CHAPTER THREE: CONFIDENCES CONVEYED IN CANDOR.

Having finished a simple and inexpensive snack in the cafeteria, which would serve as dinner, he was heading for her place and he was walking tall. There was a spring of euphoria in Paul's stride.

He felt a wonderful sense of optimism, an invincible optimism, a sense that life was exciting, exhilarating and an altogether positive experience. There was nothing to fear and there were no problems too difficult to overcome. And everything was beautiful: the night air, the stars, the trees, the buildings, the sidewalk; everything was infused with a cerebral, spiritual electricity.

And yet as high as his soaring feelings had reached, they descended suddenly to a more mundane level as soon as he saw her house--it was just so surprisingly ordinary. It was no better than the house he lived in. His bubble had not burst exactly but it had been deflated in large measure, and Paul felt somewhat deflated too.

In addition to feeling surprised and disappointed, he also felt more than a little bit stupid; and yet all of these feelings existed on the vaguest level. For reasons not clearly understood, he had formed the opinion Patina's parents were rich; and yet, had he been asked, he would have been unable to say exactly why.

That was because he was not consciously aware of having a nose that could smell money, but he had one nevertheless, and it had made this assessment on his behalf. But if it made a mistake, he would be punished for it as he would for any other kind of mistake or failure.

There were snippets of information garnered from conversations that were semi-consciously filed away in his mind's private computer under the heading of 'social status assessment, Tina Van M '.

There were but a few scanty fragments of information because Tina was not one to boast about the trappings of money. But subtle as they may have been there were nevertheless sufficient clues to foster in Paul a vague yet intense subjective sense of certainty that Tina came from a rich or well-to-do family.

There was the overriding influence of Hollywood too, and matinee movies in particular. Paul had never met a real American before. The only Americans he knew were on the movie screen or TV.

The men from Hollywood were incredibly handsome and muscular, and so smart. They never lost a single fight; they were always superior and always right. The women too were incredibly and flawlessly beautiful and could do anything they set their minds to. They could even jump out of helicopters and beat up big brawny men. They were the master race to be sure and if ever there was one.

Patina's house was situated on a one-third-acre block, which was large by suburban standards. The house was set well back from the front fence. Paul passed through the entrance gate and began the fairly long walk to her front door.

He felt nervous at the prospect of meeting her folks. He coughed nervously, and then pressed the doorbell. He was relieved that Tina was the one to answer the door. She ushered him in with a sweep of her arm. He looked around anxiously for any sign of her parents, but could see no one else there.

To relieve the tension, he decided to come straight out and ask her:

"Do your parents live here too?"

"No, they live at Harbor View."

"Good!" he thought. "I won't have to go through all the nerve-racking introductions . . . 'Harbor View', now that has a nice sound to it as addresses go."

Paul was now pleased on four levels:

1. There was no need for painful introductions.

2. The Van Maanen's are rich after all and not ordinary.

3. There would be more privacy with them living far away.

4. He wouldn't have to be punished with painful feelings of self-contempt for having entertained a spurious hunch. He always hated it when that happened. It was something he tried to avoid at all costs and whenever possible. He hated the very idea of having to entertain one of those, of having to take one out to lunch, or, worse than that: of being out to lunch himself.

Patina had just finished doing the dishes. She removed the apron she was wearing and quickly put it back in the kitchen by throwing it from a distance. It landed safely on the kitchen table.

She wore bib overalls like hillbillies wear

With straps going over the shoulder.

But these had fashion's look of flair--

She smiled so sweet when I told her.

Her pants were beige, bell-bottom in cotton,

Which all but obscured her Mexican shoes.

Her detailed appearance I haven't forgotten

In striking complexity of pattern and hues.

The pants had a flap to cover her chest,

With a rose embroidered in the center.

A white puffy shirt stuck out of this bib vest,

Embroidered with scrollwork in deep magenta.

Her pants trimmed by ribbon along each border,

A ribbon printed with many small roses.

Her garb exuded such harmony and order

To belie the negative force which opposes.

Her hair was shampooed all fluffy and thick,

And appeared to cover her shoulders completely.

Her flawless complexion wore no rouge or lipstick,

Though a trace of perfume emanated discreetly.

Her shirtsleeves were loose and puffy as well,

But tight at the wrist and hemmed in lace.

Was Homo sapiens an angel that fell?

A purpose to life was implied in her face.

"You're probably thirsty after walking all the way up here. Would you like a drink?"

Paul wasn't really thirsty but was averse to the idea of rejecting anything she might offer him.

"Sure, that would be great."

She opened the refrigerator door to reveal an array of brightly-colored beverages, which she kept stored in milk bottles. The bottles had, of course, been washed clean of residual milk. The drinks were made from powder, which she poured into the bottles, then she added water and gave them a good shake.

There were five different colors and all were extremely bright and iridescent. There was signal orange, slime green, vitriolic yellow, Presley purple, and mercuric-sulfide red. There wasn't a blue one but had there been one, Paul was convinced it would have resembled copper sulfate to such an uncanny degree it could certainly have been used as a flux for soldering.

He also wondered whether the drinks might glow in the dark. He felt an inclination to smirk with amusement, but that was quickly followed by a twinge of embarrassment, because he felt the drinks were entirely appropriate to a normal seven-year-old and were thus hardly compatible with the glamorous image he had unconsciously conjured up for Patina.

But he said nothing, as was his wont, and he kept a straight face. His funny bone had been tickled, to be sure, but he was not one to tease or make fun of people. He was not the kind to push a girl into a swimming pool under any circumstances--even a girl wearing bathers, let alone one wearing everyday clothes. He was far too serious, sensitive and timid to do anything like that.

"Which one would you like?" she asked.

"Umm, the red one, I think. I'll try the red one."

He was fond of mercuric sulfide--well, he liked the color of cinnabar at least: one of the brightest reds on any artist's palette. It didn't taste quite as fabulous as it looked but it didn't taste all that bad either.

Patina looked on as Paul drank, and was watching each mouthful go down. He felt almost self-conscious as a consequence. He looked around to avoid her direct, scrutinizing gaze. There were numerous paintings on the walls but only a few were framed.

"One of her roommates must be an art student." he thought, casually and distractedly.

There wasn't much time to waste hanging about at her place, because they had to be back at school before the movie started, so they set off on their way. Tina set the pace, and a vigorous one at that.

"I like walking." she said. "I nearly always walk wherever I go provided the distance isn't more than two or three miles. It gives me a feeling of freedom and independence because you don't have to worry about timetables or rudeness on the part of bus drivers or taxi drivers.

And the weather in Sydney is so friendly and mild you can go out in it whenever you want. Minnesota is different. There are only two seasons: winter and the 4th of July."

"You mean there's virtually only one warm day in the whole year?" asked Paul, a little incredulous at having taken her comment all too literally.

"It's a short summer . . . well, I'm exaggerating, but the summer is basically July and August--two months--the spring and fall are also two months a piece. The winter is all of six months long and very cold. I'm a native and I'm still not used to it.

It's often dangerously cold, with temperatures of minus- thirty Fahrenheit being common enough each winter. I was amazed when I looked up the weather statistics for Sydney and found the record minimum was plus thirty-five Fahrenheit, and that was set back in nineteen-thirty-something.

And you don't have a proper fall, so you don't really have a proper winter either."

Paul thought Patina had a perfectly beautiful American accent. He loved to hear her talk, and in what seemed like no time at all, they were walking through the broad and brightly- lit corridors of the main building, which housed the theater.

There was a multitude of young people headed for the same destination. Many had dressed for the occasion, but it was the women in general who wore the fancier clothes and some were even dressed to the nines. The atmosphere was festive--to Paul it was electric.

There were three guys walking just in front of them, who reacted to hearing Patina’s voice by turning their heads and bodies too to a rubbernecking extreme of about one-hundred-and-fifty degrees while they continued walking at a brisk pace. They were obviously very curious to see who belonged to the voice.

Paul noticed the eyes of the guy directly in front of him widen and light up on seeing Patina.

"Yes indeed, isn't she something!" said Paul, under his breath. "And yes, she does look even better than she sounds. And, yes sir, she's my baby and I don't mean maybe."

Paul was proud as a peacock and high as a kite. He was now so far from Tattoo Town he had lost all conscious recollection of it.

Alfie was the first in the festival series of Michael Caine movies to be screened by the Varsity theatre over a period of several weeks.

An inner circle of students from the drama department, who ran the theater, fancied themselves as connoisseurs of fine art, and would go to as much trouble as the practical exigencies of obtaining movies would allow in order to select films with artistic merit.

