"Don't be silly," Leonard said. "If we knew you were coming here, you could have come with us."

Steve picked up his five-dollar bill and followed Leonard over. Dianne patted the seat next to her.

"You should have said something, Steve," Dianne said, "about coming here. You could have come with us. What did you do, walk?"

"Yeah."

"I guess you get a lot of that, walking, in the Marines, huh?" Leonard asked.

"Try a thirty-mile hike with full field equipment," Steve said.

"Thirty miles?" Dianne asked.

"Right. It toughens you up."

"I'll bet it does," Dianne said, and squeezed his leg over the knee.

She wasn't, he saw, looking for any reaction from him. She was looking at Leonard, smiling. She relaxed her fingers, but didn't take them from his leg.

She doesn't mean anything by that, he decided solemnly. She has a boyfriend and I'm just the kid friend of her little sister. I mean, Jesus, she was married, and has a kid!

He was not used to drinking liquor; he started to feel it.

"It's been a long day," he announced. "I'm going to tuck it in."

"You haven't even danced with me yet!" Dianne protested.

"To tell you the truth, I'm a lousy dancer," he said, getting up.

"Ah, I bet you're not," Dianne said.

"You better dance with her, kid, or she won't let you go," Leonard said.

"Don't call me 'kid,' " Steve said, nastily.

Jesus Christ, I am getting drunk I better leave that f.u.c.king Scotch alone!

"Sorry, no offense," Leonard said.

"What's the matter with you, Lenny?" Dianne snapped. She got up and took Steve's hand. "I'll decide whether you're a lousy dancer."

She led him to the dance floor and turned around and opened her arms for him to hold her. And he danced with her. He was an awkward dancer, and he was wearing field shoes. And he got an erection.

"I think we better call this off," he said, aware that his face felt really flushed now, and that it was probably visible, even in the dim light.

"Yes, I think maybe we should."

He didn't sit down again with them, just claimed his overcoat and brimmed cap and put them on. After that he shook hands with Leonard and left.

It was a ten-minute walk back to the apartment. Snow had started again, but it was still cold enough for him to feel that he was sobering up. He told himself he had made a mistake leaving, that maybe Dianne had meant something when she didn't take her hand off his leg. And then came the really thrilling thought that she had felt his erection, and it hadn't made her mad.

By the time he got to the apartment, however, and was shaking the snow off his overcoat and wiping it off the leather brim of his cap, he had changed his mind again. Dianne was twenty-what? Twenty-two at least, probably twenty-three. She was an ex-married woman, for Christsake. She had a boyfriend. His imagination was running wild, more than likely because he had had all those medicine-tasting Scotch-and-sodas.

The telephone rang.

It had to be Vinny Danielli. The sonofab.i.t.c.h had finally come home, and his mother had told him he had called.

"h.e.l.lo, a.s.shole, how the h.e.l.l are you, you guinea b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"

"Steve?"

"Jesus!"

"It's Dianne."

"I know. I thought it was somebody else."

"I sure hope so," she said.

"I'm sorry about that."

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"We left right after you did. Leonard lives in Verona and was worried about getting home in the snow."

"Oh."

"Your parents get home?"

"They won't be home until tomorrow sometime."

"Mine are in bed," she said. "And so's Joey."

Joey, Steve now recalled, was her little boy.

There was a long, awkward pause.

"You want to come up?" he heard himself asking.

Oh, my G.o.d, what did I say?

"To tell you the G.o.d's honest truth, Steve, I'd love to," Dianne said. "But what if anybody found out?"

"Who would find out?"

"I wouldn't want Beraice to find out, for example. Not to mention my parents."

"She wouldn't get it from me," Steve said, firmly. "n.o.body would."

"But, Jesus, if we got caught!" Dianne said, and then the phone clicked and went dead.

He felt his heart jump.

She wouldn't come up. She's had a couple of drinks, a couple of drinks too many, and it's a crazy idea. Once she actually went so far as calling up, she realized that, and hung up. She absolutely would not come up.

