"Asleep at the switch," I muttered, embarrassed. When the next ball
came at me I leaped ten feet high to smash it over the net. Like a
schoolboy showing off for his girl, I thought. A thirty-four-year-old
schoolboy.
_CHAPTER TEN_
We played volleyball for better than an hour, working up a good sweat
and a good appetite. Then everybody lost interest in the game all at
once, and someone yelled, "How about a swim?" and the next moment we
were all racing down the hill toward the lake.
We splashed around in the water till the lunch-gong rang. The lunch
menu was meatballs and spaghetti, and I put away three heaping portions
and was considering asking for another. I felt invigorated.
I felt so invigorated that after lunch I set up the typewriter again,
rolled in the sheet of paper that was blank except for the words
CHAPTER ONE, and started to type so fast that I didn't have time to
think about whether or not I was in the mood for writing.
The pages practically wrote themselves. I just sat there feeding in
paper at appropriate intervals and watching words appear. By the time I
paused for breath, it was three in the afternoon and I had done twelve
pages, lightning-fast. Chapter One was finished.
I rolled the last sheet out of the machine and leaned back to read
it, while my heart returned to its regular pace and some of my sweat
evaporated. It wasn't bad at all. It was on the rough side, and the
spelling was lousy, but the raw material for Chapter One was all there.
All it needed was careful polishing.
It wasn't the same thing at all as finishing a page or two of ad copy.
I was a lot more tired, but also a lot more satisfied with what I had
done.
Deciding that I had put in a good day's work, I shut up shop and set
out for a stroll. In the back of my mind was the nebulous idea of
finding Joanie and perhaps spiriting her away for a long private talk.
I figured that maybe I could get to know her as a person--without
making any clumsy passes--and somehow that way contrive to break down
the barrier of inhibition with which she surrounded her true self.
The trouble was that Joanie was never available for long private talks.
She took her position as Dr. Richards' right-hand-man seriously. She
was always wandering around the camp, organizing volleyball games,
checking to make sure everyone's plumbing was okay, and generally
making herself useful.
I walked up front, since there was no sign of her on the athletic
courts. And I found her standing near the gate, leaning into a car that
had just arrived.
The car was a convertible sports car, a little MG or Jaguar or one of
those. The driver was a black-haired young lady wearing sunglasses and
a striped shirt. I started to fade away, figuring that she was a guest
or a newcomer and might be upset to have a naked man come wandering up.