stink of ether. To his surprise her arms come out from the sheets and she puts them around his head and presses his face down into her soft happy swimming mouth. “Hey take it easy,” he says.
“I have no legs,” she says, “it’s the funniest feeling.” Her hair is drawn against her skull in a sanitary knot and she has no makeup. Her small skull is dark against the pillow.
“No legs?” He looks down and there they are under the sheets, stretched out flat in a motionless V.
“They gave me a spinal or whatever at the end and I didn’t feel anything. I was lying there hearing them say push and the next thing here’s this teeny flubbly baby with this big moon face looking cross at me. I told Mother it looks like you and she didn’t want to hear it.”
“She gave me hell out there.”
“I wish they hadn’t let her in. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to see you.”
“Did you, God. Why, baby? After I’ve been so crummy.” “No you haven’t. They told me you were here and all the while I was thinking then it was your baby and it was like I was having you. I’m so full of ether it’s just like I’m floating; without any legs. I could just talk and talk.” She puts her hands on her stomach and closes her eyes and smiles. “I’m really quite drunk. See, I’m flat.”
“Now you can wear your bathing suit,” he says, smiling and entering the drift of her ether-talk, feeling himself as if he has no legs and is floating on his back on a great sea of cleanness light as a bubble amid the starched sheets and germless surfaces before dawn. Fear and regret are dissolved, and gratitude is blown so large it has no cutting edge. “The doctor said you were a good girl.”
“Well isn’t that silly; I wasn’t. I was horrible. I cried and screamed and told him to keep his hands to himself. Though the thing I minded worst was when this horrible old nun shaved me with a dry razor.”
“Poor Janice.”
“No it was wonderful. I tried to count her toes but I was so dizzy I couldn’t so I counted her eyes. Two. Did we want a girl? Say we did.”
“I did.” He discovers this is true, though the words discover the desire.
“Now I’ll have somebody to side with me against you and Nelson.”
“How is Nelson?”
“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.
“Oh, damn,” he says, and his own tears, that it seemed didn’t exist, sting the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe it was me. I don’t know why I left.”
“Vnnn.” She sinks deeper into the pillow as a lush grin spreads her cheeks apart. “I had a little baby.”
“It’s terrific.”
“You’re lovely. You look so tall.” She says this with her eyes shut, and when she opens them, they brim with an inebriated idea; he has never seen them sparkle so. She whispers, “Harry. The girl in the other bed in here went home today so why don’t you sneak around when you go and come in the window and we can lie awake all night and tell each other stories? Just like you’ve come back from the Army or somewhere. Did you make love to other women?”
“Hey I think you ought to go to sleep now.”
“It’s all right, now you’ll make better love to me.” She giggles and tries to move in the bed. “No I didn’t mean that, you’re a good lover you’ve given me a baby.”
“It seems to me you’re pretty sexy for somebody in your shape.”
“That’s how you feel,” she says. “I’d invite you into bed with me but the bed’s so narrow. Ooh.”
“What?”
“I just got this terrible thirst for orangeade.”
“Aren’t you funny?”
“You’re funny. Oh that baby looked so cross.”
A nun fills the doorway with her wings. “Mr. Angstrom. Time.”
“Come kiss,” Janice says. She touches his face as he bends to inhale her ether again; her mouth is a warm cloud that suddenly splits and her teeth pinch her lower lip. “Don’t leave,” she says.
“Just for now. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Love you.”
“Listen. I love you.”
Waiting for him in the anteroom, Eccles asks, “How was she?”
“Terrific.”
“Are you going to go back now, to uh, where you were?”
“No,” Rabbit answers, horrified, “for Heaven’s sake. I can’t.”
“Well, then, would you like to come home with me?”