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“Hmm. Casey Stengel?” John Kemp said.

“Definitely. But how about the other one?”

“Snow White on Social Security.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“But nice,” John Kemp said. “Definitely nice.”

“Hildabeth and Dotsy.”

“Foregoing a summer of iced tea on the screened porch in Elmira. And providing for themselves, you may be sure, a full, round winter of conversation and anecdote.”

“They won’t be alone,” Parker said. “Want to ride in with me and look the town over?”

“Thanks, yes. I didn’t drive down. I’m beginning to think it would have been smart.”

When they got back a little after four, Mr. Miles Drummond came trotting out as they got out of the car and said, “I’m
terribly sorry to impose on you, Mr. Barnum. This is the car you came down in, isn’t it? Well, here is what has happened. After talking to Mr. Torrigan, I don’t dare send my driver over the mountains to return after dark, and Mr. Torrigan refuses to ride with him again, and I’d ask Miss Agnes Partridge Keeley to do this, but she’s having an … uh … a digestive upset, and I thought you might be willing to run up to Mexico City to the airport and meet a Miss Monica Killdeering. She’ll be in on a six-twenty flight. There are ten students here now. There’s just Miss Killdeering, and the two young ladies who are motoring down from Texas. I hesitate to impose on you, Mr. Barnum, but …”

“But I don’t know where to find the airport.”

“I could go along and be a guide,” John Kemp said. “Between us we ought to be able to find it.”

“Would you really!” Drummond said. “That would be so good of you. I’m at my wits’ end trying to … keep everything running smoothly.” He pulled bills out of his pocket and handed one to Park Barnum. “This will pay the toll both ways on the
autopisto
. Thank you so very, very much, both of you. It’s a great help, indeed.” He scurried off.

John Kemp and Park Barnum got back into the car. “Great little organizer,” John said.

“Reminds me of something I read in a book one time. ‘He had all the administrative ability of a kitten with diarrhea.’ ”

“Wonder what kind of a name Killdeering is?”

“Indian?”

“I am under the impression there are damn few Indians named Monica.”

Park said, “I give odds she will be creepy. But there is one item present, I think. I glimpsed it from afar. A sort of tooth-some blond item. Who is she?”

John Kemp suddenly decided that maybe he wouldn’t like Parker Barnum as well as he thought he would. “She’s a Mrs. Kilmer. Barbara Kilmer. Very reticent sort. We were on the same flight from New Orleans down, but I didn’t know she’d be a classmate until they met us at the airport.”

“Too bad. Where did she come from?”

“Youngstown, Ohio.”

“Do you know where this pseudo-Indian is from?”

“I heard, but I do not believe, that she comes from Kilo, Kansas.”

* * *

The flight was late. Monica Killdeering, in a starboard seat next to the window, saw, beyond the wing, the golden tones of sunset. She was filled with such an enormous, tremulous sense of anticipation she thought she would burst. Her moist breath fogged the window and she rubbed it away with the sleeve of her suit coat.

Yes,
this
would be the summer, she thought. And she tried not to remember the other summers when she had felt precisely this same excitement that she never knew precisely what she meant by
this
.

Miss Monica Killdeering was twenty-nine years old. She had a graduate degree in Physical Education. She had been born on a prosperous Kansas farm, orphaned in a train-auto collision when she was seven, raised in Cottonwood Falls by a maiden aunt who had died during Monica’s last year of school. Upon graduation she obtained a position as gym teacher and dancing teacher at the George D. Insley High School in Kilo, Kansas. During the six full years she had taught at the high school she had lived in a rented room in a small house on the edge of town owned by Miss Hipper, who had taught Home Ec at the high school for twenty-seven years.

