His dreams are shallow, furtive things. His legs switch. His lips move a little against the pillow. The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise he is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes. In shadow he suddenly awakes, his ghostly blue irises searching the unfamiliar planes for the source of men's voices. These voices are downstairs, and a rumble suggests that they are moving the furniture, tramping in circles, hunting him. But a familiar bulbous basso rings out, it is Tothero, and around this firm center the noises downstairs crystallize as the sounds of card?playing, drinking, horseplay, companionship. Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep again.

 

"Harry! Harry!" The voice is plucking at his shoulder, rumpling his hair. He rolls away from the wall, squinting upward into vanished sunshine. Tothero sits in the shadows, a hulk of darkness dense with some anxiousness. His dirty?milk face leans forward, scarred by a lopsided smile. There is a smell of whisky. "Harry, I've got a girl for you!"

 

"Great. Bring her in."

 

The old man laughs, uneasily? What does he mean?

 

"You mean Janice?"

 

"It's after six o'clock. Get up, get up, Harry; you've slept like a beautiful baby. We're going out."

 

"Why?" Rabbit meant to ask "Where?"

 

"To eat, Harry, to dine. D, I, N, E. Rise, my boy. Aren't you hungry? Hunger. Hunger." He's a madman. "Oh Harry, you can't understand an old man's hunger, you eat and eat and it's never the right food. You can't understand that." He walks to the window and looks down into the alley, his lumpy profile leaden in the dull light.

 

Rabbit slides back the covers, angles his naked legs over the edge, and holds himself in a sitting position. The sight of his thighs, parallel, pure, aligns his groggy brain. The hair on his legs, once a thin blond fur, is getting dark and whiskery. The odor of his sleepsoaked body rises to him. "Whatsis girl business?" he asks.

 

"What is it, yes, what is it? Cunt," Tothero exclaims in a stream, and in the gray light by the window his face falls; he seems amazed to hear himself say such an abrupt ugly thing. Yet he's also watching, as if this was some sort of test. The result determined, he corrects himself, "No. I have an acquaintance, an acquaintance in Brewer, a lady?love perhaps, whom I stand to a meal once in a blue moon. But it's nothing more than that, little more than that. Harry, you're so innocent."

 

Rabbit begins to be afraid of Tothero; these phrases don't follow. He stands up in his underclothes. "I think I just better run along." The floor?fluff sticks to the soles of his bare feet.

 

"Oh Harry, Harry," Tothero cries in a rich voice mixed ofpain and affection, and comes forward and hugs him with one arm. "You and I are two of a kind." The big lopsided face looks up into his with eager confidence, but Rabbit doesn't understand. Yet his memory of the man as his coach still disposes him to listen. "You and I know what the score is, we know -" And right here, arriving at the kernel of his lesson, Tothero is balked, and becomes befuddled. He repeats, "We know," and removes his arm.

 

Rabbit says, "I thought we were going to talk about Janice when I woke up." He retrieves his trousers from the floor and puts them on. Their being rumpled disturbs him, reminds him that he has taken a giant step, and makes nervous wrinkles in his stomach and throat.

 

"We will, we will," Tothero says, "the moment our social obligations are satisfied." A pause. "Do you want to go back now? You must tell me if you do."

 

Rabbit remembers the dumb slot of her mouth, the way the closet door bumps against the television set. "No. God."

 

Tothero is overjoyed; it is happiness making him talk so much. "Well then, well then; get dressed. We can't go to Brewer undressed. Do you need a fresh shirt?"

 

"Yours wouldn't fit me, would it?"

 

"No, Harry, no? What's your size?"

 

"Fifteen three."

 

"Mine! Mine exactly. You have short arms for your height. Oh, this is wonderful, Harry. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you came to me when you needed help. All those years," he says, taking a shirt from the bureau made of beer cases and stripping off the cellophane, "all those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back."

 

Rabbit is startled to feel and to see in Tothero's wavy mirror that the shirt fits. Their difference must be all in their legs. With the rat-tling tongue of a proud mother Tothero watches him dress. His talk makes more sense, now that the embarrassment of explaining what they're going to do is past. "It does my heart good," he says. "Youth before the mirror. How long has it been, Harry, now tell me truly, since you had a good time? A long time?"

 

"I had a good time last night," Rabbit says. "I drove to West Virginia and back."

 

"You'll like my lady, I know you will, a city petunia," Tothero goes on. "The girl she's bringing I've never met. She says she's fat. All the world looks fat to my lady ? how she eats, Harry: the appetite of the young. That's a fascinating knot, you young people have so many tricks I never learned."

