up into his with confidence, but Rabbit sees no resemblance. Yet his memory of the man as his coach still disposes him to listen. “You and I know what the score is, we know—” And right here, arriving at the kernel of his lesson, Tothero is balked, and becomes befuddled. He repeats, “We know,” and removes his arm.
Rabbit says, “I thought we were going to talk about Janice when I woke up.” He picks up his trousers from the floor and puts them on. Their being rumpled disturbs him; reminds him that he has taken a giant step, and makes nervous wrinkles in his stomach and throat.
“We will, we will,” Tothero says, “the moment our social obligations are satisfied.” A pause. “Do you want to go back now? You must tell me if you do.”
Rabbit remembers the dumb slot of her mouth, the way the closet door bumps against the television set. “No. God.”
Tothero is overjoyed; it is happiness making him talk so much. “Well then, well then; get dressed. We can’t go to Brewer undressed. Do you need a fresh shirt?”
“Yours wouldn’t fit me, would it?”
“No, Harry, no? What’s your size?”
“Fifteen three.”
“Mine! Mine exactly. You have short arms for your height. Oh, this is wonderful, Harry. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you came to me when you needed help. All those years,” he says, taking a shirt from the bureau made of beer cases and stripping off the cellophane, “all those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands, and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back.”
Rabbit is startled to feel and to see in Tothero’s mirror that the shirt fits. Their difference must be all in their legs. With the rattling tongue of a proud mother Tothero watches him dress. His talk makes more sense, now that the embarrassment of explaining what they’re going to do is past. “It does my heart good,” he says. “Youth before the mirror. How long has it been, Harry, now tell me truly, since you had a good time? A long time?”
“I had a good time last night,” Rabbit says. “I drove to West Virginia and back.”
“You’ll like my lady, I know you will, a city flower,” Tothero goes on. “The girl she’s bringing I’ve never met. She says she’s fat. All the world looks fat to my lady—how she eats, Harry: the appetite of the young. That’s a fascinating knot, you young people have so many tricks I never learned.”
“It’s just a Windsor.” Dressed, Rabbit feels a return of calm. Waking up had in a way returned him to the world he deserted. He had missed Janice’s crowding presence, the kid and his shrill needs, his own walls. He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him; Tothero is an eddy of air, and the building he is in, the streets of the town, are mere stairways and alleyways in space. So perfect, so consistent is the freedom into which the clutter of the world has been vaporized by the simple trigger of his decision, that all ways seem equally good, all movements will put the same caressing pressure on his skin, and not an atom of his happiness would be altered if Tothero told him they were not going to meet two girls but two goats, and they were going not to Brewer but to Tibet. He adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero’s shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama. Like a cloud breaking in the corner of his vision Tothero drifts to the !window. “Is my car still there?” Rabbit asks.
“Your car is blue. Yes. Put on your shoes.”
“I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?” For in the vast blank of his freedom Rabbit has remembered a few imperfections, his home, his wife’s, their apartment, clots of concern. It seems impossible that the passage of time should have so soon dissolved them, but Tothero’s answer implies it.
“No,” he says. He adds, “But then of course I didn’t go where there would