Barbara Girl

Barbara-Girl Jones, who disliked the name Barbara-Girl, believed that to be called by her right name would be a great good, but it seemed to be a good which would follow only from circumstances and a state of being. Therefore she frequently put up with the name Barbara-Girl, biding her time until she could enforce her real name upon the turbulent making, unmaking and remaking universe of Manhattan. She studied, watched, waited and bided her time. She had learned to smile and she had learned to listen attentively and she was gracious by nature, and so she had merits to compensate for her secret judgments of herself. For she gave herself only a B- in Conduct of Life.

Visited late on one of those smoky afternoons of autumn in Greenwich Village, Barbara-Girl might be found curled up on the hooked rug in front of her fireplace on Perry Street, noodling gracefully through a seed catalog. There was a shelf of books about "Method" and other methods to study acting; there were several rows of art books; there was half a shelf devoted to dancing, both ballet and modern, and a history of mime, pronounced "meem"; there were many shelves of novels and poems and outsize gift books of all species and tastes, geological layers representing the jellied boys and crustacean men with whom Barbara had bided her time. Amid all this hulla-baloo of Manhattan cultivation, books, records, wire sculpture, ink sketches, arts and crafts and courses for adults, Barbara was trying to choose among varieties of parsnips, turnips and hybrid tomatoes for the sharecroppers of her farm in the highlands of Virginia. Cute Barbara. There were also an appointment book and a telephone with a black coiled slither of cord and a neat pile of hairpins in an ashtray as she leaned upon the tufts of rug before a small, expertly kindled fire. Self-sufficient Barbara, sweet Barbara. Her grand-mother (now dead) had hooked the rug; herself (not yet fully committed) had built the fire. Outside, in the courtyard off Ferry Street, there was an ailanthus, the tree of heaven, surviving expertly on earth. Inside, as she governed over her life, biding her time, Barbara wore white cluck pants, stained with ink (she drew), and a silk blouse (she was careless but elegant). Excellent Barbara had a gay, pouting, bright, squirrelly, little-girl face, a big girl's trained and generous body, exceptionally long-waisted, and a shrewd, sad head. Her mouth wore little notched turndowns at the corners. She was deprived though there had been plenty of men to discover her by telephone, by talk, by importunate request and shy courtship; they had made their way through the courtyard of white-painted brick and peeked at the neighbor's Dufy prints and plastic children's mobiles; and chief among these men was Peter Hatton, her deep clever odd wry stockbroker pal.

She knew that he had something important to say to her, she even suspected what it was, but she felt in no hurry to hear it this time. She tried to think only of parsnips growing upside down with their heads snugly in the earth; she concentrated on resistance against weevils and worms. "Whyever." Peter was asking as he strolled smiling into her room, sniffing woodsmoke like a shy animal downwind of the fire, "whyever do you spend your Saturday afternoon with a seed catalog, hey Bee Gee?"

"Because." And she blushed. She took a small income from the hillside in Virginia which was being sharecropped in garden vegetables for her; tomatoes, parsnips, crisp dusky green beans, abrupt radishes, not mere corn, tobacco, or cotton; cabfare it meant, and silk blouses, and ladylike indulgences; she had also given Peter a set of hand-carved French juggler's toys for his birthday, beautifully tooled, balanced, hand-rubbed, polished, ready for (light; and when she visited back home, she strolled in the fields, commented on the changing weather, and bit happily, like a proprietor, into a sun-hot spurting tomato. Somehow it seemed tactless to discuss her income while living among artists and esthetic stockbrokers, and so she said to Peter's question, "Because."

"I know," said Peter, who also knew what her income came to. Not enough to make any important difference if you are looking for money, just a small grace note. "Say, Barbara-Girl, that chimney doesn't draw so good, does it? Let me tell you something: smoke, hey girl? Maybe you ought to move into Washington Square Village."

"The kindling was damp, Peter, Sit down."

But he had already sat, stretching toward the fire his long legs in their fine narrow Italian corduroy. "I know I'm early. Let me read--hm--look at the pictures while you take care of business." And he removed her senior-class yearbook from between a volume of Gurdjieff and a paperback edition of Edmund Wilson's critical essays. Bad news; Peter brought bad news tonight. "Hollins College," he said, "let me tell you something, I never knew a girl graduated from Hollins College before."

"Near Roanoke."

"I knew a girl near Roanoke once, she came from there, but I never knew Hollins College. Funny."

"All right," said Barbara-Girl, mimicking him, "let me tell you something. You tease me while I finish with the seeds."

A short amused hum as if he had some private pun in mind, too weak to share but pleasant enough for his own use. "Then we'll talk," he said, "later. I take a certain pleasure in just enjoying you, girl." And he lit a cigarillo and lay patiently toasting near the fire, easy as he liked to be, watching her touch a pencil to her tongue and make her decisions. No corn at all this year. No more tobacco ever -- soil tired. New nitrogen fertilizers, then a diverse crop of eatin' vegetables. Lazily Peter blinked in a flickering ray of sunlight while late afternoon strollers outside, dressed for country, marked off another autumn Saturday in Greenwich Village, grateful for crooked streets, sunny stoops and Village ease. He heard a drunken stumble in the hall and went grinning to look, because he was always curious about instances of loss of control; it was only a painter managing an enormous limp canvas around a bend of the stairway. Peter watched, making his little hum of judgment, and then returned. "Like unborn foam rubber," he said, "mewls and squirms." Barbara did not answer, though she was supposed to ask him what he was muttering about; she wet the pencil with her tongue and marked some margins. He returned to sigh upon beautiful Barbara-Girl because there was something rather sad to tell her. Rather sad, yes sad, always sad. But how ever could he speak while she took notes in a seed catalog? He tried to drowse, his legs twitching, wanting to be up and galloping through the Village, filled with juice and wishing to be away. He was learning to juggle better and better; an easy rhythm is the goal; he practiced with oranges. An old vaudeville juggler who now ran the elevator where he lived said he had talent. He preferred to use oranges, which seemed closer to nature, rather than the slick tumblers given him by Barbara-Girl for his birthday. Mildly he smoked and considered the layers of paper quilting the walls. Beyond, in the next apartment, a bottle fell. He decided it was the janitor, who wore war surplus khaki undershirts and had once showed Peter his Purple Heart. Peter, who had been decorated for heroic rashness, had said, "Man! Wow!"

"You kidding me? I got a 18-percent disability."

"Don't let 'em take it away from you, the bastards," Peter had said.

He dozed, smiling.

The telephone rang, it softly buzzed, and Barbara was saying, "No, no, I'm busy. No. But thank you, Larry." And then she was back, closing the seed catalog, fallen quietly beside Peter on the door, gazing into his face as he opened his eyes from his dream of evasion, juggling himself in perfect liberty out on Washington Square in the brilliant October sun. "Ahoy, Peter," she said, her small face calmed, quiescent, ready for fret.

"Something to tell you!" he cried out, as if caught in his thought by her troubled eyes.

She bent to kiss him on the lips, very softly and murmurously, as they settled onto the familiar rug by the fire. "What is it?"

"Later," he said, "let me tell you something later," and sighed, and flipped over to grasp her and pull her down upon him.

"What?"

"Just a sec."

His gestures were short with her, his heart was absent, much as always. What he had to tell her could wait a few minutes. First they would make love, easing this fine autumn afternoon down toward chilly evening, with the warmth of the fire causing a spattering excitement to fall like rain upon them as they lay together on the rug. She got up abruptly, moved swiftly; then the fire was their only light and she was clasping him . . . She smiled, her wetted teeth allowed a glitter of light and pleasure, a gentle smile, her eyes going out of focus hilariously, gravely, then squeezed shut: welcome, welcome, welcome! Her smile full of welcome took him into it until it seemed to belong to them both together, all through their tolling bodies.

He almost forgot the message he was bringing her.

But when they uncoiled and lay together spread out by the fire, he remembered it afresh at once. He shook his head reproachfully. "Ah Bee Gee, Bee Gee."

"What is it?" She turned her head to the fire. She knew.

"It's all --"

"I feel cold, Peter."

"It's over between us," he said. He (continued on page 128)Barbara Girl(continued from page 76) apologized for the cliché and for the accident of the afternoon. He had meant only to tell her and to have a cup of tea on their friendship, to try to explain, and of course he couldn't explain his peculiar ways to anyone, his point of view about things, but . . . She had done nothing wrong. There was not even another girl, though true, there probably would be. It was just his nature. He had the itch to move on, he was not sure, he was fatigued, he was Peter Hatton and that's the way it was. He continually asked the question: Why can't I have the most beautiful girl, the most loving one? A very beautiful girl, a very loving one was not enough. He wanted more. He gritted his teeth because he could not juggle five oranges, but he could not juggle four either, and not three very well. This was true, too. He wished to find the something more in life that could satisfy him, and pleasure did not satisfy, love did not: there was something more. He would find it, or until he found it, he would remain a young man looking, handsome and making out if not best and most tender. That was true, too. He would remain a young man for a while.

"Why don't you say something?" he asked, and while he waited, he quickly dressed. "I'm mobile and evasive -- way I am, Bee Gee," he said, trying to grin and get his shoes on fast. "There are three things in a girl that scare me off -- possessiveness and I forget the other two." He waited, but she said nothing. "I don't mean you were possessive, kid, I just mean how I see it. I'm peculiar. Evasive. It's the juggler in me, wanting to take off, you know? The girl I liked best was married -- she left me lots of room. You see?" Speed and garrulousness were the big advantages against a Scene, he had decided. "I'll tell you something. Bee Gee. You can't beat nature. But listen: I'm sorry. You're a sweet girl, probably the sweetest. You were awfully sweet to me."

She sat cross-legged in the light of the dying fire, wearing nothing, ripe, naked and hanging, making no move to hide her nakedness. She watched him dress. She handed him his tie. In their twisting on the floor they had torn the cover of her seed catalog. Someone had kicked it. someone who lacked control. She put it together with solemn care.

"I'm sorry, Barbara-Girl. I am. Honest. Please say something. Aren't you cold? Wouldn't you like me to get you a robe?"

Her voice was very calm, very quiet. "Perhaps I knew. I think I knew," she said at last, "but I didn't," She sat unmoving. her shoulders glowing in the firelight, her face in darkness. "I certainly should have known, but why didn't I?"

Peter stood by. It was difficult, he wanted to go. but courtesy demanded that he wait till she dismissed him. He believed in common decency between people. She should say something mean and cutting, she should hurry; and then at last he could go.

"Why don't people understand about you. Peter?"

He knew how to amuse the air with that question; it bemused him, too, as it flashed overhead every day of his life: but he did not know how to answer it. He shrugged.

"I'm cold." she said.

Peter got her robe and tucked it around her. She was squatting by the fire like an Indian mourner in a story. He put his hands very intimately upon her. tucking the robe between her legs and over her breasts, because he didn't want her to catch cold, too. in addition to losing a lover. She did not move or resist, but when she turned her face to him, he found it running with tears. Her breathing remained steady -- only the tears flowing through some deep breach in her control. There were no sobs, and Peter thought, She should shiver, do her good, psyche her up a little; and to bring her out in the open, grinned, winked and said. "There's no one like you, Bee Gee. Don't move into a Project -- stay in this place. Let me tell you something: it suits you."

"Get out of here." she said.

"I'm trying to tell you I'm sorry. I know I'm not good at it. I'm terrible at it. But I'm sorry. Barbara-Girl."

"Go. Go. Just go."

At last he was dismissed, free as he wanted to be: unencumbered: back to his juggling. He hated the weight of brooding and expectation on his back: he disliked a fireplace that didn't draw: he pitied a girl who sat heavy and naked, without shame in her sorrow.

