Small Saturday

His sleep had been troubled for weeks. Girls came in out of the misty edges of dreams to smile at him, beckon him, leer at him, invite him, almost embrace him. He was on city streets, on the decks of great ships, in satiny bedrooms, on high bridges, accompanied and not quite accompanied by the phantom figures whom he always seemed on the verge of recognizing and never recognized, as they slipped away beyond the confines of dream, to leave him lying awake in his single bed, disturbed, sleepless, knowing only that the figures that haunted him were sisters in a single respect--they were all much taller than he--and that when they vanished, it was upward, toward unreachable heights.

Christopher Bagshot woke up remembering that just a moment before he opened his eyes, he had heard a voice saying, "You must make love to a woman at least five feet, eight inches tall tonight." It was the first time in weeks of dreaming that a voice had spoken. He recognized a breakthrough.

He looked at the clock on the bedside table. Twelve minutes to eight. The alarm would go off on the hour. He stared at the ceiling, searching for significance. He remembered it was Saturday.

He got out of bed and took off the top of his pajamas and did his exercises. Fifteen push-ups, 25 sit-ups. He was a small man, five feet, six, but fit. He had beautiful dark eyes, like a Moroccan burro's, with long lashes. His hair was straight and black and girls liked to muss it. Small girls. In another age, before everybody looked as though he or she had been brought up in Texas or California, his size would not have bothered him. He could have fitted into Henri Quatre's armor. And Henri Quatre was large enough to say that Paris was worth a Mass. How the centuries slide by.

• • •

"I had this dream," he said. They were standing on the corner, waiting for the 79th Street cross-town bus. Stanley Hovington, five feet, ten inches tall, neighbor and friend, was waiting for the bus with him. It was a cool, sunny, New York October. Two boys, aged no more than 15, one of them carrying a football, slouched into Central Park. Each of them was nearly six feet tall. Autumn Saturday. All over the country, long-legged girls wearing chrysanthemums, cheering for Princeton, Ohio State, Southern California. Large, fearsome men, swift on green turf.

"I had a dream last night, too," Stanley said. "I was caught in an ambush in the jungle. It's the damned television."

"In my dream ..." Christopher said, uninterested in Stanley's nighttime problems. Stanley, too, had to work on Saturdays. He had a big job at Bloomingdale's, but the thing was, he had to work on Saturdays. "In my dream," Christopher persisted, "a voice said to me, 'You must make love to a woman at least five feet, eight inches tall tonight.' "

"Did you recognize the voice?"

"No. Anyway, that isn't the point."

"It would seem to me," Stanley said, "that's just the point. Who said it, I mean. And why." He was a good friend, Stanley, but argumentative. "Five feet, eight inches. There might be a clue there."

"What I think it means," Christopher said, "is that my subconscious was telling me it had a message for me."

The bus came along and they mounted and found seats at the rear, because it was Saturday.

"What sort of message?" Stanley asked.

"It was telling me that deep in my soul I feel deprived," Christopher said.

"Of a five-foot-eight girl?"

"It stands to reason," Christopher said earnestly in the rocking bus. "All my life"--he was 25--"all my life. I've been short. But I'm proud, so to speak. I can't bear the thought of looking foolish."

"Stalin wasn't any taller than you," Stanley said. "He wasn't worried about looking foolish."

"That's the other danger," Christopher said, "the Napoleonic complex. Even worse."

"What are you deprived of?" Stanley asked. "What's her name--that girl--she's crazy about you."

"June," Christopher said.

"That's it, June. Damn nice girl."

"I'm not saying anything against June," Christopher said. "Far from it. But do you know how tall she is?"

"I think you're obsessive on the subject," Stanley said, "to tell the truth."

"Five feet, three. And she's the tallest girl I ever had."

"So what? You don't play basketball with her." Stanley laughed, appreciating himself.

"It's no laughing matter," Christopher said gravely, disappointed in Stanley. "Look--you have to figure it this way--in this day and age in America, for some goddamn reason, almost all the great girls, I mean the really great ones, the ones you see in the movies, in the fashion magazines, with their pictures in the papers at all the parties, almost all of them are suddenly big."

"Maybe you've got something there," Stanley said thoughtfully. "I hadn't correlated before."

"It's like a new natural resource of America," Christopher said. "A new discovery or a new invention or something. It's part of our patrimony, if you want to talk fancy. Only I'm not getting any of it. I'm being gypped. It's like the blacks. They see all these terrific things on television and in the magazines, sports cars, hi-fis, cruises to the Caribbean, only they can't get in on them. I tell you, it teaches you sympathy."

"They're pretty tall," Stanley said. "I mean, look at Wilt Chamberlain."

Christopher made an impatient gesture." "You don't get my point."

"Yeah, yeah," Stanley said, "actually, I do. Though maybe it's more in your imagination than anything else. After all, it doesn't go by volume, for God's sake. I mean, I've had girls all sizes; and once it comes down to the crunch, in bed, I mean, size is no criterion."

"You can say that, Stanley," Christopher said, "you have a choice. And I'm not only talking about in bed. It's the whole attitude. It stands to reason. They're the darlings of our time, the big ones, I mean the marvelous big ones, and they know it, and it gives them something extra, something a lot extra. They feel they're superior and they have to live up to it. If they're naturally funny, they're funnier. If they're sexy, they're sexier. If they're sad, they're sadder. If there're two parties that night, they get invited to the better one. If there're two guys who want to take them to dinner, they go out with the handsomer, richer one. And it's bound to rub off on the guy. He feels superior. He knows every other man in the place envies him, he's way up there with the privileged classes. But if a small guy walks somewhere with one of the big beautiful ones, he knows that every cat in the place who's two inches taller than he is is thinking to himself, 'I can take that big mother away from that shrimp any time,' and they're just waiting for the small guy to go to the John or turn his head to talk to the headwaiter, to give his date the signal."

"Jesus," Stanley said, "you've got it bad."

"Have I ever," Christopher said.

Stanley brightened. "I have an idea," he said. "I know some pretty smashing tall girls--"

"I bet you do," Christopher said, loathing his friend momentarily.

"What the hell," Stanley said. "I'll give a party. Just you and me and maybe two or three fellers even shorter than you and four or five girls, five feet, eight and over.... A quiet party, where everybody is just sitting or lying around, no dancing or charades or anything embarrassing like that."

"What're you doing tonight?" Christopher asked eagerly.

"The thing is," Stanley said, "tonight I'm busy. But for next Saturday--"

"The voice said tonight," Christopher said.

They sat in silence, listening to the echo of that ghostly imperative in the back of the cross-town bus.

"Well," Stanley began, his tone dubious, "maybe I could fix you up with a blind date."

"It's Saturday," Christopher reminded him. "What sort of girl five feet, eight or over would be available to go out on a blind date on a Saturday night in New York in October?"

"You can never tell," Stanley said, but without conviction.

"I can just see it," Christopher said bitterly, "I'm sitting in a bar waiting, and this big girl comes in, looking around for me, and I get off the stool and I say, 'You must be Jane' or Matilda or whatever, and she takes one look and that expression comes over her face."

"What expression?"

"That 'What the hell did I let myself in for tonight?' expression," Christopher said. "That 'I should've worn flat heels' expression."

"Maybe you're too sensitive, Chris."

"Maybe I am. Only I'll never know until I've tried. Look, I want to get married, it's about time, I want to marry some great girl and be happy with her and have kids, the whole deal. But I don't want to be nagged all my life by the feeling that I did my shopping only in the bargain basement, in a manner of speaking." Christopher felt that this was an apt and convincing phrase, considering that Stanley worked in Bloomingdale's. "I want to feel I had a pick from every goddamn floor in the place. And I don't want my kids to look at me when they're nineteen and they're five feet, six, and say, 'Is this as high as I go?' the way I look at my father and mother." Christopher's father was even shorter than he was and there was just no use in measuring his mother.

"Do you know any big girls?" Stanley asked as Christopher stood up, because they were approaching Madison Avenue. "At least to talk to?"

"Sure," Christopher said. "Plenty of them come into the store." He was the manager of a book-and-record store, one of a chain his father owned. There was a section devoted to greeting cards. Christopher found this demeaning, but his father was profit-minded. When his father retired, Christopher would wipe out the greeting-card section the first week. His father had no complexes about being small. If he had been running the Soviet Union, he would have run it very much along the same lines as Joseph Stalin, only more drastically. Still, Christopher couldn't complain. He was more or less his own boss and he liked being around books and his father was so busy with the more important shops in the chain that he made only flying, unexpected visits to the comparatively minor enterprise over which Christopher presided.

"I know plenty of tall girls," he said. "I encourage charge accounts, so I have plenty of addresses." When a tall girl came into the shop, Christopher tried to be on a library ladder, reaching for a book on an upper shelf. "And telephone numbers. That's no problem."

"Have you tried any yet?"

"No."

"Try," Stanley said. "My advice is, try. Today."

"Yeah," Christopher said dully.

The bus stopped and the door opened and Christopher stepped down onto the curb, with a wintry wave of his hand.

• • •

Might as well start with the A's, he thought. He was alone in the store. It was impossible to get a decent clerk who would work on Saturdays. He had tried college boys and girls for the one-day-a-week stint, but they stole more than they sold and they mixed up the stock so that it took three days to get it straight again after they had gone. For once, he did not pity himself for working on Saturday and being alone. God knew how many calls he would have to put in and it would have been embarrassing to have someone listening in, male or female. There was no danger of his father's dropping in, because he played golf all day Saturday and Sunday in Westchester County.

Anderson, Paulette**, he read in his pocket address book. He had a system of drawing stars next to the names of girls. One star meant that she was tall and at least pretty. Two stars meant that she was tall and pretty or even beautiful and that, for one reason or another, she seemed to be a girl who might be free with her favors.

Anderson, Paulette** had large and excellently shaped breasts, which she took no pains to hide. June had once told Christopher that in her experience, girls with voluptuous bosoms were always jumping into bed with men, out of vanity and exhibitionism. Treacherously, after his conversation with June, Christopher had added a second star to Anderson, Paulette.*

He didn't have her home address or telephone number, because she worked as an assistant to a dentist in the neighborhood and came around at lunch hour and after work. She wore a womanly chignon and was at least five feet, ten inches tall. Although usually provocatively dressed in cashmere sweaters, she was a serious girl, interested in psychology and politics and prison reform. She bought the works of Erich Fromm and copies of The Lonely Crowd as birthday presents for her friends. She and Christopher engaged in deep discussions over the appropriate counters. She sometimes worked on Saturdays, she had told Christopher, because the dentist remade mouths for movie actors and television performers and people like that, who were always pressed for time and had to have their mouths remade on weekends, when they were free.

Anderson, Paulette** wasn't really one of those marvelous girls--she wasn't a model and she didn't get her picture in the paper or anything like that--but if she were to do her hair differently and take off her glasses, and didn't tell anybody she was a dental assistant, you certainly would look at her more than once when she came into a room. For the first one, Christopher thought, might as well start modestly. Get the feel.

He sat down at the desk next to the cash register toward the rear of the shop and dialed the number of Anderson, Paulette.**

• • •

Omar Gadsden sat in the chair, his mouth open, the chromium tube for saliva bubbling away under his tongue. Occasionally, Paulette, comely in white, would reach over and wipe away the drool from his chin. Gadsden was a news commentator on Educational Television, and even before he had started to come to Dr. Levinson's office to have his upper jaw remade. Paulette had watched him faithfully, impressed by his silvering hair, his well-bred baritone, his weary contempt for the fools in Washington, his trick of curling the corners of his thin lips to one side to express more than the network's policy would otherwise have permitted him.

Right now, with the saliva tube gurgling over his lower lip and all his upper teeth mere little pointed stumps, waiting for the carefully sculpted bridge that Dr. Levinson was preparing to put permanently into place. Omar Gadsden did not resemble the assured and eloquent early-evening father figure of Educational Television. He had suffered almost every day for weeks while Dr. Levinson meticulously ground down his teeth and his dark, noble eyes reflected the protracted pain of his ordeal. He watched Dr. Levinson fearfully as the dentist scraped away with a hooked instrument at the gleaming arc of caps that lay on a mold on the marble top of the high chest of drawers against the wall of the small office.

