“At this point,” said Sheila, rising, “I’ve got to get back to the galleys.”

  “Can we do this again soon? Tomorrow?”

  “I shouldn’t… “

  “Another session at your place, then lunch again?”

  “Get thee behind me! All right, I surrender,” and that was that. He took her back to Fifth Avenue, and she talked shop all the way, Dane scribbling away.

  Taking stock of the afternoon, he came to certain conclusions about Sheila Grey. She was accessible, at least in the sense that what Sheila fancied, Sheila took. Had her affair with his father begun in much the same way - directly, without persiflage? Had she run into Ashton McKell in the elevator, decided then and there, This man is for me, and invited him up for a drink?

  He found himself wishing that he were meeting her under other circumstances. He admired her honesty of mind and manner, her forthright differences from most women - even the sprinkle of freckles he had faintly made out in natural light. Oddly, she did not arouse a man’s fighting instinct in the battle of the sexes. You could move comfortably in on her, without fuss, and she would either reject or accept in an uncomplicated way. He liked that.

  Dane sighed. Between himself and Sheila Grey stood his father’s selfish arrogance and his mother’s helpless self-denial. This woman had chosen to become his father’s mistress a couple of dozen feet above the head of his mother; she would have to take the consequences.

  * * *

  But the only sinister thing in their growing relationship skulked in his own heart. Sheila was delightful. She chewed popcorn like the teenagers around them in a drive-in movie, watching a Blob from Outer Space crush tiny people underfoot and topple buildings until the clean-limbed young scientist with the gorgeous laboratory assistant destroyed him with his newly invented death ray. She clapped her hands at a tiny place he introduced her to, run by devotees of a Hindu sect, and ate her curds and whey as if she had stepped out of a Mother Goose book. When the bearded proprietor pressed a piece of fig candy on her, saying, “It promotes regularity, Sahibah,” Sheila smiled, and took it, and remarked, “I wish something could be done to promote regularity in high fashion. We caught someone using a miniature camera this morning. Naturally I fired him and destroyed the film. But you can’t help wondering if somebody got away with it yesterday. We’ll know about it if copies of our line go on sale on 14th Street, selling for $7.98, the day after our fall showing.” It appeared that the art of couture espionage was highly developed. “I could give you material for a dozen novels,” Sheila said moodily.

  “I’m having enough trouble with this one,” Dane said, grinning.

  “Incidentally, how about dinner at eight?”

  This time her gaze impaled him. “You’re silly,” she said. “Nice, though. I’ll be wearing a mantilla and chewing on a red, red rose.” Dane began to feel uneasy. Things were going too well. But then he shook the feeling off.

  They dined at a little Belgian restaurant with outrageous prices, took a ferry ride to Staten Island, visited Hoboken, where they strolled about for a bit, agreeing that parts of the city had a Continental air - Dane compared it to the 14th Arondissement. On the ferry coming back, standing side by side in the bow, he took Sheila’s hand. She might have been any woman he liked. Her fingers lay cool and friendly in his clasp; the breeze lifted her hair and played with it. The great docks loomed, and Dane felt a twinge. Quite without calculation he said, “How about the Central Park Zoo tomorrow? The grilled armadillo there is out of this world.”

  “You’d produce it, too.” Sheila’s laugh sounded wistful. “No, Dane, I’ve been playing hooky far too long. You’re wicked-bad for me.”

  “Supper? I know an Armenian joint -”

  “I really can’t, I’m too far behind. Tomorrow is out.” Tomorrow was Wednesday. The thought struck him like a club. Of course. She wouldn’t date Yves St. Laurent himself on a Wednesday night. Wednesday nights were reserved for Daddy-o.

  * * *

  But there were other days and nights - the fights, the ballet, opera in a Connecticut barn, a county fair, a formal dinner at Pavilion one night and chopped liver at Lindy’s the next. On several occasions they spent the evening at Sheila’s apartment, listening to the hi-fi or viewing the summer re-runs on TV. On such occasions Sheila fed him.

