"I'm keeping out of his clutches," said Irma, who had never had much upstairs.

Luckily the restroom was crowded. When the first booth became available Laverne insisted Irma take it; and when the door closed on her friend she slipped out of the Ladies', circled the grove, and emerged at the rear of the bandstand, from which the musicians had already departed. She groaned twice and was about to surrender to despair when a little door in the base of the stand opened and the men came out, including the one and only Ken Canning, who, the lights still burning above, saw and recognized her immediately.

He closed the door and leaned against it in his striped blazer and ice-cream pants. He put his thumb up at her and beckoned.

She had no fright or doubts. As she approached him, passing the other Ragtime Dreamers, one of them said smirkingly: "Look out. Papa spanks!" And another raked his sailor straw and cried to Ken: "Baby-rape will land you in the hoosegow."

"Kiddo," said Ken, lipping an unlighted cigarette, "you the one giving me them bedroom eyes from the floor all night, ain't you?"

Laverne simpered in silence.

"Say, listen, you ever heard the gen-you-whine words to the 'Sheik of Araby'?

"At night when you're asleep, Without no pants on, Into your tent I'll creep, Without no pants on..."

She laughed through her nose, but not much, because he did remind her of Valentino.

Ken Canning said: "You got the time?" He held his cold cigarette elegantly between thumb and forefinger.

She realized she was on trial. "Gee, no I ain't, but I could run and ask somebody."

He leered at her and said: "You're sure a hayseed. I got a solid gold watch right here." He tapped his jacket at the point under which ran the waistband of his trousers. "You're supposed to answer, 'And I got the place,' see?"

He had lost her somewhere. She listened extra carefully to the next. "Another one is: 'You got the time?' The answer is: 'Yeah, but who'll hold the horse?'"

"Oh, yeah, I get it." She laughed again, but had the hollow sense of not doing well as she saw him nonchalantly light the cigarette with a match he ignited with his thumbnail and widen his nostrils to blow out a double stream of smoke. She closed her eyes and let it wash over her. As she opened them the lights went out on the bandstand above.

In the darkness Ken Canning said: "You like to jazz?"

"Oh gee, yeah," she said enthusiastically. She lived for dance music.

His cigarette ember flared from a hearty in-draught, briefly lighting his long upper lip and the fine line of clipped hair thereupon. He took her hand as darkness fell over him again. "Don't trip and break your leg." He opened the door to the cellar and led her down three concrete steps. "Don't fall over the trap drum."

He had long wiry fingers. Laverne was in an immaterial state. She did not believe he had taken her underground for a private recital of jazz music, but neither did she expect to find his naked male thing in her hand, as suddenly it was. She had expected he would kiss her and she would let him; then feel her and she would resist a little, but soon relent, because unlike the rumble-seat sheiks he would be deft and graceful and stylish at it.

And for whatever else happened after that, she would not be responsible. Laverne was not a carnal girl. Her sexual fantasies were cloudy, perfumed, and musically accompanied but not physically detailed. She had decided to give herself to Ken Canning, in whatever degree he wanted her.

Instead, he presented himself to her, and she knew not what to do with him, or rather with the gristle-handle to which he was presumably attached. He had let her go altogether by now.

"Squeeze," said he. "That's my love muscle."

Suddenly his falling pants shot past her hand, the belt buckle dealing her knuckles a painful blow. She let go.

"C'mon, baby," said he, finding her fingers and putting them back on his knobbed protuberance. "Drop your bloomers."

She went up under her skirt. He moved somewhere in the dark.

"Over here," said he. She searched for him and bumped into the bass drum with a clang of the attached cymbals. He swore. She found him against the wall, at some kind of bench, on which he ordered her to sit and lift her legs. When she had carried out this command, he bent and drove his spike into her flesh. This was what Christ had suffered: the path of the pain was cruciform, going into all four limbs.

Emerging from this single thrust, Ken Canning entered her no more. Indeed, he went away altogether, and with the clink of belt buckle and rustle of fabric he could be heard to reassume his trousers: he had taken off nothing else.

Was he done with her? She decided against asking him. She felt in the place where he had been, and it was wet. What had been pain was now merely an ache. She rose and, squatting, holding her skirt away from the blood, searched the floor for the undergarment. Not finding it, she fell to her knees and explored deliberately on the cold concrete. Eventually she encountered his trousered legs.

