We've been raped, we've been raped
BACKGROUND VOICE ABOARD SOYUZ
ONE DAY in September Rabbit comes home from work to find another man in the house. The man is a Negro. "What the hell," Rabbit says, standing in the front hall beside the three chime tubes.
Hell, man, it's revolution, right?" the young black says, not rising from the mossy brown armchair. His glasses flash two silver circles; his goatee is a smudge in shadow. He has let his hair grow out so much, into such a big ball, that Rabbit didn't recognize him at first.
Jill rises, quick as smoke, from the chair with the silver threads. "You remember Skeeter
How could I forget him?" He goes forward a step, his hand lifted ready to be shaken, the palm tingling with fear; but since Skeeter makes no move to rise, he lets it drop back to his side, unsullied.
Skeeter studies the dropped white hand, exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It is a real cigarette, tobacco. "I like it," Skeeter says. "I like your hostility, Chuck. As we used to say in Nam, it is my meat.
Skeeter and I were just talking," Jill says; her voice has changed, it is more afraid, more adult. "Don't I have any rights
Rabbit speaks to Skeeter. "I thought you were in jail or something.
He is out on bail," Jill says, too hastily.
Let him speak for himself.
Wearily Skeeter corrects her. "To be precise, I am way out on bail. I have jumped the blessed thing. I am, as they would say, desired by the local swine. I have become one hot item, right
It would have been two years," Jill says. "Two years for nothing, for not hurting anybody, not stealing anything, for nothing, Harry.
Did Babe jump bail too
Babe is a lady," Skeeter goes on in this tone of weary mincing precision. "She makes friends easy, right? I have no friends. I am known far and wide for my lack of sympathetic qualities." His voice changes, becomes falsetto, cringing. "Ali is one baad niggeh." He has many voices, Rabbit remembers, and none of them exactly his.
Rabbit tells him, "They'll catch you sooner or later. Jumping bail makes it much worse. Maybe you would have gotten off with a suspended sentence.
I have one of those. Officialdom gets bored with handing them out, right
How about your being a Vietnam veteran
How about it? I am also black and unemployed and surly, right? I seek to undermine the state, and Of Massah State, he cottons on.
Rabbit contemplates the set of shadows in the old armchair, trying to feel his way. The chair has been with them ever since their marriage, it comes from the Springers' attic. This nightmare must pass. He says, "You talk a cool game, but I think you panicked, boy.
Don't boy me.
Rabbit is startled; he had meant it neutrally, one outlaw to another. He tries to amend: "You're just hurting yourself. Go turn yourself in, say you never meant to jump.
Skeeter stretches luxuriously in the chair, yawns, inhales and exhales. "It dawns upon me," he says, "that you have a white gentleman's concept of the police and their exemplary works. There is nothing, let me repeat no thing, that gives them more pleasurable sensations than pulling the wings off of witless poor black men. First the fingernails, then the wings. Truly, they are constituted for that very sacred purpose. To keep me off your back and under your smelly feet, right
This isn't the South," Rabbit says.
Hee?yah! Friend Chuck, have you ever considered conning for po?litical office, there can't be a county clerk left who believes the sweet things you do. The news is, the South is everywhere. We are fifty miles from the Mason?Dixon line where we sit, but way up in Detroit they are shooting nigger boys like catfish in a barrel. The news is, the cotton is in. Lynching season is on. In these Benighted States, everybody's done become a cracker." A brown hand delicately gestures from the shadows, then droops. "Forgive me, Chuck. This is just too simple for me to explain. Read the papers.
I do. You're crazy.
Jill horns in. "The System is rotten, Harry. The laws are written to protect a tiny elite.
Like people who own boats in Stonington," he says.
Score one," Skeeter calls, "right
Jill flares. "What of it, I ran away from it, I reject it, I shit on it, Harry, where you're still loving it, you're eating it, you're eating my shit. My father's. Everybody's. Don't you see how you're used
So now you want to use me. For him.
