A Diet of Treacle

Chapter 5

The Hoi Polloi is a small Chinese restaurant one flight above the street on Eighth Street off Sixth Avenue. Anita Carbone had never been there before, but now she was eating pork with Chinese vegetables. Although the food was good, its taste was lost on her. Something very strange was happening to her and she was doing her best to keep up with it, to figure out what was going on.

Joe Milani sat opposite Anita and filled his mouth with chicken chow mein, washing it down with tea. Soon, she knew, the meal would be finished and the waiter would present her with the check. And she would pay it.

She had never bought dinner for a boy before. When she went out to dinner with a date, he paid for the meal. No young man had ever so much as asked her to pay her own way, let alone to swing the entire check.

But this was different, Anita felt. She had picked up Joe Milani all by herself. He had been sitting alone, and she had found him, and otherwise they would never have been sitting at the same table in the Hoi Polloi.

Of course, she argued with herself, she hadn’t exactly picked him up. She had gone to the Village again, admittedly, but not for the purpose of meeting Joe. He had been on her mind, of course. He had been rather interesting in The Palermo, naturally, and certainly not the type of fellow she had been used to—nothing run-of-the-mill about Joe Milani. But she hadn’t been consciously scouting him when she had wandered through Washington Square. Not really.

When she had seen him there, it had been only natural for her to stop and say hello. It would have been rude to walk right by him without a word.

So when you looked at it that way…Anita’s thoughts trailed off.

“Two cents,” Joe said.

She glanced up, startled.

“For your thoughts,” he explained. “You look real deep. Buried in thought. Wouldn’t be fair to offer you a penny for your thoughts, not when they’re so profound. So I’ll make it two cents.”

Anita smiled.

“What are you thinking about? Tell me.”

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. Just thinking.”

He waited.

“Emptiness,” she said. “You know how somebody says his mind is a blank? Not like that exactly. Not that my mind is blank, but what I’m thinking about…well, everything. And everything I’m thinking about is blank.” Joe offered her a cigarette and she took it, put it between her lips and lit it. She thought that she could smoke in the restaurant, that it was all right, but that she should remember not to smoke outside on the street because her grandmother would be mad at her. She thought how funny her grandmother was about things like that and she wanted to laugh but didn’t. She remembered when Joe had offered her a cigarette in the park, and she had explained that it wasn’t right to smoke in the street if you were a girl.

Depends what you smoke, he had said. And she had laughed, a little uncertainly, and then later on he had mentioned pot and she had remembered the marijuana smokers in her own neighborhood, the marijuana smokers and the heroin users. Her disapproval had shown at the time and he had laughed at her, telling her that marijuana was not bad for you at all, that a New York Public Health Report had certified it as harmless, that it wouldn’t hurt you a bit. She had not been sure whether she should believe him or no.

“Emptiness,” he repeated, waking her up again. And she nodded slowly and focused on the tip of her cigarette. It was glowing dully.

“It’s all set up,” she said. “All patterned out. My whole life, practically. I live with my grandmother. She’s a nice old lady. And she keeps the place looking good, Joe. It’s supposed to be a slum—you know, East Harlem, a slum, it says so in the paper. But our apartment—I’ve seen worse, believe me.”

He nodded. She closed her eyes for a moment and pictured the apartment, her grandmother curled up in the cane-bottom rocker, rocking slowly, shriveled, small. Anita opened her eyes.

“I go to Hunter,” she said. “If you come from New York and you do well in high school you go to college for free. I did well in high school, Joe. They told me I was very bright. So I went to Hunter. You know what I’m majoring in?”

“You told me,” he said. “History, isn’t it?”

“Government—not very different, really. It’s sort of interesting some of the time. The courses.”

Joe nodded and thought about Smollett.

“And I go out on dates,” she went on. “I’m not a wallflower. I’ve even got a steady boyfriend. Isn’t that a stupid word? Boyfriend. He’s a friend and he’s a boy. His name is Ray. Ray Rico. He’s good-looking and he’s smart. Goes to Cooper Union, studying to be an engineer. You’ve got to be a whip to get into Cooper Union. He’ll walk out of that school and walk into a job with IBM or somebody at ten thousand dollars a year. You know how much that is? Two hundred dollars a week. That’s a lot of money. And the more he works for them the more money he makes. He told me he ought to be able to go as high as twenty-five thousand. You know what’s funny? When you don’t make much money it’s so much a week. A steno makes sixty-five a week, not three thousand and something a year. Nobody makes four hundred a week. You don’t think about it that way. It’s funny, I guess.”