How easy it came to Barbara to flow into small spinster ways. She painted a little, she read, she took great care with her job as designer of a department store fashion window. She walked barefoot behind glass, directing the barefoot boys as they draped silk and tweed over crippled, cream-colored mannequins. She could be seen through glass from the busy street, silent, finger to lips, thinking: or head turned, thinking: or hand on shoulder of assistant, resting and considering a sprig of plastic fern, a paper flower. Silently behind glass she arranged the pretty mannequins in their pretty world, a style for each season, a fashion for each resort, a nest of crumpled travel posters at the plastic feet. She watched the boys doing what she told them to do and thought, Even the word mannequin originally meant a kind of boy. And took comfort in the company of barefoot boys and plastic dummies.

Her salary paid certain expenses, her income paid certain others, and as to the rest of what she sought for her few years on earth, her needs were not great. How small-small I have reduced myself! she decided, smiling as she passed the Chinese laundry on Bedford Street, doing little chores, just strolling. She believed that it is a man's duty to lead. Peter had led her into these small-small demands on life; he had prepared her to live alone, not by fortifying her with love but by sapping her trust in others. Poor small-small Peter, she thought, smalled straight into the crevices. Trusts only, merely, minutely himself. No matter how he diminishes what he takes and gives, it still comes to be too much for him.

She decided that she understood Peter. She satisfied herself even about the odd violences of his lovemaking, black silences with abrupt frantic appeals, wedges of strain on his face and, worse, glimpses of horror -- he's not simple. And yet he had been nice, considerate, pleasant through the lounging hours, and had cared to his limit for the limit of his time. When he called her Barbara-Girl, it was because he liked her. He was one of those shipside voyagers who adopt the dulled tourist, make a trip complete: they grasp for dear life at strangers, and in return, give a furious display of agility and light, leaving the most vivid memory of touching imaginable--but they turn away almost before the bells on the buoys have receded in the fog. They are most vivid in attendance, they leave an ache of vividness after, but the wanderer is made for wandering. No return voyage. Adieu, she thought, it's never goodbye.

And so she was in no hurry to be found by the next man. who might also be both vivid and a voyager, how to tell? The telephone buzzed, but she did not run. Sometimes she watched it buzz, and she barely moved, humming with the music from an FM station which kept her company in her silence, while she waited patiently for the telephone to stop, please, and then went, on with her book. She was taking a reading course in French. She liked Gide, Stendhal and Baudelaire, but Camus seemed too stylishly abstract. She had her own ideas about things. "Small-small ideas." she once said, "but mine." And she was given credit for being an Original, an unanxious 29-year-old girl who had made a nest for herself in Greenwich Village, without caring about any of the fashions, those that said to be married, to be beat, to travel, to get rich, to go to an analyst, to take overdoses. She just settled into her nest, enjoyed her health, did her pretty job, and let time span her. She knew very well the dangers of the love me look, how it makes men run: and she found fair humor in the fact that the chaps who most ran from the responsibility (continued on page 132)Barbara Girl(continued from page 128) of a woman's weight had, beneath their sharp chatter and brutal testing of the wind, their own look in the eye, that love-me-anyhow look. Juggling Peter had it. Thousands of the anxious jostlers of anxious Manhattan had it. Sometimes she spied it from her store window as she put tweed over the chill flesh of a doll. It admired her from the street, but gazed with wistful longing at the mannequins in their stiff, submissive, plastic waiting.

The months flowed past in this pleasant, easy, spinsterish fashion. She spent a weekend in the hospital, having a cyst removed. She had time for everything. She thought of taking guitar lessons. She decided to wait till she needed a change. She met visitors, friends of friends, and saw all the plays. She rather liked being the extra girl. She was put on expense accounts and shook hands goodnight and learned to wriggle out of the irate grip of men bursting in their clothes. She had a jolly way of listening. she was an Original: they were not irate long, they were frequently even relieved: often it was mere pride which made them push the girls of New York into bed. They had to get up early. They had breakfast conferences at the Henry Hudson hotel. It was nice to be given credit for vigor by a clever, friendly girl, but have to prove nothing. The physical change in her own life, the absence of a man in her bed. the smell of him and the grain of his body, was less difficult than she had imagined when she imagined herself in love with Peter. Had he aroused her much less than she, in her own pride had imagined? Perhaps: face that thought another time. Put lust and pride away: try comfort awhile. Now that she cared very little about him. was not even hurt in her pride, she found that she liked her breakfasts alone, her evenings free, her hours after work to do as she chose. New York was a pleasant blue and chocolate, alcohol and foaming town to go floating upon. Her own way. Her own lazy choices. She was in no hurry for anything different.

This news she broke as kindly as possible to the gropers, the hurt lads, the prideful list-keepers, and the big spenders from out of town. She had heard all the false reports about love that she needed for a while. She was in no hurry to repeat the news. She liked falling asleep alone to the music of WNYC-FM. "New York City's Own Radio." and waking up for a high-protein breakfast. Then to the store for a look at some swatches of cloth and fashion cutouts. It was like playing with dolls all over again.

Occasionally, with sadness, wonder, pity and the sum of it only a slight twinge which engaged her lower heart, her lower angers and appetites, she thought of Peter. Oh, Peter. But he was doing OK. and that was the news of him from the occasional friend who said. "Peter--you still interested in Peter?"

"Yes, why not? Tell me."

"Nothing much to tell."

"Interested."

"Well, making out. They say he got a big new account, another widow, and . . ."

"Peter has the wash all hung out." Barbara said, interrupting, and then she sighed. Poor Peter, who called her Barbara-Girl. But that was all. She wanted to hear no more, She could see him now as clearly as if she had invented his posture and costume in honor of the new season, though the meaning of his abstracted life on earth was as unclear as if she had made some terrible mistake in putting him together for the window. He was sad on Christmas and Thanksgiving because he had no wife, no steady hearth of affection, but not on Halloween of New Year's Eve. when there was usually a great party, a great chick. He learned to deal with the sadness by sleeping, by strolling, by movies, by juggling oranges, by crawling into the crowd of Broadway or Times Square: he learned not to try to cope with it by gambling or drinking, which left him sick. depressed and available to grippe. He learned to control the joys of holiday parties by taking a firm hold on the girl and telling her how to go with him. when, up to what point, and leaving why to her anxious imagination. (She was always finally wrong.) "It's over between us. honey. I'm sorry. I am." And then he took his position behind glass. silent and perfect.

Barbara felt that she understood him because in a way she was like him. but of course without the screwy male jumping from girl to girl. She was a girl and modest, she was a girl and careful of herself. But like Peter, making it. making out. dealing with files, reports and widows from his office. juggling away the evenings, she wanted to manage her life and make perfect decisions for herself. She, too, juggled, though without oranges flashing through the air. So that while Peter managed love by hygienic wenching, she managed very simply by giving it up. Perhaps it was not that Peter had been a great love, perhaps merely a great lesson to her. But he had touched her. though it was behind glass, like a barefoot boy in her display window. Yes. As a brother perhaps, but deeply. As a perverse brother.

For a long time she could imagine the arms of no one else about her. Peter was jumping like a rooster now. but if he grew weary of this form of chicken pox and decided to come back to her (classic formulation of the spinster's lonely dream), she would not have him. She would not punish him. No mean reversals. He would say. "Let me tell you something. Bee Gee." and she would just say no. She knew that Peter, clever Peter, would understand -- and also that he would not return blushing, eyes downcast, like the abashed knight in the dream. That was stale fantasy, an insomniac indulgence. when the clock roared its ticking in the black hour just before dawn. After she indulged it and tried to tame the clock, she was praised a few hours later for a new idea in displaying Caribbean spring fashions. gay prints with purple velvet ribbon and le chie français (Irish lace). One of the boys who worked her windows had a shrewd, sympathetic, sisterly insight and said. "Let's exchange telephone privileges. Barb. Either one of us has the agonies, she can call the other at any hour and talk it over. Sometimes it's nicer on the telephone. I don't mind being awakened unless I took a Seconal. Deal?" Barbara thanked him from the bottom of her heart, but abstractly. She did not know how to tell him her story. She did not want the bad news about his sailors at the thinking hour when she was telling herself her story.

He looked hurt. His ladyish mouth turned girlish. Barbara to the rescue.

"I don't mind sitting up awake." she said. "I solve the world's problems, Last night I got Red China into the United Nations without losing face for America. I designed a costume radiation detector you can wear with almost anything. And last week I wiped out segregation throughout the South over a cup of Sanka, with sugar and cream, that way there's no depression. But you're awfully sweet, Ronnie -- you can dial Barbara if it's a bad time for you. honest. I mean it."

Ronnie was hurt but brave. It was she he had been thinking of. Later he described Barbara as "a tough broad -- like nails." He liked her despite what he said to his special friend; but how else to talk to his special friend?

When Peter finally paid his call on her, it turned out that he had another classic formula in mind: Introduce Lonely Pal to Prize Chick. She felt both courtesy and courage flag. Peter not only gave her up, he wanted to pass her on! Shame made her lean against the door: pretty-pretty flush on her cheeks. Smiling and gabbing, he was presenting his old friend, his lifelong buddy, fine fellow, let me tell you something. Dan Shaper. just returned from a marital war in the Midwest and a wounded veteran of civil strife.

"How do you do?" Barbara said, but wanted to cry. She bent to take the telephone from the floor to its shelf: she straightened a row of fallen books: she glanced with hectic eyes into the mirror and wet the corners of her mouth with her tongue. No, meet it, meet it. For a moment her eyes shamefully met Peter's, and then finally she noticed the nice eyes of Dan Shaper, nice yellow-brown worried eyes, slightly frazzled. He understood that she was in trouble, though he did not know why and he was sorry if he had interrupted either the trouble or the working out of it. He was willing to leave at once if she wanted him to. All that was in the flecks of his eyes and his solemn little bow. The blue vein on the back of one of his hands throbbed, but she did not interpret it. "Please stay," said Barbara. "I'll make coffee. Look -- my new machine! Italian! Or you'd rather have a drink?"

"Where are your seed catalogs?" Peter boomed out with his false social heartiness, his voice even louder than the tick of her clock at the hour of desolation. "I promised Dan the seed catalogs. She has a farm." he said, repeating for his audience of two what he had already said to each one alone. "Barbara-Girl is an exploiter of the peasants, she's an absentee landlord, she's mistress of her own estate. And that's Green-witch Village, let me tell you, boy."

Outside, there was a dreamy false spring after the long winter cure; and inside here was Peter again, now presenting his friend. He had described her to Dan without stint, complete, whimsical, honest in his fashion. He believed that friendship demanded that everything be sent smoothly flying into the air, Manhattan chicks were all a juggler's dummies to be hand-rubbed and deployed skyward, they twisted and twirled, they whirled so nicely; but no kidding about the kidding; it's serious business, like those funny little electronics companies on the Coast.

"Oh yeah, after possessiveness I do hate a smoky chimney and a lot of moles on the back. And also a Ph.D. in physics who blabs about the military business in automated data control systems he ain't really got firmed up. But take Bee Gee; she got a nice clean back," he had said, "firm little rump, dance lessons, you know? Neat. Only a kind of cyst right there at the base of her spine -- like a little steering knob, fella. You remember the necker's knob on your high school jalopy?"

"What an idea," Dan had said.

"Aw, it's not big, it's sort of funny. Use it with one finger for automated steering. She's really sweet, tops, I mean it, keed."

Peter was nervous. When he was nervous, he folded his remarks like Japanese flowers and let them bloom in jabber. Then later he could turn as dry as paper. As Barbara made the coffee, rattling cups, measuring deliberate and careful, she well understood what Peter was doing, had done. How free of him? So free: she could ignore him and his projects. Let him feel guilty, let him go scheming and riding his nerves. She would not be passed on. She could make her own decision about Dan Shaper without Peter, without reacting either against or for him because of Peter. Dan was just a young man who had somehow found his way into her closed circle. He was just another edgy Dick Whittington come to make out in Manhattan. She could choose or not choose, as she chose. The team carried more than one expert juggler.

