He rubbed a little more olive oil into his shoulders and tensed. “You’re a bitta orl right,” he assured himself nasally and humorously. “Woo!” On his own he was almost likable, the vulgar charm of his honesty diminishing customary egotism. He did a few body-presses and leg-pedallings and then lay back, panting slightly, on the rattan-covered floor. Around him the walls closed in. There were just sufficient facile abstracts to establish his intelligence and skill; a dubious set of nudes whom he would claim to have known in the most realistic way, and an even stranger set of male studies about which he said nothing at all. Nothing at all except at the right time and in the right company. Doctor Varga, he called himself in the thick of the coaching-college junk sales. (“Late Hiroshima!” Bernard growled when he heard.) But he collected pupils scattered from all over the place and farmed them out to a few pass-degree students and hungry teachers who could push them through matriculation while he hunched in his cubicle office adding the receipts up and then down to try to make them come out more.
