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And it had become increasingly easy for him to restrict Suzie to one fenced area in the side yard of his mind. During his waking hours her escapes were less frequent. But at night she roamed free, taunting, accusing, wearing—one by one—all the things he had best liked to see her in.

Remembering the advices of Dr. Gottrell, Park sensed that he was in the delicate process of rebuilding his identity. Though he had the sophisticate’s approach to mental illness and analysis, it still seemed shameful to him that he could have cracked wide open. You went to a head shrinker to let him unravel the knots in your psyche placed there as a result of childhood emotional trauma. And then, at cocktail parties, you could speak somberly and intimately with those others who were couchbound, or had completed the course. It was like a big club composed of the more sensitive types. With high dues to
keep out the rabble. It seemed unfair and against the rules to suddenly have all your inner walls come tumbling down, leaving you quivering, naked as an egg.

He could sense the factors which were contributing to the new feeling of identity, the new shiny layers, like a tender new barnacle building its home, complete with lid. First there was the painting. He was aware that he was a one-eyed king in the realm of the blind, but nonetheless it was good to see the hand and brush create the desired stroke, good to sense the interest and envy of the other students. He and John and Barbara were the students with training and talent. And, to a lesser extent, the Wahls. But he felt that perhaps the Wahls would merit a higher rating were they not the obsessed victims of other interests at the moment.

Another reassuring factor was the smug knowledge that Sessions and March thought well enough of his abilities to keep him on substantial pay during his rather indefinite leave of absence. This comfort was enhanced by the awareness that, for the first time in his working life, he was saving money. With the house and Suzie and the twins, he had often felt as if he was clawing his way along the wall of a bottomless canyon. But now, as he told himself, he was a young and talented man with a new car, clothes, manners, conversation and money in the bank. As he kept telling himself.

Also, Bitsy was important to his self-esteem. It had truly shocked him when he had learned not only what her allowance from the trust fund was at present, but what it would jump to when she reached twenty-one, a date a year and a month away. It made you feel that somebody had put the decimal point in the wrong place. It awed him. So here was a rich and handsome young gal who seemed perfectly content to be with him, casually accepting their status as a twosome within the little Workshop world. She listened so well when he talked that he showed off for her, finding that special glibness and pyrotechnic turn of phrase which had also come easily with Suzie so long ago. And, as with Suzie, it was easy to be amusing. He enjoyed making her laugh. When they walked together, she had a sort of obedient puppy trick of slipping her hand in his. In the young contours of her body, in the way she handled herself, she often reminded him of Suzie.

In his relationship with her, Park had cast himself in the role of man of the world, with slight avuncular overtones. And
Bitsy was the young and impressionable girl. The progress of the script seemed inevitable. He had been saddened and broken by the loss of a great love. She had recently shucked a meaningless young romance. And so, during this summer, they would have a bittersweet affair, intense and, knowing they must part, lingeringly tragic. Her young warmth would mend his broken heart. And from him she would learn something of Life, something she would need to know on her way toward becoming a Woman.

But Bitsy would not stay put in her role. She was an enigma. Across her considerable areas of naïveté were streaks of a sophisticated practicality that infuriated him. When he tried to edge, conversationally, toward that special rapport which would enhance their need for each other, she would be off and away, into Texas anecdote or local gossip, or even, for God’s sake, sports cars or popular music. It made him feel like a stubborn and overly optimistic old hound who has never ceased believing he can get a partridge all by himself, who after the quivering stalk and the shambling pounce, runs with fierce energy and comes to a panting tongue-lolling halt as he sees the bird fly over the crest of the hill.

She was perfectly willing to be kissed. In fact, she upheld her share of the ceremony with such practiced and hearty co-operation that she tended to give him temporary emotional asthma. But it was disconcerting to have her give him one brief dreamy look, wriggle away and say, “I sure don’t think that dress Mary Jane got yesterday is a good color for her, do you?” And such diversions left him feeling like the same old hound with one tail feather in his teeth and his heart heavy.

