Student Body, Sample 3 |
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From Chapter 3
Rick strolled through the open doorway of Room 9 without knocking, as was the custom of the comrades of the combined adversity of graduate school and the dank basement. “Hey, folks,” he grinned, “how’s tricks?”
Number 9 was about half the size of Number 7, with a smallish anteroom that held only two desks, and a slightly larger office space behind. Rick nodded pleasantly to Agnes Wilkins, a British student whom he did not know very well but who seemed nice enough whenever they chatted, and then stepped into the rear of the room.
“Dave, my man,” he greeted the dark-haired, skinny fellow in a striped shirt and jeans who sat at one desk, “you up for some darts today?”
Dave Rundle, who had gone through the Department’s rather minimalist teaching training when Rick did, looked up with a reluctant smile. “I’ve got some papers...” he attempted.
“I really feel like knocking some holes in things,” Rick said, angling his head toward the crazy old secondhand dart board that hung on the wall beside Dave’s chair, somehow sporting four darts rather than three. “I thought maybe I’d better come down and urge a little break on you so you wouldn’t work too hard and strain yourself.”
“Oh, go ahead, Dave,” called a smiling voice behind Rick and to the left, in rich tones that made all the tiny hairs stand up on the suddenly cool, lonely back of his neck. “One game won’t hurt.”
Rick turned slowly to face the young woman in a white blouse and gray suit jacket who sat at a desk along the east wall. Her hair of shoulder length and a generous measure more hung midnight-dark and silky-sleek about a slender neck, framing a face as smooth as cream. Those knowing red lips smiled crookedly, easily back at Rick, and he felt a quick pang beneath his tightening lungs.
“Well, one game, or maybe two,” he said over his shoulder at Dave, who had stood and was gathering up the darts. “And, ah, Lauren,” he added a bit awkwardly, “maybe you’d like to join us...?”
She regarded him with those fathomless doe eyes of hers for a moment, almost wistfully, he thought—and that notion made him feel...strange. “Thanks,” she replied at last, softly, “but I’d better pass today.”
“If you’re sure...” He hesitated.
“You boys have your fun. I’ll murder you both next time.” She smiled up at him so guilelessly unflinching that he simply could not face it. Rick nodded acknowledgment, but even as he and Dave stepped back toward her desk to put a decent distance between themselves and the heavily pocked board, Rick found himself blinking at the dark tile between his sneakers.
But he didn’t come down to Nine just to stare stupidly at the floor, Rick realized belatedly—he could have done that well enough back in his own office. He was here, dammit, and he was here for a purpose. He wouldn’t have come without a very good reason, he told himself, wouldn’t have come merely out of some grim masochistic curiosity or, worse, out of some...some desire for—for— Well, he wouldn’t have done that.
Taking a steadying breath, Rick looked over at Lauren—but she had gone back to her papers.
He turned back at Dave. “As the challenged pahty, suh, the honor is yohs.” He gestured to the darts.
Dave nodded ceremoniously.
“Misplaced modifier,” Lauren murmured from her grading.
“Huh?” said Dave. Rick just stared.
“ ‘As the challenged party,’ ” she repeated, “ ‘the honor...’ ” She shook her head in faint disapproval. “It’s not the honor that’s challenged,” she said. “Tisk, tisk.”
“Why, yes ’tis, ma’am, yes ’tis,” Dave bristled sententiously back into character. “Mah honor has indeed been challenged. And now—” He puffed his cheeks. “And now—”
“And now,” suggested Rick, “we’d better shut up, or she’ll be challenging our intelligence, too. Or should I say that party will have the honor of challenging our intelligence.” Dave raised his eyebrows, and Rick continued, “She’s right, of course.” He sighed. “And from one just beginning a master’s. Precocious youth.”
Slowly then, scarcely believing he did it, but knowing that the action fit the mood of the moment—and trying to tell himself that a failure to follow through on the jest here would, from someone of his known wit, be all too obvious—Rick reached out and patted the girl with mock condescension upon the soft, faintly fragrant top of her head. His hand trembled.
“I had very good teachers,” Lauren smiled softly. She arched an eyebrow, and then ducked her impish chin and looked back to her work.
Rick nudged the other man quickly in the ribs. “All right, Dave,” he tried to grin, “now that we older gentuhmen have been put back in owa places, why doan you-all commence to whuppin’ mah ass?”
