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Esperanza Clueca, grimly determined not to be disturbed by the gabble of children in her parents’ tiny hut on the barranca slope near the hotel, studied her lessons by candlelight until it would be time to return to work.

Alberto Buceada, totally undone by pulque and mescal, lay smiling and unconscious in the rain behind the servants’ quarters.

Rosalinda Gomez, with the dubious help of Margarita and Pepe, was preparing dinner, resolutely boiling three great chunks of rubbery goat. When the lights went out, Pepe lighted the three old kerosene lanterns that hung from wall brackets in the big gloomy kitchen.

The new house, John Kemp had decided almost instantly, was a fraud. It had no artistic unity. It was part California modern, part half-ass Japanese and part Mexican exuberance. And he had met the people and they seemed equally fraudulent. There was a badly faded screen star with an arrogant manner, a surly poodle and a handsome and stupid young consort. There was a current film star, vast and blond, who had apparently practiced the rather nasty habit of being able to laugh one peach-basket breast out of its skimpy hammock of fabric. The length of the delay before she noticed the unveiling was apparently in direct ratio to the possible unimportance of the onlooker to her career. She was accompanied by a small, bald man with exceptionally hairy hands. Then there were three self-important and rather surly young men from the field staff of one of the picture magazines, accompanied by three glossy young women from Mexico City who had no English. And there were two novelists, one reasonably notorious, and one tall female poet who looked like an Australian tennis star, male, and dressed the part. And several staggered, bellowing drunks of both sexes, and a score of the usual expatriates with the usual diversity of
mates, legal and extralegal, rather more than half of them heterosexual, rather more than half of them from the U. S. And two bars in operation, and two buffet tables, and more than an adequate number of little people in white coats to pass things. Rick and Puss Daniels were both small, gnarled, redheaded people who had inherited some sort of automotive concession in Mexico, and who busied themselves with making odd and rather ugly ornaments of enamel baked on copper. Concealed speakers played recorded music, flamenco, bullring and
mariachi
. Prism lights imbedded in the paneled ceiling made drama of casual groupings.

John Kemp stood alone in a corner and glowered at everyone. Whenever a tray was passed, he put an empty glass on it and took a full one without particular regard to content. He was feeling sourly philosophical. Life had been very orderly, very satisfying. And then Mary Jenningson had to go into an emotional tailspin and foul the whole thing up. He had thought this summer in Mexico would be something so different that he would be able to stop thinking of Kurt and Mary and the firm. But now he knew he had brought them all along with him.

All the problems were the same. Gloria Garvey was just a tired old problem with a new name. He had never taken any particular pleasure in promiscuity. It created too many problems. He liked best the casual and comfortable affair of long duration, preferably with a woman who had a career of her own and no intention of giving it up, a mature woman of taste and intelligence, so that the physical could be nicely leavened by companionship. There had been few such affairs, but he recalled them with pleasure, and remained a good friend of the women involved. Gloria Garvey was certainly not qualified by instinct or background to join that small group. He saw her standing with a couple by the lighted indoor pool, and saw her throw her head back and laugh largely and with gusto, white teeth gleaming.

Not qualified, but rather a splendid animal. It sounded so good mentally, so analytical and patronizing that he tried it aloud. “Splendid animal. Quite.”

A man came over with a tray and a look of inquiry. John Kemp drained his glass and selected a new one. His mouth felt slightly numb. He realized he was getting tight. Possibly drunk. Hadn’t been drunk, thoroughly drunk, in years.

And he thought of Barbara Kilmer. She came into his mind without warning. Vivid and complete.

“To dear old Barbara,” he said solemnly. “Walked out on me. Left me with the splendid animal.” He considered that sentiment very thoroughly, decided it did not make a hell of a lot of sense. One could not walk out on a nonexistent relationship. But in all honesty, ole John, leave us grant that there is a desire for such a relationship to begin. Physical? No. That would be fine, yes, but this is on a new and strange level. Want to be with her is all. Sit and listen to her talk. Watch her walk. Watch her comb her fine pale blond hair. Make her smile. Make her laugh. Make her feel somebody is all the way on her side.