On this particular occasion at least, their efforts were wasted on Paul. He felt a simplistic but intense personal dislike for the character of Alfie, which overshadowed all else to such a degree it made it impossible for him to see anything else of value in that wonderful movie.

To Paul, Alfie was an inadequate psychopath, and that is certainly bad; but he was also lacking in chivalry, and that was even worse in Paul's book, because he thought chivalry the true measure of a man.

"If he had just married Gilda and been a proper husband to her, his life would have been so much better in every possible way, and so much better for everyone else." said Paul, expecting to earn brownie points as the pair exited the theater.

"But Gilda was a scheming sort of person," said Tina, "and I think she got pregnant deliberately so he might feel guilty enough to marry her--something he wouldn't have chosen to do otherwise. But Alfie didn't allow himself to be manipulated by her."

Paul was so stunned as to be lost for words. "Shouldn't women stand together in group solidarity," he thought, "especially in this era of Women's Liberation, and help protect one another from chauvinist pigs like Alfie . . . but maybe she's taking the villain's side just to be tongue in cheek and display a kind of outrageous, sardonic sense of humor?"

He looked closely at her face for any trace of a smirk or a grin but there was none to be seen. The matter was not of life -threatening importance to him and so he felt it was better brushed aside, and, in any case, he was certainly in no mood to start an argument about it.

He was more interested in absorbing the aesthetic impressions of the evening; admiring Patina and how gorgeous she looked in her outfit, experiencing the bright lights, taking in the festivities, and gazing curiously upon the many students who had dressed up for the occasion.

In a matter of a mere few minutes after the movie had ended they were already outside in the night air and heading back to her place. The evening was comfortably mild, but being late April, it was just cool enough to be fresh and invigorating.

Because they were heading due south, the Southern Cross could not help but force itself upon their attention. It was standing upright like a kite, and it was as high in the sky as it ever gets.

"I guess you've probably seen the Southern Cross before?" said Paul, tentatively.

"Yes, a friend of my father pointed it out to me not long after I arrived in Australia. It's the one on the flag, isn't it?"

"Yes, and did he tell you the stars in it form an ordered sequence?"

"No."

"If you start with the bottom star and go round clockwise, each one becomes progressively dimmer. The one on the bottom is called Alpha Crux; the next is Beta Crux, which is followed by Gamma, then Delta and finally Epsilon Crux.

The probability of such an ordered sequence occurring by chance alone is five factorial (5X4X3X2) or 120 to one." Paul then thought of the probability of being enrolled in five courses with Patina; no one else was enrolled in so many of his courses.

"And the crux of the biscuit?" asked Tina, breaking into a giggle.

"The crux of the biscuit is . . . it doesn't mean a damned thing." He said, in a tone of resignation and defeat.

The walk home seemed to take no time at all to Paul, but its duration was actually in the vicinity of twenty minutes. Tina took the key from her purse and unlocked the door, and they both entered. She had not actually invited him to do so, but it seemed to just happen automatically and so naturally--almost as if it was his home too.

"I'll make some coffee!" she said, heading for the kitchen.

In the meantime, Paul was in the living room taking a second look at the many paintings on display, which occupied almost the entire square footage of the living room’s walls.

"Her roommate must be out too, this being a Friday." he thought.

One large painting in particular caught his attention and held it. It was about two and a half feet wide by four feet high. It portrayed a scene so strange and striking as to exert an attractive force upon Paul. This force induced him to take the few quick steps that would bring about an interface between his nose and the canvas. Thus strategically situated, he might examine its every minute detail.

The scene was a polar night, and the sky was black except for tiny bright stellar points of light. There was a woman standing barefoot on the ice, who had two huge polar bears with her, which served as companions. Their facial expressions conveyed a peaceful contentment, which was very much like that of a friendly, domesticated dog toward a doting master.

The woman wore a silvery-white diaphanous gown encrusted with diamonds, which was permeated by the pale blue glow of the ice. She wore a matching veil, which made her look almost like a bride, and a diamond encrusted halo--not a true halo above her head like an angel but a metal ring around her veil and around her forehead to hold the veil in place--more in the manner of Maid Marian.

And she wore earrings, which resembled tiny diamond-encrusted chandeliers. Her almond eyes were painted to a stylized extreme that made them appear elfin and unearthly, and her irises were black.

Her arms were outstretched. Her hands were cupped together and contained a bleeding heart, which was dripping blood through her fingers and onto the ice. Her hair was white though she looked young and beautiful.

The picture didn't have the artist's name on the bottom right corner, as is customary, but it had a title: Everything About Her Was White. While examining the painting, Paul experienced eerie sensations of awe and wonder and extreme cold. And those feelings were strangely augmented by the music playing in the background, which served as a kind of fantastic accompaniment, either coincidentally or otherwise, and the song being played was: Everything Emptying Into White, by Cat Stevens. Patina had started an album running while waiting for the water to boil. She now reentered the living room carrying a tray and placed it on the coffee table.

"Gosh!" said Paul, coming over to take his coffee. "Your roommate is one hell of an artist!"

"Well, I was planning on getting a roommate, but then I thought it might cause complications, so I never did get as far as advertising for one."

"Then who painted this?" he asked, with a tone of disbelief in his voice that implicitly demanded an explanation.

"I did." she replied, simply.

"Oh, why of course, how stupid of me!" He felt suddenly assailed by embarrassment and self-contempt. "Why didn't I think of that. I am really so stupid!"

"No you're not. Why you're--" but she said no more.

"It's just that the work is so good!" said Paul, in an effort to expunge the implied insult that Patina would not have been capable of painting it. "It seems too good to be the work of anyone but an artist or a full-time art student. Boy oh boy, how do you paint the fur on the polar bears?"

He was now grinning from ear to ear and breaking into an uncontrollable giggle at what struck him as an outrageous extreme of meticulousness: the fur appeared to have been painted hair by hair, one hair at a time.

"It's just practice!" she said, enacting a stupid grin, and focussing upon her nose so as to go cross-eyed.

Paul was horrified. "Oh don't do that!" he said, moving quickly toward her. He grabbed her left forearm and squeezed it gently. This, ostensibly, was meant to convey a concern for her welfare, but in actual fact he just wanted an excuse to be able to touch her.

"You might stay like that." he thought, but didn't say so as it might sound insensitive or herald bad luck or violate some other kind of vague taboo.

"Boy oh boy! You are so talented!" His voice was still filled with amazement and incredulity. "But why don't you put your name on it?"

"Well, the painting was originally done by Edmund Dulac, so the ideas are his--that’s why I can't put my name to it; but I liked it so much I had to do a version of it of my own, though a little more stylized."

"What does ‘stylized’ mean exactly?"

"Well, do you see how the arms are a little too long and curved to be real, to exist in the real world. That's stylized. It’s of a particular style rather than a photographic depiction of the real world."

"Oh yes, and her eyes too are not really those of a real human being."

"Right, exactly . . . Take a seat."

Paul quickly assessed his seating options. There was a couch or a lazy-boy recliner, but Tina had seated herself on the carpeted floor, so he decided to do likewise.

It wasn't as uncomfortable as he might have imagined, and the floor somehow conveyed a stronger sense of his being at her place, and a degree of intimacy exceeding that of the usual arrangement of tables and chairs. He was closer to her, at eye level, and he sat feasting his eyes upon her pretty clothes, her pretty face and her golden hair.

It was all so much nicer now; the whole wide world seemed nicer now that he was at her place. He had made real progress in cementing the foundations of a friendship with her, and he felt a profound sense of accomplishment in that they were now finally more than mere classmates, but over and above all of this he felt a blissful sense of personal security and well being.

Of the paintings on the living room wall, many were of a

Hippie style and not to his taste, but the colors were nevertheless very beautiful and the color combinations were even harmoniously beautiful.

"I really like the music of Cat Stevens," she said, "but I like him even more because of what I’ve learned about his personal life. He suffered a lot. He was very sick with TB when he was young. I think he suffered so much that it touched his heart--much in the same way it touched St. Francis of Assisi.

Suffering is a perplexing mystery--don’t you think? I think so. It can have a strange effect on people. When I was young I was very withdrawn, because I suffered so much, but I would never let anyone know about it. I had a special wardrobe which was my secret hiding place where I could cry, and no one ever knew about it."

Paul felt somewhat confused. He was still struggling to formulate an answer to the question she had posed about fifty words earlier, when he became startled almost to distraction by her last statement. This had a disruptive influence on his train of thought, which might have rendered him unable to enter the conversation at all had it not been for something his father had told him only recently.

"My father often quotes a Dutchman from Indonesia, Sir Lawrence Van Der Pols, who observed suffering in Japanese POW camps. One of his favorite quotes is:

‘There's a place where the ground is soaked with blood and tears; that is where the brightest flowers grow.’"

