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the shackles of a middle-class background she'd never in a million years mess up the good thing she had with Marc for a crazy fling with a man like Henry Bradford.
    But instead of warming to the safety of that thought, it annoyed me. Maybe he was a flop; but he was my flop. He was a liar; but he was my liar. He was nothing; but he was my nothing. And Frannie's rejection of him was a rejection of me.
    It was quite an evening. Brad was surprisingly awake when they came downstairs together; none of the sullen, rubbery ineffectuality with which he usually got up. His eyes seemed positively lit from within. He was so relaxed he even had his sleeves rolled up. Brad never wore his sleeves rolled up: no swimming trunks on beaches with his top bare; no sport shirts in the hottest heat of summer. And the secret?: his right forearm. Centered between the wrist and the elbow —a garish tattoo in blue and red of the Washington Monument, acquired impulsively during the early Sonya era. He was mortally ashamed of it. You never saw it, not ever, unless you knew him very, very well.
    We played for two or three hours, timing our forty-five-second moves on an old stop-watch of Brad's. I knew inside of the first fifteen minutes that none of us stood a chance against Frannie. Even Marc fell into a pretty lagging second place behind her. Of course he didn't try as hard; he was playing for the fun of it. Frannie went at it like a convict filing the cell-bars. I could see now what the game with the Weinricks must have been like. Her skill would have been interesting to watch and vie with if that had been all there was to it. It was her dead-earnest adherence to technicalities, empowered by the bludgeon of her drive, that made you want to kill her.
    "... And the Weinricks were even worse than she," Marc said. "So you can see why I finally called a halt. Actually, I liked tonight. Tonight was tame. She's embarrassed about letting you have it full force because you're new at it. With old hands, she's a fiend..."
    "Fiend..." mused Frannie. "All you need is two I's and an L-T-Y and you've got infidelity..."
    They left at about three a.m.: Marc red-eyed with fatigue, Brad and I staggering, and Frannie brightly elated as a sprite at dawn —due, she said, to the therapeutic release of repressed aggressivity.
    Brad didn't kiss her goodnight, probably because Marc was there; but in a whoosh of admiration and affection, I did. In return she brushed my cheek briefly and stepped back. It was such a funny hit-and-miss little peck that I burst out laughing. She seemed puzzled by my amusement and about to ask me why; but then Marc called to her and she got into the car.
     

CHAPTER FIVE
    We didn't see the Brownes the following weekend. We had the Finches down. Helene was an old sorority sister of mine who had married Dick Finch, a town boy, and settled near the university after graduation. With all our endless migrating we hadn't seen them for years. It had taken months of correspondence to arrange for this visit and now that we were about to have our reunion. I felt, for old time's sake, that we'd do better alone. We picked them up on a Friday evening at Grand Central and, having taken Marc's offer of the loan of his membership card, had dinner at the Juniper Club.
    Dick hadn't changed a bit: he was still the blue-eyed baby-faced boy he'd been the day he gave Helene his fraternity pin. And Helene, in tweed topcoat and Shetland sweater, showed little to betray the span of time but a few more laughing lines around her mouth. I felt, with my mouse-brown, pinned-back mane, that I had aged as badly as the beautiful girl of Shangri-la once she had overstepped the boundaries of that magic land. "One of these days," I remarked at dinner, "I'm going to prostrate myself before Elizabeth Arden and emerge with the russet tresses of my youth."
    "The hell you are," Brad said.
    "Brad loves me this way," I explained lightly. "The more moth-eaten the better. If he had it to do