His dreams are shallow, furtive things. His legs switch. His lips move a little against the pillow. The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise he is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes. In shadow he suddenly awakes, his ghostly blue irises searching the unfamiliar planes for the source of men's voices. These voices are downstairs, and a rumble suggests that they are moving the furniture, tramping in circles, hunting him. But a familiar bulbous basso rings out, it is Tothero, and around this firm center the noises downstairs crystallize as the sounds of card—playing, drinking, horseplay, companionship. Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep again.

"Harry! Harry!" The voice is plucking at his shoulder, rumpling his hair. He rolls away from the wall, squinting upward into vanished sunshine. Tothero sits in the shadows, a hulk of darkness dense with some anxiousness. His dirty—milk face leans forward, scarred by a lopsided smile. There is a smell of whisky. "Harry, I've got a girl for you!"

"Great. Bring her in."

The old man laughs, uneasily? What does he mean?

"You mean Janice?"

"It's after six o'clock. Get up, get up, Harry; you've slept like a beautiful baby. We're going out."

"Why?" Rabbit meant to ask "Where?"

"To eat, Harry, to dine. D, I, N, E. Rise, my boy. Aren't you hungry? Hunger. Hunger." He's a madman. "Oh Harry, you can't understand an old man's hunger, you eat and eat and it's never the right food. You can't understand that." He walks to the window and looks down into the alley, his lumpy profile leaden in the dull light.

Rabbit slides back the covers, angles his naked legs over the edge, and holds himself in a sitting position. The sight of his thighs, parallel, pure, aligns his groggy brain. The hair on his legs, once a thin blond fur, is getting dark and whiskery. The odor of his sleepsoaked body rises to him. "Whatsis girl business?" he asks.

"What is it, yes, what is it? Cunt," Tothero exclaims in a stream, and in the gray light by the window his face falls; he seems amazed to hear himself say such an abrupt ugly thing. Yet he's also watching, as if this was some sort of test. The result determined, he corrects himself, "No. I have an acquaintance, an acquaintance in Brewer, a lady—love perhaps, whom I stand to a meal once in a blue moon. But it's nothing more than that, little more than that. Harry, you're so innocent."

Rabbit begins to be afraid of Tothero; these phrases don't follow. He stands up in his underclothes. "I think I just better run along." The floor—fluff sticks to the soles of his bare feet.

"Oh Harry, Harry," Tothero cries in a rich voice mixed ofpain and affection, and comes forward and hugs him with one arm. "You and I are two of a kind." The big lopsided face looks up into his with eager confidence, but Rabbit doesn't understand. Yet his memory of the man as his coach still disposes him to listen. "You and I know what the score is, we know -" And right here, arriving at the kernel of his lesson, Tothero is balked, and becomes befuddled. He repeats, "We know," and removes his arm.

Rabbit says, "I thought we were going to talk about Janice when I woke up." He retrieves his trousers from the floor and puts them on. Their being rumpled disturbs him, reminds him that he has taken a giant step, and makes nervous wrinkles in his stomach and throat.

"We will, we will," Tothero says, "the moment our social obligations are satisfied." A pause. "Do you want to go back now? You must tell me if you do."

Rabbit remembers the dumb slot of her mouth, the way the closet door bumps against the television set. "No. God."

Tothero is overjoyed; it is happiness making him talk so much. "Well then, well then; get dressed. We can't go to Brewer undressed. Do you need a fresh shirt?"

"Yours wouldn't fit me, would it?"

"No, Harry, no? What's your size?"

"Fifteen three."

"Mine! Mine exactly. You have short arms for your height. Oh, this is wonderful, Harry. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you came to me when you needed help. All those years," he says, taking a shirt from the bureau made of beer cases and stripping off the cellophane, "all those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back."

Rabbit is startled to feel and to see in Tothero's wavy mirror that the shirt fits. Their difference must be all in their legs. With the rattling tongue of a proud mother Tothero watches him dress. His talk makes more sense, now that the embarrassment of explaining what they're going to do is past. "It does my heart good," he says. "Youth before the mirror. How long has it been, Harry, now tell me truly, since you had a good time? A long time?"

"I had a good time last night," Rabbit says. "I drove to West Virginia and back."

"You'll like my lady, I know you will, a city petunia," Tothero goes on. "The girl she's bringing I've never met. She says she's fat. All the world looks fat to my lady – how she eats, Harry: the appetite of the young. That's a fascinating knot, you young people have so many tricks I never learned."

"It's just a Windsor." Dressed, Rabbit feels a return of calm. Waking up had in a way returned him to the world he deserted. He had missed Janice's crowding presence, the kid and his shrill needs, his own walls. He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him; Tothero is an eddy of air, and the building he is in, the streets of the town, are mere stairways and alleyways in space. He adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero's shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama. Like a cloud breaking in the corner of his vision Tothero drifts to the window. "Is my car still there?" Rabbit asks.

"Your car is blue. Yes. Put on your shoes."

"I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?" For in the vast blank of his freedom there remain a few imperfections: his wife, their apartment, their child – clots of concern. It seems impossible that the passage of time should have so soon dissolved them, but Tothero's answer implies it.

"No," he says. He adds, "But then of course I didn't go where there would have been talk of you."

It annoys Rabbit that Tothero shows no interest in him except as a partner on a joyride. "I should have gone to work today," he says in a pointed voice, as if blaming the old man. "Saturday's my big day."

"What do you do?"

"I demonstrate a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler in five and dime stores."

"A noble calling," Tothero says, and turns from the window. "Splendid, Harry. You're dressed at last."

"Is there a comb anywhere, Mr. Tothero? I ought to use the can."

Under their feet the men in the Sunshine Athletic Association laugh and catcall at some foolishness. Rabbit pictures passing among them and asks, "Say, should everybody see me?"

Tothero becomes indignant, as he used to now and then at practice, when everybody was just fooling around the basket and not going into the drills. "What are you afraid of, Harry? That poor little Janice Springer? You overestimate people. Nobody cares about her. Now we'll just go down there and don't be too long in the toilet. And I haven't heard any thanks from you for all I've done for you, and all I am doing." He takes the comb stuck in the brush bristles and gives it to Harry.