Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [286]
“All right,” she said cheerfully. “No tricks, now.”
Like a bug trapped in a matchbox he darted from corner to corner. The door opened an inch, all the chain would allow, and he saw Ellen Ward’s face peering in. She was pounding angrily on the door with her fists. The bathroom was as hollow as a drum.
“Now,” said Shelly Rasmussen, turning on the hot water. Steam billowed up, half concealing her. Stooping to flop a hand in the rising water, she had to turn her face. Her hand clawed back her wet hair. With an impatient grunt she sat back from the tub and hauled the jersey over her head and threw it aside and bent back in, testing. Her great breasts hung into the tub, steam rose around her. Terribly smiling, nine feet tall, she stood up in the cloud of steam and put her fists on her hips. The eyes of her breasts looked at him insolently. As if amused by his fascinated, terrified, hypnotized gaze, she did a little bump and grind.
“Come on!” she cried. “Let’s have a look at you. Off with those clothes.”
She approached, he retreated, darted, got his hand on the chain, had to let go as she lunged. Ellen was pounding on the outside of the door, the tub was filling, the room was white with steam. For a wild instant his face raced across the mirror, a smear of terror, and then she had him. Her hands were at his fly, unzipping, tugging–the pants were gone. He clung to his shirt until it was torn from his back. He sat exposed in his underwear, his urine bottle strapped to his leg, its tube disappearing inside the slit of his shorts.
“Ah-ha!” cried Shelly Rasmussen. “You old dickens! Come on now, no secrets from me!”
Leaning over his chair, her great breasts hanging like water-filled balloons inches from his nose, she tried to tear his protecting hands away. He fought her off but she was back at once. He fought her off again, and she got hold of the tube and pulled, so that he had to spread his hands to cover his emerging organ, yanked like a fish out of water. “Ha ha!” she said. “You old dickens, look at that!”
To his horror, he felt the stump of his leg begin to swell and lift, filling with pleasurable warmth. It rose until it lifted clear out of his lap like a fireplace log, its stitched and cicatriced end red and swollen. He saw Shelly Rasmussen’s admiration. She laughed, softly and hoarsely, and reached again.
“No!” he cried. “No!”
Weakly he pissed down the tube, and at once the great stump subsided, sank, went flabby, collapsed into his lap. Shelly Rasmussen took one disgusted look and grabbed up her turtleneck and left. She didn’t bother to shut the door, and now Ellen Ward stood above him looking down. Her eyes were dark, and their edges were red with crying, she touched the deflated stump with tenderness. “You see?” she said. “It wasn’t right to let her. It’s my job.”
Her face was close to his, so close that he could see the mottled coloring of the irises and the smudged skin under the tight curly hair of her brows where she had darkened them. She bent closer still, her mouth tender, her eyes sad. The eyes grew enormous, widened until they filled the whole field of his vision, shutting out the glare of light on white tile, the aseptic porcelain, the blank mirror. Closer and larger grew her eyes until, blurred by proximity, inches from his own, they were the eyes that a lover or a strangler would have seen, bending to his work.
That was the dream I woke from half an hour ago, my pajamas soaked with sweat, my bottle full–it was a piss-the-bed dream if I ever had one, but confusingly like a wet dream of adolescence too. It took me, in fact, all of five minutes to persuade myself that it was all a dream, that I had really pissed the bottle full instead of having an emission, that none of those women had been there, that Ada had had no heart attack, that Shelly had not come in brawling like a drunken logger to rape me in my bath. It made me think,