"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!' "
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."