takes her arm. Mt. Judge, built on its hillside, is full of high curbs difficult for little women to negotiate gracefully. Her bare arm remains cool in his fingers.
“Don’t tell that to the parishioners,” he says.
“See? You sound just like Jack.”
“Is that good or bad?” There. This seems to him to test her bluff. She must say either good or bad, and that will be the fork in the road.
But she says nothing. He feels the effort of self-control this takes; she is accustomed to making replies. They mount the opposite curb and he lets go of her arm awkwardly. Though he is awkward, there is still this sense of being nestled against a receptive grain, of fitting.
“Mommy?” Joyce asks.
“What?”
“What’s rottic?”
“Rottic. Oh. Neurotic. It’s when you’re a little bit sick in the head.”
“Like a cold in the head?”
“Well yes, in a way. It’s about that serious. Don’t worry about it, sweetie. It’s something most everybody is. Except our friend Mr. Angstrom.”
The little girl looks up at him across her mother’s thighs with a spreading smile of self-conscious impudence. “He’s naughty,” she says.
“Not very,” her mother says.
At the end of the rectory’s brick walk a blue tricycle has been abandoned and Joyce runs ahead and mounts it and rides away in her aqua Sunday coat and pink hair ribbon, metal squeaking, spinning ventriloquistic threads of noise into the air. Together they watch the child a moment. Then Lucy asks, “Do you want to come in?” In waiting for his reply, she contemplates his shoulder; her white lids from his angle hide her eyes. Her lips are parted and her tongue, a movement in her jaw tells him, touches the roof of her mouth. In the noon sun her features show sharp and her lipstick looks cracked. He can see the inner lining of her lower lip wet against her teeth. A delayed gust of the sermon, its anguished exhortatory flavor, like a dusty breeze off the desert, sweeps through him, accompanied grotesquely by a vision of Janice’s breasts, green-veined, tender. This wicked snip wants to pluck him from them.
“No thanks, really. I can’t.”
“Oh come on. You’ve been to church, have a reward. Have some coffee.”
“No, look.” His words come out soft but somehow big. “You’re a doll, but I got this wife now.” And his hands, rising from his sides in vague explanation, cause her to take a quick step backward.
“I beg your pardon.”
He is conscious of nothing but the little speckled section of her green irises like torn tissue paper around her black pupildots; then he is watching her tight round butt jounce up the walk. “But thanks anyway,” he calls in a hollowed, gutless voice. He dreads being hated. She slams the door behind her so hard the knocker clacks by itself on the empty porch.
He walks home blind to the sunlight. Was she mad because he had turned down a proposition, or because he had shown that he thought she had made one? Or was it a mixture of these opposites, that had somehow exposed her to herself? His mother, suddenly caught in some confusion of her own, would turn on the heat that way. In either case he smiles; he feels tall and elegant and potential striding along under the trees in his Sunday suit. Whether spurned or misunderstood, Eccles’ wife has jazzed him, and he reaches his apartment clever and cold with lust.
His wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached. The baby scrawks tirelessly. It lies in its crib all afternoon and makes an infuriating noise of strain, hnnnnnah ah ah nnnnh, a persistent feeble scratching at some interior door. What does it want? Why won’t it sleep? He has come home from church carrying something precious for Janice and keeps being screened from giving it to her. The noise spreads fear through the apartment. It makes his stomach ache; when he picks up the baby to burp her he burps himself; the pressure in his stomach keeps breaking and reforming into a stretched bubble as the bubble in the baby doesn’t break. The tiny soft marbled body, weightless as paper, goes stiff against his chest and then floppy, its hot head rolling as if it will unjoint from its neck. “Becky, Becky, Becky,” he says, “go to sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep.”
The noise makes Nelson fretful and whiny. As if, being closest to the dark gate from which the baby has recently emerged,