  “I have an understanding with the frozen-food people,” she told Dane, paraphrasing the old joke. “They don’t design clothes and I don’t stand over a hot cookbook.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Dane said. “TV dinners constitute our only native art-form.”

  She laughed, throwing her head back. Viewing the cream-smooth neck, he felt a lecherous stir and wondered if he shouldn’t encourage it.

  After all, he had been squiring her around for some time now without a single pass. Wouldn’t she begin to wonder?

  The phone rang. Still laughing, Sheila answered it. “Oh, hi,” she said, in a remarkably different tone, moving back into the chair; and Dane sighed - the moment had gone. “How are you?… No, I’m fine… I couldn’t say.” She glanced at Dane, a mere flicker, and he said to himself: It’s my father. He got up and went to the window, and her voice sank.

  The reflection showed him a scowling and - it seemed to him - evil face.

  “I’d like a drink,” Sheila said from behind him. The phone call was over; comedy, recommence! “Something tall and ginny. Be my bartender?”

  He turned to her; they were face to - the image persisted, it seemed to him - evil face. She seemed faded, even coarse, the smile on her lips complacent. This is the way of an adulterous woman,/ She eateth and wipeth her mouth and sayeth,/ I have done no wrong… He felt sick at heart, and he was glad of the excuse to turn away and tinker with bottles and ice cubes.

  From time to time Sheila received other telephone calls - twice in her office while he was with her, twice more in her apartment - which, he assumed from her guarded tone, were also from his father.

  * * *

  One night at the end of August they attended an old movie in an art theater on the Lower East Side; it was almost 3 a.m. when they emerged.

  In the car he put his arm around her. She slipped away. “I don’t believe in one-arm driving. Isn’t this safer?” She put her arm around him.

  In spite of himself, Dane felt a shiver. “Shall we stop somewhere? How about Ratner’s and a glass of borsht?”

  “That pink soup with sour cream in it?” Sheila pursed her lips. “I think I’d prefer a nightcap. Let’s have it at my place.”

  “All right.”

  It seemed natural. Entering the apartment building lobby was, as always when he was in Sheila’s company, something of a shock - knowing that his parents lay asleep overhead - but he had steeled himself by this time; he did not dwell on it. He did not dwell on much of anything these days.“Come in, Dane.”

  “I’m suddenly reminded,” Dane said, following Sheila into the penthouse apartment, “of the experience of a friend of mine. He accepted the offer of a tropical-looking beauty he met at a party to come up and have a nightcap in her apartment, and when they walked in, lo, there pacing the floor was an economy-size ocelot. Arthur swears it was as big as a leopard.

  Needless to say, all he got that night was a drink, and he spilled half of that on the rug.”

  “Well, my ocelot got the evening off,” Sheila said, “so don’t spill yours. Not on this rug. Handwoven in Jutland, I’ll have you know. Name your poison, pardner.”

  The living room, furnished in Scandinavian Modern, was dimly lighted. Always peaceful-looking, it seemed extraordinarily so on this occasion. A feeling of contentment invaded Dane, in the van of which marched a wiry little excitement. It was the queerest thing. Sheila mixed their drinks at her bar, humming to herself the absurd tune to an absurd W. C. Fields song they had heard at the art movies; she reached for the ice, and he caught a quiet smile on her face.

  So it happened - not by calculation, not with his father standing aghast and outraged in the living-room archway, not as part of a created plot, but as naturally as breathing. Dane put his arms around her. Sheila turned with the same smile, lifted her perfect face and half closed her eyes, and they kissed.

  Her lips, her body, were sweet and soft and full. He had never thought of her body before except in a repellent image, lying in his father’s hairy arms.

  Dane heard her say, “I’m glad you waited, darling,” saw her hand him his drink, raise her own. They drank in silence, looking into each other’s eyes. Then Dane set his glass down and took her hand, her strong white little hand with the smudge of violet India ink on the palm, and he kissed it, a brush of his lips; and left.

  As he undressed for bed, the thought occurred to him for the first time that night: I’ve accomplished my purpose. I’ve got her. Now all I have to do is arrange the pay-off.

