He smiles and pictures her solid sweet butt, that he tapped.
“Hey, this is Harry Angstrom. Is Jack there?”
The receiver at the other end of the line is replaced; that bitch. Just because I wouldn’t go into her frigging house with her. Poor Eccles probably sitting there his heart bleeding to hear the word from me and she going back and telling him wrong number, that poor bastard being married to that bitch. He hangs up himself, hears the dime rattle down, and feels simplified by this failure. He goes out across the parking lot.
He seems to leave behind him in the cafeteria all the poison she must be dripping into the poor tired guy’s ears. He imagines her telling Eccles about how he slapped her fanny and thinks he hears Eccles laughing and himself smiles. He’ll remember Eccles as laughing; there was that in him that held you off, that you couldn’t reach, the nasal business, but through the laughter you could get to him. Sort of sneaking in behind him, past the depressing damp gripping clinging front. What made it depressing was that he wasn’t sure, but couldn’t tell you, and worried his eyebrows instead, and spoke every word in a different voice. All in all, a relief to be loose from him. Soggy.
From the edge of the parking lot, Brewer is spread out like a carpet, its flowerpot red going dusty. Some lights are already turned on. The great neon sunflower at the center of the city looks small as a daisy. Now the low clouds are pink but up above, high in the dome, tails of cirrus still hang pale and pure. As he starts down the steps he wonders, Would she have? Lucy.
He goes down the mountainside on the flight of log stairs and through the part where some people are still playing tennis and down Weiser Street, putting his coat back on, and up Summer. His heart is murmuring in suspense but it is in the center of his chest. That lopsided kink about Becky is gone, he has put her in Heaven, he felt her go. If Janice had felt it he maybe might have stayed. The outer door is open and an old lady in a Polish sort of kerchief is coming mumbling out of F. X. Pelligrini’s door. He rings Ruth’s bell.
The buzzer answers and he quickly snaps open the inner door and starts up the steps. Ruth comes to the banister and looks down and says, “Go away.”
“Huh? How’d you know it was me?”
“Go back to your wife.”
“I can’t. I just left her.”
She laughs; he has climbed to the step next to the top one, and their faces are on a level. “You’re always leaving her,” she says.
“No, this time it’s different. It’s really bad.”
“You’re bad all around. You’re bad with me, too.”
“Why?” He has come up the last step and stands there a yard away from her, excited and helpless. He thought when he saw her, instinct would tell him what to do but in a way it’s all new, though it’s only been a few weeks. She is changed, graver in her motions and thicker in the waist. The blue of her eyes is darker.
She looks at him with a contempt that is totally new. “Why?” she repeats in an incredulous hard voice.
“Let me guess,” he says. “You’re pregnant.”
Surprise softens the hardness a moment.
“That’s great,” he says, and takes advantage of her softness to push her ahead of him into the room. Her arms and sweater give like little cushions when he pushes. “Great,” he repeats, closing the door. He tries to embrace her and she fights him successfully and backs away behind a chair. She had meant that fight; his neck is scraped.
“Go away,” she says. “Go away.”
“Don’t you need me?”
“Need you,” she cries, and he squints in pain at the straining note of hysteria; he feels she has imagined this encounter so often she is determined to say everything, which will be too much. He sits down in an easy chair. His legs ache. She says, “I needed you that night you walked out. Remember how much I needed you? Remember what you made me do?”
“She was in the hospital,” he says. “I had to go.”
“God, you’re cute. God, you’re so holy. You had to go. You had to stay, too, didn’t you? You know, I was stupid enough to think you’d at least call.”
“I wanted to but I was trying to start clean. I didn’t know