She freezes, white. Her lips thin to nothing. "Yes.
You're crazy. I'd be risking jail too.
Harry, just a few nights, until he can hustle up a stake. He has family in Memphis, he'll go there. Skeeter, right
Right, sugar. Oh so right.
It isn't just the pot bust, the pigs think he's a dealer, they say he pushes, they'll crucify him. Harry. They will.
Skeeter softly croons the start of "That Old Rugged Cross.
Well, does he? Push.
Skeeter grins under his great ball of hair. "What can I get for you, Chuck? Goof balls, jolly beans, red devils, purple hearts. They have so much Panama Red in Philly right now they're feeding it to cows. Or want to sniff a little scag for a real rush?" From the gloom of the chair he extends his pale palms cupped as if heaped with shining poison.
So he is evil. Rabbit in his childhood used to lift, out of the same curiosity that made him put his finger into his belly?button and then sniff it, the metal waffle?patterned lid on the back yard cesspool, around the corner of the garage from the basketball hoop. Now this black man opens up under him in the same way: a pit of scummed stench impossible to see to the bottom of.
Harry turns and asks Jill, "Why are you doing this to me
She turns her head, gives him that long?chinned profile, a dime's worth. "I was stupid," she says, "to think you might trust me. You shouldn't have said you loved me.
Skeeter hums "True Love," the old Crosby??Grace Kelly single.
Rabbit re?asks, "Why
Skeeter rises from the chair. ` Jesus deliver me from puking uptight honky lovers. She's doing it because I been screwing her all afternoon, right? If I go, she comes with me, hey Jill honey, right
She says, again thin?upped, "Right.
Skeeter tells her, "I wouldn't take you on a bet, you poor cock?happy bitch. Skeeter splits alone." To Rabbit he says, "Toodle?oo, Chuck. Goddam green pickles, but it's been fun to watch you squirm." Standing, Skeeter seems frail, shabby in blue Levis and a colorless little Army windbreaker from which the insignia have been unstitched. His ball of hair has shrank his face.
Toodle?oo," Rabbit agrees, with relief in his bowels, and turns his back.
Skeeter declines to go so simply. He steps closer, he smells spicy. He says, "Throw me out. I want you to touch me.
I don't want to.
Do it.
I don't want to fight you.
I screwed your bitch.
Her decision.
And a lousy little cunt she was, too. Like putting your prick in a vise.
Hear him, Jill
Hey. Rabbit. That's what they used to call you, right? Your mamma's a whore, right? She goes down on old black winos behind the railroad station for fifty cents, right? If they don't have fifty cents she does it free because she likes it, right
Remote Mom. The guilty scent of her room, medicine, bedwarmth. Of all those years when she was well he can only remember her big bones bent above the kitchen table with its four worn places; she is not sitting down, she has already eaten, she is feeding him supper, he has come home from practice late, it is after dark, the windows are glazed from within.
Your daddy's a queer, right? You must be too to take all this shit. Your wife couldn't stand living with a queer, it was like being balled by a mouse, right? You're a mouse down there, hey, ain't that right, gimme a feel." He reaches and Rabbit bats his hand away. Skeeter dances, delighted. "Nothin' there, right? Hey. Rabbit. Jill says you believe in God. I got news for you. Your God's a pansy. Your white God's queerer than the Queen of Spades. He sucks off the Holy Ghost and makes his son watch. Hey. Chuck. Another thing. Ain't no Jesus. He was a faggot crook, right? They bribed the Romans to get his carcass out of the tomb 'cause it smelled so bad, right
All you're showing me," Rabbit says, "is how crazy you are." But a creeping sweetness, rage, is filling him solid. Sunday school images ? a dead man whiter than lilies, the lavender rocks where he was betrayed by a kiss ? are being revived in him.
