As he got into the car he had wild, desperate thoughts of calling Mary Wentworth at the bank, ordering her to meet him after work, perhaps sodomizing her brutally on his desk; or lying in wait at the corner on which Grace Plum de-boarded from the bus and getting blown as he drove home. Though ordinarily Buddy deplored deviate acts as ends in themselves, he now needed ardently to defile some female while at the same time not violating his vow never to make love to anyone but Laverne. Even if she now revealed a unique nastiness, he was still so crazy about that woman that he would have gone back upstairs and kissed her ass had he thought she would thereby be mollified.

With his understanding of the female sex, he knew however that such a move would be useless at this time. Women operated on the principle: Sin in haste, repent at leisure. Left to cool her heels, Laverne would develop a usable shame; regret would stimulate her appetite, and his answering magnanimity would ignite her. Two-three days without cock would put her at the limits of her endurance. Indeed, he loved her so much-despite her current mood-that were it not a subtle kindness he could not have submitted her to this cruel denial.

Ralph was on one of his earlier deliveries when his father drove out of the neighborhood by another street. And for once their routes did not coincide. Neither his father nor his mother knew he had gone to apply for the job at Bigelow's. He might in fact not tell them for days. For example, they were utterly ignorant that he had tried caddying at the outset of the summer. For no special reason, unless it was an instinctual or hereditary strain of paranoia, of which he was unconscious, Ralph played his cards close to his chest. For their parts, his parents had never been snoops.

The address crayoned on the side of the carton was, cryptically, 23-B Myrtle; no name accompanied it. Ralph found the street, and he found the number but not the supernumerary letter on a big, old, gray, square house with almost no yard: the kind of place that looked as if it would be populated with residents to match. He removed the box, lowered the bike to the grassy strip above the curb, there being no nearby pole or tree, and went around the corner of the building, at which point the concrete path gave way to loose gravel. There he also came upon his "23-B" in unpainted zinc figures affixed to the post of an outside stairway.

With a simultaneous inflation of his chest, he hefted the carton onto his right shoulder and, securing it with one hand and a flattened ear, he ascended to the top landing, where he did not knock but called through the screendoor: "Bigelow's delivery!"

There was no response from within. Given the current angle of the sun, the light of which was detained by the crosshatching of the screen, much of which was clogged with soot, he could see nothing of the interior.

The carton having begun to hurt his ear and shoulder, he lowered it to the boards of the landing. As his head was rising he saw the bottom of the screendoor swing towards him, and he slid the box away from its projected route. Still bent, he saw upon the threshold a pair of those ladies' slippers called "mules," of pink satin with fuzzy pompoms on the toes. The ankles above them were blue-white as skim milk, as were the shins and so on to the beginning of the swell of calf. At this point bare flesh was succeeded by more pink fuzz, now along the hem of what in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, that classic sourcebook for masturbatory images, was called a negligee. The body of this garment was of a pink satin one shade darker than that of the mules, which were perhaps faded.

Ralph looked only as far as the belt, but he was conscious, through his upper peripheral vision, of two substantial bulges just above and flanking the loose, slippery satin knot.

He lifted the carton in both hands and propped it, Bigelow-style, against his midsection, though skinny as he was he had no shelf there. With an automatic smile he looked then at her face, and saw the sexiest woman he had ever laid eyes on-bright yellow curls and sky-blue eyes fringed with enormous lashes, cheeks of rose and lips of flame.

"Hi," she said. "You're a new one."

Only those remarkable eyes could have kept his own glance from falling to her fantastic breasts, which now his lower peripheral sight told him were unconfined behind the negligee, and he was dying to see whether there were nipple bumps on the sleek satin.

He nodded and mumbled, and adjusted his burden, which caused the remaining bottles to clink, reminding him of the breakage.

"See, I had a little accident-it actually wasn't my fault-" But suddenly, standing there before the muzzles of those breasts, he understood it would be unmanly to blame Margie. Deserve it though she did in one sense, in another her error could be seen as arising from her attraction to him. He might himself, with this fascinating woman, commit some disgrace for the same motive. The world could use more tolerance.

"What really happened was: a couple of things in your order got busted somehow." His eyes disappeared into his forehead. "Let's see now, a Coke and catchup and..." He had forgotten the third item.

