn. A young man stalked out, hands plunged into his pants pockets: he gunned his engine before driving off, and his wheels spun fiercely in the loose gravel.

Then another car pulled into a parking place on the far side of the lot and Warren Ormont emerged from it. He stopped to light a cigarette and she watched him outlined boldly in the parking-lot floodlights. He was wearing a long Edwardian jacket and pearl gray slacks. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, polished his glasses, put them carefully back on, folded his handkerchief and tucked it back into his pocket. He consulted his watch, then walked across the lot and up the steps and through the swinging doors of the tavern. He did not glance toward her car, did not notice her at all.

All she had to do was turn the key in the ignition and drive home. She could invent an aphrodisiacal story for Sully out of her own imagination. It would be easy enough for her to do this. She had already that evening imagined enough encounters for a dozen stories.

She laughed hard at herself. Then she got out of the car. At least she could get a drink inside, and she seemed to need one.

Couples sat at several of the round oak tables, but the bar itself was almost empty. Warren sat at one end near the piano, and there were three men she did recognize at the other end. She took a stool near the middle of the bar and ordered applejack on the rocks with a little water. The bartender brought her the drink and she sipped at it, fighting back the impulse to drink it straight down. It was commercial applejack, nowhere near as good as the kind Sully drank.

She turned toward the piano. She recognized Bert LeGrand now, remembered his face from the other time she had been here. Odd that she had been unable to remember his face, but she surely recognized it now. She looked at his hands and felt the blood surge to her face. At just that instant Bert looked at her and smiled. It was a very confident smile. A cocksure smile, she thought, and her color deepened at the word.

He played “Love for Sale,” then segued immediately into “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

I could leave now, she thought. I could.

“Why hello there! What luck running into you here!”

She turned, smiled back at Warren’s smile. She said quietly, “You sound surprised.”

“Merely pleased. Superb timing, I might say. One more number and Bert severs his shackles and becomes a free man again. May I buy you another of those?”

“Please.”

He ordered another applejack for her, another cognac for himself. “To our possibilities,” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good toast.”

“The waiting is difficult, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I think it enhances things, though. We suffer from an embarrassment of cars, by the way. Bert has his, I have mine, and I assume you didn’t come here on foot.”

“No, I drove.” Bert wrapped up the set with “Lover,” pushing the song along at a dizzying tempo. “My car is outside.”

“I’ll finish my drink now and go outside. I’ll wait in my car. Take you time finishing your drink; then go outside, and start your engine. You can follow me back to our house. Bert will be along in no time.”

“I don’t want to leave my car on the street.”

“It’s recognizable?”

“Very.”

“No problem there. I’ll pull up in front, you run your machine into the garage, and we’ll stack ours in the driveway behind it. It will entail a certain amount of vehicular maneuvering when you’re ready to leave, but we can put up with that.”

She nodded.

“And that won’t be for hours,” he said.

What fascinated her was that she seemed to have no will of her own. This had not been the case before. Even when the men she chose were strong and self-confident, as Hugh Markarian had been, she had always been the one who initiated, and in the course of things she had been more leader than follower. Now, in the living room of Warren Ormont’s house, she felt absolutely powerless and lacking in volition.

“That’s Bert’s car now,” he was saying. “He’ll be with us in a moment.”

She nodded.

“The characteristic putt-putt-putt of Bertram’s Volkswagen. Is your car a Triumph?”

“No, it’s a disaster.” He looked at her as if astonished that she was capable of a joke. “It’s an Alfa-Romeo, actually.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. It needs a cigarette lighter.”

“Oh?”

“It had a perfectly good one but I threw it away this afternoon.”

“How bizarre.”

“I must of had something on my mind.”

“So it would seem,” he said. The VW engine died, and she heard a car door open and close. Warren reached for her, and she went to him. She was still off-balance and uncertain until his mouth found hers. Then her lips parted for his tongue, and her body pressed against him and her uncertainties dissolved in the familiar assurance of passion.

She heard the door open and tensed momentarily when Bert entered the room. But Warren did not release her so she returned to the security of his embrace. One of his hands closed on her buttock, squeezing, and his leg insinuated itself between hers. His thigh pressed her pubic mound and she felt his erection against her stomach. Bert moved around the room, dimming lights, stacking records on the stereo. She heard piano music thought at first that he was playing, then realized it was a record.

