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a hard-on. The hard-on kept getting bigger and bigger. And I felt warm all over. And even in my dream I was ashamed. You know why I was ashamed? Because I wanted it.” He shook his head. He had been talking dreamily, compulsively. He shook his head angrily. “I had to tell someone,” he said harshly. “Excuse me.”
    “That’s all right, Bunny,” Gretchen said softly. “We’re not responsible for our dreams.”
    “You can say that, Mrs. Burke,” he said.
    This time she did not correct him and tell him to call her Gretchen. She could not bear to look at Dwyer, because she was afraid she could not control what her face would tell him. The best she might manage would be pity and she feared what her pity might do to the man.
    She reached out and touched his hand. He gripped it hard, in his tough seaman’s fingers, then in a swift, instinctive movement, brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. He let her hand go and turned away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said brokenly. “It was just … I don’t know … I …”
    “You don’t have to say anything, Bunny,” she said gently. Silence now would heal wounds, staunch blood. She felt confused, helpless. What if she said, Take me down to your cabin, make love to me? Womanly thought, the central act. Would her body be a consolation or a rebuke? What would it mean to her? An act of charity, a confirmation of continuing life or a last, unworthy cry of despair? She looked at the neat, muscular back of the small man who had kissed her hand and turned away from her. She almost took a step toward him, then pulled back, a psychic retreat rather than a physical one.
    The hand with which she still held the whiskey glass was cold from the melting ice. She put the glass down. “I’ve got to be getting on,” she said. “There are so many things to decide. Tell Wesley to call me if he needs anything.”
    “I’ll tell him,” Dwyer said. He wasn’t looking at her, was staring, his mouth quivering, toward the entrance to the port. “Do you want me to go to the café and call a taxi?”
    “No, thank you. I think I’ll walk; I could stand a little walk.”
    She left him there in the bow of the Clothilde, barefooted and neat in his white jersey, with the two empty glasses.
    She walked slowly away from the ships, into the town, up the narrow street, the night looming threateningly ahead of her. She looked into the window of an antique shop. There was a brass ship’s lamp there that attracted her. She would have liked to buy it, take it home with her; it would brighten the corner of a room. Then she remembered she had no real home, had come from an apartment rented for six months in New York; there was no room of hers for a lamp to brighten.
    She went deeper into the town, thronged with people buying and selling, reading newspapers at café tables, scolding children, offering them ice-cream sandwiches, no one concerned with death. She saw the advertisement for a movie house, saw that an American picture, dubbed into French, was playing that night, resolved to have dinner in town alone and see it.
    She passed in front of the cathedral, stopped for a moment to look at it, almost went in. If she had, she would have found Wesley on a bench, far back in the empty nave, his lips moving in a prayer he had never learned.

CHAPTER 3

    F ROM B ILLY A BBOTT’S N OTEBOOK—
    MY FATHER WAS IN PARIS ONCE, WHEN THEY LET HIM OUT OF THE HOSPITAL JUST AFTER THE WAR. HE HAD NOT YET MET MY MOTHER. HE SAID HE WAS TOO DRUNK FOR THE THREE DAYS HE WAS THERE TO REMEMBER ANYTHING ABOUT IT. HE SAID HE WOULDN’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PARIS AND DAYTON, OHIO. HE DIDN’T TALK MUCH ABOUT THE WAR, WHICH MADE HIM A LOT BETTER COMPANY THAN SOME OF THE OTHER VETERANS I’VE BEEN EXPOSED TO. BUT ON SOME OF THE WEEKENDS THAT I SPENT WITH HIM UNDER THE TERMS OF THE DIVORCE, WHEN HE HAD HAD ENOUGH TO DRINK, WHICH USUALLY WAS EARLY ON, HE’D MAKE FUN OF WHAT HE DID AS A SOLDIER. I WAS MOSTLY CONCERNED