Semper Fi

Chapter Twelve

(One)

The Foster Park Hotel

Central Park South

New York City, New York

2320 Hours 19 November 1941

Pick Pickering was at the wheel of the LaSalle when it pulled up in front of the marquee of the Foster Park Hotel. They had gassed up just past Baltimore and changed places

there.

McCoy had gone to sleep thinking about Ellen Feller, about her probably being somewhere in Baltimore, and about what had happened between them in China-memories that reminded him of the very long time since he'd had his ashes

hauled.

The doorman stepped off the curb, walked out to the driver's side, opened the door, and said, "Welcome to the Foster Park Hotel, sir," before he realized that the driver was some kind of a soldier, a Marine, and an enlisted man, not even an officer.

"May I help you, sir?"

Pickering got out of the car.

"Take care of the car, please," he said. "We'll need it sometime Sunday afternoon."

"You'll be checking in, sir?"

The question seemed to amuse the Marine.

"I hope so," he said. "The luggage is in the trunk."

He turned back to the car.

"Off your ass and on your feet, McCoy," he said. "We're here."

McCoy sat up, startled, looked around, and as almost a reflex action, opened his door and got out.

"Where are we?" he asked, groggily.

"My grandfather calls it Sodom-on-Hudson," Pickering said, and took McCoy's arm and propelled him toward the revolving door.

The desk clerk was busy with someone else as Pickering and McCoy approached registration. Pickering pulled the Register in front of him, took the pen, and filled out one of the cards.

When the desk clerk turned his attention toward Pickering, he thrust the Registration card at him.

"We'd like a small suite," he said.

"I'm not sure that we'll be able to accommodate you, sir," the clerk said.

The clerk didn't know what the OC insignia on the collar points of the uniforms meant, but he knew a Marine private when he saw one, and Marine privates couldn't afford the prices of the Foster Park Hotel.

"House is full, is it?" the Marine asked.

"What I mean to suggest, sir," the desk clerk said, as tactfully as he could, "is that our prices are, well, a little stiff."

"That's all right," the Marine said. "I won't be paying for it anyway. Something with a view of the park, if one is available."

The desk clerk looked down at the card in his hand.

He didn't recognize the name, but in the block "Special billing Instructions" the Marine had written: "Andrew Foster, S/F, Attn: Mrs. Delahanty."

"Just one moment, please, sir, I'll check," the desk clerk said.

He disappeared behind the rack of mail-and-key slots and handed the card to the night resident manager, who was having a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry at his desk. He handed him the registration card. The night resident manager glanced at it casually, and then jumped to his feet.

He approached the Marines standing at the desk with his hand extended.

"Welcome to the Park, Mr. Pickering," he said. "It's a pleasure to have you in the house."

"Thank you," Pick Pickering said, shaking his hand. "Is there some problem?"

"Absolutely no problem. Would Penthouse C be all right with you?"

"If you're sure we can't rent it," Pickering said. "Not at this hour, Mr. Pickering," the night resident manager said, laughing appreciatively.

"Well, if somebody wants it, move us," Pickering said. "But otherwise, that's fine. We'll be here until Sunday afternoon."

The night resident manager took a key from the rack and came from behind the marble counter.

"If we had only known you were coming, Mr. Pickering…" he said. "I'm afraid there's not even a basket of fruit in the penthouse."

"At half- past four this afternoon, it was even money that we would be spending the weekend with a brick and a pile of sand," Pick Pickering said. "I don't much care about fruit, but I wish you would send up some liquor, peanuts, that sort of thing."

"Immediately, Mr. Pickering," the night resident manager said, as he bowed them onto the elevator.

Penthouse C of the Foster Park Hotel consisted of a large sitting room opening onto a patio overlooking Fifty-ninth Street and Central Park. To the right and left were bedrooms, and there was a butler's pantry and a bar with four stools.

When he went directly to answer nature's call, McCoy found himself in the largest bathroom he had ever seen.

By the time he came out, there were two room service waiters and a bellboy in the room. The bellboy was arranging cut flowers in vases. One waiter was organizing on the rack behind the bar enough liquor bottles to stock a saloon, and the other was moving through the room filling silver bowls from a two-pound can of cashews.

Pick Pickering was sitting on a couch talking on the telephone. He saw McCoy and made a gesture indicating he was thirsty.

