much closer to ending it; there was no keeping still and no slowing it down; I had to keep moving, and I had to jazz her. She rubbed my sides and pulled my hair, and none of it was a fake and none of it was part of a show.
“You won't have to wait for me,” she said. “Don't bother with that. I'm going to beat you this time. There's something inside me that you're touching and if you do it just once more time it's going to happen.”
When I did it that one more time it happened to both of us, but it happened to Ruth first. I knew how she acted, and I was ready for her when she tried to fight me off, and I jazzed her and held her until she was limp and I had shot everything I had into her.
She must have been standing outside of Uncle's for a long time, because as soon as it was over she started to doze. She was so tired that I didn't try to talk to her any more that night. I helped her to get into bed, and when I got in with her I felt a lot better than I had felt since she had gone away.
Ruth was up before I was. It had always been like that; no matter how tired we were it was Ruth who got up first, and she usually had a breakfast ready by the time I got into my clothes. I was not so sleepy that morning, but I didn't get up right away. I lay in bed and watched her dress, and then I waited and watched her moving around and getting the coffee started.
“It's a good thing you don't work like other people,” Ruth said. “It would kill you to have to be someplace on time every morning.”
“I have a good idea,” I said. “Let's fuck.”
Ruth said it was too early in the morning, and she never felt like that in the morning. When I got out of bed she lifted her dress and stood still while I felt of her ass and her legs and her cunt, but I couldn't get any sympathy with the condition of my cock. She knew it was hard because I had to piss.
“I'll go over to Toby's and get your stuff,” I said when we were eating.
“That won't be pleasant,” Ruth said. “You'll feel funny about it and you'll probably want to hit him. Promise me you won't hit him!”
“Oh shit!” I said. “Come here and let me see you sit on this rail I've got.”
She came over to my side of the table, but she didn't do as I suggested. She went down on the floor and opened my pants and put the thing in her mouth.
“It tastes fishy. Why don't you wash it?”
“Because I knew you'd want to go down on it. And I'm a lazy son of a bitch.”
“That's dirty. You don't know how to treat a lady.”
“Don't I!”
She snapped it up and licked the end, and then she licked my balls. She was holding my balls in her mouth and pretending to chew them, and neither of us heard the superintendent when he walked in to collect the trash until he had closed the door. She couldn't get up quickly enough not to be seen, but he didn't seem to notice us at all. He was a half-witted Portuguese who never seemed to notice anything, and if I didn't watch him on his errand, he was liable to carry off whatever he could slip into his pockets. Ruth stood making faces at him behind his back until he went out.
“I wish you'd put the trash outside, Bill,” she said. “He gives me the creeps.”
“Women are funny. If he had noticed what you were doing you'd have been mad. Or perhaps you wouldn't. It's probably because he doesn't pay any attention to you that you don't like him.”
“I don't think he knows what a woman is for. I'm going to find out some day.”
“You have the most marvelous taste.”
She went into the bedroom then. I thought of waiting there until the mail came, because I was expecting a check, but while I was finishing my last cup of coffee I decided to see Toby before he had a chance to get out.
It was a good morning, and I walked part of the way before I caught a cab, so I was a little bit later in getting to Toby's place than I had wanted to be. But he hadn't gone out yet. He came to the door in a fancy smoking jacket and a church warden pipe hanging out of the corner of his mouth, all of it looking arty as all hell. He had grown a Van Dyke since I had seen him last.
“Hello Bill. Did Ruth send you?” he said.
I answered the first part of that and walked in. He had something set up on an easel in one corner but I didn't pay much attention to it. Toby was in a great hurry to finish something whenever you saw him, and he had something like that in his place every time I went there, but I never saw it after it was finished, and I never knew anybody who had seen anything of his that was finished.
He gave me a drink of sherry that was pretty good sherry, and then because we both knew why I was there he got a couple of bags and all of Ruth's things that he could find. All of what she had wasn't enough to fill the bags; I knew that because I had done all of this before. When she wanted to be someplace else she just packed the two bags and that was all there was to be done. When the bags had been moved she would have moved and get her mail at the new place. Then one day she would come back and I would go after the bags again, or if I didn't go after them it would be whoever was taking her next. But she always came back to me after she had been away for a while.
Toby tried to help me with the packing, but he didn't have any more idea of packing than Ruth had, and so when he had put several things in the bags and I had taken them out and put them in right he went and sat down and smoked his pipe.
“It couldn't have worked out. Ruthie and I, I mean,” Toby said.
“The Van Dyke looks silly,” I said.
Toby stroked his chin, and he looked at himself in the glass of a picture that was on the table, frowning, and holding his head on one side.
“It has its advantages,” he said.
He smiled that horrible smile that I had been afraid of seeing ever since I had known Toby. I had more or less expected that he would do it someday, but I had known him so long without ever having seen it that I had come to believe that he had enough sense to leave his friends, or the people he thought were his friends, alone.
“I like you, Billy,” he said. “I like you a great deal.”
I threw the rest of the things into the bags and snapped them shut. Toby had poured some more sherry into my glass, so I had to stay long enough to drink that, but as soon as I had finished it I took the bags and left. I was sorry that he had done that, because I was afraid that he would try it again now.
At the corner I got a taxi, and I started back to my place. But after I had gone a few blocks I saw somebody I thought looked familiar. I had the driver slow down, and it was Paul. He came over to the taxi and where had I been and how the hell was I? So I got out and sent the taxi on with the bags and Paul and I went down the street to have a drink.
Paul was playing a five-a-week gig at some place uptown, so he was in better shape than he was the last time I had seen him. The band wasn't union, but they were doing all right, and he had some money in his pockets and he was wearing a clean shirt. He told me all about it over his gin, and he was sorry to hear that I wasn't playing around any more.
I stuck to the sherry. Paul could drink an enormous amount of gin, though, and when we left the bar we were both feeling about the same. He kept talking about a new record Miles had just made, and he talked about it so much that we went down to the Music Shop to buy it, and before we got out of there I had bought more records than I could afford. Then Paul wanted me to go home with him and listen to a couple of old Coltrane records he had picked up some place.
I had never known before where Paul lived, but it was where I had expected: in an old tenement down in the heart of town. It was pretty shabby on the outside and next to an old factory. In between there was an alley and the whole length of it smelled of piss. Paul's side of it wasn't so bad as the side next to the factory. He said that a lot of winos used the place as a sort of urinal and that in the middle of the summer it was worse. I didn't notice the smell after the first few minutes, and I suppose that the people who lived there got used to it the same way you would get used to the view from a Swiss chalet and didn't notice it at all.
Paul played his Coltrane records for me, and then we played the records I had just bought, and he got a pint bottle of gin from someplace, but I still knew enough not to mix it with the sherry, so he did all of the drinking that was done. He began to show it pretty much, and he wanted to lie down; so he lay down on the couch with the bottle and the glass on the floor beside him and rolled his eyes at the music while I played the records, and then there was a girl in the room.
