By the time they finished their lunch they knew a great deal about each other and they were more than slightly tipsy on the daiquiris and what had turned out to be two bottles of wine. It was clear to Michael, too, that the signals he had sensed in her manner the night he met her were not merely standard party flirtatiousness. It was also plain that she was lonely so far from home and grateful to him for having called her.

When they left the restaurant, they hesitated a moment in the shade of a big eucalyptus tree that smelled of pepper. "Do you know what?" she said. "I was going to go over my lines this afternoon. Only I'm not going to. I have a nice bottle of cognac in my room . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Just the thing after a lunch like that," he said.

So they went to her room. But they never bothered even pouring the cognac.

Exquisitely made and amorously gluttonous, she turned out to be just what was needed after an old girl's wedding and nearly drowning in the Pacific Ocean.

"Is this adulterizing?" she asked. They were both dressed by now and finally she had poured the cognac and they were having just one little nip before going out to dinner and he was very fond of her and wished that he could be more than that and knew that he never could be.

"What do you think?"

"No." She shook her head, her short soft blond hair fluffing around her small, oval face. "It is pleasure given and pleasure taken. The sweet and sensible fruit of the sexual revolution. Did you fight in that war, Mister Storrs?"

He grinned. "I happened to be away at the time. "

"Anyway," she said, "I'm not married. You can't be a woman taken in adultery if you're not married, can you?"

"I don't think so."

"Are you married? I suppose I should have asked that question at the bar, when I was making up my mind, shouldn't I?"

"You were making up your mind that soon?"

"I'm famous as a quick decision maker. Are you married?"

"Yes."

She shrugged. "Tant pis. I studied in France for a year. We're not going to let it spoil our glorious Saturday, are we?"

"No." He took her in his arms and kissed her.

"Signed, sealed and delivered," she said. "Although I don't know exactly what I mean by that. Now, you've promised me dinner."

They ate in a small French restaurant, by candlelight. The food was good and they had the third bottle of wine of the day and they looked at each other with affection, untroubled for the moment by desire. His body felt light and floating, making every moment particular and lasting.

"And tomorrow?" she said.

"Tomorrow we continue as before."

She grinned at him. "You sure know how to talk to girls, don't you? What are the plans?"

"I'll drive you down to the beach and we'll eat abalone and sand dabs and maybe have some fish soup and listen to the roar of the ocean."

"I should work . . ." she began.

"I know. And you're not going to."

She grinned again. "I guess that's what I was going to say." Then she saw a man and a woman being seated across the room and waved and said to Michael, "Oh, there's an old friend of mine from New York. I had no idea she was out here. Do you mind if I go over and say hello?"

"Will I have to be introduced?"

"No."

"Then go."

She patted his hand and stood up and crossed the room, her blond hair gleaming in the flickering light of the candles on the tables. He was through eating and he sat bent over a little, his elbows on the table, his hands supporting his chin. What a dear, bright, straightforward woman, he thought. He hoped that later on she would not regret the day. He remembered Josey's departing cry, "Why the fuck couldn't you have fallen in love with me?" What would Florence cry when she departed or when he did? Christ, he thought despairingly, any other man sitting here after a day like this would at least wonder if he was going to fall in love this time. I can't even wonder. I know. I go through the motions of love, but love is out of my reach, except for one woman, and she is disappearing farther and farther into the distance. I don't even have the gallantry to try to lie or pretend. And with somebody like Florence it isn't just two bodies senselessly coming together. There's so much more to it than that, but finally not enough, and eventually she'll know it, too, and then how will she take it? There again, it won't be like Josey. He could not imagine Florence ever saying, "No hearts will be broken." When I leave on Monday, he thought, I must make it clear that it's over, that when we're back in New York we will not see each other. One lovely, perfect weekend and then finito, basta. Josey had said, "There are no rules here." That might do for Josey, although he no longer was so sure about that after her parting outburst, but it would not do for him, not with somebody like the woman whose small blond head shone in the candlelight across the room.

He sat back, closed his eyes, rubbed them for a moment, then sat staring straight ahead of him. When she came back to the table and sat down opposite him he blinked his eyes and shook his head as though he were waking himself up. He tried to smile at her, but he wasn't quite sure how it came out.

"Michael," she said, "has anything happened?"

"Why?"

"You look so-melancholy."

The word shocked him. He remembered Tracy telling him the same thing. "It's just a trick of the light," he said airily. "I'm not at my best in candlelight."

"What were you thinking?" she asked seriously.