"Hell fire," said he in irritation. "It's too late for a toot on the skin flute. Lay off!"

"I'm looking for my bloomers."

"Yeah," said Ken Canning. "It's like this, tootsie. I keep them for a souvenir, you know? I wear 'em for pocket handkerchiefs, see. You come out tomorrow night and you'll see 'em in my breast pocket. Give you a thrill, me up there onna stage and all." He chuckled. "Fun is when some tomato is down there dancing with her hubby, and she and I know I got her step-ins in my pocket."

"Sure," said Laverne, getting up. "That's okey-dokey."

"You don't happen to be married, do yuh?" asked Ken Canning in the darkness.

"I never even done it before," said Laverne.

"No lie?" said Ken. "Well, I'm a monkey's uncle. You are a spunky one. You are O.K., kid."

All summer Ken retained a soft spot in his heart for Laverne and every once in a while he would take her under the bandstand and slip it to her. She was gratified to know that she was of some use to the glamorous bandleader. On the nights he did not use her and either took some other girl or woman to the bandstand cellar or left with the Dreamers, laughing and smoking, immediately after the performance, she would go towards the bus stop but on a circuitous route that took her through the parking lot, and now if some fellow invited her into his automobile she usually accepted and charged him for it: one dollar. Occasionally she was bargained down to seventy-five or even fifty cents but not below. If offered two bits she had a wisecrack waiting: "I ain't no barbershop."

By Labor Day her monthly was several weeks overdue, and Ken Canning told her that night, in the shadow of the bandstand, "Kiddo, I picked up a dose someplace. I'd figure it was you but you was cherry when we met, so I doubt you are spreading it around just yet. I'd like to jazz you for old times' sake but the cannon's full of rust." He stuck out his hand and said: "We're leaving for Chi tomorrow early, where we got a engagement at a ritzy club in the big time, but you're a real nice kid and you gave some great laughs out here in the sticks."

They shook hands, and Laverne didn't bother with the information that it must have been he who was responsible for her being pregnant, because unless the fellows in cars had rubbers she made them finish outside in a handkerchief: theirs, if they had one. Ken went down the cellar steps for the last time, alone, and closed the door. Laverne meandered around the grove and, finding a bench, sat down upon it and wept. She would miss his stylish ways. He was a real Beau Brummell, a Gay Lothario, a Casanova, and a sheik wrapped up in one, and he was leaving to become a big muckety-muck in the Windy City.

She sat there nursing her broken heart, with a view of the deserted and darkened bandstand. At length Ken Canning came out of the cellar with a girl who in the moonlight looked like Irma Grunion, with whom her friendship had cooled after that initial slip-giving of July, but who often since, tonight included, had been her companion.

By the time Laverne reached the parking lot, the only vehicle remaining was the long touring car labeled KEN CANNING AND HIS RAGTIME DREAMERS. The drums were strapped to a luggage rack on the rear bumper, and the Dreamers sat inside. Ken, whom she was following at a distance, handed in his saxophone case, then climbed behind the wheel and drove away.

The last bus had gone too, taking Irma, if it was she. Laverne had to walk five miles home in her thin dancing pumps, and lost a heel en route. Her father, a railroad switchman who had to work all Labor Day, sat in the kitchen glowering over a tumbler of the hooch for which he paid the bootleggers most of his wages.

"You're up late," she said, trying in spite of everything to be nice.

"And you're a goddam little hoor," said he in his lousy brogue, the ugly, red-faced, heavy-eyebrowed, stupid Mick. Luckily her mother descended from Polish nobility, which was where Laverne got her own good looks, though her hair had begun to darken after she got her first monthlies at twelve and a half.

When she began to swell, Laverne ran away to Indianapolis and worked at a lunchroom in a bus station, not returning to the sale of herself until after her miscarriage. Throughout the subsequent decade she moved from city to city alternating between jobs concerned with food and drink on the one hand and prostitution on the other. She changed her name from Hogan to Lorraine and was often a platinum blonde. She remained in love with the idea of Ken Canning though on reflection she had identified the weakness of the man himself, which was a lack of faith in his own principles. He had every right to jazz Irma Grunion, but pretending he had the clap was a moral failure.