"OH YES!" she exclaimed with such force and emphasis as to suggest she was--not merely pleased but pleased to the point of ecstatic delight. "That's just so fabulous," she continued, "and it says it all because it's so true.

My parents are in the Dutch Reformed Church, and my uncle is a theologian. He has a Ph.D. and a D.D. but he's not much of a theologian because I don’t think he has ever suffered.

When I was eleven, I wrote him a letter asking questions about religion, but he never even bothered to reply. He is youngish . . . well, a good deal younger than my father, and I must admit, he's handsome. He's single too, and the women from the church are all madly in love with him. It's true, they really are! And so they have such a lot in common with him, because he's absolutely madly in love with himself.

When I was twelve I decided to become a Roman Catholic because that was the original form of Christianity. But my parents made one hell of a stink about that. It was tantamount to a declaration of war, so, when I was a little older, I secretly decided to become a Buddhist instead."

"My father used to write letters to theologians," said Paul, "but he gave up on that. He said, if they wanted to know how many teeth a horse has, they wouldn't look in the horse’s mouth but would read Plato and Aristotle instead to get the information from them. They are a bunch of troglodytes."

"But psychology is almost as bad." said Patina, with an intense expression on her face. "Take Freud and the Oedipus complex: The little boy's love affair with his mother starts at the breast; begins with the warmth and sustenance he receives. Then why shouldn't the little girl fall in love with her mother in just the same way? Well, the answer is: she does, but that comes to an end when she discovers she doesn't have a penis, blames her mother for it, and begins to hate her. What a worthless crock that is, and they try to call it a science."

"It’s a crock, to be sure," said Paul, "and yet it's really the only theory, which is a literal crock: It's funny that the secret of the universe can be found on the planet Uranus. In terms of anal retentiveness, people supposedly want to retain their own feces. Then why not save it all, and keep it stored under your bed in five-gallon crocks. Like the flat-earth brigade, they just don't get it. It's the same as humor--you either get a joke or you don't, and they just don't get it. But it's sad in a way because it means we are still living in the dark ages."

"Yes," she said, "we are living in the dark ages and on a blighted planet. Would you like some more coffee?"

"Yes indeed." He stood up quickly with the intention of picking up the tray. He was positively energized by the excitement his conversation with Patina had engendered.

"That's okay. I'll get it. Pick out an album and put it on if you like. I'll be back in a minute."

Paul now had the hiccups. He would get those from time to time, especially if he stood up quickly after eating or drinking. Those nagging little spasms would sometimes last for hours and even days.

He was looking at her albums. They were unfamiliar to him. He had only vaguely heard of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention but she had several of their albums. There was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Joni Mitchell. Then there was James Taylor, Melanie, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Joe Cocker and Jimmi Hendrix.

Paul had no idea which one to choose and was continuing to hiccup.

"Just hold your fingers in your ears," she said, on coming back with the coffee, "and that will fix the hiccups guaranteed."

Paul was not sure whether she was joking or not.

"Just hold your index fingers in your ears for twenty seconds or so--it circumvents the vagus nerve."

Paul had tried countless remedies in the past, and with little success, but he was absolutely thrilled to find her method worked beautifully.

"Wow! Why didn't someone tell me about that before!" He was smiling with delight. "But I'm not sure what album to choose, because I'm not too familiar with any of them, so maybe you should choose one. Who is your favorite artist?"

"I like quite a few, and for different reasons. But if I had to choose just one, it would have to be Joni Mitchell, because she's a black crow."

Paul was intrigued. "What's a black crow?" he asked.

"Well, a black crow is someone who asks for nothing, expects nothing and depends on nothing. A black crow is totally independent."

"I'm sort of like that myself!" he said, in blissful ignorance of having just taken a headfirst dive straight into that special place where angels fear to tread. "I've always been very independent." he boasted. "Call me a lone wolf if you like, but that's just the sort of guy I am."

His tone of voice was self-congratulatory and his manner seemed smug and self-satisfied; and yet he hesitated, stopped dead for a fleeting instant, for just long enough to allow a nagging feeling of doubt to emerge. It was a feeling akin to a fear of ridicule. He wondered whether they were still talking about the same thing, or whether he would soon end up with egg on his face.

But the feeling was a fleeting one and quickly gave way to his continuing to mouth off: "I've been very independent since I was just a little kid. I could just sit by myself and draw pictures for hours and hours, all day long. I could just keep myself amused, entertain myself . . . but gosh, it's getting so late, I'd better be going."

Paul decided against kissing Patina good night. By the laws of reciprocity (which play a significant role in human affairs) if a woman invites a man to her home to see her etchings (which she didn't do exactly in any case) it is only fair that he be entitled to invite her similarly; but it does not entitle him to kiss her, because that would be like comparing apples with oranges.

Their parting words were said with Paul standing outside on her doorstep and Tina standing in her doorway. Paul was wearing a coat but Tina wasn't, and the midnight air was growing cold. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders in a kind of self-embrace to keep warm.

"You poor boy," she said, "you have to travel such a long way home so late at night."

"It's worthwhile." he said, in a soft and understated voice, which caused her face to fill with delight and an expression of surprise engendered by modesty. She rolled her eyes and smiled so wide. Her face was intensely animated and alive with expression.

Paul had the feeling she was flirting, was using her charm to convey a 'come on', and a subtle admixture of awkwardness seemed to suggest she was hoping he would kiss her.

But he took his leave, he couldn't wait, he didn't kiss her, he was much too shy, and it didn't seem right on a very first date to a Calvinistic kind of guy.

Paul walked briskly through the invigorating night air. He was energized at being able to have a really intelligent conversation with somebody other than his father, and even more energized because that somebody was a beautiful young lady--sure, all of that was true, but his feelings went much further than that, went all the way to euphoria and beyond, because he was high on the brain's natural amphetamines--the ones that are released into the bloodstream when you fall in love.

The streetlights were now magic, the sidewalk was magic, the trees, the night air, the moon and stars; everything was magic.

"What a smashing girl!" he said out loud. She exceeds all of the expectations of my wildest dreams. Had I been asked previously to list all my requirements in a dream-girl and have her materialize, she would have fallen way short of Patina, because I don't even have an imagination capable of conjuring up all of the fine qualities she has.

And it's so strange because there were girls in the past, who were not even a quarter of Tina's stature, and they were not even slightly impressed with me. If I tried to say something in a group setting, they would ignore me or talk straight over the top of me; and, because of that, I would just sit there in silence. Eventually some would notice, and, thinking it very strange, they would say, ‘ISN’T HE QUIET!’ at the top of their voice and they would gape at me with a face full of distaste, dismay and even disbelief. That’s how they would talk about me in the third person while I was there in the first, as if I was some sort of strange laboratory specimen. Those girls might have rated my attractiveness at about twenty-percent at best; therefore, Tina, being at least four times their stature, should rate me at about five percent.

But she doesn't. I think she rates me up around eighty percent or higher. It makes no sense at all. It's just a series of contradictions. But it’s like magic, or grace, that has brought me here to this better person and this better place, a place where I'm accepted, where I can talk and be listened to, a place where I fit in. I am now transformed at being transported to the place where I truly belong. My father was right again. I even hate to admit it but he’s always right.

Patina is so clever, so erudite, and she's a gifted artist. She's beautiful, charming, funny, cute, sensitive, introverted, rich, glamorous, American, and she has her own house--a house just for herself, and for me. She is just the ultimate, and I must surely be the luckiest bastard in the whole wide world."

Paul was positively ebullient with excitement. His mood was manic. He felt like a skyrocket shooting through the air, he felt like a downhill skier pulling out all the stops and racing at maximum, breakneck speed through a forest of pine trees. He felt the wild and reckless abandon of being unbound by all earthly constraints--but it was merely a momentary and fleeting feeling. Fear followed close behind to check his speed and clip his wings, and his mood underwent a sudden descent as darker thoughts began to intrude.

"The Hippies will take her away, ha, ha!" said a voice of doom from deep inside his head. "The hippies will take her away from you sooner or later, and probably sooner, because there is something unconventional, left wing, bohemian about that girl. You mark my words!

She's the type, if she met a psychopath like Charles Manson, she would think he was beautiful just because he has long hair. Remember that hippie they interviewed on TV about free love, remember his attitude and his exact words: "Yair man, you come in some chick and it feels great."

"Damn it all the way to hell!" thought Paul. "Those goddamn Hippies can con these rich college girls so easy, just like Manson did. Most of these Hippies are no better than the riff raff I lived with in Tattoo Town.

