laughed, and then now and then smiled under him, working around to get him right, and even speaking kindly: “You’re all right, honey. You’re gone along all right.” So that when it was over he was hurt to learn, from the creases of completion at the sides of her lips and the hard way she wouldn’t keep lying beside him but got up and sat on the edge of the metal-frame bed looking out the dark window at the green night sky, that she hadn’t meant her half. Her mute back showing in yellow-white the bar of a swimming-suit bra angered him; he took the ball of her shoulder in his hand and turned her roughly. It was kid stuff; the weighted shadows of her front hung so careless and undefended he looked away. She said down into his ear, “Honey, you didn’t pay to be no two-timer.” Sweet woman, she was money. The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.
His dreams are shallow, furtive things. His legs switch. His lips move a little against the pillow. The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise be is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes. In shadow he suddenly awakes, his ghostly blue irises searching the unfamiliar planes for the source of men’s voices. These voices are downstairs, and a rumble suggests that they are moving the furniture, tramping in circles, hunting him. But a familiar bulbous basso rings out, it is Tothero, and around this firm center the noises downstairs crystallize as the sounds of card-playing, drinking, horseplay, companionship. Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep again.
“Harry! Harry!” The voice is plucking at his shoulder, rumpling his hair. He rolls away from the wall, squinting upward into vanished sunshine. Tothero sits in the shadows, a hulk of darkness dense with some anxiousness. His dirty-milk face leans forward, scarred by a lopsided smile. There is a smell of whisky. “Harry, I’ve got a girl for you!”
“Great. Bring her in.”
The old man laughs, uneasily? What does he mean?
“You mean Janice?”
“It’s after six o’clock. Get up, get up, Harry; you’ve slept like a beautiful baby. We’re going out.”
“Why?” Rabbit meant to ask “Where?”
“To eat, Harry, to dine. D-I-N-E. Rise my boy. Aren’t you hungry? Hunger. Hunger.” He’s a madman. He jumps off the bed, pivots a few times on his quick man’s little feet, and goes through the motions of bringing things to his mouth. “Oh Harry, you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t understand that.” He walks to the window and looks down into the alley, his lumpy profile leaden in the dull light.
Rabbit slides back the covers, angles his naked legs over the edge, and holds himself in a sitting position. The sight of his thighs, parallel, pure, aligns his groggy brain. The hair on his legs, once a thin blond fur, is getting dark and whiskery. The odor of his sleep-soaked body rises to him. “Whatsis girl business?” he asks.
“What is it, yes, what is it?” he asks and utters three obscenities in a stream touching a woman in her three parts, and in the gray light by the window his face falls; he seems amazed to hear himself. Yet he’s also watching, as if this was some sort of test. The result determined, he corrects himself, “No. I have an acquaintance, an acquaintance in Brewer, a ladylove perhaps; whom I stand to a meal once in a blue moon. But it’s nothing more than that, little more than that. Harry, you’re so innocent.”
Rabbit begins to be afraid of Tothero, these phrases are so inconsequential, and stands up in his underclothes. “I think I just better run along.” The flour-fluff sticks to the soles of his bare feet.
“Oh Harry, Harry,” Tothero cries in a rich voice mixed of pain and affection, and comes forward and hugs him with one arm. “You and I are two of a kind.” The big lopsided face looks