He was a sight for his enemies' eyes at that moment, Paulette thought; the Vice-President would enjoy seeing him now, and she felt a motherly twinge of pity, although she was only 24. She had become very friendly with the commentator during the last month of preparing hypodermics of Novocain for him and adjusting the rubber apron around his neck and watching him spit blood into the basin at the side of the chair. Before and after the sessions, in which he had shown exemplary courage, they had had short but informative conversations about affairs of the day and he had let drop various hints about scandals among the mighty and prophecies of disaster, political, financial and ecological, that lay ahead for America. She had gained a new respect from her friends in retelling, in the most guarded terms, of course, some of the more dire items that Omar Gadsden vouchsafed her.

She was sure that Mr. Gadsden liked her. He addressed her by her first name and when he telephoned to postpone an appointment, he always asked her how she was doing and called her his Angel of Hygeia. One day, after a grueling two hours, after Dr. Levinson had put in his temporary upper bridge, he had said, "Paulette, when this is over, I'm going to treat you to the best lunch in town."

Today it was all going to be over and Paulette was wondering if Mr. Gadsden was going to remember his promise, when the telephone rang.

"Excuse me," she said and went out of the office, in a starchy, bosomy white bustle, to her desk in the small reception room, where the telephone was.

"Dr. Levinson's office," she said. "Good morning." She had a high, babyish voice, incongruous for her size and womanly dimensions. She knew it, but there was nothing she could do about it. When she tried to pitch it lower, she sounded like a female impersonator.

"Miss Anderson?"

"Yes." She had the feeling she had heard the voice before, but she couldn't quite place it.

"This is Christopher Bagshot."

"Yes?" She waited. The name meant something, but, like the voice, it was just beyond the boundaries of recognition.

"From the Browsing Corner."

"Oh, yes, of course," Paulette said. She began to riffle through Dr. Levinson's appointment book, looking for open half hours on the schedule for the next week. Dr. Levinson was very busy and sometimes patients had to wait for months. She remembered Bagshot now and was mildly surprised he had called. He had perfect white teeth, with canines that were curiously just a little longer than ordinary, which gave him a slightly and not unpleasantly wild appearance. But, of course, you never could tell about teeth.

"What I called about"--he seemed to have some difficulty in speaking--"is, well, there's a lecture at the Y. M. H. A. (continued on page 112)Small Saturday(continued from page 102) tonight. It's a professor from Columbia. 'You and Your Environment.' I thought maybe if you weren't busy. We could have a bite to eat first and. ..." He dribbled off.

Paulette frowned. Dr. Levinson didn't like personal calls while there were patients in the office. She had been with him for three years and he was satisfied with her work and all that, but he was elderly and had old-fashioned notions about employees' private lives.

She thought quickly. She had been invited to a party that night at the home of an economics instructor at NYU, down in the Village, and she hated going into a room full of people alone and Bagshot was a good-looking serious young man who could talk about books and the latest problems very sensibly and would make a welcome escort. But there was Mr. Gadsden in the chair, and his promise. Of course, it had only been for lunch, but she knew his wife was visiting her family in Cleveland this week. She knew because he had come into the office on Monday and made a joke about it. "Doc," he'd said, "this is one week I'm glad to see you. You may tear my jaw apart, but it's nothing to what my father-in-law does to my brain. Without instruments." He had a wry way of putting things, Mr. Gadsden, when he wanted to. If he was alone, she thought, and remembered about lunch, and had nothing to do for the evening. ... It would be OK going to the party at the instructor's apartment with the bookstore boy, but it would be dazzling to walk in and say, "I guess I don't have to introduce Omar Gadsden."

"Miss Anderson," Dr. Levinson was calling testily from the office.

"Yes, doctor," Paulette said, then into the phone: "I'm terribly busy now. I'll tell you what--I'll come by after work this afternoon and let you know."

"But--" Bagshot said.

"Have to run," she whispered, making her voice intimate to give him enough hope to last till five o'clock. "Goodbye."

She hung up and went back to the office, where Dr. Levinson was standing with the new shining set of teeth held aloft above the gaping mouth of Omar Gadsden and Mr. Gadsden looking as though he were going to be guillotined within the next two seconds.

• • •

Christopher hung up the phone. Strike one, he thought. The last whisper over the phone had left him tingling weirdly, but he had to face facts. Strike one. Who knew what would happen to a girl like that before five o'clock of a Saturday afternoon? He tried to be philosophical. What could you expect the very first number you called? Still, he had nothing really to reproach himself for. He had not just jumped in blindly. The invitation to the lecture at the Y. M. H. A. had been calculatingly and cunningly chosen as bait for a girl who was interested in the kind of books Anderson, Paulette** was interested in. He had carefully perused the "Entertainment Events" section in the Times before dialing Dr. Levinson's office and had studied Cue magazine and had rejected the pleasures of the movies and the theater as lures for the dental assistant. And she had said that she would come by at five o'clock. She wouldn't have said that if she'd felt it was ridiculous for a girl her size to be seen with a man his size. The more he thought about it, the better he felt. It hadn't been a blazing success, of course, but nobody could say it had been a total failure.

Two college students, a boy and a girl, who made a habit of Saturday-morning visits, came in. They were unkempt and unprincipled and they rarely bought anything, at the most a paperback, and he kept a sharp eye on them, because they had a nasty habit of separating and wandering uninnocently around the shop and they both wore loose coats that could hide any number of books. It was 15 minutes before they left and he could get back to the telephone.

He decided to forget about alphabetical order. It was an unscientific way of going about the problem, dependent upon a false conception of the arrangement of modern society. Now was the time for a judicious weighing of possibilities. As he thumbed through his address book, he thought hard and long over each starred name, remembering height, weight, coloring, general amiability, signs of flirtatiousness and/or sensuality, indications of loneliness and popularity, tastes and aversions.

Stickney, Beulah**. He lingered over the page. Under Stickney, Beulah**, in parentheses, was Fleischer, Rebecca, also doubled-starred. The two girls lived together, on East 74th Street. Stickney, Beulah** was actually and honestly a model and often had her photograph in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. She had long dark hair that she wore down loose over her shoulders and a long bony sensational body and a big model's mouth and a model's arrogant look, as though no man alive was good enough for her. But the look was just part of her professional equipment. Whenever she came into the shop, she was friendly as could be with Christopher and squatted unceremoniously on the floor or loped up the ladder when she was looking for books that were in out-of-the-way places. She was a great one for travel books. She had worked in Paris and Rome and London and while she bought books about distant places by writers like H. V. Morton and James Morris and Mary McCarthy, when she talked about the cities she had visited, her vocabulary was hardly literary, to say the least. "You've got to get to Paris before the Germans come in again, luv," she would say. "It's a gas." Or, "You'd go ape over Rome, luv." Or, "Marrakesh, luv! Stoned! Absolutely stoned!" She had picked up the habit of calling people luv in London. Christopher knew it was just a habit, but it was friendly and encouraging, all the same.

Fleischer, Rebecca** was just about as tall and pretty as Stickney, Beulah**, with short dark red hair and a pale freckled complexion to go with it and tapering musician's fingers and willowy hips. She was a receptionist for a company that made cassettes and she wore slacks on Saturdays that didn't hide anything. She was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn and made no bones about it, larding her conversation with words like shmeer and schmuck and nebbish. She didn't buy books by the reviews nor by their subject matter, she bought them after looking at the pictures of the authors on the back covers. If the authors were handsome, she would put down her $6.95. She bought the books of Saul Bellow, John Cheever and John Hersey. It wasn't a scientific system, but it worked and she put an awful lot of good writing on her shelf that way. At least it worked in America. Christopher wasn't so sure it would work with foreign authors. She had endeared herself to Christopher by buying Portnoy's Complaint and having him gift-wrap it and send it to her mother in Flatbush. "The old bag'll sit shiva for six months when she reads it," Rebecca had said, smiling happily.

Christopher wouldn't have dared send anything more advanced than the works of G. A. Henty to his mother and he appreciated the freedom of spirit in Miss Fleischer's gesture. He had never gone out with a Jewish girl, not that he was anti-Semitic or anything like that but because somehow the occasion hadn't arisen. Listening to a Jewish girl in skintight slacks who was five inches taller than he talk the way Miss Fleischer talked was intriguing, if not more. June said that Jewish girls were voracious in bed. June came from Pasadena and her father still believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so her opinions on the subject could not be called scientific; but even so, whenever Miss Fleischer came into the shop, Christopher looked carefully for pleasing signs of voracity.

He hesitated over the two names. Then he decided. Stickney, Beulah**. A redheaded giantess who was also Jewish (continued on page 120)Small Saturday(continued from page 112) would be too much for the first go. He dialed the Rhinelander number.

• • •

Beulah sat under the drier in the living room of the three-room flat, with kitchen, that she shared with Rebecca. Rebecca was painting Beulah's nails a luminous pearly pink. The ironing board on which Rebecca had ironed out Beulah's hair into a straight shining sheet of living satin was still in place. Beulah kept looking nervously over Rebecca's bent head at the clock on the mantelpiece of the false fireplace, although the plane wasn't due in at Kennedy until 3:15 and it was only10:40 now. The girls did each other's hair and nails every Saturday morning, if other amusements didn't intervene. But thiswas a special Saturday morning, at least for Beulah, and she'd said she was too nervous to work on Rebecca and Rebecca had said that was Ok, there was nobody she had to look good for this weekend, anyway.

Rebecca had broken with her boyfriend the week before. He worked in Wall Street and even with the way things were going down there, he had an income that was designed to please any young girl with marriage on her mind. Her boyfriend's family had a seat on the stock exchange, a big seat, and unless Wall Street vanished completely, which was a possibility, of course, he had nothing to worry about. And, from all indications, he was approaching marriage, like a squirrel approaching a peanut, apprehensive but hungry. But the week before, he had tried to take Rebecca to an orgy on East 63rd Street. That is, he had taken Rebecca to any orgy without telling her that was what it was going to be. It had seemed like a superior party to Rebecca, with well-dressed guests and champagne and pot, until people began to take off their clothes.

Then Rebecca had said, "George, you have brought me to an orgy."

And George had said, "That's what it looks like, honey."

And Rebecca had said, "Take me home. This is no place for a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn."

And George had said, "Oh, for Christ's sake, when are you going to stop being a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn?" He was taking off his Countess Mara tie as she went out the front door. So she had nobody this Saturday to look good for and she was putting in some extra time on Beulah's nails, because Beulah had somebody to look good for, at precisely 3:15 that afternoon, to be exact, if the goddamn air-traffic controllers didn't keep the plane from Zurich in a holding pattern between Nantucket and Allentown, Pennsylvania, for five hours, as they sometimes did.

The picture of the man who was arriving at Kennedy that afternoon was in a silver frame on an end table in the living room and another picture of him, in a leather frame, was on the dresser in Beulah's bedroom. In both pictures he was in ski clothes, because he was a ski instructor by the name of Jirg in St. Anton, where Beulah had spent a month the previous winter. In the picture in the living room he was in motion, skis beautifully clamped together, giving it that old Austrian reverse shoulder, a spray of snow pluming behind him. He was at rest in the bedroom, brown, smiling, long hair blowing boyishly in the wind, like Jean-Claude Killy, all strong white teeth and Tyrolean charm. Even Rebeca had to admit he was luscious, Beulah's word for Jirg, although Rebecca had said when Beulah had first reported on him, "John Osborne says in some play or other that having an affair with a ski instructor is vulgar."

"Englishmen," Beulah had said, hurt, "'re jealous of everybody. They'll say anything that comes into their heads, because they zilched the Empire." It hadn't been vulgar at all. On the contrary. It hadn't been like getting involved with a man in the city, worrying about finding a taxi in the rain to get there on time and waking up at seven o'clock in the morning to go to work and eating lunch alone in Hamburger Heaven and worrying if the man's stuffy friends would think your clothes were extreme and listening to him complain about the other men in the office. In the mountains, everybody lived in ski pants and it was all snow like diamonds and frosty starlight and huge country feather beds and rosy complexions and being together day and night and incredibly graceful young men doing dangerous, beautiful things to show off for you and eating in cute mountain huts with hot wine and people singing jolly Austrian songs at the next table and all the other girls trying to get your ski teacher away from you both on the slopes and off, and not managing it, because, as he said in his darling Austrian accent, wrinkling that dear tanned face in an effort to speak English correctly, "It is neffer come my way before, a girl so much like you."

