"You don't have cancer," I said. "People our age don't get cancer. But we need to go tonight and find out what you do have."

"Okay," she said. "I guess you're right. I just can't go any further like this."

On the way over to the infirmary in the MG, with the hot, sweet air rushing past us, she said, dreamily, her head back against the seat, eyes closed, "You were going to tell me about Paul Sibley tonight, weren't you?"

"Yes," I said. "And I still am, when you're feeling better. And what's more, you're going to meet him, because he wants to cook dinner for you, and maybe Ginger and Fig. We'll do it when you get out."

"That's nice," she said. "And I'm glad you were going to tell me about him. I wanted to hear it from you, not from that idiot Fig, who's got him kind of a combination of Rupert Brooke and Laurence Olivier now. She's devoted a whole chapter to him in the famous diary."

"I was never not going to tell you," I said. "I just...it hasn't seemed to me that I knew quite what to say about him yet."

"He's the biggie, isn't he?" Cecie said.

"Oh, yes. He's it, Cece."

"Well, tell, then," she smiled, her eyes still closed. "For starters, what does he look like? Can he possibly look like Ginger and Fig say he does?"

"This time they're right," I said. "He's...oh, Cecie, he's beautiful. He's very dark, and his eyes kind of tilt up, and his hair is as black as a crow's wing, and falls in his eyebrows..."

" 'Because your eyes are slant and slow, Because your hair is sweet to touch, My heart is high again, but oh, I doubt if this will get me much.' "

Cecie murmured it drowsily.

"This time it got me everything," I said.

"Really everything?" Cecie said. I could barely hear her; her voice was fading in and out.

"Really everything," I said. "Cecie, what's the matter with you? You sound like you're passing out or something."

"Nothing. Just sleepy," she slurred. "Oh, Kate. Remember that other one we liked? Sanctuary? 'My land is bare of chattering folk; the clouds are low along the ridges. And sweet's the air with curly smoke, From all my burning bridges...' Have you burned your bridges, old Effie Lee?"

I knew what she was asking me.

"Yes," I said, and when she did not reply, I looked over at her. She lay still and white, her head had slumped against the door. I stepped on the accelerator and took the corner on two wheels into the street where the infirmary was. When I reached it, Cecie was unconscious, and they carried her in on a stretcher. I sat in the bleak, antiseptic-smelling waiting room until nearly eleven, when I had to be signed in, and then sat, silent and frightened, in our room until Mrs. Frederick, our housemother, came up at midnight to tell me that Cecie had mononucleosis, and would have to spend at least two weeks in the infirmary.

"But she'll be all right?" I said, my voice quivering.

"Oh, yes, she'll be fine," she said. "But I wish to goodness she'd come and told me earlier, or you had. She's let it go far too long. She's going to miss a lot of classes. Really, you girls act like children more often than not..."

She clopped back along the hall in her backless slippers and I shut the door to my room and crawled into my bed and cried. I cried for more than the fact of Cecie's illness; I knew that, but I did not know for what, and for the moment I did not wish to know. I turned my face into my pillow so that the weight of the great white moon hanging level with my window did not press on it, and I cried silently for a long time. And finally, without knowing when I did it, I slid into sleep.

The next few days were strange for me. I felt disoriented and divided: incomplete. Cecie, virulently contagious, was as effectively shut away from me as if in a cloister. Paul was utterly sunk in his hospital competition; except for a quick cup of coffee here and there, and once a brief, hard kiss in the stairwell in McCandless, I saw almost nothing of him. He looked sallow and haggard when I spied him in passing, and his white smile was perfunctory. I knew he probably was eating little and sleeping less, but knew, too, that there was virtually nothing I could do about that. I had the odd and vivid impression that despite the stress of the charette, he was happier than he had been since I had known him, and I know he was more alive. He hummed with excitement like a telephone wire. Not for the first time, I felt a craven coil of jealousy for the drawings that he was shaping with his dark hands. They were, I suspected, more seductive to him than my body.

But that was as futile as being jealous of the dead wife, and I knew it. If there was a living woman for him, it was me, and I could and would be content with that. And I was content in those long summer days, despite my loneliness for Cecie and my wanting of him. It was as if the world was in suspension; had ground to a stop. Soon a great gear would slip forward and the world would flow on, but for now, it was permissible simply to float on the surface of it, at rest, rocking gently in the sun, fitting everything that had happened to me into the grid of experience. I slept a lot, and read voraciously, and visited back and forth with girls I had scarcely seen for three months, and cleaned our room until it shone, and washed and ironed my clothes, and listened to every one of my records in a non-stop marathon of music. I think of those days, now, as perhaps the most peaceful I have ever known, although the strange sense of mutilation, the emptiness where Paul and Cecie had been, was never far from me. For the first time in years I was alone with myself, and for the first time ever, found the company fulfilling. There was no conflict in my heart, or for it. The abyss was silent. That sense of myself, alone and sufficient, has never come to me so completely again. I floated, and was happy.

