Throughout the evening he has this sensation of nobody hearing him, of his spirit muffled in pulpy insulation, so he talks all the louder and more insistently. Driving the car (even with his flag decal the Falcon feels more like Janice's car than his, she drives it so much more) back down Emberly to Weiser, past the movie house and across the bridge, he says, "Goddammit I don't see why we have to go back into Brewer to eat, I spend all frigging day in Brewer."

 

"Nelson agrees with me," Janice says. "It will be an interesting experiment. I've promised him there are lots of things that aren't gooey, it's not like Chinese food."

 

"We're going to be late for the movie, I'm sure of it."

 

"Peggy Fosnacht says -"Janice begins.

 

"That dope," Rabbit says.

 

"Peggy Fosnacht says the beginning is the most boring part. A lot of stars, and some symphony. Anyway there must be short subjects or at least those things that want you to go out into the lobby and buy more candy."

 

Nelson says, "I heard the beginning is real neat. There's a lot of cave men eating meat that's really raw, he nearly threw up a guy at school said, and then you see one of them get really zapped with a bone. And they throw the bone up and it turns into a spaceship."

 

"Thank you, Mr. Spoil?It?All," Janice says. "I feel I've seen it now. Maybe you two should go to the movie and I'll go home to bed."

 

"The hell," Rabbit says. "You stick right with us and suffer for once."

 

Janice says, conceding, "Women don't dig science."

 

Harry likes the sensation, of frightening her, of offering to confront outright this faceless unknown he feels now in their lives, among them like a fourth member of the family. The baby that died? But though Janice's grief was worse at first, though she bent under it like a reed he was afraid might break, in the long years since, he has become sole heir to the grief. Since he refused to get her pregnant again the murder and guilt have become all his. At first he tried to explain how it was, that sex with her had become too dark, too serious, too kindred to death, to trust anything that might come out of it. Then he stopped explaining and she seemed to forget: like a cat who sniffs around in comers mewing for the drowned kittens a day or two and then back to lapping milk and napping in the wash basket. Women and Nature forget. Just thinking of the baby, remembering how he had been told of her death over a pay phone in a drugstore, puts a kink in his chest, a kink he still associates, dimly, with God.

 

At Janice's directions he turns right off the bridge, at JIMBO's Friendly LOUNGE, and after a few blocks parks on Quince Street. He locks the car behind them. "This is pretty slummy territory," he complains to Janice. "A lot of rapes lately down here."

 

"Oh," she says, "the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward."

 

"Watch how you talk in front of the kid."

 

"He knows more now than you ever will. That's nothing personal, Harry, it's just a fact. People are more sophisticated now than when you were a boy."

 

"How about when you were a girl?"

 

"I was very dumb and innocent, I admit it."

 

"But?"

 

"But nothing."

 

"I thought you were going to tell us how wise you are now."

 

"I'm not wise, but at least I've tried to keep my mind open."

 

Nelson, walking a little ahead of them but hearing too much anyway, points to the great Sunflower Beer clock on Weiser Square, which they can see across slate rooftops and a block of rubble on its way to being yet another parking lot. "It's twenty after six," he says. He adds, not certain his point was made, "At Burger Bliss they serve you right away, it's neat, they keep them warm in a big oven that glows purple."

 

"No Burger Bliss for you, baby," Harry says. "Try Pizza Paradise."

 

"Don't be ignorant," Janice says, "pizza is purely Italian." To Nelson she says, "We have plenty of time, there won't be anybody there this early."

 

"Where is it?" he asks.

 

"Right here," she says; she has led them without error.

 

The place is a brick row house, its red bricks painted ox?blood red in the Brewer manner. A small un?neon sign advertises it, The Tavema. They walk up sandstone steps to the doorway, and a motherly mustached woman greets them, shows them into what once was a front parlor, now broken through to the room beyond, the kitchen behind swinging doors beyond that. A few center tables. Booths along the two walls. White walls bare but for some picture of an oval?faced yellow woman and baby with a candle flickering in front of it. Janice slides into one side of a booth and Nelson into the other and Harry, forced to choose, slides in beside Nelson, to help him with the menu, to find something on it enough like a hamburger. The tablecloth is a red checked cloth and the daisies in a blue glass vase are real flowers, soft, Harry notices, touching them. Janice was right. The place is nice. The only music is a radio playing in the kitchen; the only other customers are a couple talking so earnestly they now and then touch hands, immersed in some element where they cannot trust their eyes, the man red in the face as if choking, the woman stricken pale. They are Penn Park types, cool in their clothes, beige and pencilgray, the right clothes insofar as any clothes can be right in this muggy river?bottom in the middle of July. Their faces have an edgy money look: their brows have that ftontal clarity the shambling blurred poor can never duplicate. Though he can never now be one of them Harry likes their being here, in this restaurant so chaste it is chic. Maybe Brewer isn't as dead on its feet as it seems.