A certain amount of manual liberty seemed to be permitted under some unwritten covenant, but the moment he exceeded the limit, she had a knack of turning into a bundle of elbows, chins and shoulder blades. There was never any sigh of annoyance. She just blocked him into the boards and skated away.

Her background and education were curiously spotty. She knew the finest restaurants and hotels in the country the way most kids know the local drive-ins, and she had an equivalent attitude toward them. Mary Jane Elmore was the same. She had and used charge accounts in the most fabulous shops and department stores in Texas, but she would spend a half hour picking out a thirty-peso silver bracelet. She had hooked tuna off Bimini, traveling on a yacht out of Galveston, but she
couldn’t remember just what year that was or who owned the boat. She could speak superbly colloquial French, but she had no more idea of the history and geography of the world than any sparrow.

And she could so deftly avoid any serious conversation that he was in frequent despair, saying once, “Bitsy, my God, don’t you want to ever talk or think about life, or destiny or love? Do all the abstract words scare hell out of you? I don’t even know what you’re like inside. You don’t give me a clue.”

“I’m just little old Bitsy, Park. Nothing very complicated. I just go to and fro for laughs. Let’s go dig up old Mary Jane for a gin session. It’s your turn to be captain.”

“You play too damn steep for me. You scare me. Bitsy, honestly now, are we ever going to talk seriously?”

“Well now, you just talk up a storm, and I’ll listen. I don’t have all those deep thoughts. I just go to and fro.”

“I know. For laughs.”

But he retained his hope that he could get her back onto the right lines in the script that seemed so inevitable.

Until, alarmingly, the brand-new walls began to crumble. The letter from Trev Helding was the first tiny jar that started the flaking of the new plaster. Becky was doing well. It was too easy to remember all the evidences of her quickness, taste and intelligence. And, after all, Sessions and March was a business concern, not a charitable institution. They could damn well push Becky up into his job and send him a letter of regrets. Don’t come back. They could get Becky cheaper. And it would make sense for them to do so.

It wasn’t so bad if you were in an agency and sensed that you were under the ax. You developed a sixth sense about such things. So you started wheeling and dealing first. You could either mend your position by finding out who was holding the knife and either dealing with him, or striking first, if he was vulnerable. If neither would work, you could set up some lunches here and there while you still had a job, and say the right things about the stifling of your creative talents, and your need for a job with more challenge. And then when they were ready to drop all the hardware on you, you walked out smiling and fat.

But what the hell could you do from Mexico when you were on sick leave as the result of a well-known emotional disaster? Once they sent their regrets, you’d have to go back with your
hat in your hand and hang around strange waiting rooms. You couldn’t bargain from power. You were scared. And if they wanted you, they could buy you cheap. Then the big drop in income would show on the records. It was all a carnival ride, and if you slipped off, you never got back to where you were. So maybe Suzie had been his luck. All his luck.

He couldn’t keep it from going around and around in his head, and when he tried to write the necessary friendly notes to Herbie and John and Becky, the jitters kept showing. In the end he finally sent them off, but each one had required more thought and rewriting than any national budget. The savings that seemed so pleasant were curiously shrunken, even though the figure remained the same. It was the variation in the basic question—not what you could buy with it, but how long you could live on it? And what the hell was the point in buying a car he didn’t need just to come down here? And the new casual clothes he couldn’t use back on the Avenue?

When that wall began to crumble, it seemed to set off another one. The painting. For some time he had detected within himself a little nibbling of dissatisfaction with the work he was doing. And finally he detected the reason. He had become far too glib and tricky. He could create effects very readily, but the effects were achieved through the use of too many of the artifices of commercial illustration. The work he had done long ago had been clumsier by far, but stronger and more honest. When he began to look at it that way he could see that even the work Ardos was doing was more valid than his own. It had strength. And his work had the careful illusion of strength, the sly imitation of honesty, the glib imitation of power. He had told himself for so long that one day he would paint again. Once security had been achieved he would find the privacy he wanted and paint. But he had worked too long with the superficial, with all the cloying indecencies of huckster art. And all its syrups had leaked down into his soul—so that now he spread them along with the pigments in every stroke of brush or palette knife. Once he was dismally aware of his skilled decadence, he seemed to see an expression in the eyes of John and Barbara and Gam that he had not noticed before. A mild and ironic pity. Poor little ad man, trying with such self-importance to make illustration look like art. He destroyed those few pieces he had set aside to take back.

