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“I figure I’m maybe of the James Penney school. Anyway, somebody told me that once. I haven’t just got the right breaks yet, Mr. Klauss. As soon as I start getting the breaks, I’m going to have it made. The way I figure it, I’ve got something to say. That’s the main thing, you got to have something to say, and then you got to work like hell to say it the way you want to say it. And when you can do that and you’ve got the breaks, you’ve got it made. You know, I’ve never been out of the country before. The army didn’t want me on account of my eyes. But let me tell you, I know how to use my eyes. I don’t look at anything without thinking of painting it. That’s the way I look around me all the time. You know. The colors and shadows and stuff. Shadows aren’t ever black. They’re lousy with colors. Isn’t it the funniest damn thing in the world, you being from Philadephia and us never running into each other?”

“It’s a big place,” Klauss said weakly.

“I know, but when you’ve got the same kind of interests, you run into people with the same kind of interests, you know what I mean. What kind of painting do you do?”

“I’m … a beginner.”

“Oh! Well, you’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time, Mr. Klauss, but I don’t guess it’s too much time. I mean a lot of the good boys got a late start. I figure what makes a painter is being sensitive. I’m real sensitive. You wouldn’t think it, but my feelings get hurt easy. And I think a painter has to work, too. He has to be working every minute. Everything he looks at is part of his work. Just looking at it is part of what he has to do. The guys I work with, they think I’m nuts, but they’ll find out some day. Nobody wants to give you a chance. They all the time want to laugh at you instead. I don’t let them bother me too much. They can go on out and bowl and drink beer and pick up girls, but let me tell you, I go on back to the room and get the stuff all laid out and I start in painting. You know,
I even forget what time it is or whether I had dinner or not. The painting is the main thing with me. Mr. Klauss!”

“Uh?”

“Hey, I thought you were going to sleep or something. Honest to God, this is going to be a great thing. Mexico! And nothing to do all day every day but paint. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’m so damn excited right now I feel like running up and down the aisle. You know, this is the second time in my life I ever been on an airplane?”

And on and on and on. Paul Klauss could imagine, dismally, that the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop would be peopled with dozens of dull, intense, and pimpled young men named Harvey Ardos, all of whom have the same long, black, dank hair and the same stained line around the collar of their cheap white shirts. And so it would be another wasted summer. Two of them in a row. And time was going by too fast to risk the ruin of two summers in succession.

Paul Klauss was thirty-four. In the right light he could pass for twenty-six or seven. He was a trim-bodied man, five feet eight inches in height, who, by the way he carried himself and through the assistance of his constant use of elevator shoes, gave the impression of being five ten or perhaps a little more. His hair was dark blond and carefully tended. Feature by feature he somewhat resembled a blond Gregory Peck, but the pale eyelashes were longer than they needed to be, and there was a look of weakness around the mouth.

His life was orderly, exceedingly well organized. He was a bachelor, and owned and operated a small men’s clothing store near the University of Pennsylvania. He lived in a small and tasteful apartment ten blocks from the store. He did not drink or smoke. He took splendid care of himself, and purchased many medicines and devices which promised to prolong the appearance of youth indefinitely. He had no close friends. All other potential interests in his life were subordinated to his single, intense, almost psychotic compulsion—the hunting of women.

He operated his shop diligently and successfully because it provided the funds necessary to his compulsion. He had made his apartment most attractive, not because he particularly cared about his own surroundings, but because he saw a direct relationship between the frame and the eventual picture. Though not a particularly vain man, he tried to look as well as possible
at all times because it enhanced his average. He had foregone the luxury of having any specific and positive personality of his own because it was so much more effective to guess what sort of person the woman would be most vulnerable to, and then assume that personality.

He had both the cold gray eye and the unthinking cruelty of the professional hunter of any sort of game. Some men climbed mountains because they were there. Other men spent frozen hours in duck blinds, or sweaty hours on a high platform over a staked goat. Paul Klauss had equivalent patience and equivalent skills. And he paid just as much attention to the efficacy of his weapons and their condition.

