He was almost twenty-three and had no steady girls, except for Marie. He was well built, so that he had no trouble in the Village area. It was like going to the market for him. During my first days in the apartment the process had seemed like a game. And once, when he was going out, I said: “Bring back two.”

Half an hour later he came back with two girls. He got their drinks and then he called me into his room to meet them.

“This is Doris,” he said, pointing to the smaller one, “and I forgot your name,” he said to the big blonde.

“Jane,” she said.

“This is Howard,” he told her.

“Hi,” I said. Neither one of them smiled. The big blonde in white pants sat on the big bed and the little one sat on a chair near the window. He had given them his worst bourbon.

“Excuse me a minute,” Claude said to the girls. “I want to talk to Howard for a minute.” He put on a record before we went outside into the hall between our rooms. He was always extremely polite and gentle, and very soft-spoken in spite of his size.

“Listen,” he said to me outside, “you can have the blonde.”

“What can I do with that amazon?”

“I don’t care. Just get her out of the room.”

“She’s dirty,” I said.

“So you can give her a bath.”

“It wouldn’t help much.”

“Well, just take her out and talk to her,” he told me. “Remember, you asked for her.”

We went back in. “Where you from?” I said to the amazon.

“Brighton.”

“What school?”

“No. I just got here.”

“From where?”

“Brighton!”

“That’s not so far,” I said.

“England,” she said. She looked very bored. Claude Sheats looked at me.

“How did you find Washington Square so fast?”

“I got friends.”

She was very superior about it all and seemed to look at us with the same slightly patient irritation of a professional theater critic waiting for a late performance to begin. The little one sat on the chair, her legs crossed, looking up at the ceiling. Her white pants were dirty too. They looked as though they would have been very relieved if we had taken off our clothes and danced for them around the room and across the bed, and made hungry sounds in our throats with our mouths slightly opened.

I said that I had to go out to the drugstore and would be back very soon; but once outside, I walked a whole hour in one direction and then I walked back. I passed them a block away from our apartment. They were walking fast and did not slow down or speak when I passed them.

Claude Sheats was drinking heavily when I came into the apartment.

“What the hell are you trying to pull?” he said.

“I couldn’t find a drugstore open.”