her throat and I could feel the pulse in my temples thumping and making the same kind of noise you make hitting the big bag. One-two. One-two.
“And I’m going to get some perfume. What kind do you like? I never had any in my life.”
“You don’t need it.”
“Why not?”
“It’d be shooting the birds on the ground.”
“Who’s talking about birds?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is somebody?” The noises out in the street were closing down now and going far away and there wasn’t anybody left in the world but the two of us and I tried taking a deep breath to see why breathing was so laborious and it just wouldn’t go down. There didn’t seem to be any room in my chest for it. She sounded a long way off and I tried to hear what she was saying. “You can be so sweet when you want to be, Bob.”
I picked her up in my arms and stood up and walked around the bed away from the window. She let her head tilt back and looked up at me quietly, her eyes wide and dark.
“You’re not so tough,” I said.
“I don’t want to be. You make me not tough.”
“You’re not very big either. Not big enough to be looking for trouble all the time. I could throw you right out the window from here.”
“Throw me out the window, Bob. Afterward.”
“Maybe I will.”
She put an arm up around my neck and drew herself up until her lips were right against my face. “Say something nice to me, Bob,” she whispered. “After a while you’ll probably say something mean, but right now something nice. Just a little nice.”
“You’re the goddamnedest girl I’ve ever seen.”
Her eyes regarded me questioningly from a distance of three inches, very soft and wide and lovely. “Is that nice?” she asked. “If it is, I like it.”
I was having a hard time talking and just nodded my head. She hit me harder than anything ever had before.
Fifteen
Something awakened me in the dark and I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. It was three o’clock. And then I felt again the thing that had brought me out of my sleep; it was a hand running softly along my arm and across the shoulder. It was a small hand and smooth and cool and its touch was caressing.
“Are you awake, Bob?” she asked softly.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I waked you up.”
“It’s too hot to sleep anyway.”
“What time is it?”
“Three. I must have been asleep for a couple of hours. It was about eleven when we came back from getting something to eat, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. You keep track of the time for us. But I’m real sorry about waking you up. I was feeling all the muscle in your arm. And behind your shoulder. There’s regular ropes of it. Why are you so strong?”
“Clean living. Avoiding alcohol and tobacco and loose women.”
“You always joke about everything, don’t you? Bob, have you decided yet what we’re going to do? Are you going to New Orleans today?”
“No. I don’t want to go to New Orleans now.”
“Why not? I thought you wanted to go.”
“Not now,” I said.
It was very quiet outside now, with only a lone car going by in the street now and then. We lay there in the dark without anything over us, listening to the humming of the overhead fan.
“Bob,” she said after a while.
“What?”
“I want to know why you changed your mind about going down there.”
“I don’t know why. I just lost interest in it.”
“Is it because you think you have to take care of me? You don’t have to, you know.”
“No,” I said. “That isn’t it.”
“But you don’t want me around, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t ever lie, do you? You don’t ever say things you don’t mean just to keep from hurting people’s feelings. You could have said you did and it would have sounded nice even though it didn’t mean anything.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m not very smooth.”
“But we don’t have to pretend with each other, do we? I was sort of forced on you and you don’t have to play like you like me. You don’t like me, do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“How much, Bob?”
“I don’t know how much.”
“You told me this morning you didn’t.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“It seems like years, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve both changed, haven’t we?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe we just found out things we didn’t know about each other.”
“What did you find out about