"Scotch," he called, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. By the time McCoy had crossed to the bar, the night resident manager had two drinks made.

"We're glad to have you with us, sir," the night resident manager said, as he put one drink in McCoy's hand and scurried across the room to deliver the other to Pickering.

When they were all finally gone and Pickering finished his telephone call, McCoy sat down beside him.

"What the hell is all this?" he asked.

Pickering leaned back against the couch and took a swallow of his drink.

"Christ, that tastes good," he said. "Incidentally, I have located the quarry."

"What quarry?"

"The females with liftable skirts," Pickering said. "There's a covey of them in a saloon called El Borracho… which, appropriately, means 'The Kiss,' I think."

"I asked you what's going on around here," McCoy said.

"We all have our dark secrets," Pickering said. "I, for example, know far more than I really want to about your lady missionary."

"Come on, Pick," McCoy said.

"This is the Foster Park Hotel," Pickering said. "Along with forty-one others, it is owned by a man named Andrew Foster. Andrew Foster has one child, a daughter. She married a man who owns ships. A lot of ships, Ken. They have one child. Me."

"Jesus Christ!" McCoy said.

"It is not the sort of thing I would wish our beloved Corporal Pleasant, or our sainted gunny, to know. So keep your fucking mouth shut about it, McCoy."

"Jesus Christ!" McCoy repeated.

"Yes?" Pickering asked, benignly, as befitting the Saviour. "What is it you wish, my son?"

(Two)

They did not get laid. All the girls at the first night club had escorts. They smiled, especially at Pick Pickering, but it proved impossible to separate them from the young men they were with. The candy-asses were worried about leaving their girls alone with Pickering, McCoy thought, approvingly. He was sure they had learned from painful experience that if they blinked their eyes, Pickering and their girls would be gone.

Most of the time McCoy didn't know what the hell anyone was talking about. Only one of the girls showed any interest at all in him. She asked him if he had been at Harvard with "Malcolm." When he said no, she asked him where he had gone to school. When he said "Saint Rose of Lima," she gave him a funny smile and ignored him thereafter.

In the second place, which was called the "21" Club, McCoy thought they probably could have gotten laid: There were enough women around, but the son of the proprietor fucked that up. He wanted to hear all about the Platoon Leader's Course because he'd joined the Corps and was about to report for active duty.

Pick kept him fascinated with tales of Corporal Pleasant and slurping food from trays and doing the duck walk. When they left, he insisted on paying for their drinks and told McCoy that he was welcome any time. But that didn't get them laid either.

The third place McCoy remembered hearing about somewhere. It was called the "Stork Club." When they got there, he didn't think they were going to get in because there was a line of people waiting on the sidewalk. But Pick just walked to the head of the line, and a bouncer or whatever lowered a rope and called Pick "Mr. Pickering," and they walked in.

There was a table against the wall with a "reserved" sign on it, but a headwaiter snatched that away and sat them down there. Moments later a waiter with a bottle of champagne showed up, soon followed by the proprietor of the Stork Club. The proprietor asked about "Mr. Foster" and told Pick to make sure he carried his best regards to his parents.

Like the guy at "21," he picked up the bill. That meant they got a decent load on without spending a dime.

"Tomorrow, Ken, we will get laid," Pickering said as they got in a cab to return to the hotel. "Look on tonight as reconnaissance. The key to a successful assault, you will recall, is a good reconnaissance."

As they were having breakfast the next morning, Pick had an idea.

He called the Harvard Club and had the steward put a notice on the bulletin board: "Mr. Malcolm Pickering will entertain his friends and acquaintances at post-Thanksgiving Dinner cocktails from 2:30 P.M., Penthouse C, the Foster Park Hotel. Friends and acquaintances are expected to bring two girls."

McCoy had a good time in the morning. He made some remark about what a nice hotel it was, and Pickering then took him on a tour. This was fascinating to McCoy; and it was a complete tour, kitchens, laundry, even the little building up above the penthouses where the elevator machinery was.

McCoy saw that there was more to the tour than showing him around. Pickering looked inside garbage cans, even went into rooms with open doors. He was inspecting the place, looking for things that weren't as they were supposed to be. The other side of that was that he knew how things were supposed to be. He might be rich as shit, but he understood the hotel business.