Beulah hadn't seen him since St. Anton, but his influence had lingered on. She hadn't been pleased with any man she'd gone out with since she'd come back to America and she'd been saving her money so that she could spend three months at least this winter in the Tirol. Then the letter had come from Jirg, telling her that he'd been offered a job at Stowe starting in December and would she be glad to see him? Beulah had written back the same day. December was too far off, she wrote, and why didn't he come to New York immediately? As her guest. (The poor boys were paid a pitiful pittance in Austria, despite their great skills, and you always had to show practically inhuman delicacy about paying when you went anywhere with them, so as not to embarrass them. In the month in St. Anton she had become one of the most unobtrusive bill payers the Alps had ever seen.) She could afford it, she told herself, because this winter she wasn't going on an expensive jaunt to Europe but would be skiing at Stowe.

"You're crazy," Rebecca had said when she learned about the invitation. "I wouldn't pay for a man to lead me out of a burning building." Sometimes Rebecca's mother showed through a little in her daughter's attitudes.

"I'm giving myself a birthday gift, luv," Beulah had said. Her birthday was in November. "One beautiful brown, energeticyoung Austrian who doesn't know what's hit him. It's my money, luv, and I couldn't spend it better."

Jirg had written that he liked the idea and as soon as he was finished with his summer job, he would be happy to accept his old pupil's invitation. He had underlined pupil roguishly. He had some clean outdoor job on a farm in the summer. He had sent another picture, to keep his memory green. It was of himself, winning a ski teachers' race at the end of the season. He was wearing goggles and a helmet and was going so fast that the picture was a little blurred, but Beulah was certain she would have recognized him anyway. She had pasted the picture in a big scrapbook that contained photographs of all the men she had had affairs with.

There was one thing really worrying Beulah as she sat in her robe in the living room, watching Rebecca buff her nails. She hadn't yet decided where to put Jirg. Ideally, the best place would be the apartment. She and Rebecca had separate rooms and the bed in her room was a double one and it wasn't as though she and Rebecca were shy about bringing men home with them. And stashing Jirg away in a hotel would cost money and he wouldn't always be on hand when she wanted him. But Rebecca had had an unsettling effect on some of her other boyfriends, with her red hair and white skin and that brazen (that was the only word for it, Beulah thought), that brazen Brooklyn camaraderie with men. And let's face it, Beulah thought, she's a wonderful girl and I'd trust her with my life, but when it comes to men, there isn't a loyal bone in her body. And a poor gullible ski teacher who'd never been off the mountain in his life and used to avid girls coming and going in rapacious batches all winter long.... And sometimes Beulah had to work at night or go out of town for several days at a time on a job....

She had been puzzling over the problem ever since she got the letter from Jirg and she still hadn't made up her mind. Play it by ear, she decided. See what the odds are on the morning line.

"There you are," Rebecca said, pushing her hand away. "The anointed bride."

"Thanks, luv," Beulah said, admiring her nails. "I'll buy you lunch at P.J.'s." There were always a lot of extra men who ate lunch at P.J.'s on Saturday, with nothing to do for the weekend and an eye out for companionship or whatever, and maybe she could make a connection for Rebecca and get her out of the apartment at least for the afternoon and evening. With luck, for the whole night.

"Naah," Rebecca said, standing and yawning. "I don't feel like going out. I'm going to stay home and watch the game of the week on the tube."

Shift, Beulah said to herself.

Then the phone rang.

"Miss Stickney's residence," Beulah said into the phone. She always answered that way, as though she were a maid or the answering service, so that if it was some pest, she could say, "Miss Stickney's not at home. Can I take a message?"

"May I speak to Miss Stickney, please?"

"Who's calling?"

"Mr. Bagshot."

"Who?"

"From the Browsing--"

"Hi, luv," Beulah said. "My book on Sicily come in yet, you know the one?"

"It's on order," Christopher said. He was disappointed with this commercial prelude, even though she called him luv. "What I'm phoning for, beautiful," he said daringly, suddenly deciding to be racy and familiar, put himself right up there on her level, so to speak, "what I'm phoning for is what do you say you and me we hit the town tonight?"

"Hit what?" Beulah asked, puzzled.

"Well, I thought I just happen to be free and maybe you're hanging loose yourself and we could go to some joint for dinner and then split off downtown to the Electric--"

"Oh, shit, luv," Beulah said, "I'm prostrate with grief. This is Drearsville Day for me. I've got an aunt coming into Kennedy from Denver this P.M. and God knows when I can get rid of her." It was standard policy on her part never to admit that she even knew another man whenasked for a date.

"Oh, that's all right...."

"Wait a minute, luv," she said. "There's a buzz at the door. Hold fast, like a dear." She put her hand over the phone. "Hey, Becky," she said to Rebecca, who was screwing the top on the nail-polish bottle, "how'd you like to hit the town with a divine--"

"Hit what?"

"That beautiful boy from the bookstore is on the phone. He's invited me to dinner. But--"

"That dwarf?" Rebecca said.

"He's not so small, actually," Beulah said. "He's very well proportioned."

"I don't go in for comedy acts," Rebecca said. "He'd have to use his ladder even to get into scoring territory."

"There's no need to be vulgar about my friends," Beulah said frigidly, realizing finally that the whole Sixth Fleet wouldn't be able to get her roommate out of the house today. "And I do think it shows a surprisingly ugly side to your character. Prejudice is the word, luv. It's a kind of anti-Semitism, if you want to know what I think."

"Tell him to pick on somebody his own size," Rebecca said, taking the nail polish into the bathroom.

Beulah lifted her hand from the phone. "It was the super with the mail, luv," she said. "Bills and more bills."

"Yeah," said Christopher dispiritedly, "I know how it is." He remembered that Beulah Stickney owed him $47 since July, but of course this was not the time to bring it up. "Well, have a nice time...." He prepared to hang up.

"Hold on, Chris. ..." That was his name, Christopher. "Maybe something can be salvaged from Be Kind to Aunts Day, after all. Maybe I can get her drunk at the airport or she'll turn out to be suffering from some dreadful female disease and will have to plunge into bed. ..." The plane was due at 3:15, but you never could tell, it might be held up for engine trouble or darling Jirg, who had never been out of the hills before, might be confused by the wild traffic of the city of Zurich and miss the connection or go to the wrong gate and wind up in Tehran. Or even, the way things were going with airlines these days, the plane could be highjacked or bombed by Arabs or just fall down into a lake in Labrador. One thing she couldn't bear and that was having dinner alone. "I'll tell you what, you just sit there among all those lovely books like a good boy and I'll get on the horn this afternoon and tell you if Auntie looks like conking out or not. What time do you stay open to?"

"Seven o'clock," Christopher said.

"You poor overworked boy," Beulah said. "Stay near the phone, luv."

"Yeah," Christopher said.

"It was dear of you to call," Beulah said and hung up. She always concluded on the telephone with "It was dear of you to call" and without saying goodbye. It was original and it spread good will.

She looked at the clock and then went into the bathroom to experiment with her hair.

Christopher put the phone down slowly, the palms of his hands damp. The store felt verywarm and he went to the front door and opened it. He stared out at Madison Avenue. People were passing by in the sunlight. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it looked to him as though the tall people on the avenue were strolling and the short ones were, well, burrowing. He closed the door and went back into the shop, reflecting on his conversation with Stickney, Beulah. If luck had been with him, if he'd had a premonition or extrasensory perception or something, he'd have asked to speak to Rebecca Fleischer, instead of Beulah Stickney. The chances were that no aunt of Rebecca Fleischer's was coming in from Denver that afternoon. Now, after having tried to make it with Beulah, he could not call back and ask Rebecca. There were limits. The girl would be mortally offended, being tapped to go into the game as a substitute, as it were, and he wouldn't blame her.

He didn't trust Beulah's ability to get rid of her aunt before seven o'clock. He had aunts of his own and once they got hold of you, they stuck.

Back to the address book. It was nearly 12 o'clock and people would be going out to lunch and then matinees or linen showers or whatever it was girls went to on Saturday afternoons.

Caroline Trowbridge was in bed with Scotty Powalter. At one time, Caroline Trowbridge had been Caroline Powalter, but Scotty Powalter had found her in bed with his ex-roommate from Yale, Giuliano Ascione, and had divorced her for adultery. It hadn't been a completely friendly divorce. It had been all over the New York Daily News and Caroline had been dropped from the social register the next year, but she and Scotty had what they both agreed was a Big Physical Thing for each other and every once in a while they spent a night or a week together untilsomething happened to remind Scotty of his ex-roommate at Yale.

The truth was that Caroline had a Big Physical Thing with almost every man she met. She was a tall, sturdy, inbred, healthy social-register kind of girl who was crazy about boats and horses and Italians and if she had had to swear to it under oath, she wouldn't have been able to say what was more fun--leaping a ditch on an Irish hunter or crewing a Dragon in a force-six gale or going on a weekend to a sinful little inn in the country with one of her husband's best friends.

Despite her catholic approval of the entire male sex, she often regretted not being married to Scotty anymore. He was six feet, four inches tall and built accordingly and the way he behaved in bed, you'd never suspect he came from one of the oldest families along the Main Line in Philadelphia. His family continued on page 260)Small Saturday(continued from page 122) had a place up in Maine with horses and he had a 60-foot ketch at Center Island and he didn't have to bother with anything boring like working. As she sometimes said to her lovers, if he hadn't been so insanely and irrationally possessive, it would have been the marriage of the century.

He had called her the evening before from the Racquet Club, where he had been playing backgammon. When she recognized his voice on the telephone and he said he was calling from the Racquet Club, she knew he had been losing, because he always got horny when he lost at backgammon, especially on weekends. She'd canceled the man she was supposed to go to Southampton with--after all, husbands, even ex-husbands, came first--and Scotty had come over and she'd opened two cans of turtle soup and they'd been in bed ever since 9:30 the night before. It had been such a complete night that sometime around dawn, he'd even mentioned something about getting remarried. It was almost noon now and they were hungry and she got out of bed and put on a pink terry-cloth robe and went into the kitchen to make some bloody marys, for nourishment. She was always strict with herself about no drinks before 11 o'clock, because she had seen too many of her friends go that route. She was dashing in the Worcestershire sauce when the phone rang.

• • •

What Christopher liked about her. he thought, as his hand hovered over the phone, preparing to dial, was that she was wholesome. In the polluted city, she was a breath of fresh country air. If you didn't know about her and her family's steel mills and her divorce and her expulsion from the social register, you'd think she was a girl just in from the farm, milking cows. She came into the shop often, breezing in with a big childish smile, hanging onto a man's arm, a different one each time, and buying large, expensive, color-plate books about boats or horses. She had an account at the shop, but usually the man with her would pay for the books and then she would throw her strong firm arms around her escort and kiss him enthusiastically in gratitude, no matter who was looking.

She had kissed Christopher once, too. Although not in the shop. He had gone to the opening of a one-man show at an art gallery four doors down on Madison Avenue and she was there, too, squinting over the heads of the other connoisseurs at the geometric forms in clashing colors that represented the painter's reaction to being alive in America. Extraordinarily, she was unaccompanied, and when she spotted Christopher, she bulled her way through the crowd, smiling sexily, and said. "My deliverer," and put her arm through his and stroked his forearm. There was something unnatural about her being alone, like a free-floating abalone. Her predestined form was the couple. Knowing this, Christopher was not particularly Mattered by her attention, since it was no more personal than a swan's being attracted to a pond or a wildcat to a pine tree. Still, the touch of her capable ex-social-register fingers on his arm was cordial.

"I suppose," she said, "clever man that you are, that you know what all this is about."

"Well...." Christopher began.

"They remind me of my trigonometry class at Chatham Hall. That distressing pi sign. Don't they make you thirsty, Mr.--uh?"