Skeeter dances on, he is wearing big creased Army boots. He bumps Harry's shoulder, tugs the sleeve of his white shirt. "Hey. Wanna know how I know? Wanna know? Hey. I'm the real Jesus. I am the black Jesus, right? There is none other, no. When I fart, lightning flashes, right? Angels scoop it up in shovels of zillioncarat gold. Right? Kneel down, Chuck. Worship me. I am Jesus. Kiss my balls ? they are the sun and the moon, and my pecker's a comet whose head is the white?hot heart of the glory that never does fail!" And, his head rolling like a puppet's, Skeeter unzips his fly and prepares to display this wonder.
Rabbit's time has come. He is packed so solid with anger and fear he is seeing with his pores. He wades toward the boy deliciously and feels his fists vanish, one in the region of the belly, the other below the throat. He is scared of the head, whose glasses might shatter and slash. Skeeter curls up and drops to the floor dry as a scorpion and when Rabbit pries at him he has no opening, just abrasive angles shaking like a sandpaper machine. Rabbit's hands start to hurt. He wants to pry this creature open because there is a soft spot where he can be split and killed; the curved back is too tough, though knuckles slammed at the hole of the ear do produce a garbled whimper.
Jill is screaming and with her whole weight pulling the tail of his shirt and in the ebb of his sweetness Rabbit discovers his hands and forearms somehow clawed. His enemy is cringing on the floor, the carpet that cost them eleven dollars a yard and was supposed to wear longer than the softer loop for fifteen that Janice wanted (she always said it reminded her of the stuff they use in miniature golf courses), cringing expertly, knees tucked under chin and hands over head and head tucked under the sofa as far as it will go. His Levis are rumpled up and it shocks Rabbit to see how skinny his calves and ankles are, iridescent dark spindles. Humans made of a new material. Last longer, wear more evenly. And Jill is sobbing, "Harry, no more, no more," and the door chime is saying its three syllables over and over, a scale that can't get anywhere, that can't get over the top.
The door pops open. Nelson is there, in his spiffy new school clothes, fishbone?striped sport shirt and canary?yellow slacks. Billy Fosnacht is behind him, a hairy head taller. "Hey," Skeeter says from the floor, "it's Babychuck, right
Is he a burglar, Dad
We could hear the furniture being smashed and everything," Billy says. "We didn't know what to do.
Nelson says, "We thought if we kept ringing the bell it would stop.
Jill tells him, "Your father lost all control of himself.
Rabbit asks, "Why should I always be the one to have control of myself
Getting up as if from a bin of dust, one careful limb at a time, Skeeter says, "That was to get us acquainted, Chuck. Next time I'll have a gun.
Rabbit taunts, "I thought at least I'd see some nice karate chops from basic training.
Afraid to use 'em. Break you in two, right
Daddy, who is he
He's a friend of Jill's called Skeeter. He's going to stay here a couple days.
He is
Jill's voice has asked.
Rabbit sifts himself for the reason. Small scraped places smart on his knuckles; overstimulation has left a residue of nausea; he notices through the haze that still softly rotates around him that the end table was upset and that the lamp whose base is driftwood lies on the carpet awry but not smashed. The patient fidelity of these things bewilders him. "Sure," he says. "Why not
Skeeter studies him from the sofa, where he sits bent over, nursing the punch to his stomach. "Feeling guilty, huh Chuck? A little tokenism to wash your sins away, right
Skeeter, he's being generous," Jill scolds.
Get one thing straight, Chuck. No gratitude. Anything you do, do for selfish reasons.
Right. The kicks I get in pounding you around." But in fact he is terrified at having taken this man in. He will have to sleep with him in the house. The tint of night, Skeeter will sneak to his side with a knife shining like the moon. He will get the gun as he has promised. FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE HOLDS FAMILY AT GUNPOINT. Mayor Vows, No Deals. Why has he invited this danger? To get Janice to rescue him. These thoughts flit by in a flash. Nelson has taken a step toward the black man. His eyes are sunk in their sockets with seriousness. Wait, wait. He is poison, he is murder, he is black.
