“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said thickly.

“What the hell for?” Claude looked up at him in surprise, the light that came through the parted curtains reflecting damply on his eyeglasses. “The action is just beginning.”

Tom reached down and grabbed Claude by the hair and jerked him savagely to his feet.

“Hey, for Christ’s sake, watch what you’re doing,” Claude said.

“I said let’s get out of here.” Tom held Claude roughly by his necktie. “And you keep quiet about what you saw tonight.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Claude whined. “What the hell did I see! A skinny crock with a dick on him like an old rubber hose. What’s there to keep quiet about?”

“Just keep quiet, that’s all,” Tom said, his face close to Claude’s. “If I ever hear a word from anyone, you’ll get a beating you’ll never forget. Got it?”

“Jesus, Tom,” Claude said reproachfully, rubbing his sore scalp, “I’m your friend.”

“Got it?” Tom said fiercely.

“Sure, sure. Anything you say. I don’t know what there’s to get so excited about.”

Tom let him go and wheeled and strode across the lawn away from the house. Claude followed him, grumbling. “Guys tell me you’re crazy,” he said, as he caught up to Tom, “and I always tell them they’re nuts, but now I’m beginning to see what they mean, I swear to God I do. Boy, are you temperamental.”

Tom didn’t answer. He was almost running as they neared the gate house. Claude wheeled out the bike and Tom swung on behind him. They drove into town without talking to each other.

II

Replete and drowsy, Gretchen lay in the wide soft bed, her hands behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling reflected the fire that Boylan had lit before he had undressed her. The arrangements for seduction were planned meticulously and smoothly practiced up here on the hill. The house was hushed and luxurious, the servants were never in evidence, the telephone never rang, there was never any fumbling or hurrying. Nothing clumsy or unforeseen was allowed to intrude on their evening ritual.

Downstairs, a clock chimed softly. Ten o’clock. It was the hour the common room in the hospital emptied and the wounded men made their way, on crutches and in wheelchairs, back to the wards. These days Gretchen only went to the hospital two or three times a week. Her life was centered, with a single urgency, on the bed in which she lay. The days were passed in expectation of it, the nights away from it in its memory. She would make restitution to the wounded some other time.

Even when she had opened the envelope and seen the eight one-hundred-dollar bills, she had known she would return to this bed. If it was one of Boylan’s peculiarities that he had to humiliate her, she accepted it. She would make the man pay for it later.

Neither Boylan nor she had ever spoken of the envelope on her desk. On Tuesday, as she was coming out of the office after work, the Buick was there, with Boylan at the wheel. He had opened the car door without a word and she had gotten in and he had driven to his house. They had made love and after that gone to The Farmer’s Inn for dinner and after that had driven home and made love again. When he took her into town, toward midnight, he had dropped her off two blocks from her home and she had walked the rest of the way.

Teddy did everything perfectly. He was discreet—secrecy was to his taste; it was a necessity for her. Nobody knew anything about them. Knowledgeable, he had taken her to a doctor in New York to be fitted for a diaphragm, so that she didn’t have to worry about that. He had bought her the red dress, as promised, on the same trip to New York. The red dress hung in Teddy’s wardrobe. There would come a time when she would wear it.

Teddy did everything perfectly, but she had little affection for him and certainly didn’t love him. His body was flimsy and unprepossessing; only when he was dressed in his elegant clothes could he be considered in any way attractive. He was a man without enthusiasms, self-indulgent and cynical, a confessed failure, friendless and shunted off by a mighty family to a crumbling shipwreck of a Victorian castle in which most of the rooms were permanently closed off. An empty man in a half-empty house. It was easy to understand why the beautiful woman whose photograph still stood on the piano downstairs had divorced him and run away with another man.

He was not a lovable or admirable man, but he had other uses. Having renounced the ordinary activities of the men of his class, work, war, games, friendship, he dedicated himself to one thing: he copulated with all his hoarded force and cunning. He demanded nothing of her except to be there, the material of his craft. His triumph was in his own performance. The battles he had declined elsewhere, he won in the face below his on the pillow. The fanfares of victory were her sighs of pleasure. For her part, Gretchen was not concerned with Boylan’s profits and losses. She lay passively under him, not even putting her arms around the unimportant body, accepting, accepting. He was anonymous, nobody, the male principle, an abstract, unconnected priapus, for which she had been waiting, unknowing, all her life. He was a servant to her pleasures, holding a door open to a palace of marvels.

She was not even grateful.

The eight hundred dollars lay folded into the leaves of her copy of the works of Shakespeare, between Acts II and III of As You Like It.

A clock chimed somewhere and his voice floated into the room from downstairs. “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”

“Up here,” she called. Her voice was lower, huskier. She was conscious of new, subtler tonalities in it; if her mother’s ear for such things had not been deafened by her own disaster, she would have known with one sentence that her daughter was sunnily sailing that dangerous sea in which she herself had foundered and drowned.

Boylan came into the room, naked in the firelight, bearing the two glasses. Gretchen propped herself up and took the glass from his hand. He sat on the edge of the bed, flicking ashes from his cigarette into the ash tray on the bed table.

They drank. She was developing a liking for Scotch. He leaned over and kissed her breast. “I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it,” he said. He kissed the other breast. She took another sip from her glass.

“I don’t have you,” he said. “I don’t have you. There’s only one time when I can make myself believe I have you—when I’m in you and you’re coming. All the rest of the time, even when you’re lying right beside me naked and I have my hand on you, you’ve escaped. Do I have you?”

“No,” she said.

“Christ,” he said. “Nineteen years old. What are you going to be like at thirty?”

She smiled. He would be forgotten by that year. Perhaps before. Much before.

“What were you thinking about up here while I was down getting the drinks?” he asked.

“Fornication,” she-said.

“Do you have to talk like that?” His own language was strangely prissy, some hangover fear of a domineering nanny quick with the kitchen soap to wash out the mouths of little boys who used naughty words.

“I never talked like that until I met you.” She took a satisfying gulp of whiskey.

“I don’t talk like that,” he said.

“You’re a hypocrite,” she said. “What I can do, I can name.”

“You don’t do so damn much,” he said, stung.

“I’m a poor little, inexperienced, small-town girl,” she said. “If the nice man in the Buick hadn’t come along that day and got me drunk and taken advantage, I probably would have lived and died a withered, dried-up old maid.”

“I bet,” he said. “You’d have been down there with those two niggers.”

She smiled ambiguously. “We’ll never know, now, will we?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “You could stand some education,” he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette, as though he had come to a decision. “Excuse me.” He stood up. “I have to make a telephone call.” He put on a robe this time and went downstairs.