Dallie tapped a motel pen on the top of the desk. "Francie, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't have any credit cards tucked away in that purse of yours… or any plane ticket either. Now, I want to hear you tell me real quick that you've got that ticket to London put away somewhere inside Mr. Vee-tawn, and that Mr. Vee-tawn is closed up in one of those twenty-five-cent lockers at the airport."

She hugged her chest and stared at the wall. "I don't know what to do," she choked out.

"You're a big girl, and you'd better come up with something real fast."

"I need help." She turned to him, pleading for understanding. "I can't handle this by myself."

The front legs of his chair banged to the floor. "Oh, no you don't! This is your problem, lady, and you're not going to push it off on me." His voice sounded hard and rough, not like the laughing Dallie who'd picked her up at the side of the road, or the knight in shining armor who'd saved her from certain death

at the Blue Choctaw.

"If you didn't want to help me," she cried out, "you shouldn't have offered me that ride. You should have left me, like everyone else."

"Maybe you better start thinking about why everybody wants to get rid of you so bad."

"It's not my fault, don't you see? It's circumstances." She began to tell him all of it, beginning with Chloe's death, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out before he walked away. She told him how she'd sold everything to pay for her ticket home only to realize that even if she did have a ticket, she couldn't possibly go back to London without money, without clothes, with the news of her humiliation in that terrible movie on everyone's lips so that they were all laughing at her. She realized right then that she had to stay where she was, where no one knew her, until Nicky got back from his sordid fling with the blond mathematician and she had a chance to talk to him over the telephone. That's why she'd set out to find Dallie at the Blue Choctaw. "Don't you see? I can't go back to London until I know Nicky will be right there at the airport waiting for me."

"I thought you told me he was your fiance?"

"He is."

"Then why is he having a fling with a blond mathematician?"

"He's sulking."

"Jesus, Francie-"

She rushed over to kneel down beside his chair and looked up at him with her heart-stopping eyes. "It's not my fault, Dallie. Really. The last time I saw him, we had this awful quarrel just because I turned down his marriage proposal." A great stillness came over Dallie's face and she realized he had misinterpreted what she'd said. "No, it's not what you're thinking! He'll marry me! We've quarreled hundreds of times and he always proposes again. It's just a matter of getting hold of him on the telephone and telling him I forgive him."

Dallie shook his head. "Poor son of a bitch," he muttered.

She tried to glare at him, but her eyes were too teary, so she stood and turned her back, struggling for control. "What I need, Dallie, is some way to endure the next few weeks until I can talk to Nicky. I thought you could help me, but last night you wouldn't talk to me, and you made me so angry, and now you've taken my money." She spun on him, her voice catching on a sob. "Don't you see, Dallie? If you'd just been reasonable, none of this would have happened."

"I'll be goddamned." Dallie's boots hit the floor. "You're getting ready to blame all this on me, aren't you? Jesus, I hate people like you. No matter what happens, you manage to shift the blame to somebody else."

She jumped up. "I don't have to listen to this! All I wanted was some help."

"And a small bit of cash to go with it."

"I can return every penny in a few weeks."

"If Nicky takes you back." He stretched out his legs again, crossing them at the ankles. "Francie, you don't seem to realize that I'm a stranger with no obligation to you. I don't do all that good a job of taking care of myself, and I'm sure as hell not going to take you on, even for a few weeks. To tell you the truth, I don't even like you."

She looked at him, bewilderment imprinted on her face. "You don't like me?"

"I really don't, Francie." His burst of anger had faded, and he spoke calmly and with such obvious conviction that she knew he was telling the truth. "Look, honey, you're a real traffic stopper with that face of yours, and even though you're a little on the puny side, you kiss great. I can't deny that I had a few wayward thoughts about what the two of us might have been able to accomplish underneath the covers, and if you had a different personality I could even see myself losing my head over you for a few weeks. But the thing of it is, you don't have a different personality, and the way you are is pretty much a composite of all the bad qualities of every man and woman I ever met, with none of the good qualities thrown in to even things out."

She sank down on the end of the bed, hurt enveloping her. "I see," she said quietly.