But they grow their hair long and wear feathers and beads and stupid clothes. They paint rocks or small boulders, paint them pink, red, green and blue, and then lay them in the back yard and act as if they are great works of art. How phony can you get!

And that book she had sitting on her coffee table: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht. That guy was the biggest phony fink of all time, and a communist to boot. He was the archetypal turncoat, the Benedict Arnold, the eponymous fink.

Why are there so many goddamn phonies in the world? That's what I'd like to know. And it really shits me how they get by so well. These phony hippies and communists might easily con Patina into having sex with them and then give her syphilis or gonorrhea!"

*

Paul had never been popular. He had made an attempt to become gregarious in junior high but that had proved disastrous. College had been a lonely place during his first year. The many thousands of students only served to make him feel all the more self-conscious and ill at ease; it was like going to a fancy restaurant and eating alone. There had been the occasional companion from one or other of his freshman classes but no one he really clicked with.

That had not only changed now, it had changed in a scintillatingly dramatic fashion. The simple routine of attending classes saw everything transformed and painted in brightest Technicolor. Going to lunch was even better: They were a matching pair of chatterboxes engrossed in a dialogue that delighted both of them; it even seemed as if their personalities changed when they were together--they were no longer introverts. To Paul, Patina was more than a classmate and more than a friend--she was also a gorgeous gifted girl, and that, in his estimation, made her the most delightful kind of companion possible. Going out on a date with her was electrifying, but even ten times better than that was just being alone with her at her place.

The second in the Varsity festival of Michael Caine movies was The Magus. On unlocking her door that night after seeing that movie, Patina once again failed to invite Paul in--in words at least, but, in terms of body language, he sensed there was an implied invitation extended, and she showed no subsequent signs of surprise or disapproval when he followed her inside.

"I'll make some coffee," she said, casually, "you can choose a record to play if you like."

Paul noticed that Patina had five Joni Mitchell albums. He had only heard The Big Yellow Taxi, which was currently playing on the Top-Forty, and so he resolved to redress that state of deficit by playing one now.

Tina came in with coffee and snacks, and proceeded to sit on the floor. Paul joined her there.

"Are you an oyster?" she asked, rhetorically. "yyyeeesss!" She exclaimed, nodding her head with long and slow up and down movements. She was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Her face was intensely animated and filled with expression. It reminded Paul of Clara Bowe, the 'It' girl of the silent screen, who could assume any number of intensely animated facial expressions.

"That was the title of a magazine article I read once." she continued. "When I was young I was very withdrawn. I guess it was pathological really. Now that I'm older it's not so bad, but I'm still inclined that way, and I think that's because I'm scared of people.

One day, on my way home from art school, I was waiting for a bus. I guess I was about eleven at the time. Some native Americans were waiting there, for the bus I suppose, and they were drinking alcohol. Anyway, they started fighting and beating the hell out of each other. I was absolutely terrified and I freaked out. I was so scared in fact that I totally lost it and I just started screaming uncontrollably; I went right off my head."

"Were you scared they would hurt each other?" he asked, thinking it unlikely they would have any kind of motive or reason to harm Patina.

"Oh no. I was scared they would hurt me. I thought they were going to attack me, but they didn't. I guess they were only angry at each other, but, at the time, I didn't see it that way."

"Did they stop fighting when they heard you screaming like that?"

"Oh no, they just kept on fighting until the police came and broke it up. They asked if I was okay, or whether I was injured, and then they drove me home. But my mother didn’t seem pleased by what she described as ‘all the hullabaloo’ of having the police bring me home.

But I think she has helped a lot to make me such an anxiety-case--and my father too. They both used to hit me all the time when I was a kid--they don't hit me any more," she hastened to add, "but as a child I could get a whack in the face at any time, for any reason at all, or for no reason whatsoever.

It would go something like this: Don't do what I do, do what I say--WHACK! Don't do what I say, do what I mean--WHACK! Don't do as I do, do as the Romans do--WHACK! Or you will arouse their wrath--WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

"When I was seven," she continued, "I won a regional art competition, which ranged over a fairly wide slice of the mid-west, or a population base of about twenty-five-million people. I was just a little kid, and I think winning something like that at that age is more a matter of luck than talent. I think it’s more like winning the lottery.

But my mom is very competitive, and she wanted me 'on the team' after that, which was sort of okay for a little while because we did more things together; we were sort of more connected, but perhaps for that same reason, the whole scene quickly became very tedious and disagreeable.

I don't even know exactly what it was, what happened or what caused it, but I went funny after that. I went really strange. I became more and more withdrawn until, after age nine, they took me to see a psychiatrist, who thought I was autistic. I think I was inclined that way in fact."

She picked up a book that was lying on her coffee table. It was Silent Secret Snow, by Conrad Aiken.

"This short story describes pretty much how I felt during that period in my life. You can take it home and read it if you like."

There was a childlike innocence in her tone of voice. She was not self-conscious or seemingly even aware of the intense personal nature of the invitation. This enabled her, ostensibly, to extend the invitation to Paul in that spirit of mutuality and candor, which young children possess for a short period but lose soon enough to the guarded sophistication of adolescence and adulthood.

Paul took the book gladly. He viewed everything of hers as being something special that he would feel most pleased and privileged to share.

"I went through a stage when I couldn't feel anything." she continued. "I was just like a zombie. I had no feelings at all, either pleasant or otherwise.

I was apathetic. I didn’t care about anything. I went to bed early and got up late. I was asleep nearly all the time. I don’t even know how I could sleep that much.

The only thing I did was eat--not that I even enjoyed it, but that’s all I did, and I put on lots of weight. Even now, I can put on weight real easy, but back then I was really obese. The kids at school noticed how strange I was becoming, and they began to make fun of me. My grades dropped to a bare pass mark, but that didn’t bother me one little bit at the time.

I was such a mess for about two or three years, and then I gradually came out of it after I started painting again. I invented a secret friend then too called Merlin--you know, based on the wizard. That was when I was young . . . well, but my recovery began with my art, which I got into then with a renewed vigor.

It was just amazing. My painting came alive. It just blossomed! No, it almost exploded! And I was praised so much for it at that point, with some even saying I was a real artist and not just a gifted child.

My grades in school started to improve too after that, and it wasn't long before I was getting straight A's, and then I came first in the class.

During my crazy period, some of the kids had become convinced I was stupid, and I think they were disappointed when they learned otherwise.

There was one boy who was so competitive--in front of the whole class, he boasted he would come first in every single subject. He was such a big head, with such a big mouth, but his boasting had no substance.

He used to say to me: ‘You're strange, but don't change’--he was quoting Crosby, Stills & Nash--that was his idea of epigrammatic wit, I think. He would laugh like a real jerk every time he said it. He thought it was so funny.

He always thought his own jokes were funny. But he stopped laughing after the next lot of exams, when I beat him in every single subject.

They'll make fun of you if they think you're stupid, but they'll tolerate you in a patronizing kind of way, because, deep down, they're really pleased about it. But they won't tolerate or forgive you for being a lot smarter than they are. I found that out from personal experience.

They can't afford to be generous toward you when their pride is hurt. They want to drag you down then if they can. Even the teacher, who had been supportive when I was an underdog, started to make nasty comments about my grades.

In front of the whole class she sneered and said: 'Don't worry, she's not a genius, she has to really work at it!' I could feel the animosity, and I felt just as much an outsider then as when the kids were making fun of me.

People can have such a herd mentality and they can be so petty. I think Aldous Huxley summed it up so beautifully in his Brave New World: to conform and fit in, one should be not too stupid but not too bright.

But, in spite of his stupidity, that jerk was not altogether wrong in saying I was strange, because I've been through so many strange phases.

In junior high I won a watch as a prize in a minor art competition that was run by the school. It wasn't a very expensive or fancy kind of watch, but there was something about it I really liked. It became my favorite thing in the whole world.

I took it with me wherever I went and kept it under my pillow at night. But after a while I began to worry about it. I was worried at the prospect of losing it, and my anxiety on that score increased steadily till it reached a point where I simply couldn't bear it any more.

So, one day when I was standing on a bridge, I had a sudden impulse to take it off and drop it in the river. It all happened so fast that the watch was gone forever before I even had time to think about it."

"But, had you kept the watch," said Paul, who had been listening attentively all this time, "there would have been a chance of your losing it, admittedly, but there would also have been the very real possibility of your still having possession of it to this very day."

"Yes . . . well, that's logical enough, but you don't understand--it would have driven me crazy to keep the watch. I just couldn't bear it--the worry and stress associated with it, although that went on for another year or two.