Thus she turned back upon them with her soft Southern smile and her cool, intelligent, gray-green eyes: she had a tray with coffee, cookies, cream and sugar -- not Pream, not instant coffee, not sugarless sugar; she knew she walked well and both men were admiring her. In charge, just slightly livened by the presence of Peter, her cheeks scraped red from within by the idea of him, she made them make her laugh, she even accepted their impromptu invitation to dinner. "The two of you? I'll be impossible," she said.

"You'll be possible," said Peter, "just improbable."

"I declare." But she gazed calmly at him, waiting for him to bow away. She knew that he had already received the signal from his friend Dan that, yes, right about this girl: great. She had given them her back several times so that they could communicate by the telebachelor nod. Peter scowled. How boyish of him. How truly boyish. He would live up to the bargain, but all at once regretfully.

Barbara and Dan went alone to Chumley's on Bedford Street because they both liked the feel of the place. Its aura of a pub in the Auld Village, the encrusted door and the creaking little ramp of stairs, a nesting warmth against the winter chill, was more important than the kitchen. Who needed food? You can eat every day. A meeting like this takes place only once, only once . . . "Only once in a lifetime," Dan Shaper recited stalwartly, blushing. "I can't help it. I mean it." And they studied the ancient book jackets lining the wall, stained by years of smoking and frying. The waiter was Chinese. They both ordered English grill and ate only the sausage. The waiter, a chess player, understood.

They took dinner together again the next night, and the next night, and the one after. They obeyed a curious set of rules developed for their special ease. First of all, they did not ransack Peter. Also they did not deal with each other in anything but delicate, seemly, innocently foolish fashion: Dan gripped her hand only to shake it goodnight, like a chivalrous and shy Manhattan knight, a fierce suffragette's gentle cavalier. Then at last they talked about Peter, as if this friend to both of them, friend in very different ways, were a problem to be solved by great patience together. "Let him tell us something," Dan said. They measured each other across linen and tried to force entry of their friend Peter's life. What did he do with himself besides juggle oranges, invade girls, stroll streets, make money as a customer's man? (He was now a junior partner in his firm.) They could hear him saying, "Enough, boy. Quite enough, Bee Gee." Yes, enough in a way, but not enough. These pleasures were of the body, but decided by Peter's mind; they had become styles of exploration, a means to random grace, like religion and wearing clothes to those devoted to fashion and a fashionable God. ("That sociology, boy," Peter would say. "I mean, is there anything worser?")

Barbara was no longer smiling as they talked. But Dan was thinking about her teeth, which were white, even and small, and they pleased him. He was discovering that there are friendly and unfriendly teeth and Barbara's were friendly. Her teeth were beautiful, were unangry. He didn't care how he had met her; he knew that Peter's way of touching a girl was not his -- they might as well have been of different sexes. He had taken nothing of what Dan wanted from Barbara.

Yet Barbara and Dan both said, in veiled and discreet ways, that Peter was a dangerous man for the two of them. For Barbara because he called her Barbara-Girl and then hurt her. ("Stop psyching me, Bee Gee.") For Dan because of his handsome, prosperous example of reducing a man's vital decisions toward mere whims about girls (where to kiss and when? how soon to bed and why not now?), about money (wait six months for capital gains, don't churn your account), about pride and the tokens of pride, exploring the nervy city with his nervily merry and predatory eye. He leapt on the town, oh he was a chief of it; both Dan and Barbara were secretly warmed by being his friends, enormously pleased to cluck sadly over the fault in him. It made them seem provident to themselves.

"Curious how he gambles in the market," said Dan. "Why does he need it? He doesn't really care about money."

"And says boy to everyone."

"Even girls."

"That's just what I was going to say," said Barbara. "I declare."

"Read your mind."

And they crossed little fingers like children and made wishes. Neither told the other his wish, but both knew: Love, love me quick, care for me. They continued to strain their feelings through Peter, who had said, "Out of a hundred vital elements, including what the Chinese do, what the Russians do, what the President does or does not do, I can predict -- say -- 7 with certainty and 44 approximately, and that puts me on the right side with 51 percent. Do you think this gives me a profitable advantage on the market?"

"Does it?" Dan asked.

"Enough to make a dollar? Let me tell you something: When you figure in the monstrous and the capricious and the trivial improbables -- hey man?"

"Well, does it?" Dan asked, knowing how Peter liked to keep his control of things.

Peter smiled blandly, without teeth. (So Dan reported, and said to Barbara: "You have nice teeth." And she said: "On with the story.") "No story," said Dan. "He said yes and no. He gambles under control, as he does everything, he juggles and pulls out OK for himself."

"Which is all right in gambling or juggling," said Barbara.

"Which is all right in gambling. In juggling you have to know everything. You have to be perfect, 100 percent. You have to forget about everything else."

Having discussed Peter, they returned to each other through the circuitous route of Manhattan gossip. Jokes about analysis (both brushed by it), jokes about home towns (both touched by them), news of family and connections back there; good news of being both familiar and extraordinary on a special turf. Dan made his living as a writer of come-on letters for a magazine ("Come on and subscribe"), having graduated from whatsamatter letters ("Whatsamatter you didn't renew your subscription, whatsamatter you didn't send your check after you filled out the form?"). His promotion made the matter of child support easier. He put his children between them in a ritual way. "I know you miss them," she said. "I do," he said. "Lands," she said, "you can tell me."

He initiated her into the folklore of the child-support underground. Impoverished divorced fathers call their children long distance, making a nickel do for a quarter in the ears of the long-distance operator as they feed the pay telephones. "One dollar and 25 cents, please," says the operator, and Daddy uses just five nickels, rhythmically pounding the base of the telephone box as each nickel descends to give a deep, melodic, quarter-of-a-dollar tone -- another version of the naked oiled J. Arthur Rank slave and his annunciatory gong. "Highly larcenous and symbolic, yes?" Dan inquired. She smiled dimly. "Well," he said, "it's us or Bell Telephone, it's a revolutionary situation! My group survives by guerrilla warfare in the booths of Grand Central Station." With his recent promotion, he could afford to use quarters for quarters. "Getting bourgeois," he said, "a toughfisted old phoneman like me."

Having discussed, Dan and Barbara fell silent, he took her hand, he looked into her face. Her eyes seemed to have a velvety glow in the dull light of Chumley's on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village that evening. The chess players were playing chess, the thinkers and arguers were thinking and discussing. Barbara's eyes glowed with a deep, velvety patience. And on that night, having discussed Peter and the telephone company, having discussed their home towns and their parents, having made their courting jokes and fallen silent, having put a velvety glow in her eyes and a calm warmth in Dan's heart, they returned to Barbara's apartment; they kissed with great friendliness, they undressed back to back, he admired her, they went to bed together for the first time as if it were the thousandth. In the morning she awakened him with orange juice, and they made love as if it were the first time. "I'm afraid," she said.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "I'm afraid, too, but don't let's be."

• • •

"Would you like me to bath you?"

"What me?"

"Bathe you, darling, with an e."

Dan and Barbara sprang into pleasure like animals born to it, but long deprived. At the start too wounded by their history to be passionate, they relived the course of adult lust, beginning with abrupt embraces and desperate possessions, then finding their way like fortunate jungle explorers into a sunny, confident luxuriance. The first time Barbara suggested bathing Dan, he even thought maybe he was dirty: laughter erupted from her thrown-back head, "I'll tell you, I'll tell you! I'll tell you that if it occurs to me!" Then he thought she wanted to baby him, and let her, because why not? But it was not maternal babying that she wanted. Exotic flowers lay buried under the cool pine of her Southern Baptist heart; she pulled and stroked and let the suds and steam rise about them; but being American, she gave up the service all at once, impulsive and frantic, and simply flopped into the tub with him. And they embraced in hot perfumed water, her lips biting into his shoulder and slippery desire opening like a Japanese flower within her. They climbed out, they dried each other carefully: they lay down together at a steep angle, pensive, floating on nighttime seas, quiet and ceremonious in soft communication, letting time settle like water about them, until she whispered to him, through him, with a curious formality, "You have all my permission"; and then the seas swept over them with a tidal flow and they breathed as one breath together in the deep.

Later.

Later she told him that for a while she had felt safe, closed and slick against the world, like one of the mannequins in her store windows. Now no longer safe; unsealed.

He said it was better not to be scaled tight, better not to be safe.

She listened to him and lay still.

Later she told him about the dirt paths across her father's farm where she grew up in Virginia, and how she wept when her first mount died --

"You had a pony?"

"A horse."

And how her father, a peculiar country scholar, spent most of his energy compiling a history of the combats between Spads and Fokkers in the war of 1914--1918.

"Fairly odd."

"Yes, but what was fairly oddest is he didn't work on the Civil War, let's say the Confederate Navy. You want your back rubbed?"

"Just right here a little. Yes."

Leaning back and forth on him while he stretched, sighed, closed his eyes, she said, "Pa flew one of those Spads. Lucky for him. He's so shy he couldn't pronounce the other plane."

Dan lay beneath her hands, saying, "It's so nice because."

"In 25 words or less."

"Yes."

And she gave it up to roll onto his back, lying there with her heart thumping and just wiggling her rump once or twice for the sake of sweet friendship. They talked: she tried to explain about Manhattan to Dan -- all the immigrants from far countries are constantly telling each other why. Life on that island was more personal than the combat of Spads and Fokkers, though sometimes in despair in that other kind of war, a pilot might simply circle above and drop a brick onto his enemy's cockpit. "Oh yes!" said Dan. "I read about it on the back of the cereal box when --"

"Listen."

He flipped over and held her head against his shoulder and listened. As they lay cozily like two tucked-together spoons, she tried to tell him about the gasping intensity with which she coled her overheated, longing heart to the required busy immobility of New York. Her mother had died at her birth, and this is very strange: she had been raised by her father and housekeepers and boarding schools, and these are strange. She had come to New York looking for love and motion; in order to get it on Manhattan's terms, she had to refrigerate, stay still. A hot motor grinds up its heat to make the still cold of the deepfreeze. (Peter, they both thought.) She had sat in corners at parties, smiling till the bold ones came up to tease and trick with her: she hoped for the shy ones, but they were merely to be captured -- she was not a capturing woman; she waited. Oh! oh! maybe that one! she had sometimes thought, but lost him in the crowd; perhaps to be predatory was the way? But the predatory bird damages its prey in its beak, and she did not want a damaged man. What other man is there? she had wondered. There must be another kind than the reforming homosexuals, the Don Juans, the worried stylists of Manhattan (continued on page 144)Barbara Girl(continued from page 136) whose faces never age, but their gums retract, their teeth go bad, their chins unravel, and their necks get pouchy or scrawny. Pities and disasters and lurking, disastrous pities.

But Peter takes care of himself, he juggles, they decided again, without speaking of him.

And while talking, no, after falling into a silence between words, that silence which decides whether a man and a woman mean more than service for each other -- that silence which is like the darkness between the stars that gives them their radiance -- the telephone rang and it was Peter. "Hey boy," he said, "you find a girl and you leave off with your pal? Let me tell you something: that how it is? What about dinner tonight?"

"I'm with Barbary."

"I don't know that, boy? Ah declah, I mean you two and me and my lady. Listen, I won't describe, you'll see for yourself." When there was no answer, he added sweetly, "Look, is Bee Gee embarrassed about me? Come on, boy, the past is past, everyone's had lots of baths, we're all nice and clean --" Dan winced while Peter just babbled it over smoothly again: "Talk to me nice, boy."

The word bath made it a challenge. All right. And anyway, if Barbara had been touched by Peter, it had been a mere touch to teach her what she wanted. Sweet chatter, smooth clatter. Who hadn't been searched, cut, bled in this world? Busy Manhattan would wash you down the drain unless you held on to what you know for yourself and let the rest swirl by. The sewers lay boiling beneath the city. Barbara and Dan had heard the music in the conduits, but believed they could listen, sniff, peek and stand free. Peter, they knew, believed he could go strolling in the depths and come back with clean shoes.