He wondered if Pickering had learned that in school, and asked him. Pick laughed and told him that the first job he'd had in a Foster hotel was as a twelve-year-rold busboy, cleaning tables.

"I can do anything in the hotel except French pastry," Pickering said. "I've never been able to handle egg white properly."

About one o'clock, as they sat in the sitting room in their shirts and trousers drinking Feigenspann XXX Ale from the necks of the bottles, the hotel started setting up for the cocktail party. There was an enormous turkey, and a whole ham, and a piece of roast beef. And all kinds of other stuff. Thinking of how much it was costing made McCoy uncomfortable. No matter how nice Pick was being, McCoy was beginning to feel like a mooch.

It got worse when the people started showing up for the party: It wasn't hard to figure that if all the guests weren't as rich as Pick, they were still rich. And he had nothing in common with them. The only thing he had in common with Pick was the Marine Corps. And then there was one particular girl. She really made him uncomfortable.

He had never seen a more beautiful girl in his life. She was fucking near-perfect. She had black hair, in a pageboy, with dark, glowing eyes that made her skin seem pure white.

She wasn't dressed as fancy as the others, just a sweater and a skirt, with a string of pearls hanging down around her neck.

His first thought was that he would happily swap his left nut to get her in the sack, and his second thought was that she wasn't that kind of female at all. She wasn't going to give any away until she had the gold ring on her finger-not because she was careful, but because that was the kind of woman she was. Once, when she caught him looking at her, she looked right back at him, as if she was asking, "What's a scumbag like you doing looking at me? I'm not like the rest of these people."

And for some reason, she kept him from putting the make on anybody else. Not all of Pick's "friends and acquaintances" had shown up with two girls, but a lot of them had. And a bunch of women had come by themselves. One of them, a sharp-featured woman with blond hair down to her shoulders, had even come on to him, smiling at him and touching his arm when she asked him if he was in the Marines with Pick.

But he saw the girl in the pageboy looking at them with her dark eyes and didn't do anything about the blonde. After a moment, she went away.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the smoke in the place (there must have been a hundred people, and they were all smoking) got to him; and he realized he'd had more Scotch than he should have. He didn't want to get shit-faced and make an ass of himself and embarrass Pick in front of his friends. So he took another bottle of ale from the refrigerator, walked into "his" bedroom, where he interrupted a couple kissing and feeling each other up, and went out on the patio for a breath of cold, fresh air.

The sun had come up, there wasn't much wind, and it wasn't as cold as he thought it would be. It was nippy, but that's what he wanted anyhow. He sat on the wall, carefully, because they were twenty-two floors up, and looked down at Fifty-ninth Street. When that started to make him feel a little dizzy, he looked into Central Park.

He was pretty far gone from where he thought he would be on Thanksgiving afternoon, he thought, sanding the fucking deck. Then he remembered he was really far from where he had been last Thanksgiving, a PFC machine-gunner in Dog Company, First Battalion, 4th Marines, in Shanghai. He'd taken the noon meal in the mess hall. They always sent in frozen turkeys on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that was the only time there was turkey in China. They even bent the rules for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and you could bring guests who weren't European. He remembered that Zimmerman had brought his Chinese wife and all their half-white kids to the mess.

"Don't go to sleep," a female voice said to him. "That's a long step if you walk in your sleep."

Startled, he stood up and then looked to see who was talking to him.

It was the perfect fucking female in the pageboy haircut.

"I wasn't about to go to sleep," he said.

"You could have fooled me," she said. "You looked like you were bored to death and about to doze off.''

"I was thinking," McCoy said.

The string of pearls around her neck had looped around one of her breasts. It wasn't sexy. It was feminine.

"About what?"

"What?"

"What were you thinking about?" she pursued.

She sat down on the wall, and looked up at him.

Jesus Christ! Up close she's even more beautiful!

"Where I was last Thanksgiving," he said.

"And where you might be next Thanksgiving?"

"No," he said. "I wasn't thinking about that."

"I thought you might be," she said, and she smiled. "Why?"

"Well, you're a Marine," she said. "Don't they wonder where they'll be moved next?"

"I don't," he replied without thinking. "Not any further than the Corps, I mean. I know I'm going to be in the Corps. It doesn't matter where I'll be. It'll still be the Corps."