Every Saturday in the confessional booth, Laverne herself pretended to the priest that the worst of her sins were only "impure thoughts," but, one, she was a woman; two, she never had a moment's personal pleasure from the sexual employment of crotch, behind, mouth, or hand; and three, God saw everything you did anyway, so why go over it all again with the man on the other side of the grille, who being sexless by definition was immune to her God-given talents?

Laverne had never met a man she couldn't get up. But periodically she became bored with providing miracle cures for the impotence that remained a prevalent plague in the land, and went to serve foot-long hotdogs and fried fish, generally at roadside establishments where you got a changing clientele, and she always kept her faculties keen for the apprehension of another Ken Canning, whom she would never find in the practice of her other profession, he being a taker and not a buyer.

In the spring of '38 she became the third waitress hired by the first local example of the scheme imported from California: an asphalted area into which persons drove and parked and were served sandwiches on a tray that cunningly hooked over the window of their machine. This place was called a drive-in cafe, and what Laverne did was known as being a carhop. She wore an overseas cap in royal blue, a red monkey jacket with white piping over a high-necked white jersey blouse, a white pleated skirt to the midpoint of her thighs, and white calf-length boots of patent leather: like the getup of a drum majorette, cute but anywhere from five to ten years too young for her, as she who had no false vanity recognized. Her upper legs had got beefy while her calves had developed cords; her brassiere, with the weight it supported, left marks on her back that could still be seen on Sunday night after twenty-four hours out of harness, she no longer emerging into the world on the Lord's day, not even to go to Mass, which omission she dutifully confessed on Saturday just before reporting for work and atoned for with the prescribed number of reverent salutations to the virgin mother of Christ, with whom she secretly felt a common cause that no priest, being male, could ever understand, Laverne having taken a thousand cocks and never been touched by any, while Mary had accepted none. With such a consideration, Laverne no longer even included "impure thoughts" in her roster of peccancies.

Funny thing about a lot of fellows who came to drive-ins: they weren't anywhere near as fresh as guys in indoor places, especially those where liquor was sold. Her typical customers were high-school punks, usually a pack of them in one car; married types with wife and offspring; and middle-aged round waltzers. All of these were big oglers, each in their own style: the punks with jeers and guffaws and stage groans; the hubbies, on the sly; the old bastards, thin-haired and pouchy-eyed, with the insecurity of those who expected to be despised.

So when this spiffy-looking bird pulled in in the Buick on an unusually warm night in late March and swung into one of the slots she attended, Laverne at least noticed him as being different, though did not let this cut any ice as to her manner, which as always, whether serving food or taking a dick, was professionally warm and personally remote.

"Hi, how you doing?" she said automatically, lifting her order pad and taking the pencil stub from the hair just under the overseas cap.

"Real bad till now," said he, giving her a onceover that was just right; quick, appreciative, and thoroughly confident. "I was afraid I might get one of them skinny little chicks," pointing disdainfully at Millie, who was just going by with a tray of malteds, on her dreamy eighteen-year-old legs the slender thighs of which made Laverne feel like a brewery horse. "I'm gonna compliment the manager," he said, "for hiring at least one real woman." His hand was on the rim of the door; he raised his index finger. "I mean it. If he is off duty at present, I want his name and will send him my personal letter expressing same."

Laverne's face, which until now had shown the usual synthetic smile, went blank with emotion. There was nothing of Ken Canning in the substance of this speech, nor in the man's appearance, with his round, pink, boyish face and pompadour. But the uncompromising self-assurance overwhelmed her with nostalgia. He knew he was right-as did few men who consorted with her as either prostitute or waitress.

"I'd be much obliged," said he, "if you was to suggest the specialty of the house. I never been to one of these places before, and it is quite a novelty. I'm all for it, as I am in the automobile business myself, and you can look at it this way: we are scratching one another's backs, you and me." He produced a dazzling grin; he had been straightfaced until this moment. "A fascinating woman like yourself no doubt hears lots of lines, but this ain't one, I assure you." He got out an ostrich-skin wallet, with little gold corners, and took from it a piece of pasteboard. "Here's my card."

Laverne squinted and held it at an angle. The light from the globe atop the nearby standard was more than adequate, but she felt a requirement to be ceremonious. She was also getting far-sighted with age.

"'Virgil Buddy Sandifer Quality Used Autos,'" she read aloud.

"Not the biggest in the metropolitan region," said Buddy, "but the best in the world."