Hi," Nelson says, and holds out his hand.
Skeeter puts his skinny fingers, four gray crayons, as thick at the tips as in the middle, in the child's hand and says, "Hi there, Babychuck." He nods over Nelson's shoulder toward Billy Fosnacht. "Who's your gruesome friend
And everybody, everybody laughs, even Billy, even Skeeter contributes a cackle, at this unexpected illumination, that Billy is gruesome, with his father's skinny neck and big ears and a hint of his mother's mooncalf eyes and the livid festerings of adolescence speckling his cheeks and chin. Their laughter makes a second wave to reassure him they are not laughing at him, they are laughing in relief at the gift of truth, they are rejoicing in brotherhood, at having shared this moment, giggling and cackling; the house is an egg cracking because they are all hatching together.
But in bed, the house dark and Billy gone home, Skeeter breathing exhausted on the sofa downstairs, Rabbit repeats his question to Jill: "Why have you done this to me
Jill snuffles, turns over. She is so much lighter than he, she irresistibly rolls down to his side. Often in the morning he wakes to find himself nearly pushed from the bed by this inequality, her sharp little elbows denting his flesh. "He was so pathetic," she explains. "He talks tough but he really has nothing, he really does want to become the black Jesus.
Is that why you let him screw you this afternoon? Or didn't you
I didn't really.
He lied
Silence. She slides an inch deeper into his side of the bed. "I don't think it counts when you just let somebody do it to you and don't do anything back.
You don't.
No, it just happens on the surface, a million miles away.
And how about with me? Is it the same way, you don't feel anything, it's so far away. So you're really a virgin, aren't you
Shh. Whisper. No, I do feel things with you.
What
She nudges closer and her arm encircles his thick waist. "I feel you're a funny big teddy bear my Daddy has given me. He used to bring home these extravagant Steiff toys from F.A.O. Schwarz's in New York, giraffes six feet high that cost five hundred dollars, you couldn't do anything with them, they'd just stand around taking up space. Mother hated them.
Thanks a lot." Sluggishly he rolls over to face her.
Other times, when you're over me, I feel you're an angel. Piercing me with a sword. I feel you're about to announce something, the end of the world, and you say nothing, just pierce me. It's beautiful.
Do you love me
Please, Harry. Since that God thing I went through I just can't focus that way on anybody.
Is Skeeter out of focus for you too
He's horrible. He really is. He feels all scaly, he's so bitter.
Then why in holy hell
She kisses him to stop his voice. "Shh. He'll hear." Sounds travel freely down the stairs, through the house of thin partitions. The rooms are quadrants of one rustling heart. "Because I must, Harry. Because whatever men ask of me, I must give, I'm not interested in holding anything for myself. It all melts together anyway, you see.
I don't see.
I think you do. Otherwise why did you let him stay? You had him beaten. You were killing him.
Yeah, that was nice. I thought I was out of shape worse than I am.
Yet now he's here." She flattens her body against his; it feels ?transparent. He can see through her to the blue window beyond, moonlit, giving onto the garage roof, composition shingling manufactured with a strange shadow?line, to give an illusion of thickness. She confesses, in such a whisper it may be only a thought he overhears, "He frightens me.
Me too.
Half of me wanted you to kick him out. More than half.
Well," and he smiles unseen, "if he is the next Jesus, we got to keep on His good side." Her body broadens as if smiling. It has grown plain that the betrayals and excitements of the day must resolve into their making love now. He encloses her skull in his hands, caressing the spinelike ridges behind the seashell curve of her ears, palming the broad curve of the whole, this cup, sealed upon a spirit. Knowing her love is coming, he sees very clearly, as we see in the etched hour before snow. He amends, "Also, Janice has been doing some things out of the way, so I have to do things out of the way.
To pay her back.
To keep up with her.
The item was narrow?measure
Sentenced for
Possession
Eight local men and one woman were given six?month sentences for possession of marijuana Thursday.
