He turned the slightly abrasive page under the lectern light. He had chosen—God knows why, perhaps because he believed Indianapolis to be a pious place—that passage from Brother Pig where the Trappist monks, loosely based on what he had read of Thomas Merton, silently plot, with hand signals and written slips, to smuggle in a Jewish reporter from a New York tabloid—a “scandal sheet,” one would call it now—to expose the abbot’s tyranny and pederasty. How did he, Henry Bech, get caught in this embarrassing tangle of farfetched, decadent motifs when the most marvelous lay of his life was out there among the shadowy, offended heads of devout Quaylites and Butler University evangels?

Alice and he had breakfasted together, and sat dozily with books in the club car. Other travelers spoke to them, and they were inveigled into a game of bridge, of which he scarcely knew the rules, squinting at his cards beside the sun-slapped windows, trying to decipher her bids, all the time feeling her with him in a dream world of insomniac yearning and wordless anticipation of the night. When, in late afternoon, they pulled into Chicago, for a half-hour shuffle of cars and locomotives, Bech dashed out of the great barrel-vaulted station to buy, in that era just before the Pill’s liberating advent, a three-pack of Trojans at a Rexall’s on Jackson Boulevard. His heart thrummed as if to break his ribs. The sly, blond-mustached clerk tried to talk him into an entire tin of fifty instead of the pack of three—“You’ll use ’em,” he promised, on no more basis than Bech’s flushed, panting face—and with spiteful slowness, the economy size declined, counted out Bech’s change. Suppose the train pulled out without him?

Now, in Indianapolis, he was compelled to make his way through pages he had felt obliged, decades ago, to write, in order to give his scabrous, irreligious journalist a family background and a professional history satiric of postwar New York literary circles. Had ever a selection been more ill-chosen, more maddeningly prolonged? A few nervous titters in the audience tried to rise to the cultural occasion. Did he hear Alice’s laugh? She had laughed, telling him once, “You’re safe.”

At dinner, as the train hurtled into the darkness of flat farmland where a few distant houses pricked the night, she rose unsteadily from her coffee, smoothing some crumbs from her lap, and said, “I must lie down. I feel sick.”

“Oh dear, why?”

His new friend smiled. “The constant motion. The long day. Not you. I like you.” She hesitated, fighting a bit for balance as the Super Chief slammed over a patch of rocky roadbed. She bent toward him above the chattering silverware and said, softly but matter-of-factly, “Give me an hour. I must rest a little. Roomette sixteen. Knock twice.”