This stuns her skin in a curious way, makes it contract so that her body feels squeezed and sickened inside it. " Sure. Ifyou want me tó." After being a wife a whore's skin feels tight.
His relief is boyish; his front teeth flash happily. "Just once," he promises, "honest. I'll never ask you again." He tries to put his arm around her but she pulls away.
Up in the apartment he asks plaintively, "Are you going to?" She is struck by the helplessness in his posture; in the interior darkness, to which her eyes have not adjusted, he seems a suit of clothes hung from the broad white knob of his face.
She asks, "Are you sure we're talking about the same thing?"
"What do you think we're talking about?" He's too fastidious to mouth the words.
She says, "Sucking you off."
"Right," he says.
"In cold blood. You just want it."
"Uh—huh. Is it so awful for you?"
This glimmer of her gentle rabbit emboldens her. "It's not so bad. May I ask what I've done?"
"I didn't like the way you acted tonight."
"How did I act?"
"Like what you were."
"I didn't mean to."
"Even so. I saw you that way tonight and it put a wall between us and this is the one way through it."
"That's pretty cute. You just want it, really." She yearns to hit out at him, to tell him to go. But that time is past.
He repeats, "Is it so awful for you?"
"Well it is because you think it is."
"Maybe I don't. Maybe I think it'd be nice."
"Look, I've loved you."
"Well I've loved you."
"And now?"
"I don't know. I want to still."
Now those damn tears again. She tries to hurry the words out before her voice crumbles. "That's good of you. That's heroic."
"Don't be smart. Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees. I need you to" – he still can't say it "do it."
The two tall drinks have been a poor experiment; she wants to go to sleep and her tongue tastes sour. She feels in her queasy stomach her need to keep him and wonders, Will this frighten him? Will this kill her in him?
"If I did it what would it prove?"
"It'd prove you're mine."
"Shall I take my clothes off?"
"Sure." He takes his off quickly and neatly and stands by the dull wall in his brilliant body. He leans awkwardly and brings one hand up and hangs it on his shoulder not knowing what to do with it. His whole shy pose has these wings of tension, like he's an angel waiting for a word. Sliding her last clothes off, her arms feel cold touching her sides. This last month she's felt cold all the time; her temperature being divided or something. In the growing light he shifts slightly. She closes her eyes and tells herself, they're not ugly. Not.
Mrs. Springer called the rectory a little after eight. Mrs. Eccles told her Jack had taken the young people's softball team to a game fifteen miles away and she didn't know when he'd be home. Mrs. Springer's panic carried over the wire and Lucy spent nearly two hours calling numbers in an attempt to reach him. It grew dark. She finally reached the minister of the church whose softball team they were playing and he told her the game had been over for an hour. The darkness thickened outside; the window whose sill held the phone became a waxy streaked mirror in which she could see herself, hair unpinning, slump back and forth between the address book and the phone. Joyce, hearing the constant ticking of the dial, came downstairs and leaned on her mother. Three times Lucy took her up to the bed and twice the child came down again and leaned her damp weight against her mother's legs in frightened silence. The whole house, room beyond room surrounding with darkness the little island of light around the telephone, filled with menace and when, the third time, Joyce failed to come down from her bed, Lucy felt guilty and forsaken both, as if she had sold her only ally to the shadows. She dialed the number of every problem case in the parish she could think of, tried the vestrymen, the church secretary, the three co—chairmen of the fund—raising drive, Angus the old deaf sexton, and even the organist, a pianoteaching professional who lived in Brewer.
The hour hand has moved past ten; it's getting embarrassing. It's sounding as if she's been deserted. And in fact it frightens her, that her husband seems to be nowhere in the world. She makes coffee and weeps weakly, in her own kitchen. How did she get into this? What drew her in? His gaiety, he was always so gay. To know him back in seminary you would never think he would take all this so seriously; he and his friends sitting in their bare old rooms lined with handsome blue exegetical works made it all seem an elegant joke. She remembers playing with them in a softball game that was the Athanasians against the Arians. And now she never saw his gaiety, it was all spent on other people, on this grim intangible parish, her enemy. She hates them, all those clinging quaint quavering widows and Young People for Christ – the one good thing if the Russians take over is they'll make religion go extinct. It should have gone extinct a hundred years ago. Maybe it shouldn't have, maybe our weakness needs it, but let somebody else carry it on. On Jack it was so dreary. Sometimes she feels sorry for him and, abruptly, this is one of the times.
When he does come in, at quarter of eleven, it turns out he's been sitting in a drugstore gossiping with some of his teenagers; the idiotic kids tell him everything, all smoking like chimneys, so he comes home titillated silly with "how far" you can "go" on dates and still love Jesus.
Eccles sees at once she is furious. He had been having far too happy a time in the drugstore. He loves kids; their belief is so real to them and sits so light.
Lucy delivers her message as sufficient rebuke, but it fails as that; for, with hardly a backward glance at the horrid evening she has, implicitly, spent, he rushes to the phone.
He takes his wallet out and between his driver's license and his public—library card finds the telephone number he has been saving, the key that could be turned in the lock just once. He wonders, dialing it, if it will fit, if he was a fool to lean the entire weight of the case on the word of young Mrs. Fosnacht, with her mirroring, brittle, vacant sunglasses. The distant phone rings often: it is as if electricity, that amazingly trained mouse, has scurried through miles of wire only to gnaw at the end of its errand on an impenetrable plate of metal. He prays, but it is a bad prayer, a doubting prayer; he fails to superimpose God upon the complexities of electricity. He concedes them their inviolable laws. Hope has vanished, he is hanging on out of despair, when the gnawing ringing stops, the metal is lifted, and openness, an impression of light and air, washes back through the wires to Eccles' ear.
"Hello." A man's voice, but not Harry's. It is more sluggish and brutal than that of his friend.
"Is Harry Angstrom there?" Sunglasses mock his sunk heart; this is not the number.
"Who's this?"
"My name is Jack Eccles."
"Oh. Hi."
"Is that you, Harry? It didn't sound like you. Were you asleep?"
"In a way."
"Harry, your wife has started to have the baby. Her mother called here around eight and I just got in." Eccles closes his eyes; in the dark tipping silence he feels his ministry, sum and substance, being judged.
"Yeah," the other breathes in the far corner of the darkness. "I guess I ought to go to her."
"I wish you would."
"I guess I should. It's mine I mean too."
"Exactly. I'll meet you there. It's St. Joseph's in Brewer. You know where that is?"
"Yeah, sure. I can walk it in ten minutes."