There was a compulsive kind of game I had to play. I would choose, or, more accurately, I would be forced to choose my favorite possession, and then throw it away, or give it away, or leave it where someone else might find it--a poor kid perhaps. I had to play that game maybe once a month, choose my favorite remaining possession and dispose of it.

My mother would just freak out in dismay and disgust. She gave me some of my worst beatings during that time, in the form of punishment for being so forgetful."

Paul was shocked. It dawned on him now for the first time that Patina was not the all-American girl next door.

"I’m surprised she's telling me all this," he thought. "I would never tell anyone such personal things about myself. They could subsequently use that information against you, or go blabbing to everyone around the place, who might, in turn, start making fun of you. That’s exactly what would have happened to me in high school if I had told the guys anything really personal about myself.

How extraordinary that she would tell me all this . . . Yes, but she has entrusted me to be nothing less than her confidant; that's what this means."

"But you're out of that stage now, aren't you?" said Paul. "I mean, you've got favorite record albums, for example, and favorite paintings too no doubt, so you must be out of that stage, which seems to me like rather a negative and destructive stage."

"Yes, I'm out of the extreme throw-away stage, which you describe as negative, and it might seem crazy to most people, but I think there was method in that 'madness':

I'm now a Buddhist, you see, so I don't believe in having too many possessions in any case. I don't want to be driven around in a streetcar named ‘Desire’. I don't want to be on that treadmill: the wheel of life."

"Well, I'll be damned!" thought Paul, who was momentarily taken aback and lost for words. "Is that how it works? Is that how it all fits together?

But I've never even heard of anyone taking this stuff so seriously. I've heard plenty of sophomore jive in college, and I think Zen Buddhism is the favorite stamping ground of bullshit artists, who are out to embellish their phony image of themselves."

"I've seen the cost to my father." she said. "He spends his whole life grubbing after money. He owns three houses in the United States and hasn't set foot in even one of them for at least two years, because he's always busy working. He says he's working for our financial future, but we don't even use half the stuff his money has already bought us. All he ever does is work and worry. Thoreau said it so well:

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Do you like race?"

Paul was confused. "Does that mean: do I like people of different races, as opposed to being racially prejudiced? Surely not!" Paul struggled to make sense of her question, but without success. His frantic reasoning could lead him nowhere but into a quagmire of garbled nonsense.

"I thought it might be nice for a midnight snack," she said, "but I can cook something else if you prefer?"

"Oh rhoyce!" The penny had finally dropped. It was her accent he couldn't understand. "Why, of course. I love rice! My father cooks it all the time."

While she cooked their midnight snack, Paul asked to use the toilet--or the ‘restroom’ as they euphemistically refer to it over in the United States.

It was while he was seated, on the throne, that he felt a great and comforting sense of well being. But it wasn’t a sense of relief, which might result from unburdening oneself of the body’s natural waste.

No it was quite different. He felt safe and secure. He felt he was in rather than out, and that made all the difference in the world. He felt like the spy who had come in from the cold. The outside world could not intrude into these private rooms. Time would stop. Nothing else could ever matter. He was out of the gutter, clean and dry, and basking in a golden glow of warmth and wellbeing.

"I'm in. I'm on the inside. I am now her confidant no less; the bosom friend to whom she can confide all and sundry, the special anointed one, the one she trusts. I am the listener extraordinaire--I could have been a sounding board if I do say so myself, in all modesty.

I will listen and pay attention like no one else can, because she is surely so special and fine--a rare gem of innocence and candor. Girls like her don't just grow on trees

. . . just think, three houses, her daddy must be loaded."

When the rice was all cooked and ready to eat, Patina brought it into the living room, where Paul was now located once more. He was perusing her music albums. The race was nace, was worth twace the prace: he liked rice in general, but liked it especially when she cooked it for him, because it made him feel--not exactly loved but accepted by her, and this made him feel safe and secure.

But after the rice was consumed, and in view of how very late it now was, Paul was becoming concerned about overstaying his welcome. He was quick to imagine such things, being as thin-skinned as he was. He would have to leave soon, he felt, but there was one thing he was determined to do before he left:

He would kiss her even if she didn't like it. He would do it anyway and she would just have to live with it. He felt certain she didn't want him to kiss her.

When Tina took the plates back to the kitchen, he followed her closely. He placed his left hand awkwardly on the small of her back. Having mustered the courage to assume this degree of physical intimacy, he didn’t want it to become an abortive attempt, and so he tried hard not to take his hand away. However, once committed to this course of action, he was obliged to walk very close behind her, which also necessitated his moving in synchronized step with her to avoid kicking the backs of her legs or heels. In consequence, Tina was smiling with amusement and Paul was feeling more and more like a gauche imbecile the further they traveled in that ungainly tandem configuration.

It seemed to take forever before she stopped at the kitchen table, put the plates down and turned around. She was wearing a very warm and affectionate smile.

"Before I go," said Paul, "I wanted to--"

"Oh yes." she said, and her mouth came straight up to his before he could utter another syllable. He kissed and kissed her. He kissed her mouth, her face, her ears, and her hair. Then he looked at her pretty face and into her eyes, and her mouth came up to meet him again. And they wrapped their arms around one another.

Paul was just reeling, feeling he could easily fall faint and flat on his face on the floor, but this sensation of losing himself felt so positive and good. Holding her close to him sent a faint tingling of electricity up and down his spine.

And she smelled so wonderful--like a flower. But it wasn't a store-bought perfume: it was her own natural body scent, and it was so sweet and so wonderful.

Paul felt almost lost in a fantastic, ecstatic dream--almost, but not quite; because, in spite of everything, he remained persistently and stubbornly apologetic: "I hope I'm not overdoing this." He said, to which her mouth responded immediately by coming up to meet him once again, and it would reassure and quiet him.

They remained locked together like that for an indeterminate period of time, after which Patina broke free of his embrace, walked away from him and into her bedroom.

Paul followed her curiously and found her stretched out supine on a queen-size bed. It was the most comfortable one she had in the house--the one in her main bedroom.

She smiled affectionately and invitingly at him. He took his place beside her, where they devoted another four delightful hours to kissing, just kissing and nothing more--as if that wasn't enough. It was more than enough.

*

Paul read Patina's book with considerable interest. It seemed obvious the boy in the story hated his parents and was withdrawing from them into the secret world of snow as a means of escape from the hostility and lack of love within the family.

Paul knew a psychiatric nurse from night school who, as it happened, was currently working at the University of Sydney.

"What's the score on autistic children?" he asked. "Is it just that their mothers are cold and unable to love them?"

"That's a crock," said Robert, "I've met the nicest people--wonderful mothers, who were told by some whacko psychiatrist that their child's autism was due directly to a lack of love and warmth on their part, even though they had other children who are perfectly normal.

Those autistic kids are head-bangers, for crying out loud. They are grossly and congenitally brain-damaged. They are vegetables, and vegetables can't respond to love and affection even when it's given in abundance."

"Well," thought Paul, "Tina is no kind of vegetable, so that's reassuring to hear; there shouldn't be any serious problems."

*

And there were no apparent problems either--on the contrary, their relationship was growing like a hothouse plant. From friends at school, to movies, to late nights filled with words and kisses, to whole days spent together:

I arrived at her door late Sunday morn.

The clothes she wore had been contrived:

Every shade of blue that could adorn

Was worn with blue above each eye.

Her contact lenses were tinted blue--

At the zoo she wore the tinted green,

Like a beauty queen in a single hue,

From caesius through to ultramarine.

Her long blond hair and light golden skin

Did win when blue and green did wear,

And fair was she with winsome grin

And sparkle in perceptive stare.

I wore a coat and tie with pin,

A thin black tie around my throat.

To connote my learning was hair on chin

Akin to Van Dyke beard of goat.

The navy-blue coat was almost black,

The shoes and socks black, the shirt bright blue,

And beige in hue were pants off the rack,

For Jack had planned what Jill did too.

Patina was dressed like a hippie princess. There was no evidence at all of the unkempt grubbiness, which Paul tended to associate with hippies. Her clothes were not only spotlessly clean, but the color combinations were beautiful to the point of being spectacular, and they made the outfit she was wearing this day look more like a theatrical costume than regular clothes. She had native-Amerindian designs on her belt in various shades of blue, and also on the ribbon she used so much to border the edges of her clothing. She wore a necklace and earrings too of an Amerindian design.

Paul had been very cynical about hippies in the past, but his attitude was undergoing a process of rapid transformation.

"Wow!" he exclaimed. "What a beautiful, dazzling outfit. It’s the work of a true artist, and that’s for sure. The colors just blend together perfectly."

"I plan them that way." she said, with a devious smirk on her face, to suggest she might have been able to put one over on Paul by making him think the colors were simply random and accidental combinations. "It sometimes takes me quite a while to lay everything out and get it all to match."

