They are walking up Warren Avenue. Their place is seven blocks away. People are sitting out on their steps in the warm night; their conversation is in this sense public and they fight to keep their voices low.
“Boy, if this is what seeing your sister does to you I’m glad we’re not married.”
“What brought that up?”
“What brought what up?”
“Marriage.”
“You did, don’t you remember, the first night, you kept talking about it, and kissed my ring finger.”
“That was a nice night.”
“All right then.”
“All right then nothing.” Rabbit feels he’s been worked into a corner where he can’t give her hell without giving her up entirely, without obliterating the sweet things. But she did that by taking him to that stinking place. “You’ve laid for Harrison, haven’t you?”
“I guess. Sure.”
“You guess. You don’t know?”
“I said sure.”
“And how many others?”
“I don’t know.”
“A hundred?”
“It’s a pointless question.”
“Why is it pointless?”
“It’s like asking how many times you’ve been to the movies.”
“They’re about the same to you, is that it?”
“No they’re not the same but I don’t see what the count matters. You knew what I was.”
“I’m not sure I did. You were a real hooer?”
“I took some money. I’ve told you. There were boy friends when. I was working as a stenographer and they had friends and I lost my job because of the talk maybe I don’t know and some older men got my number I guess through Margaret, I don’t know. Look. It’s by. If it’s a question of being dirty or something a lot of married women have had to take it more often than I have.”
“Did you pose for pictures?”
“You mean like for high-school kids? No.”
“Did you blow guys?”
“Look, maybe we should say bye-bye.” At the thought of that her chin softens and eyes burn and she hates him too much to think of sharing her secret with him. Her secret inside her seems to have no relation to him, this big body loping along with her under the street lamps, hungry as a ghost, wanting to hear the words to whip himself up. That was the thing about men, the importance they put on the mouth. Rabbit seems like another man to her, with this difference: in ignorance he has welded her to him and she can’t let go.
With degrading gratitude she hears him say, “No I don’t want to say bye-bye. I just want an answer to my question.”
“The answer to your question is yes.”
“Harrison?”
“Why does Harrison mean so much to you?”
“Because he stinks. And if Harrison is the same to you as me then I stink.”
They are, for a moment, the same to her—in fact she would prefer Harrison, just for the change, just because he doesn’t insist on being the greatest thing that ever was—but she lies. “You’re not at all the same. You’re not in the same league.”
“Well I got a pretty funny feeling sitting across from you two in that restaurant. What all did you do with him?”
“Oh, I don’t know, what do you do? You make love, you try to get close to somebody.”
“Well, would you do everything to me that you did to him?”
This stuns her skin in a curious way, makes it contract so that her body feels squeezed and sickened inside it. “If you want me to.” After being a wife her old skin feels tight.
His relief is boyish; his front teeth flash happily. “Just once,” he promises, “honest. I’ll never ask you again.” He tries to put his arm around her but she pulls away. Her one hope is that they aren’t talking about the same thing.
Up in the apartment he asks plaintively, “Are you going to?” She is struck by the helplessness in his posture; in the interior darkness, to which her eyes have not adjusted, he seems a suit of clothes hung from the broad white knob of his face.
She asks, “Are you sure we’re talking about the same thing?”
“What do you think we’re talking about?” He’s too fastidious to mouth the words.
She says.
“Right,” he says.
“In cold blood. You just want it.”
“Uh-huh. Is it so awful for you?”
This glimmer of her gentle rabbit emboldens her. “May I ask what I’ve done?”
“I didn’t like the way you acted tonight.”
“How did I act?”
“Like what you were.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Even so. I saw you that way tonight and I felt a wall between us and this is the one way through it.”
“That’s pretty cute. You just want it, really.” She yearns to hit out at him, to tell him to go.