This time it was no very complicated joke. It turned out that he merely wanted them to meet his new girl, Freddie. Like all Peter's companions, she had beauty, and hers was that monumental beauty composed of a brazen host of flaws. She felt that Justine was her psychic sister -- she too had been a call-girl. She suffered from a head cold, but regally. Being a prostitute and suffering a runny nose were two equal imperfections. Her large, vague eyes stared and rolled myopically. They looked down a slightly hooked nose with a small sharp droop at the end. The creamy skin under her chin doubled when she laughed, suggesting a sudden softness to her face; but then she remembered and lifted her head to its patrician heights again. Her rich pelt of blue-black hair was streaked with gray. Her mouth, rather small, hid small but perfect teeth -- no imperfection here.

However, she frequently opened her mouth to speak, and here there was plenty of imperfection released toward the sky: "Oh, my dear, my dear sweet. I mean it was a magnificent book, so -- I mean he like understands people, you know, humans -- so magnificent I mean, you know -- groovy." She refused to stand up, knowing that her great courtesan's head lolling, lifting, blessing, requiescat non in pace, was her finest feature. Despite the delicate skin, her wrists were a trifle thick. She wore no precious stones except a pearl choker above the low-cut velvet dress. The night lily blooms without jewels (who's counting those pearls?). No one could take eyes from her, man or woman. Someday a reformed homosexual might marry her, made huge and proud by her groovy past.

"Why did you leave Paris if you liked it so much?" Dan asked her.

"Darling, I was busted," she said. "I got in trouble with one of their finest families over there, darling. Like they thought I was after their son and heir's fortune, but I mean all I wanted was his money, darling." Still searching for the mot juste, she paused a moment. "It was the living end, sweets."

"Hey boy, what do you think?" Peter asked Dan while Freddie spent her hour in the powder room.

"You're kidding."

"Great kid, isn't she?" But his face darkened and was abstract, and over it fell an abrupt stillness, the lines of control running from the flanges of his nose to the corners of his mouth, and both Dan and Barbara grieved for the still person within. They were silent: they gabbed to fill the silence. Freddie left her vacuum behind her. Valiantly they talked. Peter held up his head to stop them. "You're lucky, you two," he said. Then he caught sight of Freddie ambling among the tables, bestowing her smile and her hand, and he arose to meet her, grinning: "Next time you stay away so long, pal, whyn't you at least send a postcard?" And turned to Barbara and Dan with that wanness again: "You want to cut out, you two? Then cut out."

"Are you dismissing us?" Dan asked.

"The check is taken care of, boy. I made some crazy money this week -- toy money, but green, chappie." They held hands like children home in the cab, and then, with tea at midnight in her kitchen, went on touching hands over an enameled table. Poor Peter, they were both thinking, and thinking how impossible for anyone to be his friend, how impossible for them to stop hoping for him. After his juggling, he loved best walking down Broadway on the Upper West Side, just strolling, or wandering down Fourth Avenue among the used book shops, interested in the kingdoms of France and England, the lives of the courtiers; he was fond, clever and quiet; but he appeared in public with a schizophrenic whore, and played all his brasses.

"I'd like to visit your father," Dan said.

"Down there?"

"Let's make a little trip to Virginia. Want to learn how to say 'you-all.'"

"Only when talking to two or more -- that's your first lesson. And you'll have to bone up on airplanes."

"Prehistoric Spads and Fokkers."

"You-all remember!"

"How could I forget? I'll buy balsa models and study good."

She folded her hands and her eyes filled. She remembered the ache in her eyes of insomnia, but she had not felt this bite since meeting Dan, and now, as the tears soothed her, it was as if she had simply stretched herself into sweet ease, warmth and sleep.

"Why? Why do you want to see that corner of the world? Why do you want to go with me, Dan?"

They sat together in her tiny kitchen and of course he did not answer. They both knew why. The trip to Virginia was a flight from Peter's disintegrating shadow. It was an answer to jokes and probes, to partying and making-out Manhattan, the dream of evasion and its steady attrition: it was a validation. That night they did not make love. They just decided to travel the entire way together. Finally Dan said: "Love. We think we're terrific. The flower sees the sun and says. 'I'll reach it.' Well, it doesn't, but it grows."

Poor Peter, they both thought. Fortunate, happy, groovy Dan and Barbara.

• • •

They considered driving down to Virginia, making a slow sea change from Manhattan southward, learning the country and each other at the same time. Dan wanted to stop at a beach on the Atlantic shore, perhaps in Delaware, and watch the skinny sandpipers work at their continual bug-mining in the sand; he wanted to eat shellfish in a seaside restaurant; he saw the two of them holding hands on a hillside over the ocean. But love is not a rotogravure enterprise: they had jobs and obligations; there was a hurry. They flew from an aluminum-and-glass airport at Idle-wild toward the backwoods town with its heavy humid chill in the air, smell of wood fires hanging low over the pine clusters, loiterers in wool shirts and dungarees. The airport took DC-3s in a flat saucer between two rows of hills. They rented a car. The dirt roads which Barbara remembered from her childhood were blacktopped now. Hot rodders went spinning round and round the courthouse square, souped up, coked up, jazzed up, inspired by television tough guys, shouting, "Man! Man!" The old men squatting on the steps in the square blinked, spat and also watched the TV. And discussed the races and taxes and the Nawth. And not whether China should be admitted to the United Nations, but rather, should the United Nations be admitted to the United States? "It's already there!" cackled one geezer. "I read it's already there in Noo Yawk!"

"Aw, I meant the Yew-nited States," said his friend.

A tandem of two cars went screaming and roaring past, mufflers gone. Dan said to Barbara, "This is practically Sixth Avenue. Tell them."

"Shush," she said. "You Yankees come messing down here, y'all go right away thinking."

In the haze and laze of springtime Virginia they found that they thought the same thoughts, made the same jokes, and didn't need to talk much. But Barbara was issue of Wolbrook, and this man was strange to him. He puzzled over finding the daughter in the father. Wolbrook Jones had a library in which he studied and kept files of his correspondence with airplane manufacturers, aviators, libraries and museums. When he wrote, he went into the kitchen and worked with a pencil on a child's yellow ruled pad, inscribing with enormous frowning care his fantasies of heroic gallantry in the air. With spindly shanks and massive forearms, he hunched over the kitchen table like a wheelchair invalid, scribbling through an endless dream of youth and glory. He kept models of the several 1917--1918 Spads and Fokkers hung from the ceiling by string tied to thumbtacks, the struts made of thin wire and no plastic anyplace: good balsa wood and carved bits of twigs. When a storm blew up, and winds shook the house, the toy planes drifted in abstract air. The flies clung fatly for dear life to the ceiling, the planes floated in a deathly element. Wolbrook Jones watched impatiently, wishing reality would find him again. He looked like a trespasser in his own clothes. Bent over the chipped white enamel kitchen table with his tongue wetting a stub of pencil, he struggled with his memory of graceful ease in the air, frets of hair in his ears and nose, distant, horrified by the world, released from it. He reminded Dan of the gaga old men of Bickford's on Upper Broadway, clipping The New York Times and reading their scraps of paper and huffing into their coffee cups.

Barbara read his mind. "Of course I take after my father," she said, "but I'm different. And I was born of a mother, too. Dad is very old, you know. Almost 50 when they got married. We'll all get strange someday, Dan."

The milk was thick and rich, though it was town milk, and Dan let his belt out a notch. They walked in pine woods and through sunny pastures. One evening they all three of them went to the movies to see a Western, which Mr. Jones watched glumly because no hoss can replace a biplane, and afterward they had chop suey sundaes at his urging (diced fruit over vanilla ice cream). "I got good digestion, I been coming to this parlor all the time," he said. "Only one they never remodeled. Ever try a bourbon sundae? Best thing for the gut -- nourishing. Soothing when you got the anxieties, Mr. Shaper, you ought to try that up in New York." Dan made a note to try to find a bar where he could persuade them to pour a jigger of fine bourbon over a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Very little hope of it in Manhattan.

On this evening they went to bed near midnight, but on other nights they discussed awhile (the race problem, politics, wars, airplanes) and then went to bed before nine, in separate rooms. Barbara knew that Dan was thinking when he went up to his room, and thinking about passing the rest of his life with her, but she tried not to worry him. An hour later he would creep barefoot down the hall -- away by dawn. Or sometimes he just stayed in his own room, listening to the country night, and the next day they lay together in a damp field under the searching sun, under the hot sun on parts of their bodies never exposed to sunlight, swelling and greeting the spring weather. As he held her in his arms like a kitten in the sunlight, and she fell asleep on the loose soft loam, little bursts of energy went off in her body, first in her thighs, then in her arms -- a buzz and hop of electricity -- and then in the center; but now it was no longer anxious, undischarged electricity, but a subsiding, sighing, sleepy moving toward him, a sweet relenting of the total mobilization of her life. She slept. He lay awake, holding her, his open eyes focused on the sky against which wisps of cloud silently ran. Then suddenly he slept, too. When he opened his eyes again, the sun sweet and hot on their intertwined sprawl, his first thought was: I love her. He was tasting the wet salt of her shoulder.

"I love you, too," she was saying softly. "Hot. Hot. Hothothothot."

If Wolbrook Jones understood, he said nothing. He seemed not to remember courtship anymore. Some days his legs were good and his wind was bad, sometimes he breathed OK and his legs gave out, but he did not worry his time: he came to focus very closely on chivalry over the Rhineland and let the rest of the world mind itself.

But on their last evening in town, he suddenly asked Dan, "Hm, like to show you my stand of pine tomorrow morning."

Barbara looked at Dan with frightened huge eyes, pleading with him not to be offended if her father made formal requests for information. She understood that Dan believed himself too old to be questioned by a parent, it was out of an Andy Hardy movie, it was from another time. The next morning Wolbrook apologized: he would be busy with mail all day. They finally went walking in the buzzing dusk and Wolbrook said, "Pine grows fast, it does, in this country. But then it ain't good for much either, except for firewood. Which is what we do with it. Burn it." The old man had heavy gray eyebrows which hung in tufts over his eyes, like the fur of some winter animal, and Dan could not see if anything was happening in the eyes. He was saying, "Course, they make paper, too, and send it up North. They chew it up with acid in the vats. But the paper, y'know, ain't no damn good? Rots after a few years, just rots and turns yellow, y'know? All that acid."

"Aw," said Dan, falling into line.

"It does."

And they entered the thin stand of pine with its blue dying glow among the branches. There were spiders in the trees. Below, strips of sunlight lay unraveled on the soft earth. "Some kinds of wood, y'know, they can make skeletons out of?"

"What?"

"Skeletons of planes--framework? Used to. Still find them some places, I bet. Ever see a wooden plane, wooden skeleton, I mean, covered with some kind of stretched skin?"

"No," said Dan, wondering if this were his long way around to a difficult question or demand.

"Guess not. Museums maybe. Want to turn back? I'd like a pot of coffee now, get chilled easy. Used to fly, y'know? Bones chilled up there in an open cockpit, boy." And he turned anxiously to this young man about whom he knew nothing, who was traveling with his daughter, who had come to stay in his house, and he asked, "You think Barbara has sense enough to put the coffee on before we get back?"

The next day Barbara and Dan were returning to Manhattan, strapped into sanitized seats of a DC-3, served plastic pork chops and paper coffee, humming through the never-no-think land of the air. "Poor Dad," said Barbara, "but don't be too hard on him."

"Am I hard on him?"

"Sometimes I'm a little vague myself, y'know, darling."

"Am I hard?"