The defendants appearing before Judge Milton F. Schoffer had been apprehended in a police raid on Jimbo's Lounge, Weiser Street, early in the morning of August 29.
The female among them, Miss Beatrice Greene, a well?known local entertainer under her nom de plume of "Babe," had her sentence suspended, with one year's probation, as were four of the men. Two minors were remanded to juvenile court.
A tenth defendant, Hubert H. Farnsworth, failed to appear in court and forfieted bail. A warcourt and forfeited bail. A warant has been issued for his arrest.
ant has been issued for his arrest.
The proprietor of Jimbo's, Mr. Timothy Cartney of Penn
Rabbit's ears can sense now when Pajasek is coming up behind him with a phone call. Something weary and menacing in his step, and then his breath has a sarcastic caress. "Angstrom, maybe we should move your Lino into my office. Or install a phone jack out here.
I'll give her hell, Ed. This is the last time.
I don't like a man's private life to interfere with his work.
I don't either. I tell you, I'll tell her.
Do that, Harry. Do that for good old Verity. We have a team here, we're in a highly competitive game, let's keep up our end, what do you say
Behind the frosted walls he says into the phone, "Janice, this is the last time. I won't come to the phone after this.
I won't be calling you after this, Harry. After this all our communications will be through lawyers.
How come
How come? How come
How come. Come on. Just give me information. I got to get back to the machine.
Well, for one reason how come, you've let me sit over here without ever once calling me back, and for another you've taken a darkie into the house along with that hippie, you're incredible, Harry, my mother always said it, `He means no harm, he just has less moral sense than a skunk,' and she was right.
He's just there a couple days, it's a funny kind of emergency.
It must be funny. It must be hilarious. Does your mother ?know? So help me, I have a mind to call and tell her.
Who told you, anyway? He never goes out of the house.
He hopes by his reasonable tone to bring hers down; she does unwind a notch. "Peggy Fosnacht. She said Billy came home absolutely bug?eyed. He said the man was on the living?room floor and the first thing he said was to insult Billy.
It wasn't meant as an insult, it was meant to be pleasant.
Well I wish I could be pleasant. I wish it very much. I've seen a lawyer and we're filing a writ for immediate custody of Nelson. The divorce will follow. As the guilty party you can't remarry for two years. Absolutely, Harry. I'm sorry. I thought we were more mature than this, I hated the lawyer, the whole thing is too ugly.
Yeah, well, the law is. It serves a ruling elite. More power to the people.
I think you've lost your mind. I honestly do.
Hey, what did you mean, I let you sit over there? I thought that was what you wanted. Isn't Stavros still doing the sitting with you
You might at least have fought a little," she cries, and gasps for breath between sobs. "You're so weak, you're so wishy?washy," she manages to bring out, but then it becomes pure animal sound, a kind of cooing or wheezing, as if all the air is running out of her, so he says, "We'll talk later, call me at home," and hangs up to plug the leak.
Park, expressed shock and strong disapproval of drag use over the telephone to VAT inquiries.
Cartney was not in the building at the time of the arrests.
Rumors have prevailed for some time concerning the sale of this well?known nightspot and gathering place to a "black capitalist" syndicate.
During the coffee break Buchanan comes over. Rabbit touches his wallet, wondering if the touch will go up. Escalation. Foreign aid. Welfare. He'll refuse if it does. If he asks more than twenty, let them riot in the streets. But Buchanan holds out two ten dollar bills, not the same two, but just as good. "Friend Harry," he says, "never let it be said no black man pays his debts. I'm obliged to you a thousand and one times over, them two sawbucks turned the cards right around. Would you believe two natural full houses in a row? I couldn't believe it myself, nobody could, those fools all stayed the second time like there was no tomorrow." He wads the money into Rabbit's hand, which is slow to close.
Thanks, uh, Lester. I didn't really
Expect to get it back
Not so soon.
