With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines: a shuffle of lights, a neon outline of a boot, of a peanut, of a top hat, of an enormous sunflower erected, the stem of neon six stories high, along the edge of one building to symbolize Sunflower Beer. The yellow flower center is a second moon. One block down, a monotone bell tolls hurriedly, and the red?tipped railroad?crossing gates descend through the soft mass of neon, and the traffic slows, halts.

 

Ruth turns left, toward the shadow of Mt. Judge, and Rabbit follows; they walk uphill on the rasping pavement. The slope of cement is a buried assertion, an unexpected echo, of the terrain that had been here before the city. For Rabbit the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri's luminous transparence; he is lighthearted, and skips once, to get in step with this girl he adores. Her eyes are turned up, toward where the Pinnacle Hotel adds its coarse constellation to the stars above Mt. Judge. They walk together in silence while behind them a freight train chuffs and screaks through the crossing.

 

He recognizes his problem; she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas. "Hey," he says. "Have you ever been up to the top there?"

 

"Sure. In a car.",

 

"When I was a kid," he says, "we used to walk up from the other side. There's a sort of gloomy forest, and I remember once I came across an old house, just a hole in the ground with some stones, where I guess a pioneer had had a farm."

 

"The only time I ever got up there was in a car with some eager beaver."

 

"Well, congratulations," he says, annoyed by the self?pity hiding in her toughness.

 

She bites at being uncovered. "What do you think I care about your pioneer?" she asks.

 

"I don't know. Why shouldn't you? You're an American."

 

"How? 1 could just as easy be a Mexican."

 

"You never could be, you're not little enough."

 

"You know, you're a pig really."

 

"Oh now baby," he says, and puts his arm around the substance of her waist, "I think I'm sort of neat."

 

"Don't tell me."

 

She turns left, off Weiser, out of his arm. This street is Summer. Faces of brick run together to make a single block?long face. The house numbers are set in fanlights of stained glass above the doors. The apple?and?orange?colored light of a small grocery store shows the silhouettes of some kids hanging around the corner. The supermarkets are driving these little stores out of business, make them stay open all night.

 

He puts his arm around her and begs, "Come on now, be a pleasant cunt." He wants to prove to her that her talking tough won't keep him off. She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers. To his surprise her arm mirrors his, comes around his waist. Thus locked, they find it awkward to walk, and part at the traffic light.

 

"Didn't you kind of like me in the restaurant?" he asks. "The way I tried to make old Tothero feel good? Telling him how great he was?"

 

"All I heard was you telling how great you were."

 

"I was great. It's the fact. I mean, I'm not much good for anything now, but I really was good at that."

 

"You know what I was good at?"

 

"What?"

 

"Cooking."

 

"That's more than my wife is. Poor kid."

 

"Remember how in Sunday school they'd tell you everybody God made was good at something? Well, that was my thing, cooking. I thought, Jesus, now I'll really be a great cook."

 

"Well aren't you?"

 

"I don't know. All I do is eat out."

 

"Well, stop it."

 

"It's how you meet guys," she says, and this really stops him. It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.

 

"Here I am," she says. Her building is brick like all the others on?the west side of the street. Across the way a big limestone church hangs like a gray curtain behind the streetlamp. They go in her doorway, passing beneath stained glass. The vestibule has a row of brass mailboxes and a varnished umbrella rack and a rubber mat on the marble floor and two doors, one to the right with frosted glass and another in front of them of wire?reinforced glass through which he sees rubber?treaded stairs. While Ruth fits a key in this door he reads the gold lettering on the other: F. X. PELLIGRINI, M.D. "Old fox," Ruth says, and leads Rabbit up the stairs.

 

She lives one flight up. Her door is the one at the far end of a linoleum hall, nearest the street. He stands behind her as she scratches her key at the lock. Abruptly, in the yellow light of the streetlamp which comes through the four flawed panes of the window by his side, tall panes so thin?seeming the touch of one finger might crack them, he begins to tremble, first his legs, and then the skin of his sides. The key fits and her door opens.

 

Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It's insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely. By nature in such an embrace she fights back. The small moist cushion of slack willingness with which her lips had greeted his dries up and turns hard, and when she can get her head back and her hand free she fits her palm against his jaw and pushes as if she wanted to throw his skull back into the hall. Her fingers curl and a long nail scrapes the tender skin below one eye. He lets her go. The nearly scratched eye squints and a tendon in his neck aches.

