She was married but he stood in her lawn and watched her eat with her husband Cornelius in a yellow room, then walked into her flowers and amongst her high azalea bushes, near the windowsill, below which he ground himself on a whitened plank, calling in a whisper.
Now Mrs. Niggero — Nancy — sighed and Snerd retired from her lips, then went like a slave at them again. She met him with a luxury of stroke in her cunny and pulled him in way out of his depth so Snerd was almost anxious as with his waist jerked down a well, but safe, his balls would not go further, and the two of them settled into the planes of full criminal love, pulling each the other’s organ from its aim and both losing; something like a pilgrim running back and forth through the doorway of a shrine, welcomed then ejected.
Mrs. Niggero in an agony of pleasure gave birth to root and Snerd commenced his spurts with a prayer. She, all gone, pleaded quietly for his final drops. Robert Snerd, married blithely in indifference himself, was already jealous of her minutes away from him with Cornelius.
They were ashamed shortly afterwards, gathering the old clothes on for the miserable attritions demanded by the clock, in a flat horror of the zombies such as count, hasten small distances, and get mean-eyed over the matter of a nickel in the bank where Snerd first saw her. Each time they were a little incredulous such raw worship had overcome them, for eighteen years. With a terrible clasp of the other, they fled apart. Mrs. Niggero wept and had a limp. Snerd was grim in the years of his week until he saw her again but nonetheless forcing his shadow to the outer window of the bookstore he owned. He looked in on his staff, smart girls nearly devout in their errands; here and there a customer, a browser, wanting someone else’s life; the books themselves, the thousands of titles grown alien and faintly nauseating to him. He had rather warm his mind vainly in thought about his valiant hot seed still within the treacherous loins of Nancy Niggero, now in her married home. Her husband would now at seven P.M. be sitting across the room from her, looking at her although pretending interest in the television book. Mr. Niggero, hardly more than a curved backbone with a damp shirt hung on it. She would be forced into the worst role, managing her contempt by the second. An eruption might mean the end of the world.
But Snerd was in error. Nancy loved this silent drooping man deeply and burned like a penitent, always intent to sense his needs, which were few, in happy submission. Niggero watched her slyly too, and with an urge to haul goods to her feet and roll in them like a dog, then next day wag off to his work as city attorney, provided a desk and an old-fashioned clerk’s eyeshade he imagined touched him with romance in accuracy; and the briefs of fretting gnatlike spite. He for twenty-seven years had been driven pale and near emaciated by them, but his eyes still glowed with a beautiful near-insane gray like a wolfs with his nose raised for a feast six counties away and hearing — eyes and ears at attention to the far-off. He was not a dog, neither just the curved spine under a sweated shirt, a mere hanger for expensive broadcloth shirts and paisley neckties seen in Gentleman’s Quarterly, There was about him still an extremely nervous happiness of search and a small glee that he was not nearly close to its end yet. On the edge of his tongue was the appeal “Please stomp my grapes!” now for several years. Stomp my grapes. He did not know why, quite, nor was the appeal constantly there, and he knew every minute of the day it was inappropriate and scandalous.
Cornelius Niggero, because of his name partly, had never done a thing inappropriate yet and felt always shy under the odd banner of this title. He was almost bowled over by the weight of his name, enough. Even more so than by the vicious tedium of his work for the city. These days there seemed a parental or student suit at least once a week in the school system. But he loved Nancy too much to announce out loud about stomp my grapes please. He was impatient until she had everything she wished, which, as with himself, was not very much at all. She had the large clean house, splendid clothes, and ready means of travel to anywhere she wanted.
Nancy Niggero, however, a clean and even reverent person, was frugal and a creature of not much whim. Even though in Niggero’s eyes an authentic aristocrat, she was plain and definite in her speech and not partial to the vaguely depressed chatter of that class at all, even with a nice woman’s college in the East and European travel behind her. She was very north Mississippian. Of all beings she seemed to him the one most certain why she was born and went about her days as if fetched by a quiet honorable master, a call from both firmament and fundament. She astonished him and was his saint. He could never comprehend why she had married him, because he knew he was dulling and only pulled forth per diem by a fog of uncertain promise, only solid when he thought of seeing her once again and already grateful, his tongue hardly restrained from lupine rapture. Even now looking at her he could see her again tomorrow night in a different softer blouse perhaps. He could see her mailing her poems at the post office and nearly wept for her lack of success in that work, although she reviewed every rejection with a sly grin of defeat. In every other thing in life she was accepted. This was a fine mystery to her. Niggero would have cut half his finger off if she could have only one triumph. He defended her with an inner rage. It seemed highly relevant here, what he had read in some book of inspiration months ago: “When a finger points at the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.” He remembered this as Chinese. Nancy seemed suddenly even more lovely as Chinese herself to him — radiant, calm, and stoical.
In her nightgown in low light, her wet hair bound back by a scarf, she was a wrenching vision. Niggero could almost scream to her, “Stomp my grapes!” Please, asked her without sound, as she passed against the moony glass of the front door and he could hear the rush of her slippers, see her legs move her gown. It would fairly put him to sleep in admiration. When she made an uncivil stomach sound, he blamed it on the dog. She was such a wife that Niggero felt selfish and had an impulse to share her with something large and hungry, which he did in a manner when they ate with the mayor and his wife and he watched the both of them with their helpless eyes on her.
Even in winter Niggero sweated too much. He was more noxious to himself than anyone else. A grim fever was on him. It was necessary he put himself in slow motion ever since the advent of midlife in order to prevent the moisture from running into his socks. His shirt wet and rank, he had to change each day at noon. There was a space with a mirror in his closet at city hall in which he saw his beaded face, same as in the air force years ago, blurred since, quite a bit, though not lean as it should be: Italian bloodhound, Semitic without distinction, nose made for the dense odors of southern Europe and blown up by them. But the blazing wolf’s eyes in the center — if his eyes could see his eyes — two beacons on a saddle. He often broke wind with a great searching hook of sound, poisoning his closet just beyond the mayor’s secretary at her desk, and emerged red with scandal and blindness. His lungs seemed too narrow and gunked in a residue of half a year of menus. Through the window in back he saw the rubble of the rear yard one late afternoon. He was drawn to it suddenly, the glass and brick fragments and shrubweed, so he opened the window and crawled out into it. Here was his true neighborhood.
It was exile he deserved in his undeserving existence, and he squatted in it, arguing with the deer fleas and chummy ticks already on his hands. Since thirty he had been aware of being nearly dead and was shocked when anybody, even the city in legal trouble, needed him. Then he scrambled up and walked around the front of the ancient and chalky red brick city hall. The grand doorway ennobled him. He felt halfway a man about town, certified; at least a unit of the edifice, a brick with a nose. Some bustling town music, such as that in an old movie from the late forties, seemed to announce itself around him. Niggero went leaping back to his job. A hired extra, lost in the republic.