 

The menus are in hectographed handwriting. Nelson's face tightens, studying it. "They don't have any sandwiches," he says.

 

"Nelson," Janice says, "if you make a fuss out of this I'll never take you out anywhere again. Be a big boy."

 

"It's all in gobbledy?gook."

 

She explains, "Everything is more or less lamb. Kebab is when it's on a skewer. Moussaka, it's mixed with eggplant."

 

"I hate eggplant."

 

Rabbit asks her, "How do you know all this?"

 

"Everybody knows that much; Harry, you are so provincial. The two of you, sitting there side by side, determined to be miserable. Ugly Americans."

 

"You don't look all that Chinese yourself," Harry says, "even in your little Lord Fauntleroy blouse." He glances down at his fingertips and sees there an ochre smudge of pollen, from having touched the daisies.

 

Nelson asks, "What's kalamaria?"

 

"I don't know," Janice says.

 

"I want that."

 

"You don't know what you want. Have the souvlakia, it's the simplest. It's pieces of meat on a skewer, very well done, with peppers and onions between."

 

"I hate pepper."

 

Rabbit tells him, "Not the stuff that makes you sneeze, the green things like hollow tomatoes."

 

"I know," Nelson says. "I hate them. I know what a pepper is, Daddy; my God."

 

"Don't swear like that. When did you ever have them?"

 

"In a Pepperburger."

 

"Maybe you should take him to Burger Bliss and leave me here," Janice says.

 

Rabbit asks, "What are you going to have, if you're so fucking smart?"

 

"Daddy swore."

 

"Ssh," Janice says, "both of you. There's a nice kind of chicken pie, but I forget what it's called."

 

"You've been here before," Rabbit tells her.

 

"I want melopeta," Nelson says.

 

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."

 

Shouts of greeting announce in the doorway a large family all black hair and smiles, initiates; the waiter greets them as a son and rams a table against a booth to make space for them all. They cackle their language, they giggle, they coo, they swell with the joy of arrival. Their chairs scrape, their children stare demure and big?eyed from under the umbrella of adult noise. Rabbit feels naked in his own threadbare little family. The Penn Park couple very slowly turn around, underwater, at the commotion, and then resume, she now blushing, he pale ? contact, touching hands on the tablecloth, groping through the stems of wineglasses. The Greek flock settles to roost but there is one man left over, who must have entered with them but hesitates in the doorway. Rabbit knows him. Janice refuses to turn her head; she keeps her eyes on the menu, frozen so they don't seem to read. Rabbit murmurs to her, "There's Charlie Stavros."

 

"Oh, really?" she says, yet she still is reluctant to turn her head. But Nelson turns his and loudly calls out, "Hi, Charlie!" Summers, the kid spends a lot of time over at the lot.

 

Stavros, who has such bad and sensitive eyes his glasses are tinted lilac, focuses. His face breaks into the smile he must use at the close of a sale, a sly tuck in one corner of his lips making a dimple. He is a squarely marked?off man, Stavros, some inches shorter than Harry, some years younger, but with a natural reserve of potent gravity that gives him the presence and poise of an older person. His hairline is receding. His eyebrows go straight across. He moves deliberately, as if carrying something fragile within him; in his Madras checks and his rectangular thick hornrims and his deep squared sideburns he moves through the world with an air of having chosen it. His not having married, though he is in his thirties, adds to his quality of deliberation. Rabbit, when he sees him, always likes him more than he had intended to. He reminds him of the guys, close?set, slow, and never rattled, who were play?makers on the team. When Stavros, taking thought, moves around the obstacle of momentary indecision toward their booth, it is Harry who says, "Join us," though Janice, face downcast, has already slid over.