 

"It's just a Windsor." Dressed, Rabbit feels a return of calm. Waking up had in a way returned him to the world he deserted. He had missed Janice's crowding presence, the kid and his shrill needs, his own walls. He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him; Tothero is an eddy of air, and the building he is in, the streets of the town, are mere stair-ways and alleyways in space. He adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero's shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama. Like a cloud breaking in the corner of his vision Tothero drifts to the window. "Is my car still there?" Rabbit asks.

 

"Your car is blue. Yes. Put on your shoes."

 

"I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?" For in the vast blank of his freedom there remain a few imperfections: his wife, their apartment, their child ? clots of concern. It seems impossible that the passage of time should have so soon dissolved them, but Tothero's answer implies it.

 

"No," he says. He adds, "But then of course I didn't go where there would have been talk of you."

 

It annoys Rabbit that Tothero shows no interest in him except as a partner on a joyride. "I should have gone to work today," he says in a pointed voice, as if blaming the old man. "Saturday's my big day."

 

"What do you do?"

 

"I demonstrate a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler in five and dime stores."

 

"A noble calling," Tothero says, and turns from the window. "Splendid, Harry. You're dressed at last."

 

"Is there a comb anywhere, Mr. Tothero? I ought to use the can."

 

Under their feet the men in the Sunshine Athletic Association laugh and catcall at some foolishness. Rabbit pictures passing among them and asks, "Say, should everybody see me?"

 

Tothero becomes indignant, as he used to now and then at practice, when everybody was just fooling around the basket and not going into the drills. "What are you afraid of, Harry? That poor little Janice Springer? You overestimate people. Nobody cares about her. Now we'll just go down there and don't be too long in the toilet. And I haven't heard any thanks from you for all I've done for you, and all I am doing." He takes the comb stuck in the brush bristles and gives it to Harry.

 

A dread of marring his freedom blocks the easy gesture of expressing gratitude. Thin?upped, Rabbit pronounces, "Thanks."

 

They go downstairs. Contrary to what Tothero had promised, all of the men ?old men, mostly, but not very old, so their misshapen bodies have a nasty vigor ? look up with interest at him. Insanely, Tothero introduces him repeatedly: "Fred, this is my finest boy, a wonderful basketball player, Harry Angstrom, you probably remember his name from the papers, he twice set a county record, in 1950 and then he broke it in 1951, a wonderful accomplishment."

 

"Is that right, Marty?"

 

"Harry, an honor to meet you."

 

Their alert colorless eyes, little dark smears like their mouths, feed on the strange sight of him and send acid impressions down to be digested in their disgusting big beer?tough stomachs. Rabbit sees that Tothero is a fool to them, and is ashamed of his friend and of himself. He hides in the lavatory. The paint is worn off the toilet seat and the wash?basin is stained by the hot?water faucet's rusty tears; the walls are oily and the towel?rack empty. There is something terrible in the height of the tiny ceiling: a square yard of a dainty metal pattern covered with cobwebs in which a few white husks of insects are suspended. His depression deepens, becomes a kind of paralysis; he walks out and rejoins Tothero limping and stiffly grimacing, and they leave the place in a dream. He feels affronted, vaguely invaded, when Tothero gets into his car. But, just as in a dream he never stops to question, Rabbit slides in behind the wheel. In the renewed relation of his arms and legs to the switches and pedals, he finds power. His wet?combed hair feels chilly on his head.

 

He says sharply, "So you think I should've drunk with Janice."

 

"Do what the heart commands," Tothero says. "The heart is our only guide." He sounds weary and far away.

 

"Into Brewer?"

 

There is no answer.

 

Rabbit drives up the alley, coming to Potter Avenue, where the water from the ice plant used to run down. He goes right, away from Wilbur Street, where his apartment is, and two more turns bring him into Central Street heading around the mountain to Brewer. On the left, land drops away into a chasm floored by the slick still width of the Running Horse River; on the right, gasoline stations glow, twirlers flicker on strings, spotlights protest.

 

As the town thins, Tothero's tongue loosens. "The ladies we're going to meet, now Harry, I have no conception ofwhat the other one will be like, but I know you'll be a gentleman. And I guarantee you'll like my friend. She is a remarkable girl, Harry, with seven strikes against her from birth, but she's done a remarkable thing."

 

"What?"

 

"She's come to grips. Isn't that the whole secret, Harry; to come to grips? It makes me happy, happy and humble, to have, as I do, this very tenuous association with her. Harry?"

 

"Yeah?"

 

"Do you realize, Harry, that a young woman has hair on every part of her body?"

 

"I hadn't thought about it." Distaste stains his throat.

 

"Do," Tothero says. "Do think about it. They are monkeys, Harry. Women are monkeys."

 

He says it so solemn, Rabbit has to laugh.

