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“What’s the trouble, Ken?” he said. “Don’t you think that was funny?”

It wasn’t what he said that mattered—for a minute it seemed that nothing Carson said would ever matter again—it was that his face was stricken with the uncannily familiar look of his own heart, the very face he himself, Lard-A…

Ken didn’t know whether to giggle or vomit; both desires were suddenly strong in him, though his face held straight. For a long time afterwards he would remember how the swabbed black plastic of the table looked between his two unmoving hands, how it seemed the only steady surface in the world.

…

They had slept till noon and gone to the beach after lunch, for Ken didn’t mind the beach when he wasn’t alone, and before long they had picked up two American girls in the easy, graceful way that Carson always managed such things. One minute the girls were sullen strangers, wiping scented oil on t…

Ken let Carson do most of the talking now; he was more than content just to sit there, smiling around this tableful of friends with all the serenity of a well-fed young priest. It was the happiest evening of his life in Europe, to a degree that even Carson would never have guessed. In the space of …

“No more for me,” she called after him, but he was already three tables away, walking fast toward the little ell of the room where the bar was. “Bitch,” he was whispering. “Bitch. Bitch.” And the images that tortured him now, while he stood in line at the makeshift bar, were intensified by rage: th…