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As they walked down the steps to the sidewalk, a doorman opened the door of a Rolls. A woman stepped out, a gloved hand holding her fur coat close. She was the most beautiful woman Allison had ever seen. She walked past Allison with unseeing eyes. If Allison had not smelled the odor of her scent, she might have believed the woman to be a ghost.

Brad touched Allison's arm. “Rita Moore,” he whispered. “The actress.” He smiled, watching Allison turn to catch a last glimpse of the famous actress. “It won't be long now, Allison. I have the feeling that within a few months you'll be getting very friendly with people like Rita. And a few months after that you'll be saying that celebrities bore you.”

No chance of that, Allison thought, getting into the taxi. The Rita Moores are too many worlds away from me. I am snowbound in my obscurity.

L
ATER THAT SAME EVENING
, Allison sat with David Noyes in a dark corner of a little restaurant in Greenwich Village. She was wearing slacks and a pullover sweater and David had on an open-necked sport shirt. They had come to this place because Allison had been much too tired to dress and face the chic of an uptown restaurant after her afternoon with Bradley Holmes and Lewis Jackman.

“Let's see it,” David had said, as soon as she stepped through the front door of Steve Wallace's apartment, holding out his hand for the manila envelope that Allison carried.

Allison tossed it to him. The manila envelope contained her copy of the contract she had signed that afternoon.

“Sweetie!” exclaimed Steve. “You're beat. Come on, I'll run a hot tub for you. Let this monster stew in his own juices. Contracts, indeed.”

Allison had sunk gratefully into the hot, pine-scented water, and felt the tight nerves at the base of her neck begin to loosen. She thought about Lewis Jackman's dark, unhappy face; and Brad's harsh, wounding words. Could life really be reduced to Brad's simple equation? She thought not. One plus one makes two—at least, it ought to make two. By Brad's reckoning it added up to one and one, each as separate as before.

“Allison!” shouted David from the other side of the bathroom door. “This is marvelous! Say what you will about Brad Holmes, there's no one like him when it comes to getting a contract for one of his authors. Come on out of there, I want to talk to you.”

“Well, I don't want to talk to you,” said Allison. “I want to go somewhere for dinner, somewhere small and French where I don't have to get all dressed up, and I want to drink a whole bottle of wine. Then, maybe I'll talk to you. Can Steve join us?”

“No,” said David. “She's entertaining one of her buyer friends from out of town.”

“You go to hell,” yelled Steve, and threw a magazine at David.

Allison came out of the bathroom, wrapped in Steve's terrycloth robe, a towel around her head.

“Can't you come with us?” she asked Steve.

“No, sweetie. I've got a date. And not with a buyer, either,” said Steve. “This one tells me he's going to make me the biggest star in television. Naturally, I don't believe a word of it, but he has a charge account at El Morocco, so who am I to say no?”

Allison finished picking at the last shred of chicken on her plate and then leaned back against the leather seat. The candle on the table flickered smokily; the muted voices of the other diners swirled around her. Nothing can touch me now, she thought. Her joy in her success was so intense that she felt isolated and unreachable.

“I didn't realize I was so hungry,” she said, smiling at David.

David poured wine into her glass. “It's wonderful, isn't it?” he said. “There's no other feeling like it, except for holding your first printed book in your hand. But signing a contract is something you never get used to.” He smiled and picked up his glass. “I've done it four times, and it still makes me feel special.”

“It made me feel neat,” said Allison, trying to find the perfect word, the word that would describe it most exactly. “It was as if all the loose ends of my life were nicely tied up in a bundle and then I didn't even have to worry about the bundle.”

“What about changes?”

“Nothing that really amounts to anything. Brad says he thinks Jackman will publish in the spring.”

“Rewriting is the lousiest job of all,” said David. “It makes you feel as if you're being forced to travel back through a place you never wanted to visit to begin with, where everything is shabby and frayed at the edges and the ground is littered with torn newspapers.”