They held hands and talked about the passing beyond life of those who live overtime. They felt thoughtful and thought maybe this meant they were thinking. Mortality made them sigh. A squall came up, lights flashed, and the airliner bobbed and jerked like a tree being axed to earth. A very fat man whose safety belt barely reached about his sweating middle began to pray in loud wails, and his wife said, "Sha! Everybody's looking!" A young woman spilled coffee on herself and giggled hysterically, "It was just hanging there, coffee without a cup, right in the air!" The stewardess ran up and down the aisle, tugging at seat belts, and then fastened herself in with a fixed gray smile on her face. Dan said, "You OK?"

"OK."

"Let's finish what I was saying. Men used to begin their lives with love and end it with ambition. Now we begin with love and ambition and finish with ambition and love -- no good order to things anymore."

"Do you miss good order?"

"Yes, I do. I do."

Barbara watched the fat man's wife crooning and shushing him in his huge hairy ear. She had given up warning him of disgrace. She was now trying to take care of him. She had a hand on his bloated belly and she stroked him as if he were a baby with colic. Barbara sighed and turned to Dan, who was smiling at her. "I suppose it's harder to get on with things now."

"We're supposed to think about bombs and China and the future -- we keep busy in smaller ways. Airsickness. Income tax. The dream of perfect love. Dreams of freedom."

The airplane hiccuped brutally.

"Would you like to worry about the population explosion? They say we'll be twice as many in the year 2000. People will be sleeping and standing up in shifts. Think of the congestion in the bowling alleys. Your magazine may triple its circulation. A lot of them subscribers! Would you prefer grander worries?"

"You're a tease. Barbara."

"Yes, you would."

As suddenly as it came, the squall disappeared. The pilot droned an unintelligible apology. Because the fat man was outraged by the static on the pilot's microphone, the stewardess repeated the formula speech about occasional inevitable atmospheric disturbances. Also unintelligibly. Another complaint, from the fat man. The stewardess offered to write it out for anyone who could not hear her; her face was still blanched, swollen and airsick, and the trim blue skirt and slender legs seemed to belong to some other girl who had sought adventure and fascinating contacts in a romantic occupation.

Barbara said to Dan that there are some people like her father, who bear risk and even seek it out, and some who merely diminish through life. Different ways of being mortal, different ways of confronting the self. Her father did not consider his soul in splendid isolation, he governed his old age by the actions of praise, ferocity and danger in his history. They were past, past -- that was terrible. He still flew over the Rhineland with the shrill scream of wind in his struts, his eyes in goggles and a leather-helmeted head, peering out of a cockpit buffeted by the stream. He knew who the enemy was. He knew what his chances were and how to improve them. Wolbrook might be thick and slow with age, but he remembered speed and agility and could continue to treasure himself. He would die thinking of life.

Barbara and Dan thought of death and looked into each other's eyes and thought of love. They believed that to be alive must come to mean more than flying a biplane toward a lonely tournament. More than an ascending income graph and a pattern of skill at keeping oranges in the air. More than oil on the waters, more than washing salt from wounds. More. More than dressing pink dummies in a window. More than writing letters that produce seven-percent results on Class A mailing lists. Other matters and more. Barbara and Dan needed to mean enough for each other to give value to their failures and sense to the further intentions of life on earth. Their hearts laden with yearning told them that they had not come to an end in joy. They were at the border of undiscovered country.

• • •

A week after their return from Virginia, Dan for Cleveland to visit his children. Barbara was blue for him, happy for him, and blue for him. She stayed home evenings, turning the pages of a book, listening to music, waiting, astonished at how peacefully conjugal she felt. It was very different from her spinster waiting, like the difference between waiting for the alarm to ring in the morning and waiting for sleep to relieve at midnight; perspectives of the clay rather than the limits of insomnia. Her anxiety that Dan go well with his sons seemed a little fond and foolish to her. A man secure with himself is a man secure with himself. Right, Haha. Could she make a man good, virtuous, strong? Well, that's no job for a woman. But she could do other things. She could make a plastic mannequin look almost humanoid, and if she could practice this art, perhaps she could also help to make a place for Dan alongside her and with himself. He was no longer that perverse creature which a bachelor like Peter became-- his own slick bride. She would fuss over Dan, worry and fret over him, delight him, and now he could face down the roadway toward his children without looking at himself. I should knit. she thought. Such sure decisions, like the designer of a store window. But life is not like that for this down-homey girl, no, not like that.

So that when the telephone rang, she almost expected catastrophe. It was Peter, asking to come up for tea. No, not asking -- demanding. No, not that either -- pleading. "Barbara. Barbara-Girl. Will you help me, Barbara -- will you?" She had two thoughts while she tried to see what to do. When there is so much trouble in the world. Peter, why does your own trouble stand so close to you? All right, that's familiar enough, but why so close to me? While she listened to him, she brushed her hair, which was down now, long and silky, as Peter used to like it, saying that she reminded him of a cartoon witch; and while she brushed her hair, she thought: Loner, you can't stand being alone. And she was saying as she combed this hair, thought these thoughts. "All right, Peter. All right, then. I didn't know you were so fond of tea."

"Hahaha!"

His harsh burst of electronic laughter, following so soon after the imperative yearning and desperation of his words, made her hesitate again. Peter worked out his plans for everything, it seemed, even the decision to despair. His laughter was trying to say that he was still on top, deciding to be unhappy. No, no tea today, she thought; "Peter, I don't want to see you."

But he had hung up and was on his way and she must look as well as possible, put on the mask, defend herself. Peter would make even his trouble magnificently his own, agile, flashing in the air, sly and persuasive as the juggler's risks. She mobilized to face him, and went to her mirror with a vanity imposed upon her from outside; she peered anxiously into it as she blackened her eyelashes, not for pleasure or beauty but to keep her eyes private; she put on a mask of makeup to keep Peter at his distance, and then she addressed an envelope. It was to Dan. She would write him all about it after Peter left. She left the envelope leaning against the mirror, the address where he stayed in Cleveland aslant in reverse reflection, alongside the pots, tubes, bottles, brushes, creams and lotions shining like stars about it. And the gifts of perfume from Peter and Dan and that vague Terry before Peter. And the little soaps and toy animals and all the accreted souvenirs of a pretty girl floating on dreamy, groovy Manhattan. She sighed and rubbed her knuckles across her teeth. Hard work ahead. Peter on his way.

Nevertheless, as the buzzer sounded. she let him stand and sound on while she went to the window to catch one glimpse of her courtyard out-of-doors before she admitted him. A sparrow, eating crumbs on the windowsill, looked up at her with beady reproach. It took its ragged winter feathers away when she rapped. The sound of buses backfiring did not ruffle it, but the flicker through glass of a woman, watching and thinking, rent it from its small pecking. She wanted only to be friendly; it shot straight up into the sky without a sound. Then she answered the door.

She looked at him and gasped: "Your hair!"

"It's turned white," he said simply.

Then she began to laugh. "Oh, Peter, it's melting."

The cowl of snow disappeared as he shook his head. "I walked. Fresh snow, This time of the spring -- another surprise. Barbara-Girl! Let me tell you something: feels good." His cheeks were pink and his angry, overjoyed step filled the little apartment. This bore no relation to the desperation of his voice on the telephone, but the voice still had its grating edge and the eyes were cold and fixed. If he was in trouble, most of his armored body still kept its hard integrity. But he was in trouble.

"Peter, what's the matter?"

"I've been practicing my juggling." he said. "You know? That's why I have to rent a high-ceilinged apartment? You remember that ceiling?" And his shrill laughter filled the room. "Well, I used to be able to do four balls, going on five. Now I can only do three, going on four. Something's happened to me. A change." His mouth broke in a fixed deathly grimace, the teeth showing, and Barbara was astonished at this first sign of age in him. His teeth seemed lengthened, he was having gum trouble, the teeth were marked at the narrowing roots by tobacco stains. Then his mouth was opening and shutting and there was that terrible laughter again. "I've lost the touch." he said. "I'm going downhill, I haven't got it anymore. I'm ready to die."

"Peter!" she said angrily. "Stop that silly giggling!"

Abruptly he sat down and was silent looking at his shoes. "You're right," he then said. "That's one reason I thought of you -- you talk sense. I shouldn't giggle." When he turned his face to her again he was smiling, sleek, confident and stilled. "I'm no maniac. I'm sorry I upset you -- jittery."

"What's the matter, Peter?"

"Nothing. You have to expect it. Things go all wrong. The center does not hold. I function, but it's all dead. I am no longer among the living."

"You're what?"

"It disturbs me, you know, Bee Gee?" He sat very straight and purposeful, still smiling, and said. "I've got no one but myself, but that is nothing at all. Let me put it your way, perhaps: I am having a nervous breakdown. No, wait. Listen. No hallucinations, no delusions of persecution, no loss of major control. Orifices, outlets and valves in A Number One condition. Just an old-fashioned something, to wit: No reality in my life. No reason for either being here or killing myself. I've studied how to juggle and make love and enjoy my life--no point in it. No nothing. No, no, and vet again no." He smiled demurely. "For purposes of intercommunication, and I want to intercommunicate, and also concision, and I wish to be concise, I call it by an old-fashioned word--sometimes the old-fashioned ways are best -- nervous breakdown. Can't take it anymore. Take what, you might ask, Bee Gee? Don't even know what I'm to take or not take. I walk around the streets with my soul in a balloon tied to my finger, but the string has been cut -- no balloon. No reason. No response. No go, it's gone, Barbara-Girl." And he showed his gums triumphantly, running his tongue over his teeth to clean them. "But I know your name, I even know my name, I know what I'm doing and this is hardly an appeal for help, since I know Bee Gee cannot help me. Barbara-Girl. But I wanted to tell someone anyway."

He waited to see if she would interrupt. He raised his hand like a pedantic schoolteacher.

"Melodramatic? Perhaps. Nevertheless I tell you the truth, Barbara-Girl: I can no longer juggle four balls." He leaned forward and said. "Go ahead, smile. I give you permission. Please smile, my friend."

Barbara remembered the sound of Peter's voice over water as he sang to her on the dock at Southampton: lap of gentle salt breeze, dusk, moon rising, distant shout of weekend visitors. He had an easy baritone of which he was proud and he had crooned at her. She remembered his gentleness, his distance, his gentleness despite the distance of not caring very much. In the falling dusk at Southampton, he had given names to each of the sandpipers pecking their snacks in the sand: Albert, Fritz, Sheldon: each one had a character and he told her why and made her laugh. Poor Peter, poor Peter, she thought.

His checks were wet and he was smiling at her and wiping his face with his hand. There was a smudge on his forehead. "Selfish tears. Don't pity me. Only selfish tears, Barbara."

She watched him in awe. A man crying. It was like hearing the snow fall a sound that must not be heard.

"Don't you pity me," he repeated, "Just selfish and selfishness is all I've got."

They're tears all the same, she thought, and ran quickly to him and pressed his head lightly to her. "Oh Peter," she said, "I just can't see how anyone can tell it so clearly and still insist--"

"I'm not well."

"You look quiet, Peter."

"I get sick in my own way, with excellent clarity -- it's part of my sickness."

She touched his cheek and bent to look into his eyes. There was a faint smell of tomato juice on his mouth. "Feel better, please. We need you big and strong."

"OK, Bee Gee. By executive order."

"You've been drinking tomato juice. Are you on a diet?"

He grinned crookedly, showing his stained teeth. "You think I'm getting fat? No, bloody marys. But Barbara!" And he neatly put himself to her again, like a lonely child, like a juggler managing his burden. He said softly: "Barbara Girl, I need to make contact somehow."

"Not that way, your old way," she said, extricating herself.