"Bagshot."

"Of course. Why don't you and I just sidle out of here like true art lovers and go out into the night and snap on one or two martinis?"

They were nearly at the door by now, anyway, so Christopher said, as brightly as he could. "Right on." The owner of the gallery, who was a business friend of his, was near the door, too, looking at him with a betrayed expression for leaving so quickly. Christopher tried to show, by a grimace and a twitch of his shoulders, that he was under the sway of powers stronger than he and that he would come back soon, but the doubted that he communicated.

They went to the Westbury Polo Bar and sat in one of the booths and ordered martinis and Caroline Trowbridge sat very close to him and rubbed her knee against his and told him how lucky he was to have a vocation in life, especially one as rewarding as his, involved in the fascinating world of books. She had no vocation, she said sadly, unless you could consider horses and sailing a vocation, and she had to admit to herself that with the way the world was going--just look at the front page of any newspaper--horses and boats were revoltingly frivolous, and didn't he think they ought to call a waiter and order two more martihis?

By the time they had finished the second martini, she had his head between her two strong hands and was looking down into his eyes. She had a long torso as well as long legs and she loomed over him in the semiobscurity of the Polo Bar. "Your eyes," she was saying, "are dark, lambent pools." Perhaps she hadn't paid much attention in the trigonometry class at Chatham Hall, but she certainly had listened in freshman English.

Emboldened by alcohol and lambency, Christopher said, "Caroline"--they were on a first-name basis by now--"Caroline, have dinner with me?"

"Oh, Christopher," she said, "what a dear thoughtful thing to say," and kissed him. On the lips. She had a big mouth, that went with the rest of her, and she was pleasantly damp.

"Well," he said when she unstuck, "shall we?"

"Oh, my poor, dear, beautiful little manikin," she said, "nothing would give me greater joy. But I'm occupied until a week from next Thursday." She looked at her watch and jumped up, pulling her coat around her. "Rum dum dum," she cried, " I'm hideously tardy right this very moment and everybody will be cross with me all the wretched night and say nasty things to me and tweak my ear and suspect the worst and never believe I was in an art gallery, you naughty boy." She leaned over and pecked the top of his head. "What bliss," she said and was gone.

He ordered another martini and had dinner alone, remembering her kiss and the curious way she had of expressing herself. One day, when she was a little less busy, he knew he was going to see her again. And not in the shop.

• • •

Oh, damn, she thought as she reached for the phone hanging on the kitchen wall, I forgot to switch it to the answering service. When she expected Scotty over, she made a practice of instructing the service to pick up all calls on the first ring, because nothing infuriated Scotty more than hearing her talk to another man. She loved him, divorce or no divorce, but she had to admit that he was a neurotically suspicious creature.

"Hello," she said.

"Caroline," the male voice said, "this is Christopher----"

"Sorry, Christopher," she said, "you have the wrong number," and hung up. Then she unhooked the phone, so that if he called again, he'd get a busy signal. She still had the bottle of Worcestershire sauce in her hand and she shook a few more spurts into the tomato juice. She added a double shot of vodka, to calm Scotty down, if by any chance he didn't believe that it was a wrong number.

Scotty was lying with his eyes closed, all the covers thrown off, when she came into the bedroom with the bloody marys. He really filled a bed, Scotty; you got your money's worth of man with her ex-husband. His expression was peaceful, almost as if he had gone back to sleep. The phone on the table next to the bed didn't look as though it had been moved, she noted with relief.

"All up on deck for grog," she said cheerily.

He sat up, monumentally, muscles rippling, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He reached out his hand and took the glass from her, looked at it consideringly, then hurled it against the opposite wall. A good part of the room turned red.

"Oh, Scotty," she said reproachfully, "don't tell me you're being seized by one of your unreasonable moods again." She backed off a little, being careful to avoid broken glass, and took two swift swallows of bloody mary for her nerves.

He stood up. It was an awful sight when he stood up naked like that in a comparatively small bedroom. It was like seeing the whole front line of the Green Bay Packers wrapped into one moving in on you. The funny scar on his forehead that he had had since his brother had hit him with a baseball bat when they were boys, and which stood out when he was angry, was turning a frightening bright pink.

"Scotty Powalter," she said. "I absolutely forbid you to touch me."

Thank God he only slapped me with an open hand, she thought as she reeled back into a chair, still miraculously holding onto her drink.

"You're unjust," she said from the depths of the chair. "You're a fundamentally unjust man. Hitting a girl for a little old wrong number."

"Some wrong number," be said. "Who's Christopher?"

"How should I know who Christopher is? This voice said, 'Hello, this is Christopher,' and I said--"

"This voice said, 'Caroline,'" Scotty said.

"Sneak," she said. "Listening in on other people's conversations. Is that what they taught you at Yale?" Scotty wasn't really unintelligent, but his thought processes were cumbersome and sometimes you could fuddle him and make him forget his dreadful intentions by attacking him.

"I suppose he was calling up to remind you you had a date to screw him this afternoon," Scotty said. "Knowing how dizzy you are about little matters like that."

"You're fully aware of what I think about your vocabulary, Scotty," Caroline said with dignity.

"Fuck my vocabulary," Scotty said.

"If you must know, and I don't see where it's any business of yours, anyway, considering the nature of our relationship," she said, "I haven't had a date with anybody since a week ago last Tuesday. And if your poor little brain isn't drowned in the mists of alcohol, you'll recall that a week ago last Tuesday, you didn't get out of this very bed until six p.m. Wednesday." As she spoke, she began to believe herself and tears of self-pity formed in her eyes. It was almost like being married again.

"Who's Christopher?" Scotty said. He began to prowl dangerously, like a berserk elephant, and she feared for the lamps and other glassware in the room.

"I'm perfectly willing to tell you," she said, "if you'll stop marauding around like some mad beast in the jungle. You know I've never hid anything significant from you."

"Hah," he said, but he stopped prowling.

"He's just a poor little table-model clerk in a bookstore on Madison Avenue," Caroline said. "He's just a little Shetland pony of a man, you'd be ashamed of yourself being jealous of him if you ever saw him."

"He called you, no matter what size he is," Scotty said stubbornly.

"Sometimes he calls me when he gets in a book he thinks I'd like."

"The Child's Manual of Sex," Scotty said. "A Thousand and Three Indian Positions. I can guess what kind of bookstore he runs."

"That's hardly the way to talk to a woman who's been your wife," Caroline said fastidiously. "If you want to see with your own eyes and convince yourself once and for all, just you get yourself dressed and I'll take you over to Madison Avenue and I'll bet you'll take one look and get down right then and there on your beaded knee and beg my forgiveness for the bestial way you've treated me this morning."

"I don't want to get dressed," Scotty said. "I want a bloody mary and I want to go back to bed. In that order. Make it snappy."

He was like that. Anger aroused other emotions in him.

He was stretching himself on the bed like some huge beached vessel as she went out of the bedroom toward the kitchen to make another batch of bloody marys. Her head was ringing a little from that Yale-sized slap along the side of her jaw, but she was pleased with her over-all handling of what could very easily have developed into a crisis. As she shook the bloody marys, she hummed to herself. She might, later on, at the proper moment, remind Scotty that along about dawn he had mentioned the possibility of getting remarried. And she was damn well going to get him to write a check to have the bedroom repapered. And if he turned ugly again this afternoon, as he was likely to do, there was always that dear little man waiting patiently on Madison Avenue.

• • •

Wrong number, Christopher thought, staring at the dead phone in his hand. Who is she kidding? That was no wrong number. He had an annoyed impulse to dial her again, just to show her that he wasn't being fooled, but decided against it, out of tact. He could imagine all too well why she had said it was a wrong number.

Luckily, a spate of customers entered the store and he was too busy wrapping books and ringing up cash to brood about it.

By the time the store emptied in the lunchtime lull, he had almost convinced himself that it didn't matter at all to him what Caroline Trowbridge did with her Saturday afternoon.

He sat down at the desk by the cash register and took out his address book.

• • •

Toye, Dorothea**. He would never have given her two stars on his own, although she was pretty enough and if she wasn't exactly five feet, eight inches tall, she was certainly in the neighborhood of five feet, seven and a half. She was not a flashy woman. She was shapely, but in a polite way, and wore simple, sober-colored, almost college-girl clothes, or at least the kind of clothes that girls used to wear in college, and although he guessed she was 28 or 29, her appearance was demure, her voice low and hesitant, her smile rare. The first two or three times she came into the shop, he had hardly remarked her. But then he had noticed that if there were other men in the shop, even old men or men who at other times seemed to lose themselves in the books, they would slowly begin following her with their eyes and then somehow drift helplessly in her direction. He regarded Dorothea Toye more carefully to see what it was that acted so magnetically on his male customers. He decided that it was probably her complexion. She was always a light tan, with a glow, like a touch of the sun, on her silken skin. She was brilliantly clean. If Caroline Trowbridge looked like a girl just in from a farm, Dorothea Toye looked like a child who had just splashed out of the sea to be dried with a rough towel by her mother. He had been surprised when she had ordered a book of prints by Aubrey Beardsley.

He had been even more surprised when one of his old customers, Mr. O'Malley, who to the best of his knowledge had never spoken a word to the lady, had followed her out of the shop one afternoon at three o'clock and gotten into a cab with her. It was then that he had awarded her her second star. Seeing her get into a cab with Mr. O'Malley heightened his interest in her.

She didn't buy many books, but concentrated for the most part on the small record library against the rear wall, buying albums of every new Broadway musical. At the cut-rate music stores and discount houses farther downtown, she could have gotten the same albums much more cheaply, but as she once told Christopher while he was wrapping the album of Hair for her, "I don't go downtown much. I'm really a homebody."

She was an outside chance, Dorothea Toye, but the day was passing swiftly.

He dialed her number. The phone rang and rang and he was just about to give up when it was answered.

"Yes?" The voice was businesslike, but it was Dorothea Toye's.

"This is Christopher Bagshot. ..."

"Who?" Now the voice was cold and suspicious.

It was a dream of Christopher's that the day would come on which people would not say, "Who?" when he said, "This is Christopher Bagshot."

"From the bookstore, Miss Toye."

"Oh, yes." The voice was warmer but had a hint of puzzlement in it.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you," Christopher said.

"Oh, no, I'm just making myself a bit of breakfast." Christopher looked at his watch. It was nearly one o'clock, and he realized he was hungry. He wondered briefly where Miss Toye could have been the night before to be having breakfast now at one P.M.

"I guess you're surprised, my calling you up like this, I mean," Christopher said, "but I thought----"

"Oh, I get a lot of calls," Miss Toye said. She sounded husky and not demure over the phone.

"I'm sure you do," Christopher said gallantly. "What I am calling about is--I mean, what are you doing tonight?"

Miss Toye laughed peculiarly.

"I could see if I could get some tickets to a show," he said hurriedly, "unless, of course, you've seen them all."

"I'm booked from eight on tonight, honey," Miss Toye said, "but if you want, you could come over right now."

"I can't leave the store," Christopher said, confused by the bluntness of the invitation. "And I don't close till around seven and. ..."

"Well," Miss Toye said, "I can handle it at seven, if you don't waste any time getting over here. Fifty dollars."

"What was that, Miss Toye?" Christopher said faintly.

"I said my price was fifty dollars." She sounded annoyed at something.

At that moment, the front door of the shop opened and June came in, wearing a raincoat, although there wasn't a cloud in the sky. She waved gaily. Christopher tried to frown in a businesslike way as he cupped the telephone in both hands. He felt himself getting very rosy. "I'm afraid that isn't exactly what I had in mind, madam," he said.

"Look, Mr. Bagshot," Miss Toye said crisply, "you don't give books away free, do you?"

June was approaching him swiftly.

"I'll talk it over with my father," Christopher said loudly as June came into earshot, "and perhaps we can come to an arrangement."

Miss Toye's second laugh was even more peculiar than the first one had been. Christopher put the telephone down decisively as June kissed him on the cheek.

"My idea," June said, "is that you close the shop and take me to lunch."

"You know I can't do that." He walked away quickly from the phone and June followed him.

