"All he said tome was that he was going on TDY and could he borrow the Volkswagen."

"It's in back," she said. "I run the engine every morning to keep the battery charged. It was dead when he went to get it."

"You're not driving it? Why not?"

"Because I am not the good driver, and I could not pay if I hurt it."

"It's insured, you drive it," he said. "It's better for it if you drive it, and I'll be out in the woods for another goddamned month."

"If that would be best," she said.

"Tell me about Karl-Heinz," he said again.

"He wouldn't tell me where he was going, but I think Germany."

"Why do you think Germany?"

"Because he did not want to go."

"Then why did he?"

"Stupid question," she said. "Because he was told to go. Sometimes you're a fool."

"He told me he had made a deal that he wouldn't go to Germany," Geoff said. "A deal's a deal."

"And a fool is a fool. He is a soldier, and he goes where he is told to go."

The kettle whistled, and she poured boiling water and made instant coffee for him.

"I'll make you a sandwich. Or soup? You want soup? I have made a soup."

"See what's in the envelope," he said. "Then give me some soup, please."

She tore the envelope open. It contained two letter-size envelopes. She opened the thicker one. It held a stack of twenty dollar bills. She booked. at him to see his reaction, and he looked in her eyes and thought, Shit, I do love her. That's all there is to it.

"What's this?" she asked.

"I told you, I don't know."

She tore open the other envelope, took out a sheet of paper, read it, and handed it to him.

"What does this mean?" she asked.

It was a short, typewritten note: Dear Miss Wagner: S/Sgt. Wagner won third place in the pool. I thought I had better give you this, since he is on TDY.

Yours sincerely, Scott Tourtillott, I/Sgt.

She counted the money. There was just over three hundred dollars.

"We don't need this, we won't take this, you take it back and say thank you very much."

"He won it, Ursula," Geoff said. In a pig's ass, he did. He can't hit the broad side of a barn at ten yards with an M-60.

"Won it? What is a pool'?"

He explained it to her, and in the explanation got his own explanation. First Sergeant "Indian Joe" Tourtillott had had him deliver the money because he knew that he would be able to think of some way to get her to take it.

"He was an officer," Ursula said. "He is a very good shot."

"I know," Geoff said.

"He should have won this money when we needed it so badly," she said. "Now there is money enough, and more." "Is there?"

"Mrs. Sergeant Major Taylor came to see me, and she told me exactly how much money Karl-Heinz will now make, and that the army will send me a check next month, on payday, that he has made the allotment."

"We don't give the woman the husband's title in this country, Ursula," Geoff said. "You don't?"

"No. When you many me, for example, you will simply be Mrs. Geoffrey Craig."

"I told you once I don't want to hear any more of that foolishness," she snapped. "You must be crazy."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"You don't stop it, once and for all, you go," she said. "If Karl-Heinz hear you even talking like that, he be very mad "You said something about soup?"

The soup was delicious.

"Can I tell you something?" she asked. "Anything."

"You stink, you need a bath." "I know."

"And your clothes are filthy rotten stinking," she said. "You have to go right away?"

"You take a bath. I wash the clothes," she said.

"How are you going to dry them?"

There is the machine," she said.

"I said dry," he said.

There is the machine," she said. "You put the clothes in, and it spins around with heat, and the clothes are dried. Mrs. Sergea Mrs. Taylor showed me how to work it."

"And in the meantime, while the clothes are drying, I get to chase you naked around the apartment?"

"Don't be silly!" she snapped. "I give you something of Karl-Heinz to wear."

There were a pair of panties, labeled THURSDAY and embellished with hearts; a brassiere; and a slip hanging from the shower curtain. He had never seen anything so erotic in his life.

She gave him a shirt and a pair of pants to wear while the washer and dryer were operating. They didn't fit, and they were of a strange, cheap material. He asked if Karl-Heinz had brought them from East Germany.

"Not good, are they?" she asked, nodding.

"Never look a gift horse in the mouth," he said. "I wasn't criticizing. I was curious."

She had, he thought with regret, taken his joking remaxk about chasing her naked around the apartment at least half seriously. She had dressed while he was bathing in a sweater and skirt, and she'd done her hair up in the back.

They're no good," she said. "Everything back there is cheap. I mean cheap-made, not cheap to buy."

"I understand," he said.

"Do you think Karl-Heinz will be back when they say?"

"Sure," he said. "How long did they say?"

"Ninety days," she said, and then added happily, "Mrs. Taylor says that if I want, I can get a job in the PX." "Doing what?"

"Working as waitress in snack bar, to start."

Fuck that! he thought angrily.

"Do you need the money that bad?"

"I want to help," she said. "You know, we're poor."

"Well, you'll get a chance to meet a lot of men in the snack bar," Geoff said. "Try to meet a rich one."

She thought it over and decided to consider it a joke.

"What would a rich man want with me?"

To love you, to worship you, to hold you in his arms, to buy you expensive underwear and quart bottles of musky French perfume. "You make pretty good soup," he said. She smiled at him. "Don't look at me that way," she said. "What way?" "Like a puppy dog," she said.

"I can't help it," he said.

"You're a fool, Geoffrey," she said. "A fool."

He loved the way his name sounded when she said it. And he was aware that she didn't seem quite so absolutely certain that he was a fool as she had earlier.

"Actually," he said, "I'm not such a bad fellow. Most dogs, except Dobermans, like me... At that moment the dryer, with a squeal and an off-key bell, announced that it had completed its assigned task.