 

Tothero laughs too, and comes closer on the seat. "Yet we love them, Harry, don't we? Harry, why do we love them? Answer that, and you'll answer the riddle of life." He is squirming around, crossing and uncrossing his legs, leaning over and tapping Rabbit's shoulder and then jerking back and glancing out the side window and turning and tapping again. "I am a hideous person, Harry. A person to be abhorred. Harry, let me tell you something." As a coach he was always telling you something. "My wife calls me a person to be abhorred. But do you know when it began? It began with her skin. One day in the spring, in nineteen forty?three or four, it was during the war, without warning it was hideous. It was like the hides of a thousand lizards stitched together. Stitched together clumsily. Can you picture that? That sense of it being in pieces horrified me, Harry. Are you listening? You're not listening. You're wondering why you came to me."

 

"What you said about Janice this morning kind of worries me."

 

` Janice! Let's not talk about little mutts like Janice Springer, Harry boy. This is the night. This is no time for pity. The real women are dropping down out of the trees." With his hands he imitates things falling out of trees. "Plip, plip, plippity!"

 

Even discounting the man as a maniac, Rabbit becomes expectant. They park the car off Weiser Avenue and meet the girls in front of a Chinese restaurant.

 

The girls waiting under crimson neon have a floral delicacy; like a touch of wilt the red light rims their fluffy hair. Rabbit's heart thumps ahead of him down the pavement. They all come together and Tothero introduces Margaret: "Margaret Kosko, Harry Angstrom, my finest athlete, it's a pleasure for me to be able to introduce two such wonderful young people to one another." The old man's manner is queerly shy; his voice has a cough waiting in it.

 

After Tothero's build?up Rabbit is amazed that Margaret is just another Janice ? the same sallow density, that stubborn smallness. Scarcely moving her lips, she says, "This is Ruth Leonard. Marty Tothero, and you, whatever your name is."

 

"Harry," Rabbit says. "Or Rabbit."

 

"That's right!" Tothero cries. "The other boys used to call you Rabbit. I had forgotten." He coughs.

 

"Well you're a big bunny," Ruth remarks. She is fat alongside Margaret, but not that fat. Chunky, more. But tall, five eight or nine. She has flat blue eyes in square?cut sockets. Her thighs fill the front of her pseudo?silk pale?green dress so that even standing up she has a lap. Her hair, kind of a dirty ginger color, is bundled in a roll at the back of her head. Beyond her the parking meters with their red tongues recede along the curb, and at her feet, pinched in lavender straps, four sidewalk squares meet in an X.

 

"Just big outside," he said.

 

"That's me too," she says.

 

"God I'm hungry," Rabbit tells them all, just to say something. From somewhere he's got the jitters.

 

"Hunger, hunger," Tothero says, as if grateful for the cue. "Where shall my little ones go?"

 

"Here?" Harry asks. He sees from the way the two girls look at him that he is expected to take charge. Tothero is moving back and forth like a crab sideways and bumps into a middle?aged couple strolling along. His face shows such surprise at the collision, and he is so elaborately apologetic, that Ruth laughs; her laugh rings on the street like a handful of change thrown down. At the sound Rabbit begins to loosen up; the space between the muscles of his chest feels padded with warm air. Tothero pushes into the glass door first, Margaret follows, and Ruth takes his arm and says, "I know you. I went to West Brewer High and got out in fifty?one."

 

"That's my class." Like the touch of her hand on his arm, her being his age pleases him, as if, even in high schools on opposite sides of the city, they have learned the same things and gained the same view of life. The Class of '51 view.

 

"You beat us," she says.

 

"You had a lousy team."

 

"No we didn't. I went with three of the players."

 

"Three at once?"

 

"In a way."

 

"Well. They looked tired."

 

She laughs again, the coins thrown down, though he feels ashamed of what he has said, she is so good?natured and maybe was pretty then. Her complexion isn't good now. But her hair is thick, and that's the sign.

 

A young Chinaman in a drab linen coat blocks their way past the glass counter where an American girl in a kimono sits counting threadbare bills. "Please, how many?"

 

"Four," Rabbit says, when Tothero is silent.

 

In an unexpected trusting gesture Ruth slips off her short white coat and gives it to Rabbit; soft, bunched cloth. The motion stirs up a smell of perfume on her.

 

"Four, yes please, this way," and the waiter leads them to a red booth. The place has just recently reopened as Chinese; pink paintings of Paris are still on the wall. Ruth staggers a little; Rabbit sees from behind that her heels, yellow with strain, tend to slip sideways in the net of lavender straps that pin her feet to the spikes of her shoes. But under the silky stretch of her mint?green dress her broad bottom packs the cloth with a certain composure. Her waist tucks in trimly, squarely, like the lines of her face. The cut of the dress bares a big V?shaped piece of fat fair back. In arriving at the booth, he bumps against her; the top of her head comes to his nose. The prickly smell of her hair stitches the store?bought scent stirred up on her. They bump because Tothero is ushering Margaret into her seat too ceremoniously, a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman's body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.

