Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It's in the south side of Brewer, the Italian?Negro?Polish side, and Rabbit distrusts it. With its glass?brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low?lit style of an up?to?date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piped soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian?blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. You drink it and then you're embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker's assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of red light as the neon castanet on the sign outside flickers back and forth between its two positions, that imitate clicking.

 

This pink tremor takes the weight off Ruth's face. She sits across from him. He tries to picture the kind of life she was leading; a creepy place like this probably seems as friendly to her as a locker room would to him. But just the thought of it that way makes him nervous; her sloppy life, like his having a family, is something he's tried to keep behind them. He was happy just hanging around her place at night, her reading mysteries and him running down to the delicatessen for ginger ale and some nights going to a movie but nothing like this. That first night he really used that Daiquiri but since then he didn't care if he ever had another and hoped she was the same way. For a while she was but lately something's been eating her; she's heavy in bed and once in a while looks at him as if he's some sort of pig. He doesn't know what he's doing different but knows that somehow the ease has gone out of it. Tonight her so?called friend Margaret called up. It scared him out of his skin when the phone rang. He has the idea lately it's going to be the cops or his mother or somebody; he has the feeling of something growing on the other side of the mountain. A couple times after he first moved in, the phone rang and it was some thick?voiced man saying "Ruthie?" or just hanging up at Rabbit's voice answering. When they hung on, Ruth just said a lot of "No's" into the receiver and that seemed to settle it. She knew how to handle them, and anyway there were only about five that ever called; the past was a vine hanging on by just these five tendrils and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank. But tonight it was Margaret out of this past and she wanted them to come down to the Castanet and Ruth wanted to and Rabbit went along. Anything for a little change. He's bored.

 

He asks her, "What do you want?"

 

"A Daiquiri."

 

"You're sure? You're sure now it won't make you sick?" He's noticed that, that she seems a little sick sometimes, and won't eat, and sometimes eats the house down.

 

"No, I'm not sure but why the hell shouldn't I be sick?"

 

"Well I don't know why you shouldn't. Why shouldn't anybody?"

 

"Look, let's not be a philosopher for once. Just get me the drink."

 

A colored girl in an orange uniform that he guesses from the frills is supposed to look South American comes and he tells her two Daiquiris. She flips shut her pad and walks off and he sees her back is open halfway down her spine, so a bit of black bra shows. Compared with this her skin isn't black at all. Soft purple shadows flitter on the flats of her back where the light hits. She has a pigeon?toed way of sauntering, swinging those orange frills. She doesn't care about him; he likes that, that she doesn't care. The thing about Ruth is lately she's been trying to make him feel guilty about something.

 

She asks him, "What are you looking at?"

 

"I'm not looking at anything."

 

"You can't have it, Rabbit. You're too white."

 

"Say you really are in a sweet mood."

 

She smiles defiantly. "I'm just myself."

 

"God I hope not."

 

The Negress returns and sets the Daiquiris between them as they sit there silently. The door behind them opens and Margaret comes in with the chill. On top of everything, the guy with her is, he isn't very happy to see, Ronnie Harrison. Margaret says to Rabbit, "Hello, you. You still hanging on?"

 

"Hell," Harrison says, "it's the great Angstrom," as if he's trying to take Tothero's place in every way. "I've been hearing about you," he adds slimily.

 

"Hearing what?"

 

"Oh. The word."

 

Harrison was never one of Rabbit's favorites and has not improved. In the locker room he was always talking about making out and playing with himself under his little hairy pot of a belly and that pot has really grown. Harrison is fat. Fat and half bald. His kinky brass?colored hair has thinned and the skin of his scalp shows, depending on how he tilts his head. This pink showing through disgusts Rabbit, like the one bald idea that is always showing through Harrison's talk. Still, he remembers one night when Harrison came back into the game after losing two teeth to somebody's elbow and tries to be glad to see him. There were just five of you out there at a time and the other four for that time were unique in the world.

 

But it seems long ago, and every second Harrison stands there smirking it seems longer. He is wearing a narrow?shouldered seersucker suit and its cool air of business success annoys Rabbit. He feels hemmed in. The problem is, who shall sit where? He and Ruth have gotten on opposite sides of the table, which was the mistake. Harrison decides, and ducks down to sit beside Ruth, with a little catch in the movement that betrays the old limp from his football injury. Rabbit becomes obsessed by Harrison's imperfections. He's ruined the effect of his Ivy League suit by wearing a white tie like a wop. When he opens his mouth the two false teeth don't quite match the others.

 

"Well, how's life treating the old Master?" he says. "The word is you got it made." His eyes make his meaning by flicking sideways to Ruth, who sits there like a lump, her hands folded around the Daiquiri. Her knuckles are red from washing dishes for him. When she lifts the glass to drink, her chin shows through distorted.