She looked as if she didn't understand him, but the question she asked was perfectly normal: "Where were you last Thanksgiving?" she asked.

"Shanghai," he said. And added, "China."

"So that's where Shanghai is," she said brightly. "I knew it was either there or in Australia."

I knew fucking well that I would show my ass if I tried to talk to somebody like this. What a dumb fucking thing to say!

She saw the hurt in his eyes.

"Sorry," she said.

"It's all right," McCoy said.

"No, it's not," she said. "There are extenuating circumstances, but I shouldn't have jumped on you."

"What are the extenuating circumstances?" McCoy asked. "I'm an advertising copywriter," she said. "I don't know what that is," McCoy confessed. "I write the words in advertisements," she explained. "Oh," he said.

"Our motto is brevity," she said. "Oh," McCoy repeated.

"We try not to say anything redundant," she said. "It's okay to jump on somebody who does." "Okay," he said.

"I had no right to do that to you," she said. "I didn't mind," McCoy said. "Yes, you did," she said, matter-of-factly. When she looks into my eyes, my knees get weak. "What did you do in China, last Thanksgiving?" "I was in a water-cooled Browning.30 crew," he said. "Browning machine gun, you mean?" she asked. He was surprised that she knew. He nodded. "I somehow didn't think you were up in Cambridge with our host," she said.

"I guess that's pretty obvious, isn't it?" She understood his meaning.

"Different means different," she said. "Not better or worse." The door to the sitting room opened, and six or seven people came onto the patio and headed for them.

They sure as hell don't know me, which means they're headed for her. Probably to take her out of here. And if she goes, that's the last I'll ever see of her. "Prove it," McCoy said. "Huh?"

"Go somewhere else with me," McCoy said. "Where?" she asked, warily.

"I don't know," McCoy said. "Anywhere you want." She was still looking at him thoughtfully when Pickering's friends came over to her.

"We wondered what had happened to you," one of the girls said. "We're going over to Marcy's. You about ready?" "You go along," the most beautiful female McCoy had ever seen said. "I've other plans."

She looked into his eyes and smiled. He realized that his heart was throbbing. Like the water hose on a Browning.30.

(Three)

"Where are you taking me?" she asked, as they walked through the lobby of the Foster Park.

"I don't know anyplace to take you," he said. "I've never been in New York before."

"I have sort of a strange idea," she said. "Chinese food."

"Huh?"

"I guess your 'Thanksgiving in Shanghai' speech triggered it," she said. "Or maybe I'm over my ears in turkey."

"You'll have to show me," he said. "I don't know anything about this town," he said.

"I think we could find a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown," she said.

"Let's get a cab," he said.

"Let's take the subway," she said.

"I can afford a cab," McCoy said.

Which means, of course, that you can't.

"I like to watch the people on the subway," she said, took his arm, and headed him toward Sixth Avenue.

"Why?" he asked.

"You ever been… No, of course, you haven't," she said. "You'll see."

His eyes widened at the variations of the species homo sapiens displayed on the subway. And they smiled at each other, and somehow she wanted to touch him, and did, and put her arm in his, her hand against the rough fabric of his overcoat.

Maybe it is the uniform, she thought. Men in uniform are supposed to get the girls.

She let herself think about that. It was not her style to leave parties with men she had met there. Especially friends of people like Malcolm Pickering. What was there about this young man that made him different?

A drunk, a young one in a leather jacket and a knitted hat with a pom-pom, walked past them and examined her with approval.

And something happened to the eyes of the young man whose arm she was holding. And, my God, whose name I don't even know! His eyes narrowed, just a little, but visibly. And they brightened and turned alert. And menacing. She was more than a little frightened. My God, he is a Marine! And all I need is to have him get in a fist fight with a drunk on the subway.

She watched, fascinated, as the drunk sensed the menace, put on a smile, and walked further down the car. McCoy's eyes followed him until he was sure the threat had passed. Then his eyes moved to her, and they changed again. The menace disappeared and was replaced by something much softer. It was almost as if he was now frightened. My God, he's afraid of me! "I don't know your name," she said. "McCoy," he said.

"McCoy Smith?, McCoy Jones?" she asked. "Kenneth McCoy," he said.

