"How many years?"

"Two. Years of error for both of us."

"What does the man do?"

"He's a theatre director. Like tonight-a lot of talent and no thought. Also, overequipped with ego. Necessary in his profession, he's told me, but not so hot for marriage."

"Where is he?"

"Safely out of the way. Running a repertory company out in the Midwest. He sends me the good reviews. He's a hero in the Midwest. We're good friends when we're a thousand miles apart." She said it carelessly and he found it unpleasant, too much New York, too much like some of the career women he had met who were making it big in the professions in the town and wanted to prove they could be as hard as any man. She was too beautiful, he thought, and too warm, to sound unpleasant, even for an instant.

"And how do you earn your daily bread?"

"I'm a designer. I do patterns for fabrics, wallpaper, things like that."

"Good?"

"Not so bad." She shrugged. "I earn my way. People seek me out. You have probably sat on dozens of chairs and sofas upholstered with cloth that I've designed."

"Happy in your work?"

"More than you, I'd think," she said challengingly. "Actually, I love it. The joy of creation and all that jazz." She smiled. She had an enchanting smile, childlike, crinkled around the eyes, without affectation, and she didn't smile too often or merely to ingratiate herself. "Now," he said, "the preliminaries are over."

"What preliminaries?" She suddenly looked stem.

"The exchange of biographies. Now we go on from there." "Where?" Her tone was hard.

It was his turn to shrug. "Anywhere we choose."

"You seem too practiced," she said.

"Why do you say that?"

"You're too expert in talking to women. Everything falls into place too quickly. A little night music, a well-rehearsed aria before falling cosily into bed."

"Maybe you're right," he said thoughtfully. "I apologize. The truth is, I haven't talked to anyone else in the whole world the way I've talked to you tonight. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why I have. I hope you believe me."

"That sounds rehearsed, too," she said stubbornly.

"I have a feeling you're too tough for me."

"Maybe I am." She set down her glass. "And now I'm ready to go home. I have to get up early in the morning."

"On Saturday morning?"

"I'm invited out to the country."

"Naturally," he said. "I'm invited out to the country tomorrow, too."

"Naturally," she said.

He laughed. "But I'm not going."

"Well, then, I'm not going either."

He shook his head wonderingly. "Your moves are too fast for me, Tracy, darling. You could make any team in the National Hockey League. I'm dazzled."

"I'm free for lunch tomorrow."

"By a happy coincidence . . ." he began.

"Come up to my place at one o'clock. I'll give you a drink. There's a nice little restaurant down the street. Now; shall we leave?" He paid the bill and they got up and walked toward the door, the other men in the restaurant staring at her and the women staring at him.

They got into the cab and she gave Storrs an address on East Sixty-seventh Street. He repeated it to the driver.

"I live on East Sixty-sixth Street," he said. "It's a sign."

"A sign of what?"

"I don't know. Just a sign."

They sat apart from each other on the way uptown, not touching. When the cab reached the converted brownstone house in which she had her apartment and studio, he told the cabbie to wait and went up the steps with her to the front door of the building.

After she had unlocked the door, she turned to him. "Thanks for the spaghetti and the wine. I'm glad my aunt was tired."

"Goodnight," he said formally. "Until tomorrow."

She frowned. "Aren't you going to kiss me goodnight?"

"I didn't know matters had progressed that far," he said stiffly. She had put him off balance and he didn't want to give her any more advantage than she had already acquired in the restaurant.

"Oh, don't be a goof," she said and leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. Her lips were soft and sweet-smelling. He didn't put his arms around her.

" 'Night," she said casually and opened the door wide and went through it.

He stared at the closed door for a moment, then went back down the steps and into the cab and gave the driver his own address. As the driver started the car, he turned around and said, in an Irish brogue, "I hope you don't mind, friend, but that there was a really beautiful woman."

"I don't mind," Storrs said.

By the time the cab had turned the comer and drawn up at his own apartment building, Michael knew that he was going to ask her to marry him. Probably at lunch the next day.

CHAPTER FOUR.

They were married three months later, at the home of her parents, who had a house in the Hamptons, where Tracy had grown up. It was a small wedding and except for old Mr. Cornwall, whom Michael had invited to be his best man, all the guests were friends and relatives of the bride. Mrs. Lawrence had looked surprised when she had asked Michael for the names of the guests he wished to be invited to the ceremony and he had only come up with one. "I know a lot of people in New York," he had said, "but except for Cornwall I don't think any of them gives a damn whether I get married or not." He had grown to like Mrs. Lawrence and Tracy's father, a tall, scholarly man who had retired comfortably from the presidency of a small pharmaceutical company and spent his time reading, bird watching and sailing a twenty-five foot boat on the sound in the summer.

