"Why not?"
"You're here."
"But don't I seem sad, sort of?"
"You're making me pay, a little. That's all right."
He protests, "I'm a mess," meaning he is sincere: which perhaps is not a meaningful adjustment over what she had said. He feels they are still adjusting in space, slowly twirling in some gorgeous ink that filters through his lids as red. In a space of silence, he can't gauge how much, he feels them drift along sideways deeper into being married, so much that he abruptly volunteers, "We must have Peggy and Ollie over sometime."
"Like hell," she says, jarring him, but softly, an unexpected joggle in space. "You stay away from her now, you had your crack at it."
After a while he asks her – she knows everything, he realizes -"Do you think Vietnam will ever be over?"
"Charlie thought it would, just as soon as the big industrial interests saw that it was unprofitable."
"God, these foreigners are dumb," Rabbit murmurs.
"Meaning Charlie?"
"All ofyou." He feels, gropingly, he should elaborate. "Skeeter thought it was the doorway into utter confusion. There would be this terrible period, of utter confusion, and then there would be a wonderful stretch of perfect calm, with him ruling, or somebody exactly like him."
"Did you believe it?"
"I would have liked to, but I'm too rational. Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general. That make sense?"
"I'm not sure," Janice says.
"You think Mom ever had any lovers?"
"Ask her."
"I don't dare."
After another while, Janice announces, "If you're not going to make love, I might as well turn my back and get some sleep. I was up almost all night worrying about this – reunion."
"How do you think it's going?"
"Fair."
The slither of sheets as she rotates her body is a silver music, sheets of pale noise extending outward unresisted by space. There was a grip he used to have on her, his right hand cupping her skull through her hair and his left hand on her breasts gathering them together, so the nipples were an inch apart. The grip is still there. Her ass and legs float away. He asks her, "How do we get out of here?"
"We put on our clothes and walk out the door. But let's have a nap first. You're talking nonsense already."
"It'll be so embarrassing. The guy at the desk'll think we've been up to no good."
"He doesn't care."
"He does, he does care. We could stay all night to make him feel better, but nobody else knows where we are. They'll worry."
"Stop it, Harry. We'll go in an hour. Just shut up."
"I feel so guilty."
"About what?"
"About everything."
"Relax. Not everything is your fault."
"I can't accept that."
He lets her breasts go, lets them float away, radiant debris. The space they are in, the motel room long and secret as a burrow, becomes all interior space. He slides down an inch on the cool sheet and fits his microcosmic self limp into the curved crevice between the polleny offered nestling orbs of her ass; he would stiffen but his hand having let her breasts go comes upon the familiar dip of her waist, ribs to hip bone, where no bones are, soft as flight, fat's inward curve, slack, his babies from her belly. He finds this inward curve and slips along it, sleeps. He. She. Sleeps. O.K.?