 

Charlie speaks to Janice. "The whole caboodle. Beautiful."

 

She says, "These two are being horrible."

 

Rabbit says, "We can't read the menu."

 

Nelson says, "Charlie, what's kalamaria? I want some."

 

"No you don't. It's little like octopuses cooked in their own ink."

 

"Ick," Nelson says.

 

. "Nelson," Janice says sharply.

 

Rabbit says, "Sit yourself down, Charlie."

 

"I don't want to butt in."

 

"It'd be a favor. Hell."

 

"Dad's being grumpy," Nelson confides.

 

Janice impatiently pats the place beside her; Charlie sits down and asks her, "What does the kid like?"

 

"Hamburgers," Janice moans, theatrically. She's become an actress suddenly, every gesture and intonation charged to carry across an implied distance.

 

Charlie's squarish intent head is bowed above the menu.

 

"Let's get him some keftedes. O.K., Nelson? Meatballs."

 

"Not with tomatoey goo on them."

 

"No goo, just the meat. A little mint. Mint's what's in Life Savers. O.K.?"

 

"O.K."

 

"You'll love 'em."

 

But Rabbit feels the boy has been sold a slushy car. And he feels, with Stavros's broad shoulders next to Janice's, and the man's hands each sporting a chunky gold ring, that the table has taken a turn down a road Rabbit didn't choose. He and Nelson are in the back seat.

 

Janice says to Stavros, "Charlie, why don't you order for all of us? We don't know what we're doing."

 

Rabbit says, "I know what I'm doing. I'll order for myself. I want the" ? he picks something off the menu at random ? "the paidakia."

 

"Paidakia," Stavros says. "I don't think so. It's marinated lamb, you need to order it the day before, for at least six."

 

Nelson says, "Dad, the movie starts in forty minutes."

 

Janice explains, "We're trying to get to see this silly space movie."

 

Stavros nods as ifhe knows. There is a funny echo Rabbit's ears pick up. Things said between Janice and Stavros sound dead, duplicated. Of course they work together all day. Stavros tells them, "It's lousy."

 

"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.

 

Stavros relents. "Nellie, for you it'll be great. It's all toys. For me, it just wasn't sexy. I guess I don't find technology that sexy."

 

"Does everything have to be sexy?" Janice asks.

 

"It doesn't have to be, it tends to be," Stavros tells her. To Rabbit he says, "Have some souvlakia. You'll love it, and it's quick." And in an admirable potent little gesture, he moves his hand, palm outward as if his fingers had been snapped, without lifting his elbow from the table, and the motherly woman comes running to them.

 

"Yasou."

 

"Kale spera," she answers.

 

While Stavros orders in Greek, Harry studies Janice, her peculiar glow. Time has been gentle to her. As if it felt sorry for her. The something pinched and mean about her mouth, that she had even in her teens, has been relaxed by the appearance of other small wrinkles in her face, and her hair, whose sparseness once annoyed him, as another emblem of his poverty, she now brings down over her ears from a central parting in two smooth wings. She wears no lipstick and in certain lights her face possesses a gypsy severity and the dignity present in newspaper photographs of female guerrilla fighters. The gypsy look she got from her mother, the dignity from the Sixties, which freed her from the need to look fluffy. Plain is beautiful enough. And now she is all circles in happiness, squirming on her round bottom and dancing her hands through arcs of exaggeration quick white in the candelight. She tells Stavros, "If you hadn't shown up we would have starved."

 

"No," he says, a reassuring factual man. "They would have taken care of you. These are nice people."

 

"These two," she says, "are so American, they're helpless."

 

"Yeah," Stavros says to Rabbit, "I see the decal you put on your old Falcon."

 

"I told Charlie," Janice tells Rabbit, "I certainly didn't put it there."

 

"What's wrong with it?" he asks them both. "It's our flag, isn't it?"

 

"It's somebody's flag," Stavros says, not liking this trend and softly bouncing his fingertips together under his sheltered bad eyes.

 

"But not yours, huh?"

 

"Harry gets fanatical about this," Janice warns.

 

"I don't get fanatical, I just get a little sad about people who come over here to make a fat buck -"

 

"I was born here," Stavros quickly says. "So was my father."

