'What's wrong with Esther. I wrapped into her on the way down.' Rachel wished she knew. By the time she'd dried the floor and run up the fire escape and in the window to their apartment Esther was, of course, gone.
'Slab,' Rachel figured. Slab was on the phone after half a ring.
'I'll let you know if she shows.'
'But Slab -'
'Wha,' said Slab.
Wha. Oh, well. She hung up.
Pig was sitting in the transom. Automatically she turned on the radio for him. Little Willie John came on singing Fever.
'What's wrong with Esther,' she said, for something to say.
'I asked you that,' said Pig. 'I bet she's knocked up.'
'You would.' Rachel had a headache. She headed for the bathroom to meditate.
Fever was touching them all.
Pig, evil-minded Pig, inferred right for once. Esther showed up at Slab's looking like any traditional mill hand, seamstress or shop girl Done Wrong: dull hair, puffy face, looking heavier already in the breasts and abdomen.
Five minutes and she had Slab railing. He stood before Cheese Danish # 56, a cockeyed specimen covering an entire wall, dwarfing him in his shadowy clothes as he waved arms, tossed his forelock.
'Don't tell me. Schoenmaker won't give you a dime. I know that already. You want to put a small bet on this? I say it'll come out with a big hook nose.'
That shut her up. Kindly Slab was of the shock-treatment school.
'Look,' he grabbed a pencil. 'It is no time of year to go to Cuba. Hotter than Nueva York, no doubt, off season. But for all his Fascist tendencies, Battista has one golden virtue: abortion he maintains is legal. Which means you get an M.D. who knows what he's about, not some fumbling amateur. It's clean, it's safe, it's legal, above all, it's cheap.'
'It's murder.'
'You've turned R. C. Good show. For some reason it always becomes fashionable during a Decadence.'
'You know what I am,' she whispered.
'We'll leave that go. I wish I did.' He stopped a minute because he felt himself going sentimental. He finagled around with figures on a scrap of vellum. 'For 300,' he said, 'we can get you there and back. Including meals if you feel like eating.'
'We.'
'The Whole Sick Crew. You can do it inside a week, down to Havana and back. You'll be yo-yo champion.'
'No.'
So they talked metaphysics while the afternoon waned. Neither felt he was defending or trying to prove anything important. It was like playing one-up at a party, or Botticelli. They quoted to each other from Liguorian tracts, Galen, Aristotle, David Riesman, T. S. Eliot.
'How can you say there's a soul there. How can you tell when the soul enters the flesh. Or whether you even have a soul?'
'It's murdering your own child, is what it is.'
'Child, schmild. A complex protein molecule, is all.'
'I guess on the rare occasions you bathe you wouldn't mind using Nazi soap made from one of those six million Jews.'
'All right -' he was mad - 'show me the difference.'
After that it ceased being logical and phony and became emotional and phony. They were like a drunk with dry heaves: having brought up and expelled all manner of old words which had always, somehow, sat wrong, they then proceeded to fill the loft with futile yelling trying to heave up their own living tissue, organs which had no business anywhere but where they were.
As the sun went dawn she broke out of a point-by-point condemnation of Slab's moral code to assault Cheese Danish # 56, charging at it with windmilling nails.
'Go ahead,' Slab said, 'it will help the texture.' He was on the phone. 'Winsome's not home.' He jittered the receiver, dialed information. 'Where can I get 300 bills,' he said. 'No, the banks are closed . . . I am against usury.' He quoted to the phone operator from Ezra Pound's Cantos.
'How come,' he wondered, 'all you phone operators talk through your nose.' Laughter. 'Fine, we'll try it sometime.' Esther yelped, having just broken a fingernail. Slab hung up. 'It fights back,' he said. 'Baby, we need 300. Somebody must have it.' He decided to call all his friends who had savings accounts. A minute later this list was exhausted and he was no closer to financing Esther's trip south. Esther was tramping around looking for a bandage. She finally had to settle for a wad of toilet paper and a rubber band.
'I'll think of something,' he said. 'Stick by Slab, babe. Who is a humanitarian.' They both knew she would. To whom else? She was the sticking sort.
So Slab sat thinking and Esther waved the paper ball at the end of her finger to a private tune, maybe an old love song. Though neither would admit it, they also waited for
