Joel stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.

He lay there on a bed of cold pebbles, the cool water washing, rippling over him; he wished he were a leaf, like the current-carried leaves riding past: leaf-boy, he would float lightly away, float and fade into a river, an ocean, the world's great flood. Holding his nose, he put his head underwater: he was six years old, and his penny-colored eyes were round with terror: Holy Ghost, the preacher said, pressing him down into baptism water; he screamed, and his mother, watching from a front pew, rushed forward, took him in her arms, held him, whispered softly: my darling, my darling. He lifted his face from the great stillness, and, as Idabel splashed a playful wave, seven years vanished in an instant.

"You look like a plucked chicken," said Idabel. "So skinny and white."

Joel's shoulders contracted self-consciously. Despite Idabel's quite genuine lack of interest in his nakedness, he could not make so casual an adjustment to the situation as she seemed to expect.

Idabel said: "Hold still, now, and I'll shampoo your hair. " Her own was a maze of lather-curls like cake icing. Without clothes, her figure was, if anything, more boyish: she seemed mostly legs, like a crane, or a walker on modified stilts, and freckles, dappling her rather delicate shoulders, gave her a curiously wistful look. But already her breasts had commenced to swell, and there was about her hips a mild suggestion of approaching width. Joel, having conceived of Idabel as gloomy, and cantankerous, was surprised at how funny and gay she could be: working her fingers rhythmically over his scalp, she kept laughing and telling jokes, some of them quite bawdy: "… so the farmer said: 'Sure she's a pretty baby; oughta be, after having been strained through a silk handkerchief. »

When he did not laugh, she said: "What's the matter? Don't you get it?" Joel shook his head. "And you from the city, too," she sighed.

"What did he mean… strained through a silk handkerchief?"

"Skip it, son," said Idabel, rinsing his hair, "you're too young." Joel thought then that the points of Idabel's jokes were even for her none too clear: the manner in which she told them was not altogether her own; she was imitating someone, and, wondering who, he asked: "Where'd you hear that joke?"

"Billy Bob told me," she said.

"Who's that?"

"He's just Billy Bob."

"Do you like him?" said Joel, not understanding why he felt so jealous.

"Sure I like him," she said, rising up and wading toward land; her eyes fixed on the water, she was, moving slowly and with such grace, like a bird in search of food. "Sure: he's practically my best friend. He's awful tough, Billy Bob is. I remember back in fourth grade we had that mean Miss Aikens, and she used to beat Billy Bob's hands raw with a ruler, and he never cried once."

They sat down in a sunny place to dry, and she put on her dark glasses.

"I never cry," Joel lied.

She turned on her stomach, and, fingering moss, said with gentle matter-of-factness: "Well, I do. I cry sometimes." She looked at him earnestly. "But you don't ever tell anybody, hear."

He wanted to say: no, Idabel, dear Idabel, I am your good true friend. And he wanted to touch her, to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek. There was a hush; tenuous moods of light and shade seemed to pass between them like the leaf-shadow trembling on their bodies. Then Idabel tightened all over. She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull, and when she did this a terrible, and puzzled rage went through Joel. This was the real betrayal. And so he fought back; tangled and wrestling, the sky turning, descending, revolving, they rolled over, over. The dark glasses fell off, and Joel, falling back, felt them crush beneath and cut his buttocks. "Stop," he panted, "please stop, I'm bleeding." Idabel was astride him, and her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her red, angry face close to his: "Give up?"

"I'm bleeding," was all Joel would say.

Presently, after releasing him, she brought water, and washed his cut. "You'll be all right," she said, as if nothing had happened. And, indefinably, it was as if nothing had: neither, of course, would ever be able to explain why they had fought.

Joel said: "I'm sorry about your glasses."

The broken pieces sprinkled the ground like green raindrops. Stooping, she started picking them up; then, seeming to think better of this, she spilled them back. "It's not your fault," she said sadly. "Maybe… maybe some day I'll win another pair."

8

Randolph dipped his brush into a little water-filled vinegar jar, and tendrils of purple spread like some fast-growing vine. "Don't smile, my dear," he said. "I'm not a photographer. On the other hand, I could scarcely be called an artist; not, that is, if you defineartist as one who sees, takes and purely transmits: always for me there is the problem of distortion, and I never paint so much what I see as what I think: for example, some years ago, this was in Berlin, I drew a boy not much older than yourself, and yet in my picture he looked more aged than Jesus Fever, and whereas in reality his eyes were childhood blue, the eyes I saw were bleary and lost. And what I saw was indeed the truth, for little Kurt, that was his name, turned out to be a perfect horror, and tried twice to murder me… exhibiting both times, I must say, admirable ingenuity. Poor child, I wonder whatever became of him… or, for that matter, me. Now that is a most interesting question: whatever became of me?" As if to punctuate his sentences he kept, all the while he talked, thrusting the brush inside the jar, and the water, continually darkening, had at its center, like a hidden flower, a rope of red. "Very well, sit back, we'll relax a minute now."

Sighing, Joel glanced about him. It was the first time he'd been in Randolph's room; after two hours, he still could not quite take it in, for it was so unlike anything he'd ever known before: faded gold and tarnished silk reflecting in ornate mirrors, it all made him feel as though he'd eaten too much candy. Large as the room was, the barren space in it amounted to no more than one foot; carved tables, velvet chairs, candelabras, a German music box, books and paintings seemed to spill each into the other, as if the objects in a flood had floated through the windows and sunk here. Behind his liver-shaped desk unframed foreign postcards crusted the walls; six of these, a series from Japan, were for Joel an education, even though to some extent he knew already the significance of what they depicted. Like a museum exhibit, there was spread out on a long, black, tremendously heavy table a display consisting in part of antique dolls, some with missing arms, legs, some without heads, other whose bead-eyes stared glass-blank though their innards, straw and sawdust, showed through open wounds; all, however, were costumed, and exquisitely, in a variety of velvet, lace, linen. Now set in the center of this table was a little photograph in a silver frame so elaborate as to be absurd; it was a cheap photograph, obviously taken at a carnival or amusement park, for the persons concerned, three men and a girl, were posed against a humorous backdrop of cross-eyed baboons and leering kangaroos; though he was thinner in this scene and more handsome, Joel, without much effort, recognized Randolph, and another of the men looked familiar, too… was it his father? Certainly the face was only mildly reminiscent of the man across the hall. The third man, taller than his companions, cut an amazing figure; he was powerfully made and, even in so faded a print, very dark, almost Negroid; his eyes, narrow and sly and black, glittered beneath brows thick as mustaches, and his lips, fuller than any woman's were caught in a cocky smile which intensified the dashing, rather vaudeville effect of a straw hat he wore, a cane he carried. He had his arm around the girl, and she, an anemic faunlike creature, was gazing up at him with the completest adoration.