"I thought-I thought you might want to go to the play." He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face with it. He put his glasses back on.

"You ought to wear sunglasses," said Jeannine, imagining how he might look that way. "Yes, Bud and Eileen were going. Would you like to join us?" The surprised gratitude of a man reprieved. I really do like him. He bent closer-this alarmed her for the canoe, as well as disgusted her (Freud says disgust is a prominent expression of the sexual life in civilized people) and she cried out, "Don't!

We'll fall in!" He righted himself. By degrees. You've got to get to know people. She was frightened, almost, by the access of being that came to her from him, frightened at the richness of the whole scene, at how much she felt without feeling it for him, terrified lest the sun might go behind a cloud and withdraw everything from her again.

"What time shall I pick you up?" he said.

VII

That night Jeannine fell in love with an actor. The theatre was a squat, low building finished pink stucco like a summertime movie palace and built in the middle of a grove of pine trees. The audience sat on hard wooden chairs and watched a college group play "Charley's Aunt." Jeannine didn't get up or go out during the intermission but only sat, stupefied, fanning herself with her program and wishing that she had the courage to make some sort of change in her life. She couldn't take her eyes off the stage. The presence of her brother and sister-in-law irked her unbearably and every time she became aware of her date by her elbow, she wanted to turn in on herself and disappear, or run outside, or scream. It didn't matter which actor or which character she fell in love with; even Jeannine knew that; it was the unreality of the scene onstage that made her long to be in it or on it or two-dimensional, anything to quiet her unstable heart; I'm not fit to live, she said. There was more pain in it than pleasure; it had been getting worse for some years, until Jeannine now dreaded doing it; I can't help it, she said. She added, I'm not fit to exist.

I'll feel better tomorrow. She thought of Bud taking his little girl fishing (that had happened that morning, over Eileen's protests) and tears rose in her eyes. The pain of it. The painful pleasure. She saw, through a haze of distress, the one figure on stage who mattered to her. She willed it so. Roses and raptures in the dark. She was terrified of the moment when the curtain would fall-in love as in pain, in misery, in trouble. If only you could stay half-dead. Eventually the curtain (a gray velvet one, much worn) did close, and opened again on the troupe's curtain calls; Jeannine mumbled something about it being too hot and ran outside, shaking with terror; who am I, what am I, what do I want, where do I go, what world is this? One of the neighborhood children was selling lemonade, with a table and chairs pitched on the carpet of dead pine needles under the trees. Jeannine bought some, to color her loneliness; I did, too, and it was awful stuff. (If anybody finds me, I'll say it was too warm and I wanted a drink.) She walked blindly into the woods and stood a little way from the theatre, leaning her forehead against a tree-trunk. I said Jeannine, why are you unhappy?

I'm not unhappy.

You have everything (I said). What is there that you want and haven't got?

I want to die.

Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that it? And they won't let you? Did you have a talent for mathematics, which they squelched? Did they refuse to let you be a truck driver? What is it?

I want to live.

I will leave you and your imaginary distresses (said I) and go converse with somebody who makes more sense; really, one would think you'd been balked of some vital necessity. Money? You've got a job. Love? You've been going out with boys since you were thirteen.

I know.

You can't expect romance to last your life long, Jeannine: candlelight dinners and dances and pretty clothes are nice but they aren't the whole of life. There comes a time when one has to live the ordinary side of life and romance is a very small part of that. No matter how nice it is to be courted and taken out, eventually you say "I do" and that's that. It may be a great adventure, but there are fifty or sixty years to fill up afterwards. You can't do that with romance alone, you know. Think, Jeannine-fifty or sixty years!

I know.

Well?

(Silence)

Well, what do you want?

(She didn't answer)

I'm trying to talk to you sensibly, Jeannine. You say you don't want a profession and you don't want a man-in fact, you just fell in love but you condemn that as silly-so what is it that you want? Well?

Nothing.

That's not true, dear. Tell me what you want. Come on.

I want love. (She dropped her paper cup of lemonade and covered her face with her hands.)

Go ahead. The world's full of people.

I can't.

Can't? Why not? You've got a date here tonight, haven't you? You've never had trouble attracting men's interest before. So go to it.

Not that way.

"What way?" (said I).

Not the real way.

"What!" (said I).

I want something else, she repeated, something else.

"Well, Jeannine," said I, "if you don't like reality and human nature, I don't know what else you can have," and I quit her and left her standing on the pine needles in the shadow cast by the trees, away from the crowd and the flood-lights fastened to the outside of the theatre building. Jeannine is very romantic. She's building a whole philosophy from the cry of the crickets and her heart's anguish. But that won't last. She will slowly come back to herself.

She'll return to Bud and Eileen and her job of fascinating the latest X.

Jeannine, back in the theatre building with Bud and Eileen, looked in the mirror set up over the ticket window so lady spectators could put on their lipstick, and jumped-"Who's that!"

"Stop it, Jeannie," said Bud. "What's the matter with you?" We all looked and it was Jeannine herself, sure enough, the same graceful slouch and thin figure, the same nervous, oblique glance.

"Why, it's you, darling," said Eileen, laughing. Jeannine had been shocked right out of her sorrow. She turned to her sister-in-law and said, with unwonted energy, between her teeth: "What do you want out of life, Eileen? Tell me!"

"Oh honey," said Eileen, "what should I want? I want just what I've got." X came out of the men's room. Poor fellow. Poor lay figure.

"Jeannie wants to know what life is all about," said Bud. "What do you think, Frank? Do you have any words of wisdom for us?"

"I think that you are all awful," said Jeannine vehemently. X laughed nervously.

"Well now, I don't know," he said.

That's my trouble, too. My knowledge was taken away from me.

(She remembered the actor in the play and her throat constricted. It hurt, it hurt. Nobody saw, though.)

"Do you think," she said very low, to X, "that you could know what you wanted, only after a while-I mean, they don't mean to do it, but life-people-people could confuse things?"

"I know what I want," said Eileen brightly. "I want to go home and take the baby from Mama. Okay, honey?"

"I don't mean-" Jeannine began.

"Oh, Jeannie!" said Eileen affectionately, possibly more for X's benefit than her sister-in-law's; "Oh, Jeannie!" and kissed her. Bud gave her a peck on the cheek.

Don't you touch me!

"Want a drink?" said X, when Bud and Eileen had gone.

"I want to know," said Jeannine, almost under her breath, "what you want out of life and I'm not moving until you tell me." He stared.

"Come on," she said. He smiled nervously.

"Well, I'm going to night school. I'm going to finish my B. A. this winter."

(He's going to night school. He's going to finish his B. A. Wowie zowie. I'm not impressed.)