 

"He made me," she says, setting it down.

 

"He and who else?" asks Harrison.

 

Margaret wriggles at Rabbit's side. She feels somehow like Janice: jumpy. Her presence in the left corner of his vision feels like a dark damp cloth approaching that side of his face.

 

"Where's Tothero?" he asks her.

 

"Totherwho?"

 

Ruth giggles, damn her. Harrison bends his head toward Ruth's, pink showing, and whispers a remark. Her lips tuck up in a smile; it's just like that night in the Chinese place, anything he says will please her, except that tonight he is Harrison and Rabbit sits across from them married to this girl he hates. He's sure what Harrison whispers is about him, "the old Master." From the second there were four of them it was clear he was going to be the goat. Like Tothero that night.

 

"You know damn well who," he tells Margaret. "Marty Tothero."

 

"Our old coach, Harry!" Harrison cries, and reaches across the table to touch Rabbit's fingertips. "The man who made us immortal!"

 

Rabbit curls his fingers an inch beyond Harrison's reach and Harrison, with a satisfied smirk, draws back, pulling his palms along the slick table?top so they make a slippery screech of friction.

 

"Me, you mean," Rabbit says. "You were nothing."

 

?"Nothing. That seems a little stern. That seems a little stern, Harry old bunny. Let's cast our minds back. When Tothero wanted a guy roughed up, who did he send in to do it? When he wanted a hot shot like you guarded nice and close, who was his boy?" He pats his own. chest. "You were too much of a star to dirty your hands. No, you never fouled anybody, did you? You didn't play football either, and get your knee scrambled, either, did you? No sir, not Harry the bird; he was on wings. Feed him the ball and watch it go in."

 

"It went in, you noticed."

 

"Sometimes. Sometimes it did. Harry now don't wrinkle your nose. Don't think we all don't appreciate your ability." From the way he's using his hands, chopping and lifting in a practiced way, Rabbit thinks he must do a lot of talking around a table. Yet there's a tremor; and in seeing that Harrison is afraid of him, Rabbit loses interest. The waitress comes ? Harrison orders vodka?and?tonics for himself and Margaret and another Daiquiri for Ruth ?and Rabbit watches her back recede as if it is the one real thing in the world: the little triangle of black bra under the two blue?brown pillows of muscle. He wants Ruth to see him looking.

 

Harrison is losing his salesman's composure. "Did I ever tell you what Tothero once said to me about you? Ace, are you listening?"

 

"What did Tothero say?" God, this guy is a middle?aged bore and he's not even thirty.

 

"He said to me, `This is in confidence, Ronnie, but I depend on you to spark the team. Harry is not a team player."'

 

Rabbit looks down at Margaret and over at Ruth. "Now I'll tell ya what really happened," he says to them. "Old Harrison here went in to Tothero and he said, `Hey, I'm a real spark plug, ain't I, coach? A real play?maker, huh? Not like that lousy showboat Angstrom, huh?' And Tothero was probably asleep and didn't answer, so Harrison goes through the rest of his life thinking, `Gee, I'm a real hero. A real play?maker.' On a basketball team, you see, whenever you have a little runty clumsy guy that can't do anything he's called the play?maker. I don't know where he's supposed to be making all these plays. In his bedroom I guess." Ruth laughs; he's not sure he wanted her to.

 

"That's not true." Harrison's practiced palms flicker more hastily. "He volunteered it to me. Not that it was anything I didn't know; the whole school knew it."

 

Did it? Nobody ever told him.

 

Ruth says, "God, let's not talk basketball. Every time I go out with this bastard we talk nothing but."

 

He wonders, Did doubt show on his face and she say that to reassure him? Does she in any part of her feel sorry for him?

 

Harrison perhaps thinks he's been uglier than befits his salesconference suavity. He takes out a cigarette and a lizard?skin Ronson. They can't help but watch him while he snaps a shapely flame into being.

 

Rabbit turns to Margaret. Something in the way this arranges the nerves in his neck rings a bell, makes him think he turned to her exactly like this a million years ago. He says, "You never answered me."

 

"Nuts, I don't know where he is. I guess he went home. He was sick."

 

"Just sick, or" ? Harrison's mouth does a funny thing, smiling and pursing both, as if he is introducing, with deference, this bit of Manhattan cleverness to his rural friends for the first time, tapping his head to make sure they will "get it" ? "sick, sick, sick?"

 

"All ways," Margaret says. A serious shadow crosses her face that seems to remove her and Harry, who sees it, from the others. Ruth and Harrison across from them, touched by staccato red light, seem to smile from the furnace of damnation.

 

"Dear Ruth," Harrison says, "how have you been? I often worry about you."

 

"Don't worry about me," she says, yet seems pleased.

 

"I just wonder," he goes on, "about the ability of our mutual friend to support you in the style to which you are accustomed."