"You are Virgil Buddy Sandifer?"

"One and the same," said Buddy, lowering his eyelids in mock modesty.

"Pleased to meetcha."

"Likewise," Buddy said. "Listen, I don't wanna monopolize you like they say: you got a job to do, and I admire that. You'll be giving me the bum's rush if I don't order soon. Make it a filly minion on toast; no fries or pickles or anything extra." He stopped and gave her a piercing look. "I'm gonna level with you: I ain't hungry."

"Gee," Laverne said tragically, "all we got is the plain burger or the special with chopped lettuce, onion, relish, and tomato; the fish; hotdog with chili; and the American cheese, regular or grilled."

"I'm gonna level with you," Buddy said. "I saw you from the road. I just ate a big chicken dinner. I couldn't swallow another bite." He raised his finger again, and turned on the ignition key with the other hand. This produced a certain suspense. Suddenly he jabbed his foot at the starter, and the engine came to life. He revved it. "I'll put it this way: I'm gonna pick you up when you get off. What time?"

"Eleven," said Laverne. "Make it ten past, 'cause we got to wash our hands and stuff."

"You get out of that cheerleader getup?"

"Not till I get home." She could see he was disappointed; he patronized roadhouses and cocktail lounges. "You mind stopping off?" she asked. "I ain't married or nothing. I got my own little flat. I got some real nice clothes. You wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with me, I swear. I could go anyplace in the nice clothes I got."

Buddy raised his eyebrows as if in doubt, thrilling Laverne to her boots. He was the first man since Ken to make her feel both continuously useful and temporarily unworthy, that is, with something to aspire to: not daughter, whore, or waitress, all of them roles complete in themselves, dead ends, jobs for hire, really, in which you were paid to perform a function. She had served Ken for love alone, and he had given her nothing except the high sign with his thumb when he wanted her and a quick injection of semen.

Buddy was of the same kidney. He did not ask, demand, or order: he took. He took her home after work, took her to the couch, took off the blue underpants that went with the carhop outfit, took out a Trojan and then his manhood, and took possession of her. Then he took his departure. He said very little during this series, and like Ken Canning he did not kiss her once.

On Wednesday, her day off, in the late afternoon Laverne put on her best dress of Kelly-green satin, platform shoes, gold pendant earrings, gold bunch-of-grapes brooch, thin gold neck chain bearing a gold cross, a string of white beads half the size of Ping-Pong balls, three rings (zircon, hammered brass, silver-and-turquoise), and a white picture hat; and carrying a pair of white calf gloves, she appeared at the place of business called VIRGIL BUDDY SANDIFER QUALITY USED AUTOS.

A dark, hairy hook-nosed man in a rumpled brown suit came out of an aisle between the cars, raised his heavy eyebrows, and said: "Yes, ma'am, can I show you something?"

"Can I just look around?" Laverne asked in the beseeching voice she used with salesmen when she was their potential client but never when one of them was hers.

"Our pleasure," said this man, without so much as a glance at her tits or any other portion of her figure. There was not the slightest glint in his eye of guilt or even repugnance. He was either queer or neuter, in either case O.K. by Laverne, who liked fags who admitted it and even for a while in '32 lived with one, which gave them both protective coloration. As to those who had no interest in sex, as opposed to romance, she herself was one of their company.

She stared idly at the nearest machine. She didn't know beans about cars and couldn't drive one, though she had knelt, bent, or spreadeagled herself in every known make and several custom jobs including one with a dashboard of blue mirror. She hated leather seats, sticky under your bare can if beer had been spilled; also joke horns that played the first fucking four notes of "O Susanna."

The salesman went into the little concrete office, and almost immediately thereafter Buddy came out. A gust of wind threatened her picture hat, and the hand she raised to control it hid her face momentarily. With that, and the fine clothes, he showed no sign of recognition until he reached her.

"Well, say," said he, flushing with amazement and stepping back a pace and then walking around her. "Say, you look like a million dollars."

"On the hoof," said she, bending one leg and raising a heel slightly like a model.

"Hmm. You was right. You sure got swell clothes. You are dressed like Mrs. Astor's pet pony." He was impressed; he hadn't smiled once.

She said: "I figured you thought I never wore anything but the car-hop getup."

"Go on," he said, and grinned a little now. "That's bushwa, and you know it."

