"So you left college to join the army?"

"That's right. But later they... well, they decided to let me out early."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I guess I'm just not the soldier type. Not aggressive enough. Are you cold?" She had been sitting with her arms crossed over her breasts, holding her upper arms in her hands... the way she sometimes did when she was thinking about how small her breasts were. He reached across the table and touched her arm above the elbow. "You arecold."

"It's this air-conditioning. I don't know why they turn it up so high."

The refugees had been steadily thinning out, and now the family in the booth behind them left, the mother with the wet-mouthed baby in her arms, the father carrying one child and pulling a sleep-dazed little girl along by the hand, her untied shoes clopping on the floor. Soon the place would be empty, except for the night people.

She looked up at the clock above the counter. "Gee, it's after two. I've got work tomorrow." But she didn't rise to leave. He drew a deep sigh and stretched, and his foot touched hers beneath the table. He said, "Excuse me," and she said, "That's all right," and they both looked out the window at the empty street. She watched his eyes refocus to her reflection on the surface of the glass, and he smiled at her.

"What about you?" she asked. "Don't you have to be at work early?"

"No. I don't have what you'd call a steady job. I just drift from city to city. When I need money, I go to the public market before dawn and stand around with the rest of the drifters and winos. Job brokers come in trucks and pick out the youngest and strongest for a day's stoop labor. I almost always get picked, even though I'm not all that hefty. I give the foremen one of my boyish smiles, and they always pick me."

"It's true, you do have a boyish smile."

"And when the boyish smile doesn't work, I fall back on my 'look of intense sincerity'. That's a sure winner. Stoop labor only pays a buck or a buck ten an hour. But still, one thirteen— or fourteen-hour day gives me enough for a couple of days of freedom."

"But there's no future in that."

"What?No future? I've been tricked! They assured me that stoop labor was a sure path to riches, fame, success with the women, and a closer relationship with my personal savior. Gosh, maybe I'd better give it up and take a course in shorthand. The Gregg Method."

He meant to be amusing, but he evoked only a faint, fugitive smile. She didn't like being teased. She'd had a lot of teasing in her life.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't poking fun at you. If I was poking fun at anybody, it was myself. You are absolutely right! There's no future in stoop labor. I've got to start taking life seriously!" His eyes crinkled into a smile. "Maybe I'll start next Thursday. How would that be?"

She didn't answer for a time, then she said she really had to be getting home.

He nodded. "You want me to walk you? Or do you feel pretty safe in your Italian neighborhood?"

"What about you? Don't you have to get some sleep?"

"They won't let me in. It's too late. So I'll just roam the streets. Cities are interesting just before dawn when everything is quiet, except for the occasional distant siren announcing a fire, or a crime, or a birth-which is a sort of crime, considering the state of the world. There's something haunting about a distant siren. Like when you hear the whistle of a freight train at night, far off down in the valley, and you'd give anything in the world not to be the kind of..." He stopped speaking and his attention turned inward. He seemed to be listening to a distant freight train in his memory.

She cleared her throat softly. "Gee, it must be interesting to travel around on freight trains and see things. Lonely, I suppose. But interesting."

"Yup!" he said in Gary Cooper's lockjaw way. "Real interesting, ma'am. But real lonely, too."

She pushed her coffee mug aside. "I've really got to get some sleep." But she still didn't rise to go. "You said something about not being able to go to bed because they wouldn't let you in. Who won't let you in? Why not?"

"Obviously, you're not au faitwith the protocol of your friendly neighborhood flophouse. They're all pretty much the same. You sleep in wire cages that you can lock from the inside to protect your bindle from thieves and your body from men who— They're not exactly homosexuals. Most of them would rather have a woman. Most of them fantasize about women. But..." He shrugged and glanced at her to see if this was embarrassing her. But no. She was listening with a frown of concern, trying to understand with a total absence of coyness that he admired. "The flophouse routine is simple and rigid. You aren't allowed in until ten at night, and by eleven the lights are turned off. Early in the morning, usually five-thirty or six, the alarms go off and you've got half an hour to get out before they clean the place with a fire hose, shooting it through the wire cages. The mattresses are covered with waterproof plastic so they don't get soaked, but they always feel clammy, and the place always smells of urine and Lysol. But the price is right! Four bits a night. A dime more if you want a shower. Tonight I took a long cold shower, then I lay on my cot, reading a paperback until the lights went out. But it was so hot! The plastic mattress stuck to my back and made a sort of ripping sound every time I rolled over. And the sweat was stinging my eyes. So finally I decided to get out and wander the streets. But then..." He shifted to a Peter Lorre voice, nasal and lateral with dentalized consonants. "...what should I see but June Allyson coming out of a June Allyson movie, so naturally I followed her. You think that was evil of me, don't you, Rick. You don't like me much, do you, Rick." He smiled and returned to his street voice. "And now here I am, talking to a very, very sleepy girl in an almost empty White Tower. Ain't life a gas?"

She shook her head sadly. "Gosh, what a terrible way to live. And for a person who went to college, too."

He let W. C. Fields respond, "That's the way it is out there, my little chickadee. It's not a fit life for man nor beast!"

"You must be lonely."

"Yup," he said. "Sometimes a fella gets lonelier than one of those lonely things you see out there being lonely." Then he suddenly stopped clowning around. "I guess I'm nearly as lonely as a girl who gets all dressed up on the hottest night of the year and goes out to see a movie... all alone."

"Well I... I don't know many people here. And what with my night classes and all..." She shrugged. "Gee, I've really got to get home."

"Right. Let's go."

She glanced again at the clock. "And you're going to walk around until dawn?"

"Yup."

She frowned down into her lap, and her throat mottled with a blush. "You could..." She cleared her throat. "You could stay with me if you want. Just until it gets light, I mean."

He nodded, more to himself than to her.

They stepped out of the cool White Tower into the humid heat of the street. At first, the warmth felt good on their cold skin, but it soon became heavy and sapping. They walked without speaking. By inviting him to her room, she had made a daring and desperate leap into the unknown, and now she was tense and breathless with the danger of it... and the thrill of it. 'Is this it?' she said to herself. 'Is he the one?'

He felt a thrill akin to hers, and when he smiled at her she returned an uncertain, fluttering smile that was both vulnerable and hopeful. There was something coltish in her awkward gait on those high heels, something little-girlish in the sibilant whisper of her stiff crinoline. He drew a long slow breath.

She led the way up three flights of dark, narrow stairs, both of them trying to make their bodies as light as possible because the stairs creaked and they didn't want to wake her landlady. She turned her key in the slack lock, opened the door, and made a gesture for him to go in first. After the dark of the stairwell, the room dazzled and deluded him. The streetlight under which they had first met was just beneath her window, and it cast trapezoidal distortions of the window panes up onto the ceiling, filling the room with slabs of bright light separated by patches of impenetrable shadow. His eyes had difficulty adapting to this disorienting play of dazzle and darkness because the brightness kept his irises too dilated to see into the shadows. The oilcloth cover of a small table was slathered with light, while the iron bed in the corner was bisected diagonally by the shadow of an oversized old wardrobe that consumed too much of the meager space. The only door was the one they had entered through, so he assumed the toilet must be down the hall. Actually, it was on the floor below. The room was an attic that had been converted at minimal cost, and the metal roof above the low ceiling pumped the sun's heat into the small space all day long.