"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 doing anything to 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 his drowsy contentment.

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. The sullen way it yielded.

"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 sucking her straw with a brown glance, her skinny legs dark as a Negro's. Her hipbones make gaunt peaks on either side of her 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 saint," 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 to. Rabbit took this to heart. He never would have thought of it himself. He doesn't think that 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 that has a branch in Brewer. He wanted her to; he was nervous about how she'd spend her afternoons with him away. She said she never enjoyed turning tricks; he wasn't so sure. She wasn't exactly suffering when he met her.

"Quit it," he says. "I don't care. Sit around all day reading mysteries. I'll support ja."

"You'll support me. If you're so big why don't you support your wife?"

"Why should I? Her father's rolling in it."

"You're so smug, is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" She looks at him now, squarely with eyes bloodshot from being in the water. She shades them with her hand. These aren't the eyes he met that night by the parking meters, flat pale discs like a doll might have. The blue of her irises has deepened inward and darkened with a richness that, singing the truth to his instincts, disturbs him.

These eyes sting her and she turns her head away to keep down the tears, thinking, That's one of the signs, crying easily. God, at work she has to get up from the typewriter and rush into the john like she had the runs and sob, sob, sob. Standing there in a booth looking down at a toilet laughing at herself and sobbing till her chest hurts. And sleepy. God, after coming back from lunch it's all she can do to keep from stretching out in the aisle right there on the linoleum floor between Lilly Orff and Rita Fiorvante where slimy—eyed old Honig would have to step over her. And hungry. For lunch an ice—cream soda with the sandwich and then a doughnut with the coffee and still she has to buy a candy bar at the cash register. After she's been trying to slim down for him and had lost six pounds, at least one scale said. For him, that was what was rich, changing herself in one direction for him when in his stupidity he was changing her in just the other. He was a menace, for all his mildness. Still he did have the mildness and was the first man she ever met who did. You felt at least you were there for him instead of being something pasted on the inside of their dirty heads. God she used to hate them with their wet mouths and little laughs but when she had it with Harry she kind of forgave them all, it was only half their fault, they were a kind of wall she kept battering against because she knew there was something there and all of a sudden with Harry there it was and it made everything that had gone before seem pretty unreal. After all nobody had ever really hurt her, left her scarred or anything, and when she tries to remember it it sometimes seems it happened to somebody else. They seemed sort of vague, as if she had kept her eyes shut, vague and pathetic and eager, wanting some business their wives wouldn't give, a few dirty words or a whimper or that business with the mouth. That. What do they see in it? It can't be as deep, she doesn't know. After all it's no worse than them at your bees and why not be generous, the first time it was Harrison and she was drunk as a monkey anyway but when she woke up the next morning wondered what the taste in her mouth was. But that was just being a superstitious kid there isn't much taste to it a little like seawater, just harder work than they probably think, women are always working harder than they think. The thing was, they wanted to be admired there. They really did want that. They weren't that ugly but they thought they were. That was the thing that surprised her in high school how ashamed they were really, how grateful they were if you just touched them there and how quick word got around that you would. What did they think, they were monsters? If they'd just thought, they might have known you were curious too, that you could like that strangeness there like they liked yours, no worse than women in their way, all red wrinkles, my God, what was it in the end? No mystery. That was the great thing she discovered, that it was no mystery, just a stuckon—looking bit that made them king and if you went along with it could be good or not so good and anyway put you with them against those others, those little snips running around her at hockey in gym like a cow in that blue uniform like a baby suit, she wouldn't wear it in the twelfth grade and took the demerits. God she hated some of those girls with their contractors and druggists for fathers. But she got it back at night, taking what they didn't know existed like a queen. Boy, there wasn't any fancy business then, you didn't even need to take off your clothes, just a little rubbing through the cloth, your mouths tasting of the onion on the hamburgers you'd just had at the diner and the car heater ticking as it cooled, through all the cloth, everything, off they'd go. They couldn't have felt much it must have been just the idea of you. All their ideas. Sometimes just French kissing not that she ever really got with that, sloppy tongues and nobody can breathe, but all of a sudden you knew from the way their lips went hard and opened and then eased shut and away that it was over. That there was no more push for you and you better back off if you wanted to keep your dress dry. They wrote her name on the lavatory walls; she became a song in the school. Allie told her about that, kindly. But she had some sweet things with Allie; once after school with the sun still up they drove along a country road and up an old lane and stopped in a leafy place where they could see Mt. Judge, the town against the mountain, both dim in the distance, and he put his head in her lap, her sweater rolled up and her bra undone, and it was like a baby gently, her bees (who called them her bees? not Allie) firmer and rounder then, more sensitive; his waiting wet mouth so happy and blind and the birds making their warm noises overhead in the sunshine. Allie blabbed. He had to blab. She forgave him but it made her wiser. She began the older ones; the mistake if there was one but why not? Why not? was the question and still held; wondering if there was a mistake makes her tired just thinking, lying wet from swimming and seeing red through her eyelids, trying to move back through all that red wondering if she was wrong. She was wise. With them, being young did for being pretty, and them being older it wasn't such a rush. Boy some bastards you think never, like their little contribution's the greatest thing the world's ever going to see if it ever gets here.