Warren had both his hands on her behind now, holding her in an almost painful grip and rotating his lips, grinding himself against her. She put her tongue tentatively into his mouth and he sucked on it immediately, and in her mind’s eye she saw him sucking thus upon a penis and her head swam. Hands opened the clasp of her dress at the nape of her neck. She thought they were Warren’s hands at first, but Warren’s hands still gripped her buttocks, and she realized it was Bert who was now undoing her zipper and easing her dress over her shoulder. Warren went on kissing her and Bert was tugging the dress free from her body and kissing the back of her neck. His hands moved in front of her, moved between her body and Warren’s and found her breasts. Her dress had dropped to the floor and Warren’s hands once again found her buttocks, stroking, pulling and pressing while Bert kneaded her breasts.

Warren released her, disengaged himself. He took a step backward and she swayed for him but Bert caught her and spun her toward him. He was naked. She had not realized this before. Her eyes darted immediately to his penis. He was erect, his penis very long and quite slender. Her hands reached for his penis as he drew her close and kissed her. She tried to insert him but he was too tall, so she settled for leaning against him and rubbing herself against the base of his penis.

Behind her she heard Warren undressing. She went on rubbing against Bert, trying desperately to reach an orgasm. She was almost there, almost there, when Bert released her and gave her back to Warren.

“Oh, God, fuck me,” she said.

“Patience, little one.”

“Don’t tease me.”

“We’ll both fuck you, little one. Just be patient. The night is young.”

“I can’t wait—”

“All hot and bothered?” His finger found her, penetrated. “Oh, yes, very warm indeed.” He held his finger out to Bert, and she saw Bert take Warren’s finger into his mouth and suck the taste of her from it. It seemed to her the most erotic gesture she had ever seen in her life. Her knees were weak. She could barely stand on her feet, and she swayed again, and Warren caught her.

On the stereo Dave Van Ronk sang:

They were walking her to the bedroom. Warren was on her right and Bert on her left and each had an arm around her waist, like two men helping a drunken friend home. And she felt drunk, dizzy drunk. Her arms hung loose at her side. As they reached the bedroom she reached out with both hands at the same time and took hold of a penis in each hand. Warren’s was thicker, she noted almost clinically, while Bert’s was longer. Her hands worked rhythmically, pumping both organs simultaneously. They walked her over to the big double bed. The covers were already turned down. Hands lifted her, placed her in the middle of the bed. She squirmed, unable to stay still, but they did not come to her. Instead she stared as they embraced at the side of the bed. She watched them kiss, watched Warren’s hands roam Bert’s body, watched Bert’s hands on Warren’s penis.

Mr. Dillinger drove up to a gasoline station

He said, “This looks like a mighty fine location.”

The attendant said, “Do you want any gas?”

“Well, it’s either your gas or your yaas-yas-yas...”

Somehow she had not expected that they would kiss each other. The specifically sexual acts she had had no trouble anticipating, visualizing, but she had not expected this sort of loveplay. At first it simply astonished her. Then she found it adding to her own excitement She had never been a spectator at other people’s love-making before.

But they did not ignore her for long. They drew apart — reluctantly, it seemed to her — and they joined her on the bed, one on each side of her. Two mouths began to kiss her while four hands acquainted themselves with her body. She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to sensation. A mouth on each of her breasts, both of them sucking her at once. Hands everywhere, fingers in her lower parts, both front and back, both of these powerful men busying themselves with all of her.

She had a whole little fleet of orgasms, one coming right after another. All they had to do to bring her off was touch her and they never stopped touching her. But her climaxes in no sense slowed her down. Instead they spurred her on, increasing her need for an ultimate release.

She lay with her eyes clenched shut, her hands knotted into fists at her side. A penis pressed against her lips and her mouth gaped to accept it. Another penis slithered into her vagina. She nursed on one while the other pounded at her. They both were taken away from her, and she writhed desperately until the two had changed places; one, moist with her saliva, slipped into her just as the other, slick with her juices, filled her mouth.

Until at last she was between them. Warren lay on his back and she was crouched over him, his cock buried in her cunt, and she felt Bert’s hand on her buttocks and strained to open herself to accommodate him. Sully had used her thus in the past and she had learned to make herself accessible that way. Even so it was painful at first. She fought the pain and squirmed, impaled on Warren, and then Bert was within her as well and she was filled fore and aft, filled utterly, and it was as though she had spent all her life until that moment empty.

