"I'm not tattooed," George Mills says.

"It's just too creepy," Carol says. "Go without me."

"If you're not going I'm I'm not going," Sue says resolutely. not going," Sue says resolutely.

"Herb's ordered the pizza," Ellen Rose says. "Two large and a medium in his own name."

"A Sweetheart Dance," Stan David announces. "I'm calling a Sweetheart Dance."

Two thirds of the couples walk off the dance floor.

"It's the Sweetheart Dance, Herb," Ellen Rose says.

"We've got twenty minutes to get there."

"We'll dance two minutes and leave in the middle."

"I'll phone for a taxi," George says.

"What for?" asks Ray.

"To take us to Crown's to reserve a table for eleven." He's pleased to have thought of the idea of the cab and wants to make additional arrangements now that he begins to understand not the mechanics, and perhaps not even all the principles, but the theory itself who had entered this community cold, who for the seven years it took him to get from Ca.s.sadaga to St. Louis had entered all all communities cold, like a beggar at the back door, presenting himself at foundling homes, orphanages, and, during the war years, sometimes actually pa.s.sing himself off as a refugee, who had been born, it may be, with no ear for complication, with no gift for the baroque, but who has begun to see that youth-he himself is already twenty-seven-will try anything, say anything, in order to salvage its plans, which are never plans of course, never goals and their concomitant procedures, but the blatant articulation of whims, the accommodation of which involves the overriding and placation, if that was the order, of other, contrary whims. It is a kind of power, and he has never before felt its urgency, never before wheeled and dealed in the arbitrary. communities cold, like a beggar at the back door, presenting himself at foundling homes, orphanages, and, during the war years, sometimes actually pa.s.sing himself off as a refugee, who had been born, it may be, with no ear for complication, with no gift for the baroque, but who has begun to see that youth-he himself is already twenty-seven-will try anything, say anything, in order to salvage its plans, which are never plans of course, never goals and their concomitant procedures, but the blatant articulation of whims, the accommodation of which involves the overriding and placation, if that was the order, of other, contrary whims. It is a kind of power, and he has never before felt its urgency, never before wheeled and dealed in the arbitrary.

"You been to Crown's?" Ray asks.

"No."

"It's booths. It's booths and stools at the soda fountain. They got a loose booth they let you move if n.o.body's in it and you're a party of ten. Pete McGee won't come without Carol, and Sue won't come unless Carol does."

"But Sue's a good sport," George says petulantly.

"Carol said I should go without her. A good sport doesn't do that."

"Your folks!" George says. He is still planning, tuning solution. "Your folks, Louise. That would give us ten."

"I told him I came with my folks," Louise says.

"He's not from around here," Bernadette says.

"Until a girl knows what a fellow's like, George, she tells him she's with her folks," Louise says.

"Louise's folks," Ruth Oliver says, and giggles.

"What's so funny?" her husband asks. "They have a car."

George Mills doesn't understand any of this. He doesn't understand why it's necessary to get the roving booth at Crown's, or why Pete McGee should join them, or why Carol thinks tattoos itch, or what makes Sue such a good sport. All he knows is that the pizzas are burning and that Ellen Rose and Herb, who have returned from the Sweetheart Dance, have made no move to leave. "The pizzas," George says.

"Is everything settled then?" Herb asks.

"Nothing's settled," Ruth Oliver says bitterly. "Not a d.a.m.n thing."

"The pizzas?" George says again.

"Screw the pizzas," Herb says. "You don't think I gave them my real name, do you? A medium and two large? large? What's the matter with you? You lost? Ain't you from around here?" What's the matter with you? You lost? Ain't you from around here?"

"I don't know know if I'm from around here," George Mills says miserably. if I'm from around here," George Mills says miserably.

"Herb's the only one with a car," Louise tells him.

George looks up. "What about the Olivers?"

"In the shop," Charles Oliver says.

"Ray?"

"Bernadette's folks went out tonight," Ray says.

He is beginning to understand. "Pete McGee has a car," he says.

Ray nods, Bernadette does.

"Pete McGee has a car but he doesn't like to lend it."

"Pete's okay. It isn't broken in yet."

"And he certainly wouldn't let me me drive it. A total stranger." drive it. A total stranger."

"Probably not."

"So I was going to drive Sue's car?"

"Not exactly."

