The Trouble With Eden

One

“You’re the only one open. But I guess you knew that, huh?”

She looked up. Interruptions were not likely to startle her. Customers were infrequent during the off-season, and in the time she had worked at the Lemon Tree, Linda Robshaw had learned to lose herself in a book in their absence and to become quickly alert on their appearance.

She said, “Oh, hi, Tanya. What time is it, anyway?”

“Five-thirty, quarter of six. I was just getting my hair done.”

“It looks nice.”

“Well, it’s the same, but thanks. I just let him wash it. I can never get it as clean as I like it. It seems silly to pay money for what you could do standing under a shower. But I wanted to look decent for tonight.”

“Tonight? Oh, the play.”

“The Crucible. It’s the best part I’ve had so far. I don’t understand all of it, though.” Tanya had been walking back and forth in one of the aisles. Now she took a small doll from an eye-level teak shelf. “‘Made in Taiwan,’” she read. “Made in Taiwan by spastics. Who would pay four ninety-five for a dime’s worth of wood and a nickel’s worth of cloth?”

“The same kind of nut who would buy any of the crud we sell.”

“Don’t let the boss catch you talking that way.”

“Oh, Olive says the same thing herself,” Linda said. “She says contempt for your customers and their lack of taste is a form of local patriotism.”

“What are you reading? Sylvia Plath. She’s the one killed herself?”

“Uh-huh. A poem at a time.”

“Oh, poems? Any good?”

“Very. But depressing.”

“Why read something that’s gonna depress you?”

“Good question,” she said. She closed the book, got to her feet. “Wait while I close up and I’ll walk you home.”

“Well, I was going to the theater, Linda. They want me to go over a couple of things. I could walk you as far as—”

“No, go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”

After Tanya had left, Linda sat for a few moments at the desk, the copy of Ariel in her hand. Then she locked the cash drawer, turned off the lights, closed and locked the door of the little gift shop, and walked down the corridor and out of the small shopping mall.

The streets were dark, with only a few stores still open. She crossed to the grassy triangle at the corner of Ferry Street, skirted the old cannon with its mound of cannonballs, walked down Main past the playhouse and across the bridge to Mechanic Street.

She shook her head, thinking of Tanya Leopold. Why read something that’s gonna depress you? Tanya would no more read Sylvia Plath than she would permit herself to be depressed for any other reason. The little actress, who Marc had assured her was as utterly untalented as any he had met, had an unquestionable talent for life. She ate, slept, acted, had her hair done, and made love, approaching all these activities with healthy enthusiasm. She was always in good spirits and generally improved the spirits of those who knew her.

Whereas Linda Robshaw, who read depressing books, was in turn depressing—

Spring had come late this year and had not brought her the sense of rebirth she usually associated with the season’s arrival. It was her first spring in New Hope, and she had been looking forward to it through the cold wet deadening winter. Springtime in Manhattan had meant little more than a change in weather — you had to go to the parks for any visible sign of nature returning to life — yet here, with the spring bulbs flowering, with trees leafing out and flowering shrubs showing color, with massive banks of forsythia a golden fire along the Towpath, she still felt no corresponding rush of sap in her own veins.

She turned right at Mechanic Street and walked a few hundred yards to the large squat buildings where she and Marc were living. The three-story brick structure had been built in 1887 by one Cecil Crofter, who had intended it as a factory for the manufacture of wigs and other human hair goods. The business failed almost before it had begun, and the brick structure ultimately emerged as an apartment house, with two apartments on each floor. Each apartment had since been further subdivided, so that there were now six rental units on the first floor and five on each of the two upper stories.

An owner during the twenties had named it the Coryell Arms, and that inscription could still be made out, carved into oaken timbers over the doorway. But no one ever called it by this name. Instead it was universally known as the Shithouse.

Local history had it that someone had commented that the building was built like a brick shithouse and that the adjective had gradually disappeared from usage over the years. But Shithouse residents were inclined to believe that it would have acquired its name whatever materials had been used in its construction. The drabness of its exterior was more than matched by the squalor within. Neither the rooms nor the hallways had been painted within anyone’s memory. Chunks of plaster periodically dropped from the ceilings and were never replaced. The plumbing was noisy and unreliable, and the building abounded in violations that would have appalled a Harlem slumlord.

The Shithouse was, year in and year out, the most profitable piece of rental property in Bucks County.

The secret of the Shithouse’s commercial success was simple enough. Sully Jaeger rented his apartments by the week, and he would rent to anyone with a week’s rent in his hand. There was no credit investigation because no credit was ever extended. There were no leases to sign, no security deposit to pay. All tenants paid by the week, in advance, and any tenant who could not come up with the rent the day it was demanded was out on the street, bag and baggage, by nightfall. A landlord renting by the week was not hamstrung by eviction procedures, but could operate on the same basis as a hotel. Sully’s eviction proceedings consisted of advising a rentless tenant he had an hour to come up with the rent or remove his belongings. At the end of the hour Sully would return, change the lock cylinder on the apartment door, and throw whatever remained in the apartment out the window. It was widely rumored that on one occasion the tenant himself had been present in the apartment at end of the standard hour, and that Sully had unceremoniously heaved him out the window after his luggage.

Linda climbed the Shithouse stairs. The air in the stairwell was stale, flavored with old cooking smells. They ought to get out of the place, she thought. She and Marc had moved in temporarily in September, glad to pay fifty dollars a week rather than hassle with leases and deposits. But the temporary stay had dragged out for almost eight months already. For the same rent they could have a larger apartment in a decent building.

It would be worth it — if they were going to stay in New Hope. If.

The apartment door was locked. She fished in her bag for the key, opened the door. She found the note immediately. It was on top of the convertible sofa, where they always left notes for each other. Businesslike notes, some of the time — “Linda, I’ll be late at the theater, go ahead and eat without me.” Cute love notes — “Marcums, I was here. You wasn’t. I misses you. Does you misses me?”

But she knew as soon as she saw the note what it was going to be. She picked it up and stood by the side of the sofa and read it. Her eyes wouldn’t focus at first, and the words were blurred, but she read it all the way through.

There was a little more. He had left some money in the dresser drawer, not much, but all he could spare. She put the note down and went to the dresser to discover that he had been able to spare one hundred twenty dollars. She counted the bills three times, then got her wallet from her purse and counted up her own cash. It suddenly seemed very urgent to determine just how she stood financially. The thirty-seven dollars in her wallet gave her total capital of one hundred and fifty-seven dollars. After work Friday she would receive thirty dollars from Olive McIntyre, her wages for fifteen hours of work at the Lemon Tree. Around noon Saturday Sully would be around to collect fifty dollars rent.

Problem: If you have one hundred and fifty-seven dollars to start with, and each week you earn thirty dollars and pay out fifty, how long do you last?

Answer: If you can borrow three dollars from somebody, you can last eight weeks. And that’s long enough, because sometime in the course of those eight weeks you starve to death.

She moved to the kitchenette, a corner of the room furnished with a hot plate and a small refrigerator. She checked the refrigerator and the cupboards. There were some cans of chili and ravioli and vegetable soup, a box from a health food store, some eggs and cheese, other odds and ends. It somehow didn’t look like eight weeks’ worth of food.

She opened dresser drawers, checked the closet, all to confirm what she already knew, that he had taken everything of his from the apartment. They had been together for two years, a year and a half in New York and almost eight months here. For the first few months he had kept his old apartment before they decided they were enough of a long-term prospect to live together. Since then they had accumulated rather little in the way of community property. The record player was his, and he had taken it; the typewriter was hers, and it remained behind. He had taken all the records, which was hardly fair in that perhaps a third of them had been hers originally, but she could understand that he would not have wanted to waste time sorting through the stack.

And she had long ago decided that, were she to leave him, she would have left all the records behind. Except for one Billie Holiday record, which he had taken with all the others and which she rather expected she would miss. Alan had bought that record for her — how many years ago? — and she had taken it with her when she left Alan.

She would miss that record. It was good get-drunk music, late Billie Holiday, the rusty old voice just getting by, the phrasing covering up the broken-down equipment.

Do nothin’ till you hear from me... and you never will.

She picked up the letter, and Tanya’s voice echoed, again in her head, “Why read something that’s gonna depress you?” But did it in fact depress her? It shook her, it had her off-balance, but she was not at all sure that she was as down now as she had been before finding the note. He was not entirely right. It had not been good while it lasted, but it had been good for quite a while, more often than not, and then somewhere along the way, sometime in the cold, wet, gray winter, it had turned a corner and become more bad than good. Since then the end had been inevitable.

She laughed aloud, an unreal brittle sound that surprised her. “You son of a bitch,” she said, “I was going to leave you, you bastard. Why couldn’t you wait?”

But it evened out, she realized. He had done the leaving and could bear the guilt; she had been left and could feel worthless and rejected. There would be enough bad vibes to go around.

There generally were.

She had always been distant from people. Even as a girl in Dayton, she had lived very much alone in her own world. She was not autistic, and her withdrawal was recognized less by others than by herself. But she had known very early, so early that it seemed to her she had always known, that other people were able to be a part of one another in a way that she was not. An only child herself, her companions in childhood and after were almost invariably only children. With girls, she was most comfortable in relationships that furnished companionship without intimacy, friendship without the sharing of confidences. With boys and later men, her relationships similarly stayed on or near the surface. What intimacy existed was staged, an illusion created by mutual role playing.

When she was seventeen years old, she began dating a boy named Carl Spangenthal. He was nineteen, a second-year business major at the University of Dayton. He was very tall and very thin, with a narrow, rabbity nose and two high spots of color on his pale cheeks. She did not find him attractive, nor did she like him much,

But for some reason or another it never occurred to her to decline a date with him.

“You know what I like about you?” he would say. And then he would praise one or another negative virtue. “Your hands don’t perspire the way so many girls’ do. One thing I can’t take is clammy fingers.” Or he would praise her complexion by assuring her that acne really put him off. “I mean even a couple of pimples, say two or three pimples on a girl’s chin, and that’s it for me.” It seemed to her that his development of their relationship consisted of forever finding new ways in which she failed to turn his stomach.

One night, giddy and taut-nerved after an evening of petting, she became quietly hysterical in her bedroom at the thought of suddenly breaking out in everything that nauseated Carl. She envisioned herself turning in the course of an evening’s near lovemaking into a creature blossoming with pimples and gleaming with chill sweat, her eyes grown suddenly small and close together (“Just can’t take little beady pig eyes”), her breath foul, her whole body magically transformed into a compendium of everything that he deplored. Then he would turn on the lights and gag and run shrieking from the car, never to be seen again. She couldn’t get the image out of her head, collapsing on her bed in silent spasms of giggling.

However her vision changed her feelings for him, it in no way altered their relationship. He went on taking her out, and presumably would go on doing so until he hit on a flaw and found it in her. And she went on dating him. Few other boys asked her out. She was a high school senior, boys in her classes dated younger girls, and the boys she had dated in earlier years had mostly gone away to college. After she had been going with Carl for two months she turned down all other invitations automatically.

He was able to thrill her, and he was the first boy to manage this. In the limited petting she had done previously she had never been remotely excited. She had been neither fast nor slow, permitting this and prohibiting that intuitively, guessing at what the boy himself expected her to permit or prohibit. She had never enjoyed being touched or kissed. At times she had thought that no girl enjoyed it, that it was something one did — and pretended to enjoy — for the benefit of the boy. At other times she decided that this pleasure real enough for most people, but that it was denied along with access to the warm and intimate world others.

Carl, whose conversation at best bored her, whose appearance varied in her eyes from peculiar to near-ugly, was able to excite her beyond belief.

It was almost as though, when his mouth was on hers and when his hands were inside her blouse or under her skirt, he ceased to exist. He was not there at all for her. The hands on her breasts were disembodied. They were not hands at all; the warmth of her flesh, the urgent stiffening of her nipples, were simply happening.

It took him over a month to do more than kiss her chastely goodnight at her door. But from the first night he kissed her with passion she never considered denying him anything he wanted. Her capacity for refusal vanished instantly and permanently with the first utterly unexpected wave of excitement.

Yet it was six months more before he had coitus with her. She never once stopped him, and each time he managed to stop himself. Every night they were together he would go just the slightest bit farther than they had gone before, and she wondered years afterward if he had imagined himself a brilliant seducer, always moving closer and closer to that unattainable goal, never realizing that he could have her at any time simply by taking her.

As their weekly dates became more specifically sexual, they talked less, saw fewer movies. She preferred it this way. In his parked car, in darkness and silence, it was easier to tune him out and tune herself in. Their times together left her knotted with frustration which she was unable to recognize as such. She did not know that women had orgasms and mistook the tingling tension for ultimate sexual pleasure. Indeed, it was pleasurable for her; afterward she would feel vital and alive as she had never felt previously.

The pattern of their evenings together became as predictable and ritualized as a bullfight. He would park the car in the riverside park, and they would kiss and touch each other for a few minutes before moving to the back seat. There he would spend an hour undressing and exciting her, and then she would bring him to orgasm. He taught her to do this with her hands and sat back with eyes clenched shut while she stroked him rhythmically as he had shown her. A sudden intake of breath would warn her to be ready with the Kleenex.

Later she satisfied him between her breasts. Her breasts were not especially large (“One thing I can’t take is the type who looks more like a cow than a girl”) but neither were they small, and she would recline on the car’s back seat, knees high and upper body bared, while he crouched over her with his penis between her breasts.

“Hold ’em together, make it tight, oh that’s right—”

Finally there was a night when he tore the foil from an oiled prophylactic and pulled it on like a glove. Well, this is it, she thought, and lay back trembling. He had trouble entering her and cursed tonelessly. Then he was inside her, and there was pain, but hardly enough to think about, and then an instant later it was over and he was gasping and shaking upon her.

“Well,” he said. “Well, now.”

Later that night she was struck by the thought that this first time would surely be the last time as well. That it had been the pursuit he enjoyed, and that he would cease to be interested in the prize now that he had won it. The thought did not particularly bother her, although it seemed to her that it ought to. She knew she felt nothing like love for him, but she needed him in certain ways, didn’t she? There must have been a need that led her to give herself to him, and what could have happened in the act of giving to eliminate the need?

Perhaps she more than he was excited by the approach and disappointed by the arrival. They went out together five more times and had intercourse each time. On these occasions his own performance improved significantly. He sustained the act for a respectable amount of time and performed it with rather more flair. And yet each time she enjoyed it less. He had had the ability to drive her wild with excitement, and now, although she still drew pleasure from his lovemaking, her excitement was only a fraction of what it had been.

Toward the end, she began to withdraw mentally while they were making love. Previously she had blanked out her lover as a specific person. But now she blanked out the act itself and substituted fantasy. While he was astride her, his penis buried within her, her mind would entertain memories of when she had held him between her breasts.

And years later, when she thought of Carl, she would at once see him curled beside her in that car, wiping his seed from her neck and throat, then folding the tissue and putting it away. That was always the first and strongest image that came to mind when she thought of him. It was the most he had ever shown of tenderness, the closest approach he had ever made to concern, and she never forgot it.

She lit a cigarette and went over to the telephone. She lifted the receiver, poised herself to dial, and for a moment her mind lost the number completely. She could not even remember the area code. Then it came back and she dialed the number and her mother answered on the second ring.

She said, “Hello, Mom. How’s everything at home?”

“Linda! What a surprise.”

“I just thought I would call.”

“Dad and I were going to call you on Sunday. Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“I was just about to call your father for dinner. He’s out in the garage. We’ve been having a little trouble with the car.”

“I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Well, you could ask him. No use in asking me, for all I understand about mechanical objects. I seem to remember something about a wheel bearer or bearing, if there’s such a thing. I suppose Marc would know.”

“He probably would.”

“He’s still at the theater?”

“Yes. He’s going to be directing a show in the spring, if everything goes right.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful. He’ll be the director.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m glad he’s making progress. It’s a difficult business, isn’t it? The theater. You have to keep at it for years and years. The struggle to get ahead. Do you think — I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask.”

“What?”

“Oh, the usual question, I suppose.”

“There’s really no point in our getting married, Mother.”

“I know it, and I’m sorry I—”

“It would be different if we were living in Dayton, of course it would be different, but we’re not. But here nobody thinks about it.”

“You’d be surprised how many people aren’t thinking about it in Dayton. I suppose I’m old-fashioned.”

“I was married once, and so was Marc. Neither of us wants to rush into it again.”

“You don’t have to explain to me, Linda. I understand.”

“Well.”

“All that’s really important is for two people to love each other, isn’t it?”

“That’s what’s important, all right.”

“Of course if it ever came to the point of having children—”

“Then we would get married. But until then there’s no point to it. We’ve had this conversation so many times, Mother, and I—”

“I know, and I’m sorry. Well—”

“How’s everybody in Dayton?”

She got the question out and closed her eyes and tuned out the answer. Everybody in Dayton was about the same, except that so-and-so got married and so-and-so got divorced and so-and-so had a coronary, his second, poor man, but he was recovering nicely all the same, and Mrs. Something was getting cobalt treatments and when they got to that stage, it was as much as saying there was nothing to be done, but doctors of course would never come right out and admit this so they sent you for cobalt instead of telling you to go die quietly, and—

She said the right words in the right places, grateful for a stream of talk that she could half listen to, the endless stream of vital statistics about people whose names she barely recognized and in whom she had not the slightest interest. Sometimes she felt that she ought to be interested. She had spent eighteen years in Dayton plus summers during her college years. The people who filled her mother’s monologues were the people she had known for the greater portion of her life. Insofar as she had a home, Dayton was that home. If she were to die tomorrow, Dayton was where the body would be shipped, Englander’s Funeral Home where the rites would conducted, Park Hill Cemetery where she would be tucked into the earth.

Dayton was where she had run when her marriage broke up. The day she and Alan acknowledged it was over, she flew instinctively to Dayton and moved immediately into her old bedroom. And after a trip to Alabama had officially terminated that marriage, she again returned to Dayton. Because it was all the home she had, and when things fell apart, you went home. She had gone there knowing she could not stay there, could not live there, knowing that whatever life she was going to make for herself had to be made someplace other than Dayton. But it had still been the only place to go each of those times.

“Here’s your father now, Linda.”

“Hello, Dad.”

“Well, Linda. When are we going to see you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to get away.”

“Keeping busy, are you?”

“Well, there’s always something to do. I understand you’re having car trouble.”

“My own fault for not trading the damned thing. You spend four thousand dollars on an automobile and you expect to get more than two years out of it. Fix one thing and something else goes. I’ll tell you something, you and Marc are just as lucky not to have a car. Is he around there? I’d like to say hello to him.”

They had met Marc once the previous Thanksgiving. She had wanted some time to herself and suggested the trip to Dayton, positive he would tell her to go alone. He surprised her by accepting the idea enthusiastically, and the visit had gone far better than she had dared to expect. Marc was consistently polite, projecting warmth and interest in tedious conversations with her parents. He was acting, of course, playing a role in what seemed to her a transparently phony way, but he had gauged his audience well and they warmed to him. For their part, her parents avoided any mention of marriage and in no way showed disapproval for the nature of their relationship. On the last night her father, loosened slightly by brandy, took Marc aside and put a paternal hand on his shoulder. “I’ll tell you something,” he had said, “you kids have the right idea. You’re young and you’re enjoying yourselves. You know what marriage is? Marriage is the number one cause of divorce. That’s what it is. If you don’t have the one you’ll never have the other.”

“Probably the most profound thought either of them ever had in their lives,” Marc commented later. “Christ, how did you stand it for all those years?”

“They liked you, you know.”

“Listen, don’t get uptight about it. Everybody’s parents are terrible. Mine are worse than yours. ‘Marriage is the number one cause of divorce.’ The man’s a fucking philosopher.”

“Well, this is costing you a fortune,” her father was saying. “And your mother’s putting dinner on the table. You give Marc our love, Linda.”

“I will.”

“And take care of yourself. You want to say good-bye to your mother? Never mind, she’s got her hands full. I’ll say good-bye for you.”

She cradled the telephone and lit a fresh cigarette. She had called to tell them about the break, to tell them she was coming home again, but her conversation had not taken her in that direction. Marc is fine. Everything is fine. She would not go back to Dayton. She was not sure what it was that she needed, could not define it, but whatever it was she would not find it in Dayton.

There was a red leatherette address book in her purse. She thumbed through it trying to find someone to call. She dialed a New York number and let it ring twelve times before hanging up. She dialed another New York number and got a recording telling her that the number had been temporarily disconnected. She tried a third number and got a busy signal. The fourth number rang twice before she decided that she did not want to talk to that person after all, so she rang off without knowing whether the call would have been answered or not.

She supposed that she ought to eat dinner. Her father and mother were now sitting over the dinner table, talking about how nice a boy Marc was and wouldn’t it be nice if things worked out and they did get married and settled down. She sighed and went to the refrigerator again, checked the cupboards again. Nothing appealed in the slightest. She put up water and was fixing a cup of instant coffee when there was a knock at the door.

She said, “Marc?” And put her hand to her mouth, surprised at the automatic response.

“It’s Peter.”

“Oh. Come in, it’s open.”

When she had first seen Peter Nicholas with Gretchen Vann, she’d taken them for mother and son. Gretchen’s hollow cheeks and darkly circled eyes made her look far older than her thirty-seven years. Peter, blond and slim-hipped and open-faced at twenty-two, could have passed for eighteen. They shared a large one-room apartment on the ground floor with Gretchen’s three-year-old daughter, and had been living there several months before Marc and Linda moved in.

Marc had found them amusing. “She probably started nursing Peter the day she weaned the kid,” he had said. “The bond that holds them together is that nobody on earth can guess what either one sees in the other. God knows they have a strange effect on each other. Every day she looks a little older and he looks a little younger. One of these day’s he’s going to crawl right back into her womb and never get out.”

“I was making coffee,” Linda said now. “Want a cup?”

“Thanks, but — actually I’d like a cup if it’s no trouble.”

“The water’s hot. Cream and sugar?”

“Just cream.”

“Well, it’s milk.”

“That’s okay. I hardly ever drink coffee anyway. It’s supposed to be terribly yin.”

“Is that macrobiotics? I didn’t know you were into that.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I keep thinking I ought to be, but I never manage to get into it. I’ll have brown rice for three meals running and then I’ll go and have a Coke, which is ridiculous, and then I’ll see how ridiculous the whole thing is and I’ll have a cheeseburger and that’s the end of the macro thing. Things like that are only possible if you’re living alone, anyway. Or if the person you’re living with is into it. And Gretchen. The thing is, she’s just the kind of person who ought to be into something like that. Some discipline that would help her get herself together.”

His eyes were an absolutely clear and guileless blue. He made small hand movements as he spoke. His fingers were very long, very slender.

She asked about Gretchen.

“Oh, she’s all right, I guess. You know how it is. She’s okay when she’s working, and when she’s not okay she can’t work and she goes into a down cycle. It’s the work that’s important to her. It doesn’t matter if anybody buys her pots or not, It matters in terms of money but sales don’t affect her personally, just that she’s getting the work done and likes what she’s turning out. This is good coffee.”

“It’s a tricky recipe. The hard part is boiling the water.”

“I can imagine. Say, why I dropped in. I was over at the Playhouse and Marc wasn’t around, and I thought he might be here. Which he obviously isn’t. Is he coming back here before the show or should I catch him over there?”

She put down her cup, got a cigarette out of the pack, dropped it, picked it up, got it lit.

She said, “No.”

“No he won’t be here?”

“No he won’t be here and no you can’t catch him there.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, shit,” she said. She stood up and got the note from the sofa. “Annie doesn’t live here anymore,” she said.

“I must have missed the opening credits.”

“Any luck and you could have missed the whole movie. Here.”

He started to read the note. “Oh, wow,” he said. He finished reading it and held it out to her. She took it from him, folded it neatly.

“What do I say, Linda? Hell. I picked a great time to knock on the door.”

“No, I’m glad for the company.”

“How are you taking it? I’m full of stupid questions. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly. No, I seem to be taking it pretty well. I suppose I’ll fall apart in a little while but maybe not. As a matter of fact, I was feeling really rotten all afternoon, and I came home to the note and immediately felt better.”

“Maybe you were picking up vibes this afternoon.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been very terrific at picking, up vibes.”

“Well, maybe — oh, shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

“He’s supposed to be lighting a show tonight. Marc. I don’t think he told anybody. It’s almost seven and the curtain’s at eight thirty and — can I use your phone?”

“Sure.”

“Just to call the Playhouse. Tony’s going to shit when he hears this.”

She paid little attention to the conversation. It did not much surprise her that Marc would leave without telling anyone at the theater. He had always been the sort to take his responsibilities seriously only while they affected him personally. Once he was out of New Hope, whatever difficulties his absence might cause simply would not occur to him.

Peter said, “Well, that’s a break. At least I think it is.”

“What?”

“They’re going to let me light the show.”

“That’s great.”

“I’ve done a couple of matinee performances of other shows, and I handled the board once during rehearsals of this one, so it shouldn’t be too rough. The thing is, I might get to do it regularly if it goes all right tonight.”

“You’ll be good.”

“I don’t have to be fantastic. Tony knows I’ll work for less than he would have to pay anybody else. I don’t know what Marc was getting but it must have been around eighty.”

“You’re close. He was getting eighty-five and felt he should have been getting a hundred and a half.”

“Josh Logan couldn’t get a hundred and a half out of Tony. He was doing good to get eighty-five. Now if he offers me the job, and he probably will, I’ll get fifty.”

“You shouldn’t take that little.”

“Well, I could probably get sixty if I fought, but I probably won’t fight. I should, but I probably won’t.” The boyish face flashed a smile. “The money doesn’t really matter. Gretch always has enough. I want to do the work, see. A few dollars one way or the other doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“That’s the trouble with the theater. Everybody wants the work.”

“And a son of a bitch like Tony gets away with slave wages. That’s why we have to scrounge, which leads to a question. How’s my chances of scrounging another cup of coffee?”

“Don’t you have to get over to the theater?”

“I have half an hour. Coffee keys me up and I want to be keyed up tonight. What I was going to do, I was going to go downstairs and take a pill, and I thought if I had another cup, I could get away without taking the pill. I don’t like to take uppers too much because I like them too much, if you follow me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re going to be okay, Linda.”

“I am?” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re right,” she said. “I was wondering about that before you came up. If I was going to be all right. And I think I am.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to stay here in New Hope.” She tilted her head back and gazed up at the ceiling. “Do you know, I didn’t know that until just this minute. I thought about going home or going back to New York, and I hardly considered staying here, but I’m going to. I came here last fall because Marc wanted to come here, but from the first day I liked it more than he did. Just because he’s left is no reason I should leave, is it?”

“No. I think you’re right to stay.”

“I think this is an easier place to be alone in.”

“Well, New York is supposed to be impossible.”

“Oh, it is. And I’ve had practice being alone here. The past few months.”

“I didn’t know it was bad.”

“Nobody ever knows. When I was married. Well, forget that.”

“Sure.”