Dave controlled a smirk most nobly and turned back to the game. “With pleasuh, suh. With pleasuh.” He took aim and let fly. Rick watched approvingly.
Dave was a better dart player than Rick—the game was his, after all—but Rick was slowly improving. It was always good to come down to Nine and shoot the breeze and shoot some darts. They had been doing it ever since Dave first hung up the board...though this semester Rick had been remiss in visiting.
Lips moving silently, Dave added up his points, both for his regulation three darts and for that tag-along extra as well, as he went downrange and cleared the board. “Okay,” he said, returning to hand the darts to Rick with a smile. “Beat that, wise guy.”
Rick whistled quietly. “I’ll give it a try...” He raised his elbow and began flexing his wrist. He took aim. He threw.
His first dart went a handspan wide of the target. Its brass tip took a nick out of the wall, and the projectile clattered to the floor. “Ranging shot,” Dave commented.
“Yep,” said Rick. “Now I know where that wall is.” Dave bent wordlessly, and with a wry grin he chucked the dart back over his shoulder toward Rick for the taller man to reuse. “Thanks,” replied Rick, feeling both sheepish and yet a little touched as he grabbed the thing out of the air, somehow managing not to stab himself through the palm. He sighed. Then he tossed again, hitting the wedge marked with a 7.
“Bravo,” nodded Dave. “The outermost circle.”
“Very sporting of me, don’t you think?” Rick smiled. “Only a show-off would be rude enough to give a bulls-eye so soon.” He cast the next dart.
Dave cringed at the 3. “Low point,” he observed at last, “but closer. And close to a double, too,” he attempted helpfully.
Rick snorted. “Which for the 19 next to it would have meant something, and then if it could’ve edged up a little and been a triple instead...” He shook his head. “We could have ham and eggs...”
“If we had eggs?” wondered Dave innocently.
“And ham,” agreed Rick in a dramatically sepulchral tone. Despite the pose, though, his lips quirked. “Wouldn’t have wanted that other dart to feel lonely out there by itself, anyway,” he shrugged. “Might as well give it a neighbor.”
“Whereas the next...”
“Oh, yes, the next,” Rick said grandly, drawing back his hand and taking aim, “will carry the march of progress ever onward.” He tensed his arm and with cocked forefinger and thumb pulled his wrist sharply forward--
And he jerked to an awkward stop in mid-throw as Ian Tucker pranced through the doorway from the anteroom and across his line of fire. The kid tiptoed with what he must have thought was comedic effect, bobbing his sandy-haired head up and down and moving his splayed hands back and forth as if to ward off Rick’s throw. “Oops,” he chuckled, “sorry, sorry. ’Scuse me, comin’ through, comin’ through.”
Ian was a first-semester master’s student, and he got on Rick’s nerves. He always struck Rick as a self-important, smarmy little prick, and this behavior was indicative of it. Sure, he had seen Dave and Rick standing there with the darts, but he couldn’t just wait until the next throw—or even make a decent wisecrack à la, say, Phil Rodney to hold up the game for a second so he could enter. Rick could have respected that. But, no, he had to barge right through in the middle like it was the cutest thing in the world.
Fuming, Rick let Ian get about half a pace across his left, and then he whipped the dart sharply past the kid’s hunched back and into the target.
Ian plunked his books down on the desk next to Lauren’s and turned around in surprise, but Rick only had eyes for Dave. “Say,” came the appreciative comment, “that was better. Triple 13!”
“Uh huh,” Rick agreed easily. “You just have to have the right motivation.” He looked around again and saw that Lauren was smiling at him, too, her eyes dark and gleaming beneath those dense lashes of hers.
Then Ian bent over the woman’s desk to say something to her, and as he did he dropped his hand casually upon her shoulder. Rick flinched. Feeling stupid, hollow, somehow angry, he turned away in mute fury, and from a white-knuckled fist cocked way back behind his ear he snapped his last dart right in the center of the bulls-eye, deep into the cork.
“Now, that’s more like it,” Dave said, nodding. “Solid 50 right there. You didn’t catch me, but you’re getting closer. Another round?”
