“You got a job. Congratulations. What do you do?”

“I type tape for Brewer Fealty over at Youngquist, they’re putting all their records on computer tape and not only is the work so boring you could scream, you don’t even know when you’ve made a mistake, it comes out just holes in this tape, all these premium numbers.”

“It sounds nifty. Peggy, speaking of work, they don’t appreciate my being called here.”

Her voice retreats, puts on dignity. “Pardon me. I wanted to talk to you when Nelson wasn’t around. Ollie has promised Billy to take him fishing next Sunday, not this Sunday, and I wondered, since it doesn’t look as if you’ll ever ask me, if you’d like to have dinner Saturday when you bring him over.”

Her open bathrobe, that pubic patch, the silver stretch-marks, don’t count your chickens. Meaning do count your chickens. “That might be great,” he says.

“Might be.”

“I’ll have to see, I’m kind of tied up these days—”

“Hasn’t that man gone yet? Kick him out, Harry. He’s taking incredible advantage of you. Call the police if he won’t go. Really, Harry, you’re much too passive.”

“Yeah. Or something.” Only after shutting the office door behind him and starting to walk through the solid brightness toward his machine does he feel last night’s marijuana clutch at him, drag at his knees like a tide. Never again. Let Jesus find him another way.

“Tell us about Vietnam, Skeeter.” The grass is mixing with his veins and he feels very close, very close to them all: the driftwood lamp, Nelson’s thatch of hair an anxious tangle, Jill’s bare legs a touch unshaped at the ankles. He loves them. All. His voice moves in and out behind their eyes. Skeeter’s eyes roll red toward the ceiling. Things are pouring for him through the ceiling.

“Why you want to be told?” he asks.

“Because I wasn’t there.”

“Think you should have been there, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why would that be?”

“I don’t know. Duty. Guilt.”

“No sir. You want to have been there because that is where it was at, right?”

“O.K.”

“It was the best place,” Skeeter says, not quite as a question.

“Something like that.”

Skeeter goes on, gently urging, “It was where you would have felt not so de-balled, right?”

“I don’t know. If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t. Let’s turn on television.”

“Mod Squad will be on,” Nelson says.

Skeeter explains: “If you can’t fuck, dirty pictures won’t do it for you, right? And then if you can, they don’t do it either.”

“O.K., don’t tell us anything. And try to watch your language in front of Nelson.”

At night when Jill turns herself to him in bed he finds the unripe hardness of her young body repels him. The smoke inside him severs his desires from his groin, he is full of flitting desires that prevent him from directly answering her woman’s call, a call he helped create in her girl’s body. Yet in his mind he sees her mouth defiled by Skeeter’s kiss and feels her rotting with his luminous poison. Nor can he forgive her for having been rich. Yet through these nightly denials, these quiet debasements, he feels something unnatural strengthening within him that may be love. On her side she seems, more and more, to cling to him; they have come far from that night when she went down on him like a little girl bobbing for apples.