 

"Get out," she says, her chunky mussed face ugly in the light from the hall.

 

He kicks the door shut with a backward flip of his leg. "Don't," he says. "I had to hug you." He sees in the dark she is frightened; her big black shape has a pocket in it which his instinct feels like a tongue probing a pulled tooth. The air tells him he must be motionless; for no reason he wants to laugh. Her fear and his inner knowledge are so incongruous: he knows there is no harm in him.

 

"Hug," she says. "Kill felt more like it."

 

"I've been loving you so much all night," he says. "I had to get it out of my system."

 

"I know all about your systems. One squirt and done."

 

"It won't be," he promises.

 

"It better be. I want you out of here."

 

"No you don't."

 

"You all think you're such lovers."

 

"I am," he assures her. "I am a lover." And on a wave of alcohol and stirred semen he steps forward, in a kind of swoon. Though she backs away, it is not so quickly that he cannot feel her socket of fear healing. The room they are in, he sees by streetlight, is small, and two armchairs and a sofa?bed and a table furnish it. She walks to the next room, a little larger, holding a double bed. The shade is half drawn, and low light gives each nubbin of the bedspread a shadow.

 

"All right," she says. "You can get into that."

 

"Where are you going?" Her hand is on a doorknob.

 

"In here."

 

"You're going to undress in there?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Don't. Let me undress you. Please." In his concern he has come to stand beside her, and touches her arm now.

 

She moves her arm from under his touch. "You're pretty bossy." "Please. Please."

 

Her voice grates with exasperation: "I have to go to the john." "But come out dressed."

 

"I have to do something else, too."

 

"Don't do it. I know what it is. I hate them."

 

"You don't even feel it."

 

"But I know it's there. Like a rubber kidney or something."

 

Ruth laughs. "Well aren't you choice? Do you have the answer then?"

 

"No. I hate them even worse."

 

"Look. I don't know what you think your fifteen dollars entitles you to, but I got to protect myself."

 

"If you're going to put a lot of gadgets in this, give me the fifteen back."

 

She tries to twist away, but now he holds the arm he touched. She says, "Say, do you think we're married or something the way you boss me around?"

 

The transparent wave moves over him again and he calls to her in a voice that is almost inaudible, "Yes; let's be." So quickly her arms don't move from hanging at her sides, he kneels at her feet and kisses the place on her fingers where a ring would have been. Now that he is down there, he begins to undo the straps of her shoes. "Why do you women wear heels?" he asks, and yanks her one foot up, so she has to grab the hair on his head for support. "Don't they hurt you?" He heaves the shoe, sticky web, through the doorway into the next room, and does the same to the other. Her feet being flat on the floor gives her legs firmness all the way up. He puts his hands around her ankles and pumps them up and down briskly, between the boxy ankle bones and the circular solid fat of her calves. He should be an athletic trainer.

 

"Come on," Ruth says, in a voice slightly tense with the fear of falling, his weight pinning her legs. "Get into bed."

 

He senses the trap. "No," he says, and stands up. "You'll put on a flying saucer."

 

"No, I won't. Listen, you won't know if I do or don't."

 

"Sure I will. I'm very sensitive."

 

"Oh Lord. Well anyway I got to take a leak."

 

"Go ahead, I don't care," he says, and won't let her close the bathroom door. She sits, like women do, primly, her back straight and her chin tucked in. Her knees linked by stretched underpants, Ruth waits above a whispering gush. At home he and Janice had been trying to toilet?train Nelson, so leaning in the doorway tall as a parent he feels a ridiculous impulse to praise her. She is so tidy, reaching under her dress with a piece of lemon?colored paper; she tugs herself together and for a sweet split second the whole inti-mate vulnerable patchwork of stocking tops and straps and silk and fur and soft flesh is exposed.

 

"Good girl," he says, and leads her into the bedroom. Behind them, the plumbing vibrates and murmurs. She moves with shy stiffness, puzzled by his will. Trembling again, shy himself, he brings her to a stop by the foot of the bed and searches for the catch of her dress. He finds buttons on the back and can't undo them easily; his hands come at them reversed.

 

"Let me do it."

 

"Don't be in such a hurry; I'll do it. You're supposed to enjoy this. This is our wedding night."