“Why read something that’s gonna depress you?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Something someone said to me this afternoon, and she was absolutely right. I’m sorry, Peter, I’m talking to myself.”

“Say, I don’t suppose — no, of course not.”

“Now you’re talking to yourself.”

“No, the reason I was looking for Marc. He was going to sell me some dope, but he must have taken it with him.”

“He took his clothes. And all the records and the player. He’d leave those before he’d abandon the grass.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Let me look, though.” She went into the bathroom. “It must be still here. He kept it in the towel bar and he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to put the bar back afterward. He would have left it on the floor. There’s a screwdriver in that drawer on the left. Thanks.”

She removed the bracket and took out the hollow chrome towel bar, tilted it and shook out a plastic vial three-fourths full. “Here,” she said.

“Oh, this is all cleaned. This must be the equivalent of an ounce and a half, maybe two ounces.”

“Take it.”

“I just wanted enough for a couple of jays. In fact, I was going to smoke now, but I don’t want to be behind grass when I’m lighting the show. Later on when I’m used to it I could dig it, but not when I’m under pressure like tonight. I could take a pinch of it now to save for later.”

“No, take the whole thing.”

“You don’t want it?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t been smoking much. Sometimes I would keep Marc company if he insisted. But I haven’t enjoyed it lately. My head keeps going to places I’d rather stay away from.”

“Well, if you’re sure. This is, I don’t know. Say thirty dollars? It’s probably worth a little more than that, but does thirty seem all right.”

“Oh, just take it, Peter.”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“I mean I’m not in the business.”

“No, but it’s the same as money. If you’re giving it to me you’re giving me thirty dollars. I’ll pay you later. Or you can hold it until I bring the money.”

“No, take it with you. I don’t really want it around, as a matter of fact. You know, I think I will take the money, come to think of it. There’s no rush, but whenever you get the chance. I’m not rich enough to be that charitable.”

“Is thirty all right? Because there might be fifty dollars’ worth here.”

“No, thirty is fine. Thirty is a week’s wages. I like the idea of thirty dollars.”

“Well, fine, then. I’ll have it for you later tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.”

“There’s no rush.”

“If you say so. Well, I’d better get over there. Time for the goofy little kid to play games with the lights.”

“You’re not goofy. You’re not even a little kid, are you? I am going to be all right, Peter.”

“I know you are.”

“And thanks for telling me. I didn’t realize it until you said so, and it’s a good thing to know.”

“Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure.”

“And for this.”

“Sure.”

After he left she went into the bathroom and reassembled the towel bar.

She was going to be all right, and she had not quite known that before. She was going to stay in New Hope, too, and that was another thing she had not previously known. She liked it here, liked it here better now, with Marc gone, than she had with him present.

She would have to make certain changes, of course. She would need a job that paid more money and an apartment that cost less. But it was not urgent that she find either of these things immediately. It was more important that she make no sudden moves, that she permit things to proceed at their own pace.

She straightened the apartment. It was always easier for her to keep a place neat when she lived alone in it. Clutter tended to irritate her when she was living alone. Then she undressed and stood under the shower. She washed her hair, and a melody ran through her mind, just the tune at first, and it took her a few moments to fit words to it. “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair...” Funny how tunes did that, popping up involuntarily at the proper time.

She soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed, letting the stream of warm water play over her breasts and loins. She felt a quiver of erotic response and smiled. Ah, good, she thought. The machinery still worked. It was nice know that the machinery still worked.

She dried off, turned the sofa into a bed. The sheets held his smell. She noted this but found it neither pleasing nor disturbing.

She lay on her back in the darkness. With one hand she held a pillow against her breasts, hugging it close, and with the other hand she stroked herself. You’re regressing, she thought, but she had actually never done this in adolescence, had not known that it was possible for a girl to excite herself. It was not until she was halfway through her marriage to Alan that she discovered masturbation.

Now she played with herself very slowly and lazily. Her mind was virtually blank. There was no fantasy, no memory, only the pure tactile pleasure of her fingers upon her loins. At one point she heard Peter’s voice telling her that she was going to be all right.

After half an hour or so she got out of bed, made toast, fried a couple eggs. She had not reached orgasm. It would have been easy for her to do so, it always was, but she did not want to.

Two

Peter walked easily down the stairs, then felt his shoulders sag as he reached the door to his own apartment. For a moment he was tempted to go straight to the theater. It was safe enough to walk around New Hope with drugs on one’s person; if they busted everyone in town who was holding at any given moment they would cut the local population in half. Besides, he was known, he was local. The mobs of itinerant freaks who massed around the base of the cannon were subject to periodic frisks, but New Hope residents could do everything short of shooting up in public without drawing official attention.

So it would be safe enough to go directly to the theater, and thus avoid Gretchen—

But he couldn’t do it. First there was his rule: He did not carry anything illegal if there was any way to avoid it. He had several rules, all of them painfully evolved over the past few years, and he felt it necessary to stay within them insofar as possible. It was a part of staying together, and Peter was very much aware how easy it was to cease to be together, and thus to fall apart.

Gretchen was in the process of falling apart. This was a reason why he increasingly wanted to avoid seeing her, and it was also a reason why he had to see her.

Because of the kid.

Robin hopped off the couch as he opened the door, toddled across the room to him. The child’s face glowed with total joy, and Peter had never failed to respond to such radiance. “Peter, Peter, Peter,” she chirped.

He bent over, gripped her by her hips, hoisted her high into the air. “How is Robin Redbreast?” he singsonged. “How is Peter’s baby bird?”

She squealed with delight. “Oh, I can almost touch the ceiling!”

“See how big you’re getting?”

“Hold me higher, Peter, I can almost touch the ceiling.”

He boosted her a few inches higher and the little fingers brushed a piece of loose paint. “I did it,” she said.

The chip of paint fell. “Oh, my goodness,” he said, “Here comes the ceiling.”

“Is it falling, Peter?”

“Oh, Chicken-Licken, the sky is falling. The sky is falling, Robin-Lobin.”

“The sky is falling, Peter-Leter.”

He swung her to and fro, then set her on her feet. “Where’s Mommy?”

“Mommy-Lommy,” Robin said.

“Catch on fast, don’t you?”

“Gretchen-Letchen’s in the bathroom, Peter-Leter.”

He smiled. Gretchen-Letchen indeed. Mouth of babes, he thought. And was Gretchen lechin’ after all? One never quite knew.

“In the bathroom,” Robin said again. “She’s been in the bathroom almost forever.”

He went to the door, knocked. No answer. He spoke her name, knocked again, called out her name again and tried the knob. The door was locked.

His mind filled in a rush with images. Gretchen in the bathtub, her face swollen beneath the water. Gretchen sprawled on the floor with her wrists slashed and the tiles red with her blood. Gretchen slumped on the toilet like Lenny Bruce with a spike of bad smack still in her arm. But she wasn’t shooting anything these days, was she? But how could you tell, how could you ever tell from one day to the next?

“Gretchen.”

“Gretchen-Letchen, Mommy-Lommy—”

He forced his face to soften, then turned to Robin. He said, “Honey, could you go watch television for a few minutes?”

“The picture’s all funny.”

“Well, play with the knobs and see if you can fix it.”

“Oh, dynamite,” Robin said.

The hip talk had originally amused him. There was something undeniably funny in hearing hip phrases delivered with just the right inflection by a three-year-old. Lately he had become less amused. Of course the kid talked that way — it was the only kind of English she ever had a chance to learn. With Gretchen for a mother it was a miracle that Robin could talk at all.

“Gretchen, answer me if you can hear me. Because otherwise I’ll assume you’re unconscious and I’ll kick the door down, and then we’ll just have to get it fixed again.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Go away.”

“Open the door, Gretchen.”

“You fucking little snot, can’t you leave me alone?”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m all strung out and I’m shaking.”

“Open the door.”

He waited, and just as he was about to give up and turn from the door he heard the bolt. She held the door open a crack and peered out at him.

“Well?”

“I want to see you.”

She opened the door further and supported herself by leaning against the jamb. “Anybody who wants to see me,” she said, “has got to be crazy.” She tried on a smile but it wouldn’t play. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Oh, I’m so fucked up. How did I get so fucked up?”

He looked at her face and felt tears welling up behind his eyes. She was such a beautiful woman and none of the beauty showed now. Her face was ravaged, haunted. The circles under her eyes looked unreal, like make-up amateurishly applied. Her dirty blond hair was uncombed and lifeless. There were tiny sores in the corners of her mouth. The yellow cotton housedress she wore had been tight on her body when she bought it. Now it hung like a tent.

“Peter, I’m dying,” she said. “Oh, poor Peter, poor poor Peter.”

She lurched forward and he caught her, let her head drop to his shoulder. He stroked her hair and the back of her neck, making automatic calming sounds. He couldn’t get over how thin she had grown. She was eating herself up, melting the flesh from her bones.

She said, “I look like hell, don’t I?”

“You could straighten out. Get off all this shit, put yourself back together again.”

“I can’t do it.”

“You can try. I’ll help.”

“You can’t even help. Nothing can help. I hate those fucking pills and I’m worse without them.”

“What are you on?”

“What do you think? Speed.”

“Just pills?”

“I was going to shoot but I didn’t.”

“Thank God.”

“I don’t know which is worse. Shooting might have been better. Now I’m all strung out. I can’t get off and I can’t get back on either. You know what it is, I’m overamping. My brain is burning too fast for my brain to keep up with it. You can’t understand me, can you? I don’t know if I can, either. Some of the time I can—”

She ran out of words and he held onto her. “I have some grass,” he said, “but I don’t know if that would be better or worse for you.”

“Worse. I’m on a bad trip and it would just make the colors brighter. Where did you get it?”

“From Marc. Well, from Linda. Marc’s halfway to Chicago by now.” He told her briefly about the note Linda had found and that he was going to light the show. It was hard to tell whether she was interested or not. She seemed to be listening but not reacting.

She said, “Maybe that’s a good idea.”

“What?”

“Chicago.”

“You want to go to Chicago?”

“You could go. To Chicago or Kansas City or Acapulco or Tel Aviv or, oh, some place.” Her eyes fixed on him suddenly. “Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”

“I like it here.”

“Oh, shit. Nobody likes it here. I don’t know how you stand it. I can’t live with myself, how can anybody else stand to live with me?”

“Sometimes it’s good.”

“It is, isn’t it? But not very often. I haven’t been any good for you in a long time.”

“You will be.”

She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Sure you will.”

“I just don’t know. It’s a hard corner to turn this time. It isn’t a matter of getting straight. The pills, all of that shit. You know it’s not just that.”

“I know.”

“It’s wanting to be straight. If I could work. But lately all I can think is who on earth gives a shit if a pot has a lip or it doesn’t, or what fucking glaze I put on it, or whether I sell it or give it away or throw it in the canal. I mean it’s not an art. I mean go ahead and name twenty famous Italian Renaissance ceramicists. Shit, all it is is making pots by hand that they can make better than by machines, and idiots buy them because they think they’re supposed to. So they can surround themselves with craftmanship and escape from the Plastic Age. I mean who fucking cares, baby?”

He stood awkwardly for a moment, then put a quick kiss on her waxen forehead.

“I have to go. I’m sort of late.”

“Oh, the show. Yeah, you’d better do. Break a leg and everything, huh?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll be beautiful, baby, I know you will. I’m proud of you.”

“Because Marc ran off and left them hanging?”

“Just because. Because I want to be proud of you, so let me, huh?”

“Sure.” He started for the door, then turned. “Hey,” he said, “you had dinner yet?”

“Oh, sure. I spent the whole day eating and sleeping. Can’t you tell by looking at me?”

“I just—”

“I mean for Christ’s sake, Petey, do I look like I had dinner? You know how I get, you know I couldn’t swallow anything and if I did it wouldn’t stay down, and—”

“I was thinking about Robin.”

“Oh.” Her face fell. “I forgot.”

“Christ.”

“I think I gave her a sandwich for lunch. Robin? Honey, did you have any lunch?”

“Fix her some dinner, Gretch.”

“I can’t.”

“Jesus, Gretchen—”

She stood hunched forward, her fingernails digging through the sheer housedress into the scant flesh of her thighs. Tears welled out of her eyes and coursed down her cheeks. She said, “I can’t, Jesus, I can’t, I just can’t, I’d vomit, I swear I would vomit, I can’t do it—”

He looked at Robin. The girl was wide-eyed, expressionless, taking it all in. God, what that kid had to take in. The whole trip, he thought. Everything but food.

“Okay,” he said. He bent over, scooped the child up in his arms, perched her on her shoulders. “Let’s go, Robin Bluejay Nightingale Vann. Let’s get moving, Moving Vann. We’re going to a tacky little restaurant where you can have a tacky big dinner, got it?”

“Moving Vann,” Robin said, and began to giggle.

He took Robin to Raparound, an outdoor coffeehouse around the corner from the playhouse. He put her in a chair and took one of the waitresses aside.

“A large orange juice and all the milk she’ll drink, and whatever else you can stuff into her. She usually likes French toast. Then you can take her back to the Shithouse or else keep her here until after the show.”

“I didn’t think you were in it.”

“I’m doing the lighting tonight. And I’m late, I really have to run.”

The waitress was a heavyset girl named Anne. She had olive skin and prominent white teeth. She said, “I don’t mind taking her home, Peter, but is it all right?”

“Huh?”

“Is it safe?”

“Gretchen’s not a monster.”

“I know, I only meant—”

“Gretch has never been bad to the kid. It’s just that sometimes she can’t cope.”

“I know. I was thinking she could sleep in the back room here. There’s a cot.”

He thought for a moment. “All right,” he said. “Maybe that’s best if Danny doesn’t mind.”

“Why should he?”

“Okay. I’ll pick her up whatever time it is. Eleven, eleven thirty.”

She nodded and looked about to say something. He could guess what it probably was and didn’t have time to listen to it. He turned, darted outside, jogged off toward the playhouse.

Anthony Bartholomew wore his standard uniform of white duck trousers, a black shirt open at the throat, and a white linen ascot. He looked at his watch and whistled soundlessly.

Peter said, “I know. There were problems.”

“I imagine there were. Everybody has them. Well, you know the play and the board. I’ll have a fast run-through on the script with you and then we’ll see what happens. It’s going to be the usual Wednesday night crowd plus a busful of blue-haired ladies from Trenton, so if you eff up nobody’ll likely notice. Just give Warren the spot when he’s supposed to get it or the cocksucker’s likely to stop in the middle of the scene and correct you from the stage.”

“They’d just think Miller wrote it that way.”

“They might, but Tanya won’t. She’s been shitting up the stage anyway and she has trouble handling the unexpected. Well, let’s plunge into it.”

The play was The Crucible, and Peter was familiar enough with it to pick up the overall rhythm early in the first act. He found it an easy show to work. There was a predictable ebb and flow to Miller’s treatment of the Salem witch trials, and before long he was handling the board automatically, keeping on top of it with most of his mind free for other concerns.

He would have preferred it if the evening’s work had been more demanding. The thoughts that came to mind were not ones he welcomed.

“Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”

Did she know, did she have the slightest idea, how he itched to get out of there? He doubted it. She raised the question often enough, had brought it up even during the good times. “I’m too old for you, Petey. Jesus, you don’t need a mother that much. The Oedipus bit is fun but it has to drag you down sooner or later. You ought to be out there in the world with some sweet young thing with firm little tits and a nice tight cunt. What do you want with an old bag? I mean, for God’s fucking sake, Petey—”

It would be so much easier if Robin were his own daughter. If that were the case he knew precisely what he would do. He would pick up the kid and get the hell out. You could do that, if you were the kid’s real father and the mother was as completely incapable as Gretchen was.

And he could even have done it with a treasonably clear conscience. Gretchen could not be worse off without the child to care for. Robin was a responsibility at a time when the woman could barely handle the responsibility of putting on her own shoes when she got out of bed in the morning. Gretchen was falling apart, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to put her back together again. Sometimes he thought no once could, that she was doomed to burn herself out no matter what anyone tried to do to help her. Other times he was fairly sure he did her some good, gave her something however frail to lean on, did her some service by walking along behind her and picking up what she dropped.

And still other times he wondered if he might not be bad for her, as she was bad for him, wondered if his presence was not partially responsible for what was happening to her.

“Why don’t you leave me, Petey?”

Because of the kid, you silly bitch. Did she realize that? It seemed that she must, but when she was in a bad way she was scarcely aware of Robin’s existence. Gretchen had failed to feed Robin — and often failed to feed her — not out of any malice but simply because she hardly knew Robin was there. She was locked too tightly into her own self to waste any thought on Robin.

Such a sweet child. Such a sweet perfect beautiful child, and how exciting it was to have a child who thought you were the most important person in the world, and if she were only his kid, God, if she were only his kid—

But she wasn’t, any more than she was Harold Vann’s. Vann had still been married to Gretchen when Robin was born, but had moved out long before the conception. Robin’s father could have been any of a few dozen men. According to Gretchen’s calculations, the girl had most likely been conceived during a two-week stay in Miami Beach, during which time she had sexual relations with a great number of total strangers, men whose names she never knew and whose faces she could not have identified.

“It’s funny I got pregnant that trip,” she told Peter once. “I seem to remember blowing most of them. Obviously there must have been some that I fucked. Either that or the kid’s the world’s first oral conception.”

She was very nearly born by the world’s first oral delivery. Gretchen was nauseated throughout nine months of pregnancy. She had had several abortions before, and wondered aloud during the late stages of pregnancy why she had not had another one this time. “I’m already sick to my stomach with this kid,” she said, “and the little bastard’s not even born yet.”

That Robin was not literally a little bastard was the result of Harold Vann’s benevolence. He had instituted divorce proceedings but withdrew them when he learned that Gretchen was pregnant and intended to have the baby. He waited until the child was born, then permitted Gretchen to divorce him. The terms of the divorce settlement called on him to pay four hundred and sixty dollars a month in child support until Robin reached the age of twenty-one. He also carried life insurance with the child as beneficiary.

A check arrived within the first five days of every month. Vann’s attorney drew it, signed it, and mailed it. The monthly check was the extent of Harold Vann’s contact with either Robin or her mother. “He never wants to see either of us,” Gretchen had said. “Never wants to know anything about Robin, how she’s doing, anything. He told me once that he felt a certain responsibility to Robin because he should have had the sense to have me sterilized. I can still hear him saying it. I suppose he was right.”

But he wasn’t, Peter thought. Gretchen and her unknown lover had accomplished a minor miracle, producing through their loveless coupling a precious and perfect child. Such a child justified a great deal. Among other things, it justified his staying with a woman with whom it was literally impossible to live.

Well, suppose he just picked up the kid and went? He doubted that Gretchen would go to the police. It was not even inconceivable that she would fail to notice Robin was gone. And he could see the two of them off somewhere, some little farm somewhere in New England or Nova Scotia, and he would raise enough food for the two of them, earn a little money with handcrafts, bring the kid up in the open air with animals to play with, teach her everything he knew, just the two of them off by themselves and—

No way.

He sighed, focused a baby spot, softened the footlights. No way, he thought. It was a beautiful fantasy trip but would not, could not happen that way. The little cabin in the woods, with or without Robin, would involve running away from more than Gretchen, more than New Hope. It would mean running away from aspects of himself which he could not ultimately outrace.

Nor, he admitted, would Gretchen be all that easy to leave, Robin or no Robin. There was something there that he still needed. And he wondered, not for the first time, if his love for Robin was not at least in part an excuse that enabled him to stay with a woman he did not love and often could not bear.

He made himself concentrate on the stage.

Warren Ormont scrubbed at the last of his makeup and peered solemnly into his mirror. He was altogether quite satisfied with what he saw there. Several years ago his hairline had begun a rapid climb and now had crept just slightly past the midpoint of his head. What hair remained was silver-blond and hung almost to his shoulders. The recession of his hairline had appalled him at first, but as his hair fell out in front and grew longer in back, he recognized that it was just the sort of thing his particular face required. His features — a strong beak of a nose, bright and intense blue eyes, a small precise mouth — were somehow drawn together and reinforced by his partial baldness.

Now, when he popped out the contacts he had worn on stage and replaced them with a pair of rimless spectacles, he bore an unmistakable resemblance to Benjamin Franklin. His awareness of this resemblance had prompted the original purchase of the rimless glasses two years earlier. If one were going to look like anyone at all, he had considered, one could do worse than look like Benjamin Franklin.

“You were marvelous tonight, Warren,” someone said.

“Yes, wasn’t I?”

He combed his long hair carefully back. No complaints about the face, he decided. One could have done worse. It was a face that seemed to be improving with age, a face which would wear well for the foreseeable future. Altogether a better face than he would have predicted for himself twenty years ago.

An arm draped over his shoulder and a small cheek pressed against his. Tanya Leopold’s gamin face looked out of his mirror at him. “Can I get in on this picture, man?”

“You enhance it, Tanya mine.”

“Mmmm, love you,” she said. She kissed him on his bald spot, dropped onto the stool beside him. “You were beautiful out there, Warren. You scared the shit out of me, I swear to God.”

“I was properly vicious, wasn’t I?”

“Improperly vicious. You made me want to confess long before I was supposed to.”

“Pure method, love.”

“Oh?”

“Oh indeed. I summoned up all my loathing for the play’s author and directed it at you poor witches.”

“But Arthur Miller—”

“Sucks,” he supplied.

“Isn’t he supposed to be one of our major playwrights?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And Crucible’s an allegory. It was very important. The McCarthy era and everything.”

He looked at her fondly. “Didn’t you campaign for him in New Hampshire?”

Her face turned uncertain. “Was it the same person? I can never quite—”

He snapped his fingers. “By Jove, I believe you’re right. I can never keep those things straight myself. Politics is such a damned bore, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “But I guess it’s important.”

“Ah, boring things always are. Which confirms your report that The Crucible and its author are indeed important. But important to whom? Not, I fear, to me. For I am merely an actor, and the stage all I know of life. I play my part, little one. One can do no more.”

“Well, you were good.”

“How can one fail with such lines to speak. ‘I saw Goody Two-Shoes with the Devil!’ ‘Did you? What were they doing?’ ‘They were fucking!’ ‘Well, good for the Devil! And the devil with Goody!’ Shakespeare, put aside your pen. Shaw, eat your heart out. Sophocle—”

She giggled and he beamed paternally at her. A charming child, he thought. Not a brain in her head, not a wisp of talent in her body, but nonetheless charming for it.

“You were very good,” she was saying. “I keep saying I that, but what I’m trying to say is that you were so good I that you made me be a little less rotten than I usually I am, you made me feel almost good, and, I don’t know, I oh, I wanted to thank you for it.”

“Why, Tanya,” he said. She lowered her eyes and I blushed furiously. He was enormously touched and on the point of tears. His voice soft, he said, “That is as genuinely sweet a compliment as anyone has ever paid me. God bless you. I will always love you for having said I that.” He coughed to clear his throat, heaved himself to I his feet. “I must away,” he said, his voice normal again. “My turn to pay a compliment to the young lad but for whom you and I would have been utterly in the dark. I speak of young Peter of Nicholas.”

“He worked the lights, didn’t he?”

“He did. Friend Marc dropped the old show-must-go-on philosophy in the dirt, and young Peter dusted it off. I ought to tell him he was good before Tony tells him he was bad.”

“Why would Tony tell him that?”

“So that Tony can pay him as little as possible, as he will no doubt do anyhow. Tanya, you were good tonight yourself, incidentally. I hate to offer compliments as a quid pro quo, but there it is. You’ve never been better.” Which was true enough, he thought, but which was unfortunately saying lamentably little.

“I’ll be joining some people at Sully’s later,” he added. “Will you be going?”

“I don’t think so. There’s a late movie Billy was talking about seeing.”

“You insist on squandering yourself on that paint smear?”

“Well, he loves me.”

“Who could fail to?”

Her face went impish. “Now if you’d straighten out for me, Warren, I might be interested.”

His eyes inventoried her body — dainty feet, willowy legs, tight little ass, tiny waist, opulent breasts. He sighed wistfully. “I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “that you’re just the slightest shade too butch for me.”

Her laughter followed him out of the dressing room. A dramatic talent equaled only by the depth and breadth of her intellect, he thought. She would never be an actress, and he supposed she knew as much. But for the next half dozen years her looks would carry her, and by that time she would probably find the stage something of a bore.

But what a sweet thing she’d said; it had taken all his talent to keep from crying.

He found Peter and Tony Bartholomew at the rear of the house. Tony was talking, and Peter was nodding at the pauses. Excellent, Warren thought. He had timed his entrance well.

“Ah, there you are,” he called out, approaching the two. Bartholomew raised his eyes in irritation at the interruption but Warren’s gaze swept quickly over him and centered on Peter. “Peter, that was superb. I was nervous tonight when I heard you would be on the lights. I loathe being nervous. But you were so much better than I dared to hope that I was astounded.”

“That’s kind of you, Warren.”

“Kind? Kindness has nothing to do with it. It’s pure and simple self-interest. I prefer to play with the lights well handled. One does not want to become blessedly invisible at the wrong moment. Thus, as there is always the chance that you might not realize quite how good you are, I’m taking the small trouble of informing you in order to encourage you to do this regularly.” His eyes turned briefly to Bartholomew. “As I’m sure Tony has been trying to say himself.”

“I was just telling Peter I think he has real possibilities. Of course the work is a discipline, a craft—”

“Yes, of course it is, of course it is. Peter, as I’m sure Tony has already told you, you were far better tonight than Marc Hillary ever was in his life. And Marc was not bad. One got one’s money’s worth with Marc. But you are better intuitively than Marc was with rehearsal and practice and training. Tony, you’ve turned up an honest talent. Permit me to congratulate you.”

“Thanks so much, Warren. I was telling the boy—”

“I know precisely what you were telling him, and I’m sure I’ve done no more than echo your own praise Tony, it was a good show. If one must perform Arthur Miller one might as well do him properly. You’ll excuse us, won’t you? We’re supposed to be meeting some people at Sully’s and I’m afraid we’re late already. I’ll see you tomorrow, Tony?”

“It does seem likely.”

“And perhaps you can join us at Sully’s if you can get I away.”

“I think I’ll be tied up tonight.”

“A pity,” Warren said. He grabbed Peter’s arm and led him out of the theater and through the parking lot.

Halfway to the street Peter said, “What’s this about meeting people at Sully’s?”

“Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, sweet, but I thought I’d buy you a drink. I did think we ought to get away from Antonio and it seemed an easier way than handing him a bottle of mouthwash. Subtler, I thought.”

“Uh-huh. How did I do with the lights, incidentally?”

“Hmmm. Let us say that you were not awful. You were a little unsteady in the first act, you were quite good in the second act, and you may have been thinking of something else toward the very end. I can understand that. I have the same problem myself. Arthur Miller has that effect on any sensitive intelligence. Oh, you weren’t bad. On a scale of one to ten I’d give you about a seven overall, and I don’t think Marc ever got much more than an eight-point-six on his best night, so I’d call it an impressive debut.”

“Thanks, incidentally.”

“For that back there or for what I just said?”

“Both. I don’t think it will work, though.”

