"What good would my being the boss's daughter do him?"
"It'd make him feel he was climbing. All these Greeks or Polacks or whatever are on the make."
"I'd never realized, Harry, how full of racial prejudice you are."
"Yes or no about you and Stavros."
"No." But lying she felt, as when a child watching the snow dams melt, that the truth must push through, it was too big, too constant: though she was terrified and would scream, it was something she must have, her confession like a baby. She felt so proud.
"You dumb bitch," he says. He hits her not in the face but on the shoulder, like a man trying to knock open a stuck door.
She hits him back, clumsily, on the side of the neck, as high as she can reach. Harry feels a flash of pleasure: sunlight in a tunnel. He hits her three, four, five times, unable to stop, boring his way to that sunlight, not as hard as he can hit, but hard enough for her to whimper; she doubles over so that his last punches are thrown hammerwise down into her neck and back, an angle he doesn't see her from that much – the chalk-white parting, the candlewhite nape, the bra strap showing through the fabric of the back of the blouse. Her sobbing arises muffled and, astonished by a beauty in her abasement, by a face that shines through her reduction to this craven faceless posture, he pauses. Janice senses that he will not hit her anymore. She abandons her huddle, flops over to her side, and lets herself cry out loud – high-pitched, a startled noise pinched between sieges of windy gasping. Her face is red, wrinkled, newborn; in curiosity he drops to his knees to examine her. Her black eyes flash at this and she spits up at his face, but misjudges; the saliva falls back into her own face. For him there is only the faintest kiss of spray. Flecked with her own spit Janice cries, "I do, I do sleep with Charlie!"
"Ah, shit," Rabbit says softly, "of course you do," and bows his' head into her chest, to protect himself from her scratching, while he half-pummels her sides, half-tries to embrace her and lift her.
"I love him. Damn you, Harry. We make love all the time."
"Good," he moans, mourning the receding of that light, that ecstasy of his hitting her, of knocking her open. Now she will become again a cripple he must take care of. "Good for you."
"It's been going on for months," she insists, writhing and trying to get free to spit again, furious at his response. He pins her arms, which would claw, at her sides and squeezes her hard. She stares into his face. Her face is wild, still, frozen. She is seeking what will hurt him most. "I do things for him," she says, "I never do for you."
"Sure you do," he murmurs, wanting to have a hand free to stroke her forehead, to re-enclose her. He sees the gloss of her forehead and the gloss of the kitchen linoleum. Her hair wriggles outward into the spilled wriggles of the marbled linoleum pattern, worn where she stands at the sink. A faint rotten smell here, of the sluggish sink tie-in. Janice abandons herself to crying and limp relief, and he has no trouble lifting her and carrying her in to the living-room sofa. He has zombie-strength: his shins shiver, his palm sore from the clipper handles is a stiff crescent.
She sinks lost into the sofa's breadth.
He prompts her, "He makes better love than me," to keep her confession flowing, as a physician moistens a boil.
She bites her tongue, trying to think, surveying her ruins with an eye toward salvage. Impure desires – to save her skin, to be kind, to be exact – pollute her primary fear and anger. "He's different," she says. "I'm more exciting to him than to you. I'm sure it's just mostly our not being married."
"Where do you do it?"
Worlds whirl past and cloud her eyes – car seats, rugs, tree undersides seen through windshields, the beigy-gray carpeting in the narrow space between the three green steel desks and the safe and the Toyota cutout, motel rooms with their cardboard panelling and scratchy bedspreads, his dour bachelor's apartment stuffed with heavy furniture and tinted relatives in silver frames. "Different places."
"Do you want to marry him?"
"No. No." Why does she say this? The possibility opens an abyss. She would not have known this. A gate she had always assumed gave onto a garden gave onto emptiness. She tries to drag Harry down closer to her; she is lying on the sofa, one shoe off, her bruises just beginning to smart, while he kneels on the carpet, having carried her here. He remains stiff when she pulls at him, he is dead, she has killed him.
He asks, "Was I so lousy to you?"
"Oh sweetie, no. You were good to me. You came back. You work in that dirty place. I don't know what got into me, Harry, I honestly don't."
"Whatever it was," he tells her, "it must be still there." He looks like Nelson, saying this, a mulling discontented hurt look, -puzzling to pry something open, to get something out. She sees she will have to make love to him. A conflicted tide moves within her – desire for this pale and hairless stranger, abhorrence of this desire, fascination with the levels of betrayal possible.
He shies, afraid of failing her; he falls back from the sofa and sits on the floor and offers to talk, to strike a balance. "Do you remember Ruth?"
"The whore you lived with when you ran away."
"She wasn't a whore exactly."
"Whatever she was, what about her?"
"A couple of years ago, I saw her again."
"Did you sleep with her?"
"Oh God no. She had become very straight. That was the thing. We met on Weiser Street, she was shopping. She had put on so much weight I didn't recognize her, I think she recognized me first, something about the way this woman looked at me; and then it hit me. Ruth. She still had this great head of hair. By then she had gone by, I followed her for a while and then she ducked into Kroll's. I gave it an even chance, I waited there at the side entrance figuring if she came out of that one I'd say hello and if she went out one of the others, O.K. I gave it five minutes. I really wasn't that interested." But in saying this, his heart beats faster, as it had beat then. `Just as I was going away she came out lugging two shopping bags and looked at me and the first thing she said was, `Let me alone.' "
"She loved you," Janice explains.
"She did and she didn't," he says, and loses her sympathy with this complacence. "I offered to buy her a drink but all she'd let me do is walk her up toward the parking lot where the old Acme used to be. She lived out toward Galilee, she told me. Her husband was a chicken farmer and ran a string of school buses, I got the impression he was some guy older than she was, who'd had a family before. She told me they had three children, a girl and two boys. She showed me their pictures in a wallet. I asked how often she got into town and she said, `As far as you're concerned, never.' "
"Poor Harry," Janice says. "She sounds awful."
"Well, she was, but still. She'd gotten heavy, as I said, she was sort of lost inside this other person who pretty much blended in with those other fat bag-luggers you see downtown, but at the same time, still, it was her."
"All right. You still love her," Janice says.
"No, I didn't, I don't. You haven't heard the worse thing she did then."
"I can't believe you never tried to get in touch with her after you came back to me. At least to see what she did about her . . . pregnancy."
"I felt I shouldn't." But he sees now, in his wife's dark and judging eyes, that the rules were more complicated, that there were some rules by which he should have. There were rules beneath the surface rules that also mattered. She should have explained this when she took him back.
She asks, "What was the worse thing?"
"I don't know if I should tell you."
"Tell me. Let's tell each other everything, then we'll take off all our clothes." She sounds tired. The shock of having given it all away must be sinking in. He talks to distract, as we joke with a loser at poker.