Rick blinked. He let out his breath, and looked uncertainly at Dave, but the other showed only simple curiosity. Rick glanced at his watch, his face feeling warm. His pulse seemed to shake his chest. “Uh, thanks, Dave, but actually, maybe I’d better wrap it up now.” He shrugged apologetically and moved his feet so that his body rotated slightly and his gaze also took in Lauren, who glanced up past the chattering Ian to Rick again. “I’m dying for some lunch,” he explained, catching Lauren’s eye discreetly. “I’m going to head over to the Union and grab some.” He looked around the room, swiftly taking in all three of them, and craning around to nod goodbye to Agnes out in the anteroom as well—but he came carefully back to his starting point. “I’ll see you guys later.” He paused, and made as if to turn away.
“Wait a minute, Rick,” Lauren called. She gave Ian a brief, dismissive smile, and shrugged the boy off as she rose to her feet and moved to join Rick. “I’m hungry, too. Maybe I’ll join you.” Her voice was even, but her gaze was searching. Those dark eyes seemed to look right through the mask of his face to the wheels within wheels within wheels beneath.
“Okay,” he said with a studied indifference. “Whatever you like. I guess I could use the company.” Despite himself, Rick felt a quick, guilty thrill of pride that he could make her respond so. That fool Ian could fall all over Lauren like a dumb high-schooler, but with Rick...why, with him all it took was one secret look, and they could read each other instantly, even now. He tried not to think about that.
“Teacher’s pet,” sniffed Ian as he dropped sulkily behind his desk.
Suddenly the room was silent. Lauren gave the other a swift, bitter look through slitted lids, and Dave raised his eyebrows faintly at Rick, waiting for the response.
It was no secret, really, that Lauren had been Rick’s student in the year before she graduated. She had taken a lot of advanced classes as a sophomore and junior, but when she was a senior she finally had to go back and take a 200-level literature course which Rick happened to be teaching. Everybody knew it, for Lauren had explained the association easily with a graceful, self-deprecating jocularity when Phil and Rick first came to the T.A. training that she and Ian and Agnes and others had attended over the summer. But it was something Rick didn’t talk about. It just didn’t seem polite, he said, to bring up the fact that someone who was now a colleague had so recently been a mere student—and one’s own student, no less. That answer always seemed to satisfy.
Rick gazed back at Ian with what he trusted was a placid, superior smile. When an opponent grew hot, Rick liked to maintain a pose of grand lassitude, as if the matter of replying to such sort were somehow beneath him. His wife found it infuriating, and with her, at least, he tried not to lapse into the almost habitual stance. With those he disliked, however, Rick knew how to really work the tactic. In verbal jousting he was rarely bested by any but the quick-witted Phil Rodney, and if he needed a second actually to compose a quip rather than loosing it instinctively, he could cover the pause with this slow, smug smile. The moment stretched, stretched...just right, and then, triumphantly, he knew he had it.
“Any instructor whose student has gone on to graduate school and had an article accepted for publication in a major scholarly journal,” Rick said lightly, “please raise your hand.” He raised the first two fingers of his left hand idly and stared back at the sullen Ian.
He clapped his right hand in a comradely fashion on Lauren’s too-familiar shoulder, feeling her settle comfortably—so terribly gratifyingly—into his grasp, not shrink away as she had done with the other. Beneath the padded tweed of her jacket lay the thin silky fabric of her blouse, and beneath that lay skin silkier still, firm and rounded and warm. As she leaned into his impossibly nonchalant hand, his guilty palm sensed somehow a faint brief band of resistance within the slide of shirt upon shoulder, and suddenly he knew, frozen, that it was the strap of her lacy brassiere. His poor mind, futilely, tried not to follow that narrow strip of white cotton down, down, and around, to a soft scalloped cup in which nestled the most tender feminine flesh, delicate and youthful and fresh, pale and yet tipped with dusky rose, a pebbly contrast that to the right touch, or even mere smirking thought, could crinkle and stiffen with the most flattering rapidity... The others, he knew, would see nothing amiss, but as she cocked her head and winked easily up at him, it took all of his composure not to jerk his motionless hand from that shoulder in panic.
“Well, see you later, then,” said Rick to the others. Heart pounding betrayingly, he beamed a slow, confident smile around the room.
Ian said nothing, and Dave grinned back at Rick in approval. “See you later,” he agreed.
Rick nodded and let his hand slowly drop. Glancing to Lauren, who fell into step with him, he shoved his trembling hands in his pockets and walked unhurriedly out.