He let her go and went to the window which gave onto her courtyard. It was snowing, the snow sifted down as if the universe were gently rocking; and it was still clean -- that impossible pure Manhattan snow, clean at the moment of fall. "No," he said, "that's the way I've tried so much, that way. You're right. I've won and captured, but made no space for myself. You're right about that. Another victory, another notch eventually you weaken the weapon with notching your victories. Just let me sit with you. Barbara?" And fell silent, blushing like a boy at his repeated, repeated appeal. And in a stammering, discontinuous way he began to talk to her for almost -- Barbara suddenly understood--the first time in the years she had known him. He had jabbered, joked, teased, flirted, but now he was addressing her. What he said still seemed (this was Peter, wasn't it?) less important than his style. He formed his thought and explored its manner. He discovered where it led now, then uttered a desperate little summary, then went to the window and stared at the deepening snowfall in the silent court, then turned to her with a quick quirk of facetiousness, then went on. He told her as much truth as he knew. And the hours passed.

He had wanted to marry Freddie, he said, a girl named Freddie, you remember Freddie? Far-out and stupid, but he wanted her. Why? Because she was able to make him feel something. You know what that means, to feel something? To feel? Yes, you know, Barbara. But can you understand what it means to a man who has closed the flower of feeling? Closed it tight? Shut it through every season of love and striving -- no love and no striving?

And then his pacing and blank gaze out the window again. As much truth as he could find in it.

But Freddie made him feel bad, she was mean, she was a boiling ant hive of conniving and she made him sick with jealousy, that was all Freddie was, that kind of feeling.

More snow, more silent looking. Again he turned back to Barbara with a puzzled, long, humorous, sallow face. He smiled, showing a stained tooth. "A surprise to me," he said.

"What?"

"When I knew she was with some Oklahoma oilman--some stetson or other --how I felt, Bee Gee . . ." He stopped, talked, stopped, stared, paced and talked for hours, but as always with him, there was his trick of focus; he made himself real to her, even in his untouchable dodging; the hours passed and she was happy to be in his company, though the only emotion she could name for herself was pity. Maybe she, too, was cruising after strong feeling within the unexpected grace of Dan, and pity would do for a while. "Bee Gee?" he said. "I can't juggle so good anymore, I'm not steady with the balls or myself. I'm losing out."

Oh Peter, you're thinking foolish thoughts, talking foolishness."

"I thought I wasn't cut out for this kind of life, that kind of life. I was right, but -- question -- maybe I wasn't cut out for any kind of life, huh Barbara-Girl?"

With a peculiar canniness on his face, he watched her shake her head, and then cast his eyes down. Then he went on.

"I want to die."

There was absolute stillness. He meant it, and yet he calculated its effect. She was filled with horror, both for his meaning it and for his calculation, and she said, "Nonsense. What you need is--"

"A rest? a vacation? a checkup by a specialist? dinner by candlelight? reconciliation with my aged parents? a cruise of the Caribbean with the Over-30 Club? an advantageous marriage? a new sports car? a fresh young thing with long blonde hair of an understanding and experienced divorcée with both feet on the ground? protein tablets and a sun lamp? a new set of tumblers? What? Tell me, Bee Gee."

She pressed her lips together and waited, she just waited, resolving not to be angry but wondering what she could put in the place of anger. He would offer a substitute. She must be cautious. Peter had capacities for control and he sought control.

"I've been through all those remedies and more. Chicks. New woofer, new tweeter. Grand chicks -- you, for instance. Let me tell you something: I've got me my junior partnership. Any car I want I rent. I don't like owning. I can go around the world if it suits me. What next? A psychiatrist?"

"Do you need someone to talk to, Peter?"

"Haw!"

She waded straight in. "I don't mean deep analysis necessarily, but someone who can help you work through . . ."

She turned away. "I know exactly what you're thinking all at once. I lack a sense of humor."

He laughed harshly. He put his face close to hers and said "Ha!" but the light of appeal and gratitude in his eyes did not recede. As if betrayed by his eyes, he went to hide at the window again. Outside, in the courtyard off Perry Street, the snow was no longer softly piling up upon itself. There was no wind: the snow had stopped. But it was midnight, and the city had come to a halt in the snow. This man claimed so lightly to be destroyed and explained himself with facetious eloquence: he tricked and played games and made her out a fool: and yet her rhythm of breathing was broken by him. Was it because he had never loved her that she still treasured a hope of reaching him? She knew very well that the nurse is always left behind.

He returned from the window with worried concern on his face. He was always just in time, it seemed. Coolly he tuned in to her wavelength. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know how all this sounds."

"Please, Peter, just tell me how I can help you."

He shook his head. "I know you want to be kind. I suppose I'll do something about it myself ... a psychiatrist, as you say. Don't you remember what I think of that unhappy breed with their tight little mouths? Or their decisions to be spontaneous, and so they are spontaneous." He made a tight little face. He made a spontaneous face, but it was an ugly grimace, showing his gums.

"Is this really the time to make so many judgments, Peter?"

"Any port in a storm . . . Quite a storm outside. Look, a humpback of snow on your windowsill. And all this while we were talking."

And all this while they were talking . . . went the words in Barbara's head as if she were considering the troubles of strangers, the Manhattan troubles of Manhattan strangers, perpetually striving and gabbing on the anxious island. She saw Peter watching her with his hand opened as if to juggle or cup one of the balls he liked to flip into the air, and remembered his Sunday-morning trick with the oranges -- oranges up! oranges down! oranges all around! And all this while he was talking.

"For you, when love is over, it's over. Barbara? For me it's never over. I'm still in love with the scrawny little beast with scraped knees I knew in junior high school. I kissed her once -- she sucked my lip like a Milky Way. Caramel. Hotness down to my ankles even now. She had eyes like a squirrel's. But I admit that's a little dim now -- knees and eyes like that. But you, Barbara, I'm still in love with you."

Poor Peter, He looked hard into her eyes to head off the thought, head it off, stop it now, that he could not come to the end of love because he could not carry it through to the end: and so she only thought. Poor Peter, which meant the same thing.

"I love you forever, Barbara. In my own way. I never stop."

She felt an odd elation as he maneuvered about her: perhaps it was the juggler's joy in herself. No, No. Dan loved her and Peter needed someone. Peter could finish nothing, could love no one: but also needed help. She felt pride in her body very much like lust, it is very much like lust, she thought: this must be what men like so much, conquering the frontier through our bodies. They take such joy in pride. Pride--they suffer so from pride. And then she felt another flood of sorrow for the maneuvering, manipulating, writhing creature before her. "It's so cold," he was saying.

"The heat goes off at 11. We're supposed to close down."

"No, I mean outside, Barbara-Girl. Nuclear changes in the weather, you know? Radiation or something -- the winds. Maybe we're all finished. May I spend the night here? On the couch? Please?" It was a snowfall which had broken all the rules for the city in spring. "Just on the couch, Barbara?" There was mingled in his voice the excitement of the lading storm outside and the imploring jitters of what he called his "breakdown." Barbara abruptly recalled the childish sense of late-at-night, those forbidden and secret hours when the world sleeps and only the inner circle is awake. This time is misplaced in Manhattan, but not lost; disaster returns it.

"Barbara-Girl, are you listening to me? Let me just stay on the couch."

"I suppose so." she said. And this concession was punishment for pride, punishment because she knew she could love someone and he could not, and she had no right to pride for this. "Just there, but just there -- oh dear, that will never work out. I know you, Peter."

"I promise!"

A sigh, a sweet sigh: and Barbara knew she was sweetly sighing and bit her lip: Peter was busy with all his tricks, making her aware, transmitting his disease of awareness. He caused her to be sweetly yielding and languorous: she was aware of it, she disliked this automatic response. "You promise," she said severely. "Please keep your promise. There's something about you that never keeps promises, I feel."

He lowered his eyes contritely. "I'll keep them to you even if I don't keep them to myself."

"Stop playing Tom Sawyer."

"Penrod. I'm not up to Huck. Too cute."

"I said Tom Sawyer, Listen to me."

Wan smile, nibbling motions of mouth, like a squirrel. "Wasn't I listening, Bee Gee?"

No wonder he can't juggle anymore, Barbara thought, his shoulders are sloping wrong. Lord he's tired. He looked as if he were falling through space all closed in on himself, falling without a sound through dry galaxies.

"I promise," he said.

Like embarrassed grown brother and sister, they undressed, washed, scrubbed teeth, hiding and not hiding, looking and not looking. His body was very familiar to her. He was like a brother now. And all the same, Barbara knew, for whatever his reasons and hers, he had been the man who awakened her from her fretful Village sleep. After the farmer's daughter had come to New York, this salesman had shown her the sights, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty: he had taken her on the boat ride around Manhattan and showed her how the skyline could be seen like notes on a clef of yet-to-be-sung melodies. He was not a brother.

She sat at a low tufted bench, removing the girlish mask. She turned off the light at the mirror after she creamed away her makeup. The chill from outdoors was seeping into the room. She scampered into bed and hid there, like the farmer's daughter in a story.

In a moment her heart stopped pounding. She smiled to herself, holding her wrist like a hypochondriac measuring excitement by counting the pulse. But who was counting? She was not counting. The lights were out and there was only the bluish phosphorescent glow of the mound of snow against the window. She could hear the catch of Peter's breathing from the couch. Barbara felt oddly comforted by the presence of this old friend in her apartment, this loveless, hopeless, grieving old juggler of a friend, and despite the oddness and gravity of the occasion, she fell asleep with a start like the reverse of frightened wakening: a click -- she flew off from herself. Her habit when she slept alone was for careening lifts into harsh nerves, descents into oblivion, elevator rises and falls into sealed dream compartments, visions, anxieties, corrections and regrets. Now she merely slept.

She may have been away for half an hour when she felt breathing nearby and awoke calmly, cool and refreshed, knowing exactly where she lay and whose breath it was --Dan's. But it was not Dan's and she felt no less calm. "Barbara. Please," he was saying.

"Please?"

"Please let me hold your hand for a few minutes."

She gave him her hand and, sighing, he rested his cheek against it, his body sprawled ungainly on the floor. The apartment was settling and creaking in the sudden winter cold. Barbara waited, thinking he would make some violent move now, something she could ridicule or fight away. No. He seemed content. He seemed grateful. Her hand, stretched out like that against his cheek, was growing cramped. For a cramped hand, she thought, the lady might be lost. No, no, surely not.

The bristles on his cheek roughed against her hand. There was a grain of beard, there was an antigrain, back and forth. Her arm, held tight, began to ache, and she longed for the sweet ease of her sleep. The sharp drawing ache in her heart translated the practical trivial cramp in her wrist. She said: "All right!"

He did not answer.

She paused and said sharply, irritably, with a dizziness that stupefied her, "Come into bed then, you'll catch cold."

He paused and sighing as if unwillingly, slipped in beside her. She moved away from him and he did not try to follow. He seemed content to lie in the little trough of warmth where she had been. And it seemed to her (she knew she was hiding from herself, she was trying to trick herself, she was disguising the inevitable fact from herself), she fell asleep again as soon as her own part of the sheet was warmed by her own body. She deceived herself into sleep. Dreamily, irritably, she accepted him into her bed, dozing, hardly permitting him to know her -- not permitting--giving herself anyway.

She awoke with a lurch of shipwreck. She awoke on the wrong side of the disaster: she was lost and the dark ruin was hanging over her; she was foundering in icy seas. "Peter!" she cried out, "I don't allow it! I don't! I don't! You have no right!"

But there was no strength in her after the cry. She was down in the icy salt of the North Atlantic. She sobbed and turned her head and sought oblivion, but could not even freeze herself to death. As he kneeled between her, her body foundering in the crevice of the bed under his diminished heft, he swayed, he twisted like a sick child, his eyes tried to find hers; his gaze faltered, his head fell, and he was sobbing; but his body did not retreat. "Barbara, don't play." He swayed and took her, groaning softly and pleading with her, "Ride with me, don't play. Barbara, ride, ride, just ride with me one more time!"

In the depth of this alien wave, she looked at him with a pious, puzzled mien. It was as if the black ocean asked mercy of its bobbing, swept prey, saying, Don't be cold, don't freeze, let me consume you alive. She felt a hot tear fall from his face onto hers, and this was a signal that she seemed to have been waiting for. A voice, her voice, her voice despite all her decisions was whispering to him; her hands were stroking his back with hard, long, imperative pressure, "You had my permission all the time, Peter. Don't fret. Don't fret now."