"You have to eat," she said.

"I call the deli and they deliver," he said. He wondered what he could say, without actually hurting her feelings, to discourage her from these raids at all hours.

"You look like someone in the final stages of mal de mer," June said. She was studying French at Berlitz in case she ever had the occasion to go to France. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter. Nothing."

"My God, we're emphatic today," June said. "Ok, nothing. You glad I came?"

"As always," he said. His conversation with Miss Toye had done something cramping to his throat and he had difficulty in pronouncing words correctly. Ordinarily, he would have been happy to see June come into the shop, she was a sweet girl, darling, even, at certain times, but her coming in just when Miss Toye was laughing that bruising laugh on the telephone showed an unfortunate, even if unconscious, sense of timing on June's part.

His nose began to run. It was a familiar symptom. Whenever he was under tension, his nose leaked. In school, he always went to exams with three large handkerchiefs in his pockets. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew vigorously.

"Are you catching a cold or something?" June asked.

"Not that I know of." He sneezed. He wondered if any other of Miss Toye's potential clients were affected the same way after a telephone call.

"I know an absolutely fabulous pill that----"

"I am not catching a cold," he said. He blew again.

"You don't have to snap my head off just because I show a normal human interest in your health," June said.

"June," he said, "I'm having a rough day. All alone here in the store and--"

"I'm sorry," June said, instantly contrite. "That's why I came. I thought I might cheer you up. Maybe even help you a little this afternoon. ..."

"That's awfully sweet of you," he said, aghast at the thought of having June there with Miss Anderson coming in around five o'clock and maybe even Beulah Stickney, too, if she got rid of her aunt. "But it's too complicated with someone who isn't familiar with the stock and all."

"Anyway," June said, "I'm going to have lunch with you. No protests." She certainly was a bossy girl. "I'll go to the delicatessen myself and buy us both a perfectly scrumptious lunch and we'll have a picnic in the office."

There was no getting out of it, so he pulled out his wallet and took a five-dollar bill from it. But June waved it away. "This lunch is on me," she said. "I've had a big week." She worked out of an office that supplied temporary secretarial help and some weeks she made as much as $150. She wouldn't take a permanent job, because she had come all the way East from Pasadena to become a singer. She studied with a man who said he had been responsible for Petula Clark.

Christopher put the five-dollar bill back into his wallet.

"Aren't you insanely happy now I came by?" she asked.

"Insanely," he said.

"Then smile," she said, "and say something nice."

"I love you," he said. That's what she meant when she said say something nice.

"That's better," she said. She kissed him briefly and went out, blonde and small, lovable and intent on marriage, in her raincoat. She always wore a raincoat to protect her throat, just in case.

He thought of Miss Toye and had to blow his nose again.

"Isn't this cozy?" June asked as they ate their roast-beef sandwiches and pickles and drank their milk at the table in the little back office. June was against alcohol because of her throat.

"Uh-huh," Christopher said, chewing hard on a piece of gristle.

"Sometimes, when I'm alone," June said, "and I happen to think of this little room, I'm almost tempted to cry."

The reason she was tempted to cry was that the first time they had kissed, it had been in the little back office. If you wanted to look at it that way, it had all started there. The kiss had been wonderful and it had led to other and better things and there was no denying they had had a lot of fun together and she was a pretty and lively girl, nubile and often gay; but still the dark little office was hardly a shrine, for heaven's sake.

He tried to make himself think unkindly about her. When he was exposed to her for any length of time, he felt himself melting in her direction and once or twice he had been perilously close to asking her to marry him. Maybe if before he had met her he'd known a lot of tall girls intimately and had a standard of comparison, they'd be married already.

Sitting there in the cluttered little office watching her lick mayonnaise off her finger with delicious unself-consciousness, he was tempted to forget his whole damn crusade and ask her to have dinner with him that night, even though he'd lied to her successfully and told her he had to have dinner with his mother and father in Westchester that night--they were getting uptight about never seeing him anymore, now that he'd found a girl. But the front doorbell rang just as he was about to speak and he had to go out into the store and stand around for almost a half hour while an elderly couple shuffled around the poetry counter denouncing Allen Ginsberg and finally buying a play in verse by Christopher Fry that must have been on the shelves since the year one.

While the old couple were still fussing around the store, June had come out of the back office, putting on her raincoat, and had whispered, "I have to go now." She had a date with a girlfriend in front of the Museum of Modern Art and then, since he was busy tonight, maybe they'd go to a concert at Town Hall. "Call me tomorrow. And have a nice evening with your family," she said, and kissed him quickly, at a moment when the old couple had their backs to them.

He had a severe twinge of guilt as he watched the brave little raincoated figure vanish through the doorway. Perfidy did not come easily to him. He even took a step toward the door, to tell her to come back, but at that moment the old lady called, "Young man, I believe we'll take this one," waving the Christopher Fry about like a captured bird.

When he escorted the old couple to the door and opened it for them, he looked across the street and could have sworn that he saw Paulette Anderson walking uptown, holding the arm of a man with wavy gray hair. They seemed to be in earnest conversation.

One more shot, he decided, and then the hell with it.

He went through his address book with the utmost care. He didn't want to have any more Dorothea Toyes sprung on him.

He stopped at the Ms. Marsh, Susan. She wasn't preternaturally tall, but she was a good size and you could be sure she wouldn't ever ask a man $50 for the pleasure of her company. She was a dark girl with green eyes who was politically advanced, although in a quiet, unpushy way. The reason Christopher knew she was politically advanced was that the only books she ever showed an interest in were written by people like Fanon and Marcuse and Cleaver and LeRoi Jones and Marshall McLuhan. She had beautiful legs. It was unsettling to sell books of that nature to a girl with legs as beautiful as that.

She had once told Christopher that he had a good mind. It was then that he had put her name in his address book and given her two stars. She had been caught in the shop by a rainstorm and they had got to talking. It turned out she was from a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe that she despised. She had been one of the youngest girls ever to graduate from Radcliffe and had intended to take her master's in philosophy when she had seen the irrelevance of it all. She expressed disapproval of every book Christopher was displaying at the moment in the window and he said, "Actually, the whole world would be better off if they didn't print another book for the next fifty years."

That's when she said he had a good mind. "Books are dividers," she said. "They form a false elite. To immerse ourselves in the masses, we need song, ritual and bloodshed." She had invited him to a meeting that night that she said might interest him, but he had a date with June and he had to decline.

Now, seeing her name in his book, he remembered the rainy afternoon and the quiet beauty of her green eyes and her sensational legs. A girl with legs like that, he thought, doesn't use them just for walking, no matter what her politics are.

He reached for the phone. But just as he was about to pick it up, the front door opened and a huge young man without a hat entered the shop, took three steps into the room and stopped, staring the length of the shop at him with a pensive but at the same time somehow threatening expression on his heavy, handsome face. Six feet, four, Christopher thought automatically. At least.

Christopher moved away from the phone to the new customer, who remained planted and silent in the aisle in a tentlike raglan tweed coat, his face ruddy and athletic, with an old diagonal scar pinkish on his forehead, running down almost into one eye.

"May I help you, sir?" Christopher said.

"No," the man said, continuing to stare fixedly at him. "I'm browsing. This is The Browsing Corner, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm browsing." But the man never looked at a book, just at Christopher, as though he were measuring Christopher for some unpleasant uniform or deciding whether he could use him for some unpleasant purpose.

Christopher turned away to fuss with a display of books on a table. The man didn't move and the only sound from him was a rather hoarse breathing. He was too well dressed to be a stick-up man and he didn't have the look of somebody who was interested in books. Naturally, Christopher couldn't call Susan Marsh with a customer like that in the shop.

Christopher was pleased when a young couple came into the shop and negotiated their way around the huge man in the middle of the aisle and asked if he had a copy of The Red Badge of Courage. Christopher knew he didn't have a copy, but he told the young couple to wait while he looked in back. He stayed in back as long as he dared. By that time, the young couple were gone, but the man was still there, still with that fixed, pensive, animallike stare.

"Have you found anything you like?" Christopher ventured.

"I'm still browsing," the man said. He had the gift of immobility. While Christopher moved nervously from Popular Fiction to Drama to Biography to Greeting Cards, the man stood there, still, mountainlike, only unblinking his eyes, flicking in their sockets, to follow Christopher's movements.

This is the worst Saturday afternoon I have lived through in my life, Christopher thought, after it had gone on for what must have been at least half an hour.

Finally, the man said, "Hah!" and shrugged. He smiled slowly. "Thank you," he said, "it's been a nice browse, Christopher." Massively, he departed.

Christopher looked after him, confounded. Christopher! How did the man know his name? He could have sworn he had never seen him before in his life. The city is full of nuts, he said to himself. And it's getting worse.

For some reason, he was trembling and he sat down to calm his nerves. Then he remembered he had had his hand on the phone to call Susan Marsh when the tall stranger had come into the shop. It was a lucky thing he wasn't in the middle of an intimate conversation when the door had opened.

He strode over to the phone, determined not to let himself be shaken. His hand was almost steady as he dialed Susan Marsh's number.

• • •

Sue watched closely as Harry Argonaut put the machine together on the carpet in her living room. The time might come when she would have to do it herself and there was no room for error. Harry Argonaut wasn't his real name. It was his nom de plume or, more accurately, his nom de guerre. He was a small, pudgy, slow-moving man. Although he was only 24, he was already bald. Fred Drabner, who had brought over the detonating device after lunch, was seated in an Eames armchair, watching Harry Argonaut attach the last two wires. The machine was to be used that night in Newark. Newark, had been picked for the demonstration because it was one of the most explosive communities in America and the bombing of a bank in the heart of the city would createmaximum confusion and with luck provoke some shooting by the police and perhaps a few spectacular arrests of innocent passers-by.

The room was quiet as Harry worked. It was a nice room, luxuriously furnished, because Sue got a whopping allowance from her family in Grosse Pointe. Now she gave almost all her money to the movement, but she had leased the apartment and furnished it before she had seen the light. Since it was on a very good block just off Park Avenue, in a convented town house with high-rent apartments and no doorman, it was a perfect place for making bombs.

Harry Argonaut, whose accent could have come from any part of the country, hadn't told them yet who was going to take the machine to Newark. He gave out information sparingly and at the latest possible moment.

He was caressing the little machine lightly when the telephone rang.

Sue looked inquiringly at Harry, waiting for orders.

"Answer it," he said.

She went over to the leather-topped English mahogany desk in front of the windows and picked up the phone. She was conscious of Harry Argonaut and Fred Drabner watching her intently in the lamplight. All the curtains were drawn and the room looked like evening.

"May I speak to Miss Marsh?" the man said on the phone.

"This is Miss Marsh."

"This is Christopher Bagshot, Miss Marsh."

"Who?"

"From the bookstore."

"Oh, yes." Her tone was noncommittal and she watched Harry Argonaut for signs.

"I was wondering if you'd like to have dinner with me tonight, Miss Marsh."

She thought the man sounded strange, as though the simple sentence was for some reason costing him a great deal of effort to get out.

Harry Argonaut was moving his lips elaborately, silently mouthing the question. "Who is it?"

"Hold on for a moment, please, Mr. Bagshot," Sue said. "A friend of mine is just leaving andI have to say goodbye." She put her hand over the phone. "It's a man called Bagshot," she said to Harry. "He works in the bookstore on Madison Avenue."

"What does he want?" Harry asked.

"He wants to take me to dinner tonight."

"Let me think," Harry said. That was one reliable thing about Harry--he always took time to size up every situation and figure out what advantage might be drawn from it. "Do you know him well?" he asked.

"I've spoken to him four or five times, that's all."

"Do you think he suspects anything?"

"Oh, no. He's a harmless little man." She regretted the little. Harry was no taller than Mr. Bagshot.

"Why is he calling at this hour on Saturday to ask you for dinner?"

Sue shrugged. "Maybe his girl stood him up and he's lonely."

"How did he get your telephone number?"

"It's in the book, for one thing," Sue said. She was used to Harry's intensive questioning by now. "And I have a charge account with him besides."

"Get an unlisted number first thing Monday," Harry said.