 

The Negress brings their drinks and Harrison, as if flashing a badge, shows her the lizard?skin Ronson in his hand. "Real skin," he says.

 

"Mmm," the waitress says, with lots of throat. "Your own?"

 

Rabbit laughs. He loves that black chick.

 

When she goes, Harrison leans forward with the sweet smile you use on children. "Did you know," he asks Harry, "that Ruth and I once went to Atlantic City together?"

 

"There was another couple," she hastily tells Harry.

 

"A disgusting pair," Harrison says, "who preferred the shabby privacy of their own bungalow to the golden sunshine outdoors. The male of this twosome later confided to me, with ill?concealed pride, that he had enjoyed the orgasmatic climax eleven times in the all?too?short period of thirty?six hours."

 

Margaret laughs. "Honestly, Ronnie, to hear you talk sometimes you'd think you went to Harvard."

 

"Princeton," he corrects. "Princeton is the effect I want to give. Harvard is suspect around here."

 

Rabbit looks toward Ruth and sees that the second Daiquiri is on its way and the first has been delivered. She titters. "The awful thing about them," she says, "was that they did it in the car. Here was poor Ronnie, trying to drive through all this Sunday?night traffic, and I looked back at a stoplight and Betsy's dress was up around her neck."

 

"I didn't drive all the way," Harrison tells her. "Remember we finally got him to drive." His head tips toward her for confirmation and his pink scalp glints.

 

"Yeah." Ruth looks into her glass and titters again, maybe at the image of Betsy naked.

 

Harrison watches narrowly the effect of this on Rabbit. "This guy," he says, in the pushy?quiet voice of offering a deal, "had an interesting theory. He thought" ? Harrison's hands grip air ? "that right at the crucial, how shall I say? ? development, you should slap your partner, as hard as you can, right in the face. If you're in a position to. Otherwise slap what you can."

 

Rabbit blinks; he really doesn't know what to do about this awful guy. And just there, in the space of blinking, with the alcohol vaporizing under his ribs, he feels himself pass over. He laughs, really laughs. They can all go to Hell. "Well what did he think about biting?"

 

Harrison's I've?got?your?number?buddy grin grows fixed; his reflexes aren't quick enough to take this sudden turn. "Biting? I don't know."

 

"Well he couldn't have given it much thought. A good big bloody bite: nothing better. Of course I can see how you're handicapped, with those two false teeth."

 

"Do you have false teeth, Ronnie?" Margaret cries. "How exciting! You've never told."

 

"Of course he does," Rabbit tells her. "You didn't think those two piano keys were his, did you? They don't even come close to matching."

 

Harrison presses his lips together but he can't afford to give up that forced grin and it sharply strains his face. His talking is hampered too.

 

"Now there was this place we used to go to in Texas," Rabbit says, "where there was this girl whose backside had been bitten so often it looked like a piece of old cardboard. You know, after it's been out in the rain. It's all she did. She was a virgin otherwise." He looks around at his audience and Ruth shakes her head minutely, one brief shake, as if to say, No, Rabbit, and it seems extremely sad, so sad a film of grit descends on his spirit and muffles him.

 

Hamson says, "It's like that story about this whore that had the biggest ? ah ?you don't want to hear it, do you?"

 

"Sure. Go ahead," Ruth says. "I might learn something."

 

"Well, this guy, see, was making out and he loses his, ahem, device." Harrison's face bobbles in the unsteady light. His hands start explaining. Rabbit thinks the poor guy must have to make a pitch five times a day or so. He wonders what he sells; some sort of deal it must be, nothing as definite as the MagiPeel Peeler. . . . up to his elbow, up to his shoulder, then he gets his whole head in, and his chest, and starts crawling along this tunnel . . ." Good old MagiPeel, Rabbit thinks: he can almost feel one in his hand. Its handle came in three colors, which the company called turquoise, scarlet, and gold. The funny thing about it, it really did what they said, really took the skin off turnips, carrots, potatoes, radishes, neat, quick; it had a long sort of slot with razor?sharp edges. ". . . sees this other guy and says, `Hey, have you seen . . ."' Ruth sits there resigned and with horror he believes it's all the same to her in her mind, there's no difference between Harrison and him, and for that matter is there a difference? The whole interior of the place muddles and runs together red like the inside of a stomach in which they're all being digested. ". . . and the other guy says, `Stripper, hell. I've been in here three weeks looking for my motorcycle!' "

 

Harrison, waiting to join the laughter, looks up in silence. He's failed to sell it. "That's too fantastic," Margaret says.

 

Rabbit's skin is clammy under his clothes; this makes the draft from the door opening behind him sharp. Harrison says, "Hey, isn't that your sister?"

 

Ruth looks up from her drink. "Is it?" He makes no sign and she says, "They have the............