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As his father pushes closer against him to explain, he becomes one of the hundreds of skinny whining codgers in and around this city, men who have sucked this same brick tit for sixty years and have dried up with it.
He had been afraid marrying her she would get fat like her mother but as she ages more and more her skinny little stringy go-getter of a father comes out in her.
She asks, “Where do you want to eat?” “Oh, anywhere. The kid likes the Burger Bliss over on West Weiser.”
His mind softens; his prick hardens.
“I hate it!” Rabbit yells, “it stinks of Negroes,” but no voice below in the kitchen acknowledges hearing him.
Women and Nature forget.
Rabbit sees where the kid’s stubby finger (Mom always used to point out, he has those little Springer hands) is stalled on the menu and tells him, “Dope, that’s a dessert.”
“Why is it lousy?” Nelson asks anxiously. There is a look his face gets, bloating his lips and slightly sucking his eyes back into their sockets, that hasn’t changed since his infancy, when his bottle would go dry.
His breathing is a sleeping tide. So she lies there awake like the moon.
Men are strict that way, want to keep their promises to each other, women are beneath it, property. The way while making love Charlie sells her herself, murmuring about her parts, giving them the names Harry uses only in anger, she resisted at first but relaxed seeing for Charlie they were a language of love, his way of keeping himself up, selling her her own cunt. She doesn’t panic as with Harry, knowing he can’t hold it much longer, Charlie holds back forever, a thick sweet toy she can do anything with, her teddy bear. The fur on the back of his shoulders at first shocked her touch,
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Determined to bring herself off, Janice returns her hand and opens her eyes to look at Harry sleeping, all huddled into himself, stupid of him to keep her sex locked up all these years, his fault, all his fault, it was there all along, it was his job to call it out, she does everything for Charlie because he asks her, it feels holy, she doesn’t care, you have to live, they put you here you have to live, you were made for one thing, women now try to deny it burning their bras but you were made for one thing, it feels like a falling, a falling away, a deep eye opening, a coming into the deep
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Women like to lie, Harry; it makes things more fun.” And, flirtatious, unlike her, she flicks her tongue against her upper lip and holds it there, like the spring of a trap.
He pins her arms, which would claw, at her sides and squeezes her hard. She stares into his face. Her face is wild, still, frozen. She is seeking what will hurt him most. “I do things for him,” she says, “I never do for you.”
She inverts herself and pours out upon him the months of her new knowledge; her appetite frightens him, knowing he cannot fill it, any more than Earth’s appetite for death can be satisfied. Her guilt became love; her love becomes rage. The first time was too quick but the second was sweet, with work and sweat in it, and the third time strainingly sweet, a work of the spirit almost purely, and the fourth time, because there was no fourth time, sad; straddling his thighs, her cunt revealed by the flickering touch of the television to be lopsidedly agape, she bows her head, her hair tickling his
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“You’ve been confused from birth, kid.” He adds, “Any dying I’ve been doing around here, you’ve been helping it right along.” At the same time, he wants to fuck her again, to see if she can turn inside out again. For some minutes last night she turned all tongue and his mouth was glued to hers as if in an embryo the first cell division had not yet occurred.
She says, “You can’t understand, how good he was. Not sexy or funny or anything, just good.” “Sure I can. I’ve known some good people. They make you feel good.” “They make you feel everything you do and are is good. He never told me how dumb I am, every hour on the hour like you do, even though he’s much smarter than you could ever imagine. He would have gone to college, if he hadn’t been a Greek.” “Oh. Don’t they let Greeks in now? The nigger quota too big?” “You say such sick things, Harry.” “It’s because nobody tells me how good I am,” he says, and stands. The back of her neck is vulnerable
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“Suppose he asks you to sleep with him?” “He wouldn’t.” “Suppose he does, as a graduation present?” She stares at him boldly: dark gaze tempered in the furnace of betrayal. It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. “I would,” she says.
“As my father, God rest, used to say, It is to be regretted, but it can’t be helped.”
He weeds until he begins to see himself as a weed and his hand with its ugly big moons on the fingernails as God’s hand choosing and killing, then he goes inside the house and looks into the refrigerator and eats a carrot raw.
Rabbit was pretty poor at making things so he gave her himself, his trophies, his headlines. Mom had seemed satisfied: lives more than things concerned her.
Those little Springer hands.
“I don’t know, Mom,” he abruptly admits. “I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything yet.”
“Your old lady still shackin’ up across town?” Everybody knows. Niggers, coolies, derelicts, morons. Numbers writers, bus conductors, beauty shop operators, the entire brick city of Brewer. VERITY EMPLOYEE NAMED CUCKOLD OF WEEK. Angstrom Accepts Official Horns from Mayor. “I’m living alone,” Harry admits, adding, “with the kid.”
Up and down his length she bumps against him, straining against his height, touching. The strange place on her where nothing is, the strange place higher where some things are. Her haunches knot with the effort of keeping on tiptoe. She pushes, pushes: he is a cunt this one-eyed woman is coldly pushing up into. He feels her mind gutter out; she has wrapped them in a clumsy large ball of darkness.
The boy is near tears. Since Janice left, he is silent and delicate: an eggshell full of tears.