Looking back, it seems incredible to me that I did not worry about sleeping with Paul. Or rather, worry about the consequences of it: pregnancy and ostracism. No child of those times was ever more primed for worry. But I didn't, not for a moment. Perhaps it was because I had already known and bested the latter, and the former seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the wild, sweet, joyous things we did in the nights. My mind knew we were running risks; but my heart basked in safety. Paul used condoms with wry resignation and efficiency, never failing to observe that he felt like an SAE at a houseparty, with that little round intaglio in his wallet.

"Why bother, then?" I said once, when his disgust at the devices became apparent. "You're going to marry me anyway. You could just make an honest woman of me at a JP someplace and I could move in here and it would be a whole lot simpler."

"You know what a kid would do to our future right now?" he said, and I saw that he was absolutely serious, grimly so. "It would be the end of everything. We'd be living in Levittown and I'd be working at McKim for the rest of my life. Right now the whole ball game is riding on you, Katie. When we're in the white house you can have ten, if you like. But for now, it's Trojans or nothing. The first thing I want you to do when you get to New York, though, is get fitted for a diaphragm. As it is, we're taking chances with these things."

"I could go to Montgomery or somewhere and do it now," I said, obscurely hurt at his insistence. Somewhere deep within me, the thought of a child of his had lain like an actual embryo, warm and safe and secret.

"Too easy for talk to get back here," he said. "My landlady knows every doctor in a five-hundred-mile radius. Your housemother probably does, too. The whole campus would have it in an hour."

"God, Paul, you think they don't talk about us now?" I said.

"Yeah, but they don't know now," he said. "We'll just have to be careful until New York."

"Okay," I said obediently. But I never could, that enchanted summer, make myself worry about the specter of pregnancy. It seemed, like all other perils and dangers, simply outside the charmed circle in which we moved.

Cecie came back from the infirmary near the end of July, having been adjudged no longer contagious, but still too weak to attend her classes. I went and picked her up, and Ginger and Fig and I installed her in her bed, and heaped books around her, and dragged the Webcor and the pile of LPs close to the bed so she could change them without getting up, and trained the laboring fan on her. Ginger called home and the mute and thunderous Robert arrived with a new compact refrigerator and enough Coca Colas and fruit juices to stock it for the rest of the summer, and we plugged it in and set it up on the desk. Fig went down to the big dim kitchen and produced, from various boxes of mix, a sagging, sprawling chocolate cake that lay on its plate like a clubbed animal, and bore it proudly into our room.

"It sort of split in the middle, but I filled the crack up with icing, and it really tastes fine," she said, hanging her head and smiling at Cecie. "I thought double chocolate might be good. This is Duncan Hines; it's the one Mama always makes."

"It looks wonderful," Cecie said in her still-husky voice, smiling valiantly at her. "Why don't you cut it and give us all some?"

Fig did, bustling about like a Vermeer dwarf. The cake, in fact, tasted as dreadful as it looked, of stale cardboard and grainy, unmixed frosting. But we all ate it. Fig's power in some matters was awesome.

Later, when Cecie and I were alone, we looked at each other and burst into laughter. We were, I think, so relieved to be laughing together once more that we carried the laughter further and louder than we would have ordinarily. Her laugh was the same, with perhaps a rasped edge to it now, but still the rich, skating, fluting, careening thing that drew people like Pan's pipes.

"It looks like a scale model of a medieval fort," she snorted, and I fell backward across my bed, clutching my sides.

"Or a sacked and pillaged Greek city-state," I gasped. " 'This is Duncan Hines; it's the one Mama always makes.' God, I'll bet Mama makes Libby's English peas and mushrooms for Christmas dinner, too, and lime sherbet and ginger ale punch."

"And jello with those shitty little marshmallows in it," Cecie howled, tears running down her face.

"And Spam with cloves stuck in it," I choked, rolling back and forth on the bed, my hands over my face.

And for the space of minutes we could not speak for the laughter, which trailed to a stop and broke forth again whenever we looked at each other. Several people came and stuck their heads into our room to see what was going on.

"It sounds like old times in here," Trish said. "I could hear you all the way downstairs. You must be feeling better, Cecie."

"I am," Cecie said. "If I don't die laughing."

