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lifetime."
    Profane wandered up by Rachel's cabin again. He heard splashing and gurgling from the courtyard in back and walked around to investigate. There she was washing her car. In the middle of the night yet. Moreover, she was talking to it.
    "You beautiful stud," he heard her say, "I love to touch you." Wha, he thought. "Do you know what I feel when we're out on the road? Alone, just us?" She was running the sponge caressingly over its front bumper. "Your funny responses, darling, that I know so well. The way your brakes pull a little to the left, the way you start to shudder around 5000 rpm when you're excited. And you burn oil when you're mad at me, don't you? I know." There was none of your madness in her voice; it might have been a schoolgirl's game, though still, he admitted, quaint. "We'll always be together," running a chamois over the hood, "and you needn't worry about that black Buick we passed on the road today. Ugh: fat, greasy Mafia car. I expected to see a body come flying out the back door, didn't you? Besides, you're so angular and proper-English and tweedy - and oh so Ivy that I couldn't ever leave you, dear." It occurred to Profane that he might vomit. Public displays of sentiment often affected him this way. She had climbed in the car and now lay hack in the driver's seat, her throat open to the summer constellations. He was about to approach her when he saw her left hand snake out all pale to fondle the gearshift. He watched and noticed how she was touching it. Having just been with Wedge he got the connection. He didn't want to see any more. He ambled away over a hill and into the woods and when he got back to the Trocadero he couldn't have said exactly where he'd been walking. All the cabins were dark. The front office was still open. The clerk had stepped out. Profane rooted around in desk drawers till he found a box of thumbtacks. He returned to the cabins and till three in the morning he moved along the starlit aisles between them, tacking up one of Wedge's contraceptives on each door. No one interrupted him. He felt like the Angel of Death, marking the doors of tomorrow's victims in blood. The purpose of a mezuzah was to fake the Angel out so he'd pass by. On these hundred or so cabins Profane didn't see mezuzah one. So much the worse.
    After the summer, then, there'd been letters his surly and full of wrong words, hers by turns witty, desperate, passionate. A year later she'd graduated from Bennington and come to New York to work as a receptionist in an employment agency, and so he'd seen her in New York, once or twice, when he passed through; and though they only thought about one another at random, though her yo-yo hand was usually busy at other things, now and again would come the invisible, umbilical tug, like tonight mnemonic, arousing, and he would wonder how much his own man he was. One thing he had to give her credit for, she'd never called it a Relationship.
    "What is it then, hey," he'd asked once.
    "A secret," with her small child's smile, which like Rodgers arid Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.
    She visited him occasionally, as now, at night, like a succubus coming in with the snow. There was no way he knew to keep either out.
     
    IV
    As it turned out, the New Year's party was to end all yo-yoing at least for a time. The reunion descended on Susanna Squaducci, conned the night watchmen with a bottle of wine, and allowed a party from a destroyer in drydock (after some preliminary brawling) to come aboard.
    Paola stuck close at first to Profane, who had eyes for a voluptuous lady in some sort of fur coat who claimed to be an admiral's wife. There was a portable radio, noisemakers, wine, wine. Dewey Gland decided to climb a mast. The mast had just been painted but Dewey climbed on, turning more zebralike the higher he went, guitar dangling below him. When he got to the cross-trees, Dewey sat down, plonked on the guitar and began to sing in hillbilly