PULL DOWN VANITYI
457
warm through her tangled hair, her tears mingling with my perspiration,
until she found my mouth, and began again, this time against my
slippery, dead flesh, the heaving, circling motion of her hips, over and
over, until the tension in her broke. I felt a million miles away.
I must have fallen asleep for an instant, for I woke to see her
shadow against the window. She was fully dressed and combing that
incredible hair with great tenderness, as if it belonged to someone else
and had only been lent to her for the occasion.
"You're very beautiful," I said.
"So are you. It's hard to believe that you didn't really-that we
didn't- I feel so satisfied, so happy."
I let her go downstairs first alone; for she was suddenly cautious
and worried. By the time I had finished dressing, pausing over each
article of clothing to wonder why I had not been able to take her, and
why I did not care, Hank had already hit her for the first time.
My eyes had not adjusted to the brighter light, but I could see
her dearly as I stood in the doorway above the street, see her just
below me, quite distinctly but small and remote, as through a telescope.
She was standing at one end of the circle the crowd had formed around
them, not crying or attempting to fight back or even raising her hand
to the scarlet place on her cheek, but just watching Hank as detachedly
as I was watching them both, watching him lunge toward her for the
second blow. He swung from far off, a stage punch, impressive, but
not really intended to hurt; and this they both understood.
"Where were you, Jude? God damn, where were you? You stupid
bitch! You stupid bitch!" The answer was clear, though she said nothing,
for her face was soft and suffused with blood, her lips pale and swollen,
her eyes still dissolved in languor.
"Go on
in,
Hank," she said quietly, "go in and go to sleep. You're
drunk again." He was much drunker than when I had seen him last,
willing his drunkenness now, pulling it over him like a sheltering cover.
Yet everyone seemed afraid of him, afraid to break out of the protection
of the buzzing circle of spectators to confront him. Only Judith tried to
stare him down, her eyes fixed on his baffled, slack face. But when she
tried to touch him, he bellowed in rage.
As I moved forward slowly, out of some dim sense of obligation,
but without a plan, Fenton took me by the arm. "Get out of here,
Milton, get out! Or somebody will get killed." I wanted to tell him
that in our world such things no longer happened, that this was only
the playing out of a myth, unreal; but he would not have understood.
He held his hand over his heart, theatrically I thought, as he
pleaded with me; and when I shrugged him off impatiently, he staggered
