I saw you beaten up, lying still in a dark alley, bruised on the floor of a cell, dead in the street, drunk, lost, kidnapped, bleeding. Sweat stood out on my face. Once I dozed off and woke with a terrible start under the impression I'd been forced to touch a dead body. My hand had fallen on the cold phone.

Junior, take a bow. That was the first sleepless night I ever spent over anyone. But all of it-every stinking minutewas nothing compared to what came bright and early next morning. I'd started calling all the numbers in your crowded phone-book and was moving on to the police and hospitals when the phone screamed. I was startled and I jumped. And there was that voice of yours complaining about the phone being busy so long. You were way out on Whittaker and Fourth and could I pick you up in about twenty-five minutes? You'll recall a certain silence at my end of the line. I was trying to get back up from the floor. What did I answer? Something about being in the middle of rinsing out socks or some other lie like that You said okay, you'd take a taxi and maybe I should start dinner early if I wanted to go for a drive later on. Did my yeses sound odd? They should have.

Yes, Buster, I was sick. You were alive and well and, worse, wholly unaware you'd caused anyone anything but sheer joy all night long. I'd just spent many valuable hours of my life worried ulcerous about someone who was having himself the dandiest, blithest, most rollicking time he'd had in lo these many months. But that part was nothing. Your lack of

imagination was a mere mote compared to the second thing I began realizing.

It hit me like an ax that all your wonderful cleanliness and trim neatness and superb freshness had been given away like a dirty penny to a stranger. And probably accepted at that value, too, because we don't hold high what's given easily. Unless we're me. All the immaculateness just possessed at random, stomped around in-and you had allowed it in some flattered fever! I could hear you saying between swallows of beer, "We can't go to my place. It's being borrowed tonight. No, not that. We're just friends and we each go our ways and do what we damned please. No ties. Free man!" Then followed all the rest that's just a function without affection and there was no affection in all the world that Saturday night.

Don't you remember coming to me in the kitchen before you started the dishes and kneeling on the floor where I sat? On the floor on your knees and looked up as if you wished you could cry. You! I said, "Hey, what's all this?" and you said, "I know you don't want me to go. I know how much." Remember that? All right then, I'd like to know how irresistably beautiful a stranger is, any stranger, and what this particular one had and did, and precisely how this night of incidental bliss was so much more important to you than all my miles of well-paced floor. You said I know how much! and got up and went out there anyway. Just what was all that knee stuff on the floor anyway? A gesture, bone to a dog, sop to a conscience, wool for an eye? And I

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