 

"? and then knock the fucking flag," Rabbit continues, "like it's some piece of toilet paper."

 

"A flag is a flag. It's just a piece of cloth."

 

"It's more than just a piece of cloth to me."

 

"What is it to you?"

 

"It's -"

 

"The mighty Mississippi."

 

"It's people not finishing my sentences all the time."

 

"Just half the time."

 

"That's better than all the time like they have in China."

 

"Look. The Mississippi is very broad. The Rocky Mountains really swing. I just can't get too turned?on about cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe. That's what your little sticker means to me. It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece."

 

"If we don't send somebody in the other side sure as hell will, the Greeks can't seem to manage the show by themselves."

 

"Harry, don't make yourself ridiculous, they invented civilization," Janice says. To Stavros she says, "See how little and tight his mouth gets when he thinks about politics."

 

"I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. I just don't see why we're supposed to walk down the street with our hands tied behind our back and let ourselves be blackjacked by every thug who says he has a revolution going. And it really burns me up to listen to hotshot crap?car salesmen dripping with Vitalis sitting on their plumped?up asses bitching about a country that's been stuffing goodies into their mouth ever since they were born."

 

Charlie makes to rise. "I better go. This is getting too rich."

 

"Don't go," Janice begs. "He doesn't know what he's saying. He's sick on the subject."

 

"Yeah, don't go, Charlie, stick around and humor the madman.

 

Charlie lowers himself again and states in measured fashion, "I want to follow your reasoning. Tell me about the goodies we've been stuffing into Vietnam."

 

"Christ, exactly. We'd turn it into another Japan if they'd let us. That's all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus, with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty?fast fucking state of the damn Union if they'd just stop throwing bombs. We're begging them to rig some elections, any elections, and they'd rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We're trying to give ourselves away, that's all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, Jesus, we're rotten.' "

 

"I thought it was us and not them throwing the bombs."

 

"We've stopped; we stopped like all you liberals were marching for and what did it get us?" He leans forward to pronounce the answer clearly. "Not shit."

 

The whispering couple across the room look over in surprise; the family two booths away have hushed their noise to listen. Nelson is desperately blushing, his eyes sunk hot and hurt in his sockets. "Not shit," Harry repeats more softly. He leans over the tablecloth, beside the trembling daisies. "Now I suppose you're going to say `napalm.' That frigging magic word. They've been burying village chiefs alive and tossing mortars into hospitals for twenty years, and because of napalm they're candidates for the Albert F. Schweitzer peace prize. S, H, it." He has gotten loud again; it makes him frantic, the thoughts of the treachery and ingratitude befouling the flag, befouling him.

 

"Harry, you'll get us kicked out," Janice says; but he notices she is still happy, all in circles, a cookie in the oven.

 

"I'm beginning to dig him," Stavros tells her. "If I get your meaning," he says to Rabbit, "we're the big mama trying to make this unruly kid take some medicine that'll be good for him."

 

"That's right. You got it. We are. And most of 'em want to take?the medicine, they're dying for it, and a few madmen in black pajamas would rather bury 'em alive. What's your theory? That we're in it for the rice? The Uncle Ben theory." Rabbit laughs and adds, "Bad old Uncle Ben."

 

"No," Stavros says, squaring his hands on the checked tablecloth and staring level?browed at the base of Harry's throat gingerly with him, Harry notices: Why? ? "my theory is it's a mistaken power play. It isn't that we want the rice, we don't want them to have it. Or the magnesium. Or the coastline. We've been playing chess with the Russians so long we didn't know we were off the board. White faces don't work in yellow countries anymore. Kennedy's advisers who thought they could run the world from the dean's office pushed the button and nothing happened. Then Oswald voted Johnson in who was such a bonehead he thought all it took was a bigger thumb on the button. So the machine overheated, you got inflation and a falling market at one end and college riots at the other and in the middle forty thousand sons of American mothers killed by shit?smeared bamboo. People don't like having Sonny killed in the jungle anymore. Maybe they never liked it, but they used to think it was necessary."

 

"And it isn't?"

 

Stavros blinks. "I see. You say war has to be."

 

"Yeah, and better there than here. Better little wars than big ones."

 

Stavros says, his hands on edge, ready to chop, "But you like it." His hands chop. "Burning up gook babies is right where you're at, friend." The "friend" is weak.