Well, sometimes one man's in need, sometimes another man is. Spread it around, isn't that what the great ones teach us
I guess they do. I haven't talked to many great ones lately.
Buchanan chuckles politely and rocks back and forth on his heels, estimating, rolling a toothpick in his lips, beneath the mustache no thicker than a toothpick. "I hear tell you're so hard up over at your place you're taking in boarders.
Oh. That. It's just temporary, it wasn't my idea.
I believe that.
Uh ? I'd rather it didn't get around.
That's just what I'd rather.
Change the subject, somehow. "How's Babe now? Back in business
What kind of business you think she's in
You know, singing. I meant after the bust and court sentence. I just set the news item.
I know what you meant. I know exactly. Come on down to Jimbo's, any night of the week, get better acquainted. Babe's estimation of you has shot way up, I tell you that. Not that she didn't take a shine in the first place.
Yeah, O.K., great. Maybe I'll get down sometime. If I can get a babysitter." The idea of ever going into Jimbo's again frightens him, as does the idea of leaving Nelson, Jill, and Skeeter alone in the house. He is sinking into an underworld he used to see only from a bus. Buchanan squeezes his arm.
We'll set something up," the Negro promises. "Oh, yeass." The hand squeezes tighter, as if pressing fingerprints through the screen of Harry's blue workshirt. ` Jer?ome asked me to express an especial gratitude.
Jerome
The yellow?faced clock ticks, the end?of?break buzzer rasps. The last to return to his machine, Farnsworth passes between the brightly lit makeup tables, a man so black he twinkles. He bobs his shaved head, wipes the whisky from his lips, and throws Harry a dazzling grin. Brothers in paternity.
He gets off the bus early, on the other side of the bridge, and walks along the river through the old brick neighborhoods burdened with great green highway signs. Peggy Fosnacht's buzzer buzzes back and when he gets off the elevator she is at the door in a shapeless blue bathrobe. "Oh, you," she says. "I thought it would be Billy having lost his key again.
You alone
Yes, but Harry, he'll be back from school any minute.
I only need a minute." She leads him in, pulling her bathrobe tighter about her body. He tries to wrap his errand in a little courtesy. "How've you been
I'm managing. How have you been
Managing. Just.
Would you like a drink
This early in the day
I'm having one.
No, Peggy, thanks. I can only stay a minute. I got to see what's cooking back at the ranch.
Quite a lot, I hear.
That's what I wanted to say something about.
Please sit down. I'm getting a crick in my neck." Peggy takes a sparkling glass of beaded fluid from the sill of the window that overlooks Brewer, a swamp of brick sunk at the foot of its mountain basking westward in the sun. She sips, and her eyes slide by on either side of his head. "You're offended by my drinking. I just got out of the bathtub. That's often how I spend my afternoons, after spending the morning with the lawyers or walking the streets looking for a job. Everybody wants younger secretaries. They must wonder why I keep my sunglasses on. I come back and take off all my clothes and get into the tub and ever so slowly put a drink inside me and watch the steam melt the ice cubes.
It sounds nice. What I wanted to say
She is standing by the window with one hip pushed out; the belt of her bathrobe is loose and, though she is a shadow against the bright colorless sky, he can feel with his eyes as if with his tongue the hollow between her breasts that would still be dewy from her bath.
She prompts, "What you wanted to say
Was to ask you a favor: could you kind of keep it quiet about the Negro staying with us that Billy saw? Janice called me today and I guess you've already told her, that's O.K. if you could stop it there, I don't want everybody to know. Don't tell Ollie, if you haven't already, I mean. There's a legal angle or I wouldn't bother." He lifts his hands helplessly; it wasn't worth saying, now that he's said it.
Peggy steps toward him, stabbingly, too much liquor or trying to keep the hip out seductively or just the way she sees, two of everything, and tells him, "She must be an awfully good lay, to get you to do this for her.