"No," George says, "that's right. Not exactly." It's like being a little drunk, he thinks. There's just that edge. Or no. It's like having the one bottle to their three advantage, the gla.s.s-and-a-half to four ratio that accounted for his inspiration in the bars while he was pumping change into the jukebox and his science into their heads and all the while listening to what the song was saying about their lives. "Because you thought all along that I'd have one, a twenty-seven-year-old guy like me. But it was all right even when I didn't. Because the more the merrier. There'd be six in one car and five in the other. That's when I was going to drive Sue's car. We were going to make the switch at Crown's, and Sue would drive Pete McGee's like a good sport. Crown's was just the staging area. The only thing I don't really understand is Sue. No. Wait. Sure I do. Sue's spoken for, right? I mean she's here tonight but she's spoken for. The guy's in the army or off somewhere making his fortune until he can send for her, and they've exchanged pledges, oaths."

"He's in Texas," Sue says. "He's stationed in Texas."

"But just because you're promised and can't have a good time yourself, that doesn't mean you can't hang around those who can. It might even be good for you."

"He's with his his buddies," Sue says. buddies," Sue says.

"Sure," George Mills says, "sure he is. It was the cars," he says. "It was the cars, it was the cramped quarters. It was the necking in the cars." He stops and looks at them. "But you're married," he says helplessly. "Ruth's pregnant. Louise tells me Bernadette's in her fourth month. Herb is Ellen Rose's fiance. Why do you need this stuff? School's out for you people. You graduated high school. Your diploma hangs on the wall with the prom bids, or's shoved in the drawer with your underwear."

The men look shamefaced. They stare at the buffed tops of their dancing shoes. Ellen Rose picks absently at her corsage. Bernadette and Ruth seem suddenly tired. Only Louise and Carol's energies seem unimpaired, Sue the gra.s.s widow's.

"Bernadette's folks are out tonight. Oh," George Mills says, "oh."

Because only now, years after he's moved into it, does he comprehend the stability of the neighborhood. He perceives with horror and the communicated shame of the wives and husbands what he's gotten into here, the force fields of wired intimacy he has somehow penetrated. Discovering, he feels discovered. Like a child rolling Easter eggs on trespa.s.sed pitch. He's not from around here, but it's as if he's never lived anywhere else. If he intuits their customs it is done joylessly, with no pride in his cleverness. He has the solution now, of course. To invite them home with him, to open his apartment to their terrible honed occasion, to fetch them pizzas, White Castles, imperial gallons of Crown's ice cream, the syrups and sweet, auxiliary garnish of their ceremonial cravings.

He was right. He was always right. His logic is a Jacob's ladder of successive vista, a nexus of predicative data. The foot bone's connected to the shin bone, the shin bone's connected to the thigh bone, and so on up through all the bones and glands of need and time and loneliness.

Bernadette's folks are out, they've taken the car. But their house has aunts in it, uncles, the busted survivors of their youth.

Because they're only alone with their kind, he thinks. Charles' and Ruth's baby was conceived in an automobile, Bernadette's and Ray's was. I'm sure of it, he thinks. He thinks I'm positive. Sue was driving, he thinks, a G.o.dmother and good sport fiddling with her radio dial and hearing their tongues in each other's heads in the back seat and thinking of Texas.

I haven't haven't the patience he thinks. It isn't just time. It isn't just effort. There are too many virgins to deal with. the patience he thinks. It isn't just time. It isn't just effort. There are too many virgins to deal with.

But Louise is smiling at him. They d.a.m.ned near all are.

[Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom.]

Stan David calls for a Relative Dance with cut-in privileges for anyone of any generation so long as he is blood or connected by marriage. Only George and Louise and a handful of others sit this one out, and soon the room is rocking as parents, sons, wives, sisters, cousins, husbands, in-laws, daughters and brothers seek each other out on the dark, crowded dance floor of the Delgado Ballroom.

He is twenty-seven years old, an age when many scientists have already done their best work. He doesn't understand what he's seeing, he can't give it a name, but, in the spiraling life on the packed floor, George Mills has a vision, and can just make out the shape of a perfect DNA molecule.

7.

One morning when George Mills entered Mrs. Glazer's room in the small, private hospital in Juarez to which she had been admitted, the tout, Father Merchant, was already there.

Mrs. Glazer was asleep or unconscious in the hospital bed, her breathing so light it seemed a stage of rest different in kind from anything he had yet witnessed. It was so deep a state of relaxation that it appeared to Mills as if she had just received good news of the highest order. She might just have closed her eyes for a minute. She might have been meditating, or in a trance, or drowned.

George placed his package on the nightstand and sat down.

