“Sure.”
“You should’n’ be there,” she murmured. “You nee’ your sleep.”
“I slept fine. I’ve slept worse places than a comfortable chair in a clean room.”
“You slept all right?”
“I slept fine.”
“You’ll take care of him for me?”
“Yeah.”
“You need your sleep,” she said. “You should sleep in your own bed. Come on. Get into bed. You need your sleep.”
There was a stirring under the blankets, and then my shirt dropped out the side of the bed.
“You need to rest,” she said.
I got up and went around the other side of the bed. I took off my belt so the buckle wouldn’t jab her and got in.
“No,” she said. “Your skin. Want your arms and your skin.”
I got up again, shucked off my clothes, and got back in. She hitched backwards into me bottom-first and pulled my arms around her as if she were getting into a mink coat. “How’s the nose?” I said.
“I hurt it,” she said. “But it’s better.” She put my right hand on her left breast and my left hand on her belly. “G’night,” she said.
We lay like that for a minute. Then she squirmed around until she was facing me, slung a leg over mine, and gave my collarbone a vague kiss.
“Okay. Good night,” she said. “I keep seeing Lorrie.”
“It’ll be better,” I said. “Good night.”
“You saw him?”
“Yes. I went and saw him.”
“Oh. G’night.”
We lay there for a few minutes. Her breath was humid against my throat, and a little sour. “Mmn,” she said. “I keep seeing Lorrie. Can you, can I have a little... ”
She kept tugging at my shoulder and hip until she’d rolled me over on top of her.
“Easy,” I said.
“Now,” she said. “Now he can’t get at me.”
“All right. Are you all right?”
“He can’t get me now,” she said, and wound her legs around mine. “Can you sleep like this?”
“On top of you?”
“It’s safer this way. I’m safe now.” She moved sleepily beneath me, getting comfy. I found I was ready again. “Do you want to do some more?” she said, noticing.
“I don’t think you’re in any shape.”
“You have to take care of me now,” she said, moving beneath me.
Neither of us put on a stitch of clothing until we left the room that night. Of course, she didn’t have any clothing to put on, but she didn’t let me get dressed, either. It was different from the first night. She didn’t make those nice noises now or say any of those picturesque things, or much of anything at all except faster or easy or wait, and the only sound she made was harsh steady breathing, which choked off every now and then as she thought we might be getting somewhere. I tried to be careful of her bruises, but she didn’t want me to be careful. She wanted me to work. She almost didn’t care what I did, but she wanted me doing something to her all the time, and she’d clench her teeth like a small animal caught in a trap each time she thought there was some hope. And then little by little she’d see it was no good again and ease off, her face gray and exhausted and the tips of her breasts just pale flat circles.
In between, she sat naked at my desk like a schoolgirl doing lessons and drew Halliday’s house from memory on typing paper. She knew it pretty well. She scratched in every stick of furniture and put hash marks through the walls to show where the windows were. She told me how many steps there were in the back stoop and the front stoop, and made a guess about how many there were in the hall stairs.
“Where’s the safe?” I said.
She said, “When you’ve got your money, you can find a sweet young girl who doesn’t mind questions questions questions every minute of the goddamned day.”
She made me close my eyes and describe each room from memory as if I were walking through it from the back to the front, and then from the front door to the back, and when she felt I’d gotten it right she took me to bed and rewarded me. But she kept forgetting it was supposed to be my reward and started grinding again.
She was pale everywhere the sun didn’t go, and the bruises made her look paler. She looked fragile. I thought of Scarpa and his men, and what they did for a living, and how people are so damn easy to hurt.
For breakfast I made her a big omelette with tomatoes and cheddar, and for lunch I made a tuna casserole with canned salmon instead of tuna, which worked all right, and that night we had a big spaghetti dinner. I’d never been so proud to have a house full of food. People had done it for me sometimes when I was on the bum, but I’d never done it for anyone else, taken them into my house and fed them. When I was cooking, she’d either lean with her cheek against my back, humming, or sit over her plans, noodling and frowning. After lunch, she helped with the dishes, and then we sat side by side on the bed and watched TV, still in the altogether but not mauling each other particularly, as if we were an old married couple. We watched Friendship Ranch and part of Carter and Sharp on the High Seas. She hooked her leg over mine at one point and took it back when she got pins and needles.
By mid-afternoon the bed was so rotten with sweat that I had Rebecca get up so I could put on fresh sheets. She slumped in my armchair, her knees gangling out, watching me. “You’re really making that bed,” she remarked.
“It doesn’t take any longer to do it right.”
“The Army teach you to make a bed like that? Your mother?”
“She didn’t teach us to make the bed.”
“Why not?”
“She was busy. There. In you go now.”
“That’s right,” she said, her eyes closed. “I forgot you were masterful.”
The radio was playing some slow Nelson Eddy thing.
“Come on,” I said. I came over and took her hands, and she let me pull her to her feet.
“I’m so tired,” she said, and leaned against me. She put her arms around my neck and hung from it like a necklace, rocking a little. We started rocking from foot to foot together to the music.
“You got yourself all snug in here,” she said. “A real little nest.”
“I like having a nice place to stay.”
“Sure. You were on the tramp once. I forgot.”
“That’s okay.”
“Weren’t you afraid? Out there?”
“Of what?”
“I dunno. Getting hurt.”
“A little. Not much. Hurt never lasts. What doesn’t last doesn’t mean anything.”
“Then I guess you think nothing means anything much, because I don’t know anything that lasts. I don’t even think death’ll last. I think when it comes, it’ll be as crappy and slipshod as everything else.”
“Yeah?”
“I think it’ll fall apart in an afternoon like a pair of cheap stockings.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. What are you trying to do, foxtrot?”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“Why are you even listening to me?”
“Who says I’m listening?”
It was a new song now, and we weren’t even trying to keep time anymore, just shuffling in circles.
“Yeah,” I said, “I was afraid. When I was on the road. That’s why I joined up. I was afraid if I kept rattling around like that, I’d die.”
“Were you that starving?”
“I ate fine,” I said impatiently. “Sometimes I went a day or two without, but that doesn’t kill you. I don’t mean starve, I mean just die. Just go rattling around from town to town for years and years until you’re too sorry to waste a bullet on. Just go on forever. That’s what I mean by dying. I don’t ever want to do that again.”