They moved in perfect unison, like performers in a ballet, matching their strokes, thrusting and parrying expertly. She felt them on either side of the narrow membrane separating her two cavities, felt them touching each other through the medium of her flesh. Their heads were to the side of hers and their mouths were glued together; they kissed each other deeply while they plunged together in and out of her body. She felt at once utterly apart from what was taking place and simultaneously caught up in a level in involvement she had never before known.

Sully they are fucking me one in my ass and one in my cunt and I am all filled up with cock I am overflowing with cock I am rippling like a bed of hot lava they are fucking the life out of me the soul out of me the hell out of me they are fucking the hell out of me Sully God oh God oh God I am on fire I am burning I am melting I am dying oh God fucking God fucking God—

There was a hole in the middle of the world and she fell right through it.

When she opened her eyes Bert was sitting on the side of the bed holding a cold cloth to her forehead. Warren was in a chair with a glass of brandy in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

She said, “What happened?”

“You left us for awhile,” Warren said.

“I passed out?”

“That’s a more direct way of putting it.”

“That never happened before.” She pushed the cloth aside and sat up. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

“How do you feel?”

“That’s hard to say, A little dizzy. Have you got a cigarette? Thanks. I feel terrific. My God.”

“I knew you’d be good, Melanie Melontits. I didn’t know you’d be this good.”

“Well, life has its little surprises. Jesus. It’s so completely different.” —

“What is?”

“Three.”

“You never—”

“No, never. It’s a whole new world.”

“Another dimension.”

“Yeah, right.”

Warren drained his glass and approached the bed. “You have a fantastic body,” he told her. He reached out a hand, took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve never had any enormous predilection for breasts per se. Not since infancy, at any rate. But your breasts have an undeniable appeal. They have character.”

“Watch it, you’ll get me started again.”

“This is nice, too. So warm and so tight. You’ve had children, have you?”

“No.”

“Never have them. Disgusting little beasts. They’d stretch this all out of shape, and that would be a dismal shame. Have you ever considered shaving this?”

“Are you serious?”

“You ought to think about it. Give it some serious consideration. Not that this fur is without its own special charm, but if you shaved it you would look like a little girl down there. And think how much more sensitive you’d be without that hair getting in the way.”

“I’m too damn sensitive as it is. Hey, don’t do that. You’ll get me all worked up.”

“You mean this will get you worked up?”

“Jesus—”

“Why, that’s the whole idea, you silly thing!”

“Hey!” She drew away. “I’ve got to get home.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Melanie. The night’s a pup. Not even housebroken. You’ve got hours.”

“I—”

Warren took her chin in his hand, tilted her head, and looked down into her eyes. Bert was sitting impassively at her side.

“One time’s not enough,” Warren said levelly. “You know that, don’t you?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Why, Bert and I have been boggling down Vitamin E all day long in preparation for the great event. And you’re hot as a cheap stove, Melanie. But there’s something you’re afraid of, isn’t there?”

She nodded.

“Do you want to say what it is? Never mind, I don’t think you have to. So let me tell you a thing or three. You don’t have to worry that Bert and I are going to wind up owning your soul. Is that part of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because this is just one night. There won’t be any repeats. This is not how we normally live, Melanie. We normally live normally, as it happens. This is excess. There is a place for excess, anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, but even excess has a place and must be kept in its place. Are any of my words penetrating that charming little dumpling of a head?”

“I’m not as stupid as you think I am, Warren.”

“As a matter of fact I think you’re probably brighter than you know yourself, Melanie.” He looked away for a moment, then fixed his eyes on hers again. “To continue. This is one night and that’s all. So we might as well use it all up while we have the chance. And we will not talk about this, Melanie. Not to your husband, not to anyone else.”

“I wasn’t worried about that.”

“It’s probably something you should worry about. Not in our case, but generally.”

“That’s my business.”

“Of course it is. What are you worried about, Melanie?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re trying to think. That’s the whole problem, you know.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. Women aren’t designed to think. Men think, women feel. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

“Oh.”

“And now I’ll play with you some more to keep your little mind out of mischief. What a sweet little cunt you are. Why don’t you give Bert some head while I do this? He generally likes it. That’s right. You have an aptitude for this sort of thing, don’t you, Melanie? A rare attribute among women. Don’t be shy, go right ahead. One of us will be sure to tell you if you do anything wrong.”