 

He discovers he has held on to her coat. Pale limp pelt, it sleeps in his lap. Without rising he reaches up and hangs it on the coatpole hook above him.

 

"Nice to have a long arm," she says, and looks in her purse and takes out a pack of Newports.

 

"Tothero says I have short arms."

 

"Where'd you meet that old bum?" This so Tothero can hear if he cares.

 

"He's not a bum, he's my old coach."

 

"Want one?" A cigarette.

 

He wavers. "I've stopped."

 

"So that old bum was your coach," she sighs. She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it. It flares on the third scratch.

 

Margaret says, "Ruth."

 

"Bum?" Tothero says, and his heavy face looks unwell and lopsided in cagey mirth, as if he's started to melt. "I am, I am. A vile old bum fallen among princesses."

 

Margaret sees nothing against her in this and puts her hand on top of his on the table and in a solemn dead voice insists, "You're nothing like a bum."

 

"Where is our young Confucian?" Tothero asks and looks around with his free arm uplifted. When the boy comes he asks, "Can we be served alcoholic beverages here?"

 

"We bring in from next door," the boy says. Funny the way the eyebrows of Chinese people look embedded in the skin instead of sticking out from it.

 

"Double Scotch whisky," Tothero says. "My dear?"

 

"Daiquiri," Margaret says; it sounds like a wisecrack.

 

"Children?"

 

Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blonde or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog. "Hell," she says. "I guess a Daiquiri."

 

"Three," Rabbit tells the boy, thinking a Daiquiri will be like a limeade.

 

The waiter recites, "Three Daiquiri, one double whisky Scotch on the rock," and goes.

 

Rabbit asks Ruth, "When's your birthday?"

 

"August. Why?"

 

"Mine's February," he says. "I win."

 

"You Win." She agrees as if she knows how he feels: that you can't be master, quite, of a woman who's older.

 

"If you recognized me," he asks, "why didn't you recognize Mr. Tothero? He was coach of that team."

 

` "Who looks at coaches? They don't do any good, do they?"

 

"Don't do any good? A high?school team is all coach; isn't it?"

 

Tothero answers, "It's all boy, Harry. You can't make gold out of lead. You can't make gold out of lead."

 

"Sure you can," Rabbit says. "When I came out in my freshman year I didn't know my head from my" ? he stops himself, after all these are ladies of a sort ?"elbow."

 

"Yes you did, Harry, yes you did. I had nothing to teach you; I just let you run." He keeps looking around. "You were a young deer," he continues, "with big feet."

 

Ruth asks, "How big?"

 

Rabbit tells her, "Twelve D. How big are yours?"

 

"They're tiny," she says. "Teeny weeny little."

 

"It looked to me like they were falling out of your shoes." He pulls his head back and slumps slightly, to look down past the table edge, into the submarine twilight where her foreshortened calves hang like tan fish. They dart back under the seat.

 

"Don't look too hard, you'll fall out of the booth," she says, ruffled, which is good. Women like being mussed. They never say they do, but they do.

 

The waiter comes with the drinks and begins laying their places with paper placemats and lusterless silver. He does Margaret and is halfway done on Tothero when Tothero takes the whisky glass away from his lips and says in a freshened, tougher voice, "Cutlery? For Oriental dishes? Don't you have chopsticks?"

 

"Chopsticks, yes."

 

"Chopsticks all around," Tothero says positively. "When in Rome."

 

"Don't take mine!" Margaret cries, slapping her hand with a clatter across her spoon and fork when the waiter reaches. "I don't want any sticks."

 

"Harry and Ruth?" Tothero asks. "Your preference?"

 

The Daiquiri does have the taste of limeade, riding like oil on the top of a raw transparent taste. "Sticks," Rabbit says in a deep voice, delighted to annoy Margaret. "In Texas we never touched metal to chicken hoo phooey."

 

"Ruth?" Tothero's facial attitude toward her is timid and forced.

 

"Oh I guess. If this dope can I can." She grinds out her cigarette and fishes for another.

 

The waiter goes away like a bridesmaid with his bouquet of unwanted silver. Margaret is alone in her choice, and this preys on her. Rabbit is glad; she is a shadow on his happiness.

 

"You ate Chinese food in Texas?" Ruth asks.

 

"All the time. Give me a cigarette."

 

"You've stopped."

 

"I've started. Give me a dime."

 

"A dime! The hell 1 will."