When he was twenty he had begun his first journal. He had used his specialized but prodigious memory to look back across the last five years of his existence and recall each name, each face, each figure, each circumstance, each perfumed nuance and set them down in perfect order of accomplishment, in prose as cold and functional as his eyes. Ever after that he kept his journal up to date, making the entries as they occurred. When he was twenty-five he purchased several soft and expensive loose-leaf binders and a quantity of heavy, creamy bond paper. He transcribed all his previous records into the new journals, using a portable typewriter equipped with green ribbon. He worked evenings for many weeks, changing many awkward nesses of phrase and expression as he transcribed the records of his success. They were kept in a locked case in his living room, except for the three most recent ones which he had brought with him. They were his trophy room. His fishing log His hunting journal.

As other men might recall the look of the brown bear or the mountain slope, or the crashing fall of a moose on the short of a Canadian lake, Paul Klauss would remember the precise configuration of a dimpled buttock, or the approximate decibe count of a wordless cry of completion. On those evenings between expeditions, Paul would leaf through his journals. The name of the female person involved was used as a heading for each entry. Directly underneath appeared the dates, showing the duration of the affair. They did not endure long. And they never, never overlapped. After the date appeared certain statistics: her age, and whether it was verified or estimated approximate height and weight and so on. After this appeare two numerical ratings based on a scale of ten. The first ratin
was that of the woman, appearance, energy, co-operativeness. The second rating was that of his own estimate of his own effectiveness in inaugurating, completing and removing himself from the affair. It had been a long time since, out of desperation, Klauss had spent time on any woman who rated less than five on his scale, and equally long since he himself had blundered to an extent where he could rate himself lower than six.

After the factual data began the text of his entry. “Ruth (Mrs. John Williams) entered my shop at three o’clock on the rainy afternoon of April 3, 1948. She was attractively but not expensively dressed in a green wool suit, a transparent raincape and hood over her dark-red hair. She said that she was interested in buying a present for her husband, and said that she had been thinking of a sports shirt. I told her it would help me if she were to tell me what sort of a man her husband was, thus putting me in a better position to advise her …”

He thought of his journals as having some special value. It was an account of over six hundred trophies pursued, tamed and released. He thought himself unique in the world, and would have been most distressed to know not only how many others enjoyed the same cold game, but also the rather obvious psychological reason for their enjoyment.

Each winter he made the best of the rather limited opportunities on the Philadelphia scene, and for the past nine years, he had been able to leave the shop each summer in the charge of a trusted subordinate and go forth to where the game was more abundant, the handicaps fewer.

For several years he operated on the cruise circuit, but there came to be a disheartening sameness about the shipboard conquest of the adventuresome secretary, schoolteacher or nurse. When, even with the help of his journal, he found it difficult to remember their faces and their mannerisms, he decided to seek other hunting grounds.

Three years ago he had spent the summer at a music camp and conference in New Hampshire. It had provided nine unique episodes for the journal, and had made him feel as exhilarated as a spear fisherman at Marine Studios. Two years ago he had attended a summer writing conference, and it had been a splendid equivalent. But last summer he had erred dreadfully by signing up for a sculpture course in Florida. The selection had been grossly meager. Of the three entries in the journal, he suspected that he had been overly generous in awarding them
all fives. Two could have been considered fours. And one might possibly have been adjudged a three.

When he had come across the announcement of the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop in the February copy of
Diary of the Arts
, he had clipped it and set it aside. He had been dubious about it, but finally, unable to find anything that sounded better, he had sent his money at the last moment and made his air reservations.

He had embarked with anticipatory visions of a workshop galaxy of delectable trophies, bold and perfumed and vulnerable, and of himself strolling among them, in slow and thoughtful selection of the perfect blooms for a perfect bouquet. The chase itself was, to Paul Klauss, the heady and delicious aspect of conquest. The culmination, though pleasant enough, was, he sometimes confessed to himself, rather mechanical.

