“Everything’s in the front room. I can do all the back floors tomorrow, and get the rest of the stuff out of there for you. It’s not going to be hard.”
“That’s good. Arthur…?”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Richards said. “Mary’s put out a towel for you. Go right in and run yourself a bath. Do you use an electric razor?”
“No.”
“I have one, if you want. I put out a safety, for you, anyway. Blade’s new. We’d like to invite you to stay for supper.”
“Hey,” he said, wanting to leave. “That’s very nice. Thank you.”
“Bobby, you put candles in the bathroom?”
Bobby went Umph over his book.
“Life by candlelight,” Mr. Richards said. “It’s really something, isn’t it?”
“At least the gas isn’t off,” Mrs. Richards called in again. “That’s something too.” She stepped to the door. “Bobby, Arthur, both of you! This isn’t enough light to read by; you’ll ruin your eyes.”
“Bobby, put your book down. You heard your mother. You read too much anyway.”
“Arthur, he can’t read too much. It’s just his eyes.” She went back into the kitchen.
On top of the bookcase by Mr. Richards’ chair (neither he nor Bobby had ceased their reading) between an edition of Paradise Lost that said “Classics Club” and something thick by Michener, was a volume, thinner than both, with white letters down a black spine: “Pilgrimage/ Newboy.” He pulled the book loose. The candles flaked light across the cover. “Did Mrs. Brown ever come?” He turned the book over. From the case, black ceramic lions looked somewhere else and glistened. The back blurb was only three uninformative lines. He looked at the front again: Pilgrimage by Ernest Newboy.
“She’ll be here by the time we eat. She always is.” June snickered, waiting for Father or Mother to object. Neither did. “That’s by that poet they told about in the paper. Bobby got it for Mother from the bookstore yesterday.”
He nodded. “Ma’am?” He looked in the kitchen door. “May I look at this?”
“Certainly,” Mrs. Richards said, stirring, at the stove.
He went into the bathroom; probably laid out the same as the one he’d peed all over upstairs. Two candles on the back of the toilet tank put two flecks on each tile; and there was another candle up on the medicine cabinet.
He turned the taps, sat on the toilet top, and, with Newboy on his notebook, read at the “Prolegomena.”
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 ground 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 a garrison belt. 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 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, please come in and set the table. Now!”
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.