now, be a pleasant piece.” He wants to show her that her talking tough won’t keep him off. She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers. To his surprise her arm mirrors his, comes around his waist. Thus locked, they find it awkward to walk, and part at the traffic light.
“Didn’t you kind of like me in the restaurant?” he asks. “The way I tried to make old Tothero feel good? Telling him how great he was?”
“All I heard was you telling how great you were.”
“I was great. It’s the fact. I mean, I’m not much good for anything now, but I really was good at that.”
“You know what I was good at?”
“What?”
“Cooking.”
“That’s more than my wife is. Poor kid.”
“Remember how in Sunday school they’d tell you everybody God made was good at something? Well, that was my thing, cooking. I thought, Jesus, now I’ll really be a great cook.”
“Well aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. All I do is eat out.”
“Well, stop it.”
“It’s in the trade,” she says, and this really stops him. He doesn’t think of her this bluntly. It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.
“Here I am,” she says. Her building is brick like all the others on the west side of the street. Across the way a big limestone church hangs like a gray curtain under the streetlamp. They go in, passing beneath stained glass. The vestibule has a row of doorbells under brass mailboxes and a varnished umbrella rack and a rubber mat on the marble floor and two doors, one to the right with frosted glass and another in front of them of wire-reinforced glass through which he sees rubber-treaded stairs. While Ruth fits a key in this door he reads the gold lettering on the other: F. X. PELLIGRINI, M.D. “Old Fox,” Ruth says, and leads him up the stairs.
She lives one flight up. Her door is the one at the far end of a linoleum hall, nearest the street. He stands behind her as she scratches her key at the lock. Abruptly, in the cold light of the streetlamp which comes through the four flawed panes of the window by his side, blue panes so thinseeming the touch of one finger might crack them, he begins to tremble, first his legs, and then the skin of his sides. The key fits and her door opens.
Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It’s insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely. By nature in such an embrace she grows rigid. The small moist cushion of slack willingness with which her lips had greeted his dries up and turns hard, and when she can get her head back and her hand free she fits her palm against his jaw and pushes as if she wanted to throw his skull back into the hall. Her fingers curl and a long nail scrapes the tender skin below one eye. He lets her go. The nearly scratched eye squints and a tendon in his neck aches.
“Get out,” she says, her chunky mussed face ugly in the light from the hall.
He kicks the door shut with a backwards flip of his leg. “Don’t,” he says. “I had to hug you.” He sees in the dark she is frightened; her big black shape has that pocket in it, that his instinct feels like a tongue probing a pulled tooth. The air tells him he must be motionless; for no reason he wants to laugh. Her fear and his inner knowledge are so incongruous; he knows there is no harm in him.
“Hug,” she says. “Kill felt more like it.”
“I’ve been loving you so much all night,” he says. “I had to get it out of my system.”
“I know all about your systems. One squirt and done.”
“It won’t be,” he promises.
“It better be. I want you out of here.”
“No you don’t.”
“You all think you’re such lovers.”
“I am,” he assures her. “I am a lover.” And on a tide of alcohol and stirred semen he steps forward, in a