"Nothing. If I was thinking anything I imagine I was saying to myself, Boy, have you lucked out today!"

She smiled, reassured. "Why don't you put it in the plural? I'd like it better that way. Like, for example-Boy, have we lucked out today!"

"In this case," he said, glad to have the conversation light again, "the singular is more modest."

"I don't believe in modesty. I'm a good actress and I know it and I let everybody know it."

"I'm not really good at anything, Florence darling," he said, "and I guess I think if I don't brag about myself I'll get the benefit of the doubt and people will believe I'm hiding some great talent or virtue behind my mask of modesty." He reached over and took her hand. "Now, that's enough of talk like that. We're on our own private big glorious holiday-let's save soul-searching for the five-day working week."

They slept together that night in Florence's room and had a sunny day at the beach. As he had promised, Michael did not take along his board. It wasn't a good day for surfing anyway. The sea was calm and the few boys and girls out on boards sat disconsolately on the gently rippling water waiting for waves that never arrived. Where were you yesterday, friends? he thought, feeling superior as he watched the distant figures bobbing listlessly up and down, merely getting sunburned.

They didn't talk about anything serious and Michael didn't ask her when she was likely to be back in New York and she didn't ask him if it was possible that he would be sent back to the Coast in the next month or two, and she entertained him by reciting monologues from Shakespeare and long sections of The Waste Land and singing, in a low voice, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which, she said, was one of the first songs her father had taught her.

They slept together again that night, reveling in each other and not thinking about the morning. They both had to get up early, she to go to the studio and he to catch his plane, and there was no time to make any plans or deliver warnings. They kissed good-bye hastily and went their separate ways, already at a distance from each other.

When he signed for his bill at the desk, he told the clerk he was leaving his surfboard at the hotel and would let them know where to send it when he needed it.

When he got back to New York he went directly to the office to report in and old man Cornwall teased him about being so tan and asked him if his job in California involved lying on the beach for eight hours a day. He got out of the office as soon as he could. It seemed airless, aseptic, like a hospital, with people hurrying through corridors to tend to terminal cases and other people waiting fearfully to hear mortal pronouncements.

Tracy was sitting looking at the news on television when he got home and kissed him reservedly without getting up when he came into the room.

"Anything important tonight?" he asked after he had told her his trip had been successful.

"Nothing much," she said. "The world is crumbling, as it does every evening at seven. Nothing to worry about except whether we'll all be alive next week. I was too busy to make dinner. I thought it might be nice to go out your first night home."

"That's a good idea," he said, although he was tired and looking forward to a quiet evening.

They did not have much to say to each other during dinner and it was only while they were having their coffee that Tracy said, "I tried to call you Saturday night." She looked at him squarely, without emotion. "Several times."

"Did you have anything special to say?"

"No." She shrugged. "Just that I missed you. There was no answer."

"I was invited out to the beach for the weekend. I should have left the number at the hotel."

"Yes," she said, "you should have."

He was sure she knew he was lying.

It isn't going to last much longer now, he thought. He wanted to get up and fold her in his arms and hold her tight, but it wasn't something you could do in a restaurant, so he merely ordered another coffee.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

He sat in his office, going over the report he was preparing for a textile company with plants in South Carolina and Kentucky but with its headquarters in New York. He had stopped volunteering for trips out of town and since the time in California he had not been out of the city on business for more than a year. In his report on the textile company's intricate dealings, he saw that he had tentatively scrawled, in ink-"Over a period of five years, it can be confidently predicted, a sum in excess of a million dollars could be saved by moving all offices to a central location in the South." He stared at what he could recognize was his own handwriting, but he could not remember how he had arrived at that conclusion or when he had written it. The lapses of memory had started some six months ago and he had thought nothing of it, but now they were coming more frequently and closer together. My mind, he thought, is in the process of absconding.

He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. The air-conditioning was on, but he was sweating in his shirtsleeves. He had complained several times about the air-conditioning in his office and the engineer of the building had come up to test it and told him everything was in order. He couldn't bring himself to tell the engineer what he privately believed-that the machinery that cooled the hot summer air from outside also malevolently extracted most of the oxygen from the cold blasts it blew into his office and that he was having increasing difficulty in breathing. He had suggested to the engineer that it would be better to close off the machinery in his office completely and open the windows, but the engineer had patiently told him that there was no way of opening the windows in the building.

His secretary came in with a pile of letters. "What are those?" he asked. The woman, stern-faced, efficient and forty, had worked for him for five years but for the moment he couldn't remember her name.