In fact she was not feeling all that much better. She was still very thin and shadowed beneath her eyes. The horn-rimmed glasses would not stay up on her nose, and her red hair was wispy and ragged. She was no longer flushed and glassy-eyed with fever, but she was pale, and the laughing fit so drained her that she fell asleep in mid-sentence, and I drew the shades and tiptoed out. When I came back from McCandless late that evening, having done some work on my own summer design project and had a quick cup of coffee with Paul, she was propped up in bed reading Dorothy Parker and drinking Coca Cola.

"Have you had supper?" I said. "I'll go get you something from the kitchen if you haven't."

"I'm not hungry," she said. "I did try to go down, but my legs just gave out on the stairs and I came back. I guess it's going to take longer than I thought. And I don't see how on earth I'm going to finish classes this summer. I'll bet you anything I lose this entire quarter."

"So what?" I said. "You'll catch up. It's better than making yourself sick again."

"Well, you know, with you graduating a quarter early and me a quarter late, you'll be gone half a year before I will. What's that going to do to Europe?"

I had not thought about our plans to tour Europe after graduation since I met Paul; not seriously, anyway. The plans had been comfortably nebulous. I looked at her, and looked away.

"Actually, I may be going straight to work," I said. "Paul is pretty sure he can get me on in the Interiors department at McKim, Mead and White. I just couldn't turn that down. I'd never do it on my own."

"That's terrific," she said quickly. "Could he really do that?"

"Well, he has a job waiting there for him, and they want him awfully badly. He thinks he can," I said.

"Ah," she said in her light, sweet voice. It was the tone she used when something had touched her in some way and she wished to conceal the fact. I had heard it often, but never directed at me.

"But listen," I said hurriedly. "He's got another year or two here, and I'll be by myself in the apartment...if I can even find one. Why don't you come share until he gets there? Oh, Cecie, think about it...New York, and all the plays and the museums and things; maybe we could even meet Dorothy Parker. She reviews books for Esquire...and Long Island for you, if you want the water..."

"It's certainly an idea," she said, and I knew then that it would not happen.

"Cecie..." I began.

"Oh, Katie, of course you have to do it," she said warmly. "Lordy, McKim, Mead...you'll be lunching at the Algonquin with Parker inside a year. You go on and I'll come visit. You'll get so sick of me you'll start locking the door in my face."

"We could all go to Europe, you know," I said. "Paul knows it like the back of his hand. We were going to go sometime during his first year up there, anyway. You couldn't have a better tour guide than him."

She smiled at me.

"I gather Paul is going to be permanent," she said.

"I guess...yes. He is," I said. For some reason I blushed furiously.

"Then don't you think it's time you told me about him?" she said. "One might almost think you were ashamed of him."

And so I did, that night. We sat up late with Dave Brubeck spilling out "Lullaby of Birdland" into the hot night, with the tepid wash of the fan on us, and I told her what I could about Paul Sibley. I found the words frustratingly flat and short of the reality of him, but all of a sudden I wanted Cecie to know him intimately, in all his contexts and aspects, almost as I knew him. I fairly stammered with the effort to make him live in the air between us.

I told her about his childhood, and his mother and uncle and the foster homes, and about what he wanted to do as an architect, and what I believed he was capable of doing. I told her about what he wore and ate and drank and listened to and thought about and laughed at. I told her, finally, about the French marriage and the dead wife.

"She sounds awful," Cecie said. "Does she haunt you?"

"Not for a minute," I said.

She grinned, and parroted: " 'Let another hail him dear- Little chance that he'll forget me!

Only need I curse and fear Her he loved before he met me.' "

"Nuts to that and nuts to her," I grinned back. "I don't think he ever did really love her, and there wasn't a single thing he wanted out of life that she liked or approved of. Not to speak ill of the dead. But oh, Cecie, everything he loves, I love! Everything he wants is what I want! Listen, let me tell you about his white house..."

And I did. When I had finished, she was still smiling, but the essential Cecie-ness had gone out of it. I stopped talking and looked at her.

"Don't you think it sounds too perfect for words?"

"I sure do," she said. "I also think it's at least as much your white house as it is his. You're going to be the one supporting him while he makes his dream come true."

I could not think of anything to say. Did she not see?

"Well...one of us will have to work full time, and he can't do it and build a house and a practice at the same time," I said. "And I was going to try for a job in New York, anyway. What's the difference? Now I'm working at a dream job years before I could expect to, and for a house and a man I never even dared to dream about..."

"No difference, really," she said in her precise voice. "It's just that he's an extremely lucky guy, and I want him to realize it. And you should realize it, too. At least call it 'our white house.' "

" 'Our white house,' then," I said. "Oh, this is useless; I can't describe him. You're just going to have to meet him. You'll see, then. We're about one week away from that dinner party."

"Good," Cecie said. "I look forward to it."

