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And it wasn't. But lately, Selena herself had to admit that she was quite often what Corey called “touchy” and what she referred to as “cranky.” At times, she was even short with Joey.

“You've got spring fever or something,” said Joey.

“Spring fever in summer?” asked Selena.

“Don't split hairs,” said Joey. “There's something ailing you, and I'm trying to find a polite term for it.”

It took Selena a long time before she admitted to herself that she was bored. Not only with the shop and its slackened business, but with herself and her life. Boredom, with a little thread of fear running through and under it. Occasionally she went out to dinner with one of the salesmen who came to the Thrifty Corner, but the word had circulated quickly through their clubby circle. Selena Cross doesn't sleep around. So it was, for the most part, the older, more settled men who asked her out. She saw more of Peter Drake, the young attorney who had defended her at her trial, than she did of any other man. Peter took her dancing and sometimes to the theater, down in Boston. They ate dinner together frequently, either at restaurants at White River or at Selena's house, and most important of all to Selena, Peter and Joey got along well together. Every time Peter took her out, he asked her to marry him, and every time her answer was the same.

“I can't, Peter.”

“You're not in love with anyone else, are you, Selena?”

“You know better than that.”

“You're not still thinking about Ted Carter, are you?”

“I don't think anything about Ted any more. I don't even dislike him.”

“Selena, I'm in love with you.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm sorry, Peter.”

“It's not all that business about Lucas, is it? You're not afraid of me because I'm a man or anything like that?”

“Peter, will you please stop with the two-bit, street corner psychiatry? Lucas wasn't a man, he was an animal. I never thought of him as a man and what I remember of him certainly hasn't turned me into a couch case. Now will you please leave me alone?”

“Selena, what are you waiting for? What do you want?”

“I don't know, I tell you. I don't know what ails me.”

“I love you, Selena. I'm not asking you to love me back all at once. Marry me. Maybe with time—”

“I can't, Peter. I wish I could, but I can't.”

But all the same, there were times when Peter Drake was a comfort. She could rest her head on his shoulder and give him her troubles to carry for her. If I married him, he'd be good to me. And good to Joey. But at other times, when her boredom was like a prickly sweater, making her itch with impatience and annoyance, she thought, Peter is such a bore. All that love is like too much ice cream. He's tiresome and I wish he'd find himself a nice girl and settle down and leave me alone.

I'm a pig, she thought in self-flagellation. Peter is good and kind and I should either marry him or let him go.

But time went by, and Peter still courted her, and Selena kept on saying No.

Sometimes she would wake in the night, covered with perspiration and feeling the hard, hurtful beating of her heart.

“What's happening to me?” she asked silently, in panic. “Where am I going? Is this all there is to life?”

Often, she caught herself in an attitude of waiting, but she could not think of what it was she was waiting for, nor for whom, nor why.

“There you are,” said Corey Hyde, putting a plate down in front of her. “Crabmeat salad. That enough mayonnaise for you?”

“That's fine, Mr. Hyde,” said Selena. “Thank you.”

“Eat it up,” said Corey. “Make you feel better.”

At the same moment that Selena dipped her fork into her salad, Seth Buswell stopped his car in front of Hyde's diner.

“Don't know about where you come from,” he said to Tim Randlett, “but in Peyton Place it's suppertime. We can't go calling on Allison MacKenzie for another hour or so. Come on. I'll buy you a sandwich.”

“Good,” said Tim, smiling. “This will be my wild night on the town.”

Selena Cross lifted her head when she heard the door to the diner open.

“Well, if this isn't luck!” said Seth. “Now we can eat with you, Selena.”

Selena barely saw Seth at all. Her eyes stared into those of the man with him, and she could not look away. Usually, she noticed everything about a person she was seeing for the first time. Her glance took in every detail of coloring, structure and clothing, but with this stranger she saw nothing but eyes. They were a blue-green color, the kind to which Selena had always referred privately as “lucky eyes,” for she had noticed the same coloring in photographs of handsome, talented people, the ones upon whom the gods had showered extra gifts, leaving the blue-green eyes behind as the only external sign of their generosity.

