Dressed in a sailor's pants and sweater that had been loaned him, Michael was on deck as they came alongside the dock at Three Mile Harbor. Tracy and her mother and her sisters were on the dock. They were dressed in sweaters and they were all wearing scarves that twisted in the wind and to Michael they looked like the womenfolk of fishermen, waiting to see which of their men were safe and which ones had been lost on the last voyage. He waved to them, and Tracy's sisters and her mother waved back, but Tracy kept her hands at her sides, plunged into the pockets of her sweater.

So be it, he thought and went down to wake the old man and help him get into a pair of dungarees and a pea coat. There was no comb in the cabin and there was nothing Michael could do about Lawrence's hair, which hung stiffly in all directions and gave him a wild and baleful appearance, like a malevolent, senile pirate. When they climbed to the deck Lawrence waved once to his family, then went aft to look at the Tracy lying on its beam, its sail tattered, low in the water. He shook his head sadly. "Poor betrayed Tracy"

Michael wished he had given the boat another name.

They debarked, with a sailor carrying Lawrence's soaked clothes and life jacket in a duffel bag. All the women kissed and hugged the old man, and Mrs. Lawrence and Tracy's sisters hugged Michael, too. Tracy stood off to one side watching, expressionlessly. Mrs. Lawrence bundled her husband into the station wagon with the two girls, and Tracy and Michael walked to where the sedan was parked and got in, Tracy behind the wheel, all in silence.

Tracy turned the ignition key and the motor started up, but she didn't put it in gear immediately. "What can we ever do to thank those men?" she said.

Michael shrugged. "Thank them. That's all."

"When I called the coast guard station and told them you were supposed to be home by one o'clock and you were already an hour late, I could hear him say to somebody in the room, 'Two more goddamn idiots.' "

Michael didn't say anything and she put the car into gear and they moved off and followed the station wagon. Michael glanced over at his wife. Her hands were so tight on the wheel that her knuckles showed white and her face was rigid, her mouth set in a grim line, her eyes narrowed and glowering. Finally, she let it out. "It's not enough that you don't give a damn whether your wife becomes a widow or not, you have to drag my father along with you."

"I tried to insist. . ." he began.

"I can just imagine how you tried to insist."

"You ask your father. . ."

"He admires you, he's told me he wished he had a son like you, he'd like to pretend he's almost the same age as you. I know you. Without even saying a word, you shamed him into it. He's a careful, peaceful man, a sensible sailor, it's the first time in his life he's ever done, anything as suicidal as this. I wish I'd never brought you into the house."

"Let's continue this when you've calmed down a bit, shall we?" he said placatingly.

"I'm calm right now. And there's nothing to continue."

The rest of the drive they rode in silence until they reached the house.

Lawrence was coughing and looked feverish when he got out of the car and Mrs. Lawrence called a doctor and put her husband to bed, where he fell into a troubled sleep. When the doctor came he said Mr. Lawrence would have to remain in bed for a few days and stay quiet. The atmosphere in the house was mournful and Michael felt that all four women kept looking at him accusingly and he excused himself from dinner and took the car and went into Bridge-hampton, where he had a hamburger at a bar and drank too much both before and after the meal.

Tracy was waiting for him when he got home. Except for the light in their bedroom and in the second floor hall, all the lights in the house were out. He felt deathly tired as he went up the steps and stumbled, knocking against a painting on the wall that fell off its hook with a shattering noise. Cursing under his breath, he tried to put the picture back but failed, and carried it the rest of the way up the steps. The door to his and Tracy's room opened and he stood revealed, swaying a little, feeling ludicrous with the picture under his arm, as Tracy came out into the hall, lit by the shaft of light behind her.

"You don't have to wake up the whole house to applaud your entrance," she whispered, but the whisper was frigid and grating.

"No lights," he said with dignity. "And what sort of an idea is it to hang pictures on a staircase?"

"I think we can discuss your ideas on interior decoration in the privacy of our bedroom," Tracy said and pushed the door open wider so that he could go in.