 

Rabbit asks him, "How did you do your Army bit?"

 

Stavros shrugs, squares his shoulders. "I was 4?F. Tricky ticker. I hear you sat out the Korean thing in Texas."

 

"I went where they told me. I'd still go where they told me."

 

"Bully for you. You're what made America great. A real gunslinger."

 

"He's silent majority," Janice says, "but he keeps making noise," looking at Stavros hopefully, for a return on her quip. God, she is dumb, even if her ass has shaped up in middle age.

 

"He's a normal product," Stavros says. "He's a typical goodhearted imperialist racist." Rabbit knows, from the careful level way this is pronounced, with that little tuck of a sold?car smile, that he is being flirted with, asked ? his dim feeling is ? for an alliance. But Rabbit is locked into his intuition that to describe any of America's actions as a "power play" is to miss the point. America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains and darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. He fights back, "I don't follow this racist rap. You can't turn on television now without some black face spitting at you. Everybody from Nixon down is sitting up nights trying to figure out how to make 'em all rich without putting 'em to the trouble of doing any work." His tongue is reckless; but he is defending something infinitely tender, the low flame of loyalty lit with his birth. "They talk about genocide when they're the ones planning it, they're the ones, the Negroes plus the rich kids, who want to pull it all down; not that they can't run squealing for a lawyer whenever some poor cop squints funny at 'em. The Vietnam war in my opinion ? anybody want my opinion? -"

 

"Harry," Janice says, "you're making Nelson miserable."

 

"My opinion is, you have to fight a war now and then to show you're willing, and it doesn't much matter where it is. The trouble isn't this war, it's this country. We wouldn't fight in Korea now. Christ, we wouldn't fight Hitler now. This country is so zonked out on its own acid, sunk so deep in its own fat and babble and laziness, it would take H?bombs on every city from Detroit to Atlanta to wake us up and even then, we'd probably think we'd just been kissed."

 

"Harry," Janice asks, "do you want Nelson to die in Vietnam? Go ahead, tell him you do."

 

Harry turns to their child and says, "Kid, I don't want you to die anyplace. Your mother's the girl that's good at death."

 

Even he knows how cruel this is; he is grateful to her for not collapsing, for blazing up instead. "Oh," she says. "Oh. Tell him why he has no brothers or sisters, Harry. Tell him who refused to have another child."

 

"This is getting too rich," Stavros says.

 

"I'm glad you're seeing it," Janice tells him, her eyes sunk deep; Nelson gets that from her.

 

Mercifully, the food arrives. Nelson balks, discovering the meatballs drenched in gravy. He looks at Rabbit's tidily skewered lamb and says, "That's what I wanted."

 

"Let's swap then. Shut up and eat," Rabbit says. He looks across to see that Janice and Stavros are having the same thing, a kind of white pie. They are sitting, to his printer's sense, too close, leaving awkward space on either side. To poke them into adjustment he says, "I think it's a swell country."

 

Janice takes it up, Stavros chewing in silence. "Harry, you've never been to any other country."

 

He addresses himself to Stavros. "Never had the desire to. I see these other countries on TV, they're all running like hell to be like us, and burning our Embassies because they can't make it fast enough. What other countries do you get to?"

 

Stavros interrupts his eating grudgingly to utter, "Jamaica."

 

"Wow," Rabbit says. "A real explorer. Three hours by jet to the lobby of some Hilton."

 

"They hate us down there."

 

"You mean they hate you. They never see me, I never go. Why do they hate us?"

 

"Same reason as everywhere. Exploitation. We steal their bauxite."

 

"Let 'em trade it to the Russkis for potatoes then. Potatoes and missile sites."

 

"We have missile sites in Turkey," Stavros says, his heart no longer in this.

 

Janice tries to help. "We've dropped two atom bombs, the Russians haven't dropped any."

 

"They didn't have any then or they would have. Here the Japanese were all set to commit hari?kari and we saved them from it; now look at 'em, happy as clams and twice as sassy, screwing us right and left. We fight their wars for them while you peaceniks sell their tinny cars."

