Suddenly one of the girls was at the table with him. He had not seen her approach. She sat so close to him that her thigh touched his. One of his hands had been in his lap. She placed her own on top of it. “Hello, cuteness,” she said. Her tone was impersonal but intimate: “I want a drink, you want company?”

“Okay.” His face was hot; it ached from embarrassment. The girl’s hand clutched his under the table. Then, moist and cold, it moved about restlessly on his lap until it came to rest lightly on his inner thigh, just below the groin. Her face shone with a kind of waxen deadness, as if the paint had been applied by a mortician, and masses of hair surrounded it like a dull brown shroud. Nothing in this face seemed to have any knowledge of what the hand was doing under the table: it crept about independently, like a wind-up toy forgotten by its owner.

When a waitress appeared at the table, the mechanical girl said: “I’m havin’ a champagne cocktail. What about you, hon?” She squeezed his thigh. His blood had risen in him, but this excitement was not pleasurable; it only increased his turmoil.

“I’ll have the same,” he said.

“Really? Well, I don’t think you’ll like it, honey. Why don’t you just get a highball?”

The waitress leaned forward. “Listen, Frances, you lost your goddam mind? Get him out o’ here. F’godsake, he’s still got his baby teeth; can’t you tell by lookin’?”

The girl said, “It idden my job to check I.D.‘s.”

“No, but you could use your head.”

Suddenly the little cat-like man stood at the table, jumping lightly from foot to foot, glancing from face to face. “What what what, what’s goin’ on? What is it, what?” He seemed unable to stand still or to focus on one object for more than a split second at a time. But he had already assimilated the situation. Within a few seconds Clinton was on his feet, being guided swiftly toward the door. The waitress and the girl remained at the table, quarreling.

On the sidewalk, Clinton said: “Look, I didn’t want a drink anyway. I’m just lookin’ for somebody. Ize lookin’ for my brother.”

“We haven’t got any brothers, what brother, who?” the bouncer said, in his rat-a-tat-tat voice.

“Name of Berry-berry Williams.”

“He don’t come around here n’more, neither d’you, you keep out o’ here from now on, completely, crazy kid, lose m’license, what you want? Get away, go.” Suddenly the door was swinging and the swift little man was gone.

A low brick wall protected the yard of the house next door. Clinton sat on this wall and lighted a cigarette. He could not imagine what he would do next. It seemed to him that he had run out of alternatives and would remain seated here forever. When he had put out the cigarette, he found that the wall was wide enough to lie down on. He lay flat on his back. Then he put the duffel bag on top of his stomach, folded his hands across it, and closed his eyes.