"It does matter, doesn't it?" I said finally, my voice breaking. "You're mad at me."

"The only thing that matters is that you thought you couldn't tell me right off," he said in a remote voice. "The only thing that matters is that you thought it would matter to me. You must have, or you'd have told me. Did you really think I'd care about that?"

"I guess I didn't think at all," I said despairingly. "Somehow it just never seemed the time for it. I'm sorry. Please don't shut me out."

He was silent again, and I began to cry, quietly and in absolute anguish at what I had wrought. I could not bear his silence.

"Ah, Kate, don't cry," he said finally. "It doesn't matter. Nothing has changed. You've told me now, and that's the end of it. Come here and give me a hug."

And he pulled me to him and kissed the top of my head. Gradually I stopped crying. We sat so for a long time, I listening to his breathing and feeling the warmth of him in the cooling night. Finally, with the sharpening of the wind that meant the turn of the tide, we got up and went inside. In the other bed in our room, Cecie slept quietly, her face turned to the window on the sea. But it was a long time before I slept.

We were almost across the Lindsay Warren Bridge to the mainland the next morning before anyone spoke.

"Well," Ginger said to Paul, turning around in the front seat so she could see him. "Wasn't it everything I said it was?"

"Oh, yes, Gingerrooney," he said. "It was all that and more."

It was upon me then, the time of urgency and endings: there was nothing, now, between me and December graduation. No break existed so that I could say "after vacation." Nor could I say "this time next quarter." There would not, for me, be a next quarter. The sense of imploding time was terrifying.

Paul said more than once that I reminded him of an overtuned violin. I wept more often, and more easily, that fall than I ever have since, even in the days after Stephen's death, even after they found the cancer. Those two horrors were beyond weeping. But in that last autumn at Randolph, everything touched me like an electrical charge, and everything brought quick, tremulous tears. I would walk across the campus in the grape-colored early dusk of October and smell the smoke from the Friday night pep rally bonfires, and I would think, "This is the last time I'll ever smell that smell, or see this light." The Saturday thunder of the drums from the stadium, on bronze afternoons, made my heart hurt. I would walk into the steamy clatter of Harry's out of a nippy November wind and the dreary, banal little scene would move me to blindness with its sweetness and beauty. The light from my drawing board lamp on a night of blowing rain, seen through the bank of windows in McCandless, struck me to the quick. Next quarter another head would lean over into its white pool. Even the midge-whine of chapter meetings, and the fretful scramble of rush, made me nostalgic. Ginger's white grin made me want to run across the room and hug her, and I often did. Once or twice I even did it to Fig, who colored and simpered.

I found that I could hardly bear to look at Cecie. Whenever I did, and saw her red head bent over her books, or received her full, sweet kitten's smile, loss nearly drowned me. I had to turn my head away frequently, lest she see the tears in my eyes. I had the sense, at those times, that it was Cecie's ghost I saw; that the essential Cecie had moved on somewhere else, somewhere I could not follow. I found that I was starting a great many sentences to her with "Do you remember?"

"Of course I remember, it was only a year ago," she said to me once. "What's the matter with you? You'd think you were going to Inner Mongolia for the rest of your life."

"I'm afraid I'm going to forget it," I said. "I want to keep all of it, everything we said and did and laughed at, everything we read. And I want you to remember it, too."

"I'm not going to forget it, ol' Kate," she said seriously. "And I'm not going to die, either, and you're not. Stop acting like December was the end of everything. We'll see each other. I'll come to New York next summer, if you still want me to, and we're all going to meet at Ginger's in March, remember."

"I know. It's just that there's something so...bittersweet about everything this fall. Everything I see or hear..."

She smiled.

" 'The look of a laurel tree birthed for May Or a sycamore bared for a new November Is as old and as sad as my furtherest day- What is it, what is it, I almost remember?' "

she quoted.

"I know I'll never forget the Dorothy Parker," I grinned mistily. "It's the first thing I'm going to unpack in New York. I'm going to read it every night, like the Bible."

"So will I," she said. "And I'll read aloud to you in my head, and you to me, and we'll be able to laugh just as hard as if we were in the same room."

"Oh, Cecie..." I began, my eyes flooding with tears.

"Don't you dare," she said fiercely. "I don't have time to cry. I'm doomed as it is. We'll cry later." And she left for the library, and I for McCandless.