 

"Say, I think you're sick."

 

He turns her roughly and falls again into a deep wish to give comfort. He touches her caked cheeks; she seems small as he looks down into the frowning planes of her set, shadowed face. He moves his lips into one eye socket, gently, trying to say this night has no urgency in it, trying to listen through his lips to the timid pulse beating in the bulge of her lid. With a careful impartiality he fears she will find comic, he kisses also her other eye; then, excited by the thought of his own tenderness, his urgency spills; his mouth races across her face, nibbling, licking, so that she does laugh, tickled, and pushes away. He locks her against him, crouches, and presses his parted teeth into the fat hot hollow at the side of her throat. Ruth tenses at his threat to bite, and her hands shove at his shoulders, but he clings there, his teeth bared in a silent excla-mation, crying out against her smothering throat that it is not her body he wants, not the flesh and bones, but her, her.

 

Though there are no words she hears this, and says, "Don't try to prove you're a lover on me. Just come and go."

 

"You're so smart," he says, and starts to hit her, checks his arm, and offers instead, "Hit me. Come on. You want to, don't you? Really pound me."

 

"My Lord," she says, "this'll take all night." He plucks her limp arm from her side and swings it up toward him, but she manages her hand so that five bent fingers bump against his cheek pain-lessly. "That's what poor Maggie has to do for your old bastard friend."

 

He begs, "Don't talk about them."

 

"Damn men," she continues, "either want to hurt somebody or be hurt."

 

"I don't, honest. Either one."

 

"Well then undress me and stop farting around."

 

He sighs through his nose. "You have a sweet tongue," he says.

 

"I'm sorry if I shock you." Yet in her voice is a small metallic withdrawal, as if she really is.

 

"You don't," he says and, business?like, stoops and takes the hem of her dress in his hands. His eyes are enough accustomed to the dark now to see the silky cloth as green. He peels it up her body, and she lifts her arms, and her head gets caught for a moment in the neck?hole. She shakes her head crossly, like a dog with a scrap, and the dress comes free, skims off her arms into his hands floppy and faintly warm. He sails it into a chair hulking in a corner. "God," he says, "you're pretty." She is a ghost in her silver slip. Dragging the dress over her head has loosened her hair. Her solemn face tilts as she quickly lifts out the pins. Her hair falls out of heavy loops. Women look like brides in their slips.

 

"Yeah," she says. "Pretty plump."

 

"No," he says, "you are," and in the space of a breath goes to her and picks her up, great glistening sugar in her silty?grained slip, and carries her to the bed, and lays her on it. "So pretty."

 

"You lifted me, wow. That'll put you out of action."

 

Harsh direct light falls on her face: the caked makeup, the creases on her neck. He asks, "Shall I pull the shade?"

 

"Please. It's a depressing view."

 

He goes to the window and bends to see what she means. There is only the church across the way, gray, grave, and mute. Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath. He lowers the shade on it guiltily. He turns, and Ruth's eyes watch him out of shadows that also seem gaps in a surface. The curve of her hip supports a crescent of silver; his sense of her weight seems to make an aroma.

 

"What's next?" He takes off his coat and throws it; he loves this throwing things, the way the flying cloth puts him at the center of a gathering nakedness. "Stockings?"

 

"They're tricky," she says. "I don't want a run."

 

"You do it then."

 

In a sitting position, with a soft?pawed irritable deftness, she extricates herself from a web of elastic and silk and cotton. When she has peeled off the stockings and tucked them, tidily rolled, into the crevice by the footboard of the bed, she lies flat and arches her back to push off the garter belt and pants. As swiftly, he bends his face into a small forest smelling of spice, where he is out of all dimension, and where a tender entire woman seems an inch away, around a kind of corner. When he straightens up on his knees, kneeling as he is by the bed, Ruth under his eyes is an incredible continent, the pushed?up slip a north of snow.

 

"So much," he says.

 

"Too much."

