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One interesting reason for assuming Steve’s letter was written for your benefit, Fran, is his stubborn insistence upon going to such great lengths to suggest that the whole bit with the convent girls never happened. That it was all some fantasy of mine, which I wrote to him for some nefarious purpose. Steve has known me a long time, longer than almost anyone, and he can certainly tell when I’m telling the truth, so he knows dammed well that this happened. I may have had to reconstruct some of the conversation slightly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it came within a couple of words of being a verbatim transcript of what actually went down that night. I guess he must feel that my boasting—and let’s admit it, I was boasting—reflected somehow on your femininity, as if I were not only doing a rooster strut but also comparing you adversely to the six girls.

A strut, yes; an adverse comparison, surely not. Of course we both know, we all three know, that you are a few years more than sixteen, Fran(ces), and that you will not be sixteen again unless science does something phenomenal. And while twenty-nine is also a hell of a good age, asserted by most authorities to be a woman’s sexual peak, there’s no gainsaying the fact that after a certain point in life the bloom begins to leave the rose, as the poets say. But question your femininity? Christ, I would never dream of doing that. Quite the opposite. Why, if memory serves, in that very letter I devoted quite a bit of space to unequivocal praise of your oral abilities.

But just to make things as clear as possible, to make things Presidentially clear, as it were, perhaps I’d better tell you a little bit more about the Darien business.

First off, when we got to Darien, nothing happened. (Now if this were a fantasy, something damn well would have happened. To put it another way, if I were allowed to write the script for my life, I’d smooth out a lot of the wrinkles.) But by the time the station wagon got us where we were going, it was somewhere around five or five-thirty and I had a headache and the girls were exhausted. Besides, they had to be in bed so that the nun who was in charge of their dormitory could wake them at seven-thirty. They had managed to sneak out after bed check, and now they had to sneak in before reveille.

I wasn’t too thrilled about this, actually. They took me to a squat red-brick building in town and led me up a flight of stairs to a faintly furnished room and told me I could sleep there.

“Who lives here?” I wondered.

“No one.”

“It’s only eight dollars a week, Larry, and we six chip in to pay the rent. It’s secret, you might say.”

“It’s refuge from the storm, you might say.”

“It’s a safe place to fuck, you might even say.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding thoughtfully. I walked over to the bed and bounced on it. “A good bed,” I said. “Well used.”

“And there’s just room for the seven of us,” I said.

“Oh, we can’t stay.”

“Can a couple of you stay?”

“Not a chance.”

“God on a pogo stick, can at least one of you stay?”

“No way.”

“It hardly seems fair,” said Mad Poet.

They explained the situation, and fair or not it seemed to be The Way Things Were. They all assured me of their undying love and lust, and I necked them each goodbye in turn, and they went away and I went to sleep.

Passed out, actually. But neatly, after having first removed my clothes and hung them ever so neatly in a corner of the floor. And then I popped into that snug double bed and pulled up the covers and slept.

I hadn’t really thought I would be able to manage this last. I don’t honestly think I would have had the strength to fuck anybody just then, but the last thing I wanted was to have to sleep alone. I never much liked sleeping alone, and I particularly dreaded it that night. Exhaustion and India Pale Ale have a way of conquering that form of dread, though, and I went out like a burned-out bulb.

I awoke very abruptly. There was this shadowy dream that I do not remember, and then I was completely awake and completely aware of a presence curled up behind me. I was sleeping on my side,