He knows she's needling him, but he doesn't feel it, tingling all over anyway. "He and I in some ways I guess are alike," he says.
"I know. I know." Her odd quickness in saying this sets his heart ticking quicker. She adds, "But naturally it's the differences that I notice." Her voice curls dryly into the end of this sentence; her lower lip goes sideways.
What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. He doesn't know if she's a conscious or unconscious flirt. He always thinks when they meet again he will speak firmly, and tell her he loves her, or something as blunt, and lay the truth bare; but in her presence he is numb; his breath fogs the glass and he has trouble thinking of anything to say and what he does say is stupid. He knows only this: underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance. But between that preparedness and him everything reasonable intervenes. He asks, "Like what?"
"Oh – like the fact that you're not afraid of women."
"Who is?"
"Jack."
"You think?"
"Of course. The old ones, and the teenagers, he's fine with; the ones who see him in his collar. But the others he's very leery of he doesn't like them. He doesn't really think they even ought to come to church. They bring a smell of babies and bed into it. That's not just in Jack; that's in Christianity. It's really a very neurotic religion."
Somehow, when she fetches out her psychology, it seems so foolish to Harry that his own feeling of foolishness leaves him. Stepping down off a high curb, he takes her arm. Mt. Judge, built on its hillside, is full of high curbs difficult for little women to negotiate gracefully. Her bare arm remains cool in his fingers.
"Don't tell that to the parishioners," he says.
"See? You sound just like Jack."
"Is that good or bad?" There. This seems to him to test her bluff: She must say either good or bad, and that will be the fork in the road.
But she says nothing. He feels the effort of self—control this takes; she is accustomed to making replies. They mount the opposite curb and he lets go of her arm awkwardly. Though he is awkward, there is still this sense of being nestled against a receptive grain, of fitting.
"Mommy?" Joyce asks.
"What?"
"What's rottic?"
"Rottic. Oh. Neurotic. It's when you're a little bit sick in the head."
"Like a cold in the head?"
"Well yes, in a way. It's about that serious. Don't worry about it, sweetie. It's something most everybody is. Except our friend Mr. Angstrom."
The little girl looks up at him across her mother's thighs with a spreading smile of self—conscious impudence. "He's naughty," she says.
"Not extraordinarily," her mother says.
At the end of the rectory's brick wall a blue tricycle has been abandoned and Joyce runs ahead and mounts it and rides away in her aqua Sunday coat and pink hair ribbon, metal squeaking, spinning ventriloquistic threads of noise into the air. Together they watch the child a moment. Then Lucy asks, "Do you want to come in?" In waiting for his reply, she contemplates his shoulder; her eyelashes from his angle hide her eyes. Her lips are parted and her tongue, a movement in her jaw tells him, touches the roof of her mouth. In the noon sun her features show sharp and her lipstick looks cracked. He can see the inner lining of her lower lip wet against her teeth. A delayed gust of the sermon, a whining exhortation like a dusty breeze off the desert, sweeps through him, accompanied grotesquely by a vision of Janice's breasts green—veined, tender. This wicked snip wants to pluck him from them.
"No thanks, really. I can't."
"Oh come on. You've been to church, have a reward. Have some coffee."
"No, look." His words come out soft but somehow big. "You're a doll, but I got this wife now." And his hands, rising from his sides in vague explanation, cause her to take a quick step backward.
"I beg your pardon."
He is conscious of nothing but the little speckled section of her green irises like torn tissue paper around her black pupil—dots; then he is watching her tight round butt jounce up the walk. "But thanks, anyway," he calls in a hollowed, gutless voice. He hates being disliked. She slams the door behind her so hard the fishshaped knocker clacks by itself on the empty porch.
He walks home blind to the sunlight. Was she mad because he had turned down a proposition, or because he had shown that he thought she had made one? Or was it a mixture of these opposites, that had somehow exposed her to herself? His mother, suddenly caught in some confusion of her own, would turn on the heat that way. In either case, he feels tall and elegant and potent striding along under the trees in his Sunday suit. Whether spurned or misunderstood, Eccles' wife has jazzed him up, and he reaches his apartment clever and cold with lust.
His wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached. The baby scrawks tirelessly. It lies in its crib all afternoon and makes an infuriating noise of strain, Hnnnnnah ah ah nnnnh, a persistent feeble scratching at some interior door. What does it want? Why won't it sleep? He has come home from church carrying something precious for Janice and keeps being screened from giving it to her. The noise spreads fear through the apartment. It makes his stomach ache; when he picks up the baby to burp her he burps himself the pressure in his stomach keeps breaking and re—fornung into a stretched bubble as the bubble in the baby doesn't break. The tiny soft marbled body, weightless as paper, goes stiff against his chest and then floppy, its hot head rolling as if it will unjoint from its neck. "Becky, Becky, Becky," he says, "go to sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep."
The noise makes Nelson fretful and whiny. As if, being closest to the dark gate from which the baby has recently emerged, he is most sensitive to the threat the infant is trying to warn them of. Some shadow invisible to their better—formed senses seems to grab Rebecca as soon as she is left alone. Rabbit puts her down, tiptoes into the living room; they hold their breath. Then, with a bitter scratch, the membrane of silence breaks, and the wobbly moan begins again, Nnnh, a—nnnnnih!
"Oh my God," Rabbit says. "Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch."
Around five in the afternoon, Janice begins to cry. Tears burble down her dark pinched face. "I'm dry," she says. "I'm dry. I just don't have anything to feed her ." The baby has been at her breasts repeatedly.
"Forget it," he says. "She'll conk out. Have a drink. There's some old whisky in the kitchen."
"Say; what is this Have a drink routine of yours? I've been trying not to drink. I thought you didn't like me to drink. All afternoon you've been smoking one cigarette after another and saying, `Have a drink. Have a drink.' "
"I thought it might loosen you up. You're tense as hell."
"I'm no tenser than you are. What's eating you? What's on your mind?"
"What's happened to your milk? 'Why can't you give the kid enough milk?"
"I've fed her three times in four hours. There's nothing there any more." In a plain, impoverished gesture, she presses her breasts through her dress.
"Well have a drink of something."
"Say, what did they tell you at church? `Go on home and get your wife soused'? You have a drink if that's on your mind."
"I don't need a drink."
"Well you need something. You're the one's upsetting Becky. She was fine all morning until you came home."
"Forget it. Just forget it. Just forget the whole frigging thing."
"Baby cry! "
Janice puts her arm around Nelson. "I know it honey. She's hot. She'll stop in a minute."
"Baby hot?"
They listen for a minute and it does not stop; the wild feeble warning, broken by tantalizing gaps of silence, goes on and on. Warned, but not knowing of what, they blunder about restlessly through the wreckage of the Sunday paper, inside the apartment, whose walls sweat like the walls of a prison. Outside, the wide sky hosts a high sun, blue through the hours, and Rabbit is further panicked by the thought that on such a day his parents used to take him and Mim on walks to the quarry – they are wasting a beautiful Sunday. But they can't get organized enough to get out. He and Nelson could go but Nelson's strange fright makes him reluctant to leave his mother, and Rabbit, hoping to possess her eventually, hovers near her like a miser near treasure. His lust glues them together.
She feels this and is oppressed by it. "Why don't you go out? You're making the baby nervous. You're making me nervous."
"Don't you want a drink?"