the towel. Water on her back flows upwards down soft valleys of fat and drips over her shoulders. As he watches her rub her arms the smell of grass comes up through the blanket and shouts make the crystalline air vibrate. She lies down beside him and closes her eyes and submits to the sun. Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color by the sun, except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure ungrained stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. “You have it pretty good.”
“How so?”
“Oh”—her words seem slightly delayed in passage from her lips; he sees them move, and then hears—“look at all you’ve got. You’ve got Eccles to play golf with every week and to keep your wife from chasing you. You’ve got your flowers, and you’ve got Mrs. Smith in love with you. You’ve got me.”
“You think she really is in love with me? Mrs. Smith.”
“All I know is what I get from you. You say she is.”
“No, I never actually said that. Did I?”
She doesn’t bother to answer him out of her huge face, magnified by her drowsy contentment. Chalk highlights run along her tanned skin.
He repeats, “Did I?” and pinches her arm, hard. He hadn’t meant to do it so hard; something angered him at the touch of her skin. Her sullenness.
“Ow. You son of a bitch.”
Still she lies there, paying more attention to the sun than him. He gets up on an elbow and looks across her dead body to the lighter figures of two sixteen-year-olds standing sipping orange crush from cardboard cones. The one in a white strapless peeks up at him from her straw with a brown glance. Her skinny legs dark as a Negro’s. Her hipbones making gaunt peaks on either side of her slanted flat belly.
“Oh, all the world loves you,” Ruth says suddenly. “What I wonder is why?”
“I’m lovable,” he says.
“I mean why the hell you. What’s so special about you?”
“I’m a mystic,” he says. “I give people faith.” Eccles has told him this. Once, with a laugh, probably meaning it sarcastically. You never knew what Eccles was really meaning; you had to take what you wanted. Rabbit took this to heart. He never would have thought of it himself. He doesn’t think much about what he gives other people.
“You give me a pain,” she says.
“Well I’ll be damned.” The injustice: after he was so proud of her in the pool, loved her so much.
“What in hell makes you think you don’t have to pull your own weight?”
“What’s your kick? I support you.”
“The hell you do. I have a job.” It’s true. A little after he went to work for Mrs. Smith she got a job as a stenographer with an insurance company that has a branch in Brewer. He wanted her to; he was nervous about how she’d spend her afternoons with him away. She said she never enjoyed that business; he wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t exactly suffering when he met her.
“Quit it,” he says. “I don’t care. Sit around all day reading mysteries. I’ll support ja.”
“You’ll support me. If you’re so big why don’t you support your wife?”
“Why should I? Her fathers’ rolling in it.”
“You’re so smug, is what gets me. Don’t you ever think you’re going to have to pay the price?” She looks at him now, squarely with eyes bloodshot from being in the water. She shades them with her hand. These aren’t the eyes he met that night by the parking meters, flat pale disks like a doll might have. The blue of her irises has deepened inward and darkened with a richness that, singing the truth to his instincts, disturbs him.
These eyes sting her and she turns her head away to hide the tears, thinking, That’s one of the signs, crying easily. God, at work she has to get up from the typewriter and rush into the john like she had the runs and sob, sob, sob. Standing there in a booth looking down at a toilet laughing at herself and sobbing till her chest hurts. And sleepy. God, after coming back from lunch it’s all she can do to keep from stretching out in the aisle right there on the filthy floor between Lilly