The doorbell rang.

He ran and opened it, and she pushed past him, closing the door behind her and leaning on it. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe and slippers that looked like rabbits. She had a bottle of Scotch in her hand.

"I saw that you liked this," she said, holding it up.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm glad you came."

"Can I trust you? If one word of this got out, oh, Jesus!"

"Sure," Steve said.

She leaned forward quickly and kissed him on the mouth.

"Leonard is a good man," she said.

"Huh?"

"Leonard is a good man. I mean that. He's really a good man, and he wants to marry me, and I probably will. But . . . can I tell you this?"

"Sure."

"He thinks you should wait until you're married," she said. "I mean, maybe that's all right if you're a virgin. But I was married, you know what I mean?"

"Sure."

"If I hadn't come up here, were you going to do it to yourself?"

"What?"

"You know what I mean," she said.

"Yeah, probably," he said. He had never confessed something like that to anyone before, not even to one of the guys.

"You didn't, did you?" she asked, and then decided to seek, with her fingers, the answer to her own question.

"I think I would have killed you if you had," she said a moment later, pleased with the firm proof she had found that he had not, at least recently, committed the sin of casting his seed upon the ground. "After I took a chance like this."

"You want to come in my room?"

"There, and in the living room, and in every other place we can think of." She pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, and this time her tongue sought his.

It took him a moment to take her meaning. It excited him. He wondered if she would be able to tell, her having been married and all, that he was a virgin.

Jesus, I'm really going to get laid.

(Four) 121 Park Avenue East Orange, New Jersey 0830 Hours 2 January 1942 Dianne Marshall Norman woke up sick with the memory of what had happened between her and the kid upstairs. She knew why she had done it, but that didn't excuse it, or make it right. She had done it because she was drunk. And she knew why she had gotten drunk; but that didn't excuse it, or make getting drunk right, either.

Maybe she really was a s.l.u.t, she thought, lying there in her bed with her eyes closed, hung over. A wh.o.r.e. That's what Joe had called her when he'd caught her with Roddie Norman in the house at the sh.o.r.e. She'd been drunk then, too, and that had been the beginning of the end for her and Joe. He had moved out of their apartment two weeks later and gone to a lawyer about a divorce. And been a real sonofab.i.t.c.h about it, too.

His lawyer had told her father's lawyer that Joe would pay child support, but that was it. He would keep the car and all the furniture and everything else, and he wouldn't give her a dime. He would pay for her to go to Nevada for six weeks to get a divorce. If she didn't agree to that, he would take her to Ess.e.x County Court in Newark and charge her with adultery with Roddie Norman, and it would be all over the papers.

Dianne didn't think doing it with just one man (two, actually, but Joe didn't know about Ed Bitter) really made her a wh.o.r.e or a s.l.u.t. And there was no question in her mind that Joe had been fooling around himself. She'd even caught him at the Christmas office party feeling up the peroxide blonde, Angie Pal-meri, who worked in the office of his father's liquor store. And there had been a lot of times when he'd had to "work late" at the store and couldn't come home, and she had driven by and he hadn't been there.

What had happened with Roddie Norman wouldn't have happened if everybody hadn't been sitting around drinking Orange Blossoms all afternoon; it had been raining and they couldn't go to the beach. And the real truth of the matter, not that anybody cared, was that she had been mad with Joe because he had been making eyes at Esther Norman all day and looking down her dress.

And then, because Roddie was taking a nap on the couch and Joey was asleep, Joe and Esther had gone to get Chinese takeout at the Peking Palace in Belmar. G.o.d only knew what those two had been up to when they were gone, but that's when it had happened. Roddie had awakened and the phonograph had been playing and they'd started to dance, and the first thing she knew they had both been on the couch and he had her shorts off, and Joe had walked in.