The gods had endowed Miss Monica with one body in ten million. At twenty-nine she was five foot seven inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Her measurements were a barely credible 38-24-35. The texture of her body was flawless, creamy, incredibly smooth, without sag or wrinkle or unaesthetic bulge. It was a goddess body, pure as marble from the high proud globe of breast to arched and dainty instep. Her digestive system could have handled scrap iron without pause or pang. The interlocking network of glands, secretions, hormones, worked in a perfect and rhythmic harmony. Underneath the rounded softnesses of arm and thigh there were muscles and such splendid elasticity kept in such perfect tone that she could work out with the senior girls’ basketball team until all the children were exhausted—but Miss Monica would experience only a slightly accelerated heartbeat, a minor increase in the rate of respiration, and a little moisture on her brow and upper lip. She was physically uncommonly strong, stronger than most men, and this knowledge shamed her. She thought it unladylike.

The body moved in seeming awareness of its own perfections,
in grace and provocativeness of which Miss Monica was largely unaware. Her hair was glorious, inky-black with bluish highlights, glossy as the pelt of a healthy animal.

But having progressed this far toward perfection, the gods, in sudden irony, had given Miss Monica the startling and unmistakable face of a sheep. Slope of brow, wide and fleshy nose, long and convex upper lip, square heavy teeth of the ruminant, brown nervous eyes—all were in deadly pattern.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that Monica Killdeering’s personality and pattern of existence were in any way molded by hereditary factors. Her personality and her habits were the result of the horrid conflict between face and body.

She was an intense, explosive, almost hysterical bore. It was well known in Kilo that if you were putting on a carnival or a drive or a church affair, you should get Monica working on it. Her energies were inexhaustible. But if you wanted to turn a dinner party into pure horror, just invite Monica. Whoever she button-holed would end up in a curious condition—nerves frayed from the shrill and nervous tumult of her intensity, lapels damp from the fine explosive spray of her conversation, and quite ready to scream with such an excess of ennui that, afterward, it was difficult to understand just what she had done to you. Analysis would disclose that she had bored you by talking about you, a feat almost unparalleled in its rarity.

Childhood had been the best time for Monica. She had been skinny and ugly but in great demand because she could hit the long ball, climb the highest tree, and catch any kid her age in the county.

Adolescence had been the black time. The body bloomed, warm and ripe, full of an independent arrogance, aware of its own obvious destiny. But for a time Monica was too shy to speak to anyone. She acquired hopeless, helpless, bitter crushes, and wept them into her pillow. And there were the constant cruelties. The phrase overheard, or meant to be heard. And then to lie in the tumid night, and sense, but not understand, all the strengths of the body’s yearnings, and touch then the flowering breasts and feel such an aching emptiness that she wanted to die.

But the adjustments came in time. The painful shyness was obscured by a highly nervous imitation of an outgoing personality. And it was inevitable that she would choose a career that would chronically exhaust the unfecundated body. In her adjustment
she taught herself to believe that a career involving the young was a more valid and satisfying destiny than the obvious triviality of home, husband and children. She became militant about the rights of women. And, with more difficulty, she taught herself to believe that the physical act of love with a man would be degrading and repulsive, a nastiness that she was highly fortunate not to have to endure. She believed all rapists should be gelded.

As her expenses were small—she ate with Mrs. Hipper and spent little on clothing and practically nothing on cosmetics—and her salary was adequate, she saved her money during her first year of teaching and, that first summer, attended a Festival of the Dance in Biddleton, New Hampshire. She remembered the joyous sense of anticipation that grew stronger and stronger throughout the last weeks of the high school term. Surely, in Biddleton, she would meet people far more interesting and receptive and cultured than could exist in Kilo, Kansas. They would be able to appreciate Monica Killdeering. It would be a warm and wonderful and stimulating three weeks.

But after the first five days of the Festival, she felt that she had made a mistake. All the others seemed to be in cabins for two and three and four, and somehow she had been stuck in a shed in the middle of an apple orchard. Close little groups had formed, and she did not belong to one of them. She attended the lectures and the demonstrations and the recitals and the group participation experiments with dedication and energy, but she had the feeling that somewhere there was some other Festival, and she had attended the wrong one.

One night, toward the end of the second week, she had been awakened at about two in the morning in her orchard shed by hoarse cries outside. She sat up and heard a man nearby, calling, “Ruthie! Ruthie! Where the hell’d ya go, Ruthie?”

She felt indignation rather than fear and put on her robe and went out onto the shallow porch into the cool white moonlight.

