On the second of January, the school’s new academic quarter began. It was a fine season of my life. I felt like King Arthur with two of the best friends a man could want -- Guinevere and Lancelot. And too, there were the three Merlins -- Shepperton, Chi, and Townsend. It was a magical time.

Spring came in early March, warm and sunny, melting the snow in the valleys, filling the brooks, streams, and rivers. The final snowfall came late in the month. The moon waxed full again. The days were raw and cold now and again, but all were cloudless, the sky deepest azure.

Easter was played out at the school with chants, prayers, songs, dances and, of course, Tapsgame sessions. Then it was May. Beltane came -- the “High May Feast” – a sun-worshipping celebration dating back to the Druids, coinciding with “Whit Sunday,” Pentecost, a “day of grace.”

MacDougall was working nights, Monday through Thursday eight to eleven, and Saturday afternoons two to six. He and six assistants put the daily chaos of books in their places on the shelves. They also cleaned windows by the score, and built shelves and racks and reading tables galore. MacDougall closed the great glass edifice each night, alone, at ten past eleven. From the top floor, by the light of the moon, he could see southward over the expanse of lawn to the tucks and stands of evergreen, Cypress, and Chinese Chestnut trees and still further out, past them, across the entire valley.

At this time, I again acquired a car. I’d owned several in the past, but had abandoned driving cars on settling in at the Two-Top Mountain School. Now I bought a dark blue van, six years old. My plan was to take a break and go spend a night in the outdoors somewhere near the Grand Tetons. Audrey and MacDougall came along.

We arrived just out of Colter Bay and had a look around. There was still snow all over. We put on layers of clothes and heavy coats and caps and gloves and set into the woods on snowshoes. We came to a small open area bordered on two sides by snowdrifts piled heavily over three fallen tress. We stomped down the powder with our snowshoes, evened out a square, and put down a nylon ground cloth. We rolled out our sleeping bags, climbed in them, and then whispered for near an hour about how eerie the night was -- honestly, I’d never seen such a sky, so many stars -- and could hardly get to sleep.

The sky was already blue and clear when I awoke. Our bags and packs and gear were all frozen stiff. We’d arrived, in the dark of night, at an open space in just about the thickest part of a sub-alpine fir forest. Crows, ravens, and jay birds scolded us for our intrusion. I made coffee and, after we had breakfast and broke camp, we climbed further up the mountain a ways. In awe of our surroundings, we did not speak at all. After about forty minutes, we turned and went back down. I savored every second, feeling that in each was an eternity -- the passing through a lifetime mattered not so much as living in each such lucid, shining, heartfelt moment.

Late in May, after spending a lazy day lying in a field of high grass circled by Aspen, Box Elder, and pine trees, MacDougall cooked for us. He excused himself from his evening library duties and prepared mushrooms, onions, carrots, green peppers, and soybean sprouts with pineapple pieces pan fried in sunflower oil. He boiled rice. He uncorked a bottle of Rosé wine. He made a fire in the fireplace. MacDougall served his fine meal and followed up with fresh strawberries and vanilla ice-cream.

While I cleaned and washed up, he drew her. She had on her ornamental chiffon blouse and jade and turquoise jewelry. By the light of the living room candles, he drew not the Audrey of my fresco, the angel, but the woman -- the woman he loved. I excused myself and went out for a walk. I know MacDougall proceeded slowly, tenderly. He’d told me his situation – he’d been pondering how best to make love to this woman -- what could be most lovely for her? Who else talked like this? He was a true romantic. In Audrey, I knew, he’d found the love of his life.

On the weekends, now and again, they went out for picnics, taking fresh fruit, cheese sandwiches, burgundy or chablis wine, romping and frolicking like kids. Audrey would strip down to her skirt and socks and, astonishing in the meadow grass with the sunlight shining through her golden hair, simply walk around singing, cherishing her being adored by him.

I was out of the picture now, as far as desiring Audrey went. I too fell under the spell of her maturing radiance. I still had my moments of daydreaming about her -- her wearing jangling metal doo-dad ear-rings, an immodest leather vest, jade and turquoise jewelry, and nothing else. In my dreams, she’d walk up to me and do things I did not need to hire a psychotherapist to interpret the meaning of.