"I guess it takes quite a few items of blue clothing too." he said, taking her in his arms by way of a belated greeting, and they kissed and held each other for a time.

"Would you like a drink?" she asked, leading him toward the kitchen.

"Why sure."

"Which one would you like?" she asked, opening the refrigerator door to display an array of brightly-colored lolly water.

"Any one at all will do just fine." he said, casually.

Patina clenched her teeth and screwed her face up as if in response to someone scraping their fingernails on a blackboard.

"But you must make a decision!" she declared, beseechingly. Her face was fraught with distress and dissonance, and her words were spoken in a tone of deadly earnest.

Paul was confused and taken aback. He wondered where she was coming from. But puzzled as he was, he nevertheless felt a twinge of guilt at the insensitivity he may have displayed by failing to exercise due deliberation in choosing one of her special drinks. And for some strange reason the phrase "Naughty Daddy" entered his mind.

"I'll try a green one!" he said, having affected a thoughtful expression for twenty seconds or so in the hope this would serve to convey the semblance of a considered choice.

That did in fact suffice to put her mind at rest, and it filled her face once more with good humor and equanimity. She poured some of the green liquid into a glass and handed it to him. He sipped at it tentatively while she searched his face for feedback, after which they entered her living room.

"My father wanted me to go to the Australian National University (A.N.U.) in Canberra," she said, "but I chose the U.S. instead because I preferred the combination of subjects they offered."

"You'd never ever see him, or your mother either, if you were studying all the way down there, would you?"

"No, but I don't see them much anyway, and I do most things on my own. I went to Hawaii by myself last February--but it was no fun, because the sailors never stopped trying to pick me up. I guess they thought I was fair game because I was on my own, but it was really quite unpleasant because they were hounding me, just as if I was a fox at a foxhunt.

They absolutely spoiled my holiday, because I had to spend two weeks in a hotel room watching TV . . . though, admittedly, I did some artwork while I was there, but I could have done that anywhere."

"Some guys have the morals of alley cats or worse!" said Paul, sympathetically. Then he thought: "But they are not on the inside like me. They are not special or privileged like me, to have been allowed into her confidence, into her home, into her arms, into her queen-size bed."

"I spent a year alone in Minnesota without seeing my parents. That was my entire freshman year. They moved to Australia in a hurry because the previous CEO of the Australian division of Plutonic Petrochemicals died from a sudden and massive heart attack. My father was given about five minutes notice to get packed and get over here."

"And you don't have any brothers or sisters--it must get lonely for you sometimes."

"I don't have any brothers or sisters, but I have a cousin I'm close to. He's about eighteen months younger than I am. He used to visit me from time to time. I'd hear a knock on the door and I'd go and check it out and there he'd be on the doorstep grinning and saying: ‘Hi, Kid’--he used to call me that."

Paul felt she wanted him too to address her as ‘Kid’--that she had just invited him to do so, not with spoken words but with tone of voice, facial expression and body language. If that was true, then, by inference, she was also inviting him to assume an increased level of intimacy between them.

But he felt he should not begin doing this immediately, because it might lay bare her cryptic invitation and this might easily cause her to become self-conscious or embarrassed. He felt it was most important that he should do this, but he also felt it was even more important that he should do it with subtlety. But he would do it for sure and just as soon as he thought prudent.

"But I really don't get lonely." she continued. "I can get very involved in my painting and in reading, and I think I'm used to being alone anyway because, as an only child, it has always been the norm for me to be alone.

As an introvert, too I find I don't need company. I'm very self-sufficient. Introverts are like that I think, because they ask for nothing, they expect nothing, they depend on nothing."

"That's exactly how she described a black crow." thought Paul, who didn't wish to say anything pointed or argumentative, nor did he wish to appear to be questioning her or cross-examining her in any way.

"But a black crow might be just her idiosyncratic terminology, might be just another name for an introvert." he thought, and this seemed to be confirmed by what she said next:

"I read a book called The Introvert, and it said an introvert has the potential to become a superior human being provided he doesn't succumb to schizophrenia."

"A superior human being--just think of that!" said Paul. "But I'm an introvert, and I wonder sometimes what advantage there can possibly be in being so sensitive and nervous and highly strung, because that's what introversion means to me.

I've often wondered whether it isn't actually a defect condition, and I wonder why there are significant numbers of introverts when, by the theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest, the introverts should have been removed from the population a long time ago."

"Emily Dickinson found it very difficult to interact with people," said Tina, "and she became an almost total recluse, but she also felt most people were not good enough to associate with in any case, so she had a defiant sense of her own worth rather than inferiority feelings."

Those words struck a chord in Paul's mind. He had always been ashamed of his introversion--consciously at least-- ashamed of being awkward, timid, and trodden under foot. But her last statement connected with something deep inside him.

"Hey! I bet I can beat you at Indian wrestling." she said, stretching out prone on the carpet. Paul was surprised that she was tomboy enough to want to do something like that, since, in his humble opinion, there was virtually no possibility of her winning:

I was four inches taller, weighed forty pounds more,

And she seemed to ignore that I was a man.

But we clasped our hands stretched out on the floor

Where she strained each pore as we began.

In vain she heaved like mule or horse,

With force in proportion to stress over strain,

And against the grain she hoped to endorse

That Tarzan wasn't stronger than Jane.

But it wasn't quite working out that way in reality. Her best and most strenuous efforts had come to naught. Paul had subjected her to ignominious defeat time and again.

She was heating up rapidly from her many exertions and yet she was not one to give up . . . And why should she when her persistence and relentless energy had paid off so often in the past. She had the expectation it might pay off once more. And, sure enough, she was beginning to wear him down. Paul was growing so tired of the proceedings, he hoped to put an end to them by rolling over onto his back. But that was not an entirely successful maneuver.

"Let’s have a real wrestle!" she said, quickly coming to sit on his stomach. She grabbed his wrists with her hands and pinned his arms down against the floor.

She was filled with a cocky competitiveness and indomitable confidence--which formed a marked contrast to her public persona, which was often constrained to the highest degree.

He pretended to resist her by raising his arms a foot or so off the floor, but then let them drop back down again in apparent defeat. It made him feel good to let her win, and it made him feel good in any case to have her sitting on him.

He felt like a deviously fiendish frateur, ensconced in a fabulously fortunate frottage. Bouncing her around was horse- play with a difference, and the floor was now a delightful playground.

In this spirit of fun and games, Paul began to affect a cowboy accent:

"'Just wok on bay, de dong de dong dong, wait on the coroner.' Have you heard that song--that song about the autopsy?" He broke out in a fit of giggling.

"Are you trying to make fun of my accent?" she asked, laughing heartily and tickling him to make him giggle all the more. "Well, we don't talk like Texans in Minnesota, you know, and we certainly don't talk like cowboys in Minneapolis. I’ve heard Australia is exactly the same as America-- exactly the same as America was twenty years ago. Well, many a true word spoken in jest, ha, ha, ha."

"But we are with it down-under. We are abreast of the times. We are even trendsetters. We have done most everything down here already."

"Have you ever dropped acid?" she asked.

"Sure, quite a number of times." said Paul.

"Really!" she said, in amazement. "You don't seem like the type to me."

"Hell yes, I've dropped acid plenty of times--I've dropped acetyl salicylic acid since I was about seven or eight." His tone was one of boastful bravado, then he began to giggle.

"Ah, har, har," she said, sarcastically, "acetyl salicylic acid is just ordinary aspirin, and that doesn't count. Real acid is LSD, is lysergic acid diethylamide."

She had stretched the three-syllable term, LSD, to its full and unabbreviated length of ten syllables.

Paul then repeated her full-length enunciation, except that he added a twist: he re-stated it in pairs of syllables and by accenting the second syllable of each pair. At the same time, he brought his legs up so his thighs would prod her backside. And, in synchronization with each syllable uttered, he prodded her alternately, first with his left thigh and then with his right:

"Lie sir jick kass id eye eth ill uh mide." he said, prodding and bouncing her up and down.

"Part of that sounds like ‘thalidomide’ when you pronounce it like that." she said, looking disheveled enough to remind Paul of a bronco-busting rodeo rider.

"It's iambic pentameter. Any ten-syllable word can be pronounced in iambic pentameter."

"Oh really!" she said, in a tone of enacted anger. "So what would you do in the case of a twelve-syllable word?"

"In that case one could resort to pronouncing it in dactylic tetrameter," he said, smugly, "and that would be a very simple solution to an only slightly difficult problem."

"Well, I should just beat you up!" she said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. "I should just beat you up for being such a big show off." She pushed her arms down hard to pin Paul's hands down to the floor, then she took the pressure off and sat up straight--her mood had suddenly changed.