With her free hand she gestured to him to enter. "You're letting the flies in." She gave him room, but not much, and as he stepped across the threshold, compressing himself so strenuously that had he been carrying a bag and not a box he would have crushed it, his forearm slid along and over not one but both warm, weighty, sleek-surfaced, superficially yielding yet immanently dominant, massive but lyrical extrusions of bosom. He wore a short-sleeved summer shirt.

The accident he had anticipated, and forgiven himself for by exploiting Margie's example, happened at this point: his sneaker was imprisoned briefly at the threshold, perhaps fouled on the rubber stair tread often encountered in such a place, its lip curled to trap and trip the unwary toe. In freeing his foot Ralph projected himself forward with a violence which, after the liberation of the sneaker, was too much for his equilibrium.

So as not to fall, he ran right across the living room, reaching the entrance of the hallway before he gained his balance. He did not however drop the carton.

She was chuckling behind him.

"Sorry," said he, coming back with the blood roaring in his ears. "I better get rid of this before anything else happens."

"Right in here, on the table," said she. Her satin back led him to the kitchen. Owing to the carton, he could not see the swell of her behind. He was conscious for the first time, though it had been everywhere throughout, of her sense-reeling scent: not that of known flowers, but a compound of fragrances from imaginary jungles, gaudy fruits deliquescing into syrup, the mating odors of fur-bearing animals, along with the sophisticated essences poured from cut-glass decanters into crystal balloons and sipped with closed eyes by tuxedo-clad epicures.

Putting down the carton at last, he remembered for no reason at all: "Cream was the other thing broken." Again he blushed, remembering its thick, opaque ooze on the pavement, very like ejaculated semen in the palm of the hand.

"Listen!" he said hastily, rudely, then revised it: "I mean, you don't have to worry, ma'am. I'll make a special trip back to the store and get those items replaced. Five minutes, maybe less."

She crossed her arms beneath her sumptuous breasts and smiled gorgeously, but also kindly. "I'm not worried, for gosh sake. Accidents can happen to anybody."

Ralph just gawked helplessly at her blue eyes. He was smitten by her angelic combination of beauty and generosity.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said at last.

Ralph emerged from his coma. "It's nice of you not to be mad."

She frowned amiably. "When you think how short life is, you concentrate on the real important matters and don't cry over spilled milk."

"Cream," said Ralph, and regretted doing so; she might consider it a correction.

"Oh, sure!" She snapped her wrist at him and giggled marvelously. She bent to look into the box, favoring him with her golden crown. "Hey, here's two Cokes that are still O.K. Why don't you have one?"

Ralph was overcome.

"I'll tell you," she said, "I don't use the stuff myself." She bared her flawless teeth and tapped an incisor with a red fingernail. "I say it's no good for the enamel. It's got caffeine in it, and that's acid you know." Her expression froze for an instant. She slapped herself on the forehead. "So why am I asking you to drink it then, huh? How inconsiderate can you get?"

She was an inch or so taller than he, but in another year they would be about the same size, given his rate of growth, which had so far proved normal.

"Oh, that's all right," said Ralph. "I don't drink much pop anyway. I don't like the fizz."

Even her grimace was enchanting. "Yeah, I know what you mean. Like beer, I never cared for it." She brightened. "But champagne now, that's different."

"I never tasted it."

"Well then, you got something to look forward to." Her smile now was rather shy. "I've just had it on special occasions."

"Like New Year's Eve."

"Right!" she exclaimed, as if it were a remarkable observation. She certainly could enhance a routine give and take. Ralph yearned to have a really brilliant thought that would devastate her.

Straining too hard, he said: "Coca-Cola was invented around the turn of the century by a druggist, as a kind of medicine."

This was a mistake. Saying, "I oughtn't hold you up. You got work to do," she walked rapidly into the living room, her mule-heels clacking, and soon returned, bosoms in motion, with a red handbag already open. She took from within a little red change purse and plucked out a coin.

It was a quarter. "I can't take this," said Ralph. "With what I broke and all."

"You'll have to pay," she said. "I know how bosses are. I spilled some tea once on some gingham in a dry-goods store where I worked as a kid, and I had to pay for it. So"-she pressed the quarter on him-"I'm splitting the cost of the damage with you. I can afford it better than you. So you just take it or I'll get mad, and you don't want to get me mad or I'm a devil."

He simply stood there in wonderment.

She went on: "See, what I could do is say forget all about what was broken, because the Coke and the whipping cream were not for me but for my gentleman friend, and he and I won't be seeing one another any more, and speaking of the catchup, I still got enough in the old bottle-you can always add hot water and get some more out. So you could just go back and not mention it to the boss, and we'd be even-Steven for all I cared.