“Let me guess. He was giving you the usual ostrich shit about how much you had to learn.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And how it was essentially a favor to train you, but he was hard up and didn’t want to go to the bother of getting somebody decent all the way from New York.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“It is like hell. I could write his dialogue for the rest of the season. It’s a case of contempt breeding familiarity. What did he offer you?”

“You came in before we got around to numbers.”

“Well, thank God for that. What was he about to offer you?”

“Probably fifty.”

“And what would you have said?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell him he can pay you eighty or he can fuck himself.”

“He won’t pay me eighty.”

“No, but he’ll pay you sixty-five.”

“Why don’t I ask for sixty-five?”

“You could. That’s what I would do in your position, but I’m not sure you have the balls for it. If you ask sixty-five, do you think you could stick to it? Suppose you shot it out as an ultimatum and he said it was out of the question and turned his back on you. What you would have to do is walk out of the room and keep on walking until he raised his price to sixty-five. And I’m not at all certain you could do it.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I would think so. It’s very important to know your capabilities. You can get sixty-five, which still amounts to gross exploitation, incidentally, but you’ll only get it if you ask for eighty. And if you make it damned evident that you want eighty, and think you’re entitled to it.”

“The thing is, the money doesn’t really matter.”

“It matters to Tony.”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Ah. Then give the extra fifteen a week to a charity of your choice. But Tony’s a bad charity. If you work for fifty, you’re personally donating fifteen dollars a week to Anton Bartholomew, and that cocksucker’s no hardship case. Truth?”

“Truth.”

“Piss it away on something. Put it toward a Ferrari. Buy Gretch some new pills and a monogrammed needle. I’m sorry, I hit a sore spot, didn’t I?”

“Kind of.”

“I’m sorry, Peterkin.”

“You couldn’t know.”

“She’s been bad lately, then.”

‘‘You could call it that.”

“Well, reverse the tape and wipe out that line. And profit by my example and avoid developing a reputation for cutting wit. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. Incidentally, we are not walking toward Sully’s.”

“I know.”

“Does your knowledge also include our destination?”

“I left the kid at the Raparound.”

“I see. Again, forgive me.”

“Let it go, Warren.”

“I think I’ll pass on this domestic scene. I’d like to talk with you about it sometime, or rap, as the kiddies say. But not now. Will you come over to Sully’s later and let me buy you that drink?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, come on. You already know whether you will or not. Clue me in and I’ll make plans accordingly.”

“Well, putting it that way, I had decided not to. But I’ll change my mind. I’ll be over in, I don’t know, half an hour?”

“I’ll keep a seat warm.”

Danny had closed the grill at the Raparound. A handful of theatergoers were sitting over coffee. Peter sat down at a table and Anne took a tray of dirty dishes back to the kitchen, then joined him.

She said, “I took her home. I had her all tucked in on the couch and she started saying she wanted her mommy, so I cut out and took her home.”

“How was everything?”

“Gretchen seemed all right. I mean she didn’t throw anything at me. She seemed, I don’t know, in control?”

“That’s good. What do I owe you?”

“Just a minute, I have the check here. Here it is. Oh, wow.”

“How much?”

“Well, it comes to $4.77.”

“Huh?”

“That’s including the tax.”

“Anne, find the right check.”

“Fifty cents for a large orange juice, a dollar and a half for a bacon burger, a dollar for french toast, and fifty cents each for three glasses of milk.”

“She drank three glasses of milk?”

“She was starving, Peter.”

“Yeah, I can dig it, but you’re charging a three-year-old kid a dollar and a half for less than a quart of milk? That’s beautiful.”

“Well, this is no place for a meal, Peter. What am I supposed to do?”

He nodded. “I know. It’s okay, it really is. It’s just that the numbers threw me for a minute.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Okay to give it to you tomorrow?”

“Well, you’ll have to give it to me. I mean personally, because I’ll cover the check out of my own pocket. You know Danny and credit.”

“Uh-huh. Same as I know Danny and fair prices.”

“It’s for the tourists. You know that. It’s to sit over a cup of coffee for three hours or it’s for the tourists.”

“Sure. New Hope’s a nice place to live but I’d hate to visit here.”

“Oh, it’s not even a nice place to live, Peter.”

“I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

“I kind of hope you do.”

“I will, Anne. And thanks.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“That’s the point.”

Three

Sully Jaeger leaned on the bar and looked over the house. The crowd was a little better than usual for a week-night in April. Sully’s restaurant business, like virtually every other retail business in New Hope, was very much a seasonal operation. The fat summer months yielded enough of a profit to cover the rest of the year. But Sully’s place, unlike some others, came out ahead twelve months of the year. While he sold little food off-season, he had a large enough regular trade of local drinkers to cover the nut even in the deadest months of January and February.

During the summer Sully moved a lot of steaks and chicken and shrimp. But his only food customers were tourists, and for most of them one meal at Sully’s was enough. The steaks at the Barge Inn cost seven dollars a copy and were on a par with those at the $1.49 steak joints on Times Square. His fried chicken cost five times as much as the foxy old franchising colonel’s and wasn’t a fifth as good. His shrimp were too long out of the ocean and a plate of four of them was priced at $4.50. His baked potatoes sat in the oven until they sold, however long that might take. Sully himself never ate at his own restaurant, taking most of his meals at a lunch counter on Main Street.

Complaints about the food generally brought a sorrowful expression to his face. He was a jowly, bearish man, a little puffy under the eyes, and he had as much trouble getting a clean shave as Richard Nixon. He had a barrel chest and an ample but firm gut. His whole body was thickly pelted with black hair. Each of his four wives had initially found his hairiness exciting, and each had gradually lost her enthusiasm for it.

Sully first married at thirty-eight, taking as a bride a girl of twenty-two. Since then he had traded in every five years or so, always selecting as a replacement a voluptuous girl between twenty and twenty-five years of age. Sully was now fifty-six and had been married to the current Mrs. Jaeger for a little over three years. No one earth expected it to last much longer.

Sometimes he became defensive when the quality of” the Barge Inn’s food was brought to his attention. “Listen,” he would say, “let’s be honest. I didn’t open this place for people to have a meal. That’s not what it’s for. This is a place to come have a couple of drinks and talk with your friends and feed cracker crumbs to the ducks on the canal. Summer weekends you do all this and listen to music. The rest of the time it’s the same program without the music. Now some people won’t walk into a place unless there’s food. They got to have food in front of them or they can’t enjoy theirselves. So all right. There’s food. They eat it, it fills their stomachs, it don’t kill them. They don’t like it then next time they can use their brain and eat somewhere else first, or for that matter they can stay out of here altogether. That’s all.”

He sighed now and took a long drink from the water glass that was always on the bar top beside him during business hours. The glass contained applejack, but it was neither the American commercial brand nor the imported Calvados that he stocked behind the bar. Twice a month a farmer from over in Berks County drove to Sully’s and delivered two gallon jugs of applejack, exchanging them for a pair of empty jugs and a twenty-dollar bill. The farmer was a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Gutnacht; he and his father and grandfather had been making applejack in the same old-fashioned way since long before Prohibition. Sully had been a steady customer for almost twenty years, during which time the price had gone from six to ten dollars a gallon. It was still cheaper than any taxed liquor available, but Sully would have paid three times the price if he had to. It was the only thing he would drink.

He set the glass down and shook his head. “This fucking town,” he said.

Hugh Markarian grinned across the bar at him. “A familiar phrase,” he said. “What brings it on?”

“Nothing in particular. Another of those?”

Hugh covered his glass. “No, I’m all right. I don’t think it’s such a bad town. Or were you speaking literally? I’m not sure there’s that much more fucking going on here than in the average town. It’s more visible here, of course, and perhaps it runs to more unorthodox forms, but—”

Sully leaned forward, elbows on the bar top. “You know what it is? Two kinds of people in the town, the young ones and the old ones. The young ones are always figuring out where to go from here, and the old ones are trying to figure out how they wound up here.”

“How did you wind up here. Sully?”

“God knows.”

“You weren’t born here?”

“Christ, no. It’s a Dutchy name, but it’s Milwaukee Dutch, not Pennsylvania. Except they never said Dutch for German in Milwaukee. Krauts they called you, or Chermans. Christ, if I was born here, I never would of stayed around.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Let me think. I came here two years before I got married the first time. That was to Alicia, I think that was before your time. So that would be something like twenty years in September. Twenty years exactly. I remember I hit this town Labor Day weekend.”

“I suppose you never thought you would stay. At the beginning, that is.”

“You kidding? I was here ten years never figuring I would stay no more than another week. Then one day I look around, and there’s ten years gone and I don’t know where the hell they went to, and I realize I’m probably gonna spend the rest of my life in this toilet. It’s the kind of town it is, it sneaks up on you like that.”

“It’s been good to you, though.”

“Yeah, I got no personal bitch.”

“You’ve done well.”

“I make a living.”

“You’ve got this place and you’ve got the Coryell Arms and God knows what else.”

“Not so much else. Not so much as you might think, Hugh. You know something, you’re the first person ever called it the Coryell Arms in my hearing. I had to think a minute to realize you were talking about the Shithouse. Sully’s Shithouse, that’s all anybody calls it. Hell, it’s what I call it.”

“Twenty years in New Hope. You should throw a party to celebrate.”

“Hold your breath,” He picked up the glass again his large hand, took a long swallow. “You can almost throw your own party, can’t you, Hugh? You haven’t been around any twenty years but you didn’t turn up yesterday either. What is it, twelve, fourteen years?”

“More like eighteen.”

“Is that a fact? Well, I wouldn’t of said that much. If that’s the case you must of been here when I was married to Alicia, but I don’t remember knowing you then.”

“I didn’t go to bars much back then.”

“I didn’t have this place at the time, but you would of had to go to a bar to meet me. I worked for old man Lakey who had a place where the mall is now, and then I tended bar for a time at the Inn up in Pipersville. You look empty.”

“Yeah, you can do it again, Sully.”

“Same way? Here you go. No, you’re giving me too much, Hugh. What you’re drinking is just a buck ten. Thanks.” A waitress approached with a table order and Sully expertly mixed half a dozen drinks, then returned to Hugh. “This fucking town,” he said.

“You said that before, I think.”

“It’s a downhill town, Hugh. There’s towns that are getting better and there’s towns that are getting worse, and this one’s the kind that’s getting worse. The tourists come here because it’s supposed to be an art colony. The good artists have been getting fewer and farther between in these parts ever since the war. The tourist business is still alive because those shitheads don’t realize anything until a hundred years after it happens, so they still come up to look for artists and walk around with ice-cream cones in their fists looking for something to hang on the bathroom wall. Each year there’s more of them in town and each year they spend less and look worse. These days they’re either freaked-out kids with no money in their pockets or Bermuda shorts types who wouldn’t pay a nickel to see Christ ride a bicycle. The fucking tourists keep the town alive and the fucking town won’t put up a parking lot or a public toilet for their benefit. Who the hell wants to come to New Hope as a tourist? If I drove through this shithole I wouldn’t even get gas.”

“You would if you ate here.”

“Huh? Oh, very funny, very fucking funny. But why do I have to tell you this, for Christ’s sake? You live here, you know the place is dying.”

“They’ve been saying that for eighteen years that I know about.”

“They’ve been saying it for twenty years that I know about, and they’re still saying it, and it was true then and it’s true now.”

Hugh Markarian was halfway through his drink of Grant’s and water when a voice sounded in his ear. “Why are you not at your typewriter?”

He turned around, then smiled up at Warren Ormont. “Why aren’t you at the Old Vic?” he countered.

“Ah, but I didn’t ask why you weren’t writing the Great American Novel. I merely inquired as to why, rather then write anything at all, you had chosen to visit this snake pit. I hope you didn’t eat here?”

“I ate here once.”

“Everyone ate here once. How are you, writer? You look good.”

“I feel good. And you, Warren?”

“Never better, although God knows I’ve been in better things. Why don’t you grab your socks and join us? I’m telling some dear friends the awful truth about Arthur Miller.”

“Which is?”

“That he’s either Rod Serling in drag or Paddy Chayefsky rolled into one. Possibly both, but one can’t be sure.”

Hugh laughed. “That’s a good line.”

“And it’s delivered with the full force of my rapierlike wit. Come join us. Solitary drinking is nothing but alcoholic masturbation.”

“I might. Who’s in the party?”

“Let me see. There’s Bryce Meredith, who’s directed this little gem. He actually likes Miller, no doubt because he directs him as well as anyone I’ve ever worked with. I think you know Bryce.”

“Not well, but we’ve met.”

“There’s also a very pleasant couple named John and Rita Welsh. Or it may be Walsh. Friends of Bryce’s from Baltimore. I gather Bryce knew John in college. They came up to see the play and they’re putting up overnight at the Logan, I think they said. He’s a dermatologist but he has the good grace to keep it to himself. He’s also a fan of yours, by the way.”

“I don’t have fans. I have readers, but no fans. People apologize for enjoying my stuff.”

“He didn’t sound apologetic. There’s also Peter Nicholas, who is Gretchen Vann’s current thing, and lucky little her. A face like the little Belgian boy who pisses into the water in those plaster monstrosities people bring home from Europe. And an adorable little ass.”

“You sound proprietary. Isn’t Bert with you tonight?”

Warren rolled his eyes. “Gawd,” he said. “I turned queer to escape from all that, Hugh. I’ve been getting ‘Where’s Bert?’ since I walked in here. I feel like a philandering husband who keeps running into all his wife’s best friends. It’s damned annoying.”

“Where is Bert, anyway?”

“Bless your heart, you rug peddler. Bertram is auditioning at Upper Black Eddy. He thinks it may lead to Something Good.”

“Isn’t he happy at Mignon’s?”

“That’s just Fridays and Saturdays. The people up the river have the weekends covered with a jazz trio and thought Bert’s brand of Bobby Short cocktail-piano-cum-torching might be the cat’s nuts during the week. Or a couple nights thereof. Which I have just explained for the last time this evening. The next person who asks after Bert is going to be told some positively outrageous lie. ‘Bert has terminal acne,’ I’ll say. ‘Bert is in Egypt buggering a camel.’ Coming, Hugh?”

“Let me get a refill first.”

“We’re over on the rail where we can throw things to the ducks. It’s fun watching the mother duck and the father duck push the cunning little ducklings aside and hog the food themselves. A graphic lesson in the perfidy of parents, avian division.”

Hugh finished his drink, motioned to Sully for another. He hesitated for a moment. That John Welsh (or Walsh) was a fan of his had an effect opposite to Warren’s intention. It was not by any means an inducement for him to join the table. Any fan, however well intentioned, sooner or later wondered aloud when Hugh would write another book of the stature of One If by Land. Not that they didn’t enjoy all his books, of course. Not that they didn’t feel the work he was doing now was as good as anything he had done in the past. But there was something about One If by Land—

Hugh had just turned twenty-three when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Army the next morning, was tabbed for OCS, and spent the next three and a half years commanding infantry in North Africa and Europe. After his discharge he returned to the States with no clear idea of what he ought to do. Unlike many returning veterans, he didn’t have the option of killing four years in college while he sorted himself out. He had already graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and had put in half a year as a Wall Street trainee before the war broke out.

He went home to Westminster, Maryland, and spent six weeks with his mother. By the end of the second week he was starting to feel like Krebs in the Hemingway story. Hugh’s Armenian father had died of a pulmonary embolism about the time of the Italian campaign. His Scottish mother was keeping company with a widower who was thinking of retiring from his dry-cleaning business. The man came over every other night after dinner to drink the Armenian coffee Mrs. Markarian had learned to make. The two of them killed a pot of coffee and played backgammon. Sometimes they coaxed Hugh into playing, and then the three of them would pretend to be enjoying themselves.

Hugh’s two younger sisters had both married while he was overseas. Emily, the one he’d always liked best, had married a dentist and lived somewhere in southern California. Ruth, the older of the two, lived in Westminster. Her husband sold real estate and insurance and seemed incapable of believing that Hugh was equally uninterested in acquiring either. Ruth had always bored him and now he found her company unbearable. Her husband was worse. They felt obligated to invite Hugh once a week for dinner, and he felt obligated to accept. It was worse than the backgammon sessions.

He stuck it for six weeks and then went to New York. His old firm was perfectly happy to rehire him, which surprised him. He took an apartment on West Thirteenth Street and went to the office every morning and came home every night. It took him two weeks to confirm something he had suspected all along, that had no desire whatsoever to become a stockbroker. He had been perfectly happy before the war with the idea of spending his life selling stocks and bonds. Now every time he sat at the desk he thought of his horrible sister and her horrible husband and he couldn’t stand it.

He explained this to his boss, who had heard similar stories from other veterans. “You may change your mind later on,” the man said. “Take some time to find yourself. If it turns out that this is the right kind of life for you, come back and we’ll talk about it.”

He never went back. He moved furniture, cooked at a lunch counter, sold women’s shoes on Fourteenth Street. He would pick up a job and keep it until he couldn’t stand it, and then he would sit around his apartment drinking beer and reading library books until his cash ran out.

One night a girl was talking about a recent war novel. “You’ve just got to read it,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”

“I was over there,” he said. “Why do I have to read about it?” He preferred Westerns, and was at the time gradually working his way through the complete works of Zane Grey.

“Listen,” she said, “just read it. That’s all. Just read it, it’s unbelievable.”

The next afternoon he went to the Eighth Street Book Shop and paid five dollars for the book. He’d asked for it at the library, but the waiting list ran clear onto the back of the card. He took the book home and read fifty pages and threw it against the wall. He went around the corner, drank three glasses of beer, returned to his apartment and picked the book up again. He sat down with it and read the remaining five hundred pages at one sitting. By the time he was done it was eleven in the morning but he didn’t even consider going to bed. He showered and changed his clothes and spent the next six hours walking aimlessly around the Village.

The girl worked as a secretary at an advertising agency. He was waiting on her doorstep when she got home from work. She didn’t recognize him at first. They’d just met at a party, and their only conversation had concerned the novel.

“You read it already? I’m flattered. Isn’t it something?”

“It’s unbelievable, all right.”

“I told you you’d—”

“It’s unbelievable as a flood in the desert. I read it from cover to cover and it’s the worst piece of shit I ever read in my life.”

She stepped back and gaped at him as if he were exposing himself in Washington Square.

“It’s phony all the way through,” he went on doggedly. “Either the biography on the back cover is so much crap or he walked through the war wearing a blindfold. Not to mention the cotton in his ears. Nobody ever talked like that, nobody ever thought like that, nobody ever felt like that—”

“Now just who the hell do you think you are?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you!” Her voice was pure Bronx now. “You were there in all the mud and blood and so that means you know it all, huh? A man produces a work of art and all you can do is knock it.”

“If that’s a work of art—”

“I suppose you could do better?”

“If I couldn’t,” he said, “I might as well jump off a bridge.”

“Oh, people like you make me sick to my stomach. You could write a better book than Moby Dick and you could paint better than that idiot Picasso and what the hell did you ever do?”

“I couldn’t paint better than Picasso. In the first place nobody could and in the second place I couldn’t paint a floor without getting paint on the ceiling.”

“So what gives you the idea you could write better than—”

“I don’t know about Moby Dick,” he said. “I never read Moby Dick, and if you think a lot of it I don’t think I want to. I just—”

“What do you know, anyway?”

“I know there’s no r in ‘idea.’ And I know I could write better about the war than that moron I read last night.”

“So go,” she said. “So do it.”

So he did it.

It took forever. He thought it would take him a month, maybe two at the outside. He bought a typewriter and a box of paper and put a sheet in the the typewriter and typed “1.” on top of it. Then he skipped few lines and typed “Chapter One.” He lit a cigarette, took two puffs, put it out, skipped a few more lines, and started pecking at the keys.

He wrote for a week, then took a job, trying to work nights on the book, but after a day’s work he couldn’t concentrate sufficiently to write well. So he established a pattern, working for a week or ten days, then writing for as long as he could make his money last. He taught himself to cook spaghetti and lived on it. He found a furniture mover who would hire him whenever he ran out of money and who would throw all the overtime work his way that he could handle. He could clear a hundred dollars in a week’s work, and he learned to make that hundred last out the month.

His mother wrote him a letter every week. She had married her dry cleaner and they were thinking about living in Florida, but Ruth was pregnant and she wanted to be there for the delivery. Ruth’s baby was born and his mother was living in St. Petersburg before he typed “The End” at the bottom of page 784. He looked at the two words and wondered what in hell to do now.

He spent four hours getting drunk and ten hours sleeping. He got up and took the 784 pages to the girl’s apartment. She had moved out four months earlier and he had trouble getting her new address from the building superintendent because he didn’t know her last name and the super’s English was minimal. They worked it out finally and he found out that the girl was living on West Thirteenth just the other side of Sixth. He went over there and rang her bell. She didn’t recognize him. He was thinner, pale from working indoors, and he had a full beard because shaving was a waste of time and nobody cared what a part-time furniture shlepper looked like.

He put the manuscript in her hands. She looked at it and at him and asked what the hell it was supposed to be.

“It’s not a better book than Moby Dick,” he said. “I read that one since I saw you and I’d know better than to try to top it. But it’s the best I can do.”

“It’s you,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

“I thought maybe you’d look at it.”

“Listen, I’m no authority.”

“You sounded like one last time.”

“I wondered how come I never saw you after that. I figured you left town.”

“I was busy writing. Fifteen months. I never thought it would take that long.”

“Writers sometimes spend years and years.”

“I can see why.”

She weighed the script in her hands. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“You could try reading it. And tell me if it’s any good.”

“What’s your phone number?”

“I haven’t got a phone. I’m only a block away, you could come over when you’re done. The address is on the first page.”

“I don’t even know your name. ‘One If by Land by Hugh Markarian.’ That’s you?”

“That’s me.”

He went crazy waiting. Three nights later she appeared and handed him the manuscript and four single-spaced pages of criticism tearing the book apart. She sat down on the edge of his bed while he read two of the four pages. Then he looked up and asked if he had to read the rest. “It’s obviously a piece of shit and I wasted fifteen months, so why read all this?” She told him to skip to the last paragraph if he wanted. He did, and in the final paragraph she told him that the book was rough and choppy and disorganized and cluttered and vague, and that it was also a better book by far than the one that started all this, and it needed work but that didn’t change the fact that he had written a great book and might be a great writer.

He asked her if she really meant it.

She said, “Jesus Christ, you think I’d break my neck typing all that if I didn’t?”

She spent the night at his place. In the morning she told him his apartment was terrible and he should move in with her. He did, but kept his place to work in. He thought it would take him another fifteen months to rewrite the book but he did it in six, cutting almost a hundred pages and reworking virtually every scene. The editor who saw it took Hugh to lunch and told him the book was great, truly great, but that his house was over inventoried with war novels and the public’s interest in World War II fiction was ebbing fast. “I’d like to scrap half the books we have scheduled and publish yours in their place,” the man said, “but I can’t do it.”

He went back to Anita dejected. He said, “I’m a genius and he loves the book and they don’t want it.”

“Well, fuck him,” she said.

The next editor who saw it took Hugh to the same restaurant, where he ordered the same dish he had had before. The editor started off the same way and spoke in the same prep school accent and Hugh was tempted to finish his sentences for him. But while he was picking at his food and barely paying attention the man was saying that there were a few changes he would recommend, nothing substantial and Hugh of course would be the final judge, and they would like to schedule the book for the following spring if Hugh thought he could make the changes by then, and they would pay an advance of thus and so many dollars, and—

The next afternoon they took out a marriage license. “I don’t know,” she said. “An Irish-Italian and a Scotch-Armenian. I know it’s the American way but my parents are going to shit.”

“Well, fuck ’em,” he said.

“It would help if you were Catholic. What exactly are you, anyway?”

“I’m an atheist.”

“Well, no kidding. So am I, but I mean a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist.”

“A Protestant atheist.”

“Yeah, I know. It would be so much easier all around if you were a Catholic atheist.”

“I could pretend to be one.”

“You could, couldn’t you? While you’re pretending, you could even leave out the atheist part.”

“There I draw the line.”

They were married and the book came out in the spring. It hit the charts three weeks after publication day and went straight to the top. There was a movie sale and dozens of foreign sales and reprint offers and all of a sudden it was raining money and he knew he would never have to eat spaghetti again. Which was unfortunate, because it was the only thing Anita knew how to cook.

The book was still high on the best-seller list when the baby was born. That was in 1953, eight years after the war had ended, seven years after he had started trying to write about it. They told each other that New York was no place to bring up a kid and they looked around and found Bucks County and let a realtor drive them around and show them houses. They bought a stone farmhouse with thirty acres of land five miles out of New Hope.

Twelve years later Anita flew to El Paso and walked across the border for a Mexican divorce. She came back to the Bucks County farmhouse long enough to collect Karen and to tell Hugh that he ought to read his own books if he wanted to know why the marriage failed. She spent a week in New York before flying to Arizona. There was an architect she’d met in Juárez. He wanted to marry her. She knew he was good in bed but wanted to check what kind of houses he built before making up her mind. Evidently she liked his houses better than she liked Hugh’s books since One If by Land.

He still lived in the stone farmhouse. On three occasions he had listed the property for sale, and each time he had withdrawn it at the first sign of a serious offer. One local realtor had not spoken to him since. He realized now that he would never leave, that something kept him there, that no matter how far he traveled he would always come back. He lived there and wrote a book every year. Every winter he turned in a manuscript to his publisher, and every fall a new novel by Hugh Markarian appeared in the bookstores. Only a couple had made the best-seller lists and none had lingered there long, but neither had any of them ever lost money. The paperback editions were constantly in print. Reviewers generally noted his smooth professionalism, his ability to tell a story and keep it moving, his facility with realistic dialogue and swift delineation of character. And nine times out of ten they mentioned One If by Land.

Every now and then he would pick up a copy of One If by Land and try to read it. There was a song from On a Clear Day, the Broadway musical, and it ran through his head during those occasional forays at the book.

Each time he found the book unreadable. The writing was awkward, uneven. The construction of the book, after all that careful revision, was impossibly clumsy. He would read sentences and wince at the thought of ever having written so badly.

The paradox infuriated him. Every book since One If by Land was better written, and none was as good a book.

What had he had that he didn’t have now?

He closed his eyes for a moment. He had turned in his latest novel two months ago and it was time for him to start a new one. Hence it was not a time for negative thoughts. Hence he would stop thinking negatively.

He picked up his drink and crossed the room.

Four

Peter was drinking screwdrivers and making them last. He didn’t understand alcohol and never knew what to order on the rare occasions when he had to order something. This time he had tried to order a brandy Alexander. He had had one once and seemed to remember enjoying the taste. But Warren refused to let him order it. “That’s a faggot drink,” he insisted. “Order a man’s drink, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well, a screwdriver, then.”

Warren put his head in his hands, muttering that a whole generation of American youth had failed to learn how to drink and the country was going to hell in a hearse. The screwdriver wasn’t too bad. It tasted like orange juice that was beginning to go bad in the carton. He was on the point of telling the waitress that the orange juice was turning when he realized that the sort of varnishy taste was the vodka.

