"Oh yes. I'll do that, Charla."

She sighed. He felt the perfumed warmth of her exhalation against his face. "You have put me off, you know. Just a "Betsy?"

He grinned broadly and drained his Irish coffee. "She's maybe the weirdest one of all. She can tell what's going to happen before it even happens. She's a witch, maybe."

Joseph's big, bronzed, glossy face was suddenly like something on a coin. "Just what did she predict, Kirby?"

Suddenly, too late, the alarms rang. The fox became a rabbit and ran under a bush.

"Who predict what, Joseph?"

"Has Betsy been talking to you?"

"Excuse. I think maybe I might be going to. be a little bit sick."

He went into the men's room, leaned close to the mirror, and made strange savage faces at himself until somebody else came in ....

"Naughty boy," the gentle, chiding, loving voice said, husky-sweet in the night. "Oh, yes indeed, a very naughty boy." Fingers stroked his forehead. He opened his eyes cautiously. He saw a dark edge of building overhead, and half a sky full of stars. A head, bending over him, blocked out some of the stars. The face was in dark shadow, but light came from somewhere behind her, silvering the outline of her head.

"Dear G.o.d," he whispered.

"Oh yes, darling boy, you drank much too much. And such a waste, really. Such a waste of all manner of good things."

He moved his head slightly. There was a smooth, rounded, pneumatic warmth under the nape of his neck. As he began to wonder just what it was, a stir of the warm night breeze ran along his body and he felt as if he was entirely naked. He moved one hand cautiously. He was naked. He sat up abruptly in spite of the pain which split his head in two. He got his head up into the light for a moment before Charla took him by the shoulders and yanked him back down so firmly his head bounced once off the resilience of her thigh then settled into its previous position. At least he had gathered some information. He was on a sun deck, on a sun cot, and from the micro-glimpse of the room beyond, he guessed it was his own. Charla sat at the end of the cot, his head on her lap. And at least there was a rea.s.suring layer of fabric over the rubbery convexity of his fleshy pillow.

"Don't leap like that, dear one," she said.

"I was just, "

"So naughty," she crooned. "Getting so squiffed. Lying to me. You shouldn't lie to me. You did see Betsy."

"For a minute." He hesitated. "Where my clothes?"

"Right here on the floor, sweet. After we got you up here and you pa.s.sed out here on the deck, you felt so sweaty and hot and miserable, I took them off."

"Oh."

"I'm really very angry with you. You don't know who your real friends are, do you?"

"I don't feel very good."

"Of course you don't! And you haven't acted very well. Just rest now. You've spoiled it all for us, for tonight. Didn't you know you were spoiling things for your Charla?"

"I didn't know it was, "

"Did you think I'd be so vulgar as to make an appointment? I'm a woman, darling. Maybe there'll be another night. Maybe not. Who can say?"

"The liquor hit me."

The fingertips closed his eyelids, then moved gently across his lips. "Maybe you were exhausted, dear. Maybe poor, stringy, little Betsy used all your resources."

"No! We just sat in a hotel and talked."

"Her hotel?"

"No. Just a hotel. In the lobby."

"And you listened to that poor crazed mind and began to doubt us. Where is she staying, dear?"

"An apartment."

"Do you know the address?"

"She didn't tell me."

"Don't you think you've done enough lying for one night?" "

"Really, she didn't tell me. She said she'd get in touch."

"She knows you've moved here?"

"Yes."

"And when she does get in touch with you, you'll let me know, won't you, lover. Immediately."

"Oh yes. I'll do that, Charla."

She sighed. He felt the perfumed warmth of her exhalation against his face. "You have put me off, you know. Just a little. I told you, I have to be a little more than half in love. I think I was. But not now."

"I'm sorry. Please forgive me."

She held his head, eased herself out from under him and lowered his head to the woven plastic of the sun cot. She stood beside the cot for a moment looking down at him. Because of the darkness of the night, he was just able to keep from making some violent, ludicrous concession to modesty.

"I'll try to forgive you, darling. But you really must be very good from now on. I must leave you now."

The remembered mouth came slowly down upon his, flexing, changing, with soft heated movements. His arms went around her without volition, holding her with an increasing strength until suddenly he made a great Hoo-Aah sound and leaped like a stung horse, galvanized by the sudden, shocking, forceful, momentary grasp. She pulled free and, from the doorway into the room, laughed in a gentle mocking way, and was gone.

He lay quivering under the stars, then went in and had an icy shower, and left a call for nine o'clock. It was a few minutes before three. He found a switch for the deck light and picked up his clothes. After he sorted them out and hung them up, he turned off the deck light and went out again into the April night to sit on the wide concrete wall at the end of the deck, sit naked on the abrasive texture, his back against the solidity of the hotel, knees flexed, forearms on his knees, hands slack, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He could look to his left and straight down, down past architectural solutions, straight down through an obscured and dizzy vista to a tiled death below.. He could look straight out at a night-dark sea and sense the slow pulse of the swells and the tides. He could look to his right and see the few highlights of the aseptic sun cot, a prop in a play now over. The wind was fresher, almost cool enough to be uncomfortable. His heart rapped a little too fast, and he had a dull headache. But these physical stigmata were minor compared with his emotional trauma. Charla, with a single vulgar tweak, had reduced him to clownishness, had turned consternation into farce, had shown, symbolically, her ability to destroy his pride, dignity and manhood at her option.

He thought sourly of all the should-have-done things. Another man, a real man, might well have burst from the couch with a roar of rage at such playful violation of privacy, grasped her, swung her onto the couch and ravished her there, under the stars, a fitting punishment for impertinence. (But maybe that was really what she was asking of him!) He wondered what, long ago, had created this incapacity to deal with people like Charla. He looked out at the sea and wondered why he should be afraid of anything, of anyone. The sea went on, and the sh.o.r.e people changed, but there were stars so lasting that the sea itself was smaller than the life of one man in comparison. Compared to the sea, compared to the stars, of what moment was one s.n.a.t.c.h of the fishwife hand, one small humiliation, on one night, for one man?

He thought of her hands, small, strong, quite square-looking, beautifully kept, the nails long and curving, the pads of the palms prominent.

He groaned and snapped his cigarette toward the sea and went to bed.

Chapter Five..