I started keeping a diary, to try to deal with the exasperrating jumble -- I almost wrote jungle -- of my cares, concerns, fears, visions, nightmares, desires, and prayers. It only got to forty pages, and I couldn't stand it any more. I supposed I'd have to give up even trying to be mature. About every fifth sentence in my diary held a reference to either breasts and what was on them or legs and what lay between them, or both -- with more lips and teeth and eyes than even punctuation. I finally decided that, for a man, there was never any getting over these, nor could a proper expression of the truth of this be had.

I had nightmares too -- arising from my earlier husbanding and parenting failures. In fact, there was a recurring nightmare I had often, in which I saw my runaway wife with our sweet boy, them both in the house of a stupid, wicked man who only knew to screw the wife and beat the child. All their world was misery.

Love was dangerous -- this Audrey knew, too. She knew MacDougall loved her, but she could also see how he used her for his art. It was not Audrey actually that he depicted in his pictures, but representations of the flights of his fancy -- the fruits he plucked from the heights she launched him into. She loved his adoration and his wild exaggerations and interpretations of her beauty, but she was not oblivious to this danger.

Whether they went at it fast or in slow motion or in haste didn't seem to matter to her. They were doing the old dance of lovers, the urge urging them. As for me -- carefree spirit, bachelor, motherless son, sonless father -- I'd finished my angel frescoe and had taken to cutting and chipping sculptural figures from local stones.

Cyrus Rankin also has to be mentioned again, for he too had his eyes on Audrey. But, even more than that, he had his sights fixed on MacDougall and me! He desired to be part of a “Band of Brothers” -- “Three Musketeers” -- “The Three Powers” -- “Three Worlds” -- “Piscator, Auceps, and Venator.”

Cyrus believed in hardship. "Creative people suffer," he insisted – artists were crazed, stuttering, wild eyed drunkards, outlaws, madmen. The world was made for pain and madness, he insisted. Cyrus could be counted on to be morbidly quiet -- prior to blurting something out. His black lunacy, encroaching on whatever sanity he had in him, plunged him into fits -- terrible spontaneous maelstroms.

"MacDougall's in love," he teased. "Ah for the love of a woman, her hair like golden strands of sun, her cheeks fleur-de lis, her eyes like sapphires, her mouth a red rose, her teeth pearls," Cyrus said prettily; "Her sweet paps like melons, lovely to suckle." Cyrus was up to something. Suddenly he blurt it out: "MacDougall's nothing but a fucking pornographer," he declared. Then he began to cry. He sat down right there and blubbered. "These are violent times," he spluttered. "MacDougall, I'm telling you -- keep away from Audrey."

"What?" MacDougall said, astonished. "I can't stay away. I'm in love."

"Stay away from Audrey," red-mad Cyrus fiercely warned a second time.

One evening Cyrus burst in waving a gun in each hand -- two Colt pocket automatics, .32s. Audrey screamed. I lunged for him and brought him down. Audrey dressed. I gave her a ride home.

MacDougall lectured Cyrus on gun control. Cyrus defended guns. He said, "Guns, like sex, have positive and negative aspects. I'm for the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms. Aren't you?"

"You're affirming death, not sex," MacDougall said.

"You promote pornography and lust. You like showing off women like whores. I like turning violence into sport. Guns are for sport," Cyrus said. "Men like guns. I thought you were a big advocate for what men want. Men want to hunt and shoot guns. Since when are you against the Bill of Rights and men shooting guns?"

In the middle of June, we put up at the library a display of our student paintings and drawings -- including MacDougall's portraits of Lizzie and Audrey. We were assured by professors Shepperton, Chi, Townsend, and others that we had the right to freedom of opinion and expression, without interference -- to impart information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers. Townsend said the only speech not protected by the First Amendment was speech that created an imminent incitement to physical violence. If any work of art endorsed any such threat, then even the American Civil Liberty Union would count it an offense – and a crime.

The art show went largely unnoticed but was counted, at least by Roger Shepperton, a great success. The semester ended quietly. The school year was over. Summer school began.