“What do you want?” she demanded, and saw a man come wavering toward the porch, holding a bottle by the neck. She recognized him as a man from New York, one of the staff of the Festival, a big round-faced man with a small neat mustache.

“Whad’ya do with Ruthie?” he demanded.

“I haven’t seen Ruthie, whoever she is. You better go home, Mr. Rudnik.”

He planted his feet, uptilted the bottle, lost his balance and
caught it again, and said, “Hah!” and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. A disgusting spectacle, Monica thought. He came closer to her and said “Ruthie run out on me.”

“That’s too bad. You better go home.”

He lost his balance again and swayed toward her and clasped her in an effort to save himself. She half turned and caught his weight easily but she was off balance and they both sat down heavily, side by side, on the edge of the porch.

“Li’l drink?” he said. “Didn’t spill a drop.”

“No, thank you,” she said and started to get up. He caught her by the waist immediately and kept his arm around her.

“You stay right here, honey,” he said.

Monica was outraged. She had no intention of being pawed by a drunk. It was degrading. She tried to pull away from him. He set the bottle aside and got both arms around her, one hand sliding further around her so as to be able to reach her breast.

Monica wanted absolutely no part of such a messy situation. But, quite suddenly, she could no longer resist. It was as though she had to stand aside, in a revolting and helpless dream, stricken by horror as she had to watch herself get up and help Mr. Rudnik up and then lead him into the black of the shed toward her narrow bed.

The unused body had suddenly taken over. It had been like a retired fire-wagon horse cropping grass in a pasture and suddenly hearing the sound of the siren down in the village. I lifted its head and its eyes went wide and its ears went flat And quite suddenly it was off in a cumbersome, rocking gallop panting, whinnying and blowing, pounding toward the pasture gate and the sound of the siren, aware of its essential function tousled mane flapping in the wind.

When she woke up in first daylight, Mr. Rudnik was putting on his shoes. She looked at him in fear and yearning and a horrid shyness. His face was gray. He looked at her and looked away. Neither of them said a word. He went out and she heard him walking heavily away.

She was certain she was pregnant. She could not stand the thought of looking at him again, of looking at anyone who could know how she had been, like a crazy person. She had no way of knowing that Rudnik had suffered a complete black out, with no awareness of anything that had happened from about ten the previous night until he had awakened at six sentangled with a woman on a narrow bed that he had to extricat
himself gingerly to get far enough away from her to see who it was. Nor could she have imagined the appalled horror with which he had stared at the sleeping countenance of the young woman he had privately termed the Venus Sheep.

Monica packed and left that day, in emotional confusion and a sentimental agony. She existed in a special nightmare until she learned that she was not with child. Only then could she permit her memory to range timidly back to the episode with Rudnik, and feel a delicious disgust at the unexpected abandon of the traitorous body. It was said a virgin should expect, should be prepared to endure, intense pain. But the eager, reveling body had felt no pain. She could no longer entertain the conviction that such union was entirely degrading and disgusting. It was degrading and disgusting, she thought, to the sensitivities of a lady, but now a new factor had to be admitted—and guarded against in the future. She had learned there was a terrible weakness of the body, a veritably bestial need, which should never be given the opportunity of displaying itself again.

She rigidly suppressed the sleazy and shameful little twinge of pride she felt in the body’s co-operative competence, and resolved that from then on she would spend her summers in Kilo where she belonged, and where there would be no opportunity for evil temptation.

But, by April of the following year, she had signed up for The Horse Mesa Writers’ Conference in Atcheson, Nevada, telling herself that Rudnik was an unfortunate episode in the remote past of Monica Killdeering.

There, in the penultimate week of the conference, she was enthusiastically and repeatedly undone by a squatty, hairy, fiftyish man from San Diego named Vincent Hurlberth who operated a florist shop and composed unsalable science fiction on the side. Hurlberth, unlike Rudnik, was not in his cups. He was merely an eminently practical and hot-blooded little man who, having ascertained the unavailability of other possible targets, had decided to ignore the face and the personality as being factors having no bearing on his immediate needs, and found no cause to regret his decision.