He stood and pulled out his wallet. "I don't have a lot of ready cash right now. I'll cover the rest of the motel bill with plastic and leave fifty dollars to hold you for a few days. If you get around to paying me back, send me a check in care of General Delivery, Wynette, Texas. If you don't get around to it, I'll know things didn't work out between you and Nicky, and hope greener pastures turn up soon."

With that speech, he tossed the motel key on the desk and walked out the door.

She was finally alone. She stared down at a dark stain that looked like an outline of Capri on the motel carpet. Now. Now she'd hit bottom.


* * *

Skeet leaned out the passenger window as Dallie approached the Riviera. "You want me to drive?" he asked. "You can crawl in the back and try for a few hours' sleep."

Dallie opened the driver's door. "You drive too damned slow, and I don't feel like sleeping."

"Suit yourself." Skeet settled in and handed Dallie a Styrofoam coffee cup with the lid still snapped on. Then he gave him a slip of pink paper. "The cashier's phone number."

Dallie crumpled the paper and pushed it into the ashtray, where it joined two others. He pulled on his

cap. "You ever heard of Pygmalion, Skeet?"

"Is he the guy who played right tackle for Wynette High?"

Dallie used his front teeth to pull the lid off his coffee cup while he turned the key in the ignition. "No, that was Pygella, Jimmy Pygella. He moved to Corpus Christi a few years back and opened up a Midas muffler shop. Pygmalion's this play by George Bernard Shaw about a Cockney flower girl who gets

made over into a real lady." He flipped on the windshield wipers.

"Don't sound too interesting, Dallie. The play I liked was that Oh! Calcutta! we saw in St. Louis. Now that was real good."

"I know you liked that play, Skeet. I liked it, too, but you see it's not generally regarded as a great piece of literature. It doesn't have a lot to say about the human condition, if you follow me. Pygmalion, on the other hand, says that people can change… that they can get better with a little direction." He threw the car into reverse and backed out of the parking place. "It also says that the person directing that change doesn't get anything for his trouble but a load of grief."

Francesca, her eyes wide and stricken, stood in the open door of the motel room clutching her case to her chest like a teddy bear and watched the Riviera pull out of the parking place. Dallie was really going to do it. He was going to drive away and leave her all by herself, even though he'd admitted he'd thought about going to bed with her. Until now, that had always been enough to hold any man to her side, but suddenly it wasn't. How could that be? What was happening to her world? Bewilderment underscored her fear. She felt like a child who'd learned her colors wrong and just found out that red was really yellow, blue was really green-only now that she knew what was wrong, she couldn't imagine what to do about it.

The Riviera swung around to the exit, waited for a break in the traffic, and then began to move out onto the wet road. The tips of her fingers had gone numb, and her legs felt weak, as if all the muscles had lost their strength. Drizzle dampened her T-shirt, a lock of hair fell forward over her cheek. "Dallie!" She started to run as fast as she could.

"The thing of it is," Dallie said, looking up into his rearview mirror, "she doesn't think about anybody but herself."

"Most self-centered woman I ever encountered in my life," Skeet agreed.

"And she doesn't know how to do a damn thing except maybe put on makeup."

"She sure as hell can't swim."

"She doesn't have even one lick of common sense."

"Not a lick."

Dallie uttered a particularly offensive oath and slammed on the brakes.

Francesca reached the car, gasping for breath in small sobs. "Don't! Don't leave me alone!"

The strength of Dallie's anger took her by surprise. He vaulted out of the door, tore the case from her hands, and then backed her up against the side of the car so that the door handle jabbed into her hip.

"Now you listen to me, and you listen good!" he shouted. "I'm taking you under duress, and you stop

that goddamn sniveling right now!"

She sobbed, blinking against the drizzle. "But I'm-"

"I said to stop it! I don't want to do this-I got a real bad feeling about it-so from this minute on, you'd better do exactly what I say. Everything I say. You don't ask me any questions; you don't make any comments. And if you give me one minute of that fancy horseshit of yours, you'll be out on your skinny ass."

"All right," she cried, her pride hanging in tatters, her voice strangling on her humiliation. "All right!"