She took her arm from under his and gave him her hand. "Ernestine Sage," she said. "My parents obviously hoped for a boy. Please don't call me either 'Ernestine' or 'Ernie.' " "What can I call you?" Kenneth McCoy asked. Not ' 'what do I call you,'' she thought, but, ' 'what can I call you." He's asking permission. He doesn't want to offend me. I don't have to be afraid of him.

"Most people call me 'Sage,' " she said. "Sage means wise."

"I know," he said.

She slipped her hand back under his arm. And she saw the skin of his neck deepen in color.

They walked down Mott Street with her hand very much

aware of the warmth of his body, even through the overcoat.

"There is a legend that young white women should not

come here alone," Sage said. "That they will be snatched by

white slavers."

He did not sense that she was teasing him. "You'll be all right," he said. When she looked into his face, he averted his eyes. "They say the best food is in little places in the alleys," Sage said. "That the places on Mott Street are for tourists. The trouble is that they speak only Chinese in the little places."

"I speak Chinese," he said, and while she was still wondering whether or not he was trying to pull her leg, he led her into one of the alleys. Fifty feet down it, he stopped in front of a glass-covered sign and started to read it.

He's really very clever. If I didn't know better I'd almost believe he knew what he was looking at.

"See anything you think I'd like?" she asked, innocently.

"No," he said. "This is a Szechuan restaurant. Most Szechuan food is hotter than hell."

An old Chinese woman scampered toward them.

McCoy spoke to her. In Chinese. Sage looked at him in astonishment. But there was no question he was really speaking Chinese, because, chattering back at McCoy, the old woman reversed direction and led them farther down the street.

"Her nephew," McCoy explained, "runs a Cantonese restaurant. You'll like that better, I think."

The restaurant was on the fourth floor of an old building. There were no other white people inside, and the initial response to the two of them, Sage thought, was resentment, even hostility.

But then McCoy spoke to the man who walked up to them, and smiles appeared. They were bowed to a table, tea was produced, and a moment later an egg roll rich with shrimp.

"This is to give us an appetite," McCoy said. "Hell, I can make a meal of egg rolls." Then he heard what he had said. "Sorry," he said. "You have to remember, I'm a Marine. We get in the habit, without being around women, of talking a little rough."

"Hell," Sage said. "I don't give a damn. If it makes you feel any better, cuss as much as you goddamn well please."

He looked at her without comprehension, then he smiled. When he smiled like that, he looked like a little boy.

Their knees touched under the table. He withdrew his as if the contact had burned. With a mind of its own, seemingly, Sage's foot searched for his. When they touched, he withdrew again. She finally managed to pin his ankle against the table leg.

Now they didn't seem to be able to look at each other.

There was a steady stream of food. Very small portions.

"I told him to bring us one of everything," he said. "If you don't like something, give it to me." "What does that OC mean on your collar?" "They call it the oxes," he said. "I suppose it stands for officer candidate."

"You're going to be an officer?"

He nodded, wondering if that would surprise her, and then hoping it might impress her a little. "When?"

"End of the month," he said. "Then what?"

"What do you mean, 'then what'?" "Where will you be stationed?" "I don't know," he said.

"I remember. It's all the Corps, and therefore it doesn't make any difference, right?" "Something like that."

We are both pretending, Sage thought. He is pretending that I am not playing anklesy with him, and I am pretending that I am not doing it.

"I can't eat another bite," she said, after a while. "I don't even know what I've eaten," McCoy said. "To hell with turkey anyway," Sage said. "This is what I'm going to do from now on on Thanksgiving."

For some reason, when they got to the street, Sage felt a little dizzy.

"This time a cab," she said.

"Where are we going?"

"West Third Street," she said.

"What's there?"

"Another Chinese restaurant I heard about, what else?"

She motioned him into her apartment and then closed the door and locked it.

He roamed the apartment, and when he came back, she was still leaning on the door.

"I like your apartment," he said.

"I'm glad," she said. "My father calls it my hovel."

"I was afraid you were going to turn out rich, like Pick."

"Would that have bothered you?"

"Yes," he said, simply.

They looked at each other, their eyes locking for a long moment.

"I don't know what the hell I'm doing," McCoy said. "All I know is that I don't want to fuck this up."

He's so upset that he didn't hear himself. Otherwise I'd have got an apology for the "fuck," and he would have blushed like a tomato.

