She is my favorite candy box blonde. Small perfect delicate features, silky floating hair. She has a thin little-girl voice with overtones of a lisp cured long ago.

However, there is a level honesty and intelligence in her blue eyes that keeps her from being insipid. Her figure is flawed, if you can consider it a flaw. I have no doubt that she does, because her clothes, even the sun suit are styled to de-emphasize the flaw. She is very long-wasted.

Her torso, discernible through any clothing, is long, ripe, muscular, perfectly formed. You see such torsos carved hi old marble a loll oftener than you see them on people.

Were her legs hi proportion Nancy would be six feet tall. But the lovely torso rests on short heavy legs. They are shapely, but they do not fit. Understand, it is not something you see immediately. After you see her a few times you begin to realize that though she is lush indeed, the proportions are subtly off. Then you see why. Her hips are too far from her head, and too close to the ground.

We walked to a pine log a hundred yards up the beach.

"He's pretty upset," she said.

"Yes."

"Clint, do you have any remote idea what could have happened?"

"Not the slightest."

"It's d.a.m.ned funny. I... I hope she never comes back." Nancy said that shyly. We could not talk together of Mary Olan without constraint. She became shy when she remembered the way she had talked the second time we had all gone out as a foursome. Sober, Nancy would not have confided in me-I had been a stranger.

Dodd had set up the first double date. There had been undercurrents of tension that I didn't understand. Mary and Dodd would begin to close Nancy and me out of the conversation by talking of old friends during the old days in Warren. Then they would remember their manners.

Mary's att.i.tude toward me had been casual and friendly, but to Nancy she was patronizing. Nancy had kept her claws unsheathed just enough so they showed. I chalked that up to the normal stress you would expect between wife and old gal friend. I even a.s.sumed that Dodd had decided, since he was going to stay in Warren for some time, that the best way to smooth things out was to throw wife and old gal together and rub the edges off.

For my part, I was pleased. My social contacts in Warren were limited. The guys on my same level in the firm were out there in Brookways, well wired and hairned.

They had me out a few times for dinner. During the evening people would be drifting in and out, and some of them were lovely ladies. But each of the lovely ladies had a husband who just happened to be somewhere else that evening, and a place like Brookways-even if you had the inclination, which I most certainly haven't-is no place to make pa.s.ses amid the married set. Compared to Brookways, a fishbowl is a mountain retreat.

There were, of course, the gals in the office. But C.P.P. regards such goings on with a paternalistic frown.

Warren is a tight community. I was part of the new influx of postwar population, and a professional transient at that. The old part of town drew its skirts tightly around itself, talked about the dreadful habits of the "new element," and quietly raised its standard of living with the money we were bringing in. So I had battered myself into apathy with workouts at the Y, with sheafs of work I brought home from the office, with library books that I had never gotten around to reading before. When restlessness got its sharp little fangs into me, I'd roam the Sat.u.r.day bars. That is a forlorn pursuit, eyeing the tight-skirt little drabs in the neighborhood joints, or the enameled Vogue-like birds of prey in the dollar-a-c.o.c.ktail lounges, nursing their pale poison during the five o'clock ritual of appraisal and rejection. The jukes hammer your head and your need is a sickness to be a.s.suaged only by predictable shame.

During my five transient years I had come to learn that the more complex the civilization grows, the more violent are the effects of loneliness. I had learned why C.P.P." G.E." Dupont, Alcoa, Ford, General Motors, Kodak and all the rest of them wanted us safely married. Still, there were a lot of us still single, minds honed keen by Sheffield, Towne, Stanford, Harvard Business, M.I.T." and by day we made things run and move and grow. But by night we paced the neon sidewalks where nylon whispers on hips and ankles, and lipstick shows black when the light overhead is red.

A few times I had reached the point where the act of marriage became a goal in itself, apart from any specific woman. Marriage to a faceless being who was nevertheless all too vivid from the neck down, who by warmth and closeness would still the gnaw of the blood.

Thus I was grateful to Dodd for being willing and able to give me this chance to enter a world previously denied me. Mary Olan opened a door and the city changed.