 

"No, listen. You're good." Cupping a hand behind her hot sheltered neck, he pulls her up, and slides her slip over her head. It comes off with liquid ease. Clothes just fall from a woman who wants to be stripped. The cool hollow his hand finds in the small of her back mixes in his mind with the shallow shadows of the stretch of skin that slopes from the bones of her shoulders. He kisses this expanse. Where her skin is whiter it is cooler. The hardness of his chin hits the hardness of her bra. He whispers "Hey let me" when Ruth's one arm crooks back to unfasten it. He gets behind her. She sits upright with her fat legs jackknifed sideways and her back symmetrical as a great vase. The tiny dingy catches are hard to undo; she draws her shoulder blades together. With a pang the tough strap parts. Her back broadens and turns convex as she shrugs the straps down off her shoulders. As one arm tosses her brassiére over the edge of the bed the other, on his side, presses against her breast, so he won't see. But he does see: a quick glimmer of tipped weight. He moves away and sits on the corner of the bed and drinks in the pure sight of her. She keeps her arm tight against the one breast and brings up her hand to cover the other; a ring glints. Her modesty praises him by showing she is feeling something. The straight arm props her weight. Her belly is a pond of shadow deepening to a black eclipsed by the inner swell of her thighs. Light seizes her right side as her body turns in its stillness, rigidity her one defense against the hunger of his eyes. She holds the pose until his eyes smart with echoes of white. When her voice breaks from her stilled form, he is startled: "What about you?"

 

He is still dressed, even to his necktie. While he is draping his trousers over a chair, arranging them to keep the crease, she slips beneath the covers. He stands over her in his underclothes and asks, "Now you really don't have anything on?"

 

"You wouldn't let me."

 

He remembers the glint. "Give me your ring."

 

She brings her right hand out from under the covers and he carefully works a thick brass ring, like a class ring, past her bunching knuckle. In letting her hand drop she grazes the distorted front of his jockey shorts.

 

He looks down at her, thinking. The covers come up to her throat and the pale arm lying on top of the bedspread has a slight serpent's twist. "There's nothing else?"

 

"I'm all skin," she says. "Come on. Get in."

 

"You want me?"

 

"Don't flatter yourself. I want it over with."

 

"You have all that crust on your face."

 

"God, you're insulting!"

 

"I just love you too much. Where's a washrag?"

 

"I don't want my Goddamned face washed!"

 

He goes into the bathroom and turns on the light and finds a facecloth and holds it under the hot faucet. He wrings it out and turns off the light. As he comes back across the room Ruth laughs from the bed. He asks, "What's the joke?"

 

"In those damn underclothes you do look kind of like a rabbit. I thought only kids wore those elastic kind of pants."

 

He looks down at his T?shirt and snug underpants, pleased and further stirred. His name in her mouth feels like a physical touch. She sees him as special. When he puts the rough cloth to her face, it goes tense and writhes with a resistance like Nelson's, and he counters it with a father's practiced method. He sweeps her forehead, pinches her nostrils, abrades her cheeks and, finally, while her whole body is squirming in protest, scrubs her lips, her words shattered and smothered. When at last he lets her hands win, and lifts the washrag, she stares at him, says nothing, and closes her eyes.

 

When he knelt by the bed to grip her face he pressed the sensitive core of his love against the edge of the mattress and now without his will a little spills, like cream forced over the neck of the bottle by the milk's freezing. He backs away from contact; the shy series of hops, puzzled, throbs to a slow halt. He stands and presses the cloth against his own face, like a man sobbing. He goes to the foot of the bed, throws the rag toward the bathroom, peels out of his underclothes, bobs, and hurries to hide in the bed, in the long dark space between the sheets.

 

He makes love to her as he would to his wife. After their marriage, and her nerves lost that fineness, Janice needed coaxing; he would begin by rubbing her back. Ruth submits warily when he tells her to lie on her stomach. To lend his hands strength he sits up on her cushiony buttocks and leans his weight down through stiff arms into his thumbs and palms as they work the broad muscles and insistent bones. She sighs and shifts her head on the pillow. "You should be in the Turkish?bath business," she says. He goes for her neck, and advances his fingers around to her throat, where the columns of blood give like reeds, and massages her shoulders with the balls of his thumbs, and his fingertips just find the glazed upper edges of her pillowing breasts. He returns to her back, until his wrists ache, and flops from astride his mermaid truly weary, as if under a sea?spell to sleep. He pulls the covers up over them, to the middle of their faces.

