"She sounded as if she'd like it better if you stayed, Dodd. She said she didn't want to spoil your evening."

"Any more than she already has." He finished his drink, reached over and set the empty gla.s.s on the bar.

"I might as well hang around, I guess. Buy you a drink, Clint?"

"Not right now, thanks."

He put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a couple of squeezes. I was born with a catlike aversion to such stray gestures. I merely endure them, hoping my expression doesn't give away my distaste. Besides, there was something forced about the way he did it. He looked at me intently.

"Clint, I've never had a chance to tell you how d.a.m.n well much it means to me to come out here and find a guy like you to help carry the ball. I mean that."

"Well, thanks, Dodd."

"You know what you can get sometimes in this outfit.

A politico. An oily switch artist. h.e.l.l, I know where you stand."

He took his hand off my shoulder, made a fist out of it and punched me lightly in the arm.

"We're both going places in this outfit, boy."

I told him I hoped so and watched his broad back as he went off toward the festivities. It was obvious that he had just enough quasi-feminine perception to sense that Nancy had somehow acquired an ally; how much else she might have in me he couldn't tell. He wanted to pour a little water on the flame. Deciding that wouldn't do, he had built a back fire. I cannot say that it was ineffective mellow words from the boss are always welcome. And he was almost a nice guy.

Between eleven and twelve the party was in overdrive.

Every time I saw Mary she was with Dodd. A junior miss who took considerable pride in the gaudy details of n D. MacDonald the recent escapade that had gotten her tossed out of Sweet Briar on her pretty tail, had taken me over and kept braising my morale by frequent references to how much "older men" appealed to her.

She steered me, not too unwillingly, out into the darkness. But when I came to kiss her she sagged softly against me, a boneless, gasping, wide-mouthed horror. I have no idea where and how such a response happened to become fashionable among the younger set. Maybe they think it sets a mood of sweet surrender. You reach for a firm-boned young morsel and she falls into suet. I pushed her away and eased her back into the bright lights.

After the first cut-in I moved back out into the shrubbery alone. The clouds had thinned and a moon cruised blandly through the ragged edges. Music thudded out across the somber fairways. I fingered an empty cigarette package and remembered the half carton in the glove compartment. I walked across the gra.s.s toward the parking lot.

I was close enough to the car to touch it when I heard Mary Olan's voice coming from inside the car. Her tone was lazy, taunting.

"My dear, you aren't on the basis where all you have to do is whistle. So I won't take your key.

Any time I go back there-if I ever do go back there you d.a.m.n well be there waiting for me, not I for you.

This isn't Back Street, sweets."

Dodd's heavy voice said, "This double-dating is childish."

"Is it? I know what you want. You want me waiting there for you any time you happen to take a notion. You don't want me to go out at all. I happen to like this arrangement. Clint is sweet. Wasn't he sweet with your plotzed Nancy?"

"Are you falling for him? d.a.m.n it, if I find out you've let him get to you, I'll get him shipped so far away from here he'll..."

"Jealous, darling?" she drawled.

"Why don't you just take the key and then..."

"You want one cake to eat, one to look at and one in the cupboard. No thanks. I might decide never to pay you another visit there."

"Mary, listen to me..."

"You listen to me. You're boring me. That wasn't in the agreement. I'll continue to go out with Clint. You'll continue to come along too, with Nancy. It's a cozy arrangement.... And I'm getting sick of sitting here like a college girl on a date."

"But tonight Clint took her home and we could..."

"We could but we won't, dear. Not tonight. Face it like a brave little man."

I had stood there and listened. And learned a great deal.

It was a situation that smelled faintly of mental illness.

"But Mary..."

"And, darling, I didn't like that phrase 'get to me."

People don't 'get to me." I get to people. Now if you'd take that slightly clumsy hand off my breast..."

I moved back fast as the door latch clicked. She got out of the car quickly. She'd have seen me if she'd turned my way, but she headed off, heels punching the gravel, toward the front door of the club. I was back in better cover when Dodd got out and lighted a cigarette. I watched him take three long draws, then snap it away toward the wet gra.s.s. He followed her slowly. When I got my cigarettes the interior of the car was heavy with the perfume she used, a musky, offbeat scent.

When I drove them home I dropped Dodd off first.

Mary Olan didn't move over next to the door after he got out. She stayed pleasantly and encouragingly close to me, the side of her leg touching mine. I took her out to the Pryor place where I had picked her up. Though a lot of the old line families have stayed down in the shady quiet streets of town, a few, such as w.i.l.l.y Pryor, have built out in the country. It has a stone wall, a bronze sign, a quarter mile of curving drive before you get to it. Probably the outmoded term for it would be a machine for living. You know the type-all dramatics. Dramatic window walls, dramatic bare walls, dramatic vistas. Two floodlighted pieces of statuary-one all sheet aluminum and the other a grey stone woman with spider limbs and great holes right through her where b.r.e.a.s.t.s should have been. The architects do fine, they can really set up a place. The only trouble is that no one has been similarly occupied redesigning people. Such machines cannot sit in sterile functional perfection. We people have to move in bringing of course, our unmodified belch, our unreconstructed dandruff, our enlarged pores and our sweaty love.

I parked and Mary made no move toward the door handle, so I gathered her in and kissed her. She hesitated for a stilted second and then baked the enamel on my teeth. She was no pulpy junior miss. She brought to the task at hand a nice interplay of musculature, a crowding enthusiasm, and the durability and implacability of a Marciano. She stopped all clocks except the one in the blood, so that on terminus, I was dimly startled to find myself merely sitting in my own automobile.

"You're an agreeable monster, Sewell," she said softly.

"Likewise."

"You should get a bonus for overtime."

"A truly obscure remark," I said, pretending young innocence.

"Would, Sewell, that I were a touch more charitable and I would make of myself a suitable bonus, because I suspect you are a nice guy who deserves a better deal than you are getting."

"Tonight is my night to be told I'm a nice guy. How do I go about arousing your charitable instincts, lady?"

She permitted a second flanking operation. During same I investigated traditionally, hopefully, a breast warm and cla.s.sic. She re banked her fires and extricated lips and breast, putting a cold foot of distance betwixt us.

"No sale, Sewell."

"Anything my best friends have neglected to tell me?"

"Nope. You are a fine crew-cut, long-limbed specimen of young American manhood, my dear."

"Then why?"