Joe smiled. “I worked in a drugstore once,” he said. “I made seventy-five cents an hour. While I was in high school. Deliveries, dusting the stock, sweeping the floor. That type of scene. You ever hear anybody talk about making twenty bucks an hour?” But Anita’s eyes were staring into the far-away. What was she looking at, Joe wondered. Emptiness, perhaps. Space.

“All in a pattern,” she said. “When Ray graduated from high school he knew what kind of a job he would finally have. Now he knows he’ll marry me. We go out once, twice a week. A movie, a cup of coffee. At first he kissed me once at the door every night before I went inside. On the mouth. Now we sit on the roof once in a while and he touches my breasts. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? But that’s what he does. He touches my breasts. I guess pretty soon he’ll start putting his hand under my skirt. Then when there’s nothing else to do but go to bed—we’ll be married. And he’ll graduate and get his good job and we’ll buy a little house on the Island. A split-level. I’ve seen pictures of them. Small and ugly but very chic, very modern.”

She closed her eyes and saw the pictures of the split-levels. She remembered wondering why anybody would want to live in one of them.

“I’ll have an electric kitchen,” she said. “Electric range and electric refrigerator and electric dishwasher and electric frying pan and electric coffee maker and an electric sink. They’ll probably have electric sinks by then. They’ve got everything else. And we’ll have two-point-three children and one of them will have to be a boy and one a girl and God knows what the fraction will be. And we’ll have a big television set and we’ll sit in front of it every night. All of us. All four-point-three of us. We’ll stare at that screen and let it think for us nice and electrically. Real togetherness. We wouldn’t watch television alone. It wouldn’t be right. Do things in a group. The family that prays together stays together.”

“You make it sound pretty sad,” Joe ventured.

She looked hard at him. “That’s just it,” she said. “I make it sound terrible. And, you know, it is not that terrible. Not for most people. They would tell me I’m insane to make such a fuss. Look at me, I’ve got a nice guy, he’ll make money, we’ll have a good life. It’s nice. Isn’t that a great word? Nice. And it fits. It’s nice. For everybody else in the world it’s nice and I don’t want it.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

Anita put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything. I think I’m cracking up. Can you believe that? I think I’m cracking up. A nice intelligent nice Italian nice bright nice nice nice girl and I’m positively cracking up. Let’s get out of here, Joe.” She glanced at the check for the first time—no more than a dollar-seventy. She was pleasantly surprised. She put two dollars on the table and they walked out.

They walked over Eighth Street to Macdougal to the park and found a bench to sit on. On the way she didn’t know whether to take his arm or no.

They sat on the bench and were silent. She observed the passers-by and she wondered who she was. She had to be somebody. She watched boys, men with beards, girls with very long and very wild hair, and she wondered if she were one of them. She thought about the girls and boys in her classes at Hunter, the other girls and boys in her neighborhood, and she wondered if she were like them. She had to be like somebody. You couldn’t be all by yourself, she thought. You would go crazy that way.

“I talked a blue streak,” Anita said. “Before. In the restaurant. I really went on. I ran off at the mouth.”

“You had things to say.”

“I never said them before. I hardly thought them.”

“But they were still there.”

“But I hardly even thought them,” she said. “I could never tell them to anybody. Not to Ray. If I tried, he would look at me as though I were insane. And I met you for the second time and I can tell you everything.”

“Maybe it’s because you don’t know me.”

“Or because I do.”

Joe lit a cigarette and gave one to Anita who took it without hesitation, smoking it for the first time without the persistent sensation of there being something inherently wrong with the act.

“What do you do, Joe?”

“Not much.”

“I don’t mean for a living. I mean what do you do? You know what I mean.”

He shrugged. “I live with another guy. I mentioned him. Shank. The guy I was with at The Palermo.”

She nodded.

“You sure you want to know all this? Some of it isn’t pretty. You may want to go away from me. You may not like me as much anymore,” Joe said carefully.

“I want to hear.”

“He sells marijuana,” he said. “He makes a living. He pays the rent, slips me a buck now and then. He supports me, you could say. I don’t cost much. Food, rent, a buck now and then to ball with. Nothing much else.”

“He’s a…pusher?”

“Not a pusher. He buys and sells. You could call him a connection, sort of. Strictly small-time. He makes enough money so that we live. Not in style but we live.”

