V.

"Deracinated. Which of them is not. Which of this Crew couldn't pick up tomorrow and go off to Malta, go off to the moon. Ask them why and they'll answer why not."

"I could not care less about Valletta." But hadn't there been something after all about the bombed-out buildings, buff-colored rubble, excitement of Kingsway? What had Paola called the island: a cradle of life.

"I have always wanted to be buried at sea," said Profane.

Had Stencil seen the coupling in that associative train he would have gathered heart of grace, surely. But Paola and he had never spoken of Profane. Who, after all, was Profane?

Until now. They decided to rollick off to a party on Jefferson Street.

Next day was Saturday. Early morning found Stencil rushing around to his contacts, informing them all of a third tentative passage.

The third passage, meanwhile, was horribly hung over. His Girl was having more than second thoughts.

"Why do you go to the Spoon, Benny."

"Why not?"

She edged up on one elbow. "That's the first time you've said that."

"You break your cherry on something every day."

Without thinking: "What about love? When are you going to end your virgin status there, Ben?"

In reply Profane fell out of bed, crawled to the bathroom and hung over the toilet, thinking about barfing. Rachel clasped hands in front of one breast, like a concert soprano. "My man." Profane decided instead to make noises at himself in the mirror.

She came up behind him, hair all down and straggly for the night, and set her cheek against his back as Paola had on the Newport News ferry last winter. Profane inspected his teeth.

"Get off my back," he said.

Still holding on: "So. Only smoked pot once and already he's hooked. Is that your monkey talking?"

"It's me talking. Off."

She moved away. "How off is off, Ben." Things were quiet then. Soft, penitent, "If I am hooked on anything it's you, Rachel O." Watching her shifty in the mirror.

"On women," she said, "on what you think love is: take, take. Not on me."

He started brushing his teeth fiercely. In the mirror as she watched there bloomed a great flower of leprous-colored foam, out of his mouth and down both sides of his chin.

"You want to go," she yelled, "go then."

He said something but around the toothbrush and through the foam neither could understand the words.

"You are scared of love and all that means is somebody else," she said. "As long as you don't have to give anything, be held to anything, sure: you can talk about love. Anything you have to talk about isn't real. It's only a way of putting yourself up. And anybody who tries to get through to you - me - down."

Profane made gurgling noises in the sink: drinking out of the tap, flushing out his mouth. "Look," coming up for air, "what did I tell you? Didn't I warn you?"

"People can change. Couldn't you make the effort?" She was damned if she'd cry.

"I don't change. Schlemiels don't change."

"Oh, that makes me sick. Can't you stop feeling sorry for yourself? You've taken your own flabby, clumsy soul and amplified it into a Universal Principle."

"What about you and that MG."

"What does that have to do with any -"

"You know what I always thought? That you were an accessory. That you, flesh, you'd fall apart sooner than the car. That the car would go on, in a junkyard even, it would look like it always had, and it would have to be a thousand years before that thing could rust so you wouldn't recognize it. But old Rachel, she'd be long gone. A part, a cheesy part, like a radio, heater, windshield-wiper blade."

She looked upset. He pushed it.

"I only started to think about being a schlemiel, about a world of things that had to be watched out for, after I saw you alone with the MG. I didn't even stop to think it might be perverted, what I was watching. All I was was scared."

"Showing how much you know about girls."

He started scratching his head, sending wide flakes of dandruff showering about the bathroom.

"Slab was my first. None of those tweed jockstraps at Schlozhauer's got any more than bare hand. Don't you know, poor Ben, that a young girl has to take out her virginity on something, a pet parakeet, a car - though most of the time on herself."

"No," he said his hair all in clumps, fingernails gone yellow with dead scalp. "There's more. Don't try to get out of it that way."

"You're not a schlemiel. You're nobody special. Everybody is some kind of a schlemiel. Only come out of that scungille shell and you'd see."

He stood, pear-shaped, bags under the eyes, all forlorn. "What do you want? How much are you out to get? Isn't this -" he waved at her an inanimate schmuck - "enough?"

"It can't be. Not for me, nor Paola."

"Where does she -"