 

Stavros pats his mouth with a napkin folded squarely and regains his appetite for discussion. "Her point is, we wouldn't be in this Vietnam mess if it was a white country. We wouldn't have gone in. We thought we just had to shout Boo and flash a few jazzy anti?personnel weapons. We thought it was one more Cherokee uprising. The trouble is, the Cherokees outnumber us now."

 

"Oh those fucking poor Indians," Harry says. "What were we supposed to do, let 'em have the whole continent for a campfire site?" Sorry, Tonto.

 

"If we had, it'd be in better shape than it is now."

 

"And we'd be nowhere. They were in the way."

 

"Fair enough," Stavros says. "Now you're in their way." He adds, "Paleface."

 

"Let 'em come," Rabbit says, and really is, at this moment, a defiant bastion. The tender blue flame has become cold fire in his eyes. He stares them down. He stares at Janice and she is dark and tense: án Indian squaw. He'd like to massacre her.

 

Then his son says, his voice strained upward through chokeddown tears, "Dad, we're going to be late for the movie!"

 

Rabbit looks at his watch and sees they have four minutes to get there. The kid is right.

 

Stavros tries to help, fatherly like men who aren't fathers, who think kids can be fooled about essentials. "The opening part's the dullest, Nellie, you won't miss any of the space parts. You got to try some baklava for dessert."

 

"I'll miss the cave men," Nelson says, the choking almost complete, the tears almost risen.

 

"I guess we should go," Rabbit tells the two other adults.

 

"That's rude to Charlie," Janice says. "Really rude. Anyway I won't be able to stay awake during this interminable movie without coffee." To Nelson: "Baklava is really yummy. It's honey and flakes of thin dough, just the kind of dry thing you love. Try to be considerate, Nelson, your parents so rarely get to eat in a restaurant."

 

Torn, Rabbit suggests, "Or you could try that other stuff you wanted for the main deal, mellow patties or whatever."

 

The tears do come; the kid's tense face breaks. "You promised," he sobs, unanswerably, and hides his face against the white bare wall.

 

"Nelson, I am disappointed in you," Janice tells him.

 

Stavros says to Rabbit, tucking that pencil behind his ear again, "If you want to run now, she could get her coffee and I'll drop her?off at the movie house in ten minutes."

 

"That's a possibility," Janice says slowly, her face opening cautiously, a dull flower.

 

Rabbit tells Stavros, "O.K., great. Thanks. You're nice to do that. You're nice to put. up with us at all, sorry if I said anything too strong. I just can't stand to hear the U.S. knocked, I'm sure it's psychological. Janice, do you have money? Charlie, you tell her how much we owe."

 

Stavros repeats that masterful small gesture of palm outward, "You owe zilch. On me." There can be no argument. Standing, himself in a hurry to see the cave men (raw meat? a bone turning into a spaceship?), Rabbit experiences, among them here, in this restaurant where the Penn Park couple are paying their bill as if laying _a baby to rest, keen family happiness: it prompts him to say to Janice, to cheer Nelson up further, "Remind me tomorrow to call your father about those baseball tickets."

 

Before Janice can intervene, Stavros says, everybody anxious now to please, "He's in the Poconos."

 

 

 

Janice thought when Charlie calls Harry "paleface" it's the end, from the way Harry looked over at her, his eyes a frightening icy blue, and then when Charlie let that slip about Daddy being away she knew it was; but somehow it isn't. Maybe the movie numbs them. It's so long and then that psychedelic section where he's landing on the planet before turning into a little old man in a white wig makes her head hurt, but she rides home resolved to have it out, to confess and dare him to make his move back, all he can do is run which might be a relief. She has a glass of vermouth in the kitchen to ready herself, but upstairs Nelson is shutting the door to his room and Harry is in the bathroom and when she comes out of the bathroom with the taste of toothpaste on top of the vermouth Harry is lying under the covers with just the top of his head showing. Janice gets in beside him and listens. His breathing is a sleeping tide. So she lies there awake like the moon.