"But I'm not going to do that. Why? Do you have any idea?" She turned her glorious face at an angle to her swan neck.

Ralph shook his head in adoration. He hoped she would take hours to explain, in that musical voice and exuding that fragrance, eyes sparkling and hair glowing.

"I'll tell you," she said. "You might call me mean, but I think nothing in the world is more important than a sense of responsibility in a man. Like it might not of been your fault for the accident, but delivering those groceries is your responsibility, and you want to make it good. So if I was to say forget all about it, I would be taking away your chance to be a man who stands for something." She blinked dramatically. "Does that make any sense? I guess it's pretty complicated."

Ralph felt faint. Her intelligence and moral character were comparable to her heavenly beauty.

"Oh, yes," he said. "It makes a whole lot of sense." He nodded so vigorously he felt a catch in his nape.

She extended her hand. "Let's shake on it. Put 'er there, partner."

Her hand was no larger than his, but warmer, softer, and with more strength; his own was happily helpless.

"You going to be regular or is it just for today?" she asked. "Frankly, I never have much cared for that kid Horace. He's an example of what I'm talking about. Now when he breaks something, he never comes clean like you; he tries to sneak it past me."

With a disloyalty that could be called divine-considering the deed he had performed for Hauser on Saturday night-Ralph said: "He's not much of a guy. I got his job."

"Well," said she, "since we'll be seeing each other a lot, my name's Laverne."

"I'm pleased to meet you, Miss Laverne."

"No, that's my first name, unless you're talking like a colored person from Gone with the Wind. My last name's Lorraine, and my middle is Linda, all L's, but I wish you would call me just Laverne. We're just plain folks here." Her giggle was like the ringing of a silver bell.

"Mine's Ralph."

"Hi, Ralph."

"The whole thing's Ralph V. Sandifer." He shrugged. "The middle's actually Virgil. My dad was stuck with that for a first name, but he doesn't use it, either, except for legal matters." Noticing her queer look, he assumed that he had somehow offended her, given her great moral sensitivity, with this kind-of-apology. "I guess names don't matter really." But hers did, magnificently: Laverne Linda Lorraine was a song in itself.

She walked briskly to the sink and clattered things there. Whatever the reason, she had, he saw definitely, enough of him at the moment.

He said: "I have to get back to work."

She made no response. But as he reached the doorway she asked: "That your dad who's got the car lot?"

He turned and saw her more beautiful than ever. Now, despite her coloring, she looked dark, vulnerable, tragic in fact, with shadowed eyes like Merle Oberon's. Of what exquisite variations she was capable! Laverne Linda Lorraine, I love you with all my being. But what he said was merely: "Yes."

"It's not your uncle or anything like that?"

"No." He fled in a disorder of feeling.

When he got to the curb he discovered his bicycle had been stolen.

Buddy brooded resentfully for the rest of the afternoon, which he spent sitting in the office behind the closed door, ignoring the customers, if such there were, outside. Few cars sold themselves. Only one person breached his privacy. This fellow entered without knocking. He was young, with steel-rimmed glasses and a smirk.

"Hey," he said brashly, "you know that thirty-seven Chevy two-door of yours-they got one in better condition at Loewenfels', down on the Milltown Pike near the infirmary-for fifty dollars less."

"Then you go over and scoop it up, fella."

The young man's smirk grew broader. "Oh, yeah? I figured we could do a little negotiating."

"Take a look at the rubber on that baby."

"The muffler's rusted out, and the paint on the hood is shot: engine heat's faded it."

"I know the car," Buddy said frostily. "You wanna make a quick deal, I'll go down twenty-five."

"I'm going to take another look at Loewenfels'," said the guy. He hesitated at the door, waiting in three-quarter profile, one shoulder high, for another offer, but it being in Buddy's psychological interest, which was predominant at the moment, to deny him, he heard nothing further, and left.

Buddy had the feeling that things were coming to a head. His decision, made as usual on impulse, to let Laverne stew in her own juice for a few days was in retrospect seen as impracticable, like an unenforceable law such as that, still on the books in some states, forbidding unorthodox sex practices even by spouses.

Already he felt a growing pressure in his groin. Unless his testes were regularly evacuated they became the seat of his central nervous system and sent throughout his body venomous communications in the forms of neuralgia, dyspepsia, and a twitching of the inner eyelid, maddening though not visible to others.