Rick strolled through the open doorway of Room 9 without knocking, as was the custom of the comrades of the combined adversity of graduate school and the dank basement. “Hey, folks,” he grinned, “how’s tricks?”
Number 9 was about half the size of Number 7, with a smallish anteroom that held only two desks, and a slightly larger office space behind. Rick nodded pleasantly to Agnes Wilkins, a British student whom he did not know very well but who seemed nice enough whenever they chatted, and then stepped into the rear of the room.
“Dave, my man,” he greeted the dark-haired, skinny fellow in a striped shirt and jeans who sat at one desk, “you up for some darts today?”
Dave Rundle, who had gone through the Department’s rather minimalist teaching training when Rick did, looked up with a reluctant smile. “I’ve got some papers...” he attempted.
“I really feel like knocking some holes in things,” Rick said, angling his head toward the crazy old secondhand dart board that hung on the wall beside Dave’s chair, somehow sporting four darts rather than three. “I thought maybe I’d better come down and urge a little break on you so you wouldn’t work too hard and strain yourself.”
“Oh, go ahead, Dave,” called a smiling voice behind Rick and to the left, in rich tones that made all the tiny hairs stand up on the suddenly cool, lonely back of his neck. “One game won’t hurt.”
Rick turned slowly to face the young woman in a white blouse and gray suit jacket who sat at a desk along the east wall. Her hair of shoulder length and a generous measure more hung midnight-dark and silky-sleek about a slender neck, framing a face as smooth as cream. Those knowing red lips smiled crookedly, easily back at Rick, and he felt a quick pang beneath his tightening lungs.
“Well, one game, or maybe two,” he said over his shoulder at Dave, who had stood and was gathering up the darts. “And, ah, Lauren,” he added a bit awkwardly, “maybe you’d like to join us...?”
She regarded him with those fathomless doe eyes of hers for a moment, almost wistfully, he thought—and that notion made him feel...strange. “Thanks,” she replied at last, softly, “but I’d better pass today.”
“If you’re sure...” He hesitated.
“You boys have your fun. I’ll murder you both next time.” She smiled up at him so guilelessly unflinching that he simply could not face it. Rick nodded acknowledgment, but even as he and Dave stepped back toward her desk to put a decent distance between themselves and the heavily pocked board, Rick found himself blinking at the dark tile between his sneakers.
But he didn’t come down to Nine just to stare stupidly at the floor, Rick realized belatedly—he could have done that well enough back in his own office. He was here, dammit, and he was here for a purpose. He wouldn’t have come without a very good reason, he told himself, wouldn’t have come merely out of some grim masochistic curiosity or, worse, out of some...some desire for—for— Well, he wouldn’t have done that.
Taking a steadying breath, Rick looked over at Lauren—but she had gone back to her papers.
He turned back at Dave. “As the challenged pahty, suh, the honor is yohs.” He gestured to the darts.
Dave nodded ceremoniously.
“Misplaced modifier,” Lauren murmured from her grading.
“Huh?” said Dave. Rick just stared.
“ ‘As the challenged party,’ ” she repeated, “ ‘the honor...’ ” She shook her head in faint disapproval. “It’s not the honor that’s challenged,” she said. “Tisk, tisk.”
“Why, yes ’tis, ma’am, yes ’tis,” Dave bristled sententiously back into character. “Mah honor has indeed been challenged. And now—” He puffed his cheeks. “And now—”
“And now,” suggested Rick, “we’d better shut up, or she’ll be challenging our intelligence, too. Or should I say that party will have the honor of challenging our intelligence.” Dave raised his eyebrows, and Rick continued, “She’s right, of course.” He sighed. “And from one just beginning a master’s. Precocious youth.”
Slowly then, scarcely believing he did it, but knowing that the action fit the mood of the moment—and trying to tell himself that a failure to follow through on the jest here would, from someone of his known wit, be all too obvious—Rick reached out and patted the girl with mock condescension upon the soft, faintly fragrant top of her head. His hand trembled.
“I had very good teachers,” Lauren smiled softly. She arched an eyebrow, and then ducked her impish chin and looked back to her work.
Rick nudged the other man quickly in the ribs. “All right, Dave,” he tried to grin, “now that we older gentuhmen have been put back in owa places, why doan you-all commence to whuppin’ mah ass?”