Warren was drinking Cognac and drinking quite a lot of it. The more he drank, the more he seemed to become himself, with all of his mannerisms more pronounced than ever. As he studied him, Peter saw that alcohol was definitely a high for some people. For him it had never been other than a down, and he was incapable of understanding what people liked about drinking. It tasted terrible and it dulled your mind and eventually it made you throw up and pass out. He could see no stage of the game where it was even marginally pleasurable.

He had tried most drugs in the course of his twenty-two years. He had done glue in ninth grade and found nothing much to it outside of dizziness and nausea. You reeled around a little, and you threw up. During the next two years he got into cough syrup and grass. The cough syrup was a down, and while there were still times he seemed to require it — especially during bad times with Gretchen — he had never much liked it. Grass was good from the beginning, and for a long time he thought grass was never other than good, until one day he was in a bad mood and smoked a lot and freaked completely. He had never stopped doing grass, it was a part way of life, but there were times when he knew it would be a bad idea to smoke just then.

Acid was nice. He’d tripped ten times in the space of about two months and was glad he had done it and equally glad never to do it again. It took him to some interesting places and showed him some important parts of his head, but it also scared the hell out of him. He saw how easy it would be to let go completely and just stay inside there with all the pretty colors. What seemed most frightening of all was that he might like it there and want to stay there, and he did not want to want it. Besides, while it taught you to get out of linear paths it also did odd things to memory and perception, and he decided he could live without it.

He could also live without scag, which he had snorted once, and barbiturates, which he tried four times in an effort to discover something pleasurable in them. There was no difficulty finding pleasure in scag. It was so overwhelmingly enjoyable that he knew once was enough and twice was too much, and when something felt that good it would be very fucking easy to acquire a jones and very fucking hard to kick it. There were a great many things he did not want to be, and a junkie was high up on the list.

Speed was beautiful, cocaine best of all. One time after he and Gretchen had been living together for a couple of months she came home with a couple of twists of coke. They each snorted one and jumped into bed. They didn’t get out of bed for sixteen hours and didn’t stop balling for more than five minutes at a time in all those sixteen hours. It was a supergood sex trip but the stuff was expensive and hard to find, and he thought it was probably just as well, because you could literally screw yourself to death on it. It wasn’t supposed to hit everybody that way. It certainly hit him hard, though.

Other speeds were good, if not sexy. Your brain worked better than ever and you were all ego, absolutely on top of everything. For a while he and Gretchen had been doing a hell of a lot of speed, and it was no good because the stuff had to get to you sooner or later. You lost weight and began to fall apart physically. That part of it he had always been able to control. He took heavy doses of organic vitamins and made sure he ate decently whether he felt like it or not. But Gretchen wouldn’t take the trouble. Even if he put the vitamin pills out for her she wouldn’t get around to swallowing them. And even the vitamins couldn’t protect him from the mental effects of too much speed, the occasional blackouts, the desperate need to crash, to sleep, counterbalanced by the utter inability to turn one’s mind off and escape from consciousness. Finally they both got off it, balanced themselves out with tranquilizers and worked their way clean. He had stayed off, Gretchen had not. He would drop a pill now and then when he had a reason to but he would not ride the high, would not take another pill when the first one ran down. He seemed capable of staying on that plane, but he was still not entirely sure of himself; it was like heroin, you had to be terrified of anything you liked that much.

By that line of reasoning, he didn’t have to be terrified of alcohol. He sipped now and then at his screwdriver, wondering as he did so how anyone could prefer the taste of it to that of pure orange juice, and when the glass was finally empty he let himself be talked into a second.

He was enjoying himself, the drinks notwithstanding. He was pleased with the way the show had gone, and Warren’s praise had warmed him, however little of it had been sincerely meant. Warren had introduced him to the dermatologist and his wife as “the Harold Pinter — no, no, the Bryce Meredith — of theatrical lighting.” But Bryce had also complimented him on his efforts and Bryce was supposed to be a director who was generally sparing of praise.

It felt nice just sitting here, being simultaneously alone and among friends. He was happy to let the conversation go on around him, and no one seemed to care that he wasn’t saying much of anything. Warren was carrying most of the conversation, as he generally did when he was in a manic phase; when the pendulum swayed the other way he generally kept to himself. He moved the ball around now, interspersing a running put-down of Arthur Miller with various numbers on absent members of the theatrical company.

“Did you know that he actually thought Salesman was a comedy? He wrote it as a comedy and when he was all finished he read through it and thought it was a comedy. So he gave it to someone to read and they said ‘baby, this is tragic,’ and he thought, ‘Oh, then it’s a tragedy.’”

“You are oversimplifying and—”

“Oh, of course I am, Bryce. I don’t want to put us all to sleep, do I? But consider that play staged as comedy. Would you care for that job?”

“I enjoy directing it traditionally.”

“And you do it brilliantly, dear boy. No one denies it But the author saw it as a comedy! Now there are plays that work both ways. Hamlet, for example. Has there ever been a better comic character than Polonius? Those incredible gusts of pompous wind. And then the man is slain by mistake! Or the soliloquy, the famous and genuinely beautiful soliloquy, with its metaphors so thoroughly mixed it could have been written by a Waring blender, except that it transcends its own ridiculous elements. Imagine the soliloquy—”

Peter faded out of the conversation, let the warmth and cadence of the voices soothe him without bothering to register the words.

Warren fascinated him, and this fascination in turn worried Peter. Warren delighted in flaunting his homosexuality in a way Peter could not comprehend. He could understand people insisting on the right to be openly homosexual. He could similarly understand the Gay Militants with their “Gay Is Proud” slogan. But Warren’s approach took neither of these forms. He did not defend his rights so much as he took them for granted, and instead of exuding homosexual pride he managed at once to mock himself and the heterosexual world.

Peter could never have carried it off, and knew it. Even when he had been able to accept himself as gay he had been unable to believe deeply that homosexuality was normal or respectable. Occasionally he worried that it was this disbelief that turned him away from male lovers and toward female ones. Most of the time he rejected this line of thought, feeling instead that homosexuality had been for him a logical developmental stage, a stage very much consistent with his personality and upbringing, but no more than a stage for him on the road to adult heterosexuality. He was not yet entirely secure enough to be comfortable when Warren vamped him. He knew that it was a game and not to be taken seriously, but like every game it had its serious aspects, and if Warren was kidding, he was also kidding on the square. And he would not be doing so if he did not think Peter was something of a prospect, and where there was smoke and all that, and Peter wished he were more confident that Warren was wrong.

The first time he had not known what was happening. Later on he would imagine that he must have known, must have sensed what it was all about, but he was fourteen years old and drug-wise and sex-foolish, a fair and slender boy who hitchhiked back and forth from Newton every day after school because New Hope was where it was happening.

He remembered the driver, remembered the upholstery of the car, remembered the sound of the man’s voice but could not summon up a picture of the face. The stream of questions — Did he like girls, did he like to jerk off — a line of patter he now knew was the ultimate seduction cliché but which he was being exposed to then for the first time.

“There’s something that’s better than jerking off,” the man assured him. “Twice the fun and half the effort, and it’s not bad for you the way jerking off is.”

This had interested him. He had always vaguely assumed there was something wrong with masturbating, but the pleasure was too great to pass up. Especially if you were stoned — the orgasm seemed to last for a month.

“The only thing is I don’t know if you’re mature enough for it. You’d better let me see your cock.”

Without a second thought he had opened his pants, produced his penis. The man’s hand, large and calloused, reached to stroke him. “Hey, that’s not bad at all for a guy your size,” he said admiringly. His fingers worked skillfully and Peter responded immediately. “Ah,” the man said. “You can really get it up there, can’t you? Hard as a fucking rock. You’re more of a man than I would have guessed.”

The praise dispelled any doubts the boy might have had. The man turned the car onto a side road, found a parking space behind a clump of brush. “Now I’ll tell you what we’ll do. First show me how you jerk off, and then I’ll show you a way that’s ten times as good.”

“And it’s really better for you?”

“The best.”

Peter reached to manipulate his penis. “No,” the man said. “No, show me on mine.” He opened his pants and exposed himself. His penis was much larger than Peter’s and was already erect. Peter envied it. He stroked the organ for a few seconds until the man moaned and had a powerful orgasm.

“You are great,” the man said. “You are one great kid.” He caught his breath. “Now I’ll show you the better way,” he said, and leaned over to take Peter’s organ in his mouth and suck him.

It was a complete surprise, he had never even heard of anything like this, and Peter’s initial reaction was panic; he thought the man was a lunatic who was going to bite his cock off. But the sensations banished the fear and overwhelmed Peter completely. The man was good, bringing him to the brink of orgasm and then shifting the pace until the boy was dizzy and breathless with the need to reach a climax.

The orgasm, when it came, was indescribable.

Afterward the man dropped him in New Hope and told him he was a great kid and a man’s man and gave him a dollar. Peter spent the dollar on three jays that he bought from a black kid who did a little small-time dealing around the high school. He couldn’t wait to find out what it would feel like behind grass.

It wasn’t long before he found out. He never saw the first man again, but in less than a week he hitched a ride with another man with similar tastes. It was even better this time. In a way it wasn’t as exciting because this time he knew what to expect, but the grass enhanced it fantastically and of course this time he wasn’t afraid of having his penis bitten.

He learned quickly, learned how to operate before he really knew what he was doing. He learned how to predict that a man would want to suck him and he learned how to make it evident that he could be safely approached. Something about it bothered him, something that many of the men projected, and he would try to give it up just as he had tried to give up masturbation, and with no greater success.

Ultimately — he was surprised in retrospect that it took as long as it did — he met a man who wanted reciprocity. A man who sucked him well enough and then pulled out his own penis and demanded that Peter give what he had just received.

“I never do that,” he said.

“You do today,” the man said, and grabbed Peter by the hair.

He struggled, but knew as he did so that he was going to do as the man desired. The man was twice his size and built like an ox, and Peter knew the man could make him do anything he wanted.

Besides, he wanted to know what it was like. All these men wanted to do it. What did they get out of it? What was it like to have a cock in your mouth and suck it? What did it feel like, what did it taste like?

He had to do it, so here was the perfect excuse to find out.

He found out he liked it.

“... have to admit he attempts more than any other American playwright. The man tries.”

“He tries my patience.”

“He’s ambitious, Warren.”

“Don’t you think you might be confusing ambition with pretense? God knows he selects the loftiest themes imaginable, but to praise him for that is like giving a man a medal for climbing fifty feet up Mount Everest. What’s so ambitious about coming out against witchhunts? And the analogy doesn’t even hold, you know. Those girls in Salem were witches. Damn silly reason to hang them, but facts are facts.

“As far as ambition goes, the most ambitious thing the man ever did was marry Marilyn Monroe, and I don’t think he handled that so triumphantly. He did not do well by the lady, but then nobody did.”

“You one of her fans, Warren?”

“How could I be otherwise? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. What self-respecting faggot can fail to respond to that? Garland, Monroe—”

“Why is that, Warren?” This from Hugh.

“Why the attraction? Lord, I don’t know. The usual argument is identification. Another one is that we hate women and want to see them fail, so we treasure the failures. Or that they embody (a) all the qualities the typical faggot’s mother lacked or (b) all the qualities she had. You pays your money and you takes your choice. None of it makes much sense to me. But we like the losers, the fey doomed ones. The Ophelias.”

“What do you think of Miller, Hugh?”

“I haven’t seen that many of his plays, and none of them recently. I remember enjoying A View from the Bridge.”

“Better than most,” Warren conceded.

“But I can’t really judge him, I’m afraid.”

“You can judge him as a craftsman, can’t you?”

“Oh, definitely not. Playwriting is a completely different discipline and one I know nothing about.”

“You’ve never written a play?”

“Wouldn’t know where to start.”

“But your dialogue—”

“Dialogue is a completely different matter on the stage and between book covers. It has an entirely different task to perform. In a book...”

Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe and Gretchen Vann.

Was that how he had chosen her? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. That was Gretch well enough. She was a loser, fey, doomed, and it was there in her haunted eyes in the best of times. Was that the aspect of her that had appealed to him?

He wondered. In a way he had not chosen her at all. She had chosen him, warming to him that afternoon when he had stopped at her shop on the Towpath, keeping him there in bubbling conversation all afternoon, then taking him back to her apartment in the Shithouse and leading him promptly to bed.

He’d never expected it would end in bed; when it did, he never thought it would lead to more than a quick tumble, of little good to either of them. He had not thought of her that way while they talked, probably because of the difference in their ages. He had been with girls before, perhaps half a dozen of them (although she was the first he ever lived with), but all his female sexual partners had been in his own age group.

Perhaps that had made it easier for him to relax in her presence. They got to know each other through conversation uncomplicated by sexual overtones; the undertones were there but he wasn’t listening to them. He talked to her, more at ease with her than with any other man or woman, and he listened to her and was struck by her wit and warmth and verve.

If she surprised him by taking him to bed, once there he surprised himself. Her body was exciting, soft skin over firm flesh, the curves of her hips, the sweet plain of her belly, but while recognizing this he felt no great desire for her. His detachment was cerebral; his loins had other ideas and wanted her with an urgent and yet confident potency he had never enjoyed before. He lay upon her and moved in and out of her warmth with long, deep, tantalizingly slow strokes, each movement heightening his passion but bringing him no closer to fulfillment. Her first orgasm thrilled him with a sense of heady masculine power; he had experienced nothing like it before. He thought he ought to stop, that she was finished and it would be boorish to continue. His body had other ideas and he went on thrusting at her and breathing the hot female smell of her. He moved faster and harder, hammering himself into her, and she quivered and moaned in serial orgasm until he emptied himself utterly into her.

“Oh, baby,” she told him afterward, cuddling his head to her little breasts. “Baby, if I had the strength to move, I’d lock the door and swallow the key. I’ve got me a sweet young stud and I’m not letting go of him. Are you always so great? Be a gentleman and lie and tell me I had something to do with it.”

“You had everything to do with it. It’s not a lie. It was... I can’t fit words to it.”

“Baby says the sweetest things. Oh, I knew you’d be good for me the minute I saw you. You’re so beautiful and you turned me on so much, and I knew you would want me a little. But talk about beyond the lady’s wildest dreams. The sun and the moon and all the fucking stars. I don’t think I’ll ever let you out of this room. You can go but your cock stays right here.”

“I want to keep it company.”

“I’d never let it be lonely. Oh, my God! How can you be ready already? I have a feeling we’re going to screw all night. How do you want to do it? Think of a fantasy and we’ll work it out. Oh, just stay like that. Let me get on top, let Mama do the work. Baby worked hard and baby deserves a rest. God, you feel good inside me. You’re so beautiful. Do you like this? And this? Oh baby, Petey baby, you’re divine, you know that?”

There were still times like that. They would go weeks without having each other, especially when drugs them too far inside their own heads for the sexual apparatus to function. Then the mood would be suddenly right and they would take each other in frenzied coupling. At such times they thrilled each other as neither had ever been thrilled by anyone else. The rest of the world looked at them and saw a depraved older woman and a young man who lived off her; no one knew how tightly they were bound to each other.

He had fled homosexuality before meeting her, preferring a sexless existence to a way of life that had grown increasingly uncomfortable and guilt-ridden. She made him aware of himself as a fully heterosexual being. And now, even knowing that he had to leave her, that she was tearing him apart, he realized what he owed her and how much he still seemed to require her.

“Let me get on top. Let Mama do the work.”

“... vacancy coming up at the Shithouse, so if you know anybody looking for a place—”

“Dear dear Sully. Now how could I in all good conscience recommend that establishment to anyone? It should be condemned, you know.”

“It’s a solid building. And it gives people what they need.”

“So do the heroin peddlers.”

“You know the longest I ever had a unit vacant? Ten days, and that was in the depths of winter.”

“The depths of winter. Winter’s gloomy depths. Suleiman, you’re a closet poet.”

Peter looked up. “A vacancy? Who’s moving out? Or are we evicted?”

“I wouldn’t throw you two out. Hell, I love you people.”

“Then who is it?”

“What’s-his-name, Hillary. Top floor.”

“Who told you they were moving?”

“Well, he left town, didn’t he? I guess his girl’s still around the way I heard it, but she won’t be staying.”

Peter shook his head. “She’s staying.”

“Staying in New Hope? Who told you that?”

“She did. A couple of hours ago.”

“And she’s keeping her room?”

“For the time being. I don’t know how she can afford it. She works part time for Olive McIntyre and I don’t think she can be making more than twenty-five or thirty dollars a week.”

“Maybe she’s got money of her own,” Sully suggested.

“Well, maybe, but I have the impression she doesn’t.”

“Which means I haven’t got a vacancy now but probably will in a couple of weeks. Well, that’s something to know. Very interesting. What’s her name again?”

“Linda.”

“That’s right, Linda. Not a bad-looking girl, either. Not bad at all. You wouldn’t know her last name by any chance? He took the place in his name, Hillary, so I never got her last name.”

Peter had to think a moment. “Robshaw,” he said.

“Linda Robshaw. Well, you’ll excuse me, but I just told some other people that I had a vacancy, and now I have to tell them that I don’t.”

When Sully was out of earshot, Warren said, “The great hunter goes off to load his gun.”

Hugh said, “Whoever Linda Robshaw is, it sounds as though she has a good shot at being the next Mrs. Jaeger. If she plays her cards right.”

“If she plays them wrong, you mean. I’m afraid not, though.”

“Isn’t he about due for a change?”

Warren shrugged. “I don’t follow his career all that closely, but I think the current model still has a year or two left on it. He wouldn’t marry Linda, though. She’s too old. She must be around twenty-eight.”

“He did look predatory,” the doctor said.

“Ah, Sully the Magnificent was that, all right. He’ll try to screw her and he may well manage it. He’s sup posed to have a surprisingly good batting average that way.”

The doctor’s wife said she couldn’t imagine why. “He’s not at all attractive. I certainly wouldn’t consider him attractive.”

“Nor would I, my dear. It’s the cocksure masculinity, if you’ll pardon the expression, coupled with the feudal approach. He’s most successful with tenants and employees. Tumbles them three or four times and then never wants them again. According to rumor, he’s been in bed at least once with every girl who ever waited tables here He doesn’t make it a requirement up front, but somehow it always seems to work out that way before long.”

“I don’t think he’ll get Linda,” Peter said.

“I hope not,” said Rita Welsh. “I think he’s a monster. He looks like an ape, anyway.”

“Interesting,” Warren said. “I’ve never noticed it before, but his arms are a shade longer than his legs. Something odd about his thumbs, too. I wonder if he ever had anything going with Fay Wray?”

Hugh was the first to leave. Bryce and the Welshs followed him within a few minutes. Peter took a last sip of his second screwdriver.

“Well,” he said.

“One more round,” Warren said, signaling the waitress.

“I really don’t want another drink, Warren.”

“I do, and I hate drinking alone. One more won’t hurt you, Peterkin.”

“I know it won’t, but I can’t stand the taste. Would it be all right if I had plain orange juice?”

“You’re beyond salvation.” He raised his eyes to the girl. “A double Cognac and a large OJ on the rocks.”

When she brought the drinks she asked Warren if he wanted them mixed. He turned slightly green and shuddered violently. “Thanks just the same,” he said, “but the Cognac is for me, and the orange juice is for my young friend here. He’s driving, you see.”

Peter said, “Maybe it wouldn’t be bad. Cognac and orange juice.”

“Let us take it on faith that it would be bad.”

“I really ought to be getting home, Warren.”

“Nonsense. The night is young. And you’re so beautiful.”

“I wish you’d stop that.”

“You know what Blake said about ungratified desire. Or perhaps you don’t. Briefly, he was against it. You don’t want to go home, lad. You want to come home with me.”

“I suppose I Should feel flattered.”

“No question about it.”

“The thing is, Warren, I couldn’t be less interested. I’m not gay.”

“Of course not. You’ve never been in bed with a man, have you?”

“That was a stage.”

“All the world’s a stage, Peterkin.”

“I grew out of it.”

“Outgrown and discarded like a child’s old shoes. What a sad fate for poor old homosexuality! I’ll tell you a secret, Peterkin. You never outgrow it. Think of the things you used to do in bed and tell me how they wouldn’t be fun anymore.”

“Maybe they would be. I don’t want to find out. I’ve given all of that up.”

“For Gretchen.

“For myself, actually.” He forced a smile. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to come between you and Bert.”

“You wouldn’t want to come between us? I wasn’t suggesting a trio, but it sounds delicious.”

“I mean Bert wouldn’t like it if you brought me home, would he?”

“The only thing that would disturb Bert is if I did something unkind to his piano, and I’ve never been deliberately unkind to a piano in my life. Bert hasn’t a jealous bone in his head. I really think you ought to come home with me, Peterkin.”

“I really think you ought to tone down the camping, Warren. And I really think I ought to go home myself.”

“To Gretchen.”

“Yes, to Gretchen.”

“What an odd medium you selected as salvation from the quagmire of faggotry. She’s just a mother substitute, Peterkin.”

“Leave it alone.”

“Although I have to admit her maternal impulses are sometimes hard to detect.”

“God damn it—”

“I’m sorry. I am sorry. I enjoy baiting people but when I drink too much I carry it too far. It’s primarily self-destructive because now I’ll have to sit around hating myself. You’ll forgive Aunt Warren, won’t you?”

“Of course. You found a sore spot, that’s all.”

“It’s a habit of mine. One of the more regrettable ones. You’re going now? How was the orange juice?”

“Better than the screwdriver.”

“Extraordinary. Well, I think I’ll have one more before I toddle off. I’ll see you tomorrow. And remember what I told you about Tony. Don’t sell yourself any shorter than you absolutely have to.”

“I’ll remember.”

The apartment was dark when he returned to it. He let himself in and checked Robin. She was curled on her side, her thumb in her mouth. She sucked her thumb only when she slept.

He went to the big double bed. He undressed quietly in the darkness, went to the bathroom and urinated. When he was on his way back to the bed she said, “You can flush it. I’m not asleep.”

He flushed the toilet. “I thought you were out. I was hoping you’d be able to sleep.”

“I can’t just yet, but I’m getting a little drowsy, baby. My head is still making circles but they’re slowing down a little. I took a trank.”

“I hope it wasn’t a Librium.”

“No, it was Valium. Librium would have been a bad idea.”

“A very bad idea. I didn’t know we had any Vals, or I would have gotten one into you before.”

“I took the last one. I almost took a sleeping pill but I didn’t. Are you proud of me? I’m proud of me.”

“I’m proud of you. Who was going to give you the sleeping pill?”

“I still have a couple of reds.”

“Christ.”

“I had them hidden. Isn’t that disgusting? Only a couple, Petey. Not enough to kill yourself if you wanted to, and I would never do that anyway. I don’t think I would.”

“It’s such a bad drug. People kill themselves by accident. They have one and they get groggy and forget they took it so they take another, and they empty the whole bottle that way and never wake up.”

“I’ll throw them out tomorrow. I swear I will. I’ll give them to you and you can throw them out. You’re right. They’re scary. To kill yourself by accident. Isn’t that what happened to Marilyn Monroe? I’ll give them to you and you can — did I say something wrong, baby?”

“Just a mental connection. Nothing.”

“Oh, I didn’t ask you about the show.”

“It was fine. I think I’ll have a jay before I go to sleep, but I don’t think you should have one.”

“No, I don’t want to smoke.”

“I’ll just have enough to get a little buzz. I don’t want to be very high.” He got the plastic vial and a pack of cigarette papers and rolled a skinny cigarette. He smoked half of it, then pinched it out and emptied the stub back into the vial. “That’s enough,” he said. “Just to soften the edges.”

“Come to bed, Petey.”

He lay down beside her and she turned to him. “I’m going to come out of it this time, Petey. I can feel the wires loosening. I’ll be better.”

“I know you will.”

“I wish I knew it. All I can do is think it and not be sure. You’ll help me.”

“Sure.”

“I can’t stay a hundred percent clean, but I can at least balance myself. Don’t leave me, Petey.”

“I won’t.”

“Hold me, Petey. Just hold me. Make us be warm. It’s so cold out there, and there are men with long sharp knives. Hold me.”

Linda was just drifting off to sleep when there was a knock at the door. Her mind was beginning to shift from thought to dream, and for an instant she tried to fit the knocking sound into the dream pattern. Then it registered — a knock on the door — and she sat bolt upright, her heart pounding.

Was it Marc?

But Marc wouldn’t knock. And Marc would not come back. Marc, once gone, would never return.

Then who?

The knock was repeated. She considered who it might have been. Peter, coming to pay her the thirty dollars? It seemed unlikely that he would bother her so late at night, but if he was sufficiently stoned it might seem like a good idea to him. Whoever it was, she couldn’t imagine why she should answer the door. She had been to sleep. All right — if she left the knock unanswered she could slip back into sleep and that would be the end it. If only whoever it was would go away—

Another knock. And a voice she didn’t recognize: “Miss Robshaw?”

Oh, the hell with it. “Who is it?”

“Mr. Jaeger.”

“Who?”

“Sully Jaeger. Sully.”

“What do you want?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour but I couldn’t help it, I just closed the restaurant a few minutes ago. Could you open the door?”

What did he want at this hour? To tell her she’d have to vacate the apartment? But he wouldn’t barge in on her in the middle of the night to throw her out. Then again, he might very well throw her out if she refused to let him into his own property.

“Just a minute.”

She always slept nude. Now she grabbed a pair of jeans and a sweater and got into them hurriedly. She looked like hell but she was damned if she would comb her hair and brush her teeth for his benefit. She went to the door and opened it and asked him what he wanted.

“Really sorry to disturb you,” he said. “I thought you just might be up, so many theatrical people keep late hours, and I’m going to be out of town tomorrow and it couldn’t wait. So I took a chance.” He tried a smile. “I’d as soon be in bed myself.”

Was that double entendre or was she getting paranoid?

“I’m not in the theater.”

“Well, Mr. Hillary.”

“Mr. Hillary doesn’t live here anymore.”

“I know. That’s what I heard, and this evening I had a fellow over to the place asking did I have a vacancy, and he has to know one way or the other. What I wanted to know is whether you’ll be staying on now or not.”

“I’ll be staying.”

“Well, fine. I’m glad to hear that.”

“You are?”

“I always get the rent on time and I never had the slightest bit of trouble from you. I’d much rather have you here than take a chance on somebody else, and with somebody new you’re always taking a chance.” The same smile again. “Besides, you’re prettier than he is. You do more for the place’s image, I think they call it.”

“Thank you. Is that all?”

“How’s that?”

“Is that all you wanted to know?”

“I guess that’s the size of it.”

“Well.”

He scratched his head. “I guess it’s no strain for you financially. Fifty a week is a tougher rent to pay when there’s only one person paying it.”

“I think I’ll manage.”

“You’re working for what’s-her-name over at the mall—”

“Olive McIntyre.”

“Yeah, I see a lot of her husband. Sell liquor in this town and you’ll see a lot of old Clem. What are you, working part time for her?”

Would he never leave? “That’s right.”