"You know," she said, in a serious tone of voice, "you can be beaten up just for using big words. A friend of mine had that experience. He's an assistant professor in philosophy, and he was traveling cross-country with a couple of friends.

They stopped at this roadhouse--a truck stop with a pool- room. There were truckers, bikers, red necks and cowboys--a pretty rough crowd. The Prof. somehow got into an argument with some of these guys--a debate really--and he started using his usual twenty-dollar words.

Well, they beat him up real good, and he felt sure it was the big words; that they had reacted to them almost like a bull is said to react to a red flag."

Paul was suddenly and unexpectedly thunderstruck. What she had just said was nothing less than mind-blowing in terms of the personal significance it held for him, and it had all happened so quickly and it had come to him seemingly from out of the clear blue sky.

It was like a grenade had exploded and blown a hole through the roof of a cave. And this hole was allowing a brilliant illuminating light to penetrate the darkness beneath. He was a troglodyte who was so used to living in a cave he didn't even know it was dark, or didn't truly know what darkness was until he saw it contrasted with the light, which was now staring him in his face:

"My stammering," he thought, "it's caused by my need to censor big words. Yes, that's exactly how it operates. I can talk normally until I come to a big word, which I can't use because it's taboo for me; so I censor it, I stop, then I have to start a complete new sentence. Then I get all tongue-tied and confused, which, in turn makes me nervous and self-conscious . . . but only with men and not with women . . . I guess because I'm not scared they'll beat me up.

Good God almighty, what is this? It’s like a secret world within a world. Am I a sleepwalker living in some sort of dream world? Yes! That's exactly it: the supposed real world is actually a dream world, and the oblivious world of the subconscious is actually the real world."

"Hey, you're a million miles away." she said, in protest at the lack of attention he was showing her and with a frown so glum upon her face.

Paul felt a sharp sense of guilt at having neglected the one he held in true and highest esteem. An impression of neglect and disrespect was not an impression he cared to make--on the contrary, he wanted to come back to her just as quickly as he could, so he suddenly stretched his arms out wide to the maximum extent.

Because their hands and fingers were interlocked, this also forced Patina's arms wide apart, and had the fortunate consequence of bringing her head suddenly right down to where he could steal a kiss. He then wrapped his arms around her. She did likewise and they began to kiss passionately.

He opened his eyes and looked at her admiringly. He was still incredulous as to the flawlessness of her skin, the loveliness of her golden hair, and the perfection of her Hollywood smile.

Her teeth were sparkling, pearly white.

Her sight was shrouded underneath.

The reef-blue eyelids that invite

A flight of kisses to bequeath.

Her eyes, now blue, were natural gray,

Her body scent so delicately sweet,

As fresh and natural as new-mown hay

But with subtle pheromones replete.

They immersed themselves in the delightful intimacy of necking for maybe three hours--a mere warm up for later that night. They kissed until they got hungry. Then they went into the kitchen for coffee and a snack.

Tina was in the bathroom when, at about 6:p.m., the telephone rang. Paul was sitting right next to it in the living room, and, on impulse, picked up the receiver. It was in that very instant he realized he shouldn't have; he realized he had made an error in judgement, and perhaps even a serious one, but by then it was too late.

"You imbecile, what have you done now?" said his critical inner voice. But he had passed the point of no return. He couldn't just hang up, he would have to answer it, he was committed now to a course of action and he would have to follow it through regardless of where that might lead him.

But after a brief delay, during which time he said nothing, the party at the other end began speaking first:

"Patina, this is your mother, are you there? Are you coming home?"

"Hello, this is Paul, I'm a friend of Patina's from college. She's in the bathroom right now, but I can take a message if you like, or you can wait a while till she gets out if you prefer. She should be out presently."

His words were somewhat stilted--perhaps due to nervousness--but he was also feeling pangs of guilt. Exactly what he was guilty of he couldn't rightly say, but that had never stopped him from feeling guilty before in any case, so it certainly wasn't going to stop him now.

"She's a great lairdle keird!" said the mother with the loud imposing voice and the enormous American accent. "She calls me nearly every week. You know, I can honestly say she has never caused me the slightest little bit of trouble ever, and I can tell you there aren't many around like that nowadays.

You will have to come for dinner. I'm not sure when we can arrange it, but I'll let Patina know. Just tell her, her mom rang. She doesn't have to call back. We'll see you sometime in the near future." With that much said Mom hung up the phone.

Paul was very relieved--no, he was more than relieved: he was actually very happy indeed with the outcome of a sequence of events he could not have foreseen even moments before: that his interference would lead to something positive--an invitation to meet her folks.

His tone of voice, however, was strangely and defensively apologetic when he broached the subject with Patina. It was almost like he was trying to explain himself or justify his actions:

"Your mother just called. I picked up the phone on impulse. Perhaps I shouldn't have? She said you didn't have to call her back."

"Oh yes, I heard the phone . . . Umm, that's okay." Her tone of voice was casual. "I'll pick out some albums to play. I'll put a stack on so they'll last maybe a couple of hours or so."

Patina set things up accordingly and they adjourned to her queen-size bed. She reclined supine to lay back in eager anticipation of his loving arms. Paul took his place beside her, which was something he was now habitually prone to do.

Their arms entwined in a firm embrace. Touching like that, chest to chest would send electricity right through his body and out to his extremities, and the sensation was intense enough to be almost physically painful. It was heavenly and ecstatic too, and yet it gave him such a helpless, hankering feeling, and a sense of losing himself in her arms.

They surrendered themselves to the delightful intimacy of mouths and bodies merging, of hands rubbing over shoulders and backs. Paul could just hear the faint buzz of hippie music in the background. He was beginning to like hippie music more and more.

Gradually over a couple of hours, as they became ever more passionately and deeply ensconced in these proceedings, Tina would begin to make whimpering sounds like a tiny, blind puppy dog, and this made her seem like a helpless little baby.

And she held his hand, but her grip was a strangely contorted kind of clinging, clasping and clutching:

Her hand was bent at the wrist and to the maximum extent, she held on clumsily and tenuously to just one or sometimes two of his fingers, and she maintained that same ungainly, palsied grip for all of an hour at a time or more.

The words of an old Peter, Paul and Mary song sprang to Paul's mind: "Way down yonder in the meadow, poor little baby crying Mamma."

Patina appeared to lose herself and become totally immersed in and absorbed by what they were doing. It was more than just the pleasure to be derived from kissing or necking. It seemed vital to her in a manner reminiscent of mouth to mouth resuscitation or a blood transfusion or maybe even kidney dialysis:

Her senses centered on that vital infusion.

All else was lost to sweet abandon.

Her cares and woe, her fear and confusion

Were drained from her like spooks in tandem.

They stopped for a coffee break around 1:00 a.m., and then went back to work--it was in fact beginning to resemble a day's work, at least in terms of the latter's typical eight-hour duration. The ‘work’ continued then until 4:a.m., at which point Paul was forced to take his leave.

"I have to go, Kid!" he said, addressing her that way for the very first time.

This induced a blissfully irrepressible smile in her, and yet it was a smile beset by embarrassment. She dug her chin into her neck in a futile attempt to hide her face from him. It seemed as if she had become constrained by self-consciousness all of a sudden because she didn't want him to see the sheer strength and effusiveness of her feelings. But her face was an open book to an ingratiator's look:

Ingratiator's read faces, you see. They must do that in order to protect themselves from the disapproval and wrath of people, who are more aggressive than they are; which, in Paul's case, was almost everyone.

He needed constant feedback to see how he was coming across with other people, and he could slant a conversation in whatever direction would meet with the good-humored approval of the other party.

Such chameleon-like behavior might be viewed as unprincipled cowardice by some, and it certainly has a downside; but, by the law of compensation, it must also have an upside. The upside consists of an enhanced sensibility, which is, arguably, a more than adequate compensation.

"I have to go home!" he said. "I wasn't expecting to be here so late. I have to pick up an assignment and get it back to school by 9:00 a.m. There's no way I can get around it."

She let him go, and he headed off into the pre-dawn darkness to walk the two-mile journey that would get him to the railway station, from where he could catch the early morning train that would take him home.

"I don't think I'll get much sleep tonight, but who cares about sleep or anything else. Who gives a damn when everything is just so wonderful!

I've never had such a beautiful girl give me as much as the time of day before, let alone want to kiss me for hours and hours and hours. Isn't it wonderful! What a smashing girl she is. What a gorgeous gifted girl!"

