V.

  'Benny,' one fingernail touched his face.   'Wha.'   'Will you be my friend?'   'You look like you have enough,'   She looked down the quarry. 'Why don't we make believe none of the other is real,' she said: 'no Bennington, no Schlozhauer's, and no Five Towns. Only this quarry: the dead rocks that were here before us and will be after us.'   'Why.'   'Isn't that the world?'   'They teach you that in freshman geology or something?'   She looked hurt. 'It's just something I know.'   'Benny,' she cried - a little cry - 'be my friend, is all.'   He shrugged.   'Write.'   'Now don't expect -'   'How the road is. Your boy's road that I'll never see, with its Diesels and dust, roadhouses, crossroads saloons. That's all. What it's like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton. Places I won't know.'   He scratched his stomach. 'Sure.'   Profane kept running into her in what was left of the summer at least once a day. They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at.   Soon enough what he was afraid would happen happened - he finagled himself into love for Rachel and was only surprised that it had taken so long. He lay in the bunkhouse nights smoking in the dark and apostrophizing the glowing end of his cigarette butt. Around two in the morning the occupant of the upper bunk would come in off the night shift - one Duke Wedge, a pimpled bravo from the Chelsea district, who always wanted to talk about how much he was getting, which was, in fact, plenty. It lulled Profane to sleep. One night he did indeed come upon Rachel and Wedge, the scoundrel, parked in the MG in front of her cabin. He slunk back to bed, not feeling particularly betrayed because he knew Wedge wouldn't get anywhere. He even stayed awake and let Wedge regale him when he came in with a step-by-step account of how he had almost made it but not quite. As usual Profane fell asleep in the middle.   He never got beyond or behind the chatter about her world - one of objects coveted or valued, an atmosphere Profane couldn't breathe. The last time he saw her was Labor Day night. She was to leave the next day. Somebody stole Da Conho's machine gun that evening, just before supper. Da Conho dashed around in tears looking for it. The head chef told Profane to make salads. Somehow Profane managed to get frozen strawberries in the French dressing and chopped liver in the Waldorf salad, plus accidentally dropping two dozen or so radishes in the French fryer (though these drew raves from the customers when he served them anyway, too lazy to go after more) From time to time the Brazilian would come charging through the kitchen crying.   He never found his beloved machine gun. Lorn and drained-nervous, he was fired next day. The season was over anyway - for all Profane knew Da Conho may have even taken ship one day for Israel, to tinker with the guts of some tractor, trying to forget, like many exhausted workers abroad, some love back in the States.   After teardown Profane set out to find Rachel. She was out, he was informed, with the captain of the Harvard crossbow team. Profane wandered by the bunkhouse and found a morose Wedge, unusually mateless for the evening. Till midnight they played blackjack for all the contraceptives Wedge had not used over the summer. These numbered about a hundred. Profane borrowed 50 and had a winning streak. When he'd cleaned Wedge out, Wedge dashed away to borrow more. He was back five minutes later, shaking his head. 'Nobody believed me.' Profane loaned him a few. At midnight Profane informed Wedge he was 30 in the hole. Wedge made an appropriate comment. Profane gathered up the pile of rubbers. Wedge pounded his head against the table. 'He'll never use them,' he said to the table. 'That's the bitch of it. Never in his lifetime.'   Profane wandered up by Rachel's cabin again. He heard splashing and gurgling from the courtyard in back and walked around to investigate. There she was washing her car. In the middle of the night yet. Moreover, she was talking to it.   'You beautiful stud,' he heard her say, 'I love to touch you.' Wha, he thought. 'Do you know what I feel when we're out on the road? Alone, just us?' She was running the sponge caressingly over its front bumper. 'Your funny responses, darling, that I know so well. The way your brakes pull a little to the left, the way you start to shudder around 5000 rpm when you're excited. And you burn oil when you're mad at me, don't you? I know.' There was none of your madness in her voice; it might have been a schoolgirl's game, though still, he admitted, quaint. 'We'll always be together,' running a chamois over the hood, 'and you needn't worry about that black Buick we passed on the road today. Ugh: fat, greasy Mafia car. I expected to see a body come flying out the back door, didn't you? Besides, you're so angular and proper-English and tweedy - and oh so Ivy that I couldn't ever leave you, dear.' It occurred to Profane that he might vomit. Public displays of sentiment often affected him this way. She had climbed in the car and now lay back in the driver's seat, her throat open to the summer constellations. He was about to approach her when he saw her left hand snake out all pale to fondle the gearshift. He watched and noticed how she was touching it. Having just been with Wedge he got the connection. He didn't want to see any more. He ambled away over a hill and into the woods and when he got back to the Trocadero he couldn't have said exactly where he'd been walking. All the cabins were dark. The front office was still open. The clerk had stepped out. Profane rooted around in desk drawers till he found a box of thumbtacks. He returned to the cabins and till three in the morning he moved along the starlit aisles between them, tacking up one of Wedge's contraceptives on each door. No one interrupted him. He felt like the Angel of Death, marking the doors of tomorrow's victims in blood. The purpose of a mezuzah was to fake the Angel out so he'd pass by. On these hundred or so cabins Profane didn't see mezuzah one. So much the worse.   After the summer, then, there'd been letters, his surly and full of wrong words, hers by turns witty, desperate, passionate. A year later she'd graduated from Bennington and come to New York to work as a receptionist in an