"Your shirt's filthy," she says behind him.
"I know." He moves away from the window light. "It's Tothero's shirt. I got to get my own clothes. But let me get us food now. What shall I get?"
"What do you like?" she asks.
He leaves pleased. The thing about her is, she's good—natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the way her thighs made a lap. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things; they're a different race. The good ones develop give. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. The pavement kicks under his feet as he runs to the grocery store in his dirty shirt. What do you like? He has her. He knows he has her.
He brings back eight hot dogs in cellophane, a package of frozen lima beans, a package of frozen French fries, a quart of milk, ajar of relish, a loaf of raisin bread, a ball of cheese wrapped in red cellophane, and, on top of the bag, a Ma Sweitzer's shoo—fly pie. It all costs $2.43. As she brings the things out of the bag in her tiny stained kitchen, Ruth says, "You're not a very healthy eater."
"I wanted lamb chops but he only had hot dogs and salami and hash in cans."
While she cooks he wanders around her living room and finds a row of pocketbook mysteries on a shelf under a table beside a chair. The Jewish guy in the bunk beside his at Fort Larson used to read those all the time. Ben Shamberger. A smart mouth but mournful inky eyes. Hated the Army. Broke his arm from riding a steer one weekend on a dare from that maniac Jarzylo. Ruth has opened the windows, and the cool March air is sharpened by this memory of baking Texas. Ruth's curtains of dingy dotted Swiss blow; their gauze skin gently fills and they lean in toward him as he stands paralyzed by another memory: his home, when he was a child, the Sunday papers rattling on the floor, stirred by the afternoon draft, and his mother rattling the dishes in the kitchen. When she is done, she will organize them all, Pop and him and baby Miriam, to go for a walk. Because of the baby, they will not go far, just a few blocks maybe to the old gravel quarry, where the ice pond of winter, melted into a lake a few inches deep, doubles the height of the quarry cliff by throwing its rocks upside down into a pit of reflection. But it is only water; they take a few steps farther along the edge and from this new angle the pond mirrors the sun, the illusion of inverted cliffs is wiped out, and the water is as solid as ice with light. Rabbit holds little Mim hard by the hand. "Hey," he calls to Ruth. "I got a terrific idea. Let's go for a walk this afternoon."
"Walk! I walk all the time."
"Let's walk up to the top of Mt. Judge from here." He can't remember having ever gone up the mountain from the Brewer side. Gusts of anticipation sweep over him, and as he turns, exalted, away from the curtains stiff and leaning with the breeze, huge church bells ring. "Yeah let's," he calls into the kitchen. "How about it?" Out on the street people leave church carrying wands of green absentmindedly at their sides.
When Ruth serves lunch he sees she is a better cook than Janice; she has boiled the hot dogs somehow without splitting them. With Janice, they always arrived at the table torn and twisted and tortured—looking. He and Ruth eat at a small porcelain table in the kitchen. As he touches his fork to his plate he remembers the cold feel in his dream of Janice's face dropping into his hands, and the memory spoils his first bite, makes it itself a kind of horror. Nevertheless he says "Terrific" and gamely goes ahead and eats and does regain his appetite.
Ruth's face across from him takes some of the pale glare of the table—top; the skin of her broad forehead shines and the two blemishes beside her nose are like spots something spilled has left. She seems to sense that she has become unattractive, and eats with quick little self—effacing bites.
"Hey," he says.
"What?"
"You know I still have that car parked over on Cherry Street."
"You're O.K. The meters don't matter on Sunday."
"Yeah, but they will tomorrow."
"Sell it."
"Huh?"
"Sell the car. Simplify your life. Get rich quick."
"No, I mean – oh. You mean for you. Look, I still have thirty dollars, why dontcha let me give it to you now?" He reaches toward his hip pocket.
"No, no, I did not mean that. I didn't mean anything. It just popped into my fat head." She is embarrassed; her neck goes splotchy and his pity is roused, to think how beautiful she appeared last night.
He explains. "You see, my wife's old man is a used—car dealer and when we got married he sold us this car at a pretty big discount. So in a way it's really my wife's car and anyway since she has the kid I think she ought to have it. And then as you say my shirt's dirty and I ought to get my clothes if I can. So what I thought was, after lunch why don't I sneak over to my place and leave the car and pick up my clothes?"
"Suppose she's there?"
"She won't be. She'll be at her mother's."
"I think you'd like it if she was there," Ruth says.
He wonders; he imagines opening the door and finding Janice sitting there in the armchair with an empty glass watching television and feels, like a piece of food stuck in his throat at last going down, his relief at finding her face still firm, still its old dumb tense self of a face. "No, I wouldn't," he tells Ruth. "I'm scared of her."
"Obviously," Ruth says.
"There's something about her," he insists. "She's a menace."
"This poor wife you left? You're the menace, I'd say."
"Me?"
"Oh that's right. You think you're a rabbit." Her tone in saying this is faintly jeering and irritable, he doesn't know why.
She asks, "What do you think you're going to do with these clothes?"
He admits, "Bring them here."
She takes in the breath but comes out with nothing.
"Just for tonight," he pleads. "You're not doing anything are you?
"Maybe. I don't know. Probably not."
"Well then, great. Hey. I love you."
She rises to clear away the plates and stands there, thumb on china, staring at the center of the white table. She shakes her head heavily and says, "You're bad news."