“She can’t be paying you a hell of a lot.”

“Pardon me?”

“I said she can’t be—”

“Mr. Jaeger, is there a point to all of this?”

He scratched his head again and flashed the smile. “Well, matter of fact, there is. I don’t want to barge right in with it—”

I’ll fucking bet you don’t.

“—but it occurs to me that working for Clem’s wife can’t pay you enough to get by on, and maybe you could use either a full-time job or some additional part-time work. I generally look to hire two extra waitresses around the first of June for the summer season, but we’ve been doing fair business the past couple weeks and it wouldn’t hurt to get another girl any time now, and I thought if you need work you might be interested.”

For a moment she felt guilty for having guessed he was dropping back to throw a pass. Then she realized she was supposed to fed guilty, and he was preparing to make a pass.

“That’s very generous of you,” she said.

“Not generous. I need a waitress and you need work. One hand washes the other, I think they call it. Just a question of being practical.”

“I’m impractical.”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t think I’d like the work, Mr. Jaeger.”

“I’m an easy guy to work for, Linda, and—”

“I understand you make it a point to sleep with your waitresses.”

He looked hurt. “Who told you that?”

“Everybody.”

“Well, I don’t know what you heard—”

“I just told you what I heard.”

“I don’t know what you heard, but don’t believe everything you hear.” The smile. “Sleep with all my waitresses. Like some Arab with his harem, the way you make it sound. I admit it sometimes works out that there’s what they call a mutual attraction, and then nature takes its course. But as far as—”

“I’m sorry if I jumped to conclusions,” she said, her tone as flat as she could make it. “Thank you for the offer, then. But I really don’t think I’d care for the work.”

“How do you know till you try it?”

“I waited on tables before, Mr. Jaeger. I didn’t like it.”

He nodded, and his face changed; he had tried and failed and was now giving up. “Well, you could always change your mind,” he said.

“I’ll let you know if I do.”

“You do that,” he said.

When the door was closed and the key turned in the lock she sagged against the door and listened to his footsteps on the stairs. She felt drained, exhausted. Early in the conversation she had wanted a cigarette but had been unwilling to step out of the doorway to get one.

Now she found the pack and lit a cigarette, walked listlessly around the room. She wondered if she had handled it well and decided that she had. She had made it nixonially clear that she was not interested in his job or in him and had done so in a manner which ought to discourage further overtures. And she had kept her cool; he left disappointed but left without hating her. It was never a good idea to have a landlord who carried a grudge against you. Life at the Shithouse was bad enough without that.

Men, she thought, were just incredible. She would have gladly bet her remaining hundred and fifty-seven dollars that he had no prospective tenant with an urgent need to know if her apartment was up for grabs. She was convinced that Sully had known the answers to his questions before he asked them. The question that mattered to him was one he had never put in words, however clearly he got his meaning across.

Well, she’d answered that question, too.

She put out the cigarette. She would have to get used to this sort of thing from now on. Men would be sniffing at her like dogs at a bitch in heat. That she had never been less in heat seemed to be immaterial. All that mattered was her availability.

It had been that way after her divorce. Some of the suitors surprised her. Friends of Alan’s, husbands of her own friends, men who had never done so much as exchange a secret glance with her at parties, were suddenly turning up on her doorstep. Not because she was irresistible. Merely because she was there.

The best thing about living with a man, she thought, was that it tended to keep some of the others away.

Sully was breathing heavily on his way down the stairs. He bore the rejection philosophically. The easiest way to get any woman was to be the nearest man around during times of stress. Folk wisdom had it that recent widows were the easiest game on earth, and while Sully couldn’t bear that one out on the basis of personal experience, he saw every reason in the world why it should be true. They leaned on some man for ten or twenty years and all at once he wasn’t there, so they fell over. And as soon as they hit the ground they opened their legs.

This one wasn’t having any. Well, that was up to her. But the only way to find out was to find out, and it hadn’t cost him more than a short walk and a couple flights of stairs. It was like being a salesman, he had often thought. You had to make the calls and get the doors shut in your face if you were going to make any sales. A guy who stopped girls on the street and asked them if they’d like to fuck would get his face slapped a lot, but he would also get laid a damn sight more frequently than the average Joe.

He paused at the ground-floor landing. She’d riven him a hard-on just standing there and talking to him, and he’d been wondering if she was going to notice. If she had, she’d given him no sign of it. But you couldn’t be sure with that kind; she was all ice water, frozen to the bone.

He touched himself. He was still partially tumescent, and his groin throbbed with need. He thought of his wife. She would be in bed now. If there was a late movie that she liked, she’d be watching it, propped up with pillows. Or she’d be asleep, smelling jointly of Shalimar and her own warm musk. She always wore Shalimar to bed, and nothing else. She had said so not long before the wedding, and the line had charmed him. Later he found that a movie star had said it twenty years ago, that some flack wrote the line for the star, and that the extent of Melanie’s originality had been to change the name of the perfume from Chanel to her own brand.

He could smell her now, could remember the way her skin felt against his.

He started for the door, stopped abruptly, turned and walked down the hallway. He stopped before a door and put his head against the panel. No voices, just soft music. And a light was on; he could see it under the bottom of the door.

He knocked.

“Who’s there?”

“Me. Sully.”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? I want to go across the Atlantic in a rowboat.”

“Not tonight.”

“Oh?”

“I got company.”

She might have had company, or she might have been alone. There was no way of knowing. The relationship he had with her was such that he felt free to knock on her door whenever he felt like it, while she in turn was just as free to turn him down. She had not turned him down often, and on those few occasions she had always made an excuse — that she was with someone, that she was feeling sick, that she was washing her hair.

He walked to the Barge Inn parking lot and picked up his car. He drove home and used his key in the door. The bedroom light was out, but he saw her in bed, illuminated in the glow of the television set.

She smiled. “Missed you,” she said.

“Long night.”

“Busy?”

“Fairly busy. What are you watching?”

“Nothing sensational. You could turn it off, I was just looking at it until I fell asleep.”

He tuned off the set, undressed in the darkness and got into bed beside her. He breathed her smell and put a hand on her and she turned to him and pressed against him. He ran his hands over her and felt the texture of her skin and kissed her.

“Oh, I missed you,” she said.

He kissed her and stroked her, telling himself how perfect her breasts were, how warm she was, how desirable. He focused his mind on the urgency of his desire and how much he wanted her. He made love to her with expert hands and she made small noises and caught at the hair on his back and shoulders.

“Oh God don’t make me wait—”

Nothing. Nothing at all. He could get a hard-on talking to a dime-a-dozen nobody who wished he would drop dead, and now he was with a beautiful woman who was dying for him and he didn’t have enough cock to fill a thimble.

“Sully—”

He kicked the bedclothes back, kissed her breasts, then moved downward. Not her fault so why leave her hanging? His mouth found her and she sighed luxuriously with pleasure, told him over and over how good it was.

He performed skillfully, hating her and hating himself all the while. For a while he thought she was never going to make it, but she got there with a near scream and collapsed gasping on her pillow.

He pulled up the covers and got under them, lying on his back.

“You’re so good to me,” she said.

“Baby.”

“Can I be good to you?”

“Not tonight.”

“Nothing I could do?”

There was nothing she could do because there was nothing that would work. He could not stay married for more than five years because he could never find a woman he could go on wanting for more than two or three years. It didn’t seem to matter how young she was or how beautiful, or how much she did or didn’t love him, or what she did or didn’t like to do in bed. Any other girl in the world right now and he’d be a bull, a prize stallion with the mare’s fee paid, but here he was with the most attractive woman in the world and there was nothing she could do because nothing would work.

“Let’s just get some sleep,” he said. “I’m beat.”

“Me too. Sully? Is it me?”

“You kidding?”

“I just wondered.”

“Too much work is all. I’m no kid, and I was on my feet all day.”

“Well, you made me feel awful good. Love me?”

“Love you,” he said, and kissed her and turned away.

Five

Olive McIntyre’s hair had turned silver-gray overnight when she was twenty-nine. Since then her face had had almost thirty years to grow to match the hair and hadn’t yet succeeded. Her brow was unlined, her eyes keen and vital. She was a tall woman, bigboned and stout; men never thought of her as pretty and never failed to regard her as attractive.

When Linda rang the bell of her white clapboard house, Olive led her inside to the kitchen, seated her at a round oak table, poured out two cups of fresh coffee and sat down opposite her. “You’re a damn sight better off without the son of a bitch,” she said by way of preamble. “But nobody can live on thirty a week this side of Pakistan. If you’d lived in New Hope longer you wouldn’t look so surprised. You can’t move your bowels here without the word getting around. Made any plans yet?”

“No.”

“Well, let’s put our heads together. Dumb as we are, the two of us ought to come up with something.”

Olive had never been inclined to beat around bushes. She always found it more natural to walk right over them. She was the only child of a Presbyterian minister who had in turn been the son and only heir of a Scotch-Irish immigrant who got rich in the Pennsylvania oilfields and went on to own railroads and newspapers. Olive’s father had spent little of the money while losing a great deal of it through bad investments; every few years Olive would turn up another batch of worthless securities in the attic. At first she had burned them. Now she sold them in bulk to a local shop which framed old documents and sold them as wall hangings. “Daddy always insisted those czarist bonds would be worth something, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right after all,” she’d said more than once. “Twenty-five cents a piece for a trunkful. A fraction less than the original purchase price, but it’s the principle that’s important.”

But there was no way for the minister to lose everything, and after his death Olive put her inheritance solid issues and never thereafter had the slightest difficulty living on her income. Except for occasional vacations, she spent every night of her life under the roof of the white clapboard house where she had been bom. Her wealth and social position enabled her to live as she wanted, unchallenged by anyone. Her dour view of the human race in turn enabled her to regard wealth as convenience and social position as an absurdity.

It was widely believed that the night Olive’s hair turned gray was the same night she married Clement McIntyre. “One night with Clem and she just turned white, and one look at that gray hair on the pillow next to him and Clem felt the need of a drink. Her hair never went brown again and he never stopped drinking, and one’s as likely as the other in time to come.”

It was a good story, the sort men enjoyed telling whether they really credited it or not. There was no truth in it. Olive’s hair went gray three years before she met McIntyre and as many years after her first night in bed with a man. She received her first proposal of marriage three days after her eighteenth birthday. It was the first of a dozen, none of which she ever considered accepting. Then at thirty-two she took a walk along the Towpath and passed a man sitting at an easel and gazing at an empty canvas. He had a three-day growth of beard and his pants were spotted with paint.

She took the same route back two hours later, not having thought of him since. He was still there in the same position and the canvas was still blank.

“It’s coming along nicely,” she said pleasantly.

“It’s finished.”

“Is it for sale?”

He turned and looked at her for the first time. Some life came into his eyes. “It’s too personal a statement for me to take money for it,” he said. “But I’ll give it to you, if you like.”

“I’d love to have it.”

“It’s yours.”

He handed it to her. She moved to take it, then withdrew. “You didn’t sign it,” she said.

“I’ll sign it on the back. I don’t like signatures on the front. They distract.”

He signed the back of the blank canvas. She thanked him again and went home with the blood singing in her veins. She did not look at his signature until she was inside her house with the door closed. “Clement McIntyre,” she said aloud. “Mrs. Clement McIntyre. Olive Drew McIntyre. Olive McIntyre.” She liked the sound of it, and in less than two weeks it was her name.

He was an alcoholic painter who had drifted into town just two days before she met him. He arrived in a Model-A Ford with the back full of canvases. In two days he had shown his work to every gallery in town and had found no one willing to display him. His paintings and his car and the clothes on his back were all he owned in the world. All he wanted to do on earth was to drink and to paint, and he was better at the former than the latter. No one in New Hope could figure out how on earth he persuaded Olive Drew to marry him.

He didn’t. It was she who persuaded him, and it took her the better part of a week. At first he couldn’t believe she was serious. Then he decided she was crazy. He told her if all she wanted was a husband she could do better than him. She said if all she wanted was a husband then she had picked a funny time to decide it, because she had already turned down half the town.

“I didn’t want them and I don’t want the other half. I want you.”

“Then you’ve got to be crazy.”

“If I’m too crazy to live with you can always get back in the car and leave. I wouldn’t let the bloodhounds after you.”

“How could I marry a woman I never slept with?”

“Now you’re talking,” she said. “The bedroom’s upstairs. You want to take a fresh drink with you?”

“I want to take the whole bottle.”

In bed they were perfect together. He was utterly astonished, and candid enough to say so. She was not surprised at all, because it had gone exactly as she had expected, exactly as she had known it would be from their first exchange of words on the Towpath.

She said, “Well?”

“Well, you’ve got to be crazy to want to marry me, but I’d have to be crazier to turn you down. As far as that goes I might have to marry you. Meaning I didn’t use anything. I was going to pull out but I got carried away.”

“Thank God for that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t have children. I had an operation a couple of years ago and they had to take out some spare parts. Everything’s in working order but I can’t ever get pregnant. You ought to know that ahead of time. I never cared to have children myself, but it means a lot to some people.”

“All it means to me is never again being embarrassed in a drugstore. It’s your own business but when you say an operation—”

“If I meant an abortion I would have said so.”

“You do tend to cut to the heart of the matter. You know, downstairs I was half convinced you were a virgin, and in bed I got the complete reverse of that impression.”

“In other words, how close to a virgin am I? There were five men. Nobody ever made love to me more than once.”

“An hour from now,” he said, “you won’t be able to make that statement.”

They were married by a justice of the peace in Doylestown on a rainy Thursday afternoon in October. For twenty-five years there had never been a day when she was not conscious of her love for him. He was never an unpleasant drunk, never had blackouts, never became sloppy or hostile. Nor was he ever wholly sober.

He warned her before the wedding that he might not remain faithful to her. “Just don’t bring anything home with you,” she said.

“You wouldn’t get upset?”

“Five years ago the tools in this town passed a law that no dog could run free within town limits. The day the law became official I took two good beagles and gave them to a farmer the other side of Lahaska. I never want anything with a leash on it.”

“I’ve got to marry you because God knows I’ll never find anyone else like you.”

“Of course if a dog or a man would sooner stay home in front of the fire I wouldn’t hold it against him. But it’s got to be him that decides.”

He never once had another woman because he never once wanted one. And not even in fantasy could she entertain the thought of another man. She paid for paints and canvases and he would paint in occasional spurts of great energy. The walls of the clapboard house were covered with his work to the point where every room but one looked like an art gallery.

The exception was the bedroom. Only one canvas hung there, the blank one he had given her on their first meeting. She had hung it that first night, centered over her bed. She had never taken it down.

“It’s a shame he couldn’t have cooled his heels for another month,” Olive said now. “As of Decoration Day we go on summer hours. I’d had it in mind to see if you’d want to work full time starting then. Our summer schedule’s about standard for New Hope. Tuesday through Sunday, eleven to ten, sometimes later on Saturdays if the crowds hold up. Like everybody else we close Mondays. I generally work most of Saturday and Sunday and split shifts on weekdays with whoever works for me.

“I can use you a minimum of forty hours a week, maybe a little more if you want extra work. And I’ll raise you to two fifty an hour. Not out of the goodness of my heart. I pay more during the season because it’s more work. In the good months you’re busy all day long. The scum of the earth streams in and out of the shop in a neverending stream. They may not buy much of anything, but they’re there. Forty hours at two-fifty an hour is a hundred a week before deductions, and if you can’t live on that you’ve got a problem.”

“I can live on that easily.”

“That’s starting Decoration Day. In the meantime it’s pointless to extend the hours. It would just give you more time to sit around waiting for something to happen. What I will do is raise your hourly rate to two fifty immediately. That’s not charity either, it’s an inducement to keep you working for me for the next six weeks. It’s not hard to find summer help around here. There’s nothing easier. What’s hard is to find anybody who’s any good, or if you do they pack up and go to Woodstock in the middle of July and leave you stranded. If you don’t plan on staying through Labor Day, I’d like you to tell me now.”

“I’ll stay. Definitely.”

“Fair enough. In the meantime you can work four days instead of three. That would be twenty-four hours. On Saturdays and Sundays you can open at eleven I’ll take over at two. That’s six more hours making it thirty hours comes to seventy-five dollars a week. Can you get by on that?”

“Yes.”

“Barely, but you can make it.”

“The thing is—”

“What?”

“I’ve almost felt guilty working for you this winter. There are days when the shop doesn’t take in enough to pay my salary, and I don’t want—”

“You don’t want to be a charity case. Well, I don’t want to be a home for stray cats, as far as that goes. I don’t make a profit on weekdays off-season. I stay open because it does a business good in the long run to have regular hours and keep to them. If people never know whether you’ll be open or not they give up after a while and stop coming around.

“This is the most amateur town in the world, Linda. The English are supposed to be a nation of shopkeepers. Well, New Hope is a town of shopkeepers, but ninety percent of them are doing it as a hobby. They don’t have to make a living, but they’re sick of playing solitaire and not bright enough for anything else, so they come here and open some artsy-fartsy shop and try not to lose more money than they can afford. As long as the stock dividends or the alimony or daddy’s check comes in every month they’ve got nothing to worry about.”

She refilled the coffee cups, gave Linda a cigarette and took one herself. She said, “Well, I’m an amateur myself. I opened the Lemon Tree because I thought it would be something interesting to do. I like to watch people. I think they’re the most amusing animals on God’s earth. The locals give you more long-range laughs but the tourists are always good for a few chuckles. They tickle the hell out of me.

“But I wouldn’t keep the shop open if it didn’t make a profit. The money’s not important in and of itself. I could live without it, or God knows I could find easier ways to make more of it. But I don’t want to play a game and lose at it, and the money is how you keep score. Now this is a roundabout way to say what I said in the beginning. I’m not doing you any favors. I’m not extending hours to create work. They’re just hours that I’d be working myself otherwise, and there’s no difference between paying two and a half bucks an hour to you or paying it to myself. Does that cover the subject?”

“I guess so.”

“You can go on down and open up as soon as you finish that coffee. I stay on summer hours until sometime in October, so you’ll have enough to live on at least that long. And by then you’ll have some other man to live with.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Oh? Perhaps not. You’re tougher than you look, aren’t you?”

“I’m learning,” she said.

She left her coffee unfinished and went to the shop and opened for business. That first day was a fluke; although the volume of tourists was no higher than usual, she somehow took in over two hundred dollars. A third of the sum came in a single sale. There were a dozen of Clement McIntyre’s canvases on one wall, and she sold one of them for seventy-five dollars. It was the first painting she had sold in all the months she’d worked there. Later she found out that there was a twenty percent commission on the pictures. “But don’t get carried away,” Olive warned her. “It’ll probably be six months before you sell another one.”

The days that followed were a return to normal, with a handful of small sales scattered across the hours. She chose to take it as an omen that her first day was such a good one. It seemed like confirmation of Olive’s offer and of her own acceptance of it.

She found herself more involved with the Lemon Tree now. She worked more hours, yet found the work less boring. Before the job had been a place to go and little more. If owning the Lemon Tree had been a hobby for Olive, working there had been much the same sort of thing for her. Before she had put in an occasional afternoon before going home to Marc; now she worked there six days a week for the money that she lived on, and when she left it was to return to an empty apartment. By the end of the first week in May she realized that she was getting along very well. She had anticipated bad moments and there had been several of them, but they had not been as bad as she had feared. There were some sleepless nights, and black hours of self-doubt and self-loathing. But they were no worse than similar hours while Marc lived with her. Solitude in and of itself was not a cause of despair, any more than companionship was in and of itself a cure.

And, too, she was becoming more open to casual conversations than she had been before Marc’s departure. She found herself chatting briefly with other residents of the Shithouse. Before she had rarely spoken to anyone there besides Peter and Gretchen — who had been Marc’s friends through the theater — and the couple on the first floor from whom she had bought a handmade silver necklace. And at work she seemed to be functioning as more of a social being.

Part of it, she knew, stemmed from her availability. Other men had followed in Sully’s wake, with more or less subtlety but with the same lack of success. She was open and friendly in most cases but she was simply not interested.

But not everyone who talked to her was a man on the make. She felt that she must be projecting more warmth, that she must give the impression of greater openness. More people were waving hello on the street; more casual acquaintances would stop into the Lemon Tree to exchange a few words.

Peter confirmed it for her. “You’ve changed,” he said. “I suppose everyone’s told you that.”

“As a matter of fact, you’re the first. How have I changed?”

“You seem less uptight, I guess.”

“Maybe I am. How?”

“I don’t know. You’re easier to talk to.”

“Did I used to be hard to talk to?”

“I shouldn’t say that, because you and I hardly ever talked. I think the first time we rapped at all was the night Marc split. But before that, I don’t know, it was a feeling I got from you. Vibrations. Like walking past a restaurant and just knowing they’re not going to want you in there with sandals. I always felt that you wanted to be left alone.”

“And I’m opening up now?”

“Well, maybe it’s that I know you better than I did. But you look better, did you know that? You look more, alive.”

“Well I feel better, Peter.”

She did little long-range planning. She would get up around nine and cook breakfast and do the dishes. Then she would read or play the radio until it was time to open the shop. For lunch she would pick up a sandwich and a container of coffee from the diner down the block. After she closed at night she generally took a long walk around town. The weather had turned warmer and her response to spring, somewhat delayed this year as was the season itself, was strong.

In the course of her walk she would stop to pick up something for dinner. She had turned lazy toward the end of her time with Marc, and dinner more often than not consisted of something canned or frozen. Now, with only herself to cook for, she cooked everything herself. Her meals were not elaborate, but they were good and inexpensive and she enjoyed preparing them.

Periodically she would tell herself that she ought to move out of the Shithouse. She was paying too much for too little, and the building had always depressed her. There had been times when she could barely stand to look at it from the outside, times when she had had to force herself to walk in the door. The Shithouse’s one advantage no longer applied in her case. She was pledged to stay in New Hope at least until fall and had pledged to herself to stay longer than that. So she would have no qualms about signing a year’s lease on an apartment or on investing money in furniture.

The point came up in conversation with Tanya Leopold. The young actress was a local girl who lived with her parents, but who lately spent most of her offstage time with Bill Donatelli, a bushily bearded abstract painter who lived across the hall from Linda and who, as far as she could tell, was incapable of speech. At least he had never talked in her presence. Tanya told her she had to move soon or forget it for a few months. “A lot of people come up for the season. For one thing there are more jobs in town and the people who come to take them need to stay somewheres. And there’s people like the ones who run the art gallery on Bridge Street. They live in Philly and move here in June and just stay open during the season. Plus the freaks and college kids who move in for the summer. There’s probably still time to find something, but another two weeks and that’s it.”

Now, with time a concern, she made a decision. She would stay at the Shithouse. She would stay for no better reason than that it seemed to suit her, she seemed to functioning well, and so for the time being she would opt for the evil she knew. The building would always be depressing, but her segment of it could become pleasant enough. She already kept it neater and cleaner than before. It was not merely that she had more time and inclination, but that it was simply easier to keep a place neat when only one person lived in it. And there was no reason why she could not improve it further. A few dollars’ worth of paint would make a world of difference. Sully might spring for the paint and brushes. If not she could spare the money herself. A new bedspread, some halfway decent curtains — she couldn’t afford to do everything at once, but it would be fun doing it a little at a time.

And it would give her something to do. One of the reasons for long walks after work was that they shortened the gap between dinner and bedtime, the hours when solitude could become desperate. There was just not that much she could do with those hours. She took books from the library and read them, she listened to the radio; she dealt out hands of solitaire. Twice she walked to Lambertville for a bottle of wine and brought it back across the bridge and drank it. But private drinking held little appeal for her; it was a last resort, and one she rarely felt the need of.

There was no movie within walking distance. There was the Playhouse, but seats were not inexpensive and she had never been that much of a theatergoer. In the time she had been with Marc, first in New York and then here, she had seen far more plays than she cared to.

Occasionally she went to the Raparound and sat over a cup of coffee for an hour or two. The problem was that she hated to go alone, not because she minded sitting by herself, but because she looked as though she were waiting to be approached. She had enough men coming on to her without sitting around asking for it.

“You ought to get out more,” Tanya told her one afternoon. She was at the Lemon Tree and Tanya had stopped in to handle the dolls, tap experimentally on the African drums, and chat idly while she examined the stock. “You must go nuts spending that much time looking at four walls.”

“I don’t mind it.”

“No? It would, have me walking across the ceiling in no time at all. I need people, conversation.”

If she required conversation, Linda thought, her affair with the silent painter smacked of masochism. “Besides,” Tanya, went on, “how are you going to meet somebody?”

“Going to meet who?”

“Well, anybody.”

“Who am I supposed to meet?”

“Well, you won’t know his name until you meet him, Linda. A man, like. You don’t want to be a nun, do you?”

Did she? She was unsure of the answer and had spent recent weeks trying to avoid the question. She said, “I don’t really want to meet anybody just now.”

“It’s like horse riding. When you have a bad fall the thing is to get right back on again.”

“So you can have another bad fall? I would think the thing to do is stay away from horses. But that’s not the point, Tanya. I didn’t really have a bad fall. I’m in better shape now than I was before he left. I was going to leave him sooner or later, he just happened to get around to it first. ‘You can’t fire me, I quit,’ that sort of thing.”

“Then what’s the hassle?”

“I don’t feel like getting involved with anybody for the time being. That’s all.”

“Well, that’s cool.” She picked up a woven shoulder bag, modeled it, put it back on its hook. “But just girl to girl, what do you do about sex?”

“About sex,” she drawled, “I has me cuppa tay.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, it’s a joke. An Englishman is in the west of Ireland, and he likes it there but there’s nothing to do for sex, so he asks an Irishman what they do about sex, and the Irishman says about sex we have our tea. I can’t do accents at all and it’s not that good a joke in the first place but I happened to think of it.”

“Oh, I get it.”

“It’s not very funny.”

“But besides tea, Linda, what do you do?”

For the slightest moment she wondered what the point of this was, wondered if there was a motive to Tanya’s interest. Paranoia, she told herself. Not everyone in the world wanted her fair white body. And Tanya was an unlikely lesbian; Bill kept her busy enough in his room across the hall. All the two of them seemed to do was screw and watch television, and they hadn’t been watching much television lately.

“I don’t do anything,” she said.

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“But don’t you... I don’t know, doesn’t it get to you? I mean you’ve lived with guys, you get used to it”

“I’ve lived without them and I’ve gotten used to that, too.”

“I suppose so. I couldn’t go without it myself. I just get so I can’t even talk to people. I start biting my nails, I get ginchy, the whole trip. I mean a couple of days and I just about break out in hives. I guess people are different that way.”

“I guess they are.”

“For me it wouldn’t be healthy. And as far as getting involved. I mean there are enough guys in this town and the last thing they want is getting involved. Unless you’re afraid of falling in love yourself and getting hurt.”

“No.”

“The point is, you could take care of your needs without getting involved.”

“Well, I have all the time in the world, Tanya.”

“Well, sure.”

“It’s not as if I had a deadline.”