I was finally into my senior design thesis, and was spending virtually every waking hour in labs or with my adviser. I felt a keen pressure to make the project as good as it could be. Paul had, indeed, written Carl Seaborn, his mentor at McKim, Mead and White, about employment for me, and Carl had called the next day to say that they'd found both a place for me as a junior draftsman in their interiors department and a tiny apartment on First Avenue in the 80s, that had just been vacated by an employee who was joining the Peace Corps. The job was a foregone conclusion, he said, but they'd want to see my thesis, just as a formality. And so I poured heart and soul and hundreds of hours into it, and Paul photographed it in progress and sent it to Carl Seaborn, and the word came back that they thought it very good indeed, and were proud to have me on the team. I thought they probably were. The project was good; even I knew that. I had, inevitably, chosen to do interiors for the house by the sea, and the clean, low lines of the massive furniture and the sea-and-wind-cool blues and greens and vibrant whites and gull grays flowed from my fingers as if fountains had been tapped.

"We're going to do these rooms just this way," Paul said, looking at it. "It's perfect. I won't want to change anything. The house is a real partnership now."

And happiness flooded me, bringing, inevitably, tears.

Urgency infected everyone that autumn, it seemed. Paul's entire quarter was devoted to a design competition for a bus station in Tuskegee, and his hours at the board were even worse than mine. We made silent, urgent love in haste, gulped coffee in haste, met in dark stairwells and parking lots and kissed and broke apart, sweat-damped, and dashed on our different ways. He continued to work three nights a week with Fig, at the English, but mercifully she ceased making so much of it, and he simply forgot to mention it unless I remembered to ask. I seldom did. His summer English grade had been a B. The tutoring was obviously a success.

Ginger was away much of that quarter, doing a stint of elementary school practice teaching in nearby Montgomery. She stayed with elderly relatives in a dim, enormous old house during the week and streaked for Randolph like a homing pigeon when her classes were over on Friday afternoons.

"She has shingles and the UDC at her house every Wednesday, and he doesn't do anything but talk about Martin Luther King," she said in disgust. "And they as much as said they thought Daddy was trashy. I said in North Alabama we called it rich. They'll be as glad as I am when this quarter's over."

I saw less of Fig that quarter than I ever had. Perhaps it was because I was so distracted and overflowing with work and angst. But often days went by before I was aware of seeing her, and when at last I put my head into hers and Ginger's room, she was usually curled up on her bed writing in the diary. She was still as secretive about that as ever, shielding it elaborately from my eyes.

"I've started my novel," she said one evening. "I'm going to make you and Paul famous, like Cathy and Heathcliff. But you can't read it till I'm finished."

"Well, I hope we come to better ends than they did," I said, smiling to hide my annoyance at her fatuousness. "Does Paul know you're immortalizing him?"

"Yes, but he can't see it, either. He's already said he was going to break my neck if I tried to publish it."

And she smirked.

I went back into our room, thinking she would be lucky indeed if he didn't. I was tired and edgy and lonely for Paul, for Cecie. But one was in the lab and the other the library. Presently I crawled into bed and put out the light. It was much later when I finally heard Cecie come in.

She was carrying a double course load that quarter, trying to make up for the classes she had lost when she was sick in the summer, and it was soon clear to me, if not her, that she was not going to be able to sustain the pace. She looked as bad to me by the middle of November as she had when I had finally taken her to the infirmary, thin and white and glittering with fever, and soaked often with sweat that matted and darkened the copper curls. There was a pinched look at the base of her nose, and I knew that her throat hurt her, because she stopped going to meals and began living on soup and colas and tea and things that would slip down easily, and lost even more weight. She would not even talk about going back to the infirmary.

"I've just got four more weeks and I'll be caught up and I can go home and crash over Christmas," she said hoarsely. "Don't touch me or drink after me and you ought to be okay. I scald out the sink after I wash. And don't nag me, Kate; I can't afford to lose any more time. I'm going to start going to bed earlier and sleeping later. That will help."

And she did, and after that, the most I saw of Cecie Hart was the diminished mound of her little body, as still as death under the covers, or the tip of her nose, or the lustreless tangle of her hair. It was like, I told her once, when I found her awake, living with the dead man in Yossarian's tent, in Catch 22. She laughed, but it was not her old, full laugh.

I did not go home to Kenmore for Thanksgiving. When I called my mother to say that I'd like to bring a friend home to meet her, she said, fretfully, that Mr. Jessup, the deacon, had asked her to share the holiday with him and his married daughter and her family in Selma, and she didn't like to impose two extra people on them.

She sounded like someone I had never even met, determinedly middle class and deliberately banal, and I knew that she had, in her inimitable way, assumed the coloration of the world in which she found herself. My mother became a Methodist deacon's wife before the deacon ever got around to asking her; just as she had been a Virginia belle long before my father plucked her out of her waitress's uniform to bring her South. I thought that she could probably survive so on Saturn.