But neither terror nor pity nor love can end the long troubles. He rushed into her, he did not flow, he did not fly and soar, he seized and took and slipped from her grasp: he was all effortful pride: he lay gasping and sobbing on her breast and she comforted him as best she could.

• • •

When Barbara awakened late in the morning, with a vacuum cleaner angrily searching in corners upstairs, she felt the queasy seasick lurch of shame located in that same place in the belly reserved to jealousy; but shame has a sweeter, sickish taste. The machine upstairs was sucking up dust and air, squealing, heaving great, boastful gusts. Apparently Peter had awakened at her first movement. She shrank away. He waited an instant and then slipped out of bed. She felt him watching, standing naked by the bed and blinking. She held her eyes squeezed shut. She knew this was cowardly, but even as she pretended she was asleep and fooled no one, she felt herself dimming out; the act followed swiftly upon the child's imitation of it, her fists opened, she departed from herself for a few moments.

Then Peter was standing by their bed, fully dressed, pink-cheeked, hair combed with water, slicked down, himself sleek and grinning, with an incongruous stubble of beard above the neatly knotted tie. "Hey Barbara-Girl?" he said, "Open the eyes."

She did. There was a stunning sick taste in her mouth. She lay like dead, stiff and twisted as if caught by death in the midst of a flight from crime.

"Hey Barbara-Girl. I really felt bad last night, honest, I'm sorry I came on like that."

"Leave me alone now, Peter. Hurry away fast."

"OK. Let me tell you something: it was depression, the blues, you know?

And about Dan -- I guess I just didn't like."

"Go."

"I didn't mean any harm. Not really harm harm, anyway. I suppose no one does. Sort of jealous maybe, but listen, Bee Gee, I only wanted to make things clear and straight--out here among us--"

Heedless of her nakedness, of the chill of death in her limbs, she flew out of bed with her arms Hailing--"Get out! Get out! Out!" --and it seemed to her as she stood alone, naked, alone and sobbing in that room, that he scampered away like some quick animal, like a rabbit in danger. She could hear his light steps in the hall, as if he were skipping. As she squinted in the ferocious winter sunlight at the window, she could almost see his tracks, woodsy leapings as he made off for cover in the snow. She then lost him entirely. She even seemed to lose the thought of him. She stood frozen like a plastic manenquin awaiting its clothing.

How did Peter pass the remainder of the day? He thought. Few who knew him could imagine him reading annual reports and talking with his clients by telephone when he went to his office, though he most frequently passed his time at this trade: today he did not go to his office. Probably he ate snacks (he liked health foods, he ate lightly): probably he drank coffee and made up his mind. He decided all day long, and at the end of the day, he had decided. He telephoned Dan early in the evening, without yet having shaved or washed carefully on this day, feeling Barbara like a validating aura still clinging to his body as he put coins in the pay telephone in a booth in Grand Central Station (how did he get there? wandering, walking), and repeated, "No. I'm not drunk, pal. I thought you should know--can't trust any of them -- object lesson, buddy-boy. Couldn't help myself. Really wanted to prove--"

And sighed when Dan hung up on him. Had bet himself that he'd never get that sentence out. Everybody interrupting him lately by making him stop in the middle. As if they already knew the rest.

He sat in the booth, frowning because he believed this very moment would find Dan speaking with Barbara and she would be saying, "Yes, it's true. In a way it's true. I don't suppose I can make you see how it happened. It's true."

Then Peter went to his high-ceilinged studio to juggle oranges and wait for Dan. Interested in finance and credit. Peter understood that he considered his friend a debtor and had been disturbed by Dan's profit from an abandoned investment. But he also knew that his crazy scheme to collect the debt was a noncommercial, nongain transaction, and as he puzzled, he dropped an orange and heard it break, squirt. No marked skill at his chosen craft. You have to go with beautiful unconsciousness with the oranges, you have to ride without command, you have to fly high with all three, leaving pride behind. No marked skill here. Marked skill at brooding, at being densely Peter: but these habits were not good enough for him as he skipped across the middle of his life. Trouble, trouble, when pride and health leave the man who trusts too much in them; health and pride cannot endure without the exorcising of weaknesses, the growth of fresh sources for the new season in used-up soils. Trouble, trouble: no more simplicity, no more switchblade health flashing out when he willed the button be pressed; he felt weakness and complication on their way into his life. Sucking the broken orange, he went to the refrigerator for another. He could only keep three in the air, never more. He had lied to Barbara. But he had told the truth to Dan. He had lied about his juggling. He had told the truth about Barbara to Dan and he had told the truth to Barbara about himself, both in the night when he felt alone and isolated and in the morning when he was angrily sated. Now he would wait, and if an orange fell, he would begin again, juggling with a cracked orange. Hup, hup, hup. Not too high. In an easy arc. Think with the flight, not with the oranges. Don't think, ride with them.

He retrieved the fallen fruit and it leaked on his hand as he answered the call from Dan. who was now back in Manhattan.

"Meet me at the Howard Johnson's on Sixth Avenue at Eighth Street," Dan said.

"That's a hell of a place to meet, buddy."

"Meet me there."

"Makes you feel like you're on a turnpike, that place. What's the matter with you? Why there?"

"That's where I want to see you."

"You sound like you want to quarrel, buddy." Frowning, he sucked the acid juice of orange on his palm.

"First meet me at Howard Johnson's and I'll see."

"We shall see, boy," Peter said.

"I'll see."

Dan stalked him in the damp and wet doorway of the restaurant. Nearby there was a newsstand, a paperback bookshop just closing, a subway entrance with loose papers chasing down the stairs. Within the Howard Johnson's, late on this evening, marcelled homosexuals chattered and tough ones planned their missions: a few other eaters, loyal to ice cream in this curious delayed winter of March, took up their sundaes avidly: the softly shifting glow of the jukebox bathed the faces of the lonely, the hunting and the discussing couples. There was a bleat of buses as Peter approached, waving a hand in greeting. There was a spatter of wet in the air.

"Is it true?" Dan asked.

"Hiya, buddy."

"Is it true?"

"Yes."

"Did you have any reason?"

Peter was shining with alert pleasure in the beginning of the conversation. At last the conclusion to an experience! feeling something again! He took a deep breath of the fine cold March wind swirling through Eighth Street and across the intersection. It did not occur to him that Dan might hit him or that anything like a vulgar Village street fight could interrupt this odd conjunction of two old friends. He said: "Everything has a reason."

A Negro cat in blue jeans, a short cashmere coat and Italian sandals, with hair blondined so that it looked almost green, was soliciting in the subway entrance. Entranced young men were floating elegantly past, back, past again. The boy began to hum a little tune to himself and to the universe. Peter desired to await a reply from the universe, something he could share with the green-haired cat, but Dan seemed pressed for time and so he continued his little speech: "Let me explain, pal. You came to town and I had a nice deal. You were lonely -- sick with yourself-- remember? I tried to help you. Now it's you has the nice deal. And me? Well, you didn't help me, so I had to help myself."

No answer from Dan. Pause. Fresh gusts down Eighth Street.

"You see, don't you now, buddy?"

Dan was staring at him like a stranger.

"You're crazy off your head, Pete."

"Maybe." Well, give him the stranger look right back. "And you're smart, funny and pretty for a man. Let me tell you something. You've got it made, But you haven't got the big thing which I have."

? ? ?

Peter screwed up his face in a dwarlish grin, pushing it forward, showing his teeth and whispering. "No truth in you anyplace, boy. Nothing but -- listen. whatever I do, I do it. I make out. But you -- square!" He hoped the green haired crooner was listening. He said: "You hear me? You're ready to lie down like everyone else. You want to slide by the same easy way. You want to make a nice little hole for yourself with canned water and supplies for a lifetime underground! You think you can beat the game with a tight door and a Bee Gee! Well, I wanted to show you! Wrongo! Wrong! You're nothing but square, nothing but lies, nothing! Nothing more and nothing at all!"

Dan made a little grunt which was perhaps intended to continue the discussion. He wanted to see clearly, he wanted to understand the charge against him. No man fails to feel guilt when accused of total fault. Thus the madman has an important advantage over the man who listens: for does not the listener then say, Maybe true? Maybe I fail totally? But Dan thought of Barbara and this gave him a narrow practical sense of what to do. Jealousy and fury taught him a simple act, and he knew a terrible moment of exultation -- jealousy, fury, pride, hatred and a vivid bone and blood joy in the wet March air of a doorway. He then said: "Here's some truth," and drove his list as hard as he could, with a short flooding lunge. toward Peter's head, all the while thinking: No, the sensible thing would be to hit him in the belly or below. I'm still being a gentleman.

Perhaps that's what Peter meant when he said he had no truth -- he neglected striking his enemy where he could destroy most cruelly. Peter took the blow leaning on his cheekbone, crying out "Ha!", whirling, coming back Hailing, head down, unhurt and uncaring, like a child in a tantrum. He was hurt. He felt great joy. His body flew unencumbered toward Dan through the salt air of the city.

Now imagine a great drawing away from what the world recognized at once was not a mere street brawl. There were chattering idlers who fell silent: there were sighs of satisfaction from watchers ("Olé," murmured the boy with green hair): there was a priestly hum on Sixth Avenue, and within this stir Dan leapt on Peter and bore him to the slushy. littered, laden sidewalk. Someone said. "Oh my, lookit. Someone said. "It's quicker than lung cancer. hey Mike?" And then the awe of disaster fell fully over the watchers. Trained by the isolation of cities, they observed. They studied. All understood that this was no anecdote -- blow. cry, man fallen and man running. Dxn meant murder, although so far the crowd knew more about his intention than he did. He struck wild, unfocused blows with his list exploratory thrusts, returned in slow motion by Peter; and only as Dan splintered a tooth, as his knuckles were cut and clothes filthied, did the pure lust for murder gradually arise in his throat. It was with a dizziness of triumph that he realized that he wanted to destroy Peter, just that, nothing more, merely to kill him and this was sufficient truth unto the moment. And the communication seemed to pass almost instantaneously to Peter. his old friend, and Peter was up on his feet. gasping, roaring, thrilled in his turn, with cunning slits watching above the cut cheekbones. Peter was no longer thinking of the boy with green hair. he, too, was focused, he said. "Don't mess with me. buddy."

Dan lunged with arms extended and took a world-darkening blow to the chest: the universe tipped and the lights drifted out, as if the rheostat had shorted; retching. Dan fell, and calmly wondered if he had broken a rib, and thought over his mistake in not watching more carefully (Manage the rage! he thought): and Peter stood over him: "Enough?" Dan breathed wet snow. His fingers clenched over a handful of softly silted sidewalk filth; he waited: he listened to this word enough. Then he thrust himself at Peter's ankles with a tackling hook suddenly rendered up from high school memories, feeling his body light and contracted despite the dark gasping in his chest. They were down on the sidewalk together, rolling in the slush. Dan using lists and elbows to hurt, break, maim, and Peter using lists to hit hack and protect himself: Dan was not aware of any effort to stop blows against himself, he was conscious only of his target. And yet neither of them, covered with sidewalk slime and blood, struck out with feet or knees at the vulnerable private parts. They were still gentlemen obeying the rules though their coats had been torn off in the brief gasping respites.