“Who said it was? You know, I think I’d like one of the Greek bags. That’s where they’re from, Greece? For two bucks I might as well. You think it’s right for me?”

“I think it’s very good. Try the blue one right behind you, it might be a better color for you. Yes, I think it’s better.”

“You know, you’re right. Yeah, I think I’ll take it, Linda.”

When Warren walked into the Raparound he saw Peter and Gretchen at a corner table. Robin was crouched beneath the table playing with Peter’s shoelaces and squealing joyously. Warren glanced their way quickly, then walked on by toward the other side of the room. He looked for someone to sit with but there was no one around whom he knew well enough to join. He was just pulling out a chair at an empty table when Peter hailed him.

He pretended not to hear. When Peter called his name a second time he closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, then spun around and made a show of recognition. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Peter said. “Have a seat.”

“I’m supposed to be meeting someone.”

“Well, sit here until they come. I suppose you’ve heard about Gypsy. You’re lucky you’re out of this one.”

“So I understand.”

“Sit down and have some coffee.”

He hesitated, then pulled out the chair Peter was indicating. As he did so Gretchen pushed back her own chair and stood. Her coffee cup was still half full.

“I really have to run,” she told Peter. “I was going to get Robin into the tub an hour ago. Are you coming or do you want to stay here?”

Peter stared.

She retrieved Robin from beneath the table, hoisted her onto her shoulder. “Whichever you want,” she said to Peter. “I’ll be at the apartment.”

Peter watched her walk quickly to the door and out. He put money on the table and gaped at Warren. He said, “I just don’t get it.”

“Go with her.”

“I don’t—”

“Some other time. Go on.”

Warren turned and went to the table he had originally selected. He sat down and ordered a cup of coffee, unfolded his newspaper and glanced idly through it. The new Hillbreth play had opened the night before and Clive Barnes seemed to have liked it, although it was hard to be sure. It was also evidently hard to be sure what the play was about, or at least it had been hard for Barnes. He scanned the cast. Three of the seven listed performers were ones he’d worked with at one time or another.

He felt a momentary twinge of envy and smiled at it. No matter how thoroughly one knew one did not wish to play Broadway, there were inevitable moments when one forgot. He had decided long ago that he did not want all that. Nor was it sour grapes. He could have had, if not steady employment, at least the Broadway equi thereof. He was a solid character actor with a wide range. Producers and directors knew him and liked to use him. Other actors found him good company on and off the stage.

He had worked one Broadway show. The vehicle was a good play, the first (and, as it turned out, the last) work of a promising young playwright. Warren’s own part was small, but that sort of thing had never concerned him.

What did concern him was what had happened to the play. After endless rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts, it opened at the Martin Beck and closed after three performances. The critics, the handful of important ones, did not like it. What they didn’t like nobody saw.

He decided it was ridiculous. He and a great many other talented people had spent an untoward amount of time — not to mention a ton of Other People’s Money — polishing a play to the point where they could bring it to New York, perform it three times, and then consign it to theatrical limbo for eternity. It did not make sense, nor did it make much more sense to land in a hit show and be doomed to play the same role night after night until you couldn’t keep from walking through the play one night out of three. There were two pitfalls for an actor on Broadway — failure and success.

He had returned to New Hope vowing never to be tempted away from it. God knew it had its disadvantages. Tony Bartholomew was one of them all by himself. The money was not good, although it was not much worse than Broadway and the steady work more than compensated. The performances were never perfect. Something was always a little off, and often virtually everything was a little off. If the New Hope Repertory Company was not in any sense amateur, neither was it utterly professional. In any event, it was handicapped by the need to get a new play on the boards every week or two. Things could never be perfectly polished under those circumstances.

On the other hand, there was the excitement of a new play always in the wings. One could not go stale in a role. The most loathsome play never took more than a few weeks of your life. One was sustained by the knowledge that it would be part of the past before too long. Nor could any play fail as plays failed on Broadway. Good or bad, critically praised or damned, they played out their run and drew about the same size house regardless.

There were still occasional moments when he would forget that he did not really want fame. He would see an old friend on the Cavett show and would have to remind himself that he did not want to be on the Cavett show, that it was sacrifice enough on his part to watch it. He played enough ego games and played them well enough. He needed no additional ones.

He had worked his way through the Times to the television section and was on his third cup of coffee when Peter sat down at his table. He folded his paper and sighed.

“I’m sorry about that, Warren.”

“You’ve no reason. I just hope that didn’t precipitate a scene.”

“It didn’t. We gave Robin a bath and put her in for a nap, and Gretch was tired and decided to take a nap herself. So I thought I’d see if you were still here.”

“And here I am.”

“And here you are. What was all of that about?”

“It’s too long to go into, and it’s ancient history anyway. I hope you didn’t ask her.”

“I wanted to but she acted as though nothing had happened, and I thought it would be uncool to bring it up.”

“Wise of you. She looks good, by the way.”

“She’s been good.”

“I can see it, and I’m glad for her. And for you. I take it she’s working.”

“Not too many hours a day. The important thing is staying clean. But she’s working.”

“That’s very important. And you too are working, which is also important, and I believe you were telling me with a certain amount of glee that the show stank.”

“You haven’t seen it?”

“I played the album just last night. I saw it on Broadway with Merman. A solid show. Not much book, but the music and lyrics are more than enough to carry it. Of course,” he added casually, “you do need a star.”

“That sums it up.”

“Vanessa, I take it, shall not a Merman make.”

“I never even heard the album, let alone saw show. The thing is, it doesn’t matter whether she’s good or not. She has everybody around so uptight that they can barely walk on and off the stage. Either she’s coming on to you with this phony sugary routine or she’s screaming like I don’t know what.”

“Like a fishwife, perhaps?”

“I guess. She has Tanya just about ready to give up show business for life, and Tanya’s hardly in the fucking play. I don’t know how she found an excuse to give the kid hell, but she did.”

“Oh, dear. Tanya does not deserve that sort of treatment. I suppose you get your share of abuse.”

“It doesn’t bother me. It’s a pain in the ass but she acts that way to everybody so I can’t see taking it personally.”

“You’re wise.”

“She isn’t always yelling at me. The rest of the time she’s groping for my cock.”

“I think I’d rather be yelled at.” He shook his head. “I would not work with that bitch in a royal command performance. I worked with her once the summer before last. She deliberately made me look bad four times on opening night. Cheap tricks, Peter. She came in as a big name star and had to feed her ego with the tackiest sort of bits. Things you learn how to do in high school drama groups, and then in college you learn not to do them. She went from one lucky Broadway role to Hollywood, and if she knew anything about acting she forgot it out there. Now she’s too old to stand close-ups and too rotten to make it on Broadway, so she plays the circuit and everybody wants to see her because she’s a Big Star. They see her on talk shows and think they know her.”

“She certainly sells tickets.”

“So do a ton of name people who are also human beings. Her outstanding feature is that Tony can get her cheap because so many places won’t touch her with a rake. She gave me the treatment opening night and waited to see what I’d do. I did nothing. Pretended I didn’t notice. So she did it again the next night, and I let her get away with it. Eight shows, and each time the cunt was waiting for a reaction. By the last performance she was blowing her own lines. She was that tense to see what I was saving up for her. Nothing. Nothing on the stage, nothing after the show. It was a truly difficult piece of acting, and I doubt she got the point, but I was trying to teach her a trick she never heard of. Restraint.”

“I think that was too subtle for her.”

“I’m sure it was, but I like to think I made her uncomfortable. Tony wanted me to play opposite against her last summer. What was the play? Mame. I took the script home and didn’t open it. I brought it back the next day. I told him I couldn’t handle the part. He said it would be a cinch for me. ‘I just can’t do it,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t got the talent.’ Of course he knew why I wouldn’t do it and he knew better than to push. This time he wanted me for Mr. Goldstone. Well, you walk on and you walk off. Anybody can do it who can wear a suit, and you don’t have to wear it particularly well. ‘I don’t have the talent, Tony.’ He had to stand there and take it. Somehow I couldn’t sympathize with him.”

“He’s been getting it pretty good from Vanessa himself.”

“He knew what to expect. He tried to tell me I thought bit parts were beneath me. I would have liked a bit part. It’s a pleasure every now and then to be part of a production without the strain of a demanding role. Next week we get going on The Man Who Came to Dinner. I’ve played that so many times I don’t think I’ll have to refer to the script, but even so it’s a taxing part. A bit part before that would have been pleasant. Well, it’s even more pleasant to be at liberty. I even like the phrase. It’s a delicious euphemism, and one can’t object to the state when it’s only going to last for a week. Peter? I’m glad to see Gretchen looking herself again. I think you’re very good for her.”

“We’re good for each other.”

“May I presume for a moment? Please don’t take this the wrong way.”

“What?”

“Just that you shouldn’t expect miracles.”

“I hardly ever do.”

“She’s gotten better before. It’s what she does when she’s not getting worse.”

“I know.

Six

On the first of May, Hugh Markarian got up at daybreak. He showered, shaved the stubble from his neck and cheekbones, and noted that his beard needed a trim. He habitually trimmed his own beard, never having found a local barber to whom he would trust the job. But beard trimming was methodical work, certainly not to be undertaken first thing in the morning.

He got the Times from the front stoop and scanned the front page while his eggs fried in the cast-iron saucepan. He read as much as he cared to of the paper while he ate his breakfast, and in the course of it noticed the date.

A line of doggerel ran through his head:

Well, it would have to start without him, he thought, because he had other things to do. He generally began the annual novel at about this time and had already decided that today would be his first day on the book. If things went well he would turn it in by Christmas; even if they didn’t, he would have a final manuscript on his publisher’s desk in time for the book to appear the following fall.

He was at his desk with the door closed before his housekeeper arrived. Mrs. Kleinschmidt was a garrulous sort, pleasant enough company when he was in the mood but a pain in the neck when he wasn’t. When she had come to work for the Markarians fifteen years ago he had given her strict instructions: when he was in his study with the door closed she was not to disturb him unless the house was on fire.

She had taken these instructions to heart, and he suspected she might let the house burn almost to the foundation before intruding on his privacy. During the windstorms in August of ‘55 there had been heavy flooding in the front rooms of the old house, with heavy damage to the wide board floors. He did not learn of the situation until he left his desk at five o’clock. Mrs. Kleinschmidt, coping herself with the situation, had not even considered interrupting him. To her, his work was sacred.

Perhaps she was able to think so because she had never read his books or anyone else’s. She’d been an elderly widow when she came to work for them and looked now exactly as she had then, a wizened dumpling of a woman with an unquenchable passion for cleanliness. For years one of her sons drove her to the Markarian house four mornings a week and picked her up in the afternoons. When Anita divorced him, Mrs. Kleinschmidt had taken it harder than Hugh. “To leave a man such as you,” she muttered. “To do this.”

He suggested she move into a room in the house. “I was chust thinking these things,” she said. “In the car house there could be a room fixed up. The large room in the upstairs. This would be goot. The other, not so goot. These people, they chust look for such things. Then the tongues will wag. So why should the tongues wag?”

There were servants’ quarters on the second floor of the old carriage house and it had been simple enough to have carpenters fix up a bedroom and bathroom. She had insisted on bringing her own furniture from her son’s house and had seemed very comfortable there ever since. He had no idea what her living quarters looked like, having never been invited to visit them.

Although the thought of tongues wagging over himself and the little old woman had done nothing but amuse him, her idea was a good one for another reason. Another person in the house would have bothered him. This way he had as much privacy as he could have wished — the carriage house was not even in sight of the main house, screened by a thicket of white pine. And he had Mrs. Kleinschmidt nearby so that she could handle all of his housekeeping and shopping. He paid her a good salary and always wondered what she did with it. It did not seem to him that her personal expenditures could have amounted to as much as ten dollars a week.

He sat down at his desk, uncovered his typewriter. The machine was an IBM electric, the model with the little ball that moved magically along the page and somehow managed to print the proper letters as long as he touched the proper keys. At first it had seemed likely to drive him crazy. He hadn’t been able to get used to a machine without a moving carriage. He had had it three years now and its idiosyncrasies had long since come to seem perfectly natural.

It was a far cry from the broken-down Royal portable on which One If by Land had been systematically pounded out. But then this room, paneled in oak and lined with bookshelves, was at least as far a cry from the room on West Thirteenth Street.

Because it was the first of the month, there were things he had to do before he could begin the novel. He wrote out a check for one hundred and fifty dollars and addressed an envelope to his daughter Karen, at Northwestern University. His child-support obligations had legally ceased on Karen’s eighteenth birthday, but he had insisted on paying her college tuition and room and board costs. He had not said anything about incidental expenses; if Anita wanted to send the girl pocket money, he was not inclined to discourage her. But he himself sent a check directly to her every month. This morning in particular he would have liked to tuck the check in the envelope and let it go at that. But he had never done so before and would not do so now. Karen did not always acknowledge the checks, and when she did it was with a brief and uninspired letter. He was unbothered by this. He himself had no taste for correspondence and wrote to no one regularly other than her. He enjoyed her company, indeed he delighted in it, but he did not seek letters as a substitute for it.

He rolled a sheet of letterhead into the typewriter and tried to think of something to tell her. He would again suggest that she might enjoy spending at least part of the summer in New Hope. But he would have to keep it a suggestion and avoid giving it anything resembling the force of a command. There were a few things that had happened recently around town she might find amusing. It was hard knowing just what kind of tack to take with her. He never saw her more often than twice a year, and she was at an age where personality changes and growth in a six-month period could be extraordinary.

From the day she was born he had loved her total and uncritical love, and it seemed to him that loved him in much the same way. It was the totality of his love for her that paradoxically helped make the separation bearable. He was confident of her: No matter how far away she was or how infrequently he was with her, she would always be his daughter.

He began typing, hesitantly at first, then getting into the letter as he got into a piece of fiction. He covered almost all of the page, took it from the typewriter, read it and signed it.

His other first-of-the-month tasks took little time and less attention. He cleared them up and readied himself for work. He stacked a ream of fresh white bond paper at the right-hand side of the typewriter. He had not kept a carbon copy when he wrote One If By Land because it had never occurred to him that you were supposed to. Three books ago he had stopped keeping carbons. It was a nuisance, and he now felt that he could afford a couple of hundred dollars to have the finished manuscript reproduce in quadruplicate by xerography.

He put the first sheet in the typewriter. In the left-hand corner he typed his name and the name and address of his agent. Below it he typed the date followed by a dash; after it he would ultimately put the date on which the book was completed. As he typed the date, the same bit of doggerel again went through his head. Hey, hey, the first of May—

He skipped halfway down the page for the title. He grinned suddenly and typed:

He took the page out of the typewriter, looked at it, and laughed wholeheartedly. Still laughing, he crumpled the piece of paper and dropped it in the wastebasket. The wastebasket was richly covered in leather; it had been a Christmas gift several seasons ago, purchased by his agent from Dunhill’s for $79.95.

On West Thirteenth Street he had torn unsuccessful pages from the typewriter, wadded them viciously into a ball and hurled them across the room. Sometimes that corner of the room had looked like the scene of a snow-storm. Now he had a seventy-nine-dollar wastebasket for failed pages, and now far fewer of them had to be discarded and redone.

Outdoor Fucking starts today. Why were the best jokes invariably ones which could not possibly be funny to anyone else? But he already had a title. It had come to him several books ago but had never quite suited anything he had written until now.

He again prepared a title page. His name, his agent’s name and address, the date. In the middle of the page he typed:

He read it through and was happy with it. He placed the title page to the left of the typewriter and prepared a second page, this one containing the epigraph quotation. It was the first stanza of a poem by Josephine Miles and he did not have to look it up in order to reproduce it. Later, when he got around to it, he could check the punctuation.

The title was good by itself. The context put it in perspective. And it seemed to fit the book he intended to write. Of course the book might take its own shape, as all of his did to a greater or lesser extent. His present title could lose its significance, or a more appropriate title might occur as the book grew.

On a third page he typed “(dedication).” He had not yet decided to whom the book would be dedicated so he left the page otherwise blank and added it to the stack.

There were now three sheets to the left of the typewriter, and none of them represented any work on his part, but he had discovered that he was uncomfortable working on a book unless he had already prepared the front matter. He might discard or change all of it later on, but he could not write the first page of the novel until he had these other pages written.

He lit a cigarette, set it in the ashtray. By the day’s end the ashtray would be overflowing with butts, yet he would have smoked relatively little. When his work engrossed him, he would let cigarettes burn up unnoticed in the ashtray.

He typed “1.” in the top left corner of a fresh page. Halfway down he typed “Chapter One” and skipped a dozen lines. Page one, chapter one. Now what?

He lit a cigarette, having already forgotten the one burning a few inches from his elbow. He took a few drags from the new one and set it alongside the other. His fingers positioned themselves on the keyboard. The opening scene was clear enough in his mind. It was just a matter of deciding which of several ways to structure it.

For fifteen minutes he did nothing but sit with his eyes on the blank paper before him. Then he began typing, and for the next twenty minutes the typewriter was never silent for more than five or ten seconds at a time. After twenty minutes he lit a cigarette. By that time he was at the top of page four, and when he left his desk at three fifteen that afternoon there were a dozen more finished pages to the left of the typewriter and a dozen fewer blank sheets to the right.

Sometimes at night he would stay in the large stone house, reading and listening to records. His reading consisted of magazine pieces and nonfiction. He had discovered that he could not read novels while he was himself writing one. He knew writers who consciously avoided fiction while they were at work, fearing that another author’s style would adversely influence their own. This had never bothered Hugh. Instead, he found that he simply could not concentrate on another man’s book when his own was in progress. He was too conscious of style and technique. Characters seemed to lack depth, dialogue had no flavor, plot lines were impossible to remember. Between books he read voraciously, swallowing novels in huge gulps, but he could not do this while he was at work.

Other nights he went out. He needed people around him at such times, yet was too locked into his work to be of much use in conversation. He would go to Sully’s or the Logan Inn or one of several other bars. He would never drink heavily, but always had enough scotch in him so that sleep came easily by the time he returned home.

On such nights there would almost always be questions about his work. When was his next book coming out? That was easily answered but led to questions about its title and theme, and he disliked discussing one book while involved with another. He even more disliked discussing current work and simply refused to do so, explaining that if he talked about it it would go stale for him. How was the new book coming, then?

It was coming along, he would say.

Which was as much of an answer as existed, because he could not have said whether the book was going well or poorly. All he knew for certain was that it was continuing to get written, that the pile to the typewriter’s left was increasing while the pile to the right grew smaller.

Some days were good ones, when the pages seemed to write themselves. On those days he would have to force himself to stop when he had written twenty pages, the maximum he allowed himself in a single day. On other days he would enter his study at nine in the morning and it would be dark before he had finished his minimum of five pages. Some days every page that went into the typewriter wound up on the stack of finished copy. Other days there were three sheets in the wastebasket for every sheet he kept.

And later, when the book was done, no one including Hugh would be able to tell the easy work from the hard, the smooth pages that hurried their way to completion from the ones over which he sweated blood. The work itself was all of a piece. It made no sense to him, seemed as though it should not be that way, but it was so.

The summer after the divorce he lectured at a writers’ conference in New Hampshire. He had received similar invitations frequently in the past and had always regretted them, considering such conferences a waste of time for all concerned, the students at least as much as the instructors. He accepted this invitation because it was something to do and some place to go at a time when he was doing nothing and going nowhere. They paid his expenses and a fee of five hundred dollars, which they called an honorarium and which he alternately regarded as too much or too little.

The conference was about what he had expected. The other instructors included a lesbian poetess of whom he had never heard, a screenwriter who arrived drunk, gave one disastrous lecture and fled to the Coast, and a painfully earnest woman from Washington who wrote articles for general magazines. Hugh avoided them all. The students included some who, like Hugh, seemed to find the idea of a week in New Hampshire agreeable. Others really thought the conference would help their work, and they were as agonizingly sincere about it as the magazine writer. Finally there was a sprinkling of women who wanted to sleep with a successful author. Hugh could not imagine their reasons, but he obliged one a night for seven nights and spent the rest of his time drinking.

His lectures went over well enough. Idiotically enough, his audience sat there taking meaningless notes while he told them how to write novels. Afterward he couldn’t remember what he had told them, and hoped their memories were equally selective.

Because he had no idea how to write a novel.

There was a time when he thought there was a way. After the success of One If by Land he had had considerable second-novel trouble. He threw away one effort after another, ten pages of this and thirty pages of that and once a hundred pages that simply died on him. In desperation he began reading books purporting to tell how to write a novel.

Most of them were too vague to do any harm. But one had reduced the entire process to a systematic method which anyone with a typewriter could follow. First you drew a chart with all your characters and the relationship of each to the others. Then for each character you filled out a series of index cards with all their quirks and foibles and the details of their lives from cradle to grave. Then you did an outline of the entire book, indicating every scene and conversation. Then, with your chart and your index cards and your outline to guide you, you filled in the blanks and wrote the book.

He had proceeded as far as the index cards and had filled out a series about his lead character before he came to his senses and burned cards and chart in the fireplace. He also burned the book that had involved him in this idiocy, and other books of its ilk, and all the false starts he had thus far made on his second novel. Then he wrote the book as he had written One If by Land, by the simple method of putting the chair in front of the typewriter and his ass on the chair and going ahead and doing it.

He still didn’t know how he did it. From time to time he tried outlines, only to discard them as overly rigid once the book took on life of its own. All he knew now was that there was a magic that had to happen. The characters had to become real, had to speak their own lines to him so that he could put those lines on the paper.

The magic was not always there. His best books had parts that lacked it. His worst ones — the ones he liked least, which was no criterion of their critical or popular reception — always had parts that worked perfectly. Sometimes he thought the whole thing was illusory. There was no magic. You got the words down and part was good and part was bad and it didn’t matter what you did or how you did it.

For seventeen days he wrote every day. That was not uncommon for him at the beginning of a book; he dreaded breaking for a day for fear of losing the handle. In those seventeen days he wrote one hundred and eighteen pages. His novels normally ran close to eight hundred pages, sometimes longer. Cutting reduced this length by as much as a third in some cases, but several of them had been published virtually as written.

On the eighteenth day he sat at the desk and typed “119,” at the top of a page. For two hours he sat without typing anything further. It was time for a break, time to take a week or more off, and he had known it from the moment he had finished the previous day’s writing. He fought it because he could not begin a book without a fierce urge to see it finished, but he knew better than to fight it any longer. He was drained for the time being. He could not write what he could not imagine, and his imagination was out to lunch. He dropped page 119 in the wastebasket and covered his typewriter. It had not been covered once since he began the book.

He drove to Trenton, caught an express train to New York. He lunched with his agent, Mary Fradin, an intense woman who chainsmoked and consumed endless cups of strong black coffee. She had represented him far the past dozen years, inheriting him from Jerry Geller, who had retired to Florida and died within two months, presumably of boredom. On their first meeting after Geller’s retirement, she took him to Orsini’s and Downey’s, and he took her to the Algonquin and to bed. All night long conversation had been a trial, and little about her had appealed to him personally or professionally. He made a pass at her less out of desire than with the thought that she might recoil violently, providing him an excuse to find another agent. She surprised him twice, first by going to his room, then by revealing a talent and enthusiasm beyond his fondest dreams.

After the first time he lay back exhausted, too spent even to laugh at his own astonishment. She said, “Ready to sleep?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s what you think. You look better naked than I thought. A little pudgy, though. You should get more exercise out there in God’s country. Chop some wood, do you good, just like the song.”

“Song?”

“Never mind. Let me know if you don’t like any of this.”

“Any of what?”

“Shhhh.”

She began to kiss and lick various parts of his body. For the most part these consisted of areas he had never considered erogenous zones, and for the most part he found out he’d been wrong. At the end he raised his head to watch her mouth working greedily on him. The expression on her face was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. And then at the very end he had to put his head down and close his eyes because the pleasure was too intense to be borne.

“When you come good,” she said, “you like to make noise, don’t you?”

“Jesus.”

“And you thought you were ready to go to sleep. Now you can sleep.”

He sat up. “I’m not sure I can now.”

“Of course you can.” She was off the bed and dressing. “God, don’t tell me I shocked you. You should have figured. Cigarettes and coffee all day long. Very oral. Read your Uncle Sigmund. Something you should know, I don’t sleep with clients.”

“That’s why you’re going home now?”

“Correction, I don’t fuck clients. But you were obviously ready to look for someone else anyway, and I had the feeling we’d be good together.”

“So?”

“So don’t think you have to stay with me so we can do this again. Because if you do stay with me, it means we won’t do this again. Although I have the feeling we wouldn’t anyway. I don’t think you’ll want to.”

“I want to right this minute, and I haven’t—”

“Yes, right this minute, but you also have a wife and you’re not looking to get involved with anybody. You won’t pass up a quick jump but you don’t want an affair. Neither do I, as far as that goes. So don’t stay a client thinking we’ll do this on alternate Thursdays, because we won’t. At all. And for that matter don’t find a new agent because you think I’ll unzip your pants every time you walk into the office.”

“Why should I?”

“Why should you what?”

“Stay a client.”

“In twenty-five words or less? And without the bullshit? Because you were evidently satisfied with Jerry, and I’m twice as sharp as Jerry and a lot more honest. No, he never cheated you, but there were things he did that you never knew about. I’m not going to tell you what. I can get you as good terms as anyone and I’ll never give you any shit. And I’ll leave you alone. Jerry used to call you just to talk and I know you didn’t like it. He was your agent and I already know more about you than he ever did.”

“I never went to bed with Jerry. Anyway, that’s more than twenty-five words.”

“I don’t get paid by the word. Think it over.”

“I already did.”

“And?”

“Come to bed one more time and I’m your client far life.”

She looked at him. Then she said, “Well, I’ve done a lot crazier things,” and took off her clothes again. “I feel a little like a hooker, but that’s not the world’s worst feeling. What do you want to do?”

“What we just did.”

“You mean what I just did. I ought to be able to get on the Sullivan show with this. Don’t get used to it, Hugh, this is the last time for us.”

“Then make it a good one.”

She did, and it was the last time for them. She was, as far as he could tell, as good an agent as Jerry Geller had been. He stayed away from New York as much as possible, paid minimal attention to contracts and options, but over the years he had learned to trust her. It was possible that Jerry had been cheating him, and it was equally possible that she was cheating him, but there was that possibility with any agent. He trusted her.

Once, during the turmoil after the divorce, he had tried to get her to bed. She sidestepped neatly. “You don’t want me,” she told him. “You really don’t. I’m flattered, sweets, but I’m not what you want right now. But there’s a friend of mine you’ll love, and she’ll love you. Wait here while I make a phone call.”

“I couldn’t go through the getting-to-know-you number right now, Mary.”

“You won’t have to. I have senses about people. ESP. The two of you are going to take a look at each other and jump into bed. Just like that.”

She sent him to an apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street where a Eurasian girl met him at the door. He spent the next three days and nights in her bed. It was three months later that he found out the Eurasian girl was a hooker and Mary Fradin had picked up the tab. From then on there wasn’t a thing she could do wrong.

