that she does laugh, tickled, and pushes away. He locks her against him, crouches, and presses his parted teeth into the fat hot hollow at the side of her throat. Ruth tenses at his threat to bite, and her hands shove at his shoulders, but he clings there, his teeth bared in a silent exclamation, crying out against her smothering throat that it is not her crotch he wants, not the machine; but her, her.
Though there are no words she hears this, and says, “Don’t try to prove you’re a lover on me. Just come and go.”
“You’re so smart,” he says, and starts to hit her, checks his arm, and offers instead, “Hit me. Come on. You want to, don’t you? Really pound me.”
“My Lord,” she says, “this’ll take all night.” He plucks her limp arm from her side and swings it up toward him, but she manages her hand so that five bent fingers bump against his cheek painlessly. “That’s what poor Maggie has to do for your old bastard friend.”
He begs, “Don’t talk about them.”
“Damn men,” she continues, “either want to hurt somebody or be hurt.”
“I don’t, honest. Either one.”
“Well then undress me and stop screwing around.”
He sighs through his nose. “You have a sweet tongue,” he says.
“I’m sorry if I shock you.” Yet in her voice is a small metallic withdrawal, as if she really is.
“You don’t,” he says and, business-like, stoops and takes the hem of her dress in his hands. His eyes are enough accustomed to the dark now to see the cloth as green. He peels it up her body, and she lifts her arms, and her head gets caught for a moment in the neck-hole. She shakes her head crossly, like a dog with a scrap, and the dress comes free, skims off her arms into his hands floppy and faintly warm. He sails it into a chair hulking in a corner. “God,” he says, “you’re pretty.” She is a ghost in her silver slip. Dragging the dress over her head has loosened her hair. Her solemn face tilts as she quickly lifts out the pins. Her hair falls out of heavy loops.
“Yeah,” she says. “Pretty plump.”
“No,” he says, “you are,” and in the space of a breath goes to her and picks her up, great glistening sugar in her sifty-grained slip, and carries her to the bed, and lays her on it. “So pretty.”
“You lifted me,” she says. “That’ll put you out of action.”
Harsh direct light falls on her face; the creases on her neck show black. He asks, “Shall I pull the shade?”
“Please. It’s a dismal view.”
He goes to the window and bends to see what she means. There is only the church across the way, gray, somber, confident. Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath. He feels gratitude to the builders of this ornament, and lowers the shade on it guiltily. He turns quickly, and Ruth’s eyes watch him out of shadows that also seem gaps in a surface. The curve of her hip supports a crescent of silver; his sense of her weight seems to make an aroma.
“What’s next?” He takes off his coat and throws it; he loves this throwing things, the way the flying cloth puts him in the center of a gathering nakedness. “Stockings?”
“They’re tricky,” she says. “I don’t want a run.”
“You do it then.” In a sitting position, with the soft-pawed irritable deftness of a cat, she extricates herself from a web of elastic and silk and cotton; he helps clumsily. His uncertain touches gather in his own body, bending him into a forest smelling of spice. He is out of all dimension, and in a dark land, and a tender entire woman seems an inch away around a kind of corner. When he straightens up on his knees, kneeling as he is by the bed, Ruth under his eyes is an incredible continent, the pushed-up slip a north of snow.
“So much,” he says.
“Too much.”
“No, listen. You’re good.” He kisses her lips; her lips expect more than they get. Into their wet flower he drops a brief bee’s probe. Cupping a hand behind her hot sheltered neck, he pulls her up, and slides her slip over her head. In just the liquid ease it comes off with he feels delight; how clothes just fall from a woman who