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put off, disturbed, forced on the defensive by the soft, lazy country voice.
    They sure do,’ he agreed. They sure do.’ He leaned on his hands and turned his face towards her. What have I got to learn about you, Miss Jordache?’
    ‘Me?’ A forced little laugh was surprised out of her. ‘Nothing. I’m a small-town secretary who’s never been anyplace and who’ll never go anyplace.’
    ‘I wouldn’t agree to that, Miss Jordache,’ Arnold said seriously. ‘I wouldn’t agree to that at all. If ever I saw a girl that was due to rise, it’s you. You got a neat, promising style of handling yourself. Why, I bet half the boys in this building’d ask you to marry them on the spot, you gave them any encouragement.’ ‘I’m not marrying anyone yet,’ Gretchen said. ‘Of course not.’ Arnold nodded soberly. ‘No sense in rushing, lock yourself in, a girl like you. With a wide choice.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in an ash tray on the table, then reached automatically into the package in the pocket of the bathrobe for a fresh one, which he neglected to light. ‘I had a girl in Cornwall for three months,’ he said. The prettiest, most joyous, loving little girl a man could ever hope to see. She was married, but that made never no mind. Her husband was out in Africa sorriewhere since 1939 and I do believe she forgot what he looked like. We went to pubs together and she made me Sunday dinner when I got a pass and we made love like we was Adam and Eve in the Garden.’
    He looked thoughtfully up at the white ceiling of the big empty room. ‘I became a human being in Cornwall,’ he said. ‘Oh, yeah, the Army made a man out of little Arnold Sims from St Louis. It was a sorrowful day in that town when the orders came to move to fight the foe.’ He was silent, remembering the old town near the sea, the palm trees, the joyous, loving little girl with the forgotten husband in Africa.
    Gretchen sat very still. She was embarassed when anybody, talked of making love. She wasn’t embarrassed by being a virgin, because that was a conscious choice on her part, but she was embarrassed by her shyness, her inability to take sex lightly and matter-of-factly, at least in conversation, like so many of the girls she had gone to high school with. When she was honest with herself, she recognised that a good deal of her
    feeling was because of her mother and father, their bedroom separated from hers by only a narrow hallway. Her father came clumping up at five in the morning, his slow footsteps heavy on the stairs, and then there would be the low sound of his voice, hoarsened by the whiskey of the long night, and her mother’s complaining twitterings and then the sounds of the assault and her mother’s tight, martyred expression in the morning.
    And tonight, in the sleeping building, in the first really intimate conversation she had had alone with any of the men, she was being made a kind of witness, against her will, of an act, or the ghost and essence of an act, that she tried to reject from her consciousness. Adam and Eve in the Garden. The two bodies, one white, one black. She tried not to think about it in those terms, but she couldn’t help herself. And there was something meaningful and planned in the boy’s revelations - it was not the nostalgic, late-at-night reminiscences of a soldier home from the wars - there was a direction in the musical flowing whispers, a target. Somehow, she knew the target was herself and she wanted to hide.
    ‘I wrote her a letter after I was hit,’ Arnold was saying, ‘but I never got no answer. Maybe her husband come home. And from that day to this I never touched a woman. I got hit early on and I been in hospital ever since. The first time I got out was last Saturday, We had an afternoon pass, Billy and me.’ Billy was the other Negro in the ward. ‘Nothin’ much for two coloured boys to do in this valley. It ain’t Cornwall, I’ll tell you that’ He laughed. ‘Not even any