THE INFORMATION

She thanked him. Richard had skimmed Double Dating: Yes and No, Lucy's how-to book about not getting raped by all your friends. He had agreed with her arguments, while simultaneously wondering why anyone would need to hear them. Who could explain the fact that "My Way" was the anthem of modern America? Americans didn't want to do it their way. They wanted to do it your way.

"I'm actually traveling with Gwyn while he's touring here. I'm writing it up. We're very old pals. Yes, we shared rooms at Oxford. Scholarship boys. I came up from London, and there he was, fresh in from the Welsh valleys."

"How romantic."

"Romantic? Yes. Well."

"I'm sorry. I'm a disgusting Anglophile."

"He was from Wales, not England," said Richard, who thought it extraordinary that Anglophilia was still staggering around the place. "Imagine it as something like Puerto Rico."

"Even more romantic."

"Romantic? Well, Gwyn was certainly a ferocious … A 'ladies' man' is I suppose a polite way of putting it."

"Really?"

"A very polite way of putting it," he said, realizing that he was about

to get carried away. "Let's go and sit over there. Let's get a drink. You'll

need it."

Richard had not, so far, found much to do in Washington, which was only the center of the world. All afternoon he reclined on his hotel bedin a trance of cunning. While Gwyn had done four photo sessions and six interviews in a variety of mediums, while also finding time to visit the Phillips Collection, the Senate, the Library of Congress, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard had succeeded only in washing his hair. Oh yes. And in throwing in a call to the Lazy Susan (this was arduous), where he was eventually told that they had two copies of Untitled in stock. Washing his hair was no formality either. Again he found himself riveted to the bathroom mirror, immersed in the question of how the same human being could look so bald and so shaggy. In the end, after a visit to the pharmacy, he smothered himself in mousses and conditioners. It hadn't worked out, and, for the time being at least, Richard's hair was basically in deep shit… He made his own way to the party. Because of the weather, or the zone system, his cab kept picking up new passengers, all orphans of the loosening Milky Way, all starred and kissed by the six-faceted snowflakes. Richard sat zestlessly in the back while the driver idled them all over town, along the unbarricadable boulevards, through the bare snowfields of American history; the cab glass creaked to the sharp switches of the winds, but the many-eyed Capitol seemed to loom no bigger however close you got to it; they did Georgetown, the Hill, Du Pont Circle, following the city's large design which was accessible only to a higher being. He climbed out at last, in the embassy district. And Gwyn was there to greet him at the door.

"There's probably a medical term for it now," Richard was saying. "Satyromania or some such."

"Well he has a certain style," Lucy said tolerantly. "And all those pretty students . .."

"Oh no. It wasn't with the students. All those little paragons from Somerville and St. Hilda's. With as many O-levels as freckles on their noses. No no. He'd never get the turnover he needed. It wasn't the students. No." Richard paused and said, "It was the college servants that friend Barry looked to for his sport."

Lucy frowned: a small frown under her dark ringlets. As a parting gesture, Richard conjured up a genuine memory from his first year at Oxford: himself, crashing in at two in the morning, after some debauch in some bedsit at the secretarial school, to find Gwyn, in his earphone sideburns, still bent over his books, inching down that long road toward his bad Second. Every other weekend Gilda would bus herself in from Swansea. She used to cower in the little bedroom. On Sunday mornings, after breakfast in Hall, Gwyn would bring a bun back for her hidden in his pocket. She liked marmalade. Anyway, marmalade was what she got.

"He was notorious for the way he went after the scullery maids. Inthose days, the college servants, or 'gyps' as we used to call them-unbelievable, isn't it?-were almost slave labor. They were sacked en masse at the beginning of the long vacation and hired in the autumn, after a summer of breadlines and doss houses. So if a young gentleman wanted to take advantage …" Richard moved his head upward and sideways, in pained recollection. "There was one particularly unfortunate incident involving a kitchen maid of barely sixteen. A touching-looking girl. Dark ringlets. Just a child, really. Some said she was a Gypsy girl-a foundling." Richard tried to pull himself together. His eyes were stinging at his own fiction. "Gwyn … Gwyn and one of his fellow bloods contracted a wager. I'll spare you the details. Gwyn won, but his friend- Trelawney his name was-refused to pay up. A matter of a few guineas."

"Guineas?" said Lucy Cabretti.

"A unit of currency. Favored by gamblers." He lurched on, raising his voice. "And so Gwyn forced Trelawney's hand. He nailed up her-he nailed up a section of her underwear onto the notice board of the Junior Common Room. With full details of the hazard."

"Then what? Trelawney pays up, right? Pays Gwyn the gwyn-the guineas. How much is a guinea?"

"Twenty-one shillings." He thought it had probably been a mistake about the guineas.

Lucy folded her arms and sighed. She said, "You know, your story is really hard to believe."

"Oh? Why's that?"

"He seems so nice and normal. And his books. That Amelior stuff. He writes like such a whuss."

"A what?"

"You know. A real pooch. As if all he wanted to do was not offend anybody. I mean it's pleasant enough, that stuff, but it's just dead."

Richard was happy and proud. But he could see that he didn't need to waste any more time on Lucy Cabretti. He stood up, saying, "It's been nice talking to you. And I hope you like that review."

"Thanks. You too. Wait. What happened to the girl?"

"What girl?"

"The serving girl. The foundling."

He paused. He actually had one foot in the air-about to begin its ponderous journey to the door. Pregnancy? Prison? Thrown out into the wind and the rain, naked, without a groat to her name? But she thought Gwyn's stuff was shit anyway, so all he said was, "Who knows? Once they've been used and cast aside-who knows what happens to these poor girls??

When he got back to the hotel Richard rang home and spoke to Lizzete, Marius and Marco, Gina being elsewhere … Then he sat down at the desk and coerced himself into facing up to something: biography. As he had long suspected, the ring road of his reviewing schedule was all freezing fog and black ice, all sideswipe and whiplash: he faced a catastrophe of deadlines. Richard was actually reviewing more books than ever before. It remained true that he was partly resuscitated as a novelist; but novels still showed no sign of earning him any money. This had taken a while-and many reminders from Gina-to sink in. He turned in his chair. Biographies were scattered . . . No. Biographies were stolidly installed around the room, each of them as heavy as a cinder block. Richard felt dizzy and that was strange, because he'd been very good at the party and had carefully counted his drinks: he'd had seventeen. There were several more biographies in his suitcase: his suitcase, which he would never unpack; his suitcase, gravid with heavy lives.

It was ten o'clock. Lucy Cabretti was home by now. And she, too, was reading. Richard was on page five of The Mercutio of Lincoln's Inn Fields: A Life of Thomas Betterton. Lucy was on page 168 of Come Be My Love. Within minutes she would finish Come Be My Love and would begin Magenta Rhapsody. Lucy read chain-store romances at a rate of three or four a day. This had no effect on the stern probity with which she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment; it did not color her speeches and lectures on economic equity; in no wise had it vitiated her non-anecdotal and dryly legalistic best-seller on sexual mores. But she read chain-store romances at the rate of three or four a day. Lucy was in bed, alone. Her handsome and sagacious boyfriend was in Philadelphia, visiting his sister. As she read on (with his cane, his snorting mastiff, Sir William was stalking Maria through the hayricks), her eyes swelled fearfully, and her hand sought her glowing throat. Maria was a serving girl, small, pretty, with dark ringlets.