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 intimate 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 exclamation, 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 painlessly. "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."