After lunch he walked her back to her office, then took a cab to his publishers. His editor showed him some rough flap copy and asked polite questions about the new book. Hugh gave him polite answers in return. His editor was under thirty and wore mod clothes, and could get excited talking about books by New Left activists and aspiring black writers until he remembered Hugh wasn’t interested in them any more than he was interested in Hugh. He left as quickly as he could and checked in at the Algonquin. Then he called a number he had called in the past and gave his name and the hotel and room number and said he could take immediate delivery of fifty cases of hairpins.

He had just enough time to shower before the girl arrived. Half an hour later he gave her fifty dollars, and she left. He called downstairs for a bottle of Grant’s and some ice and soda. He drank and watched television for four hours, then called the same number again with the same request.

The woman on the other end of the line read it back in a finishing school accent, then stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute, was something the matter with Trina?”

“That was hours ago,” he said.

“You just get off a ship?”

“A nuclear submarine. Three years under the ocean.”

“I guess.”

In fifteen minutes a second girl arrived. He thought at first that she looked something like Trina, then realized that he had forgotten what Trina looked like. In any case she was attractive enough to fill his needs, as Trina had been. She was less hurried than Trina, accepted a drink, and made a certain amount of conversation in and out of bed. It was almost an hour after her arrival when she took her fifty dollars and left.

He tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. He was drunk but not drunk enough for sleep and he did not want to drink any more. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at himself in the mirror on the closet door. He wasn’t crazy about what he saw.

He had noticed at lunch that Mary Fradin had gray in her hair. Well, he was getting gray in his beard lately. They were none of them getting younger. His editor talked reverently about One If by Land, whether he had really read it or not. His editor had been born in 1942 and had been three years old when the war ended, the war that One If by Land was about. Worse, his editor gave the impression of knowing nothing about anything that had taken place before his own brief lifetime; as if anything much more ancient than yesterday was unimportant.

He smoked cigarettes and made another drink without wanting it. He had had a number of affairs since the divorce, but only two of them had been of any substance. Twice he had lived with women, once for three months, once for almost a year. Twice they had moved into the old stone house, and each time their entrance and ultimate exit was tactfully unremarked by Mrs. Kleinschmidt. Tongues might wag all they wanted, evidently, just so they did not wag about her.

In each instance he had seen marriage as an eventual outcome, though both times he had wanted to be very sure before letting it go that far. And in each instance the relationship had run its course and then broken down. No hard feelings, no regrets or bitterness on either side. Smiles at parting. Cards at Christmas. He had even slept again with one of the two women a year and a half after they separated. It was nothing important at the time and convinced him it had been nothing important before.

He reached for the phone and found himself starting to dial the same number a third time. The act had been involuntary and scared him. He cradled the phone and forced himself to lie down. He did not want another whore. He had not wanted the first two, much as he had seemed to need them. He wanted a woman.

He wanted Anita. He had always wanted her and always would, and of course he knew it. But that was one of a great many things he tried not to think about.

He woke up in the morning. When he ordered breakfast he also asked them to send up a tin of aspirin and a double Bloody Mary. He went back to Trenton on the Metroliner and his headache was gone by the time he boarded the train.

He spent the next few days as he spent most nonworking days. He drove into New Hope one day and Doylestown another, wandering the streets, looking in store windows, talking to friends and strangers. He drank coffee in his kitchen and half listened to Mrs. Kleinschmidt’s endless stories about various friends and relatives. He could not keep the people straight in her stories and did not try to, as there was no point. Her stories all lacked a time element; she would tell him an anecdote as if it had happened yesterday, and he would later learn it had taken place fifty years ago, and that the daring young people in the story were now sitting on porches while their arteries hardened. Most of her stories concerned people long dead, some of them local characters who had died in her childhood, but her reminiscences all had the flavor of current gossip. Years ago he had learned to let her conversation wash over him, neither listening nor not listening to it. It was astonishing how much of what she said, not consciously noted at the time, would later find its way into one of his books. On more than a few occasions he had realized after the fact that a bit of plot material or a scrap of background he had thought he was inventing had in fact derived from something the old woman had said.

In the morning after breakfast or in the evening when the sky was still bright he would walk over his property. Eighteen years ago his land had been a farm, neglected for a time but still identifiable as such. The back land was clear pasture to within less than a hundred yards of the creek, where the woods began. With surprising speed the woods had moved up toward the garden behind the house. In ten years’ time the whole meadow had become a young forest of red cedar. Now the cedar forest was rapidly evolving into a hardwood forest; oak and maple seedlings shot up above the short-lived cedars, and as they matured and shaded the cedars they would take over completely. There were deer in the woods, and in season there were hunters who would not be deterred by the signs he posted every autumn. There were also foxes and rabbits and pheasants, and muskrats lived in the creek bed. Now the grackles were nesting, and nine out of ten of the cedars had nests in their branches. He walked through his woods and felt the special pleasure he had felt so many times before and knew as he had always known that he could not sell this land.

It did not belong to him nearly so much as he belonged to it. For the first two years he had tried to maintain it himself, mowing and planting and pruning with furious energy. He would put in farmer’s hours at these tasks, but when a book took hold, he could put in no time at all. When he wrote he could think of nothing but the book on which he was working and would go weeks without walking over his land, let alone working on it. A garden could not be thus neglected, and eventually he had hired gardeners. They had been busy this spring, and he walked through the beds of flowers and shrubbery and noted the changes. The towering Kieffer pear was in bloom at the kitchen door. Late daffodils vied with the earliest tulips. Most of those flowers were bulbs he had planted. In eighteen years there had not been an autumn when he had not put at least a few bulbs into the ground.

On one afternoon almost a week after his trip to New York he returned from a walk in the woods just as a car pulled into the driveway. One of the rear doors opened and a girl emerged carrying a suitcase. The driver rounded the circular driveway and headed back toward town and the girl approached the house. She was on the doorstep before he recognized his daughter.

He was at the side of the house as this happened, and he hurried forward and called to her. She turned to him still holding the suitcase, and her face broke out in a smile that made his chest ache. They met in front of the living room window and embraced.

He said, “Did you write? I never got your letter. You should have called.”

“I thought I’d surprise you.”

“I’ve never had a better surprise. You cut your hair.”

“I got tired of it.”

“Let me see. Well, it was lovely long, but I can understand why you got bored with it.”

“I mean, everybody had long hair.”

“I know.” He stepped back and looked at her. “You know, when you got out of the car I didn’t recognize you. I wondered who was the beautiful girl and what she was doing here. You grow more beautiful every time I see you.”

“You just think so because I look like you.”

“That’s what they tell me, but it looks better on you. How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know. All I know is I’m here.”

“Well, I’ll settle for that. How did you get here?”

“Oh, wow. I was in New York and I took a bus to Flemington and hitched a ride to Lambertville and walked across the bridge and looked around for someone I knew to give me a ride, and I didn’t see anyone I knew. That’s weird, growing up in a town and all of a sudden there’s nobody around that you know.”

“You still know a lot of people here. Last summer—”

“Well, they weren’t around today. I took a cab.”

“It’s a shame you took a cab. You should have called me, but I guess that would have blunted the surprise. What were you doing in New York?”

“Let’s go inside, okay? I want to sit down in your chair and put my feet up. I hope you still have that chair.”

“Of course I do.”

He carried her suitcase. They went into the living room where she sat in his reclining chair. He called in Mrs. Kleinschmidt and the woman made just the right amount of fuss over the girl before retiring to the kitchen. He made himself a drink and was sitting down himself before he thought to ask Karen if she wanted one.

“I don’t — actually I think I will. If it’s all right.”

“Of course it’s all right. What would you like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t drink much.”

“Well, this is an occasion. Scotch and water?”

“Just scotch.”

“Ice?”

“Just plain.”

He poured two fingers of scotch in a glass and took it to her. He went to get his own glass for a toast but before he could turn around she had tossed off her drink and was grimacing.

“You don’t have to drink it like that,” he said mildly.

“I just wanted to — I don’t know.”

“What’s the matter, kitten?”

“I don’t know.”

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“You’re happy there? Because you can always transfer, you know.”

“Daddy.”

He looked at her, and for a moment her face was twelve years old again.

“Go on, kitten.”

“I just don’t know,” she said, miserably.

“Anyway you want.”

“I can’t decide whether to be nice or honest.”

“Which would you rather someone were to you?”

“Honest, but it might not be the same if I was a parent.”

“I was a kid once.”

“You were, weren’t you?” She patted her pockets, asked for a cigarette. He gave her one and lit it for her. Two years ago he had seen her smoking for the first time, and she had acted as if she had been puffing cigarettes all her life.

She said, “I had it all worked out in my mind. I would come down here and be Little Mary Sunshine for a couple of days and everything would be cool, but I don’t want to play games with you. I can put on an act with Mother and Gregory because I’ve been doing it for years, but not with you.”

“You don’t have to, kitten.”

“I know I don’t, but do I have to lay a whole trip on you? That’s the question.” She worked on the cigarette in silence. Then she said, “I didn’t do too well in school.”

“Exams didn’t go very well?”

“Next week is exam week, Daddy.”

“I see. Of course you’ve decided not to go back.”

“I couldn’t pass them anyway. No, you might as well have the whole thing. Then we can play out some shitty scene and I’ll get on a bus in the morning. I dropped out of school — I don’t know, three months ago? Something like that. Sometime after the start of the semester. I had just had it with that place.”

“But you weren’t in New York all that time. Unless you had mail forwarded—”

“No, I was in Evanston.”

“They let you stay in the dorm?”

“I wasn’t in the dorm.”

“Oh.”

“I was in this sort of commune off campus. Not exactly a commune, we called it that but it wasn’t a real commune. Just a house in town that somebody rented and a bunch of us were living there.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. You dropped out and you were shacking up with a guy and experimenting with drugs and you want to feed me this a spoonful at a time because you’re afraid it will shock me.”

“Just grass, if you call that a drug. There were other things around but we stayed away from them.”

“I’m just as glad to hear that.”

“And I wasn’t exactly living with a guy. We weren’t into a monogamy thing. So you could say I was shacking up with four guys, if you wanted to use that term.”

“Well, one term’s as good as the next.”

“I suppose so. You are shocked, aren’t you?”

He made a fresh drink. Before answering the question aloud he tried to answer it in his own mind. He said, “I am, but probably not in precisely the way you think. I wonder how I can explain it. When I called to you and you looked at me with your face beaming I held out my arms to you. I don’t know if you noticed. And I realize now that I expected you to fly across the gravel and throw yourself into my arms the way you did years ago. But of course you didn’t because you’re — I was going to say a woman, and I’m not sure that’s accurate. It doesn’t matter. You’re an older girl than the one who would run crazily and leap at me. I’m your father, Karen, and that means for the rest of my life I’ll always tend to remember you as a child and I’ll always tend to think of you as younger than you actually are. So I am shocked, but not because I disapprove of anything you’ve done. I may disapprove of it and I may not but that’s beside the point. I’m shocked because you’ve changed and of course it would be infinitely worse if you hadn’t changed, but nevertheless it takes getting used to. Did you follow any of that?”

“I think so.”

“I can’t judge you, kitten. I only see you on special occasions. Perhaps your mother can judge you, and I’m by no means sure of that, but I can’t.”

“I wouldn’t have told her any of this.”

“That’s something else again.”

“I went to New York for an abortion. No, I’m all right, there was nothing to it. I was pregnant and I had the money and I took care of it, and I’m fine. I didn’t| feel bad about the abortion. All I feel bad about is getting pregnant in the first place.”

“There are ways to avoid it, you know.”

“I know, but the Pill only works if you remember to take it.” She grinned suddenly. “From now on I’ll remember.”

“That’s a good idea. All right, if there’s any more to the confessional period I might as well hear it now. You dropped out of school and you’re not a virgin, and you had an abortion and what else? You’ve got ‘Property of Hell’s Angels’ tattooed on your behind.”

“Who told you?”

“Oh, it was in all the papers. Hey.”

“What?”

“I missed you. And you look good. From what you said it doesn’t sound as though you should, but you do.”

“So do you.”

“What are your plans? Assuming you have any.”

“I don’t exactly.”

“What are your inexact plans? Back to Evanston?”

“No, there’s nothing there for me. I thought I would go back to New York.”

“What’s there in that rotten town?”

“I know some people there, sort of.”

“You could spend the summer here, you know.”

“That’s what I was hoping. That’s why I came here to begin with, hoping I could stay here awhile. The only thing is I don’t know if I can.”

“Of course you can.”

“Can I?” Her eyes challenged him. “What you said. I’m not a little kid. I’m used to living a certain way, having a certain amount of freedom.”

“There are no bars on the windows, Karen.”

“I might, you know, stay out all night.”

“I think I could live with that.”

“I might even want to bring someone home with me.

“Well, I occasionally bring someone home myself. I won’t get upset if you don’t.”

“Do you really mean it?”

“I think so, yes. You have the right to live your own life, Karen. I can’t think why you shouldn’t have the right inside this house as well as out of it. What’s so funny?”

“I was picturing the four of us at breakfast. You and someone and me and someone. Do you have someone in particular?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Well, whoever she is, remind her to take her pill. You mean it, don’t you? I can stay here?”

“Oh, baby,” he said.

Seven

Sully closed the bar a little earlier than usual. The crowd was light, and on such nights he rarely remained open until the legal closing hour. While the few remaining customers finished their drinks he approached one of the waitresses and told her to stick around afterward, he wanted to talk to her. He spoke in a low voice and talked out of the side of his mouth.

“I don’t know,” she said, but he was already walking away and gave no sign of having heard her.

When everyone else had gone he took her in his arms and kissed her. She did not exactly resist but he felt the stiffness of her shoulders. She was a big South Philadelphia girl with high Slavic cheekbones and a flat forehead. He put a hand on her back between her shoulder blades and ran it slowly down to her buttocks. He drew her toward him, kissing her mouth again, and the lower part of her body first moved against him, then pushed stubbornly back against his hand.

He released her. “C’mon,” he said.

“I don’t know about this.”

He ignored her and she followed him to his office. It was a small room that contained a heavy Mosler safe, a small maple kneehole desk with matching chair, three other straight chairs, and a long, deep sofa upholstered in dark-red plush. The walls were bare except for two calendars from liquor distributors and a few dozen eight-by-ten glossy photos. Periodically a minor celebrity would present Sully with an autographed photo. He always responded with effusive thanks and a drink on the house, and later he pinned the unframed photo to his office wall and forgot about it.

He closed and locked the office door and spread a towel on the couch. The girl watched him do this, her face stolid and expressionless. “I don’t know,” she said again.

He straightened up from the couch and grinned at her. “What do you have to know? You want a drink?”

“No.” “C’mere.”

“Just like that.”

“Look, don’t stay if you don’t want to.”

“And find some place else to work, huh.”

“Did I ever say that? What the hell’s the matter with you tonight?”

“Maybe I got my monthly.”

“Not you. Your forehead breaks out when you get your period.” She flushed. “Give me credit, I notice things. You want to go, the door’s over there. But don’t give me maybe you got your monthly.”

He went over and embraced her again. When he touched her breast she began to respond and was on the point of letting herself go. Then she went rigid and he let go of her and looked at her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“You enjoyed yourself the other times,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“So what’s different now?”

“What’s different is I been seeing this person.”

“So?”

“So he wouldn’t like it.”

“Tell you what. I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

“I’m seeing him later tonight. You probably know who it is.”

“I probably do, and his shift don’t end until four so you got the time.”

“That’s him.”

“Listen, he’s married himself. You think he’s saving it all for you? Because why kid yourself?”

“I don’t know. Going from you to him.”

“You even got time for a shower in between, kid.” He reached for her confidently, put one hand on her shoulder and the other between her legs. Her eyes closed and the muscles in her jaw went slack. “Just tell me this don’t do a thing for you,” he said, “and you can walk right out the door.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Who am I kidding?” He let her go, and she began unbuttoning her uniform.

He dropped her at her rooming house in Lambertville and drove back across the river to his own house. The lights were on in the living room and bedroom. When he put the car in the garage he saw that her little red. Alfa-Romeo was missing. He went directly to the bedroom and looked immediately in the closet. Her dresses were still there. That meant she would be back.

He switched on the television set and sat down on the bed to watch it. There was a remote-control unit, and he switched from channel to channel for fifteen minutes but couldn’t pay attention to any of it. He went downstairs and poured some applejack and sat in the living room in front of the picture window, sipping applejack and waiting.

At three o’clock he went upstairs and got into bed. When he gave up and put on the light it was not quite three thirty. He’d thought it was much later. He got up and put on pajamas and a robe and went downstairs, but after a few minutes he felt uncomfortable dressed that way and went upstairs to change back into the clothes he had worn earlier. Then he returned to the living room to wait for her.

A few nights ago he had come home to an unlit house. He had undressed silently in the darkness and got in bed beside her. He was almost asleep when she spoke his name.

He said, “Hell, I tried not to wake you.”

“I was awake.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“No, I didn’t.” She put on the bedside lamp, “We have to talk.”

“In the morning, huh?”

“I was thinking you should see a doctor.”

“Come on, don’t give me all that in the middle of the night. I break my back all day—”

“Well, it’s either you or me, and you say it isn’t me, so who does that leave? So maybe you see a doctor, and he gives you a shot of something and it’s all right again.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Look, are you a doctor? How do you know?”

“I don’t have to see a doctor. It’s a temporary thing, it happens to everybody. Look, Melanie, you get satisfaction, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but you don’t.”

“So maybe that’s my problem.”

“And it’s not my problem knowing I can’t do a thing for my own husband? That’s not my problem?”

“Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you—”

“Have you had this problem before, Sully?”

He hesitated, but only briefly. “Well, of course I have. After a certain age it happens to everybody from time to time. A youngster in his twenties, that’s all he thinks about. You get older and other things get on your mind, business and taxes and one thing or another, and on top of working hard you can’t unwind and for a while, you got a problem. That’s all there is to it. Now can we get some sleep?”

They left it at that, but he got little sleep that night. There were more questions that she had not asked but would not forget. And now he sat in the darkened living room waiting for her and wondering what he would say to her when she came home. The sky was light when her little sports car turned into the driveway, and he was still sitting there and still had thought of nothing to say.

He met her at the door. She told him he shouldn’t have waited up for her.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to ask?”

“What should I ask? All right, I’m asking.”

“Well, you already know the answer. You know what I did, you just don’t know who with.”

“Who was it?”

“I’m not going to tell you that. It doesn’t matter anyway, does it?”

“No, I don’t suppose it does,” he said. He walked away from her and sat down on the living-room couch with his hands cupped over his knees. She followed him and sat in a chair across from him. He said, “I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

“Sure, I enjoyed myself.”

“That’s good.”

“He wasn’t as good as you, but I enjoyed myself. And he enjoyed himself, and I needed that.”

“Yeah, I suppose you did.”

“So now you got an excuse,” she said. He looked at her. “To divorce me. I went out like a tramp and got screwed all night and now you got an excuse to divorce me. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“No. No, that’s not what I wanted.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“Is that what you want? A divorce?”

“What I want is for you to want to screw me, and you won’t, so let’s not talk about what I want.”

“I told you—”

“I know what you told me. You told me a lot of shit about business and taxes. All your headaches, but you only get those headaches at home. Those headaches don’t get in the way when you’re with one of your other girls.”

“I don’t have any other girls.”

“I know I’m stupid, Sully, but you can’t think I’m stupid enough to believe that. Don’t you think I know you better than that? You’ll fuck anything that’s warm. You’ve had your girls since we were married. I always knew about it.”

“And it didn’t bother you?”

“Just at the beginning, but I got over it right away. I knew what you were like before I married you. And I thought why the hell should it bother me when you and I had such a good thing going. You always had it for me, so if you had some left over for the rest of the world that was your business. Wait a minute. Jesus, I’m stupid, all right.”

“What?”

“This always happens, doesn’t it? With your other three wives. The same thing. All of a sudden they don’t turn you on anymore. It’s not you trading them in when you’re bored. It’s you not being able to do anything and then the whole thing goes to hell from that point. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

He had closed his eyes and he kept them closed now. “You’re not wrong.”

“Something else I just realized, and I’ll bet I’m right. You never wanted a divorce. You don’t want to divorce me and you didn’t want to divorce them. It was their idea.”

He nodded.

“Tell me something else. You never had this conversation with any of them, did you?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“It is? Why?”

“I’m not sure but it is. I’m gonna make some coffee. You want a cup? I’ll just make instant.”

“If you’re having some.”

When she brought the coffee she sat beside him on the couch. After awhile she said, “There’s doctors for kind of thing, too. You know. Psychiatrists.”

“They don’t do any good.”

“You tried?”

“With my first wife I would of tried anything. The guy kept asking me all this crap about my childhood. Things I couldn’t remember if my life depended on it. Finally he told me the one sensible thing he ever said, which was that I should try it with another girl and see if it was the same. By that time I had already figured that out for myself and I tried it and I was my usual self. So I decided that it had to be her, something gone wrong between us.”

“And when it happened the second time? With your second wife, I mean.”

“Then I had to face facts, that it was me.”

She put her cup down and turned to him. “This is very interesting,” she said. “I’m glad we’re talking. You ever have trouble with other girls?”

“Never.”

“It always works. They don’t have to do anything special or anything.”

“All they have to do is be there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Same as it used to be with us.”

She looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment, then turned away and sipped coffee. Without looking at him she said, “Truth time. Do you want a divorce?”

“No. Unless you do, in which case you’ve got it. For me, no.”

“Even if I screwed a guy tonight?”

“Even if you did. I hate it that you did, but what right have I got?”

“Suppose I made a habit of it.”

“You mean with one particular guy?”

“No, I don’t mean with one particular guy and I don’t mean walking around town with a mattress on my back. I mean doing what you do.”

“Sauce for the goose,” he said.

“Not exactly, but I’ll tell you, I needed what I got tonight.”

“Uh-huh. Well, as to how would I feel, I don’t know how to answer you. As far as people talking I never paid attention yet, but how I’d feel, hell, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know.” She got to her feet. “I’m kinda sleepy,” she said. “How about you?”

“I don’t know. Tired, but I don’t know if I could sleep. But I know I should. I’ll come up with you.”

He lay in bed beside her trying to figure out how he felt. It was a strange feeling and he could not understand it. She had been with another man and he felt that it ought to bother him more than it did. It was on his mind, it was very much on his mind, yet it did not genuinely bother him, and he wondered why that should be.

After awhile he said, “You won’t tell me who it was?”

“No. Would you tell me who was the last girl you laid?”

“You tell me and I’ll tell you. No, come to think of it, I see what you mean. Tell me this. Do I know him?”

“I don’t know who you know and who you don’t know.”

“Well, tell me who he is and I’ll clear that little point up for you. Just joking. Where did you go with him?”

“A motel.”

“Meaning he’s married. If people stopped fucking each other’s wives they’d take motels and make parking lots out of them. Was he good? You already said he was good. What motel did you go to?”

“So you can check the register?”

“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t even know why I asked. I was just trying to picture it.”

“Well, just picture me in a room with somebody and let it go at that.”

“How many times?”

She sat up. “Hey, what is this?”

“How many times did he screw you?”

“What do you want to know that for? Twice.”

“Two times. You come both times? I guess you did, enjoying it that much.”

She was silent for a few moments. Then she said, “I came the first time and not the second time. I don’t have to come to enjoy it.”

“He go down on you?”

“Next time I’ll take movies. I don’t—”

“Did he or didn’t he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Some gentleman you picked. How about you? You go down on him?”

“Jesus, I don’t believe it. Yes, as a matter of fact I did. What’s the next question? Was he circumcised? Yes, he was. Did he come in my mouth? No, he didn’t. I don’t get it with these questions.”

“I don’t get it myself,” he said. A few minutes later he touched her arm and said, “Come here a minute.”

“I was just falling asleep.”

“Not until you see the present I brought you.”

He took her hand and put it on his penis.

“Well, what do you know about that?” she said. “Where did that come from?”

“Damned if I know. Is two times all you can handle tonight, or do you want to see what happens?”

“Let’s see what happens.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

Afterward she lit a cigarette and offered it to him. He shook his head. She took another drag and put it out.

She said, “What did it?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Thinking about me with him? That must of been what did it.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, whatever it was, I’m not complaining. Tell me something and make it the absolute truth.”

“Did this ever happen before? That’s the question, isn’t it? The answer is no, it never did.”

“Once you couldn’t make it with them, you could never make it at all.”

“Right.”

“Then I wonder what it means.”

“Beats me,” he said.

Eight

One Sunday Linda met Tanya in the hall. The actress had just closed Bill Donatelli’s door. “He wants to get some painting done,” she said. “He says I distract him.”

“I imagine you do.”

“I wanted him to paint me. He only does abstracts, but I thought I could pose nude and he could look at me while he painted an abstract, and it would give him inspiration. He said it always gave him the wrong kind of inspiration.”

“I didn’t know he ever said that many words all at once.”

“Billie talks to me. He’s very shy with most people, but he talks to me. By the way, I guess you took my advice.”

“What advice was that?”

“About, you know, physical needs.”

She was confused at first, her mind fixing on a conversation she had had with someone recently who had been trying to convince her of the virtues of organic vitamins and a vegetarian diet. Then she remembered Tanya’s theories of sexual requirements. Her advice, as far as Linda could remember, was that she ought to go out and get laid.

She said, “What makes you think I took your advice?”

“Well, I’m not saying it was anything I said that made you change your mind. It was a matter of speaking. You know, to make conversation. Not that I had anything to do with what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re sleeping with Peter Nicholas.”

“I’m what?”

“Sleeping with—”

“Where did you hear that?”

“You’re not?”

“Of course not. Who told you that?”

“Gee, Linda, don’t bite my head off. Nobody told me anything. It’s just that he’s up here all the time two of you spending so much time together Gretchen the way she is and I put two and together.”

“First you have to know how to add.”

“Linda—”

“Because I know it must be news to you, but it’s possible for a man and a woman to spend time together with, out having sex together. That may come as a shock to you. Two people in a room without so much as a television set and yet they manage to keep their clothes on. Strange as it may seem—”

“Linda, what did I do?”

The girl looked on the point of tears. “I’m sorry, Tanya,” she said.

“I mean I didn’t do anything.”

“I know you didn’t, and I’m sorry. It just threw me. Peter’s the one person I can relax with completely, the one man, because he wants my company but doesn’t want anything more than that.”

“Well, I didn’t know, Linda.”

“I hope you didn’t say anything to anybody.”

“Of course not. Well, except for Billie.”

“I guess the secret’s safe with him, since you’re the only human being he talks to. Not that there’s a secret to be kept safe.”

It was two nights before she saw Peter. She was on the point of mentioning Tanya’s conversation to him and his mood changed her mind. Gretchen had had a bad day and when Gretchen had a bad day, Peter wound up in a bad mood.

Often she thought how unusual was her own special perspective on the situation. No one heard so much about the ups and downs of Gretchen Vann and spent so little time with the woman. She was often invited to stop at their apartment or to accompany them to the Raparound. At first she had tended to accept those invitations, and then she began to find excuses to decline them. She baby-sat for them occasionally, enjoying Robin’s company and happy to do them a favor, but she spent less and less time in Gretchen’s actual company.

