points of my fingertips together and found the breath inside me to open my lips. It had to be! My heart swore at me. One cannot live otherwise, sooner or later a human being has to be himself among his fellows. It must be, it must be!

"Sel-"I opened my mouth after her name and I could feel that I was ready. "Sel, I-"

Little Davie cried then from his room. The mother rose and pattered rapidly toward the nursery, cooing afar at her son. Dave and I smiled after her and I slumped back in my chair relieved in spite of myself.

"What were you saying Rita?" Dave asked, hunting around the coffee table. for the cigarettes.

I stared at him blankly. "Just an anecdote. I'll hold it for Sel."

He leaned forward and frowned as he lit his cigarette. "That kid is so spoiled already. Rita-"

"Yes?"

His voice dropped down to a register where it would never be heard in the next room. I felt something sinister, unpleasant, difficult troubling him for expression. I forced myself to look directly in his eyes and saw a naked, almost childish embarrassment. Í froze. Suddenly I didn't want it, didn't want Dave to ever know. Something which can only be called shame took over my body and made it rigid. I folded my hands stiffly and experienced a flash of memory of all those times when I was a child, during those moments before someone mother, teacher anyone was going to give me a scolding which I felt I didn't deserve. Those scoldings had always seemed to hurt something deeper in me than those I knew I deserved. though the words were not harsher. Even at ten I had considered that those were mistakes by people whom I loved but who would not let me explain . And it was to all happen now. Dave knew. I didn't know how or how long, but I could see he knew. I forced my eyes to stay on him, to look at him though I really could not see him. Numbly I was trying to feel if I had my chin right, at the angle where Eve would want it to be, demand it to be, at such a moment.

•

Dave leaned even closer and finally looked directly at me, then he spoke and his voice was a biting, disgusting whisper. Every drop of friendliness, of warmth I had ever known in that voice was gone.

"Listen," he said, "there are some things I don't talk about too much with Sel, you know what I mean?"

I blinked at him a little blankly.

"No you don't. Look, this guy, this Kevin-" he waved his hand in something that could have been an unfulfilled ballet gesture, "he's gay as a Mardi Gras parade, you know what I mean?"

I sat there and stared at my cousin's husband. They say, and I do not know if it is true, but they say that there are moments on the battlefield, instants, when a man can feel only relief when he sees his buddy fall instead of himself, and it is a painful thing about the human race I suppose. But that was all that I felt—a sweet, lifegiving relief that swept through my entire body and left me limp in the chair feeling coolness at the back of my neck as shocking in its suddenness as the perspiration a second before had been.

In the next instant, as my comrade lay dead upon the battlefield, relief had quite passed and I only despised myself as I opened my mouth and said, "Oh no! Really? Dave, how horrible!"

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