am.” He regrets that they have started talking about it. A big bubble, the enormity of it, crowds his heart. It’s like when he was a kid and suddenly thought, coming back from somewhere at the end of a Saturday afternoon, that this—these trees, this pavement—was life, the real and only thing.
“Where is she?”
This makes it worse, picturing Janice, where would she go? “Probably with her parents. I just left her last night.”
“Oh. Then this is just a holiday. You haven’t left her.”
“I think I have.”
The waiter brings them a plate of sesame cakes. Rabbit takes one tentatively, thinking they will be hard, and is delighted to have it become in his mouth mild elastic jelly, through the shell of bland seeds. The waiter asks, “Gone for good, your friends?”
“It’s O.K., I’ll pay,” Rabbit says.
The Chinaman nods and retreats.
“You’re rich?” Ruth asks.
“No, poor.”
“Are you really going to a hotel?” They both take several sesame cakes. There are perhaps twenty on the plate.
“I guess I’ll tell you about Janice. I never thought of leaving her until the minute I did; all of a sudden it seemed obvious. She’s about five-six, sort of dark-complected—”
“I don’t want to hear about it.” Her voice is positive; her many-colored hair, as she tilts back her head and squints at a ceiling light, settles into one grave shade. The light was more flattering to her hair than it is to her face; on this side of her nose there are some spots in her skin, blemishes that make bumps through her powder.
“You don’t,” he says. The bubble rolls off his chest. If it doesn’t worry anybody else why should it worry him? “O.K. What shall we talk about? What’s your weight?”
“One-fifty.”
“Ruth, you’re tiny. You’re just a welterweight. No kidding. Nobody wants you to be all bones. Every pound you have on is priceless.”
He’s talking just for happiness, but something he says makes her tense up. “You’re pretty wise, aren’t you?” she asks, tilting her empty glass toward her eyes. The glass is a shallow cup on a short stem, like an ice-cream dish at a fancy birthday party. It sends pale arcs of reflection swimming across her face.
“You don’t want to talk about your weight, either. Huh.” He pops another sesame cake into his mouth, and waits until the first pang, the first taste of jelly, subsides. “Let’s try this. What you need, Mrs. America, is the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler. Preserve those vitamins. Shave off fatty excess. A simple adjustment of the plastic turn screw, and you can grate carrots and sharpen your husband’s pencils. A host of uses.”
“Don’t Don’t be so funny.”
“O.K.”
“Let’s be nice.”
“O.K. You start.”
She plops a cake in and looks at him with a funny full-mouth smile, the corners turned down tight, and a frantic look of agreeableness strains her features while she chews. She swallows, her blue eyes widened round, and gives a little gasp before launching into what he thinks will be a remark but turns out to be a laugh, right in his face. “Wait,” she begs. “I’m trying.” And returns to looking into the shell of her glass, thinking, and the best she can do, after all that, is to say, “Don’t live in a hotel.”
“I got to. Tell me a good one.” He instinctively thinks she knows about hotels. At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.
“They’re all expensive,” she says. “Everything is. Just my little apartment is expensive.”
“Where do you have an apartment?”
“Oh a few blocks from here. On Summer Street. It’s one flight up, above a doctor.”
“It’s yours alone?”
“Yeah. My girl friend got married.”
“So you’re stuck with all the rent and you don’t do anything.”
“Which means what?”
“Nothing. You just said you did nothing. How expensive is it?”
She looks at him curiously, with that alertness he had noticed right off, out by the parking meters.
“The apartment,” he says.
“A hundred-ten a month. Then they make you pay for light and gas.”
“And you don’t do anything.”
She gazes into her glass, making reflected light run around the rim with a rocking motion of her hands.
“Whaddeya thinking?” he asks.
“Just wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“How wise you are.”
Right here, without moving his head, he feels the wind blow. So this is the drift; he hadn’t been sure. He says, “Well I’ll tell ya. Why don’t you let me give you something toward your rent?”