Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner Page B

free of them. She stood up without warning, yanking the sheet off him. In alarm he grabbed for it, but her own nakedness was so careless that he was ashamed to be more delicate of his own. Trapped, worrying about what might happen if Tom Barnabas came back, all at the same time furious with himself and fascinated by Betty Spahn’s animal unconcern as she padded around the room, he lay and watched her while she bathed. With the wet towel she mopped face and neck and throat, and when she moved the towel over and around her breasts, pushing them into provocative unconscious distortions, he felt again the sticky closing of his lungs. He watched her, queerly moved by the revelation of the secret places under her breasts and the rough way she flopped herself around with the towel.
    As if a blind had slipped and gone roaring to the top of the window, he was back in a scene from his boyhood, from the time when he was perhaps twelve or thirteen, when he had come home from school one afternoon and caught his mother bathing in the bedroom. He had seen her from the kitchen, through two open doors, not directly but reflected in the dresser mirror that tipped at just the right angle. She was completely out of sight, yet completely visible, and it had not occurred to him that mirror reflections went two ways, and that he was as visible to her as she to him. Stopped on the instant of calling for her, he had stood and watched, and had seen her all over. There was a moment when her face turned toward the mirror and she stood still, bending, but after a moment she straightened again and went on with her bath almost stiffly, almost ritually. She let the crooked eye of the mirror stare at her until she was done, and afterward he tiptoed off and in ten minutes came loudly back into the house, whistling and banging his books. When he reflected on it later he knew she had seen him and stood up to his peeping with a kind of proud modesty that made him crawl with shame whenever he remembered. Now Betty Spahn stood and stooped and moppedwith the towel, giving him her whole body to study coolly, and it fascinated and half sickened him to see how the weight of her breast drooped over the secret fold precisely as his mother’s breast had drooped, and how the nipple looked out like a stupid cocked eye.
    Swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, he found his scattered clothes, but before he could put any of them on she came over to him and somehow willed him to his feet. Cool now from the sponging, her body moved against his, and he stood dull as a stump, embarrassed and helpless, while she stood against him searching his face. He could see no gold flecks in her eyes now; they seemed pure amber. She was not laughing, or even smiling, and what she was doing to him could not have come from unsatisfied desire.’ Quite seriously she said, “You’re a funny one. It isn’t women you want at all, is it?”
    “Why should I when I’ve just had one?” Cupping his hands like the pans of a scale, he balanced her breasts, one against the other, but she paid no attention to what he was doing, and she was not fooled.
    “And you never give a straight answer,” she said. “You’re as cautious as a rabbit in a foxfarm. But I’m right, it
isn’t
women you want, is it? They don’t mean anything to you. You want something else.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, and pulled away as if irritated. “I thought I knew a hungry look when I saw one, and what a guy like you is generally hungry for, but the kind of hungry look you’ve got beats me.” She turned and started dressing, and in the silence he disliked her sullenly.
    But when she finished buttoning her blouse she kissed him and held his face between her hands. “Forget it,” she said. “We had a nice time and nobody’s hurt.”
    “How about Tom?” He knew what about Tom, but he wanted her to say it.
    “Tom and I understand each other,” she said. Unlocking the door, she poked out her