“Selena,” Seth was saying, “this is Tim Randlett. Tim, Selena Cross.”

It was as if Seth had pulled a lever, releasing her, so that she could move again, and speak.

“How do you do, Mr. Randlett?” she said. “Hello, Seth. Please sit down.”

“Tim, here, is with the summer theater up at Silver Lake,” said Seth. “He's an actor.”

“Yes, I know,” said Selena. “I've seen you in movies, Mr. Randlett.”

Tim laughed. “You must have been a very little girl. That was a long time ago.”

“Not so very,” said Selena. “My friend, Allison MacKenzie, and I used to go to the movies every Saturday.”

“And, speaking of Allison—” began Seth, glancing at his watch, “we'd better eat and—”

“Yes,” interrupted Tim Randlett quickly. “If you have to see her, Mr. Buswell, I imagine you'd better run along.” He turned to Selena. “May I have dinner with you?” he asked.

Selena closed her book, not remembering to mark her place, and looked up at him.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I'd like that very much.”

As Seth Buswell said to Matthew Swain later that night over a drink, “And that was when I knew that I was
de trop,
as they say.”

“As who says?” demanded Matthew, through the beginnings of a small alcoholic glow.

“A bunch of fairies I went to college with,” said Seth with Scotchand-water dignity. “Not that I consorted with them, mind you, but I sometimes overheard their conversations.”

“Seth,” said Matthew Swain, “you are one of the few remaining members of a species commonly known as bullshit artists. If you ever got anywhere near a fairy, you'd run like hell the other way, worried pissless over your virtue.”

“And you, sir, are a vile-tongued old man.”

“Maybe vile-tongued and old, but I'd never be so goddamned dumb as to leave Selena with some actor I'd picked up. How do you know what kind of fellow he is?”

Seth swirled ice around in his glass. “Seemed like a decent enough sort,” he said.

“What d'you mean by that? Decent enough sort.”

“Well, you know. Polite and well spoken.”

“On the outside,” said Matthew Swain. “How do you know what he's like on the inside?”

“I wasn't with him long enough to know,” said Seth, “and even if I had been, and he turned out to be a son-of-a-bitch, there wouldn't have been a thing I could have done. The two of them just looked at each other, and the air between them was enough to give anyone an electric shock.”

“You're full of shit and talking like a teen-age poet,” roared Matthew. “Things like that don't happen.”

Seth Buswell finished his drink and poured himself another.

“Yes, they do, Matt,” he said finally. “Yes, they do, I was there, and I saw it happen.”

I
N
P
EYTON
P
LACE
, the black-tarred sidewalks softened in the summer sun and were scarred with U-shaped heel marks that would show forever. Green Meadow Pond was filled with screaming, splashing children, and all day long the cicadas hummed in the trees. But it was a good summer, with rain in proportion to sunlight, so that the northern countryside had an almost tropical lushness. There was a heavy, ripe greenness to everything that stunned the granite-spined farmers, who were too used to either drought or the puny growth caused by no sunshine at all.

“There's somethin' almost indecent about it,” said Kenny Stearns aloud, snipping still another red rose from one of his heavily laden bushes. He looked at the thick green of his lawn and saw his apple tree with its burden of swelling fruit so heavy that the branches hung almost to the ground. “Yep,” he said. “Almost indecent. Like a whore with big breasts and honey between her legs.”

It was easy, that year, to blame the unheard-of, green summer for just about everything. At the Harrington Mills, workers shirked their jobs and gazed out the factory windows while Leslie screamed in impotent rage and blamed the weather. Young girls who had clung to their virginity with leechlike tenacity now surrendered, with little squeals of anguished joy, to the erect demands of their teen-aged lovers. They returned home with their behinds covered with poison ivy, their arms dotted with mosquito bites and their hair full of pine needles.