“Not I,” said Allison, laughing. “It makes you feel like that because you're a genius. I'm not. I'm a hack and very pleased with myself.”

“Stop belittling yourself,” said David. “You're no hack, and if you were, you'd never have to say it yourself. The critics would say it.”

Allison put down her glass and stared at the candle's wavering orange flame. The high elation had begun to leave her, but she had known it could not last. As her happiness dissipated itself—it was as if it were seeping out of her pores, she thought—doubts began to enter.

“Sometimes I get scared, David.”

“We all do.”

“What if nobody buys my book? What if nobody likes it if they do buy it?”

“Then there is nothing to do but try again.” He poured more wine. “Come on. Drink up and stop worrying. This is supposed to be a celebration. Do you want to go to a movie or something?”

“No,” said Allison. “Let's just sit here and talk.”

“I'm an obliging soul. What do you want to talk about?”

“I don't care,” said Allison. “Anything. Everything.”

“Are you over Bradley Holmes?” asked David.

Allison picked up a cigarette. “I guess there was never really anything to get over,” she said. “I didn't love him to begin with.” But she could tell by the way her heart raced that she wasn't over him yet. The memory of herself and Brad still had the power to move her.

“Is that what
he
told you?”

“No. He said that I did love him, a little, and that he loved me a little, too.”

“Crap,” said David. “That guy may be good at contracts but he's the biggest crap artist in New York.”

“Because he said what he did about love?”

“Love, my can,” said David. “Maybe he wants to sleep with you again, but that's the extent of his love.”

“Stop it,” said Allison, snapping the cigarette between her fingers. “I don't want to talk about it.”

“Why?” demanded David. “Does it still scare you? Shame you? Make you want to run?”

“No,” cried Allison. “Now, stop it, David.”

“I can't stop it,” said David with quiet desperation. “I have to know about
me,
you see.” He moved the ashtray and then stared into it, as if he might find the answer there. “I've been waiting a long time, Allison. I have to know.”

“Not now, David. Let's go.” I'm not ready yet, Allison thought. Brad's like a poison in my system. I have to get rid of him completely, before I can be good for anyone else.

“No,” said David. “Let's get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

“Us. You and me.”

“David, for Heaven's sake, can't we leave things the way they are? Can't we be friends without this everlasting talk of turning it into something else?”

“I told you before, Allison. I told you two years ago and it's still true. I don't want to be your goddamned friend. I want you, and I want you any way I can get you. I'd like to marry you, but if you don't want that, I want to be your lover. I want to live with you if I can, but if I can't, I want you anyway.”

“Oh, David,” she sighed. “I'm so tired I can't think now. Let's go home.”

They sat close together on the sofa in Steve's apartment. Allison's head rested on David's shoulder and he stroked her hair.

“David?”

“Yes?”

“Kiss me.”

He turned her face toward his and kissed her gently, as if he were afraid to hurt or startle her, and Allison put her arms around him. He began to seek her tongue with his and his hand rested gently on the underslope of her breast, and very quickly Allison began to kiss him harder. Her mouth opened and she moved against him and he pressed her back gently, so that she was lying down. His hand touched the skin under her sweater and he stroked her.

“But not here, darling,” he said against her cheek. “And not today. Not until you're sure.”

“I'm sure,” Allison lied. She wanted him to take her; she wanted David to drive Brad out and claim her for himself.

“You're sorry for me,” David said. “I don't want that.”

She sat up and tugged at the bottom of her sweater.

“Damn it,” she cried. “Don't always be telling me what I am and what I'm not!”

“I'm playing for big stakes, Allison,” said David. “I want all of you, or I don't want you at all. I want you whole and unafraid and I don't want you haunted by the ghost of Bradley Holmes.”

Allison burst into tears. “Please, David,” she sobbed. “Please wait. Just a little longer.”

“I'll wait,” said David. “It's a habit I seem to have acquired.” He put his arms around her. “Come on, darling. Stop crying. Everything's going to be all right. I'm here.”

Allison fell asleep with her head in his lap. Steve Wallace found him holding her when she came home at one o'clock in the morning.