It was not really her apparent contentment that had caught George up, or the presence of the tout, or even the extraordinarily tidy, shipshape condition of her room. (Which he noticed. Mrs. Glazer had not been a particularly fastidious patient. She wadded Kleenex and dropped it on her bed, the carpet. Though she did not smoke, her ashtrays were always full--with pins, with sputum, with bits of string. And though she had not gotten dressed in a week, underwear caught in the chest of drawers, stockings lay over chairs, dresses were askew on hangers or visible in the open closet. Sections of the El Paso newspaper, though she barely glanced at it, were everywhere, under the bed, beside the toilet, on top of the television set. There were the peels of tangerines and oranges, fragments of lunch and-he had no idea where these came from-husks of dry chewing gum. The telephone cord was unaccountably tangled, the tuning k.n.o.b on the radio twisted above or below the frequencies printed on the dial. The faucets dripped. Motel soap lay in the bottom of the basin or wrapped in damp washcloths on the surface of the writing desk or even in the peels of the fruit. It often took Mills the better part of an hour merely to straighten the mess and, by the time he was done, Mrs. Glazer, practically immobile in her wide double bed, had somehow begun the room's piecemeal derangement. It was the same sloven story in the back seat of their rental car.) Today her hospital room seemed immaculate, almost alphabetically arranged.

But it wasn't the condition of the room, or Father Merchant, or Mrs. Glazer's strangely exalted sleep which had startled Mills. It was the current magazines, the box of candy, the potted plant and mint bestsellers on her nightstand.

"What's happened?" Mills asked Father Merchant.

The tout shrugged.

"There's something you don't know?" Mills said. "There's still some circ.u.mstance in this world of which you're ignorant?"

"There's nothin' I don' know."

"Where'd she get that candy? What's that stuff?"

"Gif's," the tout said. "Everywhere the ill are made offerin's. Meals. Throughout the worl' presents een sick rooms are an el grande el grande part of the gross national produc'. Even disease ees good for business." part of the gross national produc'. Even disease ees good for business."

"Do you know who brought them?"

"There's nothin' I don' know."

"Has her husband come?"

"Sam's in San Louis," Father Merchant said, "an' won' arrive till later. He have an meetin' muy importante. muy importante. The chairman of the philosophy departments have receive The chairman of the philosophy departments have receive el el offer offer fantastico fantastico from the Universidad de Alabama. Eef Walter leavin' they don' no good logician have. Blauer can't thin' straight. They are approach Gutstein een Hawaii. from the Universidad de Alabama. Eef Walter leavin' they don' no good logician have. Blauer can't thin' straight. They are approach Gutstein een Hawaii. Mucho dinero tambien. Mucho dinero tambien. Personal I feel he don' come. Personal I feel he don' come. Es verdad, Es verdad, cos' of livin' chipper in Midwes' than the islan's. cos' of livin' chipper in Midwes' than the islan's. Todos Todos he do to sale his he do to sale his casa casa in Waikiki an replace eet on the mainland two as in Waikiki an replace eet on the mainland two as grande grande he ahead. he ahead. Pero Pero money's no money's no el problemo. el problemo. Eet's Grace. She have art'ritis. I don' thin' she lookin' forward to no bad winter. Eet's Grace. She have art'ritis. I don' thin' she lookin' forward to no bad winter. There is nothing I do not know! There is nothing I do not know!"

"Hold it down, will you!" George hissed. "You'll wake her. She needs the sleep."

"She's going to die," Father Merchant replied. "She needs all the wakefulness she can get. You should go home, George. You should go back to your wife. Laglichio has work for you. You have been too much with this woman."

"Oh," Mrs. Glazer said, "it's you, Mills. Did Father Merchant tell you? Mary's come with my brother."

"Mary?"

"I thought it would be best," Father Merchant said.

"You did? did? You You did?" George Mills said. did?" George Mills said.

"Please, Mills," Mrs. Glazer said, "they'll be back soon. We don't want a scene."

And, before he could make one, a girl he recognized and a man he didn't, appeared in the doorway. Mary was even larger than the big girl who had reluctantly admitted him to the house just over a month before. The man was in his mid-fifties and deeply tanned. He wore a tropical-weight suit of a light pearl gray with large, dark brown b.u.t.tons on the jacket.

"You must be Mills," the brother said. "I'm Harry Claunch. I want you to return my sister's rental car this afternoon. You may borrow mine when you pick my brother-in-law up this evening."

"Yes, sir," Mills said.

"Did you rest, Judith?"

"I feel fine, Harry. b.u.t.ton your blouse please, Mary."

"What's in the bag?" Mary said.

"Oh," George Mills said, "I'm sorry, that's mine."

"Pi-uuu, it stinks," Mary said. "What is it anyway? Oh, it's shrimp. shrimp. Mommy, look, did you ever Mommy, look, did you ever see see so many shrimp?" She took one of the boiled, cleaned shrimps and bit into it as though it were a chocolate. so many shrimp?" She took one of the boiled, cleaned shrimps and bit into it as though it were a chocolate.

"You're eating Mills's lunch, Mary," the brother said.

"There's so many. many. Oh, is this your lunch?" Oh, is this your lunch?"

"That's all right, Miss."

"He calls me Miss."