Sue nodded. She wondered if Bagshot was still on the phone.

Harry thought for 30 seconds, kneeling on the carpet, his eyes closed in concentration.

"Tell him you can't give him an answer now," he said, "but that you have to pass by his shop in a half hour or so and you'll drop in and tell him then. Go ahead."

Sue nodded. She didn't know what was in Harry's mind, but whatever it was, it was part of a greater plan.

"Mr. Bagshot," she said, "are you still there?"

"Yes." His voice was eager.

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but--"

"Oh, that's perfectly all right, Miss Marsh," he said.

"I'm a little up in the air right now," Sue said, "and I'm late for an appointment. But I'll be passing by your shop in a half hour or so. I ought to be sorted out by then, and if I can possibly make it, I'd adore having dinner with you." Being in the movement was a lot like being in the theater. The better you were as an actress, the more effective you were as a revolutionary.

"That's fine, Miss Marsh," Bagshot said. The way he said it, you could tell his life was full of postponements, if not worse. "I'll be waiting."

She hung up.

"Well done," Harry Argonaut said. She Hushed with pleasure. Coming from him, that was high praise, indeed.

Without speaking, Harry got up off his knees and went to the hall closet and took out the blue tennis bag that a small boy had delivered to her apartment three clays before. She had asked the boy no questions and had put the bag in the closet, hiding it behind a leather-and-canvas valise from Mark Cross that her father had given her as a Christmas present.

Harry brought the tennis bag into the living room and opened it. It was jammed with crumpled sheets of the Newark Evening News and the Newark Star-Ledger. While Sue and Fred Drabner watched him silently, he took out some of the newspapers and made a nest of those that remained and lovingly fitted the machine into the nest. Then he zipped up the bag and snapped a small padlock through the two overlapping eyelets in the brass zipper tags.

"Now," he said to Sue, "you're going to put on your nicest, most respectable dress and you're going to walk over to Madison Avenue carrying the tennis bag. You'll go into the shop and tell this fellow Bagshot that you haven't been able to get hold of this man you have a tentative date with, but you'll know definitely by six o'clock. You have some shopping to do, meanwhile, you say, and can you leave the bag there until you come back. You've got all that now?"

"Yes," Sue said and repeated word for word what he had told her.

"It's always safer policy," Harry said, "to store material in a place other than the one where the material is assembled. That way, if one cover is broken, all the others remain intact."

Sue wished Harry would let her take notes when he delivered his rare instructive generalities, but she knew it was out of the question.

"After you deposit the bag," Harry Argonaut said, "you come back here. I will not be here and neither will Fred. At a quarter to six, your phone will ring. A voice you will not recognize will say, 'I'll meet you at a certain corner.' If the person adds, 'At the southwest corner of Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, at six-thirty,' you will do the following. You will add ten to twenty-three, that makes Thirty-third Street, subtract one from eight, that makes Seventh Avenue, you will add one hour to the time, that makes seven-thirty, and you will reverse the compass points, that makes northeast corner. Got it?"

"Repeat, please," Sue said.

Harry repeated his instructions patiently. Then he made her repeat them back to him twice, until he was satisfied there would be no mistake. When he was certain that she knew what she was to do, he went on, "At six o'clock, you will go to the bookshop. You will tell the man that you'd be delighted to have dinner with him, but you have to go to a cocktail party, but that you'll meet him at a restaurant at eight-fifteen. Choose the restaurant yourself. Make sure that it is a crowded one, where you are well known. After you have made the contact and delivered the bag, take a taxi downtown to the Village. Get out in front of a restaurant there. When the taxi has gone, hail another taxi and go to the restaurant where you're going to meet the man from the bookstore."

"All clear," Sue said.

"Keep him out as late as possible. If he suggests going to his place, by all means do so. Just be back here at four A.M., for possible further instructions."

Sue nodded, then frowned.

"What is it?" Harry asked. He was terribly alert, even for the smallest signs.

"I have no money for all those taxis," Sue said. "I gave Fred my last ten dollars yesterday. And my allowance doesn't come in before the first."

Harry thought patiently about the absence of money. "Cash a check," he said.

"It's Saturday afternoon," she said, "the bank is closed. Anyway, I'm overdrawn this month."

Harry thought patiently again. "Cash a check in the bookstore. Is he good for a hundred, do you think?"

"I can try."

"Do the best you can," Harry said. "Now go get dressed." He was stuffing the extra newspapers from the tennis bag into the fireplace and once again Sue had to admire him for his foresight. If anything went wrong and the tennis bag were found, with the Newark newspapers in it, there would be nothing in her apartment that even by the wildest chance could connect her with the event. As she was pulling on a soft brown wool dress with a midiskirt, she could hear the crackling from the fireplace in the living room as the papers went up in flames.

She went back into the living room and put on a tweed coat over the brown dress and picked up the tennis bag. How invariably clever Harry was, she thought. Who would suspect that a well-dressed, aristocratic-looking girl carrying a tennis bag had destruction at her finger tips; saw, in her mind's eye, Park Avenue in ruins, Madison Avenue smoldering in the cleansing fire of revolution? She wanted to ask Harry when she was going to see him again. But she knew better and all she said was goodbye.

• • •

One hundred dollars, Christopher thought as he watched the door close behind Miss Marsh. I wonder if I wasn't a little excessive. He took the check out of the cash-register drawer and examined it once more, interested in the handwriting. It was bold but controlled, generous but intellectual. He put the check back into the cash-register drawer and picked up the blue tennis bag and carried it into the back office for safe-keeping. He tried to keep his excitement down. The bag was a hostage, a guarantee that she would return. And she had said that she was almost 100 percent sure that she would be free to have dinner with him tonight. And she hadn't been political at all during her brief visit, but sort of twinkly and almost coquettish, especially when he had been enterprising enough to say that it was a shame a girl like her, with legs like that, thought she had to wear a midiskirt, to be in fashion.

It was the most hopeful thing that had happened to him all day, he thought.

• • •

When Sue opened the door to her apartment with her key, she didn't have the time to be surprised that Harry and Fred were still there. There were four other men in the living room and they immediately turned out to be detectives.

Harry had handcuffs on his beautiful slender wrists, and he spoke to her quickly in a loud clear voice, "Don't say anything until we get a lawyer."

• • •

At exactly the moment that Sue Marsh was arrested, Beulah Stickney was in the glassed-in visitors' gallery at Kennedy peering down at the floor where the passengers from Zurich were waiting for their baggage before going through Customs. Quite a few miles away to the west, in a one-room apartment on East 87th Street that Omar Gadsden used, he said, when he was kept in town too late to go to his home in Mount Kisco, Paulette Anderson was fighting weakly to keep the silvery-haired commentator from tearing off her cashmere sweater.

"Please," she said plaintively, struggling to sit up on the day bed on which she somehow had been trapped. "Please. ..." He had gotten one hook of her brassiere undone. It was like wrestling with a man with ten arms. It was obscene for a man with that much gray hair to be so strong. "Yon mustn't. Mr. Gadsden," Paulette said, half smothered by a shoulder that butted into her mouth. "Really, you mustn't."

"Come on, treasure," Mr. Gadsden said hoarsely, all his ten arms working at once.

It was nice being called Treasure, even nicer that Angel of Hygeia, but she would have preferred it at a distance.

His behavior had come as a complete surprise. He had been fatherly and wise at lunch, suggesting delicious dishes and talking authoritatively about campus disorders and the ABM and Nixon's Southern strategy and integration and the relation of the G.N.P. to ecological decay in America. She didn't remember ever having a more informative lunch. He hadn't even tried to touch her hand in the restaurant. It had been so friendly and he seemed to be enjoying her company so much that she had ventured to say that she was invited down to a party in the Village that evening where he would meet some young people who would be wildly interested to hear his views. And he had said yes, he'd like to go, he knew a nice little place on Ninth Street where they could have dinner first. She had hoped that he would take her to a movie to fill in the time between lunch and dinner, but he said he was exhausted from the morning session with Dr. Levinson, as well he might be, poor man, and why didn't they go to this place of his that he kept for emergencies and play some music on the hi-fi and just relax until it was time to go downtown. Although she was disappointed about the movie, she told herself that she could go to a movie any time and when would she ever get the chance again to have Omar Gadsden for an entire afternoon, with the knowledge that when the evening came, she was going to give her friends something to talk about for months to come.

But in the meantime, Mr. Gadsden was working powerfully on her stockings. There was a fiendish' ingenuity to his attack. When she defended one place, the assault shifted, with demonic energy, to another. If this was the way he was when exhausted, he must be perfectly shocking when fresh. If his public were to see him now, she thought, they might take his pronouncements on public morality with a grain of salt.

Suddenly, he stopped. He didn't move away, but he stopped. He looked at her, wrinkling his lovely gray eyebrows inquiringly. His hair was tousled and he looked sad and disturbed. As long as he didn't move, she liked him very much. If you had to do it with an old man, she thought, he wouldn't be a bad one to start with. She lay on the couch, disheveled, skin showing here and there.

"What is it?" he asked. "Are you a Lesbian?"

She began to cry. Nothing as bad as that had ever been said to her before, she said. What she didn't tell him was that she was something even stranger. She was a virgin. She felt that she would die of shame if Mr. Gadsden found out that she was a virgin.

She sobbed bitterly, not knowing whether it was because Mr. Gadsden had asked her if she was a Lesbian or because she was a virgin. He took her in his arms and stroked her hair and kissed her tears away and said, "There, there, treasure," and in eight minutes she was lying naked on top of the day bed and Mr. Gadsden was taking off his shirt. She kept her eyes averted from him and looked at the photographs on the walls, of Mr. Gadsden with President Kennedy and Mr. Gadsden with Mayor Lindsay and Mr. Gadsden with John Kenneth Galbraith. When the moment comes, she thought, I'll close my eyes. I can't bear the thought of doing it in front of all those important people.

Mr. Gadsden seemed to be taking a long time and she looked over at him out of the corner of her eye. He was putting his shirt on.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You'd better get dressed. I can't go through with it."

She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of Mr. Gadsden, President Kennedy, Mayor Lindsay, John Kenneth Galbraith.

But she couldn't shut her ears. "I looked down at you, lying there, so young and perfect," Mr. Gadsden was saying, "and I thought of you in your white uniform performing those humble necessary tasks in Dr. Levinson's office, peering in at my bleeding jaws with all those weird little stumps of teeth, the ugly maw of age, and I thought, Omar Gadsden, you are trading on innocence and pity, you despicable old lecher; it is unbecoming and disgusting."

It was too bad that she was in no condition to appreciate him at that moment, because later on she realized he had never been as eloquent or convincing on any of the programs on which she had seen him.

"Get dressed, Paulette," he said gently, living up to his image. "I'll go into the bathroom until you're ready."

He left the room and she dressed slowly, half hoping he would come out and say he'd changed his mind. She didn't know how she'd ever be able to get this far with a man again.

But he didn't come out until she was fully dressed and had put up her hair, which had fallen loose in the scuffling.

He poured stiff whiskeys and they sat in elegiac silence in the dying light of the late October afternoon. When she reminded him timidly that he'd wanted to go to the party downtown. he said his jaws were hurting him and he was going to stay home and nurse them.

They had another drink and it was dark when she left his apartment, leaving him sunk in a chair, swishing whiskey around his wounded gums.

She remembered that she had told the boy in the bookstore that she'd come in around five. She didn't really make a decision, but she started across toward Madison. She had to go downtown tonight anyway, she told herself.

• • •

People came crowding into the baggage and Customs area from Immigration in clotted lumps of tourism and there was so much milling around that it would have been hard to pick out your own mother from the visitors' gallery, let alone a man you had only seen for 30 days in your whole life nine months before. Beulah peered through the plate glass anxiously, trying to spot Jirg, with people all around her waving spastically to relatives on the floor below and holding up babies and waving the babies' hands for them.