Anita thought about that. Joe lived because Shank was willing to support him for reasons of his own. By all rules Joe was something contemptible—low, cheap, worthless. But for some reason this did not bother the girl. She judged it unimportant, his earning a living or no.

She felt comfortable with Joe. She could relax with him, a far more important consideration to her.

“So I bum around,” he went on. “With Shank, with other people, by myself. I wander. I look at things. That’s about it, I guess. I smoke a stick here and there, lie around the pad, sit in the park. I’m a waste of time.”

“Could I live with you?”

The question startled her at least as much as it startled him. She hadn’t planned on saying that. She hadn’t even realized it had been on her mind. But it was out now, in the open, and he was staring at her.

“You don’t mean that, Anita.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. Maybe I made it sound like a picnic. You don’t understand. It’s no picnic. It’s a drag, actually. When all is said and done it’s a drag. You come on about split-levels and fractional children and you miss making a lot of important connections. You’re hipped on forests so much you forget how much you hate trees.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s where it’s at. You don’t understand at all. You think this is roses or something. No worries, no sweat. Just dig everything because it’s real. You missed a few changes, Anita. You think I’m here because I love it so damn much. That’s not it.”

“I know.”

“Sure you do. You think it’s a perfect scene. You think it’s free and romantic and wonderful and anybody who works for a living is out of his head. You think you can beat the world by making a scene like this.”

“I didn’t say that.”

He ignored her. “You just don’t understand,” Joe said. “You think I make the let’s-be-beat scene because I like it. I don’t. I don’t like it at all.”

“Then—”

“I make it because there’s no other scene I could make. I make it because everything else is just a little bit worse. Not for the world. For me. Personally. It’s not the world’s fault. It’s my fault and I’m stuck with it.”

“I know,” she said. And when he tried to interrupt her she shook her head. “I understand,” she went on. “But you don’t. You think you’re the only person who thinks your way. Maybe I can’t…can’t make it…either. I don’t know the words yet. I don’t know how to talk the way you talk. Just how to think and even that I’m just learning. I don’t know who I am. But I know who I’m not. There’s a difference. And that’s why I want to come and live with you. Why I still want to. Unless you don’t want me.”

She felt his hand on her arm. She closed her eyes and stopped talking.

“You don’t love me, Anita.”

“Of course not!”

“Then—”

“I don’t love Ray, either. But I could marry him, still without loving him, and the whole world would throw rice at us. Does that make so much more sense?”

“Maybe not.”

“Then why can’t I live with you?”

He smiled gently. “Your grandmother won’t like it,” he said. “Even with a nice Italian boy like me. She won’t like it at all.”

“I’ll tell her I’m taking an apartment with another girl. I’ll tell her something. I don’t care what she thinks. She’ll leave me alone.”

“Ray won’t like it either.”

“He’ll find another girl. One who’ll fit in the split-level a little better. He’ll live.”

Joe Milani had no comment.

“I’m just a virgin,” she said slowly. “I won’t know what to do. But if we go to your place now you can show me, and tomorrow I can move in after I tell my grandmother something. And—”

“Are you very sure, Anita?”

She started to say yes and then she changed her mind. Because she was not at all certain and she saw no reason to conceal her uncertainty from him. “Of course not,” she said. “I’m not certain about anything. I’m all mixed up inside and I’m going to pop any minute. Now stop asking me questions. I know what I want right now. I want you to take me home and make love to me. That’s all I want.”

He stood up, held out a hand for her. She hesitated only for a second. Then she took his hand and straightened up and they began walking out of the park. When Joe and Anita slipped into the small apartment together, he could not help but sense a vague uneasiness.

Shank was there, sitting on his bed, a paperback novel in one hand. His eyes flicked from the book to the girl, then to Joe, and back to the girl. His lips never moved. His eyes somehow signified he recognized and remembered the girl, and was reserving judgment.

“Shank,” Joe said. “Anita.”

That was the introduction. Anita smiled at Shank, hesitantly, and Shank nodded shortly before returning to the book. Joe was disturbed by the feeling he could swing either with Shank or Anita—but the three of them?

“Shank—”

Eyes came up. Hard, cold.

“Could you do a brief split?” Joe said.

“Huh?”

“If I give you a quarter will you go to the movies? A little brother routine. Like that.”

“Oh,” Shank said. “Really?” He stood up, smiled strangely, and closed the novel, tucking it away in his hip pocket. He took out a cigarette and lit it, dropping the match to the floor. “Congratulations,” he said, speaking the words to Joe while his eyes were busy reassessing Anita. He had bold eyes. He stared hard at her breasts and loins until she flushed. Then he smiled, pleased, and headed for the door. He left it open and Joe had to close it.