On the first Friday evening in August Cecie and I and Fig and Ginger tiptoed up the stairs to Paul's apartment in the thick, leafy dark. There was not so much need for silence; the landlady was at the Passion Play in Oberammergau. But Paul had asked us to wait until dark fell.

"I think she's put her neighbors on red alert," he said.

And so we groped our way, trying not to fall and not to giggle. There was a white half-moon rising behind the trees, but it had not broken clear yet. I thought suddenly how much earlier dark was coming now. Off in the distance, at the edge of the trees, cicadas called and winter waited, crouching. I felt a wing-brush of melancholy. The coming fall would be my last one at Randolph, my last one with Cecie. After that, I would be in another country entirely.

He opened the door to us in tight white pants and a striped French sailor's jersey. On his dark head was the little round matelot's cap, and he wore, astoundingly, well-worn rope-soled espadrilles. Behind us, Edith Piaf wailed of pain and degeneration and late nights and cigarettes, and something smelling powerfully of raw red wine and herbs bubbled audibly behind the painted screen. I stared at him as if I had never seen him before, and indeed, I had not, not this Paul. He looked absurdly, theatrically, indescribably wonderful, and as remote from Randolph, Alabama, or even New York, not to mention Kate Stuart Lee, as it was possible for a human being to look. This man was the very essence of the word exotic. It struck me, standing there dumbly and hearing the little, indrawn breaths behind me, that he might be mocking us with the costume, but then he grinned, easily and charmingly, and I saw that he was not. He was parodying himself for us. He had surely known that I would make much of his years in France to my friends. This was his way of defusing the formidability which he well knew clung to him, of laughing at himself so that we might laugh, too.

And at his grin we did, all of us, even Fig. Even as they gaped around at the apartment, even as they sniffed the air and heard the Piaf and the accordions, even as they stared at Paul Sibley whenever his eyes were not on them, Cecie and Ginger and Fig laughed with delight and a kind of relief, and with capitulation. I had seen him do it before; topple walls and barriers with one brief, wry smile. He had done it to me. But it never failed to amaze me. I loved him so much in that instant that I closed my eyes with it; so the room swam.

"Thank you," I said to him silently. "Oh, thank you."

Aloud I said, "Where on earth did you get that costume? You look like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris."

"Actually, I look a lot better," he grinned. "Kelly is a dwarf. This is not a costume, my dear; I actually wore these astounding garments during my first days in Paris. I even carried a baguette around with me under my arm. I thought I was wonderful. But I had to give it up; none of my French friends would be seen in public with me."

Cecie's laugh burbled.

"What did they wear?" she said.

"Blue jeans and Brooks Brothers shirts," he said. "Come on in. I'm making tripes a la mode de Caen. It's as authentic a peasant dish as I could think of."

"Smells heavenly," Ginger said, wrinkling her freckled nose at him in appreciation. It included, I knew, Paul as well as the food.

"It sure does," Fig echoed, faintly. Something was wrong with Fig's voice. She sounded as if she had been hit in the midriff with a baseball. I looked at her. She was very pale, and two vermilion spots stood out on her cheeks. Behind the thick glasses, her eyes looked stunned and stupid. She seemed to be breathing hard through her nose, as if an asthma attack were imminent. I opened my mouth to speak to her, and then it dawned on me. Fig had, in that instant, fallen in love with Paul.

"Oh, shit," I whispered, and saw Cecie's mouth quirk.

"I'll say it does," I said briskly, to cover the "shit." "What is it?"

Cecie snorted. Paul grinned at her, the dark eyes dancing.

"Actually, it's tripe," he said. "The first and second sections of the stomach of a ruminant such as a sheep, or a goat. The guy at the grocery store gave it to me free; I think he called it a gut. Of what animal I dared not ask. I do it the classic way, with pigs' feet and carrots and onions and leeks and all kinds of herbs and wine, and pastry. Plus enough Calvados to make you forget what it is. Or at least not care. It's the acid test. If somebody I've just met eats my tripe without throwing up, or at least tries, I know I've got a friend for life."

"Maybe it would be easier to try a little Russian roulette," Cecie murmured, and he laughed outright.

"It may be the same thing," he said.

"The only way you're going to get me to eat that stuff is pour scotch down me from now till dinner time," Ginger said.

"I love tripe. We have it all the time at home," Fig said. Her voice sounded so frail and bruised that I thought she might burst into tears.

"Then," said Paul, "there's no help for it. I will simply have to marry you. Kate here has said she'd as soon eat dog."

"I've said nothing of the kind," I said in mock indignation, loving him and his foolishness and his kindness to poor Fig, loving them for admiring him, loving the place and the night and the world and everything in it, stars and bugs and elephants and shoes and pins and needles. I felt ready to burst, in that instant, with pure joy.