He heard the end of the metallic thunder of the water roaring into her tub, and as he fancied her stepping into it, he groaned aloud. O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.

But he had the dim suspicion that such were the obvious riches of Charla that even a far more worldly man might have experienced a visceral tremor or two.

Considering the wretched paucity of his experience and the extent of his carefully concealed shyness, he marveled that when he had come upon her there, he had not merely given a mad cackle of laughter and vaulted the cement railing a hundred feet above the gaudy roofs of the beach cabanas.

He knew well the forlorn pattern of his increasingly compulsive search for s.e.xual self-confidence. In this world that Hugh Heffner had made, he alone seemed forever bunnyless. And it was becoming less a matter of hunger than of pride.

He knew that women found him reasonably attractive. And he had laboriously developed that brand of semi-insinuating small talk which gave women the impression he was as accustomed to the casual diversion as the next fellow. But there was the d.a.m.nable shyness to contend with. Where do you start? How to start? In situations where unattached women were abundant, he had developed into a fine art the knack of making each of them believe he was intimately concerned with one of the others.

Once in a great while he would finally overcome the shyness, turn into the final pattern for the attack on target, and then have the situation blow up in his face. He knew he was not a clownish man. It depressed him to look back on too many slapstick situations. One would think it possible for a man of dignity to approach a woman like Charla without suddenly, inadvertently, peeling her like a grape and hurling her over a bed. His face grew hot as he remembered.

It was, he suspected, because he tightened up in the clutch. With the bases loaded, two out, and a three-nothing count on the clean-up hitter, the rookie comes in, steps on the rubber, glares sternly at the batter, and drops the ball.

Sometimes nature intervened. As in the case of the earthquake. A man could begin to believe he was hexed.

Sometimes, as with Andrea last year in Rome, it seemed pure accident. He had rescued her from a yelping throng which had confused her with Elizabeth Taylor. The talk had been amusing. They were staying in the same hotel, on the same floor. She was alone, trying to recover her morale after a bad marriage and a messy divorce. It was understood, without words, that he would walk a dozen feet down the corridor and tap at her door and she would let him in.

The prospect terrified him. He had presented too glib and sophisticated a front. She would expect a suave continental competence, a complete and masterful experience. And it was rather much to expect of a fellow whose most recent, in fact, whose only affair, had taken place twelve years earlier in the back seat of a 1947 Hudson in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in a public park during a rainstorm with a noisy, pockmarked girl named Hazel Broochuk, and had lasted for about twelve incomparably clumsy minutes.

Though these were hardly the experience factors one would bring to an a.s.signation with a woman who could be mistaken for Liz, he steeled himself to carry out the impersonation to the best of his ability. After a scalding bath, he donned his wool robe and marched up and down his room, fists clenched, jaw set. To the sound of trumpets, he turned toward his door, marched out into the corridor and firmly yanked the door shut. He yanked the door shut on a substantial hunk of the hem of the robe. The door locked itself. The keys were inside, on the bureau. Maybe in the world there were men of sufficient aplomb to go tap on the door sans robe. It certainly would reduce any areas of confusion as to the purpose of the small-hours' visit. But Kirby Winter was not one of them.

And the worst time of all, perhaps, was when, emboldened by brandy, hand in hand with a sweet laughing little darling of a girl, they had run like the wind from the big house in Na.s.sau down toward the beach cabana in the moonlight. And halfway there the wire clothesline had caught him just under the chin.

But for each opportunity denied him by the fates, there had been twice that number he had run away from, in sweaty terror. He sneered at himself and sipped the champagne. You are a clown and a coward, Kirby Winter, a lousy, neurotic, mixed-up coward, and yet you go around making women believe you're a gay dog. Gahr, indeed.

Charla came into the room. She planted herself in the corner of the couch near him before he could begin to stand up. She was barefoot. She wore short pink shorts and a candy-striped halter and a pink ribbon in her hah". He realized that if he focused beyond her instead of right at her, she looked about fifteen. Startlingly precocious perhaps, but no more than fifteen. Only the direct gaze detected the webbed flesh under her eyes, the lines bracketing the mouth, the slight sag of tissue under her chin.

"Again, dear," she said, holding her empty gla.s.s toward him. He filled it and his own and put the bottle back on the ice. "That shirt is really handsome."

"Thank you. It's very nice. The other things are nice too. But I really can't accept, "

She made a face at him. "So grim and stuffy all of a sudden? Are you cross when you wake up? I am. That's why I left you alone, Kirby dear."

"No. Not cross, I guess. It's just, "

"Pressing wasn't enough for your suit. It'll be back this afternoon. With your tie and socks and so on, dear. Really, I threw your shirt away. I hope it didn't have some sort of sentimental value. It was actually shabby. Please tell me you do feel better. I mean, when one makes a special effort to, "

"I feel a lot better, Charla."

She pulled her knees onto the couch and sat crosswise, wrinkling her eyes at him as she sipped her drink. She was long-waisted, he saw. The weight of hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s made her waist look smaller than it was. Her glossy legs were short and rather heavy, but seemed exactly suitable for her. ' "Mad with me?" she asked.

"Should I be?"

"Oh, because I teased you a little. Do you remember?"

"Yes."

"Such a cruel thing a woman can do, isn't it?"

"I guess so."

"I may tease some more, you know."

He shifted uneasily. "I guess you might."

"But some time I might not be teasing at all." She stared at him, her eyes wide and innocent. "Poor little man. How will you be able to tell when the time comes when I don't tease?"

He cast about for a change of subject. "That girl."

"Oh, yes. She disturbed you. My niece. Now she calls herself Betsy Alden. I was very cross with her, Kirby. I still am."

"She made quite a fuss."

Charla shrugged. "I seem to have done some horrible, damaging thing to her career. I didn't realize. I wanted her to come here to see me. After all, I am her only aunt. She wouldn't come. She had some silly idea of her play-acting being more important. So, I remembered an old friend and called him up. He called a good friend of his. Suddenly they didn't need her. Is this so terrible?"

"Only if she can't find another job."

"She says she'll have trouble. She cursed me. She was very noisy and vulgar. Once upon a time she was a very sweet child. It's hard to believe."

"Did she leave?"

"Oh, no! She has to stay here. Because she will now have to beg me to undo the terrible damage she thinks I've done. After she becomes sweet enough to me, then I shall phone my friend again, and then she will be in demand again for those idiotic television things. It's what she seems to want, poor child."

"At first she thought I worked for you. And then she got another idea about me, and that wasn't right either."

Charla's smile was curiously unpleasant. "She mentioned that. I admit it is not accurate. But it could have been, so easily, don't you think?"

"I guess so."

"You seem so solemn today, Kirby. Even, forgive me, a little bit stuffy. You talked so much on Friday night, and were so charming and hurt."

"I must have been a nuisance. I want to thank you for,giving me a chance to sleep it off. And I really must be going."

"Oh, not until Joseph comes and we tell you our idea."

"Idea?"

"Come, dear. We know you have no specific plans. You told us that."

"Did I? I'll have to find something, "

"Maybe you've found it, Kirby. You have certain attributes Joseph and I could use, you know. You make a good impression, dear. You look very decent and earnest and reliable and trustworthy. Many people look like that, but it is a false front. You are what you seem to be, dear."

"I beg your pardon?"

"And you have such a great capacity for loyalty. I'm certain your Uncle Omar was pleased with you, and made wonderful use of you. He trained you. And really good people are so hard to find these days. And you're at home in so many countries. We have little problems you could help us with."

"What sort of problems?"