The woman made her uncomfortable. She recognized this before she knew why. Gretchen was brittle and unstable, an enervating companion on her best days, but that didn’t explain it. Later she sorted it out. She didn’t like Gretchen’s company because Gretchen disliked her, and ultimately she guessed the reason for Gretchen’s dislike. It was suddenly obvious.

“Gretchen doesn’t like me,” she told Peter. “No, I’m serious, she doesn’t.”

“It’s just her way.”

“It’s more than that. God knows she has the right to like and dislike whomever she wants. But when I know someone dislikes me I can’t enjoy their company much.”

“Why would she—”

“Because she’s jealous.”

“Of you?”

“Of you and me.”

He was incredulous. “But that’s ridiculous!”

“Of course it is, but she doesn’t think so.”

“She knows we talk all the time, she knows it’s innocent, she never says anything—”

“And she can’t stand me. Didn’t she pull a scene awhile ago with Warren Ormont?”

“I don’t think that was jealousy, for God’s sake.”

“Well, you said he’s always making a play for you.”

“Oh, that’s just Warren’s way.”

“Yes, that’s Warren’s way and the other is Gretchen’s way. She doesn’t like Warren or me because she’s jealous, and of course it’s ridiculous but that doesn’t change the way she feels. Peter, she’s fifteen years older than you. That might not matter to either of you and there’s no reason why it has to but don’t think she’s ever going to forget about it. She’s not able to forget it. And the fact that I’m older than you myself won’t mean anything to her, because all she can see is that I’m still ten years younger than she is.”

He thought it over. “I guess I ought to stop inviting you to join us, then.”

“Yes. And maybe it would make sense if we spent less time together.”

“‘Darling, we have to stop meeting like this.’ No, I won’t buy that. That’s a little too much.”

“Well, at least don’t keep telling her how relaxed we are with one another and how easy it is for us to talk to each other. We are and it is, and the reason is we’re friends and couldn’t ever be more than friends. Gretchen is never going to see it that way.”

“You may have a point there.”

So she still kept posted on Gretchen’s emotional equilibrium but saw very little of it first hand. Item: Gretchen was off speed completely and clean. Item; Gretchen was cutting down on the tranquilizers. Item: Gretchen was working and the work was going well. Item: Gretchen was not satisfied with the work. Item: Gretchen had yelled at Robin. Item: Gretchen had met him after the play and they had gone to Sully’s with some members of the company, and she had handled herself very well. Item: Gretchen had been very good with Robin and seemed to be taking a genuine interest in the child for the first time in a long time. Item: Gretchen was drinking. Item: Gretchen was still drinking but seemed to be able to handle it. Item: Gretchen had left Robin alone for three hours one afternoon. Item: Gretchen had taken him to her shop to show oft her latest work, which she said was far and away her best. Item: Gretchen had been mean-drunk, passed out, and started in drinking again when she woke up. Item: Gretchen had gone drunk to her shop on the Towpath, where she smashed the piece of work she had been so proud of, along with all her other ceramic work and various craft items on consignment from other artisans.

There was one item after another, until sometimes Linda wondered if she really wanted to be kept so well posted on Gretchen’s rise and fall. Peter’s own views on Gretchen (and Gretchen’s Problem) varied with whether the most recent item was good or bad. When it was good his optimism was heartwarming, if not precisely contagious; Linda doubted the woman would ever achieve anything approaching stability. When the item was on the minus side, Peter would turn moody and introspective, admitting that Gretchen and he and Robin in the bargain, were trapped in an up-and-down cycle that had no end to it.

While she sometimes found Gretchen less than fascinating as a primary topic of conversation, she never tried to change the subject at those times when Peter needed someone to talk to. He could talk to her, and evidently could talk as intimately to no one else. His confidences concerned the present, or at least were limited in time to the extent of his relationship with Gretchen. Her own, on the other hand, hardly ever concerned the present, or even the immediate past. When she felt the need to talk she was more likely to speak of something that had happened in childhood or adolescence or, on one occasion, of her marriage to Alan. At such times he was more than an interested listener. Without seeming to probe, he could draw her out so that she could say the things she wanted or needed to say.

They were friends, and yet they were more than friends because they performed a service for one other which transcended simple friendship. She thought it might be said that they played a mutually psychoanalytic role with one other, the part of therapist shuttling back and forth between them. Or was that a common function of friendship? She had never had that sort of friendship before, but then she wondered if any of her past associations had been a true friendship at all. She thought of Olive McIntyre as a friend, felt that she could turn to the woman if she ever had to, enjoyed her company immensely, and yet Olive’s conversation comprised little more than a compendium of the most scandalous Bucks County gossip of the past several decades. Linda enjoyed it well enough, found it increased her sense of belonging in and to the town, but she could not reply in kind and indeed barely replied at all. A conversation with Olive was essentially a monologue.

It did not fail to amuse her that her first genuine friend in twenty-seven years was a young former homosexual living with a thirty-seven-year-old emotional basket case.

She was at the shop on a midweek afternoon when a man walked in and began to browse the shelves. He looked faintly familiar, but after a second look she decided it was the type that was familiar and not the individual. He looked around forty-five and had a vaguely professorial aspect to him. He wore an Irish tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a pair of faded chinos. He had glasses with heavy rims and a small beard confined to his chin and upper lip. He carried but was not smoking a large briar pipe with a curved stem.

She noticed that much about him and then ignored him, because she knew he was not going to buy anything. She could not automatically spot a buyer, that was impossible, but she could identify a non-buyer, and he was definitely one. He had time to kill and was killing it in the Lemon Tree. That was all right, and might lead to a sale sometime in the future, but it meant she could safely ignore him unless he happened to request her attention. She did so, returning to the novel she had been reading.

“Why waste your time on Markarian?”

She looked up at the interruption. It was the man with the patched elbows and he was pointing to her book.

“I realize he’s local talent in these parts,” he continued. “But that’s no reason to subject yourself to that garbage. Which one is that? Caleb’s House. I think I missed that one, praise be to God.”

Gratuitous conversation was one of the hazards of the job. Sometimes, if you ignored these people, they went away. She nodded pleasantly and said, “I see,” and turned her eyes back to the page. But he didn’t go away. She had rather thought he wouldn’t.

“You read much of his stuff?”

“I think I read one or two others.”

“Glutton for punishment. Enjoying that one?”

“It’s interesting.”

“Cardboard characters and predictable themes. A book a year out of his assembly line, and every year he writes more and more about less and less. What do you like about him?”

This was annoying. She kept her eyes on the page and said, “He takes my mind off things that bore me.”

“By boring you in black and white? That’s a small blessing. What do you like about his books?”

“The stories are interesting. In this one, anyway. I get interested in what happens to the people. I’m not an intellectual.”

“Whatever that means.”

“Whatever it means, I’m not one. I gather you are.”

He grinned. “I suppose I come closer to the category than Hugh Markarian, for whatever that’s worth. He did write one good book, though.”

“Did he.”

“You must have read it. One If by Land.”

“I haven’t read it.”

“His first novel, the war novel. Of course you read it.”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“The World War Two novel.”

“I’m not really interested in World War Two.” She looked up from the book and made her expression as unpleasant as she knew how. “It’s one of the things that bore me. There are other things.”

He seemed immune to insult. “In that case I’ll tell you a secret. One If by Land is even worse than the rest of his swill. The critics are just denser than the reading public, that’s all. You’re lucky you never read it. Have the sense to stay away from it”

And he left.

He returned the next day about the same time, wearing the same jacket and carrying what looked like the same pipe. She was within twenty pages of the end of Caleb’s House when he popped in.

“I see you’re still wasting your time with the same mind rot,” he said. “At least it’s a library copy, and you’re not contributing to his royalties.”

She raised her eyes and gazea benevolently at him. “I think you’re making a mistake,” she said.

“How so?”

“Confusing the author with his books.”

“Oh, I’m willing to concede he may be a decent enough fellow. That’s neither here—”

“No, it’s the other way around.”

“Oh?”

“I think so,” she said, thoughtfully. “After what you said yesterday I read the rest of the book more carefully. With the idea of trying to figure out the man who wrote it.”

“And what did you figure out?”

“That his books are a great deal better than he is. And that what might seem to be flaws or weaknesses in his writing are just the flaws of his own personality coming out.”

“How so?”

“Oh, I don’t know where to start. His whole concept of women, for example.”

“The standard Male Chauvinist Pig?”

“No, I’m not talking about that kind of crap. But this total inability to relate to women stands out on page. He needs women but he’s afraid of them. He believe they’re really people. Every female character his is either too good or too bad. They come alive anyway because of his craft as a writer but he puts impossible speeches in their mouths and impossible ideas in their heads. I’ll bet he’s never really loved a woman in his life. He may make a fool of himself over a woman now and then but never knows her enough to love her on an adult level.”

He stroked his beard. “Interesting,” he said. “As a man, I’m less apt to pick up on that sort of thing. What else have you doped out about him?”

“Oh, it’s not fair to play detective like this,” she said, smiling. “But other things seem fairly obvious.”

“For example?”

“The usual latent homosexuality. Narcissism. And his emphasis on communal roots — I’d guess he lacks roots himself and has never gotten over the fact. Of course that would have to be the case or he wouldn’t have wound up in Bucks County.”

“You don’t think he has roots here? It seems to me he’s been here forever.”

“Not deep roots. Transplants never do, do they?”

“Interesting,” he said. He took his pipe apart and blew through the stem. “And yet you read his books.”

“They’re interesting. He’s interesting, as far as that goes, even if he’s not admirable.”

“Uh-huh. Anything else you don’t like about him?”

“Definitely.”

“Such as?”

Now she did look away from him. “His beard needs trimming,” she said, “and the patch is coming off the left sleeve of his jacket.”

When she dared to look up at him he had turned slightly to the left and was looking at the juncture of ceiling and wall. Without looking at her he said, “I’ll bet you’ve handed out a lot of coronaries in your young life.”

“You did ask for it, you know.”

“Indeed I did. But you certainly pushed enough of the right buttons. I can’t tell you how relieved I am it was a put-on, not that that will keep me from brooding for weeks about what you said.”

“Oh, I was just being a little rotten, that’s all.”

“That’s what I’ll tell myself. When did you—”

“Yesterday.”

“Before or after I left?”

“After, I’m afraid. While you were here all I knew about you was that you were the most godawful pest so far this week. Then something made me turn the book over. Why don’t you wear your glasses for photographs?”

“I think people should be able to see eyes. If they’re going to see an author at all.”

“What about his chin?”

“No one ever called the chin the window of the soul. What do you do when you’re not making people wish they were dead?”

“Nothing much. I hope it wasn’t that cruel.”

“Crueler than you could have known. Incidentally, one of us hasn’t been introduced.”

“It’s Linda Robshaw.”

He swooped to kiss her hand. “Mrs. Robshaw, the pleasure is mine.”

“It’s Miss Robshaw. As you already know, because otherwise you would have kissed a ring.”

“I feel increasingly transparent. When do you finish work here? Which is a euphemism for when can I buy you a drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Or coffee. Or a sandwich, or an ice-cream cone, or a — what? A ping-pong ball? A subway token? An autographed photo of Mrs. Warren G. Harding? You need merely ask.”

She laughed aloud.

“Well?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“There’s no Mrs. Markarian, you know. There was, but she has a different last name now.”

“I know.”

“I have no wife, no criminal record, and no significant bad habits. I could submit character references.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“You’re involved in something.”

“It would be easy to say yes to that, wouldn’t it? Something, perhaps, but not someone, which I suppose is what you meant.” He nodded. “I’m not. I was, and now I’m not, and I’m getting over it.”

“I see.”

“Do you? I’m not sure I do myself. I’m getting more than the person I used to be involved with. It seems to be a time-consuming process. Just now I’m not ready for anything complicated.”

“Not even something as uncomplicated as a cup of coffee?”

“I think we both know it would amount to more than a cup of coffee.”

“It would, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He filled his pipe and lit it. This took a great deal of time, in the course of which she found herself constantly looking at him and then glancing nervously away. When the pipe was going well he took it from his mouth and held it at arm’s length, fixing his eyes on it.

“Fair enough,” he said. “Yesterday was my day for being a pest, and I try not to do that more than once a week. We’ll probably run into each other from time to time.”

“Yes, we probably will.”

“You threw me as wide a curve this afternoon as I’ve ever seen. Naturally I’m going to want a couple of swings at it.”

“I’m not trying to strike you out.”

“I’m not aiming to strike out. I’ll see you. Enjoy the book. The ending’s a little weak, but then so at the moment is the author. ’Bye.”

Friday night she recapitulated both conversations with Markarian for Peter. Her report was virtually verbatim. She sat on the floor of her room and shared a bottle of wine with him and told him everything in great detail.

“I think you made an impression,” he said.

“More than I planned.”

“You couldn’t have expected him to take all that in stride.”

“I hadn’t planned on giving him all that to begin with. I got carried away.”

“So did he, from the sound of it. Has he been back since?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Which does or doesn’t please you?”

“Both.”

“That’s cool. I’m beginning to develop a taste for wine.”

“So am I.”

He had brought her the wine an hour ago on his return from the theater. Earlier he had asked if she would sit with Robin. Gretchen had gone to Philadelphia to have something complicated done to her teeth. She had been born in Philadelphia, he explained, and like many people she never got over it She still went to a Philadelphia dentist. He had booked her for Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and there was an aunt with whom she would stay.

“Or she won’t stay with her aunt and isn’t going to the dentist, and I’ll tell you something.”

“You don’t fucking care.”

“I don’t fucking care is right. It’s good if she’s seeing the dentist because it’s a good sign if she takes an interest in that sort of thing, but all I do fucking care is that she’s off my back for a night. Robin already had dinner. All she needs is someone to keep her company and laugh at her jokes.”

“I always laugh at Robin’s jokes.”

“That’s just one of the reasons I love you. I’ll see you when I see you.”

He saw her at eleven thirty, by which time Robin had been laughed and played with and bathed and cuddled and tucked into bed. He knocked lightly on the door and when she opened it he presented the bottle of wine. “Valpolicella,” she read. “How lovely.”

“Is that how you pronounce it?”

“It’s how I pronounce it. For me? I suppose you know you didn’t have to.”

“I know, and it’s only for you if you insist. I was thinking of it as for us.”

“This is the real stuff, isn’t it? That means a cork. I think I know where the corkscrew is. She’s out cold, one of us can check her every once in a while and she’ll be fine.”

He locked the door and they went up to her room and opened the wine. They were both light-headed and buoyant. He said he never got a cork out of a wine bottle without breaking it and she asked if he generally broke the cork or the bottle and he said nobody loved a smartass. He opened the bottle perfectly and they sat on the floor and passed it back and forth while she told, about her encounters with Hugh Markarian.

She said, “What do I do when he shows up?”

“That’s the question.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you think you’ll do?”

“I don’t really know, Peter. I don’t want to go out with him. Or I think I don’t.”

“Because it might turn serious. You really think it would?”

“I don’t know. Not serious serious, but maybe pretend serious. Whatever the lady means by that. What do you know about him?”

“He’s a writer and he lives a few miles out of town. I know what he looks like because somebody pointed him out once. But I never — wait a minute, I met him about a month ago. We were at the same table at Sully’s but he wasn’t saying much and I wasn’t listening closely anyway. I never read any of his books. He’s just a name to me on the list of Bucks County writers who make this place such a culture center. Pearl Buck and James Michener and S. J. Perelman—”

“Didn’t he move?”

“That’s right, he did. And who else? The tall skinny one who wrote three books set here with real people in them, that everybody’s still uptight about. I can’t remember his name.”

“Neither can I, but I know who you mean.”

“From what I’ve heard they almost rode him out of town on a rail. The guy I can’t think of, that is. Not Hugh Markarian. I suppose you can afford to turn him down a few more times. It sounds to me as though he’ll come back for more.”

“For a while. And not if I really put him down.”

“It sounds as if you have his combination, too.”

“I think I do. I was just enough of a bitch the other day. If I was a little bit more of a bitch he wouldn’t have been interested.”

“You really do have a bitch streak, don’t you? It’s hard for me to believe it.”

“I usually keep it on a leash.”

They each had some more wine and he said, “Linda? Mind a question? Even if it could be serious, so what?”

“I knew you were going to ask that.”

“I mean it’s not as if you were likely to freak. You’ve got yourself very much together.”

“And want to stay that way.”

“I think you’re worried about nothing.”

She put down the bottle and looked at him. She was beginning to feel the wine and she was enjoying what she felt. And there was something besides the wine, an extra presence in the room. No, it wasn’t a presence, it was an absence. Gretchen had always been present in their previous conversations and tonight she was in Philadelphia.

“Makes the heart grow fonder,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Did I say that out loud? I must have had either too much or too little of this wine. There’s only one solution.”

“Here. What were you saying?”

“Thanks. I wasn’t saying anything, but maybe Tanya was right.”

“About what?”

“About what she said.”

“I’m starting to feel like the dentist Gretchen is going to. Pulling teeth. What did Tanya say now?”

She gave him a long look. “Well, Peter,” she said, mock serious, “I don’t think I’m going to tell you Tanya’s most recent utterances. Utterance. I don’t think I’m going to tell you now.”

“Okay.”

“Later. I may tell you later.”

“Okay.”

“But I will tell you what Tanya said before.”

“Okay. Well? What did she say before?”

“There is alcohol in this wine.”

“That’s what Tanya said?”

“That’s what I said just this minute. Or last minute. What Tanya said is that a woman has certain basic needs, and once she gets used to it she can’t get along without it, and of course I’ve lived with a man and must be able to recognize my needs, and what Tanya said in so many words is I ought to get laid.”

“Oh.”

“She said when she goes without it for a couple of days, she starts climbing the walls.”

“How would she know?”

“Do you know, I almost asked her that. I wonder what she does when she has her period.”

“Shhh, they’ll hear you.”

“If that would bother Just Plain Bill over there.”

“It might if he noticed. If he noticed.”

“He might if they showed it on television.” They went into hysterical laughter again. He got hold of himself before she did. It was just so much fun to laugh life this. When she could talk she said, “Peter, are we really this funny? Or is it just the wine?”

“I think we’re really this funny.”

“She wanted to know what I did for sex. Tanya.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I don’t remember. I made a joke and explained the joke to her and then she asked me again. She’s not too good at taking a hint.”

“Neither am I.”

“Huh?”

“What did you finally tell her?”

“Oh, I get it. That wasn’t a hint. I have to be a lot soberer than this to be subtle. Where were we? What did I tell Tanya. What I told her was I didn’t do anything for sex.” She stared owlishly at him. “What I didn’t tell her was the truth.”

“Oh.”

“Just ‘Oh’?”

“If you think I’m going to ask—”

“Then I ain’t about to tell, Massa.”

“What do you do for sex?”

“Ah plays with mahself.” In her own voice she said, “I never said that before. God knows I did it before. Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Plays with yoreself.”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, I’m in a weird mood.”

“I’ll say.”

“It feels so good. The mood. So does playing with myself. Oh, I feel about six years old. I feel like Robin-Lobin. You better teach her another game, incidentally.”

“I know.”

“Because it doesn’t work with my name and it’s frustrating the piss out of her. Robin-Lobin and Peter-Leter and Gretchen-Letchen, and then along comes Linda-Linda, and what kind of big hairy deal is that?” She moved around the room in little two-steps. “This is Robshaw-Lobshaw speaking,” she announced, “and this is Truth Time! Do you play with yourself, yes or no, you have ten seconds to answer, bong.”

“Yes.”

“The man says yes! Now our next question. One hand or two?”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I know, isn’t it wonderful?” She plopped herself onto the floor, folded her legs. “Give me my bottle-lottle,” she demanded.

He hesitated.

“Come on.”

“Do you think you should have any more?”

“Well, I don’t think I should have any less. You can’t save wine, you know. Or it tastes corked or something. I’m sure you can’t save Valipo, Vapilo — I can’t say it, Peter.”

“If you can’t say it you can’t drink it.”

“Valpolicella. There. See, I’m not as drunk as I seem. When push comes to shove I make the grade. Fucking Peter, give me the fucking botttttle!”

“Shhhhh.”

“Then give me the bottle. If you give me the bottle I’ll tell you what else Tanya said. Thank you. This is good wine. See, if this was bad wine we would be getting drunk, but the bottle’s almost empty and we’re both sober. Except I am talking very loud. Now I am not talking very loud. Is that better, Peter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You just finished the wine. You made the wine all gone. That’s what Robin says. Peter-Leter made the wine all gone.”

“You ought to drink this stuff all the time.”

“Just what I was thinking. Don’t you want to know what Tanya said?”

“I never in my life heard her say anything worth repeating, and we’ve been talking about what she said for the past six hours.”

“She said you and I are sleeping together. Peter? You’re not laughing.”

“Tanya really said that?”

“Oh, shit. Why isn’t it funny? It was funny as hell when she said it. But I didn’t laugh then either. I blew up at her and she almost cried, and then I came home and broke up laughing, and I thought you would too if I saved it for when you were in a good mood, and all of a sudden it isn’t funny, is it, Peter?”

They looked at each other for a long time. She couldn’t get her eyes away from his. Gretchen was in Philadelphia and the room was full of her absence and the heart was growing fonder all the time.

“I have to check Robin,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, it’s late.”

“Don’t be long,” she said.

She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Don’t be long. She should not have said that and it was good he had not reacted to it. He would go downstairs and go to bed, and that was as it should be. It was a good thing one of them had sense.

She took off all her clothes. She turned on the bathroom light and left the door open a crack, then turned off the other lights. She touched herself, thinking One hand or two? and sniffed her fingers. She got in bed and covered herself only with the sheet.

She thought Don’t come back, and then she heard his footsteps on the stairs again.

He stood in the doorway with the hall light framing him from behind. He said, “I just came up to say good-night.”

“Kiss me good-night.”

“Linda, I’m scared.”

“So am I. Kiss me good-night.”

Until he sat on the bed and kissed her it was never entirely real. It was the mood and the wine and the absence of Gretchen and it was not entirely real. It was kids playing chicken. You could always change your mind at the last minute, and so it was not real.

There is always a moment when you can change your mind and a moment when you cannot, and the line that divides them holds fewer angels than a pin head. There is the moment in roulette before the ball drops. There is that instant before a trigger is quite squeezed, before a trap is sprung. On one side of the line is possibility and on the other side is certainty.

Such moments come one after another in the course of every person’s life, and in the vast majority of cases they approach and are resolved without anyone’s being truly aware of them. They are most commonly recognized after the fact, enlarged a thousand times in hindsight. That had been the turning point. There was the crisis. But even in retrospect most are shrouded from view, for one prefers to regard the good turns as planned and the bad as unavoidable.

But in this case she saw herself at a critical moment and knew that he shared this awareness. He was so close to her, they were so close to each other, and yet he could still get up and she could still turn away.

Then he did not get up, and she did not turn away, and then he kissed her, and after that everything happened just as it had to happen.

They lay a long time together, neither one willing to move first. Then they moved at so nearly the same instant that it was impossible to say who had initiated it. They disengaged and lay very close together but did not touch. She was close enough to feel the warmth of his skin but no part of her body touched his.

The silence lasted forever. Thoughts kept flooding her head and she tried to find the right words for them but nothing seemed worth saying. There was an increasingly unbearable tension in the silence.

Finally she said, “I can’t think of anything clever.”

“I can’t think of anything. Period.”

“Oh, I can think of a ton of things. All of them wrong.”

“Oh, wow.”

“That was one I hadn’t thought of. I think maybe I should have. Oh, wow.”

“Yeah.”

“What I keep wanting to say is I never thought it would be like this but some silly cunt says it in every really bad novel I ever read. What really sucks about clichés is they’re so appropriate. I never did.”

“Neither did I.”

“Did you ever think about us? Did you ever think to yourself, ‘I wonder what it would be like to fuck Linda?’”

“No.”

“If I had any class I’d be insulted. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I don’t. Have any, I mean. Class, I mean.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How the hell do I know? You honestly never thought about it? Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Cross your heart and all that jazz?”

“Oh, come on.”

“I never did until Tanya. Like telling a kid don’t put beans up your nose. It would never occur to her otherwise. Did you ever tell Robin not to put beans up your nose? Up her nose, I mean. Not up yours.”

“Up yours.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that. Did you?”

“Which? No, I never told Robin not to put anything up her anywhere. No, I never thought about us. No, I never thought it would be like this either, if that’s what you’re asking me to say, but then I didn’t think about it at all.”

“I did, and you know what I thought? Well, first of all I thought it would never happen in the first place, so it was sheer fantasy.”

“Right.”

“And then I thought it would be horribly awkward. You know what I thought? I thought it would be silly. Silly Linda and silly Peter pretending to fuck. Pretending. That’s exactly what I thought. I thought it would be the two of us pretending to be two other people fucking.”

“That’s very far-out.”

“You know what I mean, don’t you?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“But it wasn’t like that.”

“No.”

“Are you glad or sorry?”

“That it happened? I don’t know. Both.”

“I’m more glad than sorry. I think. It was something that was going to happen sooner or later. I never knew that before, but it’s true. And if it had to happen it couldn’t happen to a nicer evening. I’m not drunk anymore. I wasn’t as drunk as I acted. I don’t mean it was an act. I thought I was that drunk but I wasn’t really. Or I was drunk but it wasn’t just wine. I was drunk on us. Or on you and me. Do you know what I’m saying, because I don’t know if I do or not.”

“I think so. You’re saying that you... oh, the hell with it. I know what you mean. The hell with it.”

“Right, the hell with it. God, I’m so glad we can still laugh together. I couldn’t live if I forgot how to laugh. It keeps you going. It wasn’t being horny. I wasn’t horny, Peter, I swear I wasn’t. I didn’t have an urge to get laid. I haven’t had an honest-to-God urge to get laid since January, as a matter of fact. Are you gonna say it or am I? I guess I am. One, we won’t do this again, and two, we can still be friends. God, talk about clichés. Just go ahead and talk about clichés.”

“We won’t do it again because we don’t have to now.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“I do ninety-nine percent of the talking and you make ninety-nine percent of the sense. Peter? We’ll never tell anyone.”

“God knows I won’t.”

“I mean ever. No matter who we marry or where we move to or what we wind up doing. It will always be something that nobody knows about. It’s so beautiful I want to cry. I’m picturing two old people who made love once a million years ago and never told anyone and neither of them ever forgot it. Don’t ever forget me, Peter.”

“Linda.”

“No. No, I’m all right. Do you want to sleep with me? I mean sleep. You can if you want to. No, because of Robin.”

“If she wakes up and nobody’s there—”

“I know. And we wouldn’t just sleep. I can’t talk anymore.”

“I’ll go.”

“I want you to go but I don’t want you to go. I’m glad about us. I’m going to say something once and I’ll never say it again.”

“Let me. I love you, Linda.”

“Oh, I love you.”