 

The needless urgency of her refusal offends him, it sounds as if she wants a profit. Why does she think he'd steal from her? What would he steal? He dips into his coat pocket and comes up with coins and takes a dime and puts it into the little ivory jukebox that bums mildly on the wall by their table. Leaning over, close to her face, he turns the leaves listing titles and finally punches the buttons, B and 7, for "Rocksville, P?A." "Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston," he says.

 

"Listen to the big traveller," Ruth says. She gives him a cigarette. He forgives her about the dime.

 

"So you think," Tothero says steadily, "that coaches don't do anything."

 

"They're worthless," Ruth says.

 

"Hey come on," Rabbit says.

 

The waiter comes back with their chopsticks and two menus. Rabbit is disappointed in the chopsticks; they feel like plastic instead of wood. The cigarette tastes rough, a noseful of straw. He puts it out. Never again.

 

"We'll each order a dish and then share it," Tothero tells them. "Now who has favorites?"

 

"Sweet and sour pork," Margaret says. One thing about her, she is very definite.

 

"Harry?"

 

"I don't know."

 

"Where's the big Chinese?food specialist?" Ruth asks.

 

"This is in English. I'm used to ordering from a Chinese menu.

 

"Come on, come on, tell me what's good."

 

"Hey cut it out; you're getting me rattled." `

 

"You were never in Texas," she says.

 

He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, "Absolutely I was."

 

"Doing what?"

 

"Serving Uncle."

 

"Oh, in the Army; well that doesn't count. Everybody's been to Texas with the Army."

 

"You order whatever you think is good," Rabbit tells Tothero. He is irritated by all these Army veterans Ruth seems to know, and strains to hear the final bars of the song he spent a dime to play. In this Chinese place he can just make out a hint, coming it seems from the kitchen, of the jangling melody that lifted his spirits last night in the car.

 

Tothero gives the waiter the order and when he goes away tries to give Ruth the word. The old man's thin lips are wet with whisky. "The coach," he says, "the coach is concerned with developing the three tools we are given in life: the head, the body, and the heart."

 

"And the crotch," Ruth says. Margaret, of all people, laughs. She really gives Rabbit the creeps.

 

"Young woman, you've challenged me, and I deserve the respect of your attention." He speaks with grave weight.

 

"Shit," she says softly, and looks down. "Don't bleed on me." He has hurt her. The wings of her nostrils whiten; her coarse make?up darkens.

 

"One. The head. Strategy. Most boys come to a basketball coach from alley games and have no conception of the, of the elegance of the game played on a court with two baskets. Won't you bear me out, Harry?"

 

"Yeah, sure. just yesterday –"

 

"Second ? let me finish, Harry, and then you can talk second, the body. Work the boys into condition. Make their legs hard." He clenches his fist on the slick table. "Hard. Run, run, run. Run every minute their feet are on the floor. You can't run enough. Thirdly" ? he puts the index finger and thumb of one hand to the corners of his mouth and flicks away the moisture "the heart. And here the good coach, which I, young lady, certainly tried to be and some say was, has his most solemn opportunity. Give the boys the will to achieve. I've always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the ? yes, I think the word is good- the sacredness of achievement, in the form of giving our best." He dares a pause now, and wins through it, glancing at each of them in turn to freeze their tongues. "A boy who has had his heart enlarged by an inspiring coach," he concludes, "can never become, in the deepest sense, a failure in the greater game of life.". He lifts his plump hand. "And now may the peace of God, et cetera. . ." He draws on his glass, which is mostly ice cubes. As he tilts it up they ride forward and rattle against his lips.

 

Ruth turns to Rabbit and asks quietly, as if to change the subject, "What do you do?"

 

He laughs. "Well I'm not sure I do anything any more. I should have gone to work this morning. I, uh, it's kind of hard to describe, I demonstrate something called the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler."

 

"And I'm sure he does it well," Tothero says. "I'm sure that when the MagiPeel Corporation board sits down at their annual meeting and ask themselves, `Now who has done the most to further our cause with the American public?' the name of Harry Rabbit Angstrom leads the list."

 

"What do you do?" Rabbit asks her in turn.

 

"Nothing," Ruth answers. "Nothing." And her eyelids make a greasy blue curtain as she sips her Daiquiri. Her chin takes something of the liquid's green light.

 

The Chinese food arrives. Eager saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, no bloody slab of cow haunch or hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of mute vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. Heaped on a smoking breast of rice. Each is given such a tidy hot breast, and Margaret is in a special hurry to muddle hers with glazed chunks; all eat well. Their faces take color and strength from the oval plates of dark pork, sugar peas, chicken, stiff sweet sauce, shrimp, water chestnuts, who knows what else. Their talk grows hearty.

 

"He was terrific," Rabbit says of Tothero. "He was the greatest coach in the county. I would've been nothing without him."