"Well, maybe we'll come the Friday after, then," I said. "I want you to meet Paul. You'll have to, sooner or later. I'm probably going to marry him, mother."

There was a silence.

"Paul who?" she said finally.

"Sibley," I said. "From Miami."

"We never knew anybody from Miami," my mother said suspiciously. "Who are his people?"

I thought of her own provenance, in the blasted little roadside store in rural Mississippi. Anger leaped bright and clean in my chest.

"A Seminole Indian princess and a Negro preacher from the Everglades," I said sweetly. "Boy, when he speaks in tongues, he speaks in tongues. He's so full of the Spirit you can't even understand him. Of course, you never know if it's the Holy Spirit or the Great Spirit."

"If you can't speak nicely to me, don't bother to come at all," my mother said righteously.

"I guess I won't, then," I said. "Because I probably can't speak any nicer than that."

And so we did not go, and I found to my surprise that I did not at all regret it. I suspected that Paul might simply never meet my mother at all; that did not bother me, either. She seemed no part of me; she had not, for a long time. We stayed at his apartment for the long weekend, while his landlady was visiting her son in Texas, and made love and listened to music and worked on our boards and ate the roast duck a l'orange that he made, and drank a great deal of wine. And made more love. And drank more wine.

"Do you care if you don't meet her?" I said once.

"Only if you do," he said. "I can meet her now or later; it isn't going to change anything. I hate to think you've fallen out with your mother over me, though."

"I think I must have separated from her a long time ago, and just not realized it," I said. "Probably when my father died. It was like that line in that Frost poem, 'The Hill Wife': 'Sudden and swift and light as that,...the ties gave.' I didn't feel anything when I talked to her and I don't now. I think the main connection for me was always my father, as sad as that was."

"Well, then, that's two of us," he said. "Travel light and travel fast. And far. Right now let's travel over there to that bed."

And we did.

The second week in December I had my thesis hearing, and after waiting an interminable afternoon, head ringing and heart pounding, while Paul left his lab all those precious hours and sat in Harry's with me, went to the McCandless bulletin board where the grades were posted and found that I had made an A.

My thesis adviser, a rangy, immensely talented young designer with the look and manner of an Alabama farm boy, kissed me on the cheek and said if I ever got tired of New York and the big time and Paul, I could come and teach at Randolph.

"Hell, I'll marry you and you can design my white house by the Randolph water works," he said.

He hugged me again and shook Paul's hand, and I cried, and Paul went back to his lab, and I went back over to Harry's and sat and drank more coffee and got my bearings. Fall graduation was three days away; until this morning there had been the great, glittering iceberg of the thesis between it and me, but now that was gone, melted into the swirl of Randolph that was vanishing as rapidly as water down a drain, and I was face to face with it. I was suddenly terrified, as frightened as I have ever been in my life, immobile and weak with panic. I sat still in the booth, trying to breathe normally, trying not to look as though I were going to die in a spasm of terror, and gradually the vise loosened. I was limp and wet with sweat and very, very tired. I got up and got into the MG and drove back to the Tri Omega house. I had done nothing; everything remained to be sorted, packed, loaded, stowed away. It would take me the entire three days to arrange my erasure from this room and this house and this campus. Instead, I lay down on my bed and went to sleep. Cecie, as usual, was not there. This time I did not hear her come in.

The night before graduation Ginger sneaked three iced bottles of Mumm's into our room and locked the doors and had a farewell party for me. Driven by the stinging cloud of endings hanging like furies in the air about us, we drank down the first bottle as if it had been cola, and by the time we started on the second the constraint and prickling strangeness of my leaving were gone, and we laughed and sang and riffled through all the memories we had forged in those two dark little rooms and that one dingy bath, and we all cried except Cecie.

"I'll do my crying after you're gone, Kate," she said, swigging champagne. "I don't want you to remember me weeping like a willow. Toujours gai, by God, is what I say!" And she waved the bottle aloft.

"Toujours gai," we all shouted. Fig burst into howls of wet woe and launched herself at me.

"I can't stand for you to leave, Effie," she sobbed. "I just know I'm never going to see you again!"

"You're going to see me in March, at Nag's Head," I said, disentangling myself from her short, solid arms. "And lots of times after that. Don't make me start crying now, Fig. And don't say goodbye, just get up in the morning and go on home and pretend it's between quarters. You're really going to undo me if you carry on like this."