"Well," she said, "that's what I thought anyway."

"So you come over here to prove your point," Buddy said. "I like that. That takes class, kid, and I like it a whole lot. I like you too. I liked you the other night, but I admit I never knew you was a fashion plate."

Laverne was overjoyed. Her basic mission accomplished, she intended to go off alone to the Idle Hour, the local movie house, where a Barbara Stanwyck picture was playing. She wasn't after Buddy any more than she had been after Ken Canning. To a real man you just made yourself available, with the full understanding that at any given time he might well have more important claims to his attention or superior appeals to his taste. You did not lower yourself by entertaining expectations.

"Well, so long then," she said. "Maybe sometime when you haven't eaten you might show up at the drive-in and get one of my slots again, and I'll try to suggest something you would like. I asked Carl-he's the boss-about filly minion that you mentioned the other night, and he said tell everybody the fish is filly of sole though I know it ain't: it's haddock, I think. Actually, everything they serve over there is garbage, if you wanna know. If you saw the kitchen you wouldn't never eat a bite there. I don't, that's for sure. We get our food free, but I bring my own sandwiches from home." She stopped. "I'm running off at the mouth."

"No, you ain't," said Buddy with vehemence. "I regard nothing more important than what a man eats. I want good food. I don't care if it's fancy, you know, but it's got to be good."

"You can't believe the signs they put up. You know, they all say 'Good Food.' Whereas I have seldom worked anywhere where that wasn't a damn lie, if you pardon my French." She smiled gently. "I'm like you about food."

Buddy was earnest. "Say, them sandwiches you make for yourself: what kind?"

Laverne giggled; this was getting personal. "Sometimes just cold cuts or cheese or both, but sometimes I get ambitious, you know, like ground ham and I grind cheese into it, and also sweet and dill pickles both and olives with pimento, and I mix the mustard in it instead of smearing it on top, and then I put that on whole wheat toast, which I think is bette r when cold than when hot."

During this account Buddy had by degrees lost his look of self-possession. This sophisticated individual had a true boyish quality which she had never identified in Ken Canning.

"That's the kinda stuff my old lady used to make, real original, like she would make a sandwich that sounds crazy when you hear it but by Jesus it was something to taste. You might laugh at this, but she'd fry bananas and mash 'em all up with bacon and she made her own nutbread and would make a sandwich of two slices of that, toasted, and I tell you it was something you'd lay down and lick the floor for. Though I know it sounds crazy."

"It don't to me," said Laverne, then lied: "I can make nutbread."

"I haven't tasted that in years. My old lady-I mean my mom, not the wife-died when I was a kid."

He had already, in a few brief moments, separated himself forever from Ken Canning, who had had no such vulnerability-except perhaps when lying about having the clap on that last night; if so, it was of another, a bleaker, kind.

Laverne found herself wanting desperately to feed this man. "Look," said she, "I don't want to get out of line, you probably have to eat with your missus and all, but sometime if you might want one of them sandwiches your mama used to make, I could do it. I'd need to know in the morning if it's a workday, so I could make the nutbread before I went on shift at four."

In fact she had never tried much cooking at all, let alone baking. She would buy a loaf of nutbread someplace; anybody could put bananas and bacon in a skillet.

Buddy collected himself from his reverie. "I'll take a rain-check on that." He had his authority back again. "You call in sick to the drive-in tonight. We'll go downtown to the Stardust Roof of the Maumee Hotel, or the Palm Terrace of the Chippewa. We don't wanna waste them ritzy clothes of yours."

"It's my night off, anyway," said Laverne.

"Tell you what you do," Buddy said. "Walk on down the corner, and I'll pick you up there in five minutes."

Laverne said: "I don't want to get you in trouble."

Buddy was offended. "You won't," he said curtly. He turned away, but couldn't let it go at that, and turned back. "You can't. What I say goes. I do what I want, see. It's just good taste like the fella says. That's all."

"Sure," Laverne said softly.

They ended up at the Palm Terrace of the Chippewa, at Laverne's suggestion. Already she had discovered how to influence Buddy without appearing to defy him. She pointed out that the Starlight Roof of the Maumee was neither really starlit nor a roof: it was on the second-to-top floor, and the stars were little light bulbs set in holes in the ceiling.

"You been there, huh?" This seemed to crush him.