One night while he is letting his purged body drift in listening Jill comes and bends over and caresses him. He turns his head to kiss her thigh and she is gone. But she has wakened him; it was her presence, and through this rip in her death a thousand details are loosed; tendrils of hair, twists of expression, her frail voice quavering into pitch as she strummed. The minor details of her person that slightly repelled him, the hairlines between her teeth, her doughy legs, the apple smoothness of her valentine bottom, the something prim and above-it-all about her flaky-dry mouth, the unwashed white dress she kept wearing, now return and become the body of his memory. Times return when she merged on the bed with moonlight, her young body just beginning to learn to feel, her nerve endings still curled in like fernheads in the spring, green, a hardness that repelled him but was not her fault, the gift of herself was too new to give. Pensive moments of her face return to hurt him. A daughterly attentiveness he had bid her hide. Why? He had retreated into protest and did not wish her to call him out. He was not ready, he had been affronted. Let black Jesus have her; he had been converted to a hardness of heart, a billion cunts and only one him. He tries to picture, what had been so nice, Jill and Skeeter as he actually saw them once in hard lamplight, but in fantasy now Rabbit rises from the chair to join them, to be a father and lover to them, and they fly apart like ink and paper whirling to touch for an instant on the presses. JILL COMES AGAIN. Angstrom -Senses Presence. She breathes upon him again as he lies in his boyhood bed and this time he does not make the mistake of turning his face, he very carefully brings his hand up from his side to touch the ends of her hair where it must hang. Waking to find his hand in empty mid-air he cries; grief rises in him out of a parched stomach, a sore throat, singed eyes; remembering her daughterly blind grass-green looking to him for more than shelter he blinds himself, leaves stains on the linen that need not be wiped, they will be invisible in the morning. Yet she had been here, her very breath and presence. He must tell Nelson in the morning. On this dreamlike resolve he relaxes, lets his room, with hallucinatory shuddering, be coupled to an engine and tugged westward toward the desert, where Mim is now.
"That bitch," Janice said. "How many times did you screw her?"
"Three times," Charlie said. "That ended it. It's one of her rules."
This ghost of conversation haunts Janice this night she cannot sleep. Harry's witch of a sister has gone back to whoring but her influence is left behind in Charlie like a touch of disease. They had it so perfect. Lord they had never told her, not her mother or father or-die nurses at school, only the movies had tried to tell her but they couldn't show it, at least not until recently, how perfect it could be. Sometimes she comes just thinking about him and then other times they last forever together, it is beautiful how slow he can be, murmuring all the time to her, selling her herself. They call it a piece of ass and she never understood why until Charlie, it wasn't on her front so much where she used to get mad at Harry because he couldn't make their bones touch or give her the friction she needed long enough so then he ended blaming her for not being with him, it was deeper inside, where the babies happened, where everything happens, she remembers how, was it with Nelson or poor little Becky, they said push and it was embarrassing like forcing it when you haven't been regular, but then the pain made her so panicky she didn't care what came out, and what came out was a little baby, all red-faced and cross as if it had been interrupted doing something else in there inside her. Stuff up your ass, she had hated to hear people say it, what men did to each other in jail or in the Army where the only women are yellow women screaming by the roadside with babies in their arms and squatting to go to the bathroom anywhere, disgusting, but with Charlie it is a piece of ass she is giving him, he is remaking her from the bottom up, the whole base of her feels made new, it's the foundation of life. Yet afterwards, when she tries to say this, how he remakes her, he gives that lovable shrug and pretends it was something anybody could do, a trick like that little trick he does with matches to amuse his nephews, making them always pick the last one up, instead of the sad truth which is that nobody else in the whole wide (Harry was always worrying about how wide the world was, caring about things like how far stars are and the moon shot and the way the Communists wanted to put everybody in a big black bag so he couldn't breathe) world but Charlie could do that for her, she was made for him from the beginning of time without exaggeration. When she tries to describe this to him, how unique they are and sacred, he measures a space of silence with his wonderful hands, just the way his thumbs are put together takes the breath out of her, and slips the question like a cloak from his shoulders.
She asked, "How could you do that to me?"
He shrugged. "I didn't do it to you. I did it to her. I screwed her."
"Why? Why?"
"Why not? Relax. It wasn't that great. She was cute as hell at lunch, but as soon as we got into bed her thermostat switched off. Like handling white rubber."
"Oh, Charlie. Talk to me, Charlie. Tell me why."
"Don't lean on me, tiger."
She had made him make love to her. She had done everything for him. She had worshipped him, she had wanted to cry out her sorrow that there wasn't more she could do, that bodies were so limited. Though she had extracted her lover's semen from him, she failed to extract testimony that his sense of their love was as absolute as her own. Terribly – complainingly, preeningly – she had said, "You know I've given up the world for you."
He had sighed, "You can get it back."
"I've destroyed my husband. He's in all the newspapers."
"He can take it. He's a showboat."
"I've dishonored my parents."
He had turned his back. With Harry it had been usually she who turned her back. Charlie is hard to snuggle against, too broad; it is like clinging to a rock slippery with hair. He had, for him, apologized: "Tiger, I'm bushed. I've felt rotten all day."
"Rotten how?"
"Deep down rotten. Shaky rotten."
And feeling him slip away from her into sleep had so enraged her she had hurled herself naked from bed, shrieked at him the words he had taught her in love, knocked a dead great-aunt from a bureau top, announced that any decent man would at least have ofered to marry her now knowing she would never accept, did things to the peace of the apartment that now reverberate in her insomnia, so the darkness shudders between pulses of the headlights that tirelessly pass below on Eisenhower Avenue. The view from the back of Charlie's apartment is an unexpected one, of a bend in the Running Horse River like a cut in fabric, of the elephant-colored gas tanks in the boggy land beside the dump, and, around a church with twin blue domes she never knew was there, a little cemetery with iron crosses instead of stones. The traffic out front never ceases. Janice has lived near Brewer all her life but never in it before, and thought all places went to sleep at ten, and was surprised how this city always rumbles with traffic, like her heart which even through dreams keeps pouring out its love.