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 a few hours it filled all the emptiness of his past month, the time that had begun with Carson’s saying, “Go, then. Can’t you go to Cannes by yourself?” It atoned for all the hot miles walked up and down the Croisette on blistered feet to peek like a fool at girls who lay incredibly near naked in the sand; for the cramped, boring bus rides to Nice and Monte Carlo and St. Paul-de-Vence; for the day he had paid a sinister druggist three times too much for a pair of sunglasses only to find, on catching sight of his own image in the gleam of a passing shop window, that they made him look like a great blind fish; for the terrible daily, nightly sense of being young and rich and free on the Riviera—the Riviera!—and of having nothing to do. Once in the first week he had gone with a prostitute whose canny smile, whose shrill insistence on a high price and whose facial flicker of distaste at the sight of his body had frightened him into an agony of impotence; most other nights he had gotten drunk or sick from bar to bar, afraid of prostitutes and of rebuffs from other girls, afraid even of striking up conversations with men lest they mistake him for a fairy. He had spent a whole afternoon in the French equivalent of a dime store, feigning a shopper’s interest in padlocks and shaving cream and cheap tin toys, moving through the bright stale air of the place with a throatful of longing for home. Five nights in a row he had hidden himself in the protective darkness of American movies, just as he’d done years ago in Denver to get away from boys who called him Lard-Ass Platt, and after the last of these entertainments, back in the hotel with the taste of chocolate creams still cloying his mouth, he had cried himself to sleep. But all this was dissolving now under the fine reckless grace of Sid’s piano, under the spell of Carson’s intelligent smile and the way Carson raised his hands to clap each time the music stopped.