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By Root 4396 0

air; she closes her eyes and moves blindly. Two skinny boys dabbling at the shallow end of the pool splash away from her headfirst approach. She brushes one with a backsweep of her arm, awakes, and squats smiling in the water; her arms wave bonelessly to keep her balance in the nervous tides of the crowded pool. The air sparkles with the scent of chlorine. He rejoices in how clean she feels: clean, clean. What is it? Nothing touching you that is not yourself. Her in water, him in grass and air. Her head, bobbing like a hollow ball, makes a face at him. Himself, he is not a water animal. Wet is cold to him. Having got wet, he prefers to sit on the tile edge dangling his feet and imagining that high-school girls behind him are admiring the muscle-play of his broad back. He revolves his shoulders thoughtfully and feels the blades stretch his skin in the sun. Ruth wades to the end, through water so shallow the checker pattern of the pool floor is refracted to its surface. She climbs the little ladder, shedding water in great grape-bunches. He scrambles back to their blanket and lies down so that when she comes over he can see her standing above him as big as the sky, the black hair high on the inside of her thighs pasted into swirls by the water. She tears off her cap and shakes out her hair and bends over for the towel. Water on her back flows upwards down soft valleys of fat and drips over her shoulders. As he watches her rub her arms the smell of grass comes up through the blanket and shouts make the crystalline air vibrate. She lies down beside him and closes her eyes and submits to the sun. Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color by the sun, except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure ungrained stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. “You have it pretty good.”

“How so?”

“Oh”—her words seem slightly delayed in passage from her lips; he sees them move, and then hears—“look at all you’ve got. You’ve got Eccles to play golf with every week and to keep your wife from chasing you. You’ve got your flowers, and you’ve got Mrs. Smith in love with you. You’ve got me.”

“You think she really is in love with me? Mrs. Smith.”

“All I know is what I get from you. You say she is.”

“No, I never actually said that. Did I?”

She doesn’t bother to answer him out of her huge face, magnified by her drowsy contentment. Chalk highlights run along her tanned skin.

He repeats, “Did I?” and pinches her arm, hard. He hadn’t meant to do it so hard; something angered him at the touch of her skin. Her sullenness.

“Ow. You son of a bitch.”

Still she lies there, paying more attention to the sun than him. He gets up on an elbow and looks across her dead body to the lighter figures of two sixteen-year-olds standing sipping orange crush from cardboard cones. The one in a white strapless peeks up at him from her straw with a brown glance. Her skinny legs dark as a Negro’s. Her hipbones making gaunt peaks on either side of her slanted flat belly.

“Oh, all the world loves you,” Ruth says suddenly. “What I wonder is why?”

“I’m lovable,” he says.

“I mean why the hell you. What’s so special about you?”

“I’m a mystic,” he says. “I give people faith.” Eccles has told him this. Once, with a laugh, probably meaning it sarcastically. You never knew what Eccles was really meaning; you had to take what you wanted. Rabbit took this to heart. He never would have thought of it himself. He doesn’t think much about what he gives other people.

“You give me a pain,” she says.

“Well I’ll be damned.” The injustice: after he was so proud of her in the pool, loved her so much.

“What in hell makes you think you don’t have to pull your own weight?”

“What’s your kick? I support you.”

“The hell you do. I have a job.” It’s true. A little after he went to work for Mrs. Smith she got a job as a stenographer with an insurance company