The face of Gloria Garvey appeared suddenly in front of his unfocused eyes. He focused on her. John Kemp had seen looks of invitation before. He had detected flirtatiousness. But the look Gloria gave him bore about the same relationship to flirtatiousness and coyness as a cap pistol does to a mass barrage by atomic cannon. She pierced him with a look and expression so prurient, so demanding, so entirely explicit that his heart leaped and withered within him. He wanted to turn and run like an alarmed adolescent. He was reminded of the fate of male spiders. Gloria, in one all-out projection, made the escaping-breast routine of the Hollywood blond seem like the pigtail bit with a sand bucket on the beach. She looked as if she need merely shrug once, and her faded untidy clothing would fall to the floor at her feet. She slipped a hand out, hooked her finger tips around his belt, yanked him six inches toward her, banged a kiss onto his mouth that hurt and said, “Take me home now, Johnny Kemp. Quick like.”

“But …”

“I don’t want you drinking one more drop. I’ve said goodbye for both of us.”

“Wait a minute, Gloria. I … uh … promised to give Mr. Daniels an opinion on his horse.”

“It stinks. Go tell him and then let’s go.”

John spotted Rick Daniels on the far side of the big room, standing near the end of the indoor pool, and started toward him. Gloria came right along with him, a special felinity now apparent in her stride. But John had the odd sensation of being a tame and rather toothless old lion accompanied by the female trainer, carrying whip, kitchen chair and pistol loaded with
blanks, while the drums rolled ominously. He had the impulse to turn on her and stamp his foot and say, in a shrill and petulant voice, “I will
not
. I don’t
want
to.” It was a situation he had never faced in all his adult life. For the first time in his life he could appreciate the sticky dilemma of the frightened maiden who finds that inadvertently she has given a very dominant male some reason to believe that she is immediately accessible. Gloria had made her intent so clear that he felt as if he wore a placard reading, “Main Dish.”

He wished desperately that he had not fogged his perceptions and ingenuity with a horrid mixture of too many drinks. He felt that if he got into the blue Jag with her, he was hopelessly lost. She seemed quite capable of clamping her big white teeth around the nape of his neck and bounding off into her lair with him. He knew that his alarm seemed out of proportion to the fate that awaited him, a fate that to many might seem eminently desirable; it was merely the quality and quantity of her aggression that upset him.

They came up to Rick Daniels. He was talking to a dark little woman of pronounced simian cast of countenance. As they approached, John Kemp had one desperate and implausible idea, and to his own consternation, he put it into effect the very moment it occurred to him. He faked a stumble and, while catching his balance, inflicted a most effective body block on Gloria. His hip met hers solidly. She went spinning away, made an effective arm tackle on one of the house servants walking along the apron of the pool with a loaded tray, and carried him with her into the shallow end of the pool. There was no moment of being poised in the air, no nonsense about slow motion. It seemed to John Kemp but a fraction of a second from the moment he conceived the idea to the moment when a sheet of water hit the simian woman squarely in the face and the blue water of the lighted pool closed over the faded stern of Gloria’s Seminole skirt.

Gloria sprang, spluttering, to her feet. The water came to mid-thigh, and she stood in a jetsam of hors d’oeuvres, the sodden waiter scrambling to stand up beside her, looking at her with an expression of incredulous outrage. Her brisk mane was plastered flat, as were blouse and skirt, modeling the heroic limning of breasts and flanks so valid that they made the objects so frequently displayed by the cinema queen look like a confection too abundantly fashioned of pink junket.

All conversation had ended in shock, making the music seem much louder. Puss Daniels came at a fast hostess trot. Rick took one of Gloria’s hands and John took the other and they hoisted her out of the pool.

As Puss was saying, in exclamation points, you poor dear, and you’ll catch your death, and we’ll get you some warm dry clothes, John said, “I’m sorry, Gloria. I tripped or something.”

She palmed damp hair off her forehead and said, “I forgive you, you big clumsy son of a bitch. Puss, I’ve got dry clothes at home. John will drive me home right now.”

