“You didn’t, why not? Anybody else would have. I was sick enough.”
“When, with me?”
“God, yes. Why don’t you look outside your own pretty skin once in a while?”
“Well why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why should I? What would that have done? You’re no help. You’re nothing. You know why I didn’t? You’ll laugh, but I didn’t because I thought you’d leave me if you knew. You wouldn’t ever let me do anything to prevent it but I figured once it happened you’d leave me. You left me anyway so there you are. Why don’t you get out? Please get out. I begged you to get out the first time. The damn first time I begged you. Why are you here?”
“I want to be here. It’s right. Look. I’m happy you’re pregnant.”
“It’s too late to be happy.”
“Why? Why is it too late?” He’s frightened, remembering how she wasn’t here when he came before. She’s here now, she had been away then. Women went away to have it done, he knew.
“How can you sit there?” she asks him. “I can’t understand it, how you can sit there; you just killed your baby and there you sit.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your ministerial friend. Your fellow saint. He called about a half-hour ago.”
“God. He’s still trying.”
“I said you weren’t here. I said you’d never be here.”
“I didn’t kill the poor kid. Janice did. I got mad at her one night and came looking for you and she got drunk and drowned the poor kid in the bathtub. Don’t make me talk about it. Where were you, anyway?”
She looks at him with dull wonder and says softly, “Boy, you really have the touch of death, don’t you?”
“Hey; have you done something?”
“Hold still. Just sit there. I see you very clear all of a sudden. You’re Mr. Death himself. You’re not just nothing, you’re worse than nothing. You’re not a rat, you don’t stink, you’re not enough to stink.”
“Look, I didn’t do anything. I was coming to see you when it happened.”
“No, you don’t do anything. You just wander around with the kiss of death. Get out. Honest to God, Rabbit, just looking at you makes me sick.” Her sincerity in saying this leaves her kind of limp, and she grips the top slat of a straight chair bearing a Pennsylvania Dutch design stenciled in faded flowers.
He, who always took pride in dressing neatly, who had always been led to think he was all right to look at, blushes to feel this sincerity. The sensation he had counted on, of being by nature her master, of getting on top of her, hasn’t come. He looks at his fingernails, with their big cuticle moons. His hands and legs are suffused with a paralyzing sense of reality; his child is really dead, his day is really done, this woman is really sickened by him. Realizing this much makes him anxious to have all of it, to be pressed tight against the wall. He asks her flat, “Did you get an abortion?”
She smirks and says hoarsely, “What do you think?”
He closes his eyes and while the gritty grained fur of the chair arms rushes up against his fingertips prays, God, dear God, no, not another, you have one, let this one go. A dirty knife turns in his intricate inner darkness. When he opens his eyes he sees, from the tentative hovering way she is standing there, trying to bring off a hard swagger in her stance, that she means to torment him. His voice goes sharp with hope: “Have you?”
A crumbling film comes over her face. “No,” she says, “no. I should but I keep not doing it. I don’t want to do it.”
Up he gets and his arms go around her, without squeezing, like a magic ring, and though she stiffens at his touch and twists her head sideways on her muscled white throat, he has regained that feeling, of being on top. “Oh,” he says, “good. That’s so good.”
“It was too ugly,” she says. “Margaret had it all rigged up but I kept—thinking about—”
“Yes,” he says, “Yes. You’re so good. I’m so glad,” and tries to nuzzle the side of her face. His nose touches wet. “You have it,” he coaxes. “Have it.” She is still a moment, staring at her thoughts, and then jerks out of his arms and says, “Don’t touch me!” Her face flares; her body is bent forward like a threatened animal’s. As if his touch is death.