 

In their ten though it became twenty minutes over the coffee together she had told Charlie she had thought it reckless of him to come to the restaurant when he had known she was bringing them and he said, in that way he has of going onto his dignity, his lips pushing out as if holding a lozenge and the hunch of his shoulders a bit gangsterish, that he thought that's what she wanted, that's why she told him she was going to talk them into it. At the time she thought silently, he doesn't understand women in love, just going to his restaurant, eating food that was him, had been enough an act of love for her, he didn't have to make it dangerous by showing up himself. It even coarsened it. Because once he was physically there all her caution dissolved, if instead of having coffee with her he had asked her to go to his apartment with him she would have done it and was even mentally running through the story she would have told Harry about suddenly feeling sick. But luckily he didn't ask; he finished the coffee and paid the whole bill and dropped her off under the stumpy marquee as promised. 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, something freakish, but no, that's the way many men still are. Cave men. Cave bears. Janice smiles in the dark.

 

In the dark of the car driving over the bridge along Weiser he asked her if Harry guessed anything. She said she thought nothing. Though something had been bugging him the last couple of days, her staying so late supposedly at the office.

 

"Maybe we should cool it a little."

 

"Oh, let him stew. His old line on me used to be I was useless, at first he was delighted I got a job. Now he thinks I neglect Nelson. I say to him, `Give the boy a little room, he's going on thirteen and you're leaning on him worse than your own mother.' He won't even let him get a mini?bike because it's too dangerous supposedly."

 

Charlie said, "He sure was hostile to me."

 

:`Not really. He's like that about Vietnam with everybody. It's what he really thinks."

 

"How can he think that crap? We?them, America first. It's dead."

 

She tried to imagine how. One of the nice things about hav-ing a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny. She answered at last, "Something is very real to him about it, I don't know what it is." She went on with difficulty, for a blur-ring, a halting, comes over her tongue, her head, whenever she tries to think, and one of the many beautiful things about Charlie Stavros is he lets her tumble it out anyway. He has given her not only her body but her voice. "Maybe he came back to me, to Nelson and me, for the old?fashioned reasons, and wants to live an old?fashioned life, but nobody does that anymore, and he feels it. He put his life into rules he feels melting away now. I mean, I know he thinks he's missing something, he's always reading the paper and watching the news."

 

Charlie laughed. The blue lights of the bridge flickered on the backs of his hands parallel on the steering wheel. "I get it. You're his overseas commitment."

 

She laughed too, but it seemed a little hard of him to say, to make a joke of the marriage that was, after all, a part of her too. Sometimes Charlie didn't quite listen. Her father was like that: a hurry in their blood, wind in their ears. Getting ahead, you miss what the slow people see.

 

Stavros sensed the little wound and tried to heal it, patting her thigh as they arrived at the movie house. "Space odyssey," he said. "My idea of a space odyssey would be to get in the sack with your ass and ball for a week." And right here, with the light beneath the marquee slanting into the car and the agitated last late shreds of the audience buying their tickets, he ran his paw across her breasts and tucked his thumb into her lap. Heated and rufed by this touch from him, guilty and late, she rushed into the movie house ? its plum carpeting, its unnatural coldness, its display?casket of candies ? and found Nelson and Harry down front, where they had had to sit because of her, because she had made them late so she could eat her lover's food, the great exploding screen close above them, their hair on fire, their ears translucent red. The backs of their heads, innocently alike, had sprung a rush of love within her, like coming, a push of pity that sent her scrambling across the jagged knees of strangers to the seat her husband and son had saved.

 