Paul was high as a kite, but he was quite correct about getting little or no sleep. It would end up being a bare hour and a half, and he dreamed ferociously the whole time:

His dream commenced on a familiar theme: He was wandering once again through the downtown squalor of the inner city. It was night. He came upon a building, which caught his particular attention. It was actually a series of old, derelict buildings, which were mostly only one or two stories high, and they were linked together in a circular fashion like a stockade.

The main entrance was a wide opening in this circular wall of old buildings, which had a covered archway with a sign incorporated into it. The sign was made of large, three-dimensional letters, which read:

"THE MANUAL LABOR WILL SET YOU FREE."

"Is that right?" thought Paul. "Is that from the bible

. . . no, it's the truth--the truth will set you free. I'm sure that's what the bible says."

Paul headed for the invoicing office, which was located just to the left of, and conveniently close to, the main entrance. It was a place where truck drivers might have their paperwork checked and certified upon entering or leaving.

Paul had his eighth-grade report card with him--the one, which showed him placed second-last in every single subject. He had it folded open at the ready in anticipation that it would soon be needed.

He came to the door, and with all his courage mustered, was just able to suppress a nervous cough.

"Seize the day." he said to himself. "Seize the bull by the horns."

He knocked quite noisily and entered immediately. A man of Asian appearance was seated at a desk. He looked up in surprise at Paul. That man was none other than Pol Pot, leader of the Khemer Rouge.

"Pardon my boldness, Pol, but my name too is Paul--is almost the same as yours I'm proud to say. I come here like this at the risk of your displeasure, because I feel it is my destiny to serve you."

He handed the report card to Pol, who read it with more than apparent interest but real and genuine pleasure.

"Ah hah, every subject the same--you are special boy!" said Pol, grinning from ear to ear with a smile so effusive and disarmingly jovial it made Paul feel very safe and reassured. "I like your style. You are decisive flunky.

I shall make you officer. Here are lieutenant's stripes. Take them through that doorway at end of hall, and they will issue you with uniform, gun and assignment."

Paul bowed in gracious acknowledgment of the favor bestowed upon him, then turned and quickly took his leave.

"I think it worked. I think I got away with it!" he thought, even though he could sense the heat of a dragon's breath down the back of his neck. He was walking in the direction of the doorway and feeling a reckless sense of excitement, which was heavily admixed with fear.

Through the doorway he met a woman who was standing behind a counter. She was in charge of the quartermaster's store. It was Madam Qing, of the infamous Gang of Four, and she was issuing clothes and equipment.

She gave Paul a khaki uniform, a red polka-dot scarf and an assault rifle. She then proceeded to give him his basic orientation and instructions:

"The school teachers and librarians must work in the laundry, the engineers and architects must work digging ditches with pick and shovel, the brain surgeons and professors must clean the toilets, etc. etc. etc . . . unnerstand:

The really smartest ones must be treated worst of all."

"So these people are actually very smart?" asked Paul, inquisitively.

"NO! NOT SMART!" she screamed, her face going almost purple with rage. "They only think they smart. But they are not smart. They are just geeks, and they are stupid, because they are always reading books so they can fill their heads with trivia. But trivia is worthless, is smallness, is nothing: that’s why geeks are nothing."

Paul thought it prudent to say no more, so he tiptoed away from her and headed through the next doorway to begin work. In that next room he found a man in his late fifties who had been badly beaten.

His spectacles were so badly cracked that his continuing to wear them seemed pointless. In terms of clothing, he was wearing a long-sleeved white business shirt that was all dirty and torn, and nothing else. He was lying in filth and debris on a damp concrete floor.

It was none other than Harry Westergard-- his old high school headmaster. Paul had never been overly fond of that pompous old bastard but seeing him now in his abject nakedness and degradation he felt a heart-rending pity for him.

Old Harry had always been far from perfect, it's true, but he didn't deserve to be treated with this kind of brutality either.

"Don't be afraid." said Paul, on seeing Harry cringe at his approach. "I've come to get you out of here."

"Paul Van Zandt--it's you! I remember you well. You know, I never meant to be so hard on you in school, but after you came first in math I checked your exam papers; and, after seeing all the working, I knew you hadn't cheated. I then checked your IQ scores and found yours was one of the highest in the school.

That made me so mad, because I know plenty of kids who really try hard and they just can't get the grades because they don't have the talent. You had a gifted brain but you just wouldn't use it. I thought your under-achieving was due simply to laziness or sheer perversity, and that made me so angry.

But I didn't understand. I was just too stupid. I now know you were hiding your light under a bushel, and I also finally understand why."

"Just take it easy on yourself. There's no need to feel guilty. You really don't deserve any of this."

"But I've learned so much in here--more than I've learned in twenty years of teaching: Pol Pot said, 'Come forward. All is forgiven. If you have a college degree or can speak French, we will find a special place for you in the new order.'

I went forward like a blind fool and began to brag and boast: 'I not only have a degree,' I said, 'I have an honors degree, and my French is better than excellent, if I do say so myself in all modesty.'

They shook my hand and offered congratulations, smiling all the while. Then their smiles changed gradually and became sarcastic, then sardonic. They then stood in a circle around me and began pushing me from one to another to another.

Then they began beating me, first just with fists but then with sticks and stones--they beat the hell out of me! Pol Pot then said I should be killed without further ado, but Madam Qing said I should be spared because I am really only a mediocre intellect.

Ho Chi Mhin then said he would kick all of the ethnic Chinese out of Vietnam even if it meant war with Red China; he said they are not a useful middle class but an exploiting class of Bourgeois parasites.

Pol Pot said Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus both had the wrong technique for dealing with the educated elite.

But, Paul, you understood this all along. You were way ahead of me. You are so much smarter than I am."

"Well, I didn't really understand it. It's been a mystery to me for most of my somnambulistic life. I just sort of sensed it on a very deep visceral or intuitive level . . . but enough talk--it's time to get you the hell out of here. Take my old civilian clothes and put them on. Can you see at all through those broken glasses?"

"Not worth a damn."

"Then you will have to walk behind me and hang on to my belt. I will try to walk at an even pace and not too quickly."

Paul and Harry set off in tandem and, with Paul up front and Harry in tow they journeyed to and through the next doorway. In that next room they found Patina. She was on her knees and bound by hand and foot. A teenage girl wearing black pajamas was in the process of placing a plastic bag over Tina's head with the obvious intention of suffocating her. In seeing Paul's weapon pointed at her in anger, the girl responded in agitated surprise and protest:

"But, but, but, but," she blurted out, "but this one has IQ one-fifty."

Paul forced the teenager to lie face down on the floor. He rested the gun barrel in the middle of her back.

"Hold this gun in place, Harry, and let her have it if she tries anything."

Paul then untied Patina, and used those same ropes to tie up the girl in black, and he used the plastic bag to gag her so she would be unable to cry out and warn the others.

In less than a jiffy, the three of them had escaped, and were seated in a train carriage in metropolitan Sydney.

Paul looked at Patina in deadly earnest and said, "Don't you understand?" Then he began walking around the carriage addressing all the passengers: "Don't you understand? GOOD GOD! Don't any of you understand? It's time to wake up and smell the coffee."

"Don't you understand," said Paul's mother, shaking him furiously, "you simply have to get up or you'll miss your train--you've barely got time for a cup of coffee."

Paul felt all of the fearsome fatigue of a narcoleptic zombie. With a singular effort of will, he dragged himself out of bed, got dressed, had half a cup of coffee and a slice of toast, and he was off and running to the railway station like his very life depended on it--just as he had done so many times before.

"What a dream!" he thought, as he seated himself inside the train carriage. It took him a minute or so to catch his breath. "It was so vivid, and the meaning of it seems pretty much clear and obvious:

That highly intelligent people can be the target of malicious envy, and so it pays to keep your clever self safely hidden away from view."

"Well," said his critical inner voice, "that's some kind of fanciful notion, but there is a flaw in your line of reasoning, which makes all of this purely, simply and totally irrelevant; namely: you are not clever.

You barely scraped through with a pass last year in math. To become a physicist you will need a high distinction or at least a distinction in math. You won't even get a credit. You could easily fail outright!

It is the absolute summit of absurdity that you should be trying so compulsively to hide the high intelligence, which you don't even have in the first place."

"My IQ tests say I'm gifted in everything, including math. But I simply can't handle the higher math, so I guess it's true what they say: IQ tests are not a valid measure of intelligence."

"You are good at doing IQ tests, but you can't handle the higher math, and that's probably why you are studying so many stupid discrepant subjects like ethology, taxonomy, biochemistry, psychology, mathematics and physics. You will be a jackass of all trades and master of none!"

"Yes, but without those stupid discrepant subjects, I wouldn't now be so comfortably ensconced in Patina's affections."

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