He placed the picture carefully against the wall and went into the room. Tracy closed the door behind her and stood against it, looking at him as he sat down on a straight wooden chair, his body stiffly erect. The pallid rigidity of her face was in contrast to the soft, pretty wool robe she was wearing.

"For your own good, Michael," she said, "I suggest that when you're as drunk as you obviously are now, you leave the car outside the bar or wherever else you happen to drink yourself senseless and take a taxi home. I know you don't mind killing yourself, but I doubt that you'd like to do it crashing unheroically into a tree."

"I'm not drunk." He knew his speech was a little thick and that he had had some trouble climbing the stairs, but his mind felt clear, ready to make sensible decisions.

"In the last year or so, Michael," Tracy went on steadily, "you've become a drunkard. A solitary, pitiful drunkard."

"I won't argue with you."

"I don't intend to argue," Tracy said. "Waiting here tonight I realized it was all over, Michael. It's too bad, but there it is. Today was the end."

"I told you I insisted . . ." he said, feeling misused. "I know I've been guilty a lot of times before for many things . . ."

She laughed, without amusement.

"But today," he continued doggedly, "it wasn't my fault. You have to believe that."

"I don't have to believe anything. It's been coming on for a long time and I kept hoping that one day you'd wake up and see what you were doing to yourself, to me. I can't live anymore being afraid that every time you go out of the house the telephone will ring and somebody will tell me my husband is dead. If you can't bear even to touch me for over a year and you have to whore all over the country-don't think I haven't heard, I have good friends or not-so-good friends who are more than anxious to let me know what my husband is doing- and if you detest me so much you'd rather die than stand the sight of me, why in the name of God do you want to hang on?"

"I love you," he said, staring down at his hands.

Again she laughed, the same mirthless half-sob. "Maybe, in your own crazy way, you do. But if it is love, it's love that's destroying me. And just for your information, you're not the only one who's found consolation in other beds."

"What do you mean by that?" He looked up, genuinely surprised. Somehow, it had never occurred to him that she . . . There had been no signs. Womanly deceit, he thought, hurt.

"You know what I mean," Tracy said. "What did you expect?"

He considered this for a moment. "I should have expected it," he said humbly. "I don't blame you."

"If it's of any use to your ego," she said, "it was never any good, it changed what I thought of myself, it erased me."

"Oh, darling," he mumbled sadly.

"It's too late for darlings."

"Do you want a divorce?"

Standing, tense and accusing, her back against the door, a prosecuting attorney nearing the bitter end of a long trial, she sighed. "I don't know what I want except that tomorrow I want you to take the car-it's your car, anyway, and . . ."

"Our car," he said.

"There is no more our. There's only yours and mine from now on. And tomorrow you take your car and drive in to the city and take every last thing of yours out of my apartment."

He looked at the big double bed. He knew that he couldn't lie side by side with her for one last time for the rest of the night. Finally, he stood up. "In that case," he said, taking great trouble to speak clearly and intelligently, "in that case, there's no sense in waiting till morning. I'll pack my bag and get out right now."

"You can't drive in your condition. You'll wake up in jail."

"Let me worry about my condition," he said and went to the closet and got out his overnight bag and started throwing things into it.

Tracy shrugged. "Have it your own way," she said. She watched silently as he packed his bag and locked it. He picked the bag up and started for the door. She stood there, blocking his way. He felt the tears coming to his eyes as he looked at the lovely grim face that he had adored in so many different moods and was furious for his tears. "What're you going to tell your mother and father?" he asked.

"Something. Anything. That you got a telephone call on business and had to be in town in the morning. Later on I'll figure how to break it to them. I'll take my share of the blame. They like you and there's no need to change that. Incompatibility, how's that for a bright new excuse?" She laughed again. "You really want to go now -tonight?"

"Nothing could make me stay."

She shrugged, moved away from the door. "Drive carefully."

