“You’re not even a man!
He knows it.
Who does know it if he dont?”
The car was in motion.
She began to shriek at him.
“You, a man, a bold bad man, when you cant even—When you had to bring a real man in to—And you hanging over the bed, moaning and slobbering like a—You couldn’t fool me but once, could you?
No wonder I bled and bluh—” his hand came over her mouth, hard, his nails going into her flesh.
With the other hand he drove the car at reckless speed.
When they passed beneath lights she could see him watching her as she struggled, tugging at his hand, whipping her head this way and that.
She ceased struggling, but she continued to twist her head from side to side, tugging at his hand.
One finger, ringed with a thick ring, held her lips apart, his finger-tips digging into her cheek.
With the other hand he whipped the car in and out of traffic, bearing down upon other cars until they slewed aside with brakes squealing, shooting recklessly across intersections.
Once a policeman shouted at them, but he did not even look around.
Temple began to whimper, moaning behind his hand, drooling upon his fingers.
The ring was like a dentist’s instrument; she could not close her lips to regurgitate.
When he removed it she could feel the imprint of his fingers cold on her jaw.
She lifted her hand to it.
“You hurt my mouth,” she whimpered.
They were approaching the outskirts of the city, the speedometer at fifty miles.
His hat slanted above his delicate hooked profile. She nursed her jaw.
The houses gave way to broad, dark subdivisions out of which realtors’ signs loomed abrupt and ghostly, with a quality of forlorn assurance.
Between them low, far lights hung in the cool empty darkness blowing with fireflies.
She began to cry quietly, feeling the cooling double drink of gin inside her.
“You hurt my mouth,” she said in a voice small and faint with self-pity.
She nursed her jaw with experimental fingers, pressing harder and harder until she found a twinge.
“You’ll be sorry for this,” she said in a muffled voice.
“When I tell Red.
Dont you wish you were Red? Dont you?
Dont you wish you could do what he can do?
Dont you wish he was the one watching us instead of you?”
They turned into the Grotto, passing along a closely curtained wall from which a sultry burst of music came.
She sprang out while he was locking the car and ran on up the steps.
“I gave you your chance,” she said.
“You brought me here.
I didn’t ask you to come.”
She went to the washroom.
In the mirror she examined her face.
“Shucks,” she said, “it didn’t leave a mark, even;” drawing the flesh this way and that.
“Little runt,” she said, peering at her reflection.
She added a phrase, glibly obscene, with a detached parrotlike effect.
She painted her mouth again.
Another woman entered.
They examined one another’s clothes with brief, covert, cold, embracing glances.
Popeye was standing at the door to the dance-hall, a cigarette in his fingers.
“I gave you your chance,” Temple said.
“You didn’t have to come.”
“I dont take chances,” he said.
“You took one,” Temple said.
“Are you sorry?
Huh?”