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project. Removed big picture window with flanking dormer windows from south wall of living room. Enlarged opening. Replaced with folding glass doors and screen doors opening onto the patio that had been 1954’s major project. Managed to conceal all evidences of unskilled labor. Left hand folding door has never worked right. Much experimentation with weather stripping still does not eliminate wintry blast when winter wind is from south.)
    He sat on the low wide wall and sipped his beer. At infrequent intervals he could hear a distant grumble of thunder to accompany the summer lightning in the west. The west breeze had turned gusty. He looked into the house, and decided that when Joan was well they should go through the living room and mark some items for disposal. Somehow, without being aware of it, they had acquired too much stuff. The room was looking cluttered. The clean lines of the low furniture were being destroyed.
    He got up and stepped over the wall and strolled to the west boundary of his land. The Cables’ house was set aboutfive feet lower than his. Barrow Lane sloped down from his corner lot at what they had told him was a seven percent grade. He was above the roof level of the houses farther down the street. He walked to the red maple that had replaced the one assassinated by the Rikers and hooked his arm in the crotch of it and looked at Cindy Cable.
    The kitchen window was about thirty-five feet away, and five feet below him. The fluorescent lights made the kitchen glaringly bright. She sat in the breakfast booth on the far side of the kitchen, elbows on the table, a book open in front of her. She sat there, dressed as he had seen her in the hospital, with cigarettes, lighter, opened beer bottle and a third of a glass of beer. It made him feel guilty to look in at her. Due to the screen of plantings, you could not look from one house into the other. But from this place on the lot he could see into the kitchen perfectly. She had pulled a strand of her dark blond hair forward and she wound it around a finger. He watched her sip the beer, turn pages, light a cigarette.
    There was, for him, an inexplicable quality of tension in the scene. It was as though he looked into a stage set. Girl sits reading. Somebody enters. Or something. He felt an odd compassion for her vulnerability, something that he had previously felt only about Nancy. She was alone on a summer night, and the dark world was full of dark motives. Her slim attractiveness was a provocation to the things of the night. But, of course, nothing happened and nothing would. The night bugs would bang their hypnoid heads into the screening, and she would read her book until she finished it, or felt sleepy and went to bed.
    On impulse, and because he was both lonely and restless, he walked cautiously down the abrupt slope and then across the flatness of their rear yard to the kitchen door. He stamped on the two concrete steps noisily and said, “You sell beer, lady?”
    “Come on in, Carl,” she called. She got up from the booth as he walked into the kitchen. “Hey, you’ve already got a beer.”
    “One tenth of an inch left in the can. And, to be perfectly truthful, a full six pack in the refrigerator. If you’re short I can …”
    “Got scads,” she said. She took a bottle out of the icebox and jacked it open on the wall opener in the corner. The cap came off but the magnet failed to catch it and it fell behindthe waste basket. “Damn!” she said. “Last week I would have dived after it. Now it can stay right where it is.”
    “No glass. I’m a bottle man.”
    They sat in the booth, facing each other. “What are you reading?”
    She turned it so he could see the jacket. “A modrun novel. All full of hangovers, remorses and fornication. It’s supposed to be a tragedy, sort of, and see it says here that it ranks right up there with
Appointment in Samarra
. But I find it faintly queasy and mostly dull. I’m a classicist, I guess, when it