 

Janice was shy of his eyes so Ruth heats in his darkness. His lids flutter shut though she arches anxiously against him. Her hand seeks him, and angles him earnestly for a touch his sealed lids feel as red. He sees blue when with one deliberate hand she pries open his jaw and bows his head to her burdened chest. Lovely wobbly bubbles, heavy: perfume between. Taste, salt and sour, swirls back with his own saliva. She rolls away, onto her back, the precious red touch breaking, twists, giving him cool new skin. Rough with herself, she forces the dry other breast into his face, coated with a pollen that dissolves. He opens his eyes, seeking her, and sees her face a soft mask gazing downward calmly, caring for him, and closes his eyes on the food of her again; his hand abandoned on the breadth of her body finds at arm's length a split pod, an open fold, shapeless and simple. She rolls further, turning her back, cradling her bottom in his stomach and thighs. They enter a lazy space. He wants the time to stretch long, to great length and thinness. Between her legs she strokes him with her fingertips. She brings back her foot and he holds her heel. As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a wall. The body lacks voice to sing its own song. She floats through his blood as under his eyelids a salt smell, damp pressure, the sense of her smallness as her body hurries everywhere into his hands, her breathing, bedsprings' creak, accidental slaps, and the ache at the parched root of his tongue each register their colors.

 

"Now?" Ruth asks, her voice croaky. He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs. With her help their blind loins fit. Something sad in the capture. The capture grows. He braces himself on his arms above her, afraid, for it is here he most often failed Janice, by coming too soon. Yet, what with the alcohol drifting in his system, or his coming a little before, his love is slow to burst in her warmth. He hides his face beside her throat, in the mint of her hair. With thin, thin arms she hugs him and presses him down and rises above him. From her high smooth shoulders down she is one long underbelly erect in light above him; he says in praise softly, "Hey."

 

She answers, "Hey."

 

"You're pretty."

 

"Come on. Work."

 

Galled, he shoves up through her and in addition sets his hand under her jaw and shoves her face so his fingers slip into her mouth and her slippery throat strains. As if unstrung by this anger, she tumbles and carries him over and he lies on top of her again, the skin of their chests sticking together; she reaches her hand down and touches their mixed fur and her breathing snags on something sharp. Her thighs throw open wide and clamp his sides and throw open again so wide it frightens him; she wants, impossible, to turn inside out; the muscles and lips of her expanded underside press against him as a new anatomy, of another animal. She feels transparent; he sees her heart. So she is first, and waits for him while at a trembling extremity of tenderness he traces again and again the arc of her eyebrow with his thumb. His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel. At each shudder her mouth smiles in his and her legs, locked at his back, bear down.

 

She asks in time, "O.K.?"

 

"You're pretty."

 

Ruth takes her legs from around him and spills him off her body like a pile of sand. He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows an expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair. Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little contribution leaves you with nothing. The sweat on his skin is cold in the air; he brings the blankets up from her feet.

 

"You were a beautiful piece," he says from the pillow listlessly, and touches her soft side. Her flesh still soaks in the act; it ebbs slower in her.

 

"I had forgotten," she says.

 

"Forgot what?"

 

"That I could have it too."

 

"What's it like?"

 

"Oh. It's like falling through."

 

"Where do you fall to?"

 

"Nowhere. I can't talk about it."

 

He kisses her lips; she's not to blame. She lazily accepts, then in an afterflurry of affection flutters her tongue against his chin.

 

He loops his arm around her waist and composes himself against her body for sleep.

 

"Hey. I got to get up."

 

"Stay."

 

"I got to go into the bathroom."

 

"No." He tightens his hold.

 

"Boy, you better let me up."

 

He murmurs, "Don't scare me," and snuggles more securely against her side. His thigh slides over hers, weight on warmth. Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat. Best bedfriend, fucked woman. Bowl bellies. Oh, how! when she got up on him like the bell of a big blue lily slipped down on his slow head. He could have hurt her shoving her jaw. He reawakens enough to feel his dry breath drag through sagged lips as she rolls from under his leg and arm. "Hey get me a glass of water," he says.

 

She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There's that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men's dirt ?insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained?glass church window that shows beneath the window shade. Its childish bright-ness comes from years away.

 

Light from behind the closed bathroom door tints the air in the bedroom. The splashing sounds are like the sounds his parents would make when as a child Rabbit would waken to realize that they had come upstairs, the whole house would soon be dark, and the sight of morning would be his next sensation. He is asleep when like a faun in moonlight Ruth, washed, creeps back to his side, holding a glass of water.