"Neither do I," Sage said. "I don't expect you to believe this under the circumstances, but neither do I."

"I think maybe I had better go."

She pushed herself off the door and walked so close to him that she could smell the wet wool odor of his overcoat.

"There's a time and a place for everything," she said. "And this is the time and place where I think you should kiss me. If that goes the way I think it will, then I think you should pick me up and carry me into the bedroom."

"Pick you up?" he asked, incredulously.

"I could crawl, I suppose," she said.

He laughed, and scooped her up, and carried her into the bedroom. He lowered her onto the bed and then stood up.

He still hasn't kissed me. All we've done is play anklesy. And the way he's standing there with that dumb look on his face, nothing is going to happen.

Very deliberately, she reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head. He stared at her in marvel. She reached behind her back and unhooked her brassiere, so that he could look at her, naked to the waist.

"Now you," she said, very softly.

She looked at him then as he ripped the uniform off.

He's good at that. Very fast. He's probably had a lot of experience taking his clothes off in a hurry in situations like this.

And then he was naked.

"You're the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," he said.

"So are you," Sage said.

As McCoy came to the bed and put his arms around her and with a great deal more tenderness than she expected held her tight against him, Sage thought, I wonder if it's going to hurt as much as they say it hurts, and if there will be a lot of blood, and if that will embarrass him.

(Four)

Pick was sitting in his underwear having breakfast in the sitting room of Penthouse C when McCoy returned. "Been out spreading pollen, have you?" Pick said. McCoy didn't reply.

"I wondered what the hell had happened to you," Pickering said. "I took a chance and ordered breakfast for both of us."

"I'm not hungry," McCoy said.

But he sat down for a cup of coffee and wound up eating a breakfast steak and a couple of eggs and the half dozen remaining rolls.

"I thought you might take just a little bite," Pickering said, "for restorative purposes." "Fuck you," McCoy said.

"Then you didn't get any," Pickering said. "With your well-known incredible good luck, you fell into the clutches of one of our famous cockteasers."

"I got a goddamned cherry," McCoy said. "I didn't know there were any left," Pickering said without thinking, before realizing that McCoy wasn't boasting; that quite to the contrary, he was ashamed. "Who was she?" he asked.

"There were two poor people in here yesterday," McCoy said. "I found the other one."

"What has being poor got to do with getting laid?" Pickering asked. "Just looking around, I get the idea that poor people spend a lot of time screwing."

"She's a nice girl, Pick," McCoy said. "And I copped her cherry."

"Death," Pickering said, mocking the sonorous tones of the announcer in the March of Time newsreels, "and losing cherries comes inexorably in due time to all men. And virgins." "Screw you," McCoy said, but he was smiling. "Which one was it?" Pickering asked. McCoy didn't want to tell Pickering her name. "We're going to have lunch," he said. "I will, of course, vacate the premises," Pickering said. "Nothing like that, goddamn it," McCoy said. "She has to work this morning. She said she would meet me for a sandwich. Someplace called the Grand Central Oyster Bar. You know where it is?"

"Oddly enough, I do. The Grand Central Oyster Bar, despite the misleading name, is in Grand Central Station." He stopped himself from saying what popped into his mind, that McCoy's deflowered virgin had apparently heard of the aphrodisiacal virtues of oysters. "It's right around the comer from Brooks Brothers."

"She said twelve-thirty," McCoy asked. "Is that going to give us enough time?"

"Sure," Pickering said.

Platoon Leader Candidates Pickering and McCoy were not the first about-to-be commissioned Marine officers the salesman at Brooks Brothers had seen. More than that, he was pleased to see them. Not only was it a sale of several Hundred dollars (more if the customer wanted his uniforms custom made rather than off the rack), it was a quick sale. None of the salesman's time had to be spent smiling approval as the customer tried on one item after another. There were no choices to be made. The style was set.

"Uniforms, gentlemen?" the salesman said.

"Sure," one of the Marines said. "I thought it would be a good idea if you remeasured me. I have just gone through a rather interesting physical training course, and I think I ain't what I used to be."

"Oh, you have an account with us, sir?"

"Yes," Pickering said. "But I'm glad you brought that up. This is Mr. McCoy. He's just come from the Orient, and he doesn't have an account. I don't think he's even had time to open a bank account, have you, Ken?"