In this condition in the old days he would have gone instantly to the nearest woman and relieved himself inside her. He could not be resisted when under the force of this need, though several times it had happened that his partner, met but an hour earlier in one roadhouse and under the assumption she was being taken to another, interpreted as rape his assault on her in the parking lot-but dropped the charges long before his climax, which invariably succeeded two or even three of hers.

Such a measure was unthinkable now. A latecomer to monogamy, like all converts Buddy was a zealot. He could not abstain from Laverne, and he could not do otherwise with any other female.

To boot, in the area of his profession he was as it were emasculated by Leo's defection: strange but true. By cracking up, Leo had stolen his thunder, had become the romantic, the focus of concern and attention. Leo might come out of it once his mother had been buried; but his potentiality for disorderliness under stress would not be forgotten. In a word, Leo, previously the soul of reliability, could never be trusted again.

Buddy seized the phone, called the authoress of all his ills, and listened hatefully to her pretentious announcement.

"Naomi Sandifer speaking. Hello."

"Say, Nay," Buddy said. "Leo Kirsch's mom passed away yesterday. She's laid out at his house. We better look in there about five-thirty, so hold the supper."

"How dreadful," said Naomi. "I gather it was unexpected."

"Yeah, yeah," Buddy said with an unusual display of open impatience. "You didn't know the lady."

"Still-"

Before she could make some fucking philosophical statement about death, Buddy said: "I got business to do, and I'm all alone here, but I'll get away by five and pick you up."

"I'll be here."

You could count on that. She would throw on a shapeless dress, powder her face sloppily, with a spill on the collar, and be ready. You never had to wait on the bathroom because of her: insufficient compensation for the embarrassment of escorting her into the world, if Leo's living room could be called public.

"Okey-doke," said Buddy and was about to hang up when he was halted by an unpremeditated thought. "Say, is Gladys coming this week?"

Her sister, who lived about ten miles away, was wont to visit Naomi once or twice a month, by bus. If the matter of departure escaped her mind until evening, she often stayed overnight. Despite Buddy's business, her husband, a limp mailman, owned no car, but would take no favors from his brother-in-law. She was two years older than Naomi, freckled and sinewy, athletic in appearance and in action as well, had played volleyball in high school and nowadays bowled on some team of neighborhood women. She had by her own admission never come close to having a child, for reasons undisclosed. She was one of the few females with whom Buddy had had social contact and yet never thought about in positive sexual terms, Gladys being more masculine than her husband, against whom Buddy also had the moral bias of the self-made man when contemplating a Civil Service malingerer.

"There's a coincidence," said Naomi, with her meaningless enthusiasm over a banal event. "She had intended to come today, but won't be able to because of some breakdown, I believe, in the plumbing."

Under stern control, Buddy converted his emotion into exaggerated sympathy. "Gee, that's too bad."

"Oh," said Naomi, who was always vivified by an expression of regret, "it's not a tragedy."

"Huh," said Buddy.

"It's not life-or-death, by any means," Naomi said.

Buddy hung up, went to the safe, then found a blank envelope in his desk and put the money therein. This sequence had been brisk, but he entered the garage in a dreamy fashion. Clarence was not in evidence. Probably he was out on the lot dusting the merchandise. Buddy put the envelope in the inside breast pocket of the old jacket, the lining of which was so frayed that towards the tail it hung in ribbons.

He headed back to the office, now in a saunter. He re-assumed his seat behind the desk. Unbeknown to himself, he began to work his face in a manner that looked to his employee Jack, who had heard about Leo's loss at the gas station and come to the lot and opened the office door at this moment, like an epileptic fit. Being a devotee of first-aid tips in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets given away free at drugstores, Jack knew the danger was that the subject would swallow his own tongue, and he loped towards Buddy, flexing en route the index finger he must thrust down his employer's throat.

Since receiving Ballbacher's sucker punch, Buddy had been instinctively on guard against another unprovoked, maniacal attack. Had Leo chosen to make one when in possession of the gun, he would of course have been helpless. Jack was another matter: a large man, but flabby and sissified; lumbering urgently but slowly, his hand clawed like a girl's, he would go for the eyes.

Buddy grasped a heavy glass paperweight shaped like half an ostrich egg and prepared to let Jack have it with a roundhouse to the temple. His reaction was so quick and Jack's advance so sluggish that there was even time to gloat: "Come and get it, sucker."

This and the raised paperweight put Jack on ice. He stopped and asked: "Are you O.K.?"