And it was shortly after Gam’s curiously humbling weekend
in town, that the Bitsy arrangement began to crumble. When he had had her largely to himself, he could feel that somehow she would change and it would all be as planned. But Mary Jane, with constantly increasing efficiency, had begun to make a special talent of acquiring large, random young men, who were summering in Mexico. These young men stimulated by the proximity of the girls from Texas, could become uncommonly persuasive. And as Mary Jane’s deliberate acquisitions began to use up more and more of the girls’ time, they attended even fewer classes. It became most difficult for Park to keep track of Bitsy. He would be away from her for a half hour and return, only to find that the girls had left, accompanied by a pair of meaty, grinning young men who had come to El Hutchinson to pick them up.

In the long stillnesses of the insomniac night he would hear the giggling return, the traditional fragments of “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You,” the
chunk
of car doors, the donkey bray of some young tower of muscles. And he would know that if either of the girls made breakfast, she would be drab with hang-over, husky with song, talk and cigarettes, and almost indetectably musky with the last exudations of alcohol through young pores.

He found himself devoured by a jealousy of that special kind which has its roots in pride. And he wondered if he had gone about the whole thing wrong. Maybe his approach to her should have been to go about honking with laughter, making muscles, baking his hide brown in the sun and belaboring the obvious.

It was disappointing to be able to spend less and less time with her, and see his emotional plan become ever more improbable, but it was considerably more wearing to join her group. They had an unconscious talent for shutting him out. He was with the group, but not of it. His most reliable conversational performances, when he could wedge himself into the conversations, were met with a rather blank stare from all the sets of young eyes, a certain amount of courteous attention, and that small and polite riffle of laughter which is the usual accompaniment to all lead balloons. Age seemed an insurmountable barrier. He kept telling himself that thirty-one was far from ancient. When he tried to talk and comfort himself in their fashion, he knew he struck all the wrong notes. Yet when he tried to be himself, that slight avuncular tendency he had shown
toward Bitsy bloated itself into ridiculousness. He heard himself trying to make sage remarks, and could not stop. He began to feel like a philosophical filler on the bottom of a page of the
Reader’s Digest
. “Yessirree, you find that the grass, hit grows a sight taller in the valleys.”

He carried his apartness around with him as they went from bar to bar, like an albatross around his neck. He would look at them with his mouth spread in an aching grin, and he would hear their bright babble and look at their smooth young faces, and sometimes he would get the impression that he sat there in pathetic senility with rheumy eyes and thread of drool and socially embarrassing incontinence. And wondered why they put up with him at all.

And so he drank heavily when he was with them. His training had eliminated the normal antics of the sometime drunk. He went from glazed to wooden to incomprehensible, without ever losing the ability to add up the check and leave the proper tip and walk out in a straight line. He did not pass out, and he surrendered with an old-timey courtliness when it was decided by the group that somebody else should drive the wagon instead of good old Park Barnum.

With a great deal more frequency, Suzie kept hopping over her fence and wading through his mind, picking up her skirts and stepping with a fastidious distaste for the goop underfoot.

He knew that something was happening to him, and he knew it was not good, and he was scared. Somewhere he had once read that when a person is in free fall, if he shuts his eyes, he cannot tell up from down. He was being carried in some indefinable direction, with constantly increasing speed. He wanted to be able to reach out and grasp something, but he did not know where to reach. And he had begun to be afflicted with nervous involuntary movements of his hands and facial muscles.