Dave controlled a smirk most nobly and turned back to the game. “With pleasuh, suh. With pleasuh.” He took aim and let fly. Rick watched approvingly.
Dave was a better dart player than Rick—the game was his, after all—but Rick was slowly improving. It was always good to come down to Nine and shoot the breeze and shoot some darts. They had been doing it ever since Dave first hung up the board...though this semester Rick had been remiss in visiting.
Lips moving silently, Dave added up his points, both for his regulation three darts and for that tag-along extra as well, as he went downrange and cleared the board. “Okay,” he said, returning to hand the darts to Rick with a smile. “Beat that, wise guy.”
Rick whistled quietly. “I’ll give it a try...” He raised his elbow and began flexing his wrist. He took aim. He threw.
His first dart went a handspan wide of the target. Its brass tip took a nick out of the wall, and the projectile clattered to the floor. “Ranging shot,” Dave commented.
“Yep,” said Rick. “Now I know where that wall is.” Dave bent wordlessly, and with a wry grin he chucked the dart back over his shoulder toward Rick for the taller man to reuse. “Thanks,” replied Rick, feeling both sheepish and yet a little touched as he grabbed the thing out of the air, somehow managing not to stab himself through the palm. He sighed. Then he tossed again, hitting the wedge marked with a 7.
“Bravo,” nodded Dave. “The outermost circle.”
“Very sporting of me, don’t you think?” Rick smiled. “Only a show-off would be rude enough to give a bulls-eye so soon.” He cast the next dart.
Dave cringed at the 3. “Low point,” he observed at last, “but closer. And close to a double, too,” he attempted helpfully.
Rick snorted. “Which for the 19 next to it would have meant something, and then if it could’ve edged up a little and been a triple instead...” He shook his head. “We could have ham and eggs...”
“If we had eggs?” wondered Dave innocently.
“And ham,” agreed Rick in a dramatically sepulchral tone. Despite the pose, though, his lips quirked. “Wouldn’t have wanted that other dart to feel lonely out there by itself, anyway,” he shrugged. “Might as well give it a neighbor.”
“Whereas the next...”
“Oh, yes, the next,” Rick said grandly, drawing back his hand and taking aim, “will carry the march of progress ever onward.” He tensed his arm and with cocked forefinger and thumb pulled his wrist sharply forward--
And he jerked to an awkward stop in mid-throw as Ian Tucker pranced through the doorway from the anteroom and across his line of fire. The kid tiptoed with what he must have thought was comedic effect, bobbing his sandy-haired head up and down and moving his splayed hands back and forth as if to ward off Rick’s throw. “Oops,” he chuckled, “sorry, sorry. ’Scuse me, comin’ through, comin’ through.”
Ian was a first-semester master’s student, and he got on Rick’s nerves. He always struck Rick as a self-important, smarmy little prick, and this behavior was indicative of it. Sure, he had seen Dave and Rick standing there with the darts, but he couldn’t just wait until the next throw—or even make a decent wisecrack à la, say, Phil Rodney to hold up the game for a second so he could enter. Rick could have respected that. But, no, he had to barge right through in the middle like it was the cutest thing in the world.
Fuming, Rick let Ian get about half a pace across his left, and then he whipped the dart sharply past the kid’s hunched back and into the target.
Ian plunked his books down on the desk next to Lauren’s and turned around in surprise, but Rick only had eyes for Dave. “Say,” came the appreciative comment, “that was better. Triple 13!”
“Uh huh,” Rick agreed easily. “You just have to have the right motivation.” He looked around again and saw that Lauren was smiling at him, too, her eyes dark and gleaming beneath those dense lashes of hers.
Then Ian bent over the woman’s desk to say something to her, and as he did he dropped his hand casually upon her shoulder. Rick flinched. Feeling stupid, hollow, somehow angry, he turned away in mute fury, and from a white-knuckled fist cocked way back behind his ear he snapped his last dart right in the center of the bulls-eye, deep into the cork.
“Now, that’s more like it,” Dave said, nodding. “Solid 50 right there. You didn’t catch me, but you’re getting closer. Another round?”