"I've got a bank account," McCoy said.

"In any event, you'll have to open an account for him," Pickering said.

"I'm sure that won't be a problem, sir," the salesman said. "I didn't catch the name?"

"Pickering, Malcolm Pickering."

"One moment, sir, and I'll get your measurements," the salesman said.

Pickering's measurements were filed together with his account. There were coded notations that payment was slow, but was always eventually made in full.

Brooks Brothers preferred to be paid promptly, but they were just as happy to have very large accounts (the last order from young Mr. Pickering had been for two dinner jackets, three lounge suits, one morning coat, a dozen shirts, a dozen sets of underwear, a dozen dress shirts and two pairs of patent leather evening slippers) paid whenever it was convenient for the affluent.

The fitter was summoned. Mr. Pickering was an inch and a half larger around the chest than he had been at his last fitting, and his across-the-shoulder measurement had increased by an inch.

"You know what we're supposed to have?" Mr. Pickering asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Well, measure him, then, and we can get out of here. Mr. McCoy has a pressing social engagement."

When McCoy signed the bill, he couldn't quite believe the amount. They were to be paid a $150 uniform allowance. The uniforms he had just ordered (Brooks Brothers guaranteed their delivery, if necessary by special messenger, in time for their commissioning) were going to cost him just under $900.

He had the money in the account at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, but it was absolutely unreal that he was going to pay nearly twice as much for uniforms as he had paid for the LaSalle.

When they were on the street, Pickering said: "I debated you getting your uniforms there," he said. "They're expensive, but you're going to need good uniforms. In the long run, they're just as cheap. If you don't have the dough, I'll lend it to you."

"I don't need your money."

"Hey, get off my back. Get two things straight. First, that you're my buddy. And second, that being rich is better than being poor, and I have no intention of apologizing to you because I was smart enough to get born to rich people."

"The last shirts I bought cost me sixty-five cents," McCoy said. "I just bought a dozen at six-ninety-five apiece. That's what they call 'unexpected.' "

"Then you had better be careful with them, hadn't you?" Pickering said. "Make a real effort not to spill mustard on them when you're eating a hot dog?"

McCoy smiled at him. He found it very difficult to stay sore at Pickering for very long.

"It's five minutes after twelve," McCoy said. "Where's Grand Central Station?"

"Yonder," Pickering said, pointing at it. "Do I get to meet your deflowered virgin?"

"That's going too fucking far!" McCoy flared.

Pickering saw icy fury in McCoy's eyes.

"For that I apologize," he said.

The ice in McCoy's eyes did not go away.

"I'm sorry, Ken," Pickering said. "You know my mouth."

"Well, lay off this subject!"

"Okay, okay," Pickering said. "I said I was sorry and I meant it. If you're free, I'll be either in the room, or '21.' Call me. If you're not otherwise occupied."

McCoy nodded and then turned and walked toward Grand Central Station. Pickering watched him. Halfway down the block, he looked over his shoulder as if to check if Pickering was following him.

Pickering pretended to be looking for a cab.

The poor sonofabitch has really got it bad for this broad. I wonder who she is?

A cab stopped, and Pickering got in.

"Grand Central," he said.

"It's right down the street, for Christ's sake!"

Pickering handed him five dollars.

"Take the long way around," he said. "I'm in no hurry."

Feeling something like a private detective shadowing a cheating husband, he stationed himself in the Oyster Bar where he felt sure he could see McCoy and the deflowered virgin, but they could not see him.

Pickering was twice surprised when the deflowered virgin showed up five minutes early, and after a moment's hesitation kissed McCoy, first impersonally and distantly, and then again on the lips, looking into his eyes, as a woman kisses her lover.

Pick Pickering had known Ernie Sage most of her life. He was surprised that she had been a virgin. And he was surprised that McCoy thought she was poor. There were some people who thought Ernie Sage had gotten her job with J. Walter Thompson, Advertising, Inc., because she had graduated summa cum laude from Sarah Lawrence. And there were those who thought it just might be because J. Walter Thompson had the account of American Personal Pharmaceutical, Inc., which spent fifteen or twenty million a year advertising its wide array of toothpastes, mouthwashes, and hair lotions. The chairman of the board of American Personal Pharmaceuticals (and supposedly, its largest stockholder) was Ernest Sage.