Now Harvey Ardos had faded anticipation to a kind of sour pessimism. Possibly the ad had attracted a damp swarm of Harveys, and their female equivalents. Abused and disheartened by the intensity of the repetition of banalities, Klauss was pleased when there was a subtle change in the engine noises and the
NO SMOKING
sign began to flash. Harvey Ardos terminated his conversation abruptly and began to adjust himself to the imminent task of absorbing all the color of an early afternoon landing in Mexico City.

After they had gone through customs and emerged into the station proper, Klauss heard a tremulous male voice saying nervously, “Mr. Klauss. Mr Ardos. Mr. Klauss. Mr. Ardos.”

Paul turned and saw a clerky-looking little gray-haired man in chamois jacket standing next to a vast middle-aged woman with metallic yellow hair who stood babbling and billowing beside the little man, peering around with quick movements of her head.

With sinking heart Paul Klauss went over and introduced himself to Miles Drummond and Agnes Partridge Keeley. Harvey Ardos acted overwhelmed with the distinction of being met in such a huge and glamorous terminal building, and there was a nervous squeak in his voice.

After a certain amount of bumbling, passengers and luggage were settled into a great gray Cadillac across from the terminal building. Paul managed to maneuver himself into the front seat beside Agnes. He did not feel that he could endure another moment seated beside Harvey. He thought that Miles Drummond
was certainly a bold and resounding name for the nervous and apologetic little man who was running the school. In his anticipations of the school he had placed Agnes Partridge Keeley on his list of possibles. He removed her in a tenth of a second. Agnes Partridge Keeley talked volubly about delightful old Mexico as she eased the car through traffic with such an excess of caution that they were trailed at all times by a file of taxicabs hooting in frustrated anger and derision. Miss Keeley did not appear to notice them. They sought opportunities to cut around the Cadillac, glaring as they passed, inches away.

It was a new city to Paul Klauss, but he looked at it with that limited interest born of specialization, in much the same way that an experienced hunter might survey new terrain from the air. There is a water hole. There is heavy brush country. There is a game trail through the hills. Paul noted that there seemed to be a great many bars and a great many hotels. And it was heartening to see the high percentage of trim young females, particularly on one street they traversed. At a corner he found the name of the street and filed it away carefully in his mind. Juarez.

As Agnes Partridge Keeley talked, Paul extracted pertinent information. They were the first two students to arrive. The rest were coming tomorrow by air, or arriving by car. As Agnes paused for a moment to inch her way around the circle in front of the Continental Hilton and turn south on Insurgentes, Paul said, “How many students will there be?”

“Thirteen,” Miles Drummond said from the back seat.

Paul was appalled. Thirteen was far too small a group to provide not only adequate choice, but sufficient room for maneuver.

“I suppose there are several married couples?” he said with forced cheer.

“Really, I expected more than we are getting,” Miles Drummond said. “Just one married couple. Their name is Wahl. Doubleyou aye aitch el. Mr. Klauss, tell us about your painting.”

Paul hesitated long enough for Harvey Ardos to pounce. And pounce he did. From then on whenever Agnes would try to break in, Harvey would run right over her by increasing his decibel count. She gave up and drove up the mountains in silence, a pinched look of exasperation on her mouth.

Soon after they left the toll road at the Cuernavaca end, they
turned through an open iron gate in a high wall and parked directly in front of a building that was not only an exceptionally ugly structure, but seemed to be in a state of utter disrepair. A motley collection of servants came out after the baggage. One of them was one of the dirtiest small boys Paul had ever seen.

Drummond, with his continual air of apology, took Paul to the ground-floor room that had been assigned to him, and handed over the key and said, “Ha ha, Mr. Klauss. You may find it a bit primitive, but it’s clean and after all, we’re here to paint, aren’t we?”

“Mmmm,” he said.

“I’ll let you get settled while I go show Mr. Ardos his room. Dinner at eight-thirty, Mr. Klauss. Until then, ha ha, you are on your own. The town is four miles away. If you feel you need transportation, see me and I’ll see if anything can be arranged. Cuernavaca is very … picturesque.”