He's talking just for happiness, but something he says makes her tense up. "You're pretty wise, aren't you?" she asks, tilting her empty glass toward her eyes. The glass is a shallow cup on a short stem, like an ice—cream dish at a fancy birthday party. It sends pale arcs of reflection skidding across her thoughtful face.

"You don't want to talk about your weight, either. Huh." He pops another sesame cake into his mouth, and waits until the first pang, the first taste of jelly, subsides. "Let's try this. What you need, typical American homemaker, is the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler. Preserve those vitamins. Shave off fatty excess. A simple adjustment of the plastic turn screw, and you can grate carrots and sharpen your husband's pencils. A host of uses."

"Don't. Don't be so funny."

"O.K. "

"Let's be nice."

"O.K. You start."

She plops a cake in and looks at him with a funny full—mouth smile, the corners turned down tight, and a frantic look of agreeableness strains her features while she chews. She swallows, her blue eyes widened round, and gives a little gasp before launching into what he thinks will be a remark but turns out to be a laugh, right in his face. "Wait," she begs. "I'm trying." And returns to looking into the shell of her glass, thinking, and the best she can do, after all that, is to say, "Don't live in a hotel."

"I got to. Tell me a good one." He instinctively thinks she knows about hotels. At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.

"They're all expensive," she said. "Everything is. Just my little apartment is expensive."

"Where do you have an apartment?"

"Oh a few blocks from here. On Summer Street. It's one flight up, above a doctor."

"It's yours alone?"

"Yeah. My girlfriend got married."

"So you're stuck with all the rent and you don't do anything."

"Which means what?"

"Nothing. You just said you did nothing. How expensive is it?"

She looks at him curiously, with that alertness he had noticed right off, out by the parking meters.

"The apartment," he says.

"A hundred—ten a month. Then they make you pay for light and gas."

"And you don't do anything."

She gazes into her glass, making reflected light run around the rim with a rocking motion of her hands.

"Whaddeya thinking?" he asks.

"Just wondering."

"Wondering what?"

"How wise you are."

Right here, without moving his head, he feels the wind blow. So this is the drift; he hadn't been sure. He says, "Well I'll tell ya. Why don't you let me give you something toward your rent?"

"Why should you do that?"

"Big heart," he says. "Ten?"

"I need fifteen."

"For the light and gas. O.K. O.K." He is uncertain what to do now. They sit looking at the empty plate that had held a pyramid of sesame cakes. They have eaten them all. The waiter, when he comes, is surprised to see this; his eyes go from the plate to Rabbit to Ruth, all in a second. The check amounts to $9.60. Rabbit puts a ten and a one on top of it, and beside these bills he puts a ten and a five. He counts what's left in his wallet; three tens and four ones. When he looks up, Ruth's money has vanished from the slick table. He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, A dime a pound.

And that's not counting the restaurant bill. He takes the bill to the counter and gives the girl the ten. She makes change with a studious frown. The purple simplicity of her kimono does not go with her complicated permed hair and rouged, sweet—and—sour American face. When she puts his coins on the pink cleats of the change pad, he flicks his hand in the air above the silver, adds the dollar to it, and nods at the young Chinese waiter, who is perched attentively beside her. "Tank you vewy much, sir. We tank you vewy much," the boy says to him. But his gratitude does not even last until they are out of sight. As they move toward the glass door he turns to the cashier and in a reedy, perfectly inflected voice completes his story: "– and then this other cat says, `But man, mine was helium!' "

With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines: a shuffle of lights, a neon outline of a boot, of a peanut, of a top hat, of an enormous sunflower erected, the stem of neon six stories high, along the edge of one building to symbolize Sunflower Beer. The yellow flower center is a second moon. One block down, a monotone bell tolls hurriedly, and the red—tipped railroad—crossing gates descend through the soft mass of neon, and the traffic slows, halts.

Ruth turns left, toward the shadow of Mt. Judge, and Rabbit follows; they walk uphill on the rasping pavement. The slope of cement is a buried assertion, an unexpected echo, of the terrain that had been here before the city. For Rabbit the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri's luminous transparence; he is lighthearted, and skips once, to get in step with this girl he adores. Her eyes are turned up, toward where the Pinnacle Hotel adds its coarse constellation to the stars above Mt. Judge. They walk together in silence while behind them a freight train chuffs and screaks through the crossing.

He recognizes his problem; she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas. "Hey," he says. "Have you ever been up to the top there?"

"Sure. In a car.",

"When I was a kid," he says, "we used to walk up from the other side. There's a sort of gloomy forest, and I remember once I came across an old house, just a hole in the ground with some stones, where I guess a pioneer had had a farm."

"The only time I ever got up there was in a car with some eager beaver."

"Well, congratulations," he says, annoyed by the self—pity hiding in her toughness.

She bites at being uncovered. "What do you think I care about your pioneer?" she asks.

"I don't know. Why shouldn't you? You're an American."

"How? 1 could just as easy be a Mexican."

"You never could be, you're not little enough."

"You know, you're a pig really."

"Oh now baby," he says, and puts his arm around the substance of her waist, "I think I'm sort of neat."

"Don't tell me."

She turns left, off Weiser, out of his arm. This street is Summer. Faces of brick run together to make a single block—long face. The house numbers are set in fanlights of stained glass above the doors. The apple—and—orange—colored light of a small grocery store shows the silhouettes of some kids hanging around the corner. The supermarkets are driving these little stores out of business, make them stay open all night.

He puts his arm around her and begs, "Come on now, be a pleasant cunt." He wants to prove to her that her talking tough won't keep him off. She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers. To his surprise her arm mirrors his, comes around his waist. Thus locked, they find it awkward to walk, and part at the traffic light.

"Didn't you kind of like me in the restaurant?" he asks. "The way I tried to make old Tothero feel good? Telling him how great he was?"

"All I heard was you telling how great you were."

"I was great. It's the fact. I mean, I'm not much good for anything now, but I really was good at that."

"You know what I was good at?"

"What?"

"Cooking."

"That's more than my wife is. Poor kid."

"Remember how in Sunday school they'd tell you everybody God made was good at something? Well, that was my thing, cooking. I thought, Jesus, now I'll really be a great cook."

"Well aren't you?"