V.

"Idlewild?" he said. "Maybe we can borrow Roony's car. The Buick. Only I can't drive."

"I can," Rachel said, "stand by."

Profane with a rueful look back at the buoyant Mafia and her friends, moseyed down the fire stairs to the garage. No Buick. Only McClintic Sphere's Triumph, locked, keys gone. Profane sat on the Triumph's hood, surrounded by his inanimate buddies from Detroit. Rachel was there in fifteen minutes.

"No car," he said, "we're screwed."

"Oh dear." She told him why they had to get to Idlewild.

"I don't see why you're so excited. She wants to get her uterus scraped, let her."

What Rachel should have said then was "You callous son of a bitch," slugged him and sought transportation elsewhere. But having come to him with a certain fondness - perhaps only satisfied with this new, maybe temporary, definition of peace - she tried to reason.

"I don't know if it's murder or not," she said. "Nor care. How close is close? I'm against it because of what it does to the abortionee. Ask the girl who's had one."

For a second Profane thought she was talking about herself. There came this impulse to get away. She was acting weird tonight.

Because Esther is weak, Esther is a victim. She will come out of the ether hating men, believing they're all liars and still knowing she'll take what she can get, whether he's careful or not. She'll get to where she can take on anybody: neighborhood racketeers, college boys, arty types, daft and delinquent, because it's something she can't get along without."

"Don't, Rachel. Esther, wha. Are you in love with her, you sweat it so much."

"I am."

"Close your mouth," she told him. "What is your name, Pig Bodine? You know what I'm saying. How many times have you told me about under the street, and on the street, and in the subway."

"Them," chopfallen. "Sure, but."

"I mean I love Esther like you love the dispossessed, the wayward. What else can I feel? For somebody who guilt's such an aphrodisiac for. Up to now she's been selective. But when she's felt it, feeling always this own breed of half-assed love for Slab, and the pig Schoenmaker. Going for these exhausted, ulcerous, lonely rejects."

"Slab and you were -" kicking a tire - "horizontal once."

"OK." Quiet. "It is myself, what I could slide back into, maybe a girl-victim underneath this red mop -" she had one little hand pushed up from under into her hair and was slowly lifting the thick mane of it, while Profane watched and began to grow erect - "part of me that I can see in her. Just as it is Profane the Depression Kid, that lump that wasn't aborted, that became an awareness on the floor of one old Hooverville shack in '32, it's him you see in every no-name drifter, mooch, square's tenant, him you love."

Who was she talking about? Profane'd had all night to rehearse but never expected this. He hung his head and kicked inanimate tires, knowing they'd take revenge when he was looking for it least. He was afraid now to say anything.

She held her hair up, eyes gone all rainy; came off the fender she'd been leaning back on and stood spraddle-legged, hips poised in a bow, his direction.

"Slab and I rotated our 90 degrees because we were incompatible. The Crew lost all glamour for me, I grew up, I don't know what happened. But he will never leave it, though his eyes are open and he sees as much as I do. I didn't want to be sucked in, was all. But then you . . ."

Thus the maverick daughter of Stuyvesant Owlglass perched like any pinup beauty. Ready at the slightest pressure surge in the blood lines, endocrine imbalance, quickening of nerves at the lovebreeding zones, to pivot into some covenant with Profane the schlemiel. Her breasts seemed to expand toward him, but he stood fast; unwilling to retreat from pleasure, unwilling to convict himself of love for bums, himself, her, unwilling to see her proved inanimate as the rest.

Why that last? Only a general desire to find somebody for once on the right or real side of the TV screen? What made her hold any promise of being any more human?

You ask too many questions, he told himself. Stop asking, take. Give. Whatever she wants to call it. Whether the bulge is in your skivvies or your brain, do something. She doesn't know, you don't know.

Only that the nipples which came to make a warm diamond with his navel and the padded cusp of his ribcage, the girl's ass one hand moved to automatic, the recently fluffed hairs tickling his nostrils, had nothing, for once, at all to do with this black garage or the car-shadows which did accidentally include the two of them.

Rachel now only wanted to hold him, feel the top of his beer belly flattening her bra-less breasts, already evolving schemes to make him lose weight, exercise more.

McClintic came in and found them like that, holding together until now and again one or the other lost balance and made tiny staggers to compensate. Underground garage for a dancing-floor. So they dance all over the cities.