“No, darling. I insist. Come on, now. Come with me, dear.” A platoon of female guests and servants bundled Gloria off the field of play, toward the bedroom wing.

Just before she disappeared, she looked back and called, “I’ll be right back, Johnny.”

He realized that his single impulse would avail him nothing unless coupled with other tactical moves. He took the most direct. He began what he hoped was an inconspicuous and not too circuitous trek toward the handiest exit. His last glance at the party disclosed the cinema type standing on the pool apron, dangerously close to the edge, her back to the pool, awaiting her chance to be similarly victimized.

He went out the drive, oriented himself, and began walking briskly in what he suspected was the right direction. After a little while he began to hum to himself.

After Gloria had squeezed herself precariously into a blouse belonging to Puss Daniels, and an old pair of gray flannel Daks of Rick’s, too big at the waist, too short in the cuff, and drum-tight across the rump, and after she had toweled her hair with great vigor and scrawled on more lipstick, it took her five full minutes to become convinced that John Kemp had actually walked out on her. It was an entirely new experience. Other men had walked out, some of them motivated by self-preservation, afterward. Never beforehand.

She felt betrayed, victimized, scorned, insulted … and furiously angry. His defection seemed to redouble her sexual ferment. She felt as if she could drop to her knees and bang her head on the floor. She stood squarely and indignantly and looked with hot fierce eyes at every man in the room in turn, tempted to make a savage and random selection. But they were as health bread to someone whose stomach is rumbling for
steak. So she took another drink, a massive jolt, and she took her bag of damp clothing and her private torment and drove home to Las Rosas. By the time she had garaged the car and reached her suite, she was dangerously calm. Her jaw was clamped so tightly that little pale knots of muscle stood out at the corners. Her eyes were narrow. It is an index of her highly emotional state that she hung the borrowed clothes up neatly and tidied up the two rooms before she went, seething, to bed.

Barbara Kilmer wrote another letter, a letter to Rob’s people, after dinner. When it was finished it was just late enough to go to bed, but she felt restless. She put on a sweater and went out onto the loggia, closing her room door behind her. The rain had stopped and the wind had stopped with the rain. A half-moon rode high and there was a gentle and elusive fragrance of the rain-wet flowers of the night.

She walked out into the patio and sat on a concrete bench and looked at the moon, but felt conspicuous there in the moonlight. After a time she went over and sat on the low wall of the loggia, under one of the stone arches, leaning her shoulder against a stone column.

The night is made for sharing, and a lovely night is especially made for sharing. Once in a while she could hear distant laughter. And the trucks droning and whining down the grades of the
autopisto
. And the night bray of a burro starting with cynic laugh and ending on a fading note of despair. And, far away, the skirl and thud of a jukebox in a cantina far down on the other side of the barranca. She was conscious of a growing scission with her, an increasing concern with present and future which she resented as being an evidence of disloyalty to the precious past. The feeling was not yet strong, but its very existence troubled her. She did not want any change to take place. Just live the long days and, at night, go to sleep by going over every tender detail of one of the days with Rob. And, if very fortunate, meet him again in those dreams where he was alive and smiling.

But there, too, there were changes. The dreams did not come as often. And when they did, there was a random and disorganized quality about them. In the dreams Rob would be far off and acted strangely and he kept turning into other people.

And memory too. The vivid memories of the good days were becoming subtly blurred. Like paintings by an artist who has
used materials which do not last. Colors fade and the bold lines become indefinite.

Yet, worst of all, the sour, nagging little suspicions that perhaps she had dwelt too long and too dramatically on her own grief and loss. It was a feeling that popped up into her conscious mind all too frequently, grinning and smirking at her. She had been able to suppress it very easily at first, and lately with more difficulty, by telling herself that it had been the best of all possible marriages, that it had been a love such as few people are so lucky to attain. But lately, before she could hammer it back down out of sight, it would stand there and say, “But, Barbie, are you quite certain you haven’t come to really
enjoy
this role of tragedy and mystery? Aren’t you really charmed with this chance to act such a touching part?”