Across from him her broad pelvis, snug in a nubbly brown skirt, is solid and symmetrical as the base of a powerful column. His heart rises through that strong column and, enraptured to feel his love for her founded anew yet not daring to lift his eyes to the test of her face, he says, "I can't help it. You're such good news."
He eats three pieces of shoo—fly pie and a crumb in the corner of his lips comes off on her sweater when he kisses her breasts goodbye in the kitchen. He leaves her with the dishes. His car is waiting for him on Cherry Street in the cool spring noon mysteriously; it is as if a room of a house he owned had been detached and scuttled by this curb and now that the tide of night was out stood up glistening in the sand, slightly tilting but unharmed, ready to sail at the turn of a key. Under his rumpled dirty clothes his body feels clean, narrow, hollow. He has scored. The car smells of rubber and dust and painted metal hot in the sun: a sheath for the knife of himself. He cuts through the Sunday—stunned town, the soft rows of domestic brick, the banistered porches of wood. He drives around the southern flank of Mt. Judge; its slope by the highway is dusted the yellow—green of new leaves; higher up, the evergreens make a black horizon with the sky. The view has changed since the last time he came this way. Yesterday morning the sky was ribbed with thin—stretched dawn clouds, and he was exhausted, heading into the center of the net, where alone there seemed a chance of rest. Now the noon of another day has burned away the clouds, and the sky in the windshield is blank and cold, and he feels nothing ahead of him, Ruth's blue—eyed nothing, the nothing she told him she did, the nothing she believes in. Your heart lifts forever through that blank sky.
His mood of poise crumbles as he descends into the familiar houses of Mt. Judge. He becomes cautious, nervous. He turns up Jackson, up Potter, up Wilbur, and tries to make out from some external sign if there is anyone in his apartment. No telltale light would show; it is the height of day. No car is out front. He circles the block twice, straining his neck to see a face at the window. The panes are high and opaque. Ruth was wrong; he does not want to see Janice.
The bare possibility makes him so faint that when he gets out of the car the bright sun almost knocks him down. As he climbs the stairs, the steps seem to calibrate, to restrain by notches, a helpless tendency in his fear—puffed body to rise. He raps on the door, braced to run. Nothing answers on the other side. He taps again, listens, and takes the key out of his pocket.
Though the apartment is empty, it is yet so full of Janice he begins to tremble; the sight of that easy chair turned to face the television attacks his knees. Nelson's broken toys on the floor derange his head; all the things inside his skull, the gray matter, the bones of his ears, the apparatus of his eyes, seem clutter clogging the tube of his self his sinuses choke, with a sneeze or tears he doesn't know. The living room smells of desertion. The shades are still drawn. Janice drew them in the afternoons to keep glare off the television screen. Someone has made gestures of cleaning up; her ashtray and her empty glass have been taken away. Rabbit puts the door key and the car keys on top of the television case, metal painted brown in imitation of wood grain. As he opens the closet door the knob bumps against the edge of the set. Some of her clothes are gone.
He means to reach for his clothes but instead turns and wanders toward the kitchen, trying to gather up the essence of what he has done. Their bed sags in the filtered sunlight. Never a good bed. Her parents had given it to them. On the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous numbers and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas. Insecurely tilted against the wall is the big oval mirror they took away when her parents had a new bathroom put in; he always meant to attach it to the plaster above her bureau for her but never got around to buying molly bolts. A glass on the windowsill, half full of stale, bubbled water, throws a curved patch of diluted sun onto the bare place where the mirror should have been fixed. Three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel; what ever made them, when? Beyond the edge of the bed a triangle of linoleum bathroom floor shows; the time after her shower, her bottom blushing with steam, lifting her anns gladly to kiss him, soaked licks of hair in her armpits. What gladness had seized her, and then him, unasked?
In the kitchen he discovers an odd oversight: the pork chops never taken from the pan, cold as death, riding congealed grease. He dumps them out in the paper bag under the sink and with a spatula scrapes crumbs of the stiff speckled fat after them. The bag, stained dark brown at the bottom, smells of something sweetly rotting. He puzzles. The garbage can is downstairs out back, he doesn't want to make two trips. He decides to forget it. He draws scalding water into the sink and puts the pan in to soak. The breath of steam is a whisper in a tomb.
In frightened haste he takes clean jockey pants, T—shirts, and socks from a drawer, three shirts in cellophane and blue cardboard from another, a pair of laundered suntans from a third, draws his two suits and a sports shirt from the closet, and wraps the smaller clothing in the suits to form a bundle he can carry. The job makes him sweat. Clutching his clothes between two arms and a lifted thigh, he surveys the apartment once more, and the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face; the rooms are filled with the flavor of an awkward job, and he is glad to get out. The door snaps shut behind him irrevocably. His key is inside.
Toothbrush. Razor. Cufflinks. Shoes. At each step down he remembers something he forgot. He hurries, his feet patter. He jumps. His head almost hits the naked bulb burning at the end of a black cord in the vestibule. His name on the mailbox seems to call at him as he sweeps past; its letters of blue ink crowd the air like a cry. He feels ridiculous, ducking into the sunlight like one of those weird thieves you read about in the back pages of newspapers who instead of stealing money and silver carry away a porcelain washbasin, twenty rolls of wallpaper, or a bundle of old clothes.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Angstrom."
A neighbor is passing, Miss Arndt, in a lavender church hat, carrying a palm frond in clutched hands. "Oh. Hello. How are you?" She lives three houses up; they think she has cancer.