Sewell, through Dodd, sponsored by Olan, became acceptable. They saw to their indubitable surprise that I unerringly chose the correct fork, that my shoulders were unpadded, that I tied my own bow tie, that I could carry on a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with helical gears, cutter grinders and industrial abrasives. I soon learned that the old line families thought Dodd's career with C.P.P. rather daring and eccentric. With law, medicine and banking open to him, he had become a technical man. Works down at one of those new plants beyond the river, doing G.o.d knows what. It's really charming that he could arrange to be sent back home.

They ship them around like cattle, you know. That little wife he found somewhere or other actually seems rather sweet. And it seemed so dreadfully obvious that he would marry the Olan girl. Much as I was amused and irritated by the att.i.tude of Old Warren, I was soph.o.m.orically delighted to become known and accepted.

It was on my second date with Mary Olan that Nancy Raymond, inhibitions liquidated, bared her distressed soul.

A woman with a top sergeant voice had phoned me at the office and given me my orders regarding a party she was giving at the Locust Ridge Club. I checked with Dodd and he said it had been his suggestion. I was to pick up Mary and the four of us could go together. When I phoned Mary I found out that she had been given her orders too.

It was an April Sat.u.r.day night, a c.o.c.ktail party for about forty in a private room at the club, then dinner and dancing. My appearance with Mary Olan made it essential that each one of the other guests meet me, categorize me and put me on a mental list for future parties should I pa.s.s inspection.

Nancy looked charming in a dinner dress that was exactly the right color and cut for her-a slate blue that enhanced her eyes and emphasized the incredibly fine texture of her skin. After I had been punted from group to group with rugby precision, I found myself in a restful corner with Nancy.

"The man who mixed these martinis belongs at White Sands," I said.

Nancy was looking, beyond me at Dodd, standing with Mary Olan in a group of eight. Mary, laughing heartily, had taken Dodd's arm.

"Skoal," Nancy said and thumped two-thirds of a c.o.c.ktail down her throat in two gulps and handed me her gla.s.s.

"Please, mister."

I brought her a new one. She took half of it, said, "To White Sands," and downed the second half.

"Easy, my lady. These can be poison."

"Hah! Fade me again, Clint boy."

"I will not be a party to self-destruction, Nance."

"I'll get it my own self."

"Okay, okay." It was not happy to watch. I wondered if our Nancy were a lush. I decided no. Female lushes carry the mark on them. Their faces coa.r.s.en, their features thicken, they grow fur on the larynx. So it had to be the Mary Olan situation, and an intensification of the strain I had noticed on the first date.

The four of us ate at a table for six with another couple.

I was between Nancy and a hollow-eyed brunette with a staccato bray of a laugh which made her husband, across the table, wince visibly each time she tinkled the chandeliers with it. Nancy had somehow managed to get a double martini at the table. When Dodd reached over for it, she wrapped her hand around it. She had reached the glazed state, monosyllabic, practically inert. After too many awkward holes in the conversation, Mary Olan began to carry the ball. She did it well, too. Conversation bounced and pranced, pa.s.sing back and forth in front of the dead eyes of Nancy Raymond. Mary kept hauling me in by the heels, but I still found time to whisper to Nancy that she should eat something. Her great slab of rare roast beef arrived and was removed untouched.

We were on coffee when she stood up abruptly. The conversation stopped and Dodd started to stand up too.

"Not you," she said to him with great clarity.

"Have to walk. With Clint."

He gave a little nod and I went off with Nancy. She walked with rigid dignity until we were outside and then clung tightly to my arm. There had been a misty rain earlier. The stars were covered and the gra.s.s was wet. We could see by the light from the club.

"Special service," she said.

"Walking drunk ladies."

"Where do we walk?"

"Round and around. Hooo. Dizzy as a bee."

We walked in silence back and forth across the wide grounds near the tennis courts. She kept lifting her head high and breathing deeply. We must have walked for fifteen minutes and then she said, "Sit down now. Over there."

We went over to some benches beside the tennis courts.

In the faint light the nets had a forlorn sag, the asphalt courts gleamed wetly. I used my handkerchief to wipe the dampness from a bench. We sat down and I lit our cigarettes.

"Clint, you ever try to... to match yourself against a great tradegy, tradegy... h.e.l.l, tragedy."

"Can't say that I have."