Then he walked over and put his arm around Anita.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She raised her head.

“Messy,” he said. “Shank can be relatively evil. A mean stud.”

“I don’t like him,” Anita said quietly.

“I do.”

“Because he supports you?”

Joe grinned. “Hey,” he said. “Like let’s not go moralistic, huh? I like Shank. We swing together. I don’t want to throw stones at him, Anita. I’m not entirely without sin, you know, and I don’t want to cast the first one. Or the second. We get along. We share a pad, talk, hit the same sets.”

“I’m sorry.”

He led her over to the bed and they sat down together. He tried to figure out what he should do next. The pad was a mess—dirty clothes on the floor, a layer of dirt covering everything. Not romantic, but he didn’t suppose that made much difference. It was not the setting itself but the prevailing mood that unnerved him. He and the girl were together in a room she had never been in before to do something she had never done before.

Shank had left, sneering, aware of the agenda. Now Joe was scheduled to make some sort of pass at her, at which she ought to respond avidly. Thereupon they were supposed to make mad and passionate love among the dirt and debris of the apartment.

Then he would go to sleep, or turn on, or go for a walk, or see some people, or do something. And she would board the train for Harlem and say hello to grandma and fall asleep in her own little bed.

It wasn’t going to work, Joe thought.

“Look,” he said, feeling terribly awkward. “Look, you can call this off. We can stop here and say good-bye. Or we can sit around and talk.”

She started. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “But—”

“If I did it was an accident. I…I want you to make love to me. That’s all.”

“We could wait until tomorrow. You could relax a little and then—”

“Tonight.”

He digested that. He still did not know where to begin, but he decided that there had to be a way, that all girls were built the same, that somehow they would wind up making their own kind of love. Then, he felt certain, she would go back to Harlem never to return. Sex was one thing. Commitment to an emptiness far greater than the one she spoke of was another. So Joe put his arm around Anita again and this time he kissed her, quietly. Her mouth stayed closed, but after a moment of the gentle pressure of one pair of lips upon another, her young arms curled around him and held him very close. He liked the taste of her lips, their coolness, and he imagined the sweetness of her young body.

He kissed her again and her lips opened, his tongue turning up between them. Without trying as yet to arouse her, he wanted to know her, to understand her body with his, to touch her in some way not strictly sexual. He kissed her again and he felt the vague foreshadowings of response—the indrawn breath, the muscular tension and faint quiverings.

“Scared?” Joe said.

Startled, she looked up at him, as if he had been reading her mind.

“This is your ball game,” he assured her. “You can call the shots. So there’s nothing to be scared of.”

And, because there was nothing in the world to say after that, he kissed the girl. He leaned against her a little and they rolled back on the bed. They were lying on their sides, facing one another. He kissed her closed eyes, and kissed her nose. He pressed his lips to her throat, the softness there surprising him. He kissed her again and again.

Then his hand finger-tipped her breast, pliant through the clothing. She stiffened a little. He remembered that this had been as much as the square cat, the engineer, had accomplished in many months of dating. So he held her breast very gently and kissed her again. He released her. “The light,” he explained, and he crossed the room to kill the lamp. The room was plunged into a kind of charcoal gray. He walked back and stretched out next to the girl curled up on the bed like a sleepy kitten in front of a fire, her eyes still closed. Joe could dimly feel the outline of the white bra through Anita’s white sweater. For a time he stroked and fondled. Then, slowly, he pulled the sweater free from the skirt and slipped his hand beneath to rub her back, the small of her back and her shoulders. He found the bra clasp and mastered it.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh—”

He kissed her lips. He used both hands to draw the sweater over her head. He could feel the tension in her body. He knew that nobody, no man, at least, had ever seen her breasts before. He knew that exposure scared her, and that he would have to be gentle. When he had removed the white sweater, he folded it carefully on a chair. He gazed at her bare and lovely breasts, large and firm, crisscrossed by light blue veins, and the nipples miniature red puffs newly wrinkled. Joe stroked her cool breasts gently, thoughtfully; he was happily aware of her sensual response, but he was sensitive at the same time to a reluctance in that very response that might be welling out of fear. He felt both desire and restraint increasing in Anita and struggling for supremacy and he wondered which would triumph.