Finally, she saw him and she took a deep breath. He was wearing a long black-leather coat, down to his ankles, like an SS officer, and a green Tyrolean hat, with a feather. He was warm and he opened his coat and took off his hat to fan his face. Under the coat, he was wearing a bright-green tweed suit. Even from where she was standing. the bumps on the tweed looked like an outbreak of green boils. And when he took his hat off, she saw that he had gotten a haircut for his trip. A good economical haircut that would last a long time, probably until next spring. A wide pale expanse showed under the high, sharp hairline on the back of his neck, and his ears, she noticed for the first time, stuck out alarmingly from the bare pink scalp. Out of a sense of style, he was wearing long pointed Italian blue-suede shoes and fawn-colored suede gloves.

She regretted that she was farsighted.

Before he could see her, she shrank back away from the window to think. She wheeled and ran clown a corridor and went into the ladies' room. She looked around her wildly. There was a Tampax vending machine on the wall. "Thank God," she said. She pushed past a square little Puerto Rican lady with three little girls and fumbled for a coin and put it into the machine.

When she came out of the ladies' room, she didn't bother to go back to the visitors' gallery, but went directly to the exit where the passengers came out after clearing Customs. She fixed a wan smile on her lips and waited.

When he finally came out of Customs, he was thriftily carrying his own bags and sweating. He had put on weight since the end of the skiing season and his face was curiously round. He was short, she noticed, almost as short as the bookstore boy. Was it possible that he could have shrunk since last winter? When he saw her, he dropped his bags, making an old lady behind him stumble, and roared, "Schalzl," at her and nearly knocked down a child of three runningover to embrace her.

The leather coat smelled as though it had been improperly cured, she noted as he kissed her, and he had doused himself with airline lavatory perfume. If I have a friend at this airport who recognizes me, she thought as she permitted herself to be chucked under the chin, I shall sink through the floor.

"Here," she said, "we'd better get your bags out of the way. I'll help you."

"Finally in your country I come," Jirg said as they gathered up the bags and started toward the taxis. "Where is the nearest bed?"

"Sssh," Beulah said. "They understand English here." Her eyes swiveled around uneasily. The people on both sides of her looked very thoughtful.

"They giff me a big party for farewell, the boys," Jirg said. For the first time she realized leis voice had been trained for shouting instructions to people caught in distant avalanches. "They know you wait for me. You should hear some of the jokes they make. You would laughing die."

"I bet," Beulah said.

They got into a taxi, Jirg holding onto the little air travel bag he was carrying.

"Where to, lady?" the driver asked.

Oy, she thought. "I'll tell you when you cross the bridge to Manhattan," she said.

The driver gave her a look. "Games," he said. He was one of those insufferable New York taxi drivers. He started his car with a neck-snapping jerk.

Jirg put his hand on her knee and looked conqueringly into her eyes. He had his hat on again.

"And what was the weather like?" she asked lovingly. "In Austria this summer, I mean."

"Always rain," he said. "Sometimes hail." He stroked her knee. In Austria it would have sent her through the ceiling with desire. His hands were horny with callus and she could hear him making snags in her stocking.

"Did you enjoy your trip?"

"Filthy," he said. "The plane was all Amerikaners. Maybe they are all right in their own country, but they hail no Kultur when they voyage. Except for one Amerikanerin I know." He leered selectively at her. He had had his teeth fixed since she had seen him last and one molar and one front tooth were pure gold. His hand went up her thigh, snagging thread.

"How was the food on the plane?" she asked, grabbing the other hand fondly, to immobilize it. She regretted not having worn culottes that day. They didn't offer much protection, but they offered some.

"Swiss food," he said. "For cows. And they make you pay for drinks. The Swiss love one thing. Money."

"All airlines charge for drinks in tourist class," she said, sweetly reasonable.

"Drink," he said. "Oh, that reminds me." He smiled benevolently. "I brought my Amerikanisches Schatzl a gift."

In the rearview mirror, she saw the taxi driver grimace, as though he had a gas pain. Jirg took his hand off her leg and dug in the air travel bag on the scat beside him and took out a small squarish unlabeled bottle. She recognized the shape of the bottle and felt her duodenum contract.

Jirg proudly held up the bottle. "See," he said, "I remembered."

It was a drink she loathed, a Tyrolean home product made up of odds and ends of herbs and poisonous weeds that grew in dank spots near precipices in the Alps. Jirg imbibed it in huge quantities, like a giant intake valve. She had pretended to be one of the boys in Austria and had expressed her enthusiasm for the foul stuff. He twisted the cork and offered her the bottle. A smell came out of the neck of the bottle like old and ill-cared-for animals.

She took a ladylike sip, managing not to gag.

He took a huge swig. "Ach," he said, nostalgically, "the nights we drank together."

"Hey, lady," the taxi driver half turned his head, scowling. "No drinking allowed in this cab."

"You'll have to put the bottle away, luv," Beulah said. "He says it's against the law."

"It is not believable," Jirg said. "Drinking against the law. He is making fun of me. I believe he is a Jew." Jirg's face turned a sudden Master Race purple. "I haff heard about New York."

"He isn't a Jew, luv, he's an Irishman." She looked at the driver's ticket, stuck in its frame at the back of the front seat. The man's name was Meyer Schwartz. "Put the bottle away, luv. We'll drink it later."

Muttering in German, Jirg put the bottle back in the air travel bag. The driver swerved the taxi in front of a truck, missing it by seven inches.

By the time they reached the cutoff to Shea Stadium, Jirg's hand was all the way under her skirt, sliding under her panties. She was surprised it had taken that long. Luckily, she was in the right-hand corner of the back seat and the driver couldn't see what was happening in his mirror.

Jirg panted convincingly in the region of her neck, while his hand worked expertly between her thighs, his middle finger amorously exploring. She lay back, tense but waiting. Suddenly, the middle finger stopped moving. Then it moved again, two or three sharp scientific probes. Jirg took his hand away abruptly and sat up.

"Scheisse," he said, "vas ist das?"

"That's fate, luv." Beulah sat up, too.

"Fate? I do not know that word."

"It means what will be will be."

"Speak slowly."

"It means I have the curse, luv."

"Who cursed?" he said. "So, I said Scheisse."

"It's a word American girls use when they are temporarily out of commission. Not in working order. Not ready for visitors."

"Four thousand miles I flew," Jirg said piteously.

"Mother nature, luv," Beulah said. "Take heart. It only lasts a few days. For most girls." She was preparing him for the moment when she would tell him it sometimes went on with her for months, especially in the autumn.

"Vat vill I do for a vew clays?" Jirg whined.

"Sight-see," Beulah said. "I think the boat that goes all around Manhattan Island is still running."

"I did not come to New York to go boat riding," Jirg said. He looked bleakly out the window at the passing architecture. "New York is a pigsty," he said.

He sat in silence, disapproving of New York, until they had crossed the Triborough Bridge.

"We are in Fun City, lady," the taxi driver said. "Where to?"

"That hotel on Ninth Avenue," Beulah said. "I forget the name." She had never been inside it, but it looked clean, efficient and inexpensive from the outside. It had the added charm of being distant from her flat. She was sure there would be ice water for Jirg, probably running out of the taps, which should entertain him for a day or two.

"We are not to your apartment going?" Jirg asked.

"I was going to explain about that, luv," Beulah said nervously. "You see, I have a roommate."

"Does she ski?"

"That isn't the point, luv. She ... she is neurotically puritanical. Religious."

"So?" Jirg said. "I am also religious. Nobody is more religious than Austria. I will talk religion with your roommate."

"She believes it is immoral for unmarried girls to sleep with men." Beulah was briefly thankful that Rebecca was not there to overhear this comment.

"I did not come to New York to be married," Jirg said warily.

"Of course not, luv. But just to keep peace in the apartment, it would be better if you stayed in a hotel for the first few days. Until she gets used to you."

"In Austria," Jirg said, "I haff slept in the same room with two girls. In the same bed."

"I'm sure you have, luv," Beulah said soothingly. "But we have different customs here. You'll catch on in no time."

"I do not like New York," Jirg said gloomily. "I do not like New York at all."

At the hotel, which was not as inexpensive as it looked, Beulah got Jirg a single room with shower. He wanted her to go up with him, but she said she was poorly, because of her malady; he could see how pale she was, she wouldn't even have stirred from her bed that day if he hadn't been arriving from Zurich; and if she didn't go home and lie down with a cold compress, she probably would faint right there in the hotel lobby. She gave him $30 in American money, because all he had with him was Austrian schillings and Swiss francs, and told him to eat in the hotel so he wouldn't get lost. If sire was strong enough that evening, she said, she would call him.

She watched him follow the bellboy with his bags to the elevator. When the elevator doors slid shut behind him, she sprinted for the main entrance.

She walked blindly cross-town. By Eighth Avenue, sire had decided she was going skiing in Sun Valley this winter. By Seventh Avenue, she had decided to take an offer for a modeling job in Brazil that meant leaving by Tuesday. By Sixth Avenue, she decided she wasn't going home before midnight, because she wasn't going to give Rebecca the satisfaction. By Fifth Avenue, she realized that that meant having dinner alone. By Madison Avenue, she remembered Christopher Bagshot. She went into a bar and sat alone over a white lady, trying to decide which was worse.

• • •

It was past six o'clock, 6:15, to be exact, and Sue Marsh hadn't shown up at the bookstore for her tennis bag. Christopher was beginning to worry. He could not keep open, waiting for her. He was disappointed in her. He hadn't thought of her as a flighty girl who made idle promises. And Miss Anderson hadn't come into the store at five o'clock, either, as she had said she would. He knew he should be angry at the type of girl who treated a man with so little consideration, but what he really felt was desolation.

Then the door opened from the comparative darkness of Madison Avenue and a tall girl with straight blonde hair came into the store. She was wearing a miniskirt that showed a great length of leg, and a hip-length fun fur, more or less electric-blue in color. He had never seen her before and from the uncertain way she moved around the shop, it looked as though she had never been in a bookstore before. He moved briskly toward her. "Is there anything I can do for you, miss?" he said.

She had big gray eyes that seemed to be imploring him. She was beautiful, in a strange, haunted way, like some of those movie actresses in Swedish pictures who have affairs with their brothers or sisters. An incoherent, unreasonable hope stirred in his breast. "Do you have any cookbooks?" she said.

"We have a selection. This way, please."

"Thank you very much," she said, in a near whisper. Her voice trembled. He wondered if she was a young wife who had a fancy dinner to prepare that evening for her husband's boss or somebody and who had met disaster in the kitchen an hour or so before the guests were to arrive. Saturday evening at 6:15 was a queer time to buy a cookbook. He didn't catch sight of a wedding ring, though.

He hovered near. "Just what sort of cooking are you interested in? French, Italian, American...?"

"Oh, any kind."

"There's an amusing one that has come out fairly recently," he said. Because it was getting so late, he resolved to be daring. "The Myra Breckinridge Cook Book, by a friend of the author, Gore Vidal. It's quite risqué." He chuckled, to show that she could take his risqu or leave it alone. "Here, let me get it down for you." He reached for the shelf. It wasn't there. He had seen it when he closed the shop the night before and he knew he hadn't sold it since. Somebody had stolen it during the day. "I'm afraid I've sold the last copy," he said lamely. "If you'll give me your name and address, I'll order one and--"

"Oh, there's no need to bother, thank you," she said softly. Just from the tone of her voice, you knew she wasn't the sort of girl who would say she'd come by at five o'clock and never show up, or the kind of girl who deposited a tennis bag and then irresponsibly left it with you while she consorted with New Left agitators who made love in public parks.

The girl took down a huge illustrated book on French cooking and opened it at random to a page on which there was a color photograph of poularde de Bresse en cocotte. She stroked the page absently. "Chicken," she said.

"You like chicken?" It was awfully pedestrian, but he had to keep the conversation going. If she had been at the literary-criticism counter, the dialog would have been more inspiring.

"I love it," the girl said. "Chicken. My mother used to kill two every Sunday. Whenever I have chicken, it's like a day I don't have to work."

"What do you work at?" The conversation was getting more intimate in long leaps and heady bounds. Although the picture of the girl's mother wringing the heads of two chickens every Sunday was a little disquieting.

"An actress. A dancer. A little bit of both," the girl said.

A dancer. That explained the legs. "Where are you working now?"