"Will do." He opened the door and stood there for a moment. "Here," she said, suddenly moving past him through the doorway, "let me put the light on again so you can see where you're going." She snapped on the staircase light, and carrying the bag, he walked slowly down the steps, holding securely to the banister.

He went across the living room, where he and Philip Lawrence had played chess so many evenings while the women chatted in the background, and opened the front door and stepped out into the damp and foggy Atlantic night. Behind him the light went out.

He threw the bag into the back of the car and got in and started the engine. He looked up at the second story where the one light shone. Then that light went out and the house was dark. He drove out through the front gate and onto the road, the fog swirling low on the glistening road in the diffused glare of the headlights. Tears clouded his vision again and again, and he drove slowly and with care, but even so he was alarmed when he saw the flashing lights of a police car speeding out of the mist behind him. But the police car swept past him, the officers not interested in a weeping drunk going forty miles an hour, hugging the edge of the highway, the armed men hurrying to an accident, a murder, a fire, to any one of a thousand disasters that could happen in the middle of the night one hundred miles from the city of New York.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

He was seated at his desk in the office, going over a thick sheaf of reports and occasionally looking out the window at the icy autumnal rain that was beating down on the streets of New York. The heat was on and as usual he was sweating, because there was no way to regulate it in the individual offices and whoever did regulate it in the bowels of the skyscraper must have had blood that had been thinned to the consistency of water by generations of pellagra-stricken ancestors who had never been north of Georgia.

Wearily, Michael went back ten pages and laboriously read the columns of figures for the third time. They made no more sense to him than they had made the first time.

The ring of the telephone was welcome. "Alio-Michel?" the voice said.

"Antoine," Michael said, because the pianist was the only one he knew who used the French version of his name, "where have you been all this time?" He hadn't seen the Frenchman in more than two years. He had inquired about him at the bar where he had played, but the manager had said that he had just dropped out of sight in the middle of his engagement.

"I've been in Paris," Antoine said. "A foolish romantic impulse. A certain lady suddenly decided she wanted to live in Paris and I knew that if I gave her a two week headstart it would be au revoir, Antoine."

Michael laughed. Antoine was by turns overly susceptible and overly cynical in his pursuit of the ladies. He also was overly candid in reciting the most intimate details of his shifting liaisons. "I'm delighted to hear your voice," Michael said. "You're brightening a gloomy day. How did it go in Paris?"

"Calamity," Antoine said. "Absolute Waterloo. Nobody wants to listen to piano players in Paris and the lady married a Japanese tycoon and the next lady . . . But I'll tell you about it when I see you."

"Where can you be found these days?"

"I've been playing at a little place in the Sixties, The Golden Hoop, but do not be deceived by the name, it's a joint. We have a little reclame, though, and I am lifting the level of the ambiance considerably, and occasionally a few people come in who look as though they eat with knives and forks." There was a little pause and then he said, "Your wife came in last night."

"Oh." '

"She told me you were still working at the same place. That's how I knew where to find you. She looked exquise, as usual. She was with two men."

"Two?"

"Two. But both of them older and uglier than you."

"Thank you."

"When I asked how you were she was rather vague," Antoine said. "There has been a rupture?"

"We're not living together for the time being," Michael said, "if that's what you mean by a rupture."

"I commiserate with you, mon vieux." Antoine sighed. "It is the sort of thing that I have become accustomed to in my life, but I didn't think it could happen in yours."

"Everything is possible in everybody's life. Especially in New York. That's why everybody comes here."

"I am happy to see that you are taking your tragedy philosophically."

"Stop sounding like an opera," Michael said testily. "It isn't a tragedy."

"It would be for me."

"Go fuck yourself."

"I expect to see you tonight," Antoine said calmly. "I am at my best between eleven and midnight. I will introduce you to the woman who has swept the memories of all other women I have ever known away from my brain like a wind from the Sahara. Promise me, out of our old friendship, you will reject any advances she makes to you." "Have no fear," Michael said. "I have given up girls for this year." "I will believe it when I see it, mon vieux. I will see you at eleven," Antoine said and hung up.

