past the glass counter where an American girl in a kimono sits counting threadbare bills. “Please, how many?”
“Four,” Rabbit says, when Tothero is silent.
Unexpected, generous gesture, Ruth slips off her short white coat and gives it to Rabbit: soft, bunched cloth. The motion stirs up a smell of perfume on her.
“Four, yes please this way,” and the waiter leads them to a red booth. The place has just recently reopened as Chinese; pink paintings of Paris are still on the wall. Ruth staggers a little; Rabbit sees from behind that her heels, yellow with strain, tend to slip sideways in the net of lavender straps that pin her feet to the spikes of her shoes. But under the shiny green stretch of her dress her broad bottom packs the cloth with a certain composure. Her waist tucks in trimly, squarely, like the lines of her face. The cut of the dress bares a big V-shaped piece of her fat fair back. In arriving at the booth, he bumps against her; the top of her head comes to his nose. The prickly smell of her hair stitches the store-bought scent behind her ears. They bump because Tothero is ushering Margaret into her seat so ceremoniously, a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman’s body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.
He discovers he has held on to her coat. Pale limp pelt, it sleeps in his lap. Without rising be reaches up and hangs it on the coat-pole hook above him.
“Nice to have a long arm,” she says, and looks in her purse and takes out a pack of Newports. “Tothero says I have short arms.”
“Where’d you meet that old bum?” This so Tothero can hear if he cares.
“He’s not a bum, he’s my old coach.”
“Want one?” A cigarette.
He wavers. “I’ve stopped.”
“So that old bum was your coach,” she sighs. She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it. It flares on the third scratch.
Margaret says, “Ruth.”
“Bum?” Tothero says, and his heavy face looks unwell and lopsided in cagey mirth, as if he’s started to melt. “I am, I am. A vile old bum fallen among princesses.”
Margaret sees nothing against her in this and puts her hand on top of his on the table and in a solemn dead voice insists, “You’re nothing like a bum.”
“Where is our young Confucian?” Tothero asks and looks around with his free arm uplifted. When the boy comes he asks, “Can we be served alcoholic beverages here?”
“We bring in from next door,” the boy says. Funny the way the eyebrows of Chinese people look embedded in the skin instead of sticking out from it. Their faces look washed always.
“Double Scotch whisky,” Tothero says. “My dear?”
“Daiquiri,” Margaret says; it sounds like a wisecrack.
“Children?”
Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blond or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog. “Hell,” she says. “I guess a Daiquiri.”
“Three,” Rabbit tells the boy, thinking a Daiquiri will be like a limeade.
The waiter recites, “Three Daiquiri, one double whisky Scotch on the rocks,” and goes.
Rabbit asks Ruth, “When’s your birthday?”
“August. Why?”
“Mine’s April,” he says. “I win.”
“You win.” As if she knows how this makes him feel warmer; you can’t feel master, quite, of a woman who’s older.
“If you recognized me,” he asks, “why didn’t you recognize Mr. Tothero? He was coach of that team.”
“Who looks at coaches? They don’t do any good, do they?”
“Don’t do any good? A high-school team is all coach; isn’t it?”
Tothero answers, “It’s all boy, Harry. You can’t make gold out of lead. You can’t make gold out of lead.”