 

"No, Harry, no. You did more for me than I did for you. Girls, the first game he played he scored twenty points."

 

"Twenty?three," Harry says.

 

"Twenty?three points! Think of it." The women eat on. "Remember, Harry, the state tournaments in Harrisburg; Dennistown and their little set?shot artist?"

 

"He was tiny," Harry tells Ruth. "About five two and ugly as a monkey. Really a dirty player too."

 

"Ah, but he knew his trade," Tothero says, "he knew his trade. Harry had met his match."

 

"Then he tripped me, remember?"

 

"So he did," Tothero says. "I'd forgotten."

 

"This runt trips me, and over I go, bonk, against the mat. If the walls hadn't been padded I'd'a been killed."

 

"Then what happened, Harry? Did you cream him? I've forgotten this whole incident." Tothero's mouth is full of food and his hunger for revenge is ugly.

 

"Why, no," Rabbit says slowly. "I never fouled. The ref saw it and it was his fifth foul and he was out. Then we smothered 'em."

 

Something fades in Tothero's expression; his face goes slack. "That's right, you never fouled. He never did. Harry was always the idealist."

 

Rabbit shrugs. "I didn't have to."

 

"The other strange thing about Harry," Tothero tells the two women. "He was never hurt."

 

"No, I once sprained my wrist," Rabbit corrects. "The thing you said that really helped me -"

 

"What happened next in the tournaments? I'm frightened at how I've forgotten this."

 

"Next? Pennoak, I think. Nothing happened. They beat us."

 

"They won? Didn't we beat them?"

 

"Oh hell no. They were good. They had five good players. What'd we have? Just me, really. We had Harrison, who was O.K., but after that football injury he never had the touch, really."

 

"Ronnie Harrison?" Ruth asks.

 

Rabbit is startled. "You know him?" Harrison had been a notorious bedbug.

 

"I'm not sure," she says, complacently enough.

 

"Shortish guy with kinky hair. A little bitty limp."

 

"No, I don't know," she says. "I don't think so." She is pleasingly dexterous with the chopsticks, and keeps one hand lying palm up on her lap. He loves when she ducks her head, that thick simple neck moving forward making the broad tendons on her shoulder jump up, to get her lips around a piece of something. Pinched with just the right pressure between the sticks; funny how plump women have that delicate touch. Margaret shovels it in with her dull bent silver.

 

"We didn't win," Tothero repeats, and calls, "Waiter." When the boy comes Tothero asks for another round of the same drinks.

 

"No, not for me, thanks," Rabbit says. "I'm high enough on this as it is."

 

"You're just a big clean?living kid, aren't you, you," Margaret says. She doesn't even know his name yet. God, he hates her.

 

"The thing, I started to say, the thing you said that really helped me,"Rabbit says to Tothero, "is that business about almost touching your thumbs on the two?handers. That's the whole secret, really, getting the ball in front of your hands, where you get that nice lifty feeling. Just zwoops off." His hands show how.

 

"Oh, Harry," Tothero says sadly, "you could shoot when you came to me. All I gave you was the will to win. The will to achievement."

 

"You know my best night," Rabbit says, "my best night wasn't that forty?pointer that time against Allenville, it was in my junior year, we went down to end of the county real early in the season to play, a funny little hick school, about a hundred in all six grades; what was its name? Bird's Nest? Something like that. You'll remember."

 

"Bird's Nest," Tothero says. "No."

 

"It was the only time I think we ever scheduled them. Funny little square gymnasium where the crowd sat up on the stage. Some name that meant something."

 

"Bird's Nest," Tothero says. He is bothered. He keeps touching his ear.

 

"Oriole!" Rabbit exclaims, perfect in joy. "Oriole High. This little kind of spread?out town, and it was early in the season, so it was kind of warm still, and going down in the bus you could see the things of corn like wigwams out in the fields. And the school itself kind of smelled of cider; I remember you made some joke about it. You told me to take it easy, we were down there for practice, and we weren't supposed to try, you know, to smother 'em."

 

"Your memory is better than mine," Tothero says. The waiter comes back and Tothero takes his drink right off the tray, before the boy has a chance to give it to him.

 

"So," Rabbit says. "We go out there and there are these five farmers clumping up and down, and we get about fifteen points up right away and I just take it easy. And there are just a couple dozen people sitting up on the stage and the game isn't a league game so nothing matters much, and I get this funny feeling I can do anything, just drifting around, passing the ball, and all of a sud-den I know, you see, I know I can do anything. The second half I take maybe just ten shots, and every one goes right in, not just bounces in, but doesn't touch the rim, like I'm dropping stones down a well. And these farmers running up and down getting up a sweat, they didn't have more than two substitutes, but we're not in their league either, so it doesn't matter much to them, and the one ref just leans over against the edge of the stage talking to their coach. Oriole High. Yeah, and then afterwards their coach comes down into the locker room where both teams are chang-ing and gets a jug of cider out of a locker and we all passed it around. Don't you remember?" It puzzles him, yet makes him want to laugh, that he can't make the others feel what was so special. He resumes eating. The others are done and on their second drinks.