She looked at him curiously as she placed the pile of letters on his desk. "You dictated these this morning," she said. She shivered. She was wearing a dark brown cardigan sweater.

"Thank you very much," he said. He didn't remember dictating any letters that morning.

She left the room and he stared at the door after she had closed it behind her. B, he thought, I'm sure her name begins with B. It was 90 degrees outside. Imagine wearing a sweater.

He pushed the pile of letters and the report he was working on toward the back of the desk and stood up and went to a window. It was divided in half horizontally and there was a metal strip that he could reach just above head height. He put both his hands on it and pushed, but of course it didn't budge. He knew it was useless because he had tried it many times before. One day, he thought, it might suddenly, magically open. Still, the men who had designed the building might have very sound reasons for closing out the sound and the fumes of the city from him. His office was on the thirty-sixth floor and if the window was open what would there be to stop him from throwing himself out?

He stared out at the towers that surrounded him, an infinity of windows. Behind each one there were men and women like him, insulated from the climate, the uproar of the city muted, all of them like him dealing in money, money which they never saw, money that was merely figures in books, money that was, as far as they knew, as much a fiction as anything in a child's fairy tale, money for which they sacrificed all their working lives. Are they all serious? he thought. Did they ever say, like him, waste, waste? What was it to him if whoever it was who owned the textile company saved or didn't save a million dollars in five years? What was it, even to them?

He stared out the window, looking downtown. He could see the tower of the Empire State Building on Thirty-fourth Street. He had received a note from Florence some months ago and the address on the envelope had been on Thirty-fifth Street. He wondered if one of the windows gleaming in the hot sunlight within his line of vision was hers. Was she at home that afternoon, did she have air-conditioning, was she taking a shower, sipping a cup of tea, learning new lines, thinking of him? He had not answered her letter, and some time later he had received a note from her. "I get the message," the note read. It was signed "F.G." In what book of etiquette had women read that it was elegant to sign only by their initials?

It had been a year since he had seen her in California and while he had not been courageous enough to tell her why he couldn't see her, he had kept his promise to himself. He hadn't called any other women, either. It was no hardship for him. He had no desire to touch a woman. Including, unfortunately, his wife.

He had done his best, he thought, to repair their marriage. He had not gone out of town, except to the Hamptons on weekends with Tracy; he had been chaste, celibate, rather, which was no way to solidify a marriage, but he couldn't help himself. God knew what Tracy thought about it. Probably that he had an affair going that sated him. Better that than the truth.

He admired Tracy for her patience with him, her stoic acceptance of his behavior, her evident quiet love for him, her forbearance of his increasingly forgetful behavior, her gratitude for.the fact that he did not slip away to jump out of airplanes or to ski or to hang-glide or surf. The surfboard was still lying somewhere in the storeroom of the hotel in California.

He went back to his desk, signed all the letters Miss Burwell-ah, Burwell, that was it-had laid on his desk. How long, he thought, before I blow?

That weekend he drove out to the Hamptons with Tracy. It was raining and it had turned cool and when he was out of the office he could breathe normally and he knew the city would be empty and bearable for two days, but Tracy was intent on getting away and he said he'd love to accompany her. He just hoped her parents weren't giving a party, one of those parties at which he didn't know anybody or had forgotten the names of the people he had met two weeks before and where there was always a drunk who owned a company or was the chairman of some board who cornered him and wanted to talk to him about the state of the economy and the confusion in Washington.

He now let Tracy drive because in the spring he had lost his way, although he had driven out dozens of times and the car could have practically made the trip on its own. They had wound up completely lost, and the trip that usually took only two hours had taken them almost five. He had lost control of himself and had cursed himself in an almost endless stream of gutter profanity as they wandered through the bleak tangle of the streets of Queens, had called himself all kinds of an idiot, using words that he had never used before. He was not a man who ordinarily lapsed into profanity and Tracy had sat white and silent as he twisted the wheel violently around corners, suddenly backed up, grinding the gears, heedlessly slammed into parked cars as he suddenly recognized that twice he had been on the same street before.

At one moment, she had said quietly, "Michael, why don't you let me take the wheel for a while?"

"Will you for Christ's sake shut your goddamn mouth," he had shouted at her and she had relapsed into silence. When they finally got to her parents' house, his hands were shaking and the sweat was pouring from him and he had slumped over the wheel. He didn't say anything for a moment and Tracy didn't make a move to get out of the car. "Forgive me," he whispered, "forgive me."

"Of course," she said quietly and leaned over and kissed his cheek and when they went into the house she made him take a hot bath and brought him a martini to drink while he was soaking in the steaming water.

