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young man, Mona. Men his age don’t live forever.”
    I left it like that, hanging in the middle of the air, and I watched her face try not to change expression. She didn’t quite make it. It was terrifying, in a way. We were a little too much alike. We had both been thinking of the same thing. I guess it had to be that way.
    “Maybe his heart isn’t too good,” I went on, talking around the whole thing. “Maybe some day he’ll fall on his face and it’ll be all over. It happens every day, you know. It could happen to him.”
    She fed my own words back to me. “If this bed had wings we could fly it, Lennie. Or if it were a magic carpet. His heart’s in perfect shape. He goes to the doctor for a physical three times a year. Maybe he’s afraid of dying. I don’t know. Three times a year he goes to the doctor, spends the whole day there getting the most complete physical examination money can buy. He went less than a month ago. He’s in perfect physical shape. He was bragging to me about it.”
    “He could still get a coronary. Even when you’re in perfect shape—”
    “Lennie.”
    I stopped and looked at her.
    “You don’t mean he could have a heart attack. You mean something else.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “You mean he could have an accident. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
    I drew on the cigarette. I looked hard at her and tried to figure out a way to fit all the pieces together. If there was a way to do it, I couldn’t find it. The pieces had jagged edges and they didn’t mesh at all.
    “I wish we weren’t us,” she was saying now. “I wish we were other people. Other people wouldn’t think rotten things. This is rotten.”
    I left it alone.
    “I don’t love him, Lennie. Maybe I love you. I don’t know. All I know is I want to be with you and I don’t want to be with him. But he’s … a good man, Lennie. He’s good to me. He isn’t mean or cruel or vicious or—”
    He was a dope peddler on a grand scale, an import-export cookie who imported the wrong thing. He was a top link in a cutie-pie game that sent high-school kids out doing armed robbery to pacify the monkey he put on their shoulders, a game that had caused more human agony than all other cutie-pie games combined. But she didn’t know this, and I didn’t know how to tell her about it. And therefore he was a good man, not mean or cruel or vicious.
    “What do you want to do now?”
    What she wanted to do was change the subject. She had a good way to do it. She put out her arms for me and forced a smile.
    “We’ve got a few more hours,” she said. “Let’s spend them in bed.” It seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. But after awhile I dropped off to sleep and she didn’t. I shouldn’t have done that, I guess. It was a mistake. But I wasn’t in any condition to do too much deep thinking at the time, and that was a shame.
    Because when I did wake up she was shaking me by one shoulder and looking at me all wide-eyed and frightened. I didn’t catch on to it right away. I had to hear it before it soaked in.
    “Lennie—”
    I sat up on the edge of the bed and took her hand off my shoulder. Her nails had been digging into me. I don’t think she realized it at the time.
    “The bags—”
    I don’t think too cleverly when I wake up. I was still lost.
    “Lennie, what are you doing with Keith’s bags in your closet?”
    It was a hell of a good question.
    She was so confused she couldn’t think straight. She stood there bubbling and babbling. I had to slap her twice across the face to calm her down. I didn’t hit her very hard, but each time I slapped her it hurt me. Finally I got her to sit down in a chair and keep her ears open and her mouth shut.
    There were a lot of things I didn’t want to tell her just yet and a few more I’d have preferred never to tell her. But I didn’t have any choice. She had seen the L. K. B. bags in the closet. God alone knew what had prompted her to rummage through my