Dan felt his attention wandering. It was like the war and out swinging under a parachute again, dangling and rushing down, swinging toward death among marionette strings and toy explosions, and thinking not about death, not about his soul and its consequences, but about the label on a box of cold cereal which he had studied over breakfast as a child, And swinging down to life and death over the green world which sent up little puffs of cream, down, down. And now, on Sixth Avenue, rolling in slime, he had a glimpse of a girl in a taxi, slowing down. her elegant courtesan's head lifted, and Freddie gazed myopically and then asked the driver to speed away. Or was it Freddie? Was it just another girl cruising in a cab? Down. down, he swung, and his ear was scraped raw against the pavement: there was flesh shredded loose; Dan thought: Can I hear the bowels of New York as I crouch here, my ear to the pavement? Could he attend the discharge of wastes and the labor of electricity and all the perturbed, buried powers of Manhattan? And there was pain from his ear. He did not hear the power lines, though he knew they sang below, tangled through granite: sewers, managed streams, gas, electricity telephone, and abandoned conduits controlled by no one. Peter was standing over him with eyes abstract and horrified and joined lists coming- down like an ax. And then Dan was no longer a gentleman. He decided. He struck swiftly and from below. In this instant it was finally settled.

Peter stumbled. He was coughing and helpless, blood choking up from his mouth. His body went slack: he fell, his knees were wet and his mouth ragged, gaping; one shoe had been torn off, and through a rip the sock showed a yellowish, shell-like ankle: he was lying in vomit, he had soiled his pants. Dan stood above him, tugging him toward a parking meter, all his life shrunken to a passion to drop his friend on it, sharpened to an ecstasy of hope of hitting him with a parking meter. Peter, through the blood which surged up in airy bubbles, gasped. "OK, boy, you're OK," and Dan let him fall.

"Mister." a little green-haired mother's helper said, "mister, they called the cops. You want to come with me and I'll put sweet stuff on your wounds?"

Dan shook his head. The gesture restored him to himself a little. He dropped his friend onto the sidewalk near the parking meter--it was slick with blood and excrement and the slush of feet: there was an ambulance on the way, there were police on the way. Dan lit out. He ran and ran and made his way up the stairway to his apartment. He fell into bed, bathed with substances he had never known before, thick blood, fierce shrill wordless tears, a black reek in which he had been dipped: and then finally he lay with his eyes fixed on the sky beyond his ceiling and the one beyond it and the last bricked ceiling of mortality above him; he lay like a stone in age-old, grave, unthinking submission.

• • •

When Dan called her, she would not see him. When he went to her apartment anyway, she would not admit him. He then stopped like an overwound clock. For a time he heard no ticking within, no feeling no motion of desire or hope. He was ill, he hurt, he felt the hurt as mere stoppage. This was perhaps a contagion from Peter: to feel nothing, to be absolutely still and silent within was Peter's disease. Dan was ill: he had the flu; the bruises on his body became swollen welts. On his right forearm there were three delicate perforations like teeth marks, like teasing lover's wounds, which suddenly opened up and exploded like seeds into ripe infection. A rooty stringlet of infection led up under his arm. Many of the oozing scrapes and bruises merely turned sore and black, but this arm ballooned up, huge and ungainly, a stiff rubbery stump with the stretched skin a torture to him. He sat with his hands and arm in hot water, trying to draw out the disease, enervated and dizzy in the steam as he crouched above the bowl. Finally a doctor came to give him penicillin. The doctor shook his head as he filed his steel away in his bag and snapped it shut. "Human teeth -- the worst. A shame on us. Worse than dogs or rats. We put such dreck in our mouths, that's why. That's the main reason." He finished a bottle of aspirin: he slept: he drank gin and lay fitfully abed and went through a half-hallucinated week in which the days and nights were all contained within alternating efforts to make Barbara answer him. to lift Peter onto the parking meter, to force Barbara to reply, to bury Peter in the filth of his own body. He wished to destroy, forgive, destroy. And he was weeping in the dark for his old friend and praying he had not hurt him. And wishing him dead and burnt to ash. And dreaming despite all he knew that Barbara was a stranger to him, a girl with flowing hair he met as she ran down a hillside through a bank of flowers to be discovered. What kind of flowers? Dream flowers for an absolute dream lover.

Only in illness could he imagine this dream purity.

The doctor gave him the third penicillin injection and suggested massive vitamin injections, "Just for fun. Why are you smiling?"

"I was thinking about flowers. Don't they make vitamins from flowers?"

"Rose hips."

"Rose hips," Dan murmured with satisfaction.

He slept himself out and bathed himself carefully, easing his sore body into the hot water, and slept again. That hillside never altered in the seasons, its bank of flowers, Barbara with her flowing hair loosened, running, a sweet breeze as he waited.

Then the penicillin and aspirin brought down the fever. He seemed to have a click in his head, the dream ended, he sprang upward from daymare and night sweat. The clock began ticking. He sat up, blinking, and threw off the blanket. He held out his hands-- steady. One arm was still slightly swollen, but there was no more pain. For the first time it occurred to him to find out about Peter. He talked with his secretary.

Out of the hospital. The body can accept a great deal. Peter had given an explanation to the police which did not mention him. It was a bizarre concocted story which bewildered Dan, but now, with an end made to their old friendship, it hardly concerned him. Somehow the reason for his assault on Peter had been covered over by the fight itself. It had served the purpose of ending his jealous rage. Sometimes it happens. This, he knew, is the only excuse for revenge -- now anger ended. He had left it dissolved in the slime on the sidewalk near Howard Johnson's on the Avenue of the Americas.

He turned back to Barbara and she was gone. She had left New York, moved out; in a few days, she had simply withdrawn and the tracks were already brushed over. Had she any right to be angry with him? His jealousy lay curled and waiting. This happens, too. Could she believe that the blame for the fight lay in him and she had nothing to do with it? He looked impatiently in a mirror and saw only himself, frowning, frazzled, stubborn, with dark stains below the eyes, one of Manhattan's false boys of 33; he gazed out the window at the jagged, musical skyline of Manhattan and believed in new possibilities for Dan Shaper--tenderness and the hope of giving up anger, pity for Barbara, willingness to sacrifice. The dense air of Manhattan, seeming to free him, seeming to stifle him. had brought him to generosity, like a basement nurturing a vagrant root carried in with some other package.

When he put through a call to her in Virginia, she would not receive it. He listened breathlessly to her voice saying to the operator very firmly and formally. "That person is not here." He sent her a telegram asking her please to talk with him, waited half a day, and then called again. "That person is not at this number."

He sent her a wire: Arriving Tomorrow. He did not wait for a reply. It did not occur to him that she would leave her father's house and he did not expect her to meet him at the station, though he had given her the time of his arrival. He hired a Ford and drove through the courthouse square, around which the same hot rodders seemed to be whipped on a string, and down the blacktopped road which he remembered as if it were the map of his own altered childhood universe; scraps of Southern town, country garage with tar-paper roof, the ungraded turnoff and the long drive until suddenly a weathered and spreading house appeared on its little knoll.

She had heard the Ford and stood on the porch wearing a loosely fitting flowered cotton housedress that must have been hanging in a closet for years after being checked on an order form from a mail-order catalog. There were freckles on her forearms and she wore no makeup and her eyes had little lines where she had frowned in the sun. She was barefooted. The dress was too long. It was as if to defy him by presenting a rural stranger to his eyes, but he was not deceived. There was Barbara from Perry Street behind the freckles and the Montgomery Ward frock. There was the girl who had been tried by the edge of broken glass in Manhattan and there was his lady. She stood on the porch and they had it straight out under the sky with no other greeting. Her face turned blood-red in the setting sun and she said, "Was that the way to settle things between us! Was that the way!"

Not a question. He answered it as if it were a question. "It was between Peter and me then. What was between you and me--"

"But who was important, Peter or me? Why didn't you think of me first? Why didn't you leave it just between you and me?"

"I am not a perfect knight. I live in this time," he said slowly. "You're right, what was for you and me is for us to settle. But about Peter you have to allow--"

"Why didn't you just forget him?"

"I can now. Now I can. You know what he's telling people? He says he was beaten up by some rough-trade sailor who thought he'd made a pass at him."

"You were wrong to be so brutal."

"I'm sorry I did it. If I hadn't done it -- maybe I'd be sorrier. But I wish there were another way. I had to lose this friend. That way."

She turned to the loose screen on the front door and pulled the rusted mesh against the frame with her fingers, it sprang when she let go. "What about me, Dan?"

"I had to think about him first in order to think about you. Maybe that was wrong. Sometimes you have to be wrong first in order to be right afterward."

"Well." He was not sure that she was listening. Was that person at this number? She did not let him know for sure, but her face began to compose itself behind its strained rural mask: she was Barbara thinking back to New York and Peter's wild, willful lies. She lowered her head, but kept her eyes on Dan's, waiting for him to make further decisions.

An old Negro on a bicycle lurched toward them in the ruts down the road. He studied the house, studied the package he was carrying, turned his bicycle around and headed out again. Dan watched him down the road, sighed, and then began once more to say that if he had done wrong, then he had done wrong. He saw nothing strange in her curious knack of making them discuss his rage as if her part in it were beyond reckoning. She seemed to ask to be privileged, just because she could not be. "You have to let me be wrong in my own way. Barbara--" Ah! Now he did remind her. "If you want me to accept your being wrong in your way."

Slowly she turned to the red, raw plowed field to the right of the house. "Did I ever ask you to forgive me--?" "Accept, I said."

"-- forgive me? No, I think not," she said softly. The rich sun turned and turned, bathing them in a golden dying afternoon light.

"I do anyway, Barbary."

She did not answer, so he repeated his words.

"All right," she said at last.

"We've decided? We've settled it between us now? Everything that's important before the beginning? We can start now?"

She sighed. The small capillaries of her eyes were slightly reddened by fatigue, by staring. She leaned against the weathered pine. She touched his hand but said nothing and looked away from him.

"Yes, I think so." he answered for her, and now quickly she turned her face to his. She stroked his hand with long pulling caresses. "Yes, I think we'll live elsewhere. Not here."

"But not in New York?"

"But not in New York either."

"Does it make so much difference?"

"Not so much," he said. "Some places are less practical -- from now on we'll try being practical. Let's try it." Then straightway he took her in his arms.

"Sometimes I'm foolish. I get depressed. I can be lonely without notice."

"I'm ready for that. Sometimes I'm surly."

"Sometimes I'm the most confused. I get still and careful then. You can't talk with me. You just have to wait."

"Frequently I'm intelligent. Recently I gave up the dream of perfection."

"Sometimes I follow someone's lead because he seems to know and I'm not sure. If someone shouts at me I start to cry. I can't help it. Sometimes just whispering is as bad as shouting, too."

But her eyes were dry and shining. He kept his arms around her and said, "We'll have the chance to practice all our faults, don't you worry."

She stood near him in her mail-order cotton dress. There was the smell of lemony soap on her skin. "Come say hello to my father." she said. "He wants to ask if you know a good history of the Curtis-Wright turbine." But she did not move. She just waited and let him hold her lightly. She put one warning hand on his arm. She meant to tell him to make up his mind from everything he knew, leaving out nothing that might rise up to trouble him later, and she also meant to influence his decision.

"We'll live in a practical way together," he told her, "a job and a place. We'll cherish each other." He had the conviction that his spirit looked around corner, even if it was only the next corner that it looked around. "We'll marry."

"This evening," she answered him, "we'll just ride the easy evening. It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

"But we're started on our way," he said. They had gone completely past the place in her road where she and Peter had met: Dan had decided completely about her. She felt easy and powerful because her hand and her holding attention to his arm had ministered to this decision. But he had decided for himself. He accepted his victory. Therefore Barbara was ready to step forever past too much gentleness, too much pity for others.

"Oh," she said at the door, stopping short as if suddenly remembering something. "Do you love me, Dan?"

"I've begun. You're the salt of the earth."

She nodded to the compliment, and to the joy and grief which would follow. "Even if--?"

"Even if anything."

"I'm going to have a child, Dan."

In the stillness of the Virginia evening, his breath stopped, the wind in the high pine branches stopped: she stood with one arm upraised, holding the door. She would not speak until he did. He said that he loved her. She said that the child was his. They awaited their further portion in the world, but they did not doubt each other, That time was in abeyance.