 

"Yes, sir, Whosie, you're a real sweet kid," Margaret tells him.

 

"Pay no attention, Harry," Tothero says, "that's the way tramps talk."

 

Margaret hits him: her hand flies up from the table and across her body into his mouth, flat, but without a slapping noise.

 

"Touché," Ruth says. Her voice is indifferent. The whole thing is so quiet that the Chinaman, clearing their dishes away, doesn't look up, and seems to hear nothing.

 

"We're going, by jingo," Tothero announces, and tries to stand up, but the edge of the table hits his thighs, and he can stand no higher than a hunchback. The slap has left a little twist in his mouth that Rabbit can't bear to look at, it's so ambiguous and blurred, such a sickly mixture of bravado and shame and, worst, pride or less than pride, conceit. This deathly smirk emits the words, "Are you coming, my dear?"

 

"Son of a bitch," Margaret says, yet her little hard nut of a body slides over, and she glances behind her to see if she is leaving any-thing, cigarettes or a purse. "Son of a bitch," she repeats, and there is something friendly in the level way she says it. Both she and Tothero seem calmer now, on the move.

 

Rabbit starts to push up from the table, but Tothero sets a rigid urgent hand on his shoulder, the coach's touch, that Rabbit had so often felt on the bench, just before the pat on the bottom that sent him into the game. "No, no, Harry. You stay. One apiece. Don't let our vulgarity distract you. I couldn't borrow your car, could I?"

 

"Huh? How would I get anywhere?"

 

"Quite right, you're quite right. Forgive my asking."

 

"No, I mean, you can if you want =" In fact he feels deeply reluctant to part with a car that is only half his.

 

Tothero sees this. "No no. It was an insane thought. Good night."

 

"You bloated old bastard," Margaret says to him. He glances toward her, then down fuzzily. She is right, Harry realizes, he is bloated; his face is lopsided like a tired balloon. Yet this balloon peers down at him as if there was some message bulging it, heavy and vague like water.

 

"Where will you go?" Tothero asks.

 

"I'll be fine. I have money. I'll get a hotel," Rabbit tells him. He wishes, now that he has refused him a favor, that Tothero would go.

 

"The door of my mansion is open," Tothero says. "There's the one cot only, but we can make a mattress –"

 

"No, look," Rabbit says severely. "You've saved my life, but I don't want to saddle you. I'll be fine. I can't thank you enough anyway."

 

"We'll talk sometime," Tothero promises. His hand twitches, and accidentally taps Margaret's thigh.

 

"I could kill you," Margaret says at his side, and they go off, looking from the back like father and daughter, past the counter where the waiter whispers with the American girl, and out the glass door, Margaret first. The whole thing seems so settled: like little wooden figures going in and out of a barometer.

 

"God, he's in sad shape."

 

"Who isn't?" Ruth asks.

 

"You don't seem to be."

 

"I eat, is what you mean."

 

"No, listen, you have some kind of complex about being big. You're not fat. You're right in proportion."

 

She laughs, catches herself, looks at him, laughs again and squeezes his arm and says, "Rabbit, you're a Christian gentleman." Her using his own name enters his ears with unsettling warmth.

 

"What she hit him for?" he asks, giggling in fear that her hands, resting on his forearm, will playfully poke his side. He feels in her grip the tension of this possibility.

 

"She likes to hit people. She once hit me."

 

"Yeah, but you probably asked for it."

 

She replaces her hands on the table. "So did he. He likes being hit."

 

He asks, "You know him?"

 

"I've heard her talk about him."

 

"Well, that's not knowing him. That girl is dumb."

 

"Isn't she. She's dumber than you can know."

 

"Look, I know. I'm married to her twin."

 

"Ohhh. Married."

 

"Hey, what's this about Ronnie Harrison? Do you know him?"

 

"What's this about you being married?"

 

"Well, I was. Still am." He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It's like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this these trees, this pavement ? was life, the real and only thing.

 

"Where is she?"

 

This makes it worse, picturing Janice; where would she go? "Probably with her parents. I just left her last night."

 

"Oh. Then this is just a holiday. You haven't left her."

 

"Don't be too sure about that."

 

The waiter brings them a plate of sesame cakes. Rabbit takes one tentatively, thinking they will be hard, and is delighted to have it become in his mouth mild elastic jelly, through the shell of bIand seeds. The waiter asks, "Gone for good, your friends?"

