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life with him happy; if it were only possible for me to carry my gifts up the hill and attend to her alone for an hour I could have everything that I wanted. Lying in the barracks toward the dawn, hearing the groaning of sleeping men around me, I felt that I could see her flesh, know the angle of her breast, know the slick tension of her thighs as they encircled to grasp but then reveille would come, and after reveille the pain and standing in the company street at noon, wincing against the sun, the day not a third over, listening to the captain scream, I knew that all of this was misdirection and lies and that no matter how close I came to her in the night, I would never have her in the real. Sometimes we would see her in the company area, coming to pay the captain a fast visit, exchange a quick confidence or two, and a gaze of perfect blankness would pass between us; her wide and empty eyes staring past the assembled troops and then to the greenery and then to the gardening orderlies picking up weeds outside the orderly room, and for all the discrimination she made between the three, she could have been in my bed that night, and I reaching out to overcome her.

IX
    At the track: noise, color assault me. I am here to play a tip given me by Tony, one of the wholesalers for the Bronx district whose brother runs a handicapping sheet out of his home in Bay Meadows and who claims that he could make a small, effective living out of the racetrack if it did not fundamentally bore him. The tip is on Gemini, a bay filly out of Revoked who has been running in straight claimers but is today being dropped into a filly maiden for the first time; the word is that today, and with blinkers, she will atone for past deceits. I am here to play $50 for Tony and anything I wish for myself.
    Unfamiliar with the races, I am nonetheless eager to learn. What marvelous passions, what heights of misdirection, what strange peace seems to afflict these people as they wander in the grandstand between bar and restaurant, tote board and window, rail and garden! Everything seems simple here; none of the complexities of the social organism and all of it reduced to figures, besides, in a paper which I can comprehend and worked out in races which I can see. Not for a long time have I permitted myself to believe in immediate outcome, but I am interested, hopeful; the office can wait for two hours and the payoff from the tip will more than cover me for my time. As I wander down toward the rail, a blond woman in a tight dress gives me an absent look compounded of desire and fear; vague but constant adulterous impulses churn, I wonder if I should ask her the time. I decide not to. I intimate from other sources that sex is nonexistent at the track.
    By the rail, jammed cheek to shoulder with hundreds of others, I watch the running of the second race. My tip is on the third and for interest I have bet $2 on the longest shot in the race to show. The horses break from the gate opposite us and run down the backstretch, into the turn, and all the way through the unfolding stretch, hitting the finish wire some yards from where I stand. This is a simple enough act; as basic and straightforward in its convolutions as fucking or sleep but it seems to overwhelm the crowd; they scream and curse, shake their fists into the air and pray, do everything within their power to urge their horses on. A small man beside me seems to faint but before his head has even hit the rail he is awake again, bright-eyed and desperate, saying something about the seven horse. I try to clear a little space around me with knees and elbows, looking for my own number, but it seems hopeless. The race is over before I am even acclimated and I have no idea how my horse has done. Numbers come on the board and it turns out that my horse has placed. The numbers turn the screams of the crowd into dull rumbles, analyses, excuses. The race is declared official and my horse has paid thirteen dollars and eighty