Dianne sometimes thought that if Joe had been able to beat Roddie up, it wouldn't have gone so far as the divorce. What actually happened was that Roddie knocked Joe on his backside with a punch that bloodied Joe's nose. Getting beaten up by Roddie was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

So she'd gone to the Lazy Q Dude Ranch, twenty miles outside of Reno, Nevada, for the six weeks it took to establish legal residence. Then she'd gotten the divorce and moved back home, where her parents treated her as though she had an "A" for "Adultery" painted on her forehead.

And then her father brought Leonard Walters home. Leonard sold dry cleaner's supplies, everything from wire hangers and mothproof bags to the chemicals they used in the dry-cleaning process itself. She had seen him around, seen him looking at her, and knew that he was interested. That was really one way to get her life fixed up, she thought. But Leonard was the single most boring male human being Dianne had ever met.

Dianne's father brought him home to a potluck supper. That was so much bull you-know-what. They just happened to have a pot roast for supper, and Bernice just happened not to be there, and they ate at the dining room table off the good china and a tablecloth, all usually reserved for Sunday dinner, if then.

It had been carefully planned, including a little dialogue between her mother and her father to explain Dianne's situation. The story they fed Leonard used the phrase "Dianne's mistake" a lot. But "Dianne's mistake," the way they told it, was not getting caught letting Roddie Norman in her pants, but in "foolishly running off to get married."

In her parents' version, Joe Norman had stolen her out of her cradle. And then, once he got her to elope with him-in the process throwing away her plans for college and a career-he started to abuse her and drink and run around with a wild crowd who drank and gambled and did other things that could not be discussed around a family dining table.

Leonard Walters not only swallowed the tale whole, but embarked on what he called "our courtship." The courtship had not moved very rapidly, though. The reason was that Leonard's name had been Waldowski before his parents changed it when they were naturalized. The Waldowskis were Polish and Roman Catholic, and Leonard's mother was a large and formidable woman who did not believe Roman Catholics should marry outside The One True Faith. She knew that Dianne was a Methodist, but Leonard hadn't told her about Dianne's marriage, and she didn't know about Little Joey either.

It was not now the time to tell her about it, Leonard said. "Let her learn to know you and love you."

Leonard was pretty devout himself, and he did not believe in premarital or extramarital s.e.x. In his view, the thing to do about s.e.x and everything else was "wait until things straighten themselves out."

On the day that PFC Stephen Koffler, USMC, entered her life, Dianne and Leonard had dinner, served precisely at noon, at the Walters' house in Verona. It was a strain, relieved somewhat by several large gla.s.ses of wine.

Then they went to East Orange, where Dianne's mother had promptly dragged her into the bedroom to deliver a recitation about how badly Joey had behaved while she was gone. After that she demanded a play-by-play account of all that was said at the Walters' dinner. When Dianne explained that Leonard had not yet told his mother about Dianne and Joe, and, more important, about Joey, there followed a two-minute lecture about why Dianne should make him do that.

Once her mother let her go, Dianne went from the bedroom to the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. She laced her cup with a hooker of gin. By the time Steve Koffler marched in, looking really good in his Marine Corps uniform, she was on her fourth cup.

At first he remained the way she always had remembered him-"the kid upstairs," a peer of Bernice's, one of the mob of dirty-minded little boys who always came up to the deck on the roof to smirk and snicker behind their hands whenever she and Bernice tried to take a sunbath.

It was difficult for her to believe that he was really a Marine. Marines were men. Stevie Koffler, she thought, probably still played with himself.

That risque thought, which just popped into her mind out of the blue, was obviously the seed for everything else that happened. A seed, she realized after it was over, more than adequately fertilized by the gin in her coffee.

It was immediately followed by the thought-not original to the moment-that playing with himself was what good old Leonard must be doing. Either that or he just didn't care about women, another possibility that had occurred to her. She had tried to arouse Leonard more than once; and she'd worked at that as hard as she could without destroying his image of her as the innocent child bride s.n.a.t.c.hed from her cradle by dirty old Joe Norman. But she'd had no luck with him at all.