“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. Her head was expanding and contracting and she felt as though she were choking. She stumbled out of the car and threw up by the side of the road in great racking heaves.

Boylan sat immobile at the wheel, staring straight ahead of him. When she was finished and the throat-tearing convulsions had ceased, he said, curtly, “All right, come back in here.”

Depleted and fragile, she crept back into the car, cold sweat on her forehead, holding her hand up to her mouth against the smell.

“Here, pet,” Boylan said kindly. He gave her the large colored silk handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Use this.”

She dabbed at her mouth, wiped the sweat from her face. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“What do you really want to do, pet?” he asked.

“I want to go home,” she whimpered.

“You can’t go home in that condition,” he said.

He started the car.

“Where’re you taking me?”

“My house,” he said.

She was too exhausted to argue and she lay with her head against the back of the seat, her eyes closed, as they drove swiftly south along the highway.

He made love to her early that evening, after she had rinsed her mouth a long time with a cinnamon-flavored mouthwash in his bathroom and had slept soddenly on his bed for two hours. Afterward, silently, he drove her home.

Monday morning, when she came into the office at nine o’clock, there was a long, white, plain envelope on her desk, with her name printed on it and “Personal” scribbled in one corner. She opened the envelope. There were eight one-hundred-dollar bills there.

He must have gotten up at dawn to drive all the way into town and get into the locked factory before anyone appeared for work.

Chapter 3

The classroom was silent, except for the busy scratching of pens on paper. Miss Lenaut was seated at her desk reading, occasionally raising her head to scan the room. She had set a half-hour composition for her pupils to write, subject, “Franco-American Friendship.” As Rudolph bent to his task at his desk toward the rear of the room, he had to admit to himself that Miss Lenaut might be beautiful, and undoubtedly French, but that her imagination left something to be desired.

Half a point would be taken off for a mistake in spelling or a misplaced accent, and a full point for any errors in grammar. The composition had to be at least three pages long.

Rudolph filled the required three pages quickly. He was the only student in the class who consistently got marks of over 90 on compositions and dictation, and in the last three tests he had scored 100. He was so good in the language that Miss Lenaut had grown suspicious and had asked him if his parents spoke French. “Jordache,” she said. “It is not an American name.” The imputation hurt him. He wanted to be different from the people around him in many respects, but not in his American-ness. His father was German, Rudolph told Miss Lenaut, but aside from an occasional word in that language, all Rudolph ever heard at home was English.

“Are you sure your father wasn’t born in the Alsace?” Miss Lenaut persisted.

“Cologne,” Rudolph said and added that his grandfather had come from Alsace-Lorraine.

“Alors,” Miss Lenaut said. “It is as I suspected.”

It pained Rudolph that Miss Lenaut, that incarnation of feminine beauty and worldly charm and the object of his feverish devotion, might believe, even for a moment, that he would lie to her or take secret advantage of her. He longed to confess his emotion and had fantasies of returning to the high school some years hence, when he was a suave college man, and waiting outside the school for her and addressing her in French, which would by that time be fluent and perfectly accented, and telling her, with an amused chuckle for the shy child he had been, of his schoolboy passion for her in his junior year. Who knew what then might happen? Literature was full of older women and brilliant young boys, of teachers and precocious pupils …

He reread his work for errors, scowling at the banality which the subject had imposed upon him. He changed a word or two, put in an accent he had missed, then looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go.

“Hey!” There was a tortured whisper on his right. “What’s the past participle of venir?”

Rudolph turned his head slightly toward his neighbor, Sammy Kessler, a straight D student. Sammy Kessler was hunched in a position of agony over his paper, his eyes flicking desperately over at Rudolph. Rudolph glanced toward the front of the room. Miss Lenaut was engrossed in her book. He didn’t like to break the rules in her class, but he couldn’t be known by his contemporaries as a coward or a teacher’s pet.

“Venu,” he whispered.

“With two o’s?” Kessler whispered.

“A u, idiot,” Rudolph said.

Sammy Kessler wrote laboriously, sweating, doomed to his D.

Rudolph stared at Miss Lenaut. She was particularly attractive today, he thought. She was wearing long earrings and a brown, shiny dress that wrinkled skin-tight across her girdled hips and showed a generous amount of her stiffly armored bosom. Her mouth was a bright-red gash of lipstick. She put lipstick on before every class. Her family ran a small French restaurant in the theatrical district of New York and there was more of Broadway in Miss Lenaut than the Faubourg St. Honoré, but Rudolph was happily unaware of this distinction.

Idly, Rudolph began to sketch on a piece of paper. Miss Lenaut’s face took shape under his pen, the easily identifiable two curls that she wore high on her cheeks in front of her ears, the waved, thick hair, with the part in the middle. Rudolph continued drawing. The earrings, the rather thick, beefy throat. For a moment, Rudolph hesitated. The territory he was now entering was dangerous. He glanced once more at Miss Lenaut. She was still reading. There were no problems of discipline in Miss Lenaut’s class. She gave out punishments for the slightest infractions with merciless liberality. The full conjugation of the reflexive irregular verb se taire, repeated ten times, was the lightest of her sentences. She could sit and read with only an occasional lifting of her eyes to reassure herself that all was well, that there was no whispering, no passing of papers between desk and desk.

Rudolph gave himself to the delights of erotic art. He continued the line down from Miss Lenaut’s neck to her right breast, naked. Then he put in her left breast. He was satisfied with the proportions. He drew her standing, three-quarter view, one arm extended, with a piece of chalk in her hand, at the blackboard. Rudolph worked with relish. He was getting better with each opus. The hips were easy. The mons veneris he drew from memory of art books in the library, so it was a bit hazy. The legs, he felt, were satisfactory. He would have liked to draw Miss Lenaut barefooted, but he was bad on feet, so he gave her the high-heeled shoes, with straps above the ankle, that she habitually wore. Since he had her writing on the blackboard, he decided to put some words on the blackboard. “Je suis folle d’amour,” he printed in an accurate representation of Miss Lenaut’s blackboard script. He started to shade Miss Lenaut’s breasts artistically. He decided that the entire work would be more striking if he drew it as though there were a strong light coming from the left. He shaded the inside of Miss Lenaut’s thigh. He wished there were someone he knew in school he could show the drawing to who would appreciate it. But he couldn’t trust the boys on the track team, who were his best friends, to treat the picture with appropriate sobriety.

He was shading in the straps on the ankles when he became conscious of someone standing beside his desk. He looked up slowly. Miss Lenaut was glaring down at the drawing on his desk. She must have moved down the aisle like a cat, high heels and all.