smell of a big city.

And here my mind went haywire, I don’t know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry—her name—was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy’s bucks by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his whatever. I never confessed this to her. We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fancied Terry was making secret eyes at him. I was tired and felt strange and lost in a far-away, disgusting place. The goof of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap. “Do you know that guy?” I said.

“What guy you mean, ho-ney?” I let it drop. She was slow and hung-up about everything she did; it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time. This was all a fit of sickness. I was sweating as we went down the street hand in hand. The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes. I kissed her meekly. Better she’d never know. To relax our nerves I knew we heeded whisky, especially me. I ran out and fiddled all over twelve blocks, hurrying till I found a pint of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy. Terry was in the bathroom, fixing her face. I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs. Oh, it was sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage. I stood behind her at the mirror, and we danced in the bathroom that way. I began talking about my friends back east.

I said, “You ought to meet a great girl I know called Dorie. She’s a six-foot redhead. If you came to New York she’d show you where to get work.”

“Who is this six-foot redhead?” she demanded suspiciously. “Why do you tell me about her?” In her simple soul she couldn’t fathom my kind of glad, nervous talk. I let it drop. She began to get drunk in the bathroom.

“Come on to bed!” I kept saying.

“Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain’t he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Don’t stand there and tell me that six-foot, redhead ain’t a madame, ‘cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you’re just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody’s a pimp.”

“Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a pimp? My only interest is you.”

“All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real nice boy instead of a pimp.”

“Terry,” I pleaded with all my soul. “Please listen to me and understand, I’m not a pimp.” An hour ago I’d thought she was a hustler. How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. 0 gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her red pumps and hurled them at the bathroom door and told her to get out. “Go on, beat it!” I’d sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. There was a dead silence in the bathroom. I took my clothes off and went to bed.

Terry came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes. In her simple and funny little mind had been decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman’s shoes against the door and does not tell her to get out. In reverent and sweet little silence she took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with