"Maybe," he said, trying to make a weak joke, "I ought to curse more often. It seems to pay great dividends in husband-pampering." "Drink it slowly," she said. "You're only going to get one. And from now on I drive."

"With good reason," he said. "This is the best goddamn martini I've ever tasted."

"Why the goddamn?"

"I retract the goddamn." Small favors, he thought. Not enough.

She sat down on a low stool next to the bathtub where he lay, his skin caressed by a froth of opaque rainbow bubbles from a preparation Tracy had put into the water. "Michael," she said, as he sipped at the martini, "I think it might be a good idea if you went and talked to a psychoanalyst."

"Oh," Michael said. "McCain did call you that Saturday morning." "He did," she said. "He sounded like a thoughtful man. I don't go along with priests or rabbis or gurus, but the analyst is a sensible idea. I don't suppose I have to tell you, but you've been acting awfully strangely for a long time, you haven't been yourself at all."

"And a few hours on the couch, and I'll be back to the carefree, happy-go-lucky young fellow you married."

"You were never a carefree, happy-go-lucky young fellow," Tracy said evenly. "And I didn't think so when we got married. I think you need help and it's worth the chance."

"Help," he said. "My dear Mr. Storrs"-he put on a slight accent that he believed sounded faintly Viennese-"you hated your mother, you felt rejected by your father because he died when you were a child, you are subconsciously equating your wife with your mother, your success as a student raised expectations of success in later life that are not satisfied in the job you hold, your jumping out of airplanes etcetera is an unconscious attempt, a symbolic attempt at escape from restrictions and resentments that are rooted deep in your childhood. A textbook case. You must understand these things and, understanding them, adapt yourself to them. Fifty dollars, please? Or maybe the price has gone up. Inflation."

Tracy sighed. "As usual, you're half again too smart for your own good."

"I've read the same books they have," Michael said. He finished the martini with a long gulp and leaned over and put the glass down on the floor next to the bathtub.

Tracy automatically picked up the glass and twirled it absently between her fingers. "Michael, maybe he'll go further than that. Maybe he'll make you discover why you want to die. Dinner is in fifteen minutes." She stood up abruptly and went out of the bathroom, carrying the glass.

Oh, darling, darling, he thought, the voodoo men will not fix anything. There are no textbook cases.

The next day was raw and windy, but Michael and Mr. Lawrence had planned to go sailing in the morning and they got into the car and drove down to Three Mile Harbor, where the twenty-five foot sloop, named after Tracy, was berthed. All the rest of the Lawrence family detested sailing, so, after they had promised to be back at one o'clock for lunch, the two men went alone, wearing heavy sweaters and wet-weather slickers. Even the long, protected, ordinarily placid harbor was ruffled with small whitecaps. Michael looked across the water doubtfully. "Don't you think it's a little rough, Phil?" he said.

"Been out in stuff a lot worse than this," Lawrence said. "I've been looking forward all week to getting out of reach of the sound of female voices." He was an ardent and skillful sailor and he was always hunting for people to help him crew the boat.

"If you say," Michael said, still doubtful.

They cast off and Lawrence deftly got the boat away from the dock and into the harbor proper, using the outboard motor. Once they were in the channel leading out to the wide reaches of the sound, Lawrence cut the motor and they raised the mainsail and then Michael put up the jib. The boat heeled over sharply and sped toward the mouth of the harbor. It looked rough out in the sound and Michael said, "Maybe we just ought to cruise around a bit inside the harbor, Phil."

"Nonsense," Lawrence said. "This boat has handled seas five times as bad as this." He was not by nature a vain man, but he was touchy when matters of seamanship came up. "I'm not a fair weather sailor. If all you did was go out and flap around when the sea is as flat as a pancake, there'd be no sense in owning a boat."

"You're the skipper," Michael said. He could see that the old man, his long gray hair streaming in the wind and his face highly colored and wet with spray, was enjoying himself hugely.

Let him have his fun, Michael thought. He, himself, was a good sailor and had never been seasick in his life. He had sailed perhaps a dozen times withh his father-in-law and had been bored when there were only little puffs of wind and they had moved slowly and erratically, trying to catch the light airs.

Out on the sound, the wind caught hold and the sails were taut and straining and the boat, heeled over more steeply now, with the rail in the water, bounced sturdily through the waves, the curl at their bow impressive because of their speed. Michael sat crouched in the cockpit, leaning to port to balance the starboard heel. Lawrence sat next to him, bent over, putting his full weight on the helm to keep them on course.