After he had undressed, he kissed her breast again, and then linked a chain of light muzzlings around her. She smiled sleepily and he was glad, feeling you had to keep your sense of humor to enjoy sex; humorless, it could drag you, slow you up.

“Joe…” she whispered. “No more.”

“You’re very pretty, Anita. Very lovely.”

“Do you like my breasts?”

“Very much.”

“I like it when you kiss them. It makes me feel…funny. I don’t know. Funny and good.”

“I like to kiss them.”

“Do it some more.”

He complied, and as he did so he hurried a hand beneath the folds of her skirt, touching the inevitable roughness of a knee and passing upward to the incredibly fantastic softness of a thigh. She gasped.

Now came the really critical part, for Joe to undress her.

He unhooked and unbelted her skirt and he took it off, his eyes dwelling on the dimly discernible wonder of her beautifully slender legs. He paused for a moment, and then he kissed her belly and thighs. She again quivered and again Joe felt from the girl the same contradictory pairing of passion and fear. Now she was nude and utterly defenseless; and, before he could touch her, her fear moved to the foreground and made her body rigid with shame. Joe understood, and became motionless.

“You can go home now,” he said. “If you want to. We don’t have to go through with it, not now, not if you’re afraid of it. We can make it some other time, there’s lots of time, you can go home now and rest and relax and think about it and then you can come back tomorrow or the next day or not at all, whatever way you want it. But we don’t have to make it now, not when you’re afraid.”

Her eyes opened.

She looked at him, at his nakedness, and her eyes held neither shame nor fear. Then she stared down at herself, at her own nakedness, and she smiled a soft and personal smile.

“I want to, Joe.”

“Are you sure?”

“I want to,” Anita said. “Of course I’m scared, any girl would be, it’s natural, I can’t help it. But I want to make love, I want to—even if I can’t get as excited as I’d like to. I want to, I want you to do it to me, please do it, please—”

Joe touched her breasts, then, sleeping things awakening the instant he found them; and his hand trailed to find the softest warmth of her, bringing her to an apex of life.

Like creatures in the oldest of dreams, they moved bodies toward one another, and they flowed together into one, the girl’s pain at first so agonizing that Joe himself ached from it, his head spinning, his eyes balls of lead. But gradually pain subsided and silken, throbbing pleasure claimed her so magically that, when Anita opened her eyes momentarily to scan the great power of her lover, she could have sworn the charcoal gray of the room had become quilted with rosy fire.

Roaches scurried across the wooden floor, ignoring two warm bodies locked in sorcery and sweetness but not quite love.

Andy’s Castle, a cubbyhole bar on Houston Street, was close enough to the mainstream of the Village to be a meeting-place, and far enough away to escape the stream of tourists and Village habitués. A jukebox behind the bar blared the pop tunes of the day. If the place had an Andy, he failed to be in evidence. A woman barkeep, a blowsy female whose dyed red hair tumbled over burly shoulders, was drawing a stein of draft beer for a rheumy-eyed man.

A boy in the booth at the back very nearly jumped when Shank pushed in through the heavy brown door. The boy forced himself to be calm while Shank ordered a glass of draft.

“Man,” the boy said. “Man.”

Shank looked at him.

“I been waiting an hour,” the boy said. “An hour in this hole. A fucking hour, you dig?”

“Shut up.”

“An hour. And—” Shank started to stand up. The alarm in the boy’s face was so great Shank wanted to laugh. Instead, he leaned over and placed his hands on the table in the booth, peering down at the boy.

“You want to play? You want to talk? Or maybe you want to deal,” Shank said.

“All right. Cool. Sit down,” the boy said.

Shank sat down. “An hour is an hour,” he told him. “I’m the one who holds. I’m the one with the world looking at him hard. You can sit in this hole till you rot and you won’t get busted for it. Perfectly legal. You’re hardly even drinking.”

The boy started to say something, but Shank motioned him to shut up.

“You wait for me,” Shank went on, “and everything’s fine. Everything stays fine. I ever have to wait for you and it’s bad. Very ugly. So you do the waiting and you keep cool about it. You dig?”

The boy nodded.

“How much?” Shank asked.

“Twenty cents,” the boy said.

Shank nodded. He took out a manila envelope containing two-thirds of an ounce of marijuana and one-third of an ounce of catnip. The boy was a steady customer and bought an average of an ounce a week. It wouldn’t do, Shank thought, to put him on a Bull Durham mix. But cutting it slightly with catnip hurt nobody, Shank judged, confident that neither the boy nor the boy’s customers, whoever they might be, could tell catnip from marijuana.

