cabinet.
He turned the taps, sat on the toilet top, and, with Newboy on his notebook, read at the 'Prologemena.'
The water rushed.
After a page he skipped, reading a line here, a verse paragraph further on. At some he laughed out loud.
He put down the book, shucked his clothing, leaned over the rim and lowered his chained, grimy ankle. Steam kissed the sole of his foot, then hot water licked it.
Sitting in the cooling tub, chain under his buttocks, he had scrubbed only a minute before the water was grey and covered with pale scalings.
Well, Lanya had said she wouldn't mind.
He let that water out, and ran more over his feet, rubbing the gritty skin from his insteps. He'd known he was dirty, but the amount of filth in the water was amazing. He soaked and soaped his hair, rubbed his arms and chest with the bar till the chain tore it. He grounded the balled washrag beneath his jaw, and then lay back with his ears under water, to watch the isle of his belly shake to his heart beat, each curved hair a wet scale, like the shingled skin of some amphibian.
Sometime during all this, Madame Brown's high laughter rolled into the hall; and a little on, her voice outside the door; 'No! No, you can't go in there, Muriel! Someone's taking a bath.'
He let out the water, and lay back, exhausted and clean, occasionally wiping at the tub-line of grit, wider than Loufer's garrison. He pressed his back against porcelain. Water trapped there poured around his shoulders. He sat, wondering if one could will oneself dry. And, slowly, dried.
He looked at his shoulder, peppered with pores, run with tiny lines he could imagine separated each cell, fuzzed with dark down. He brushed his mouth on his skin, licked the de-salted flesh, kissed it, kissed his arm, kissed the paler place where veins pushed across the bridge from bicep to forearm, realized what he was doing, with scowling laughter, but kissed himself again. He pushed to standing. Drops trickled the back of his legs. He was dizzy; the tiny flames wobbled in the tiles. He stepped out, heart knocking to the sudden effort.
He toweled roughly at his hair, gently at his genitals. Then, on his knees, he did a slightly better job washing away the hairs and grit and flaky stuff still on the bathtub bottom.
He picked up his pants, shook his head over them; well, they were all he had. He put them on, combed his moist hair back with his fingers, tucked in his shirt, buckled on his sandal, and came out into the hall. Behind his ears was cool, and still wet.
'How many baths did you take?' Mr Richards asked. 'Three?'
'Two and a half.' Kidd grinned. 'Hello, Ma — Mrs Brown.'
'They've been telling me how hard you've worked.'
Kidd nodded. 'It's not that bad. I'll probably finish up tomorrow. Mr Richards? You said you had a razor?'
'Oh yes. You're sure you don't want to use my electric?'
'I'm used to the other kind.'
'It's just you'll have to use regular soap.'
'Arthur,' Mrs Richards called from the kitchen, 'you have that mug of shaving soap Michael gave you for Christmas.'
Mr Richards snapped his fingers. 'Now I'd forgot. That was three years back. I never did open it. Grew a beard since too. I had a pretty good-looking beard for a while, you know?'
'It looked silly,' Mrs Richards said. 'I made him shave it off.'
Back in the bathroom, he lathered his jaw, then scraped the warm foam away. His face cooled under the blade. He decided to leave his sideburns half an inch longer. Now (in two distinct stages) they came well below his ears.
For a moment, holding a hot washcloth across his face, he contemplated the patterns inside his eyes against the dark. But like everything in this house, they seemed of calculated inconsequence.
From the kitchen: 'Bobby,
Kidd went into the living room. 'Bet you'd hardly recognize me,' he said to Madame Brown.
'Oh, I don't know about that.'
'Dinner's ready,' Mrs Richards said. 'Kidd, you and Bobby sit back there. Edna, you sit here with June.'
Madame Brown went over and pulled out her chair. 'Muriel, stay down there and be good, hear me?'
He squeezed between the wall and the table — and took some tablecloth with him.
'Oh, dear!' Madame Brown lunged to grab a tottering brass candlestick. (In suddenly bared mahogany, the reflected flame steadied.) By candlelight her face had again taken on that bruised-eyed tawdriness she had last night in the bar.
'Jesus,' Kidd said. 'I'm sorry.' He pulled the cloth back down across the table and began to straighten silverware. Mrs Richards had put out a profusion of forks, spoons, and side plates. He wasn't sure if he got all of them in the right place or which were his or Bobby's; when he finally sat, two fingers lingered on the ornate handle of a knife; he watched them rubbing, thick with enlarged knuckles and gnawed nails, but translucently clean. After baths, he reflected, when you're still alone in the john, is the time for all those things you don't want people around for: jerking off, picking your nose and eating it, serious nail biting. Was it some misguided sense of good manners that had kept him from any of these here? His thoughts drifted to various places he'd indulged such habits not so privately: seated at the far end of lunch counters, standing at public urinals, in comparatively empty subway cars at night, in city parks at dawn. He smiled; he rubbed.
'Those were my mother's,' Mrs Richards said, on the other side of the table. She set down two bowls of soup for Arthur and Madame Brown, then went back to the kitchen. 'I think old silver is lovely—' her voice came in—'but keeping it polished is awfully difficult.' She came out again with two more bowls. 'I wonder if it's that — what do they call it? That sulfur dioxide in the air, the stuff eating away all the paintings and statues in Venice.' She set one in front of Kidd and one in front of Bobby, who was just squeezing into place — more plates and silverware slid on the wrinkling cloth; Bobby pulled it straight again.
Kidd took his fingers from the tarnished handle and put his hand in his lap.
'We've never been to Europe,' Mrs Richards said, returning from the kitchen with bowls for her and June. 'But Arthur's parents went — oh, years ago. The plates are Arthur's mother's — from Europe. I suppose I shouldn't use the good ones; but I do whenever we have company. They're so festive— Oh, don't wait for me. Just dig in.'
Kidd's soup was in a yellow melmac bowl. The china plate beneath bore an intricate design around its fluted lip, crossed by more intricate scratches that might have come from cleanser or steel wool.
He looked around to see if he should start, caught both Bobby and June looking around for the same purpose; Madame Brown had a china bowl but every one else's was pastel plastic. He wondered if he, or Madame Brown alone, would have merited the spread.
Mr Richards picked up his spoon, skimmed up some soup.
So he did too.
With the oversized spoon-bowl still in his mouth, he noticed Bobby, June, and Madame Brown had all waited for Mrs Richards, who was only now lifting hers.
From where he sat, he could see into the kitchen: other candles burned on the counter. Beside a paper bag of garbage, its lip neatly turned down, stood two open Campbell's cans. He took another spoonful. Mrs Richards has mixed, he decided, two, or even three kinds; he could recognize no specific flavor.
Under the tablecloth edge, his other hand had moved to his knee — the edge of his little finger scraped the table leg. First with two fingers, then with three, then with his thumb, then with his fore-knuckle, he explored the circular lathing, the upper block, the under-rim, the wing bolts, the joints and rounded excrescences of glue, the hairline cracks where piece was joined to piece — and ate more soup.
Over a full spoon, Mr Richards smiled and said, 'Where's your family from, Kidd?'
'New York—' he bent over his bowl—'State.' He wondered where he had learned to recognize this as the milder version of the blunt What-nationality-
