kind of swoon. Though she backs away, it is not so quickly that he cannot feel her socket of fear healing. The room they are in, he sees by streetlight, is small, and two armchairs and a sofa-bed and a table furnish it. She walks into the next room, a little larger, holding a double bed. The shade is half drawn, and low light gives each nubbin of the bedspread a shadow.
“All right,” she says. “You can get into that.”
“Where are you going?” Her hand is on a doorknob.
“In here.”
“You’re going to undress in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t. Let me undress you. Please.” In his concern he has come to stand beside her, and touches her arm now.
She moves her arm from under his touch. “You’re pretty bossy.”
“Please. Please.”
Her voice grates with exasperation: “I have to go to the john.”
“But come out dressed.”
“I have to do something else, too.”
“Don’t do it. I know what it is. I hate them.”
“You don’t even feel it.”
“But I know it’s there. Like a rubber kidney or something.”
Ruth laughs. “Well aren’t you choice? Do you have the answer then?”
“No. I hate them even worse.”
“Look. I don’t know what you think your fifteen dollars entitles you to, but I got to protect myself.”
“If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this, give me the fifteen back.”
She tries to twist away, but now he holds the arm he touched. She says, “Say do you think we’re married or something the way you boss me around?”
The transparent wave moves over him again and he calls to her in a voice that is almost inaudible, “Yes; let’s be.” So quickly her arms don’t move from hanging at her sides, he kneels at her feet and kisses the place on her fingers where a ring would have been. Now that he is down there, he begins to undo the straps of her shoes. “Why do you women wear heels?” he asks, and yanks her one foot up, so she has to grab the hair on his head for support. “Don’t they hurt you?” He heaves the shoe, sticky web, through the doorway into the next room, and does the same to the other. Her feet being flat on the floor gives her legs firmness all the way up. He puts his hands around her ankles and pumps them up and down briskly, between the boxy ankle bones and the circular solid fat of her calves. He has a nervous habit of massage.
“Come on,” Ruth says, in a voice slightly tense with the fear of falling, his weight pinning her legs. “Get into bed.”
He senses the trap. “No,” he says, and stands up. “You’ll put on a flying saucer.”
“No, I won’t. Listen, you won’t know if I do or don’t.”
“Sure I will. I’m very sensitive.”
“Oh Lord. Well anyway I got to take a leak.”
“Go ahead, I don’t care,” he says, and won’t let her close the bathroom door. She sits, like women do, primly. At home he and Janice had been trying to toilet-train Nelson, so leaning there in the doorway he feels a ridiculous paternal impulse to praise her. She is so tidy.
“Good girl,” he says when she rises, and leads her into the bedroom. The edges of the doorway they pass through seem very vivid and sharp. They will always be here. Behind them, the plumbing vibrates and murmurs. She moves with shy stiffness, puzzled by his will. Trembling again, shy himself, be brings her to a stop by the foot of the bed and searches for the catch of her dress. He finds buttons on the back and can’t undo them easily; his hands come at them reversed.
“Let me do it.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry; I’ll do it. You’re supposed to enjoy this. This is our wedding night.”
“Ha ha.”
He hates this mocking reflex in her. He turns her roughly, and, in a reflex of his own, falls into a deep wish to give comfort. He touches her caked cheeks; she seems small as he looks down into the frowning planes of her set, shadowed face. He moves his lips into one eye socket, gently, trying to say this night has no urgency in it, trying to listen through his lips to the timid pulse beating in the bulge of her lid. With a careful impartiality he fears she will find comic, he kisses also her other eye; then, excited by the thought of his own tenderness, his urgency spills; his mouth races across her face, nibbling, licking, so