“Tony, just hand me in a towel, OK?”

“A trowel?"

“Towel, goddamn it! Rag, paper towel, anything. They’re above the galley sink.”

Tony’s disembodied hand appeared with a single paper towel. Mitch patted at his crotch. “All right,” he called. “You flunked out. What the hell are you going to do now?”

“Get a job, I guess.”

“Where?”

“Filling station? Garage, maybe.”

“Pass me my crescent wrench.”

Silence without, and then a great clanking of tools, and then silence again. “What’s a crescent wrench?” Mitch squirmed out. On his hands and knees, he regarded the fruit of his seed. Tony was calmer, apparently relieved by confession. He was there in the flesh, all right, but his mind had already fled to the hill and Nancy.

“Tony?” Mitch said softly, lifting a crescent wrench from his jumble of tools. “See?”

“Oh! Yeah.” Tony smiled. He had a great smile.

“Lots of luck,” Mitch said, “with the garage.”

They took Tony and Nancy to the Ancient Mariner for a farewell dinner. Nancy was fresh-faced and clear-eyed. She had the oval face of a medieval angel and, as far back as Mitch could remember, the conversational style of a startled fawn.

She had always bored Mitch silly. She showed no hint of intelligence, and yet she was a junior at U.C., reputedly making straight A’s. Besides, Tony was not stupid. Shy as she was, he must have discovered something in her.

He glanced enviously at the two. Tony, unemployed and possibly unemployable, chewed mightily at a $7.50 sirloin: not a problem in the world. No rent to pay, no dues: look, Ma, no ring. Mitch was impelled to rock their boat.

“If Tony joins the workforce,” he remarked, “you two ought to get married.”

“Lovely,” murmured Lindy. She looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

“Oh, wow!” Nancy’s great dark eyes swam toward him. She studied his soul for a moment. “Why can’t we just live together?”

“Why the hell not?” Mitch asked gruffly. The whole screwy set-up was, he supposed, a problem for Nancy’s father more than himself, but he found himself angry and didn’t know why.

Mitch sat on his bunk to take off his shoes. Lindy was spreading out her sleeping bag, kept rolled as a pillow for daytime use. “Move your butt,” she said. “I’ll make your bed.”

He sidled around the table and sat on her bunk. He watched her as she moved, full of grace and youth.

Nancy and Tony tonight had evoked their own fumbled love affair twenty years ago.

He loved Lindy from the first, but, in terms of the Fifties, why buy a cow? Premed students should not marry. He traveled fastest who traveled alone. The odds against getting to a good medical school were rough enough. His dad had been telling him that for years.