Tracy had two younger sisters, ebullient and pretty, but not with the touch of formal old-fashioned beauty that distinguished Tracy. All the family approved of him and the wedding was a festive affair, although Mrs. Lawrence, when she kissed Michael after the ceremony, wept a little when she said, "It's a pity your poor dear mother couldn't be here for this."

Michael made no comment.

While waiting for the last two months for Tracy's divorce papers to come through, he and Tracy had been sleeping with each other, sometimes at her place and sometimes at his. He was never allowed to keep any of his clothes at her place and she refused to leave any of hers at his. She didn't explain why she was so adamant about the matter and he didn't press her. He was completely in love and absorbed in the deliciousness of her body and was secretly amused with himself because now he never even glanced at another woman, no matter how pretty she was.

They followed no routine. Some nights, Tracy would call him and say she was busy. She never said what she was busy with and her tone made it clear any questions would be unwelcome. When he had to spend the night alone he went to the movies or watched television or caught up on his reading. For a little while some of the other women he had known would call him to invite him to a party or to the theatre, but he invariably said that he was working that night and after a few weeks there were no more calls.

While Tracy had a regular job at an office in the East Fifties, she often worked at home, too, and Michael had seen some of her designs, flower patterns, abstract designs, some of them in muted colors, others in bold splashes, but all of them delicate and controlled. When he went into a strange room he always looked around to see if he could pick out any of her creations and he was delighted when he found them. His own taste, he knew, ran to undergraduate monotony and disorder and he had the comfortable feeling that when he and Tracy finally moved into their own home, it would be a cheerful and comfortable place. Tracy started to overcome his mother-inspired loathing for works of art, and he happily allowed her to tow him to galleries and even to the opera. "Thanks to you," he told Tracy, "the Philistine in me is in full retreat."

"Give me ten more years," she had replied.

"Now, how can I change you?"

"You can't, friend."

"Good," he said, "I don't want you changed."

"Liar," she said, but kissed his cheek.

At the office he found himself daydreaming at his desk and remembering, in the middle of conferences, a certain expression in Tracy's eyes, an impatient twist of her head, her erect, straight carriage, the slender but voluptuous body, the satin feel of her skin, the excited but graceful gesture of a hand as she talked, the abandonment of her lovemaking. After the conversation the first night about her husband in the Midwest, they never talked about him again, although on a walk with Mr. Lawrence along the beach one day, the old man had said, abruptly, "By God, you're an improvement over the other one."

The toasts were in champagne and Mr. Cornwall shook his hand warmly and said, "You've done yourself proud, my boy. Now I know why you seemed on a private leave of absence the last few months at the office." He had laughed heartily, but forgivingly. "Now," he said, "you can stop racing around like a rooster in a henhouse and settle down and do the work you're really capable of." What Cornwall didn't know was that since Michael had met Tracy, his work had seemed all the more unreal, misted over, remote, to him. Once, when he had been away on a field trip for a few days and returned to New York, he had just hurried to put his bags away in his own apartment and gone over to Tracy's place, even though he knew she wouldn't get back from her job for more than an hour. He had started a fire in the fireplace and without putting on the lights had sat staring at the flames, lost in reverie he could not have described. Tracy had let herself in quietly and while he hadn't known she was there had watched him. Then she had gone over to him and kissed him softly on the back of the neck. He had pulled her around onto his lap and just held her, the both of them not moving. "Darling," she said softly, "I'm worried about you."

"Worried?" He was surprised. "Why?"

"When you're alone-like just now-you look-well-I guess the word is melancholy."

"What've I got to be melancholy about?"

"You'll have to tell me."

"I couldn't," he said, "because as far as I know I don't feel melancholy."

"Sometime," she said, "you'll have to tell me about your past."

"I don't have a past."

She ignored that. "Your other women, how you grew up, so I'll know why you're like you are now, why I love you."

"You love me because I adore you."

"Nonsense." She got up from his lap. "I need a drink. And you look as though you do, too."