And so we drank the rest of the champagne and I went back to their room with them and hugged and kissed them, and Fig cried some more, and Ginger sniffled, and I did, and I came back through the bathroom to take a shower. When I went back into our room, Cecie was asleep, covers over her head. I was obscurely glad. I knew that we would have to say goodbye at some point, and I did not want to do it yet.

She was still asleep the next morning when I left the room to go and get my things from McCandless Hall, and when I got back that night, there was a note on my bed that said she had felt so ill that Trish had run her over to the infirmary for some penicillin and that she'd see me at graduation the next day. Fig and Ginger were gone, their room neater than I had ever seen it, and as empty of them as if there had been two deaths. I could not believe I would not see them again for three months. I knew that when I did, everything would have changed for good and all. I had, in effect, said goodbye to them forever last night. A great emptiness settled over me. I packed my bags and signed out for the last time, unable, suddenly, to bear the room where Cecie was not, and drove over to Paul's apartment and stole softly up the stairs. I rapped on his door and presently he let me in.

"I want to be with you," I said. "I don't want to be by myself anymore."

We made love many times that night; it seemed to me that we did not sleep at all. Sometimes I wept, and once I thought that he did. But mostly he was silent; it was hard, urgent, voiceless, scouring love, and all through the last time he kept whispering, until he was almost shouting it aloud into my ear: "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"

We finished in an explosion of breath and heat and tears, and when I awoke the next morning, my graduation day...a soft one, and gray...the tracks of my tears were still damp on my face. He was sitting by the window in the Eames chair, in pants and a tee shirt, drinking coffee and staring out at the thick morning.

" 'This is the way the world ends,' " I said from the bed. " 'Not with a bang, but a whimper.' "

"This is the way it begins," he said, getting up and coming over to kiss me. "Not with a whimper, but a bang."

I do not remember much of my graduation. It was a small one in the ballroom of the Student Union, not nearly so large and festive as the big one, in spring. Most people had left for the Christmas holidays, and the applause for the seniors who rose and went up to receive their diplomas and shake hands with the president and pass their tassels to the other side of their mortarboards was sparse. I graduated with the Magna Cums, but there was little applause for me: my mother had not come, and Ginger and Fig had left early the morning before. I looked for Cecie's red head in the audience, but did not see it. It did not matter; in my heart I was, at last, gone from there. I had done that sometime in the December darkness, before dawn.

Back at the Tri O house, Paul came up to our room with me to carry my bags down to the MG while I said goodbye to Cecie. We found the bags stacked in the hall and the door closed. Pain seared me, and tears started once more in my eyes. Did she mean, then, simply not to see me again at all?

"Come on," Paul said softly. "Some people just can't say goodbye; I can't. You'll see her in March when we're in Nag's Head. Give both of you a break."

I started to pick up a bag and follow him down the stairs, and then I went back and opened the door, softly, and looked into the room. It was darkened, and Cecie lay asleep as I had seen her so often the past two quarters, very still, head under the covers, back to me. For a sudden, awful moment I thought she was not breathing, and then saw that she was, lightly. I started to go across and wake her, and then I did not. I closed the door and picked up my train case and went down the stairs. Paul was right. Time enough at Nag's Head.

Outside the train station, we sat in the MG not looking at each other. He would keep it while I was in New York; it would save me garaging fees and endless trouble. We had agreed earlier not to try to spend Christmas together; Carl Seaborn had asked me to spend Christmas Day with him and his family out in Bridgehampton, at the end of Long Island, and Ginger's mother had written and asked if Paul would like to come and have Christmas dinner with them at their home in Fowler. He did not think he would go.

"I wish you would," I said. "I hate to think of you here by yourself while I'm scarfing up whatever they scarf up in the Hamptons on Christmas Day."

"Lox and bagels, most likely," he said. "Well, I might. It would be sort of fun to see the birthplace of the famous Fig Newton while I'm at it. Unless you think she sprang full blown from the head of Zeus."

Down the track we could see the Crescent Limited-New Orleans to New York by way of Montgomery and Atlanta and Washington, with stops in between-crawl into view like a weary mastodon. I felt a sob start in my throat, and swallowed hard. Paul closed his eyes.

"Oh, Kate," he said, and pulled me to him. He did not kiss me; he held me against him, hard, and put his hands on my breasts, and ran them up under my sweater and over my shoulders and back, as it to memorize my flesh.

"Go on now, and don't say anything," he whispered against my hair. "Go on and hurry back to Nag's Head. I love you. Call me when you get in."

"Paul..."