  But it’s gone all to pot.

  And the horrifying thought: I’ve fallen in love with her.

  He was in love with his father’s mistress. It was not as if the kiss symbolized a beginning; it was an ending, a climax of days and nights of exploration and intermingling of ideas and attitudes and laughter and close silences; a seal to a compact they - he - had never suspected they were making. I’m glad you waited, darling… It was the same with her; she had experienced the special quality of their relationship, sealed with the kiss. If there was a beginning at all, it was not the beginning of an affair; it was the beginning of a lifetime.

  Suddenly the whole incredible structure crashed about his head.

  Whom was he punishing? His father, yes; but his mother more. Himself most of all.

  It was not supposed to be that way. It was all wrong, twisted out of any semblance to the shape he had been fashioning. Everyone was going to be hurt - mother, father, himself… and Sheila.

  He tossed for most of what was left of the night.

  * * *

  Dane awakened to a sense of purpose, almost recklessness. That was the way it had worked out. The hell with everything else.

  But with breakfast came caution. Think it over, he told himself, don’t rush it, perhaps you’re reading a fantasy into what could have been a mere kiss of the moment, as meaningless to you as to Sheila. He did not really feel that way, and he was sure that Sheila did not; still, it had to be taken into account.

  Take a day or so to simmer down, to let matters adjust themselves to some realistic yardstick.

  As the day wore on he found himself hungering for her voice. Work was out of the question. Suppose by his silence he made her think he was having second thoughts? She mustn’t think that, mustn’t. Besides… that voice, that deep and husky telephone quality it did not have at other times…

  “Sheila! Dane.”

  “I know.”

  It was like warm honey, that voice.

  “I’ve got to see you. Tonight? This afternoon?”

  “No, Dane, I want to think.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, Sheila.”

  She did not reply at once, as if she were fighting him, or herself. “I know, Dane,” she finally said. “Tomorrow.”

  She came straight into his arms. There was a nerve in the hollow of her throat that jumped when he kissed it. It was some time before he said anything. Then he held her close and said, “Sheila, I want you to marry me.”“I know, Dane.”

  She knew!

  “Then you will?” he cried.

  “No.” ‘

  It was like setting his foot down where a step should have been, but was not. A scalding wave of humiliation washed over him; and suddenly he thought of his father. This was how his father would feel; this was his punishment for having planned the whole dirty thing. Was she laughing at him? Had she seen through him from the start?

  He looked at her wildly.

  “Darling, I’m not refusing you,” murmured Sheila, and she took his head between her hands and kissed him on the lips.

  “I guess I’m too thick-witted to get it.”

  “I love you, Dane. You can have me right now. But not as your wife.” Not as my wife? “Are you married?” She was married…

  “Heavens, no!” She laughed at that. Then she looked into his face and without a word went to the bar and splashed brandy into a snifter and held the glass to his lips. He took it from her roughly.

  “You mean you’ll sleep with me,” he said, “but you won’t marry me.”

  “That’s right, darling.”

  “But you just said you love me.”

  “I do.”

  “Then I don’t understand!”

  She stroked his cheek. “I suppose you considered yourself a thoroughly seasoned old rip, and here you have to discover that you’re just a sweet old square. No, not yet, Dane. I must get this over to you. It’s important to both of us.”

  What she went on to say was not at all what he was expecting. She made no reference to Ashton McKell; she was not, after all, rejecting a new love in favor of the incumbent. She had known for some time, she told Dane, that she loved him.

  “I’m speaking only for myself, dearest - I know my ideas are anti-social, and that society couldn’t exist if everyone acted according to my views. I’m essentially a selfish woman, Dane. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to people; but I’m most concerned with what happens to me in this very short life we’re given. I suppose I’m a materialist. My notion of love doesn’t require marriage to consummate it, that’s all. In fact - I’m speaking only for myself - I reject the whole concept of marriage. I’m no more capable of being happy as a housewife, or a country club gal, or a young suburban matron than I am of renouncing the world and taking the veil.

