Though there are no words she hears this, and says, "Don't try to prove you're a lover on me. Just come and go."

"You're so smart," he says, and starts to hit her, checks his arm, and offers instead, "Hit me. Come on. You want to, don't you? Really pound me."

"My Lord," she says, "this'll take all night." He plucks her limp arm from her side and swings it up toward him, but she manages her hand so that five bent fingers bump against his cheek painlessly. "That's what poor Maggie has to do for your old bastard friend."

He begs, "Don't talk about them."

"Damn men," she continues, "either want to hurt somebody or be hurt."

"I don't, honest. Either one."

"Well then undress me and stop farting around."

He sighs through his nose. "You have a sweet tongue," he says.

"I'm sorry if I shock you." Yet in her voice is a small metallic withdrawal, as if she really is.

"You don't," he says and, business—like, stoops and takes the hem of her dress in his hands. His eyes are enough accustomed to the dark now to see the silky cloth as green. He peels it up her body, and she lifts her arms, and her head gets caught for a moment in the neck—hole. She shakes her head crossly, like a dog with a scrap, and the dress comes free, skims off her arms into his hands floppy and faintly warm. He sails it into a chair hulking in a corner. "God," he says, "you're pretty." She is a ghost in her silver slip. Dragging the dress over her head has loosened her hair. Her solemn face tilts as she quickly lifts out the pins. Her hair falls out of heavy loops. Women look like brides in their slips.

"Yeah," she says. "Pretty plump."

"No," he says, "you are," and in the space of a breath goes to her and picks her up, great glistening sugar in her silty—grained slip, and carries her to the bed, and lays her on it. "So pretty."

"You lifted me, wow. That'll put you out of action."

Harsh direct light falls on her face: the caked makeup, the creases on her neck. He asks, "Shall I pull the shade?"

"Please. It's a depressing view."

He goes to the window and bends to see what she means. There is only the church across the way, gray, grave, and mute. Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath. He lowers the shade on it guiltily. He turns, and Ruth's eyes watch him out of shadows that also seem gaps in a surface. The curve of her hip supports a crescent of silver; his sense of her weight seems to make an aroma.

"What's next?" He takes off his coat and throws it; he loves this throwing things, the way the flying cloth puts him at the center of a gathering nakedness. "Stockings?"

"They're tricky," she says. "I don't want a run."

"You do it then."

In a sitting position, with a soft—pawed irritable deftness, she extricates herself from a web of elastic and silk and cotton. When she has peeled off the stockings and tucked them, tidily rolled, into the crevice by the footboard of the bed, she lies flat and arches her back to push off the garter belt and pants. As swiftly, he bends his face into a small forest smelling of spice, where he is out of all dimension, and where a tender entire woman seems an inch away, around a kind of corner. When he straightens up on his knees, kneeling as he is by the bed, Ruth under his eyes is an incredible continent, the pushed—up slip a north of snow.

"So much," he says.

"Too much."

"No, listen. You're good." Cupping a hand behind her hot sheltered neck, he pulls her up, and slides her slip over her head. It comes off with liquid ease. Clothes just fall from a woman who wants to be stripped. The cool hollow his hand finds in the small of her back mixes in his mind with the shallow shadows of the stretch of skin that slopes from the bones of her shoulders. He kisses this expanse. Where her skin is whiter it is cooler. The hardness of his chin hits the hardness of her bra. He whispers "Hey let me" when Ruth's one arm crooks back to unfasten it. He gets behind her. She sits upright with her fat legs jackknifed sideways and her back symmetrical as a great vase. The tiny dingy catches are hard to undo; she draws her shoulder blades together. With a pang the tough strap parts. Her back broadens and turns convex as she shrugs the straps down off her shoulders. As one arm tosses her brassiére over the edge of the bed the other, on his side, presses against her breast, so he won't see. But he does see: a quick glimmer of tipped weight. He moves away and sits on the corner of the bed and drinks in the pure sight of her. She keeps her arm tight against the one breast and brings up her hand to cover the other; a ring glints. Her modesty praises him by showing she is feeling something. The straight arm props her weight. Her belly is a pond of shadow deepening to a black eclipsed by the inner swell of her thighs. Light seizes her right side as her body turns in its stillness, rigidity her one defense against the hunger of his eyes. She holds the pose until his eyes smart with echoes of white. When her voice breaks from her stilled form, he is startled: "What about you?"

He is still dressed, even to his necktie. While he is draping his trousers over a chair, arranging them to keep the crease, she slips beneath the covers. He stands over her in his underclothes and asks, "Now you really don't have anything on?"

"You wouldn't let me."

He remembers the glint. "Give me your ring."

She brings her right hand out from under the covers and he carefully works a thick brass ring, like a class ring, past her bunching knuckle. In letting her hand drop she grazes the distorted front of his jockey shorts.

He looks down at her, thinking. The covers come up to her throat and the pale arm lying on top of the bedspread has a slight serpent's twist. "There's nothing else?"

"I'm all skin," she says. "Come on. Get in."

"You want me?"

"Don't flatter yourself. I want it over with."

"You have all that crust on your face."

"God, you're insulting!"

"I just love you too much. Where's a washrag?"

"I don't want my Goddamned face washed!"

He goes into the bathroom and turns on the light and finds a facecloth and holds it under the hot faucet. He wrings it out and turns off the light. As he comes back across the room Ruth laughs from the bed. He asks, "What's the joke?"

"In those damn underclothes you do look kind of like a rabbit. I thought only kids wore those elastic kind of pants."

He looks down at his T—shirt and snug underpants, pleased and further stirred. His name in her mouth feels like a physical touch. She sees him as special. When he puts the rough cloth to her face, it goes tense and writhes with a resistance like Nelson's, and he counters it with a father's practiced method. He sweeps her forehead, pinches her nostrils, abrades her cheeks and, finally, while her whole body is squirming in protest, scrubs her lips, her words shattered and smothered. When at last he lets her hands win, and lifts the washrag, she stares at him, says nothing, and closes her eyes.

When he knelt by the bed to grip her face he pressed the sensitive core of his love against the edge of the mattress and now without his will a little spills, like cream forced over the neck of the bottle by the milk's freezing. He backs away from contact; the shy series of hops, puzzled, throbs to a slow halt. He stands and presses the cloth against his own face, like a man sobbing. He goes to the foot of the bed, throws the rag toward the bathroom, peels out of his underclothes, bobs, and hurries to hide in the bed, in the long dark space between the sheets.

He makes love to her as he would to his wife. After their marriage, and her nerves lost that fineness, Janice needed coaxing; he would begin by rubbing her back. Ruth submits warily when he tells her to lie on her stomach. To lend his hands strength he sits up on her cushiony buttocks and leans his weight down through stiff arms into his thumbs and palms as they work the broad muscles and insistent bones. She sighs and shifts her head on the pillow. "You should be in the Turkish—bath business," she says. He goes for her neck, and advances his fingers around to her throat, where the columns of blood give like reeds, and massages her shoulders with the balls of his thumbs, and his fingertips just find the glazed upper edges of her pillowing breasts. He returns to her back, until his wrists ache, and flops from astride his mermaid truly weary, as if under a sea—spell to sleep. He pulls the covers up over them, to the middle of their faces.