sneak over to my place and leave the car and pick up my clothes?”
“Suppose she’s there?”
“She won’t be. She’ll be at her mother’s.”
“I think you’d like it if she was there,” Ruth says.
He wonders; imagines opening the door and finding Janice sitting there in the armchair with an empty glass watching television, and feels, like a small collapse within him, like a piece of food stuck in his throat at last going down, his relief at finding her face still firm, still its old dumb obstinate walnut of a face. “No, I wouldn’t,” he tells Ruth. “I’m scared of her.”
“Obviously,” Ruth says.
“There’s something about her,” he insists. “She’s a menace.”
“This poor wife you left? You’re the menace, I’d say.”
“No.”
“Oh that’s right. You think you’re a rabbit.” Her tone in saying this is faintly jeering and irritable, he doesn’t know why.
She asks, “What do you think you’re going to do with these clothes?” That’s it; she feels him moving in.
He admits, “Bring them here.”
She takes in the breath but comes out with nothing. “Just for tonight,” he pleads. “You’re not doing anything are you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Well then, great. Hey. I love you.”
She rises to clear away the plates and stands there, thumb on china, staring at the center of the white table. She shakes her head heavily and says, “You’re bad news.”
Across from him her broad pelvis, snug in a nubbly brown skirt, is solid and symmetrical as the base of a powerful column. His heart rises through that strong column and, enraptured to feel his love for her founded anew yet not daring to lift his eyes to the test of her face, he says, “I can’t help it. You’re such good news.”
He eats three pieces of shoo-fly pie and a crumb in the corner of his lips comes off on her sweater when he kisses her breasts good-by in the kitchen. He leaves her with the dishes. His car is waiting for him on Cherry Street in the cool spring noon mysteriously; it is as if a room of a house he owned had been detached and scuttled by this curb and now that the tide of night was out stood up glistening in the sand, slightly tilting but unharmed, ready to sail at the turn of a key. Under his rumpled and dirty clothes his body feels clean, narrow, hollow. The car smells secure: rubber and dust and painted metal hot in the sun. A sheath for the knife of himself. He cuts through the Sunday-stunned town, the soft rows of domestic brick, the banistered porches calm pools of wood. He drives around the great flank of Mt. Judge; its slope by the highway is dusted the yellow-green of new leaves; higher up the evergreens make a black horizon with the sky. The view has changed since the last time he came this way. Yesterday morning the sky was ribbed with thin-stretched dawn clouds, and he was exhausted, heading into the center of the net, where alone there seemed a chance of rest. Now the noon of another day has burned away the clouds, and the sky in the windshield is blank and cold, and he feels nothing ahead of him, Ruth’s delicious nothing, the nothing she told him she did. Her eyes were that blue. Unflecked. Your heart lifts forever through that black sky.
His mood of poise crumbles as he descends into the familiar houses of Mt. Judge. He becomes cautious, nervous. He turns up Jackson, up Potter, up Wilbur, and tries to make out from some external sign if there is anyone in his apartment. No telltale light would show; it is the height of day. No car is out front. He circles the block twice, straining his neck to see a face at the window. Purple opaque panes. Ruth was wrong; he doesn’t want to see Janice.
The bare possibility makes him so faint that when he gets out of the car the bright sun almost knocks him down. As he climbs the stairs, the steps seem to calibrate, to restrain by notches, a helpless tendency in his fear-puffed body to rise. He raps on the door, braced to run. Nothing answers on the other side. He taps again, listens, and takes the key out of his pocket.
Though the apartment is empty, it is yet so full of Janice he begins to tremble; the sight of that easy chair turned to face the television attacks his knees. Nelson’s broken toys on the floor