  “Maybe love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, as the song says,” Sheila went on, taking his cold hand, “but I’m an electronic-age-type dame. To me a ring on the finger is like a ring in the nose.

  What a mockery modern marriage is! No wonder divorce is one of our leading industries. I can’t stomach the hypocrisy of marriage, so I side-step it. Can you picture me billing and cooing ten years after in a vine-covered cottage beside a waterfall?”

  She laughed. He looked at her woodenly.

  “The trouble is, of course, that I don’t need a man to support me. I certainly don’t need your money - I have plenty of my own. I don’t hanker after social position; I have a pretty elevated position in my own sector of society. And I certainly couldn’t subordinate myself to your career, because I have my own - what’s worse, mine is made, while yours is still in the making. Marriage is all right for women in a bourgeois society… “

  “What about children?” Dane asked her bitterly. “Doesn’t your advanced concept include the little matter of children?”

  “Not especially. Let those propagate the race who can’t propagate anything else; Lord knows there are enough of them. I love children as much as the next woman, but in this life we have to make hard choices.

  I’ve made mine, and motherhood has no place in it. So you see, Dane, what you’ve fallen in love with.”

  “I see, yes,” he said.

  “We can be happy without marriage. As long as we stay in love. Don’t you see that, darling?”

  It seemed to him there was anxiety in her eyes. As for him, the Grand Marnier was gone by now, together with his anger and most of his sickness. Only emptiness was left.

  “No, Sheila, I don’t. I don’t say what you propose is immoral - the hell with that; it’s worse. It’s impractical. If marriage without love is hateful, so is love without marriage. It has to creep instead of walk, skulk in dark corners, hide -”

  “It has to do no such thing,” Sheila retorted. Her head was cocked, her tone cool. “You’re talking like a schoolboy, darling, do you know that?

  Last night - satisfied with a kiss in the dark. Really, Dane! And now this goody-goody talk. What’s next? Are you going to tell me you’ve been keeping yourself chaste for your one and only little wifie? The difference between us is that you’re a romantic, and I’m a merchant realist.” So there it was - the shrew hidden in every woman, the flash of carnivorous teeth, the bite.

  He had thought of himself as taking his pleasure when and where he could create it, a reasonably sophisticated man. And here was Sheila, making him feel like a - what had she called him? - a schoolboy! Looking at her, he felt abjectly estranged. No trace of warmth or womanliness seemed left in the symmetrical face before him. It was like a Greek sculpture, smoothly inscrutable with secrets buried in time. Her philosophy was as far beyond him as his was beyond his mother’s.

  Maybe he was still a Yaley at heart: have fun while you’re unattached, then settle down with a wife - have fun afterward, too, if you could get away with it.

  But Sheila’s philosophy seemed contemptuous of any standard. He was sure he could never catch up with her, even surer that he didn’t want to.

  And yet… a line from a poem he had jeered at came into his head: La Belle Dame sans Merci/ Hath thee in thrall.

  It was as if she knew it, for she chuckled; and even this tiny sound from her throat made him hunger.

  “Oh, Dane, don’t look so woebegone,” she cried. “Instead of being married lovers, we’ll be lovers, period. Dane… don’t tell me you’ve never had a woman!” She looked at him with absolute horror.

  He was glad that she was not smiling when she said it, or he might have leaped at her. The brandy had been a mere stopgap; the beginning of the old feared roaring stirred in his ears. Careful, he warned himself; keep control, as he felt his hands become fists.

  “Yes, I’ve had women, but I must seem impossibly old-fashioned to you. Because I’m strictly a one-woman man. Well, I’ve had my share of disappointments. This seems to be another of them.”

  “Oh, Dane.” She moved away a little. “You say you’re a one-woman man. Don’t you mean you’re a one-woman-at-a-time man? And that’s just right with me. I shouldn’t want it any other way. I’ve no intention of sharing you with somebody. We’re not far apart at all. Isn’t that true?” When his mouth clamped tighter, Sheila said, “I don’t mean I’d never consider marriage. In a way, it would be up to you to show me that marriage - with you - is what I really want.