As Matthew Swain said to Seth Buswell, “If all the maidenheads lost in the woods this summer were laid end to end, they'd reach clear from here to the planet Saturn.”

Fathers blamed mothers, mothers blamed boys, boys blamed girls, girls blamed themselves and everybody blamed the weather for everything except the behavior of Selena Cross. For Selena there was no excuse in the eyes of Peyton Place.

“Who is he?”

“Actor feller from over to Silver Lake.”

“Come up here from down to New Yawk.”

“Usta be in the movin' pitchers.”

“Hmph. Think a girl like Selena'd know better. After all, it ain't as if she was born yesterday and didn't know no better.”

“Ayeh. There's one girl learned whatcha call the facts of life early. And the hard way.”

“Think she'd have a little shame, a girl like that. But no. There she goes, flauntin' herself right in front of the whole town.”

For Selena Cross it was a summer of such unbearable sweetness that every moment was almost like pain. There was an ache in not being able to clutch every second that passed, to have to let the hours go, and finally the whole day.

“When I was young,” said Selena, “I thought I knew all there was to know about love.”

“And what do you know now, my darling?” asked Tim, stroking the soft inside of her arm. “I mean now that you're an old woman of twenty-five.”

“I know that I didn't know a thing until now,” she said, and turned to rest her forehead gently on his chin.

They were lying side by side on the beach at Silver Lake, talking softly, caressing each other.

“This is agony of the worst sort,” said Tim, his lips brushing her ear. “To lie here next to you and be able to touch only small bits and pieces of you. Your ear, your hand, your ankle. It's a form of masochism.”

As always, his voice reached deep inside of her, so that her whole body was flushed with excitement.

“Do I turn pink all over when you talk to me like that?” she asked.

“Not really,” he teased. “Anyone looking at you would only think that you had a mild case of sunburn.”

“I'm not sunburned.”

“Selena. If you don't stand up and come with me at once, there's going to be a terrible scene right here on the beach because I'm going to start taking off your bathing suit in exactly three seconds.”

Selena sat up. “Come on,” she said and led the way to his car.

From the moment Selena had met Tim in Hyde's Diner, she had known the way it would be between them and she had wondered, too, how it would end, for in the beginning there had been no feeling of permanence for her in their relationship. The emotion between them was too ephemeral to be named, too delicate to be used as a rock on which to build.

“Let's walk,” Tim had said to her that first night when they had finished dinner.

And she had gone with him at once. Outside, he had taken her hand in his and they had walked through town to Memorial Park.

“There are nights like this on islands in the South Seas,” he said.

“Oh?” asked Selena. “Tell me about an island in the South Seas.”

“The night is just like this,” said Tim. “All black and heavy with stars. You can smell a hundred different flowers all at once and their perfume fills you with a longing and languor such as you've never known before. You lie on a white beach and the ocean is only a whisper at your feet, soft and tractable and not frightening at all. You could reach up and touch the moon if you wanted to and it would be as soft as yellow cotton in your hand.”

“How lovely,” said Selena softly. “I wish I could go there one day.”

Tim looked down at her. “You're there now,” he said. “Can't you smell it and feel it?”

“Is it really like this?”

“I imagine so.”

“But don't you know?”

“I've never been there, but I'm sure it's just like this.”

Selena sat up straight on the bench they shared.

“You mean you've never been there at all? You just made all that up about the flowers and the moon?”

Tim laughed. “Yes,” he said. “I made it up.”

Selena smiled at him in the dark. “You're just like Allison MacKenzie,” she said. “She used to do the same thing to me when we were in school. She'd make up the most fantastic things and have me believing her, then she'd laugh and tell me she had made everything up.”

“Then she is far more honest than I,” said Tim. “Sometimes I make things up and they become so real that I believe them myself and I never do confess the truth.”

They sat for a long time, hands loosely clasped, Selena's head resting easily on his shoulder. He told her about his work in New York and Hollywood and about the way things had been for him once and the way they would be again.