It was after four when she left. Warren and Bert backed their cars out of the driveway, then pulled in again after she had driven off. They walked back to the house in silence.

Bert said, “I really felt like putting clothes on and doing an automobile juggling act.”

“You could have given her the keys and told her to move them herself.”

“You know I’m nothing if not a gentleman.”

“Oh, I know that, all right. God, isn’t she incredible?”

“That’s a good word for her.”

“Absolutely incredible. Now she goes back home to the hairy old bear with sperm running out of every part of her. I can’t understand why she wouldn’t shower.”

“Maybe she likes to smell like a whorehouse towel.”

“What a thought.”

“Well, to go home to her husband like that—”

“Maybe he’s not living at home. Or maybe she said she was spending the night with a girlfriend and she’s on her way to a motel or some such. Lord, her eyes were swimming in sperm.”

“That’s a beautiful image.”

“Henry Miller thought of it first. Although I’m sure it would have occurred to me sooner or later. It would probably have occurred to me tonight, as a matter of fact. I wonder what’s going to happen to that little girl.”

“No more than she deserves, I trust.”

“And no less, I hope.” Warren sighed heavily. “Actually I think we ought to adopt her. We could keep her as a pet. Dress her in pretty clothes—”

“Walk her on a leash—”

“Don’t be such a bitch. She’d be fun to have around, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think my heart could take it.”

“Christ, nor mine either. I don’t want to so much as hear the word ‘fuck’ for at least a month.”

“Well, you won’t hear it from me.”

“I couldn’t abide as much as a handshake. Unlike Miss Melontits, I think I’m going to treat myself to a shower. My skin has a skin of its own and I just hope soap and water will get rid of it. Perhaps I ought to use Clorox. Ugh. I don’t want company in the shower, in case you thought that might be a cozy idea.”

“I think it’s a revolting idea. You’re perfectly safe in the shower. Just don’t use all the hot water.”

“Bert?”

“Hmm?”

“A memorable evening, what?”

“It’s been that. It’s certainly been that.”

She had intended to drive straight home. Halfway there she was shaking so badly she had to stop the car, She pulled the car over to the side and gripped the steering wheel tight in both hands.

Images battered her mind. She thought of everything that had happened, saw it all as if it were a movie, tried to find a way to fit herself into the picture. It was hard to do this. She could see herself in that movie but she could not understand how it had been her.

She turned the car around, found an all-night diner on 202 and stopped for a cup of coffee. All she wanted to do was to get home to Sully, but she knew that if she went home right away she wouldn’t be in shape to see him. She smoked and drank two cups of coffee and felt the aspects of herself beginning to fit themselves together again.

Before it had consistently been Sully who had been shaken by the new direction their lives had taken. She had been quite calm, quite unshaken. If anything she had wondered at her evident ability to take everything in her stride.

Now things had changed.

She paid the check, ignored the speculative stare of the rheumy-eyed cashier. She did not need his glance to tell her what she looked like. She could guess well enough what she looked like.

That was the song he had played when she walked into the Carversville Inn, and no one could have believed it was coincidental. It had begun as a tactic, a way of holding onto her husband, but after tonight there was no pretending that it was only that. It had become more, much more. She had discovered an appetite she had never realized she had, and every time she fed it it grew stronger, more intense more demanding.

Back into the car, back on the road. She pictured Sully in his chair, eyes dull, but the dullness backed by a hidden glint of anticipation, the ashtray beside him overflowing with butts, his hand wrapped around a cup of coffee or a glass of applejack.

Waiting for her.

She saw herself springing from the ear; hurrying to the door and into the house. The question in his eyes, a- quick shake of her head. And urgently she would say to him, “No, not now, I can’t talk about it now. Just hold me, baby. Just grab me and hold me, just hold me, just take me upstairs and fuck me, do everything to me, fuck me, just fuck me, I can’t talk now, not now, just fuck me.”

And then she was home, and out of the car and into the house, and he was sitting as she had pictured him, the expression on his face precisely the expression she had visualized.

But she was saying, “Hi, baby. Is there more coffee? Don’t get up, I’ll get it myself.”

And sitting with coffee in the chair across from him; she elaborately crossed one leg over the other and let her tongue play with her upper lip.

“Who?” he said.

“Oh, it was the oddest thing,” she said lightly. “I was shopping this morning, and I was walking along Main Street to where I parked the car, and—”

“Who was it?”

“Oh, I’ll get to that,” she said.