Michael smiled. He sat for a moment staring out at the rain, remembering the times he had sat in the shadowed bar late at night with Tracy, listening to Antoine as he loomed over the piano like some dark bird, a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lower lip except when he sang, his deep brown eyes always sad and squinting from the cigarette smoke, his face, marked with what must have been one of the worst cases of adolescent acne in France, intent over the keyboard, his slightly hoarse voice singing a song that Tracy had requested, because it was one of her favorites, "C'est triste, Venise." C'est also triste, New York, Michael thought, looking out at the rain. Two men, he remembered. But older and uglier than you. Then he turned back to work.

He stayed late at the office and dined alone and at eleven o'clock went up to The Golden Hoop. The room wasn't crowded and he sat by himself at the bar, nursing a whiskey and trying not to overhear the conversation of the couple next to him, a fat man of about fifty who was talking about various sexual adventures in his past which he obviously thought was preparing the overblown blonde with him for conquest. Antoine had waved to Michael when he came in but the pianist was in the middle of a set and kept on playing. Tracy was not in the room. After all, Michael told himself, if she had been in the night before, it was unlikely she'd come in tonight. But knowing that hadn't prevented him from peering in the semidarkness for her face. There was no evidence, either, that any of the ladies present was the one who had succeeded in sweeping the memories of all the other women Antoine had known from his brain like a wind from the Sahara.

Antoine was playing as well as ever, softly, cleverly improvising changes on the melodies, but never straying far enough from them to falsify them. How satisfactory it must be, Michael thought, to be able to do something as well as that, something that gave yourself and so many others so much pleasure. He remembered the gloomy hours he had spent practicing and grinned across the years at the leaden child who had banged so unharmoniously and with such hatred at the keyboard.

Antoine finished his version of the theme from The Sting with a little flourish and came over to the bar and embraced Michael. "Enfin" he said, "it is about time." He stood back and examined Michael. "Let me see how you look," he said. "Ah. Aging. You are not taking care of yourself, mon vieux."

"What the hell happened to you?" There was a long scar from the ear down to the mouth on Antoine's left cheek.

"Oh, this." Antoine touched the scar. "A memento of Paris. A lady . . ."

"Don't tell me you're going around these days with ladies who carry straight-edged razors."

"Not the lady," Antoine said. "The gentleman-friend of the lady. A monsieur from Marseilles, well known in the milieu for having a hasty temper. Only until he pulled out the knife he was not well known to me." He shrugged. "It's not really so bad. Cosmetically not appealing, perhaps, but I am no beauty at the best of times, anyway." He swung up on the stool next to Michael's and ordered a Perrier. He didn't drink when he performed.

"Where's the beautiful lady you promised me I'd meet?"

"She is, what shall we say, undependable." Antoine sighed. "She comes and goes as the mood seizes her. She tells me she likes to see me when she has the cafard. I guess she is feeling jolly tonight. She has a great many admirers she likes to see when she is jolly. So far, my dear friend, I have had no great success with her although I have laid my heart at her feet-repeatedly."

Michael laughed. "You're laying it on thick tonight, Antoine," he said. He had always been amused when Antoine went into one of his elaborate speeches on the subject of women and he appreciated it when Antoine purposely delivered an extra-florid oration for him.

Antoine studied his face keenly. "You look as though you might have a touch of the cafard yourself tonight, Michael."

"I worked late."

"Ah, then you are not mourning the absence of the glorious Madame Storrs?"

"Let it lie, please," Michael said shortly.

"She did not look jolly either, last night. I detected an inner sorrow."

"In the light in this bar, you're lucky to be able to detect the location of the piano."

"The soul sees into the darkest corners," Antoine said pontifically. "Remember, I am an artist."

"You're a piano player in a bar, and a damn good one. Be satisfied with that and don't go snooping into darkest corners."

"Not all artists play at Carnegie Hall," Antoine said with dignity. "Is there anything particular you'd like to hear?"

"Anything but 'C'est triste, Venise.' "