"Remember how in Sunday school they'd tell you everybody God made was good at something? Well, that was my thing, cooking. I thought, Jesus, now I'll really be a great cook."
"Well aren't you?"
"I don't know. All I do is eat out."
"Well, stop it."
"It's how you meet guys," she says, and this really stops him. It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.
"Here I am," she says. Her building is brick like all the others on—the west side of the street. Across the way a big limestone church hangs like a gray curtain behind the streetlamp. They go in her doorway, passing beneath stained glass. The vestibule has a row of brass mailboxes and a varnished umbrella rack and a rubber mat on the marble floor and two doors, one to the right with frosted glass and another in front of them of wire—reinforced glass through which he sees rubber—treaded stairs. While Ruth fits a key in this door he reads the gold lettering on the other: F. X. PELLIGRINI, M.D. "Old fox," Ruth says, and leads Rabbit up the stairs.
She lives one flight up. Her door is the one at the far end of a linoleum hall, nearest the street. He stands behind her as she scratches her key at the lock. Abruptly, in the yellow light of the streetlamp which comes through the four flawed panes of the window by his side, tall panes so thin—seeming the touch of one finger might crack them, he begins to tremble, first his legs, and then the skin of his sides. The key fits and her door opens.
Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It's insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely. By nature in such an embrace she fights back. The small moist cushion of slack willingness with which her lips had greeted his dries up and turns hard, and when she can get her head back and her hand free she fits her palm against his jaw and pushes as if she wanted to throw his skull back into the hall. Her fingers curl and a long nail scrapes the tender skin below one eye. He lets her go. The nearly scratched eye squints and a tendon in his neck aches.
"Get out," she says, her chunky mussed face ugly in the light from the hall.
He kicks the door shut with a backward flip of his leg. "Don't," he says. "I had to hug you." He sees in the dark she is frightened; her big black shape has a pocket in it which his instinct feels like a tongue probing a pulled tooth. The air tells him he must be motionless; for no reason he wants to laugh. Her fear and his inner knowledge are so incongruous: he knows there is no harm in him.
"Hug," she says. "Kill felt more like it."
"I've been loving you so much all night," he says. "I had to get it out of my system."
"I know all about your systems. One squirt and done."
"It won't be," he promises.
"It better be. I want you out of here."
"No you don't."
"You all think you're such lovers."
"I am," he assures her. "I am a lover." And on a wave of alcohol and stirred semen he steps forward, in a kind of swoon. Though she backs away, it is not so quickly that he cannot feel her socket of fear healing. The room they are in, he sees by streetlight, is small, and two armchairs and a sofa—bed and a table furnish it. She walks to the next room, a little larger, holding a double bed. The shade is half drawn, and low light gives each nubbin of the bedspread a shadow.
"All right," she says. "You can get into that."
"Where are you going?" Her hand is on a doorknob.
"In here."
"You're going to undress in there?"
"Yeah."
"Don't. Let me undress you. Please." In his concern he has come to stand beside her, and touches her arm now.
She moves her arm from under his touch. "You're pretty bossy." "Please. Please."
Her voice grates with exasperation: "I have to go to the john." "But come out dressed."
"I have to do something else, too."
"Don't do it. I know what it is. I hate them."
"You don't even feel it."
"But I know it's there. Like a rubber kidney or something."
Ruth laughs. "Well aren't you choice? Do you have the answer then?"
"No. I hate them even worse."
"Look. I don't know what you think your fifteen dollars entitles you to, but I got to protect myself."
"If you're going to put a lot of gadgets in this, give me the fifteen back."
She tries to twist away, but now he holds the arm he touched. She says, "Say, do you think we're married or something the way you boss me around?"
The transparent wave moves over him again and he calls to her in a voice that is almost inaudible, "Yes; let's be." So quickly her arms don't move from hanging at her sides, he kneels at her feet and kisses the place on her fingers where a ring would have been. Now that he is down there, he begins to undo the straps of her shoes. "Why do you women wear heels?" he asks, and yanks her one foot up, so she has to grab the hair on his head for support. "Don't they hurt you?" He heaves the shoe, sticky web, through the doorway into the next room, and does the same to the other. Her feet being flat on the floor gives her legs firmness all the way up. He puts his hands around her ankles and pumps them up and down briskly, between the boxy ankle bones and the circular solid fat of her calves. He should be an athletic trainer.
"Come on," Ruth says, in a voice slightly tense with the fear of falling, his weight pinning her legs. "Get into bed."
He senses the trap. "No," he says, and stands up. "You'll put on a flying saucer."
"No, I won't. Listen, you won't know if I do or don't."
"Sure I will. I'm very sensitive."
"Oh Lord. Well anyway I got to take a leak."
"Go ahead, I don't care," he says, and won't let her close the bathroom door. She sits, like women do, primly, her back straight and her chin tucked in. Her knees linked by stretched underpants, Ruth waits above a whispering gush. At home he and Janice had been trying to toilet—train Nelson, so leaning in the doorway tall as a parent he feels a ridiculous impulse to praise her. She is so tidy, reaching under her dress with a piece of lemon—colored paper; she tugs herself together and for a sweet split second the whole intimate vulnerable patchwork of stocking tops and straps and silk and fur and soft flesh is exposed.
"Good girl," he says, and leads her into the bedroom. Behind them, the plumbing vibrates and murmurs. She moves with shy stiffness, puzzled by his will. Trembling again, shy himself, he brings her to a stop by the foot of the bed and searches for the catch of her dress. He finds buttons on the back and can't undo them easily; his hands come at them reversed.
"Let me do it."
"Don't be in such a hurry; I'll do it. You're supposed to enjoy this. This is our wedding night."
"Say, I think you're sick."
He turns her roughly and falls again into a deep wish to give comfort. He touches her caked cheeks; she seems small as he looks down into the frowning planes of her set, shadowed face. He moves his lips into one eye socket, gently, trying to say this night has no urgency in it, trying to listen through his lips to the timid pulse beating in the bulge of her lid. With a careful impartiality he fears she will find comic, he kisses also her other eye; then, excited by the thought of his own tenderness, his urgency spills; his mouth races across her face, nibbling, licking, so that she does laugh, tickled, and pushes away. He locks her against him, crouches, and presses his parted teeth into the fat hot hollow at the side of her throat. Ruth tenses at his threat to bite, and her hands shove at his shoulders, but he clings there, his teeth bared in a silent exclamation, crying out against her smothering throat that it is not her body he wants, not the flesh and bones, but her, her.