She went into the kitchen to get some ice and he sat staring into the fire. His past-the almost demented mother, her maternal instinct gone rank because of a random death; the clumsy, fat, unpleasant child; the inability or unwillingness to make friends, the loneliness; the recklessness on ski slopes, in the surf, in the air; and then all that behind him as though it never existed and his falling into the false mold of the proper young executive, the meaningless, crowded company of easy unloved debutantes, actresses, divorcees, other men's wives, the wariness with women that had kept him from falling in love until the age of thirty-tell her all that? Never, he thought. It would weigh on her, on both of them, would darken their lives, crop up at bad moments. If he was putting on a show of being the lighthearted, careless, humorous young lover, it was for both their sakes, and if it kept their love unshadowed, the deception was valuable. He had become an expert at deception at the age of twelve and it was too great an asset to lose.

They had had their drinks and had made love all evening after that and then had gone for a late supper to a little place Michael frequented, where a young hawkfaced Frenchman named Antoine Ferre played the piano marvelously and sang sad songs in French, Italian and English, which made Tracy's eyes glisten with unshed tears, although she prided herself on being a hardheaded woman who was miserly with her emotions.

As they drove into New York after the wedding, Tracy said, "Well, it's over."

"On the contrary, it's just begun."

Tracy laughed. "Shall we consider this our first marital disagreement?"

"Agreed," he said. And he laughed, too.

They flew out to Aspen for the honeymoon. Tracy didn't ski and had no intention of learning, but she knew that Michael had skied when he was younger and yearned for the snow and she said that she loved mountains and cold weather and besides she was friendly with a couple who had a small house there who had offered to lend it to them for two weeks.

The snow was good, the weather perfect for a mountain honeymoon and he skied blithely all day, with the old exaltation that he had thought he had forgotten. He left for the slopes early each morning, leaving Tracy lying cuddled lazily in bed. During the day she took long walks in the bulky fur coat he had bought her for a wedding present, and when he saw her in the early evening in the bar they had chosen for their own after the last run down the hill, she was rosy from the cold and looked, he thought, like a glorious eighteen-year-old girl.

He had been stopped on the slopes and warned by a patrolman that his lift ticket would be taken away from him if he was caught speeding down the hills again, endangering not only his life but that of the other skiers on the slope. "I'm on my honeymoon, pal," Michael had explained, "and I'm celebrating and I sure don't want to kill anybody, especially myself."

The patrolman had grinned and said, "Okay, partner. Just make sure my head is turned the other way when you go past. And if you can't restrain yourself, there's a downhill race on Friday and nobody'll try to slow you down. You're pretty old for that sort of thing, but you look as if you won't disgrace yourself. And give my regards to the bride." After that, they had skied down together, fast, but careful to stay on the edge of the run just at the rim of the trees, where there was nobody in their way. Michael invited the patrolman, who was perhaps twenty-two years old, to have a drink with him and his wife and the patrolman had kept staring dumbly at Tracy over his hot wine and stuttered when he answered her questions. "Man," he said, after telling her how he had come to meet Michael, "I wouldn't take any chances with my neck if I was married to you "

Tracy had chuckled at that and patted the young man's hand. "You don't know how hard I had to work to get him," she said.

"I bet," the patrolman said.

Michael ordered another round of drinks and the young man asked where he'd learned to ski the way he did. "Back East, then out in California," Michael said. "Then I was an instructor for a season when I was your age."

"How come you didn't keep it up?"

"I went to New York to make my fortune and wait until Tracy Lawrence came along."

"Maybe I ought to try New York myself, before I get too old," the patrolman said. He finished his drink and stood up. "Got to go now. And Mr. Storrs, anytime you want to ski the way you were going this afternoon, remember you got a wife at home waiting for you."

"Will do," Michael said.

The young man waved stiffly, took one more hungry look at Tracy and clumped off in his boots past the noisy skiers at the bar.

"Nice young man," Tracy said.

"He looked as though he wanted to grab you and take you home under his arm."

Tracy chuckled. "You don't mind if your bride gets a little attention, do you?"

"A little, okay. He was dealing it out in wagonloads."

"I see how the girls keep looking at you. By the way, what do you do with them up on the mountain all day long?" she said teasingly.

"It's ten below zero up there, darling. There's very little fucking over ten thousand feet in altitude in the winter in the Rockies."

"You mean I have to worry about the summers-at sea level." She was still teasing him.

"I want you to remember one thing," he said, more seriously. "For the first time in my life I have discovered the ultimate sexual pleasure-monogamy. I invite you to join me."

"Will do, as you put it," she said.