T
HE WINTER PASSED
with agonizing slowness. It seemed to Allison as if not only every stream and inch of ground, but time itself was frozen by winter's iron, unyielding grip.

Allison MacKenzie had finished the revisions on her manuscript before Christmas and had mailed them to Lewis Jackman. She had worked with a craftsman's skill, with the coolness of a surgeon. She got a two-word telegram in return.

“Well done.”

In January, Bradley Holmes telephoned and told her that Jackman was ready to publish and that he planned to release the book on April tenth.

“Did you have a good Christmas?” asked Brad.

“Very nice,” said Allison. “Steve Wallace and David Noyes came up for the holidays.”

“David again?” asked Brad. “Every time I see or talk to you, I seem to trip over David Noyes.”

“Does that annoy you, Brad?” asked Allison stiffly.

“Not particularly.”

“Well, it doesn't annoy me, either. I enjoy having David around.”

“Why not get a French poodle?” asked Brad. “At least you wouldn't have to listen to him chatter.”

Allison slammed down the receiver.

David's and Stephanie's visit had been a joyful interlude for Allison, breaking the monotonous ritual of her days. She took long walks with David and talked to him about her work. They held hands as they walked, they drew closer together; but it was, Allison felt, the closeness of friendship, nothing more.

She invited Seth Buswell and Matt Swain to come on Christmas Day. Allison wanted these old friends to meet the two people who meant so much to her now. It was her attempt to tie together her old life and the new. It bothered her that there should be such a high wall separating the two parts of her life. She wanted it not to be so, she wanted to be able to move easily from Peyton Place to New York City without being assailed by a sense of strangeness.

The old friends and the new took to each other well. Seth talked literature to David for hours, talked as if he might never have the chance again. To Allison's amazed delight, Matt Swain sat on the sofa beside Stephanie and listened for hours to her stories of life among the TV actors. He never took his eyes from Stephanie's bright young face.

When they had gone back to New York, Allison met Matt Swain on Elm Street coming out of the pharmacy.

“Allison,” he said, “I liked those friends of yours.”

“Especially Stephanie,” said Allison, smiling at him.

Doc Swain looked over Allison's head to the bleak, wintry hills that ringed the town. “There's something about her face, Allison—I don't know what it is—there's something about her face that breaks my heart. When I look at her I feel young again—and, at the same time, I feel very old. I guess she makes me remember my youth, and that gives me a greater awareness of my age.” He smiled at Allison, almost apologetically.

“You're not old, Doc.”

“I wish I thought so,” he said. “Dear God, how I wish I thought so.”

Now, having just hung up on Brad, Allison pushed the phone away from her and turned unseeing eyes toward the window. She knew without really looking that gray, gaunt winter stood just outside the window.

By now, everyone was tired of the winter; it had lost the charm of newness. But everyone continued to talk about the weather, because there was very little else to talk about that winter in Peyton Place.

“Got us a real, old-fashioned winter this time.”

“Ayeh. Ain't been this much snow in fifty years.”

“That's what everybody says every winter,” said Clayton Frazier. “Every damned year it's the most snow in fifty years.”

“Well, it's true this year. Them fellers up to Mount Washington got it all figured out. When the thaw comes there's gonna be two hundred and sixty inches of snow that's gotta melt. Gonna be floods all over the place.”

“There won't be no flood,” said Clayton.

“The hell there won't. With all that snow meltin', the river'll go over its banks sure.”

“The Connecticut ain't a floodin' river,” said Clayton Frazier. “And that's the end of it.”

“You'll see, you pigheaded old bastard. You'll see.”

But Clayton Frazier was right. There was no flood. An early thaw set in at the end of January, and the snow began to melt gradually. In February nearly all the snow was gone, and by the end of the month the ice in the river had begun to loosen around the edges. When March was half gone, people began to look around and think that spring would come again after all. But this time it would come gently, like a well-mannered maiden, and not like a roaring, screaming harlot barging her way into northern New England.