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on the fenders.
    Safe in the theatre lobby, Petrescu took off his sunglasses to wipe his face. His eyes were a tender bulging blue, with jaundiced whites; a scholar’s tremor pulsed in his left lower lid. “You know,” he confided to Bech, “that man our driver. Not all is well with him.”
    “That’s what I keep telling you,” Bech said.
    O’Neill’s starveling New England farmers were played as Russian muzhiks; they wore broad-belted coats and high black boots and kept walloping each other on the back. Abbie Cabot had become a typical Rumanian beauty, ten years past her prime, with a beauty spot on one cheek and artful bare arms as supple as a swan’s neck. Since their seats were in the center of the second row, Bech had a good if infrequent view down the front of her dress, and thus, ignorant of when theplot would turn her his way, he contentedly manufactured suspense for himself. But Petrescu, his loyalty to American letters affronted beyond endurance, insisted that they leave after the first act. “Wrong, wrong,” he complained. “Even the pitchforks were wrong.”
    “I’ll have the State Department send them an authentic American pitchfork,” Bech promised.
    “And the girl—the girl is not like that, not a coquette. She is a religious innocent, under economic stress.”
    “Well, scratch an innocent, find a coquette. Scratch a coquette, you find economic stress.”
    “It is your good nature to joke, but I am ashamed you saw such a travesty. Now our driver is not here. We are undone.”
    The street outside the theatre, so recently jammed, was empty and dark. A solitary couple walked slowly toward them. With surrealistic suddenness, Petrescu fell into the arms of the man, walloping his back, and then kissed the calmly proffered hand of the woman. The couple was introduced to Bech as “a most brilliant young writer and his notably ravishing wife.” The man, stolid and forbidding, wore rimless glasses and a bulky checked topcoat. The woman was scrawny; her face, potentially handsome, had been worn to its bones by the nervous activity of her intelligence. She had a cold and a command, quick but limited, of English. “Are you having a liking for this?” she asked.
    Bech understood her gesture to include all Rumania. “Very much,” he answered. “After Russia, it seems very civilized.”
    “And who isn’t?” she snapped. “What are you liking most?”
    Petrescu roguishly interposed, “He has a passion for nightclub singers.”
    The wife translated this for her husband; he took his hands from his overcoat pockets and clapped them. He was wearingleather gloves, so the noise was loud on the deserted street. He spoke, and Petrescu translated: “He says we should therefore, as hosts, escort you to the most celebrated night club in Bucharest, where you will see many singers, each more glorious than the preceding.”
    “But,” Bech said, “weren’t they going somewhere? Shouldn’t they go home?” It worried him that Communists never seemed to go home.
    “For why?” the wife cried.
    “You have a cold,” Bech told her. Her eyes didn’t comprehend. He touched his own nose, so much larger than hers. “
Un rhume
.”
    “Poh!” she said. “Itself takes care of tomorrow.”
    The writer owned a car, and he drove them, with the gentleness of a pedal boat, through a maze of alleys overhung by cornices suggestive of cake frosting, of waves breaking, of seashells, lion paws, unicorn horns, and cumulus clouds. They parked across the street from a blue sign, and went into a green doorway, and down a yellow set of stairs. Music approached them from one direction and a coat-check girl in net tights from the other. It was to Bech as if he were dreaming of an American night club, giving it the strange spaciousness of dreams. The main room had been conjured out of several basements—a cave hollowed from the underside of jeweler’s shops and vegetable marts. Tables were set in shadowy tiers arranged around