 

"It's O.K., I'll pay," Rabbit says.

 

The Chinaman lifts his sunken eyebrows and puckers into a smile and retreats.

 

"You're rich?" Ruth asks.

 

"No, poor."

 

"Are you really going to a hotel?" They both take several sesame cakes. There are perhaps twenty on the plate.

 

"I guess. I'll tell you about Janice. I never thought of leaving her until the minute I did; all of a sudden it seemed obvious. She's about five six, sort of dark?complected ="

 

"I don't want to hear about it." Her voice is positive; her many?colored hair, as she tilts back her head and squints at a ceiling light, settles into one grave shade. The light flatters her hair more than her face; on this side of her nose there are some spots in her skin, blemishes that make bumps through her powder.

 

"You don't," he says. The bubble rolls off his chest. If it doesn't worry anybody else why should it worry him? "O.K. What shall we talk about? What's your weight?"

 

"One forty?seven."

 

"Ruth, you're tiny. You're just a welterweight. No kidding. Nobody wants you to be all bones. Every pound you have on is priceless."

 

He's talking just for happiness, but something he says makes her tense up. "You're pretty wise, aren't you?" she asks, tilting her empty glass toward her eyes. The glass is a shallow cup on a short stem, like an ice?cream dish at a fancy birthday party. It sends pale arcs of reflection skidding across her thoughtful face.

 

"You don't want to talk about your weight, either. Huh." He pops another sesame cake into his mouth, and waits until the first pang, the first taste of jelly, subsides. "Let's try this. What you need, typical American homemaker, is the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler. Preserve those vitamins. Shave off fatty excess. A simple adjustment of the plastic turn screw, and you can grate carrots and sharpen your husband's pencils. A host of uses."

 

"Don't. Don't be so funny."

 

"O.K. "

 

"Let's be nice."

 

"O.K. You start."

 

She plops a cake in and looks at him with a funny full?mouth smile, the corners turned down tight, and a frantic look of agreeableness strains her features while she chews. She swallows, her blue eyes widened round, and gives a little gasp before launching into what he thinks will be a remark but turns out to be a laugh, right in his face. "Wait," she begs. "I'm trying." And returns to looking into the shell of her glass, thinking, and the best she can do, after all that, is to say, "Don't live in a hotel."

 

"I got to. Tell me a good one." He instinctively thinks she knows about hotels. At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.

 

"They're all expensive," she said. "Everything is. Just my little apartment is expensive."

 

"Where do you have an apartment?"

 

"Oh a few blocks from here. On Summer Street. It's one flight up, above a doctor."

 

"It's yours alone?"

 

"Yeah. My girlfriend got married."

 

"So you're stuck with all the rent and you don't do anything."

 

"Which means what?"

 

"Nothing. You just said you did nothing. How expensive is it?"

 

She looks at him curiously, with that alertness he had noticed right off, out by the parking meters.

 

"The apartment," he says.

 

"A hundred?ten a month. Then they make you pay for light and gas."

 

"And you don't do anything."

 

She gazes into her glass, making reflected light run around the rim with a rocking motion of her hands.

 

"Whaddeya thinking?" he asks.

 

"Just wondering."

 

"Wondering what?"

 

"How wise you are."

 

Right here, without moving his head, he feels the wind blow. So this is the drift; he hadn't been sure. He says, "Well I'll tell ya. Why don't you let me give you something toward your rent?"

 

"Why should you do that?"

 

"Big heart," he says. "Ten?"

 

"I need fifteen."

 

"For the light and gas. O.K. O.K." He is uncertain what to do now. They sit looking at the empty plate that had held a pyramid of sesame cakes. They have eaten them all. The waiter, when he comes, is surprised to see this; his eyes go from the plate to Rabbit to Ruth, all in a second. The check amounts to $9.60. Rabbit puts a ten and a one on top of it, and beside these bills he puts a ten and a five. He counts what's left in his wallet; three tens and four ones. When he looks up, Ruth's money has vanished from the slick table. He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, A dime a pound.

 

And that's not counting the restaurant bill. He takes the bill to the counter and gives the girl the ten. She makes change with a studious frown. The purple simplicity of her kimono does not go with her complicated permed hair and rouged, sweet?and?sour American face. When she puts his coins on the pink cleats of the change pad, he flicks his hand in the air above the silver, adds the dollar to it, and nods at the young Chinese waiter, who is perched attentively beside her. "Tank you vewy much, sir. We tank you vewy much," the boy says to him. But his gratitude does not even last until they are out of sight. As they move toward the glass door he turns to the cashier and in a reedy, perfectly inflected voice completes his story: "? and then this other cat says, `But man, mine was helium!' "