“The bread,” he said.

A hand reached under the table. Shank took four bills from the hand. He glanced at them. Four fives. Twenty cents, in his parlance. Twenty dollars to the square world. He folded the money and pocketed it. Then he passed the envelope back the same way. The boy took it and found a pocket for it. Shank noticed the automatic and unconscious change in the boy’s expression. He was holding now, violating the law, and a mask of wariness jelled on his face. The boy was the hunted one now.

He made as if to rise.

“Sit down,” Shank said. “You waited an hour. Another minute won’t hurt.”

The boy looked uncomfortable.

“It’s good stuff,” Shank assured him. “The Mau-Mau’s final batch. You don’t have to worry.”

“Solid.”

“About selling it, I mean. Your customers will dig it. You never get beat stuff from the Mau-Mau.”

The boy flushed. “I don’t sell, Shank.”

“Sure, I’m hip. You smoke an ounce a week all by yourself. Solid.”

“Shank—”

“You want to lie, it’s your business. But don’t expect me to believe you.”

The boy had a red face now. “Just to come out even,” he said. “So my own stuff doesn’t cost me anything. That’s all.”

“I’m hip.”

“I don’t make a profit. I’m not a…pusher, for Christ’s sake.”

Shank smiled, happy. “Nobody’s a pusher,” he said. “We’re all connections. Just a big string of connections from the top to the bottom. You’re part of a system, my man. That’s all. How does it feel to be a little cog in the world’s roundest wheel?”

Shank walked out first, letting the kid worry about it. He felt good getting outside. It was the second sale of the night and also the last. He was not holding and he was not hustling anything. Just relaxing. Just walking around and having his own private laughs.

Like the chick. Anita. That was a laugh, a big round one. The two of them balling now, with the chick scared out of her bra and Joe looking like Papa Professor with phallic overtones. Oh, that was a gas.

But the chick was nice. Fine stuff. Choice. He liked the type—the face, the whole flip structure. And he liked the fear. The scared ones were the most fun. Pretty soon, he thought, he would have to try his luck with her. And he laughed a loud laugh echoing in an alleyway and bouncing back and forth between the empty storefronts of Houston Street. Because it would be very funny. Very funny.

She was on the train heading for home, by herself, naturally. But she had been somewhat astonished that Joe had walked her to the subway. Someone like Ray, naturally, would have escorted her home as a matter of course. But Joe was not Ray, and as a result she had been a little amazed that he had taken the time and trouble to walk her to the Lexington IRT stop at Astor Place.

Now the train rolled north, grinding down the tracks toward Harlem, and she had only her thoughts and memories. It was close to midnight, late for a night before a school day, but she felt no anxiety. Her grandmother would be asleep and probably without worry. Her grandmother seemed to be losing a little more contact with reality every day.

Tomorrow, when Anita would inform the old woman she would be moving out, the girl would scarcely encounter an argument.

Leaving Harlem. Moving in on Saint Marks Place. And where, little girl, are we headed? Where will we wind up, and why?

You are no longer a virgin, little girl, and that, if nothing else, would shock the daylights out of your grandmother. It has even shocked you a bit, little girl, much as you would like to hide the fact. Shocked you to the very core.

Anita smiled that same private and personal smile she had smiled once before that evening. And she remembered the magic of making love, of taking pleasure, giving pleasure and straining for happiness. She had not quite reached the peak, but she had found pleasure enough without it.

And Joe had assured her that she would eventually reach the peak. Not that that as yet made much difference to her; the physical pleasure remaining secondary. Her joy at the total experience was the important matter.

Now she and Joe would live together. So many things would go to hell, she mused—school and home and Ray and that split-level in suburbia. But so much would be left. A new world. Maybe the right one. Because somewhere there had to be the right one, the best of all the possible ones. Somewhere.

After the love-making Joe had offered her a marijuana cigarette that she had declined. And he had shrugged, to show it had not mattered, and had put the cigarette away. She wondered which parts of the life she would take and which to reject. There must be that level to attain on which you could freely search and think without dissipating yourself into the void. She would find that balance and so would Joe.

The train rushed on, from stop to stop, and she rushed along with it. Her thoughts and memories caught her up and whirled her around and she forgot the train and her destination. She all but missed her stop. But as the train pulled into 116th Street, she remembered who she was and where she was and where she was going.

She stepped out of the train and walked up to the night and headed quickly home.