"No place for the moment." She kept stroking the picture of poularde de Bresse en cocotte. "I'm up for a part off-off-Broadway. One of those naked plays." She kept looking down at the cookbook and her voice was so low he wasn't sure that he'd heard correctly.

But whether he had heard correctly or not, it was making an effervescent impression on him. To have a beautiful girl, with pretty nearly the longest legs in the world, who had been walking around in the nude all day before dozens of people, just wander in off the street like that. And just before closing time!

"If you like chicken," he said, putting everything on the one throw, "I know a place on Sixty-first Street where they do it better than anyplace in New York. A French place."

"I wouldn't mind a good chicken dinner," the girl said.

"By a lucky accident," he said, "I'm free tonight."

"By a lucky accident," she said, "so am I."

He looked at his watch. "I close up here in about forty minutes. There's a nice bar around the corner on Lexington. Smiley's. Why don't you have a drink there and I'll be right along and then we can go on to dinner at this great place?"

"You're sure you won't forget and leave me there?" she said, sounding dubious.

"You just don't know me, Miss--"

"My name is Anna. Anna Bukowski. I'm going to change it if I get the part."

"My name is Christopher Bagshot."

"It's a good name," the girl said, "for a man who works in a bookshop. What time did you say you'd be there?"

She was eager, to top it all. "No later than seven-fifteen. Are you hungry?"

"I can eat," she said. She gave him the Swedish-actress incest smile and went out of the shop in her miniskirt and electric-blue fun fur.

He raced catatonically around the store, getting things in order before closing up and speeding over to Smiley's Bar. Now he knew that voice in his dream hadn't spoken for nothing.

• • •

Anna Bukowski walked slowly and deliberately over toward Lexington Avenue. She had to walk slowly to conserve her energy. She hadn't eaten for two whole days now and she was dizzy from lack of food, and every step she took was like dragging through hot tar. She wasn't on a diet or anything like that. She was just flat broke. She was just in from Cleveland and she had had no idea New York was so expensive. She had spent her last money on subway fare downtown for the tryouts that morning and she had walked all the way up from St. Mark's Place after parading around naked all day, which was also fatiguing, even though it didn't seem like much. But people didn't count the nervous strain.

The reason she had gone into the bookstore was to see if she could steal a book and sell it to a corrupt little man in a basement. Somewhere, she had heard that was a thriving industry. But then that young man had stood so close to her she wouldn't have had a chance to steal a rubber band. And she had asked to see cookbooks because she had been thinking about food all day.

Her landlord had thrown her out that morning, too, and kept her bag, and she was standing in all the clothes she possessed in this world, in a miniskirt that was two centuries out of style. If that man in the bookstore was as wild to get laid as the seemed and if she didn't ruin things at dinner, she might be able to swing getting him to ask her to spend the night with him in his place. If he didn't live with his dying mother or something. And that would mean at least breakfast, too, the next morning. As an old dancer had once told her in Cleveland, "I was in Buenos Aires and I was living off coffee and rolls. My stomach was shrinking to the size of a pistachio nut and I had to make a decision, and I made it. I sold one part of me to support another."

When she got to Lexington Avenue, she had forgotten which way the man had told her to turn, uptown or downtown, for Smiley's Bar. Hunger wasn't good for the memory. Well, there were only two ways to go. She chose uptown. She stepped down off the curb without looking which way the lights were on and a taxi made a wild swing, with a loud screeching of tires, to avoid hitting her. She jumped back, but fell down. She was safe, but the day had been so awful and she had come so near to being killed that she just sat there on the cold pavement of the city of New York and began to weep.

A man who had been waiting for the lights to change came across the street and said, "Please, let me help you."

She didn't say anything but, still sobbing, allowed the man to pull her to her feet.

"You really have to watch the lights," the man said gently. "All things combine in an attempt to destroy you in this town."

She sobbed uncontrollably. She was in no mood to hear lectures on safety precautions at the moment.

"What you need is a drink, young lady." She looked at him, conscious of rivulets on her cheeks. He was about 40 and wore a nice dark topcoat and a hat.

She nodded. Her tears stopped. If the nice man took her to a bar, maybe it would be Smiley's; it was in the neighborhood. And even if it wasn't, there would probably be potato chips there and olives and salted peanuts and she could put down a little foundation so she wouldn't disgust the man from the bookstore with her gluttony at dinner and ruin her chances for a bed for the night and Sunday breakfast.

"It's very good of you, sir," she said.

The bar he took her to wasn't Smiley's. It was a dark, elegant small place, with candles on the restaurant tables in the rear. There were plenty of potato chips and olives and salted peanuts and she just couldn't help from tearing into them as she drank a bull shot, which was good for dulling the appetite, too, because of the bouillon. Bull shot, Bagshot. It was funny having a bull shot before going to dinner with a Bagshot. She giggled, the liquor getting to her swiftly in her condition. The nice man watched her with a smile on his face as she ravaged three plates of potato chips and two of salted peanuts.

"Have you been on a diet?" he asked.

"Sort of," she said.

"But you're off it now?"

"Thank God."

"Do you know," he said, "I think the best thing I could do would be to march you to a table and order us dinner."

"I'm expected in a half hour or so," she said, although it took a great effort to say no.

"We'll just have one dish," the man said, taking her down off the bar stool. "And then you can flitter off."

She couldn't refuse an offer like that, so she allowed the man to lead her to a table. She asked the bartender where Smiley's was and he said it was just down Lexington Avenue two blocks, so there was plenty of time.

The menu looked so tempting that with a little coaxing from the nice 40year-old man, now without his hat and topcoat, she ordered the whole thing. Hors d'oeuvres, cream-of-tomato soup, steak with broccoli with hollandaise sauce and French fried potatoes, salad, cheese, and strawberry tart for dessert. It seemed like a lot to cram into a half hour before going out to dinner, but the waiter assured her he would hurry.

• • •

Christopher was just about to lock the front door and go into the little lavatory next to the back office and shave. He would be cheating his father of about five minutes' worth of service, but he felt he really had to shave. He had shaved in the morning, but although he was small he was manly and he needed to shave twice a day. But just as he was about to turn the handle of the lock, through the glass of the door he saw Beulah Stickney striding toward him, like a model advertising health food. He stepped back and she entered briskly.

"Hi, luv," she said, morning-fresh, vital and friendly. "Auntie folded like last year's violets. Aren't you the lucky boy tonight? Let's celebrate. The night is young and you are beautiful. Where're you taking your friend Beulah to dinner? I hear there's a new place over on First that's--"

"I'm afraid tonight is out," Christopher said, with a delicious sense of power. "I've made other arrangements. Perhaps if I'm free some night next week. ...

"You mean you're feeding another bird, luv?" Beulah asked, a slight edge of what he thought was sharpness in her tone, and what she knew was hysteria.

"If you mean do I have an engagement for dinner with another lady," Christopher said, liking his language round tonight, "you're correct."

"Pah, luv," Beulah said airily,"let's make it trois. It can be a load of laughs. May the best woman win." She didn't ordinarily descend to lures like that, but it was Saturday night and seven o'clock.

"Well. ..." He hadn't thought about that possibility and it intrigued him. He hesitated, thinking hard. But then the door opened and Paulette Anderson came into the shop.

All I need now, Christopher thought, is for Sue Marsh finally to show up for her bag and Caroline Trowbridge to come in to apologize for saying it was a wrong number and Dorothea Toye to pass by, offering to cut her price.

"Why, Beulah," Paulette cried, "what on earth are you doing here?"

"This is my friendly neighborhood think tank, luv," Beulah said. "I was just passing by on the way home to change and I saw the beckoning light of literature and I came in to see if he had the new Harper's Bazaar or the latest Mailer to read in the tub." Her eyes flashed a clear signal to Christopher, and with a sudden maturity and understanding of women that he had never had before, he know that she was warning him not to let Paulette Anderson know that she had come in to get him to take her to dinner. And certainly not to let her know that she had been turned down. "What brings you to these parts at this hour yourself, luv?" Beulah asked, her voice rising infinitesimally.

"I was going to invite Mr. Bagshot to a party," Paulette said.

Dental assistants, Christopher realized, did not observe the same rules of feint and parry as models. Paulette looked as though she had had a wearing day and her clothes didn't seem to be on just right, but she had taken her glasses off and there was a winsome fluster to her hair.

"I see you ladies know each other," Christopher said. He hoped they didn't know each other too well.

"We're cap-and-crown sisters, luv," Beulah Stickney said. "I patronize the sainted Dr. Levinson and Paulette holds my hand to keep me from screaming while he wreaks his will on me. I havealso taken her shopping in the rag bazaar on Seventh Avenue at wholesale rates so that she can be beautiful enough to invite popular young men like you to parties."

Bitch, Christopher thought. It gave him great pleasure to say this in his mind. "Oh," he said, "so that's how you know each other."

"Well, I must be toddling along," Beulah said. "I'm late as it is." She picked up a copy of the French Vogue. "Put it on my bill, luv. The next time I have a toothache, Paulette, you can tell me how the party turned out."

She left, smiling, the air perfumed and polar behind her.

"I'm always a little in awe of her." Paulette said. "Aren't you?"

"Not really," Christopher said.

"Well, I suppose men are different," Paulette said. She breathed loudly. "I hope I'm not too late. But the afternoon was just one thing after another and I just took a chance that you might still be open and.... Well, anyway, I'm invited to a party and if' you still want to...." She ran down and stopped. The way he was looking at her, with this new light in his eye, she was sure he knew that she had been lying naked on the day bed of Mr. Gadsden's emergency apartment as late as 4:30 that afternoon.

He just remained silent, silent and powerful, looking at her.

"Of course," she said. She was nervous, even if she did tower over him and she had thought of him only as a last resort until this very minute. "Of course, if you don't want to go to a party, I'll understand...."

"I'd love to go, Paulette," he said easily. "It's just that I'm taken for the evening."

"Naturally," Paulette said. "At this hour. Well, maybe another time. Good night."

"Ciao," he said. He had never said Ciao before to anyone. "Good of you to drop by."

He opened the door for her. She heard it locking behind her.

As she walked heavily down Madison Avenue, she was overcome with the awful certainty that she was going to be a virgin for the rest of her life.

Humming, Christopher shaved. He felt marvelous. He didn't remember feeling this marvelous since the day he got his 4-F classification in the draft. Before going in to shave, he had tripped over the blue tennis bag and put it out of the way under the table. Looking at it, he decided he'd have it delivered on Monday by messenger to Miss Marsh's apartment, with a big bunch of forget-me-nots from that florist on Fifth Avenue. That would be ironic.

He shaved slowly because he didn't want to bleed. Even if he were late, that girl in the miniskirt with the great legs, what was her name, Anna, would wait. Tonight women waited for Bagshot.

• • •

It would have been all right if the steak hadn't been so good. But it was more than an inch thick and so tender you hardly needed the knife to cut it and it tasted the way steaks look in advertisements. It had just disappeared from her plate while the nice 40-year-old man was barely beginning on his and he had said, "My dear girl, I haven't seen anything like this since I played football in college." And he had insisted, it was the only word you could use, insisted, that she have another one, and what with the wine and all, and three kinds of cheese that she had never tasted before and the strawberry tart and the Cointreau with the coffee, well, it was 10:30 before she looked at her watch again and there was no use searching up and down Lexington Avenue at that hour like a lost soul for Smiley's Bar. And when she got out of the nice 40-year-old man's apartment at five o'clock the next day, which was Sunday, after a pancake and bacon-and-eggs brunch, served by a butler, there would have been even less use, wouldn't there, to look for Smiley's Bar?

She got the job in the off-off-Broadway naked show and two good reviews, mostly for her figure, if you wanted to be honest, and the nice 40-year-old man was as generous as nice 40-year-old men are supposed to be to tall young naked actresses, and all she had to worry about that autumn was her weight.

Lying idly in bed right before Christmas, reading the "Society" section of the Sunday Times, she saw an announcement that Mr. Christopher Bagshot, son of Mr. Bernard Bagshot, the owner of the well-known chain of bookstores, had been married the day before at St. Thomas's, in Mamaroneck, to a girl by the name of June Leonard.

So it had turned out well for everybody. It gave her a nice feeling.