They both looked at it as if annoyed by the distraction, but there was nothing for Geoff to do but go to the damned dryer, confirm that his goddamned uniform was clean, dry, and as warm as toast, and carry the goddamned thing into the bathroom and get dressed. She went with him to the door.

"Can I come back?" he asked. "Sure, why did you have to ask?"

"Because now that I've told you I love you, I thought maybe you wouldn't want to have me around."

She looked up at him and met his eyes, and as he fell into them, she said, "I don't even want you to go now."

"I don't really have to go now," he said. "You don't?"

"No, I don't," he said. THE BEItzrs "There's something I think you should know," she said. "I never do this before."

"Are you sure you want to now" he asked, very softly.

"What do you think9" she asked, and then she walked away from him, across the little living room and into the bedroom. His heart beating heavily, in sort of jumps, he went after her.

"Don't look," she ordered.

He cheated, he turned his back, but he saw everything she didn't want him to see in the mirror. And she caught him.

"Well, you satisfied?" she asked, her face coloring.

"Is it all right, now, if I tell you I love you'?"

"Oh, my Geoffrey!" she said, and went to him.

A minute or so later, he was able to remove his jump boots with considerably more speed than he had earlier been able to put them on. And it hurt her, as it was supposed to hurt virgins, but she told him that if he stopped, she'd kill him.

(Two) U.S. Army Station Hospital Fort Bragg, North Carolina 0830 How's, 6 February 1962 When Dianne Eaglebury parked Tom Ellis's Jaguar in the visitors' parking lot and reached in the backseat for the doll, her breasts fell out of her brassiere, and after she had the doll sitting on the roof, she had to put her hands under her sweater again and, desperately hoping that no one was watching, put things back where they belonged.

The reason her breasts had come out of the brassiere, she was well aware, was that the brassiere was not designed to hold things in place, but rather to sort of put things on display. It was of thin, lacy material, and the cups were one quarter of an orb rather than a hemisphere. When properly in place, it lifted the lower portion of her breasts while leaving the upper portion, down to the nipple, exposed.

She had seen it in the window of a store on Book Row in Durham and bought it for $29.95, even though that seemed like ahellofalotofmoneyforabraandpantysetthatcontained in all about as much material as a ma iVs handkerchief. She thought that it was entirely likely that she would be able to display the bra and panties it offered to Tom. It made her feel delightfully wicked. Finding the opportunity to give him a look at the black, transparent panties seemed less likely. There was no lock on his door, and while she was prepared to be shamelessly lewd for him, she was not willing to do it for an audience of nurses, ward boys, or anyone else who might come sailing into the room without knocking.

The doll had begun life as a cutsey-pie little girl in darling little pigtails, a skirt beneath which white-ribboned pantaboons could be seen, and with an adorable little pink beret perched cutely atop its head. The beret had inspired her. The beret was now green, the result of thirty minutes' careful labor with a green Magic Marker. Hours of additional careful labor had created a miniature Special Forces flash on the beret. The blond nylon pigtails had been carefully untwisted, combed, and refashioned into a rather good representation of Dianne's own coiffure. The skirt had been cut off above the knees, and the white-ribboned pantaboons were now black-lace panties about as brief as the ones she was wearing.

Tom would be amused, Dianne believed.

God, she hoped so. Tom wasn't doing well.

Dr. Parker had called her the night before and warned her that Tom might be a little "strange" when she saw him. He had some kind- of a fever, and a perfectly ordinary to-be expected symptom of this was a degree of irrationality.

It was nothing to be concerned about, Dr. Parker had told her, but she wanted Dianne to be prepared for it. It would pass when the fever was reduced, and it might very well be reduced by the time Dianne came down from Durham.

Dianne could not bring herself to call the lanky physician "Toni," or even think of her as "Toni," although the physician kept telling her to, and they had become friends. Antoinette Parker had insisted that Dianne stay with her in her quarters. With a good deal of wine in her to give her liquid courage, Dianne had asked for, and Dr. Parker had delivered, a lecture on the fine points of birth control, accompanied by both the appropriate prescription and the confession that she, too, had been greatly surprised with the ease and abandon with which, prior to marriage, she had presented Phil Parker with her pearl of great price.

"One week, I was a high and virginal priestess of medicine at Mass General, devoutly convinced that carnal desires were an affliction of the less intellectually endowed, and the next week I was a card-carrying camp follower, slinking around. a motel room in Manhattan, Kansas, in black underwear, praying the sight would convince a soldier that life without me was unthinkable."

Dr. Antoinette Parker seemed to understand how Dianne felt about Tom. Dianne did not think that understanding was going to come that easily, if at all, from her mother and father.

She didn't have to sneak in the hospital today the way she had on her first visit to see Tom, when they wouldn't let her in to see him and desperate measures had been required. Dr. Parker had arranged for family status for her with the hospital admimstration. Dianne sensed that that wasn't a routine thing, for she got a strange look from the soldier at the visitors' desk before he gave her a visitor's badge to pin on her sweater and asked her if she knew where the ward was.

"I know where it is," she said.

Dr. Parker was in the corridor by the nurses' station when she got to the ward, talking to a tall, good-looking Irishwoman just starting to turn gray and, Dianne thought, so confident of her good looks that she wasn't going to by to dye the gray away.

"Good morning," Dianne said cheerfully.