The girl? No, actually, she and I aren't usually on the same wavelength.
She brushes back her hair with an approximate flicking motion that lifts the bathrobe lapel and exposes one breast; she is drunk. "Try another wavelength.
Yeah, I'd love to, but right now, the fact is, I'm running too scared to take on anything else, and anyway Billy's about to come home.
Sometimes he hangs around Burger Bliss for hours. Ollie thinks he's getting bad habits.
Yeah, how is old Ollie? You and he getting together at all
She lets her hand down from her hair; the lapel covers her again. "Sometimes he comes by and fucks me, but it doesn't seem to bring us any closer.
Probably it does, he just doesn't express it. He's too embarrassed at having hurt you.
That's how you would be, but Ollie isn't like that. It would never enter his head to feel guilty. It's the artist in him, you know he really can play almost any instrument he picks up. But he's a cold little bastard.
Yeah, I'm kind of cold too." He has stood in alarm, since she has come closer another clumsy step.
Peggy says, "Give me your hands." Her eyes fork upon him, around him. Her face unchanging, she reaches down and lifts his hands from his sides and holds them to her chest. "They're warm." He thinks, Cold heart. She inserts his left hand into her bathrobe and presses it around a breast. He thinks of spilling guts, of a cow's stomach tumbling out; elastically she overflows his fingers, her nipple a clot, a gumdrop stuck to his palm. Her eyes are closed ?veins in her lids, crow's feet at the corners ? and she is intoning, "You're not cold, you're warm, you're a warm man, Harry, a good man. You've been hurt and I want you to heal, I want to help you heal, do whatever you want with me." She is talking as if to herself, rapidly, softly, but has brought him so close he hears it all; her breath beats at the base of his throat. Her heartbeat is sticking to his palm. The skin of her brow is vexed and the piece of her body her bathrobe discloses is lumpy and strange, blind like the brow of an ox, but eased by liquor she has slid into that state where the body of the other is her own body, the body of secretive self?love that the mirror we fill and the bed we warm alone give us back; and he is enclosed in this body of love of hers and against all thought and wish he thickens all over tenderly and the one?eyed rising beneath his waist begins.
He protests "I'm not good" but is also sliding; he relaxes the hand that is holding her breast to give it air to sway in.
She insists "You're good, you're lovely" and fumbles at his fly; with the free hand he pulls aside the lapel of the bathrobe so the other breast is free and the bathrobe belt falls unknotted.
An elevator door sucks shut in the hall. Footsteps swell toward their door. They spring apart; Peggy wraps the robe around herself again. He keeps on his retinas the afterimage of a ferny triangle, broader than his palm, beneath a belly whiter than crystal, with silvery stretch?marks. The footsteps pass on by. The would?be lovers sigh with relief, but the spell has been broken. Peggy turns her back, reknots her belt. "You're keeping in touch with Janice," she says.
Not really.
How did you know I told her about the black
Funny, everybody else has no trouble saying "black." Or hating the war. Rabbit must be defective. Lobotomy. A pit opens where guilt gnaws, at the edge of his bladder. He must hurry home. "She called me to say a lawyer was starting divorce proceedings.
Does that upset you
I guess. Sort of. Sure.
I suppose I'm dumb, I just never understood why you put up with Janice. She was never enough for you, never. I love Janice, but she is about the most childish, least sensitive woman I've ever known.
You sound like my mother.
Is that bad?" She whirls around; her hair floats. He has never seen Peggy so suddenly soft, so womanly frontal. Even her eyes he could take. In play, mocking the pressure of Billy impending at his back, he rubs the back of his hand across her nipples. Nibs and Dots.
Maybe you're right. We should try out our wavelengths.
Peggy flushes, backs off, looks stony, as if an unexpected mirror has shown her herself too harshly. She pulls the blue terrycloth around her so tight her shoulders huddle. "If you want to take me out to dinner some night," she says, "I'm around," adding irritably, "but don't count your chickens.