Rick blinked. He let out his breath, and looked uncertainly at Dave, but the other showed only simple curiosity. Rick glanced at his watch, his face feeling warm. His pulse seemed to shake his chest. “Uh, thanks, Dave, but actually, maybe I’d better wrap it up now.” He shrugged apologetically and moved his feet so that his body rotated slightly and his gaze also took in Lauren, who glanced up past the chattering Ian to Rick again. “I’m dying for some lunch,” he explained, catching Lauren’s eye discreetly. “I’m going to head over to the Union and grab some.” He looked around the room, swiftly taking in all three of them, and craning around to nod goodbye to Agnes out in the anteroom as well—but he came carefully back to his starting point. “I’ll see you guys later.” He paused, and made as if to turn away.
“Wait a minute, Rick,” Lauren called. She gave Ian a brief, dismissive smile, and shrugged the boy off as she rose to her feet and moved to join Rick. “I’m hungry, too. Maybe I’ll join you.” Her voice was even, but her gaze was searching. Those dark eyes seemed to look right through the mask of his face to the wheels within wheels within wheels beneath.
“Okay,” he said with a studied indifference. “Whatever you like. I guess I could use the company.” Despite himself, Rick felt a quick, guilty thrill of pride that he could make her respond so. That fool Ian could fall all over Lauren like a dumb high-schooler, but with Rick...why, with him all it took was one secret look, and they could read each other instantly, even now. He tried not to think about that.
“Teacher’s pet,” sniffed Ian as he dropped sulkily behind his desk.
Suddenly the room was silent. Lauren gave the other a swift, bitter look through slitted lids, and Dave raised his eyebrows faintly at Rick, waiting for the response.
It was no secret, really, that Lauren had been Rick’s student in the year before she graduated. She had taken a lot of advanced classes as a sophomore and junior, but when she was a senior she finally had to go back and take a 200-level literature course which Rick happened to be teaching. Everybody knew it, for Lauren had explained the association easily with a graceful, self-deprecating jocularity when Phil and Rick first came to the T.A. training that she and Ian and Agnes and others had attended over the summer. But it was something Rick didn’t talk about. It just didn’t seem polite, he said, to bring up the fact that someone who was now a colleague had so recently been a mere student—and one’s own student, no less. That answer always seemed to satisfy.
Rick gazed back at Ian with what he trusted was a placid, superior smile. When an opponent grew hot, Rick liked to maintain a pose of grand lassitude, as if the matter of replying to such sort were somehow beneath him. His wife found it infuriating, and with her, at least, he tried not to lapse into the almost habitual stance. With those he disliked, however, Rick knew how to really work the tactic. In verbal jousting he was rarely bested by any but the quick-witted Phil Rodney, and if he needed a second actually to compose a quip rather than loosing it instinctively, he could cover the pause with this slow, smug smile. The moment stretched, stretched...just right, and then, triumphantly, he knew he had it.
“Any instructor whose student has gone on to graduate school and had an article accepted for publication in a major scholarly journal,” Rick said lightly, “please raise your hand.” He raised the first two fingers of his left hand idly and stared back at the sullen Ian.
He clapped his right hand in a comradely fashion on Lauren’s too-familiar shoulder, feeling her settle comfortably—so terribly gratifyingly—into his grasp, not shrink away as she had done with the other. Beneath the padded tweed of her jacket lay the thin silky fabric of her blouse, and beneath that lay skin silkier still, firm and rounded and warm. As she leaned into his impossibly nonchalant hand, his guilty palm sensed somehow a faint brief band of resistance within the slide of shirt upon shoulder, and suddenly he knew, frozen, that it was the strap of her lacy brassiere. His poor mind, futilely, tried not to follow that narrow strip of white cotton down, down, and around, to a soft scalloped cup in which nestled the most tender feminine flesh, delicate and youthful and fresh, pale and yet tipped with dusky rose, a pebbly contrast that to the right touch, or even mere smirking thought, could crinkle and stiffen with the most flattering rapidity... The others, he knew, would see nothing amiss, but as she cocked her head and winked easily up at him, it took all of his composure not to jerk his motionless hand from that shoulder in panic.
“Well, see you later, then,” said Rick to the others. Heart pounding betrayingly, he beamed a slow, confident smile around the room.
Ian said nothing, and Dave grinned back at Rick in approval. “See you later,” he agreed.
Rick nodded and let his hand slowly drop. Glancing to Lauren, who fell into step with him, he shoved his trembling hands in his pockets and walked unhurriedly out.