"Go," he said. His voice was thick and rough. I got out of the car and ran up the steps and into the station where my luggage waited to be put aboard. I handed some money to the porter, blindly, and when I turned back to look, the MG was gone. I could hear it, burring away like a toy auto, its engine muffled in the raw silver fog that was beginning to settle over Randolph. The train was moving out slowly when I found my seat and sank into it. Tears scalded my throat and nose, but we were almost to the Georgia-Alabama state line before I began to cry.

From the minute I set foot on its mica-speckled sidewalks, New York embraced me. The fatigue of the overnight trip, the misery of leaving Paul, the pain of Cecie...all of it evaporated into the raw evening air of 43rd Street when I came up out of the pandemonium of Grand Central. My heart gave a great, unexpected swoop of joy. I had expected to be lonely and afraid, at least at first, but I had told myself over and over that I had had, by that time, sufficient practice in bluffing my way into new worlds so that at least the clumsiness and self-consciousness of the newcomer would not show. But from the beginning I was good at being a New Yorker. As my heart had found its home by the sea, so my mind and body found their counterpart in the bruising, smart-ass, exhilarating maw of Manhattan.

It seemed to me that the city did all its tricks for me that first night. Carl Seaborn sent a slim, elegant young man from the firm to meet my train, wearing a bored, polite smile with a bunch of hothouse violets in hand, and he tucked me and my luggage into a waiting limousine. It was a small, hired one, and the driver did not wear a livery, but it was a limousine, nevertheless.

"Good Lord, what an introduction to New York," I smiled at the captive minion.

"Well, I hear your boyfriend is practically a partner before he even gets here," the young man said. "Of course, we're glad to have you, too."

"Of course," I said dryly, and turned my attention to the city flashing by. It was raining that night, a soft, fine, icy rain, and lights wore halos, and hissing tires left iridescent snails' tracks on the streets. Horns blatted and street corner Santas rang bells and crowds jostled on the sidewalks and lights climbed into the skies and vanished into the clouds and the very air seemed charged with particles of diamonds, like the sidewalks.

I said something about the diamond sidewalks to the young man.

"Manhattan is built on mica schist," he said, lighting a cigarette and leaning back against the seat. "It's a pain in the ass to build on."

I fell silent, determined to stay that way, but just then the car flashed past Rockefeller Center at the precise second that the great tree bloomed into light, and I gave a small cry of pure pleasure.

"Don't you dare tell me how much lighting that tree sets New Yorkers back every year," I said to my companion.

He laughed. "Don't worry, I wouldn't even try," he said. "You're a goner. I know that look."

He brought my bags up to the apartment for me, through a dim, tiny lobby and past a dozing doorman, and unlocked the door and saw me in, and made a perfunctory sweep of it before surrendering the key. The apartment was about the size of mine and Cecie's room at the Tri Omega house, with a thin, flaccid bed that pulled out of the wall, a kitchen even smaller than Paul's behind a screen, and a bathroom in which it did not seem possible even for midgets to ablute themselves in any comfort. It had scarred parquet flooring and a growling radiator and a liver-colored, metallic-threaded couch and a formica table and two aluminum dining chairs in front of its lone window and an enormous leather Morris chair, patched with tape a shade darker than the burgundy leather. A long-dead, copper-brown palm tree in a plastic pot sat in a corner. Someone had tossed Christmas tinsel over it.

"I love it," I said. "It's wonderful."

"Better you than me," he said, turning to leave. "First month's rent is free; they should pay you to live here. Welcome and enjoy."

And he was out the steel door and gone to wherever elegant young men went in New York on icy evenings just before Christmas, and I was alone with the city.

I walked to the window and rubbed the steam off it and looked out. I saw an alley with garbage cans far below, and other pale cubes of buildings, and jumbled rooftops, and, in a gap between two of them, far away and luminous, the top of the Empire State Building. Tears came into my eyes again.

"I am in New York," I whispered to the black window. And then, turning to the room, hugging myself, eyes closed and head thrown back, I shouted as loud as I could, "I AM IN NEW YORK!"

"AND I WISH YOU WAS IN CANARSIE," a voice yowled thinly through the wall, and I sat down in the Morris chair and laughed until I was out of breath and my sides hurt. I was still laughing, off and on, when I finished unpacking late that night and heaved the bed out of the wall and crept beneath the lone nylon blanket. At least, I thought, I would not need more covers. No matter how I tugged and banged on it, the radiator continued to pump steam into the apartment like a fire-breathing dragon. When I awoke in the middle of the night, somehow absolutely certain of where I was, I was soaked in sweat.