A car moves on the curved road outside. Rugs of light are hurled across the ceiling. The refrigerator below speaks to itself, drops its own ice into its own tray. Her body feels tense as a harp, she wants to be touched. She touches herself hardly ever did it as a girl, after marrying Harry it seemed certainly wrong, marriage should make it never necessary, just turn to the other person and he would fix it. How sad it was with Harry now, they had become locked rooms to each other, they could hear each other cry but couldn't get in, not just the baby though that was terrible, the most terrible thing ever, but even that had faded, flattened, until it seemed it hadn't been her in that room but an image of her, and she had not been alone, there had been some man in the room with her, he was with her now, not Charlie but containing Charlie, everything you do is done in front of this man and how good to have him made flesh. She imagines it in her, like some-thing you have swallowed. Only big, big. And slow, slow as sugar melts. Except now that she'd been with him so many times she could be quick in coming, sometimes asking him just to pound away and startling herself, coming, herself her toy, how strange to have to learn to play, they used to tell her, everybody, the gym teacher, the Episcopal minister, Mother even one awful embar-rassing time, not to make your body a plaything when that's just what it was, she wonders if Nelson, his bedsprings creaking, his little jigger waiting for its hair, poor child, what would he think, what must he think, such a lonely life, sitting there alone at the TV when she comes home, his mini?bike, she's lost it. Though she flutters it faster she's lost it, her heat. How silly. How silly it all is. We're born and they try to feed us and change our diapers and love us and we get breasts and menstruate and go boy?crazy and finally one or two come forward to touch us and we can't wait to get married and have some babies and then stop having them and go man?crazy this time without even knowing it until you're in too deep the flesh grows more serious as we age and then eventually that phase must be over and we ride around in cars in flowered hats for a while to Tucson or seeing the leaves turn in New Hampshire and visit our grandchildren and then get into bed like poor Mrs. Angstrom, Harry is always after her to visit her but she doesn't see why she should she never had a good word to say for her when she was healthy, groping for words while her mouth makes spittle and her eyes trying to pop from her head trying to hear herself say something malicious, and then there's the nursing home or the hospital, poor old souls like when they used to visit her father's older sister, TVs going all up and down the hall and Christmas decorations dropping needles on the linoleum, and then we die and it wouldn't have mattered if we hadn't bothered to be born at all. And all the time there are wars and riots and history happening but it's not as important as the newspapers say unless. you get caught in it. Harry seems right to her about that, Vietnam or Korea or the Philippines nobody cares about them yet they must be died for, it just is that way, by boys that haven't shaved yet, the other side has boys Nelson's age. How strange it is of Charlie to care so, to be so angry, as if he's a minority, which of course he is, her father used to talk of gang fights when he was in school, us against them, Springer an English name, Daddy very proud of that, then why, she used to ask herself at school, was she so dark, olive skin, never sunburned, hair that always frizzed up and never lay flat in bangs, never knew enough until recently to let it grow long in front and pin it back, his fucking madonna Charlie calls her blasphemously though there is an ikon in his bedroom, didn't have enough body in school, but she forgives those days now, sees she was being shaped, all those years, toward Charlie. His cunt. His rich cunt, though they were never rich just respectable, Daddy gave her a little stock to put away the time Harry was acting so irresponsible, the dividend checks come in, the envelopes with windows, she doesn't like Harry to see them, they make light of his working. Janice wants to weep, thinking of how hard Harry has worked these years. His mother used to say how hard he used to work practicing basketball, dribbling, shooting; whereas she said so spitefully Nelson has no aptitude. This is silly. This thinking is getting nowhere, there is tomorrow to face, must have it out with Harry, Charlie shrugs when she asks what to do, at lunch if Daddy isn't back from the Poconos they can go over to Charlie's apartment, the light used to embarrass her but she likes it best in the day now, you can see everything, men's bottoms so innocent, even the little hole like a purse drawn tight, the hair downy and dark, all the sitting they do, the world isn't natural for them any more: this is silly. Determined to bring her-self 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 open-ing, a coming into the deep you, Harry wouldn't know about that, he never did dare dwell on it, racing ahead, he's too fastidious, hates sex really, she was there all along, there she is, oh: not quite. She knows he knows, she opens her eyes, she sees him lying on the edge of the bed, the edge of a precipice, they are on it together, they are about to fall off, she closes her eyes, she is about to fall off there. Oh. Oh. The bed complains.

 

Janice sinks back. They say, she read somewhere, some doctors measuring your blood pressure when you do it, things taped to your head how can anybody concentrate, it's always best when you do it to yourself. Her causing the bed to shudder has stirred Harry half?awake; he heavily rolls over and loops his arm around her waist, a pale tall man going fat. She strokes his wrist with the fingers that did it. His fault. He is a ghost, white, soft. Tried to make a box for her to put her in like they put Rebecca in when the poor little baby died. The way she held it sopping wet against her chest already dead, she could feel it, and screamed a great red scream as if to make a hole to let life back in. The movie returns upon her, the great wheel turning against the black velvet in time with the glorious symphony that did lift her for all her confusion coming into the theater. Floating now like a ballerina among the sparse planets of her life, Daddy, Harry, Nelson, Charlie, she thinks of her coming without him as a betrayal of her lover, and furtively lifts her fingertips, with their nice smell of swamp, to her lips and kisses them, thinking, You.