He rolls over and can't help smiling at the lumpy figure she cuts in her nightie. She looks not so different from how Judy looks in hers and not very much larger. Her scant bangs don't quite hide her high forehead, its Florida tan dulling, and her tired eyes look focused elsewhere. He begins, "There's something going wrong over at the lot. When I was over there today I asked to see the books and this fag with AIDS Nelson has put in as bookkeeper instead of Mildred told me he couldn't show them to me unless you authorized it. You're the boss, according to him."
The tip of her little tongue creeps out and presses on her upper lip. "That was silly," she says.
"I thought so, but I kept my cool. Poor guy, he's just covering up for Nelson."
"Covering up for Nelson why?"
"Well" – Harry sighs heavily, and arranges himself on the bed like an odalisque, with a hippy twist to his body – "you really want to hear this?"
"Of course." But she keeps moving around the room with her little stacks.
"I have a new theory. I think Nelson takes cocaine, and that's why he's so shifty and jumpy, and kind of paranoid."
Janice moves carefully to the bureau, flop and then flop, carrying what Harry recognizes as her salmon-colored running suit with the blue sleeves and stripes, which she never wears on the street around here, where the middle-aged are more careful about looking ridiculous. "Who told you this?" she asks.
He squirms on the bed, pulling up his legs and pushing off his suede shoes so as not to dirty the bedspread of white dotted Swiss.
"Nobody told me," he says. "I just put two and two together. Cocaine's everywhere and these yuppie baby boomers Nelson's age are just the ones who use it. It takes money. Lots of money, to maintain a real habit. Doesn't Pru keep complaining about all these bills they can't pay?"
Janice comes close to the bed and stands; he sees through her cotton nightie shadows of her nipples and her pubic hair. From his angle she looks strangely enormous, and in his diagonal position he undergoes one of those surges of lightheadedness as when he stands up too fast; it is not clear who is upright and who is not. Her body has kept the hard neatness it had when they were kids working at Kroll's but underneath her chin there are ugly folds that ramify into her neck. She was determined not to get fat like her mother but age catches you anyway. Janice says carefully, "Most young couples have bills they can't pay."
He sits up, to shake the lightness in his head, and because her body is there puts his arms around her hips. On second thought he reaches under her nightie and cups his hands around her solid, slightly gritty buttocks. He says, looking up past her breasts to her face, "The worst of it is, honey, I think he's been bleeding the company. I think he's been stealing and Lyle has been helping him, that's why they let Mildred go."
Her buttocks under his hands tense; he feels them squeeze together and become more spherical, with the tension of a basketball a few pounds under regulation pressure. A watery glimmer of arousal winks below his waist. Her blurred eyes look down upon him with somber concentration, the skin of her face sagging downward from the bone. He nuzzles one breast and closes his eyes again, smelling the faintly sweaty cotton, hiding from her intent downward eyes. Her voice asks, "What evidence do you have?"
This irritates him. She is dumb. "That's what I was saying. I asked to look at the accounts and bank statements today and they wouldn't let me, unless you authorized it. All you have to do is call up this Lyle."
He hears in her chest a curious stillness, and feels in her body a tension of restraint. Her nightie is transparent but she is opaque. "If you did see these figures," she asks, "would you know enough to understand them?"
He flicks her nipple with his tongue through the cotton. The glimmer below has grown to a steady glow, a swelling warmth. "Maybe not altogether," he says. "But even the monthly statements we got in Florida didn't look quite right to me. I'd take Mildred with me, and if she's too far gone – he said she's senile and over at Dengler's – I think we should hire somebody, a professional accountant in Brewer. You could call our lawyer for who he'd recommend. This may be something we have to bring the cops in on eventually." A nice April shower has started up outdoors, kindled by the slow sunset.
Her body has stiffened and jerked back an inch. "Harry! Your own son!"
"Well," he says, irritated again, "his own mother. Stealing from his own mother."
"We don't know anything for sure," Janice tells him. "It's only your theory."
"What else could Lyle have been hiding today? Now they'll have the wind up so we should start moving or they'll shred everything like Ollie North."
Now Janice is getting agitated, backing out ofhis arms and rubbing the back of one hand with the other, standing in the center of the carpet. He sees that the sex isn't going to happen, the first time in weeks he's really had the urge. Damn that Nelson. She says, "I think I should talk to Nelson first."
"You should? Why not we?"
"According to Lyle, I'm the only one who counts."
This hurts. "You're too soft on Nelson. He can do anything he wants with you."
"Oh, Harry, it used to be so awful, that time I ran off with Charlie! Nelson was only twelve, he'd come over on his bicycle all the way into Eisenhower Avenue and he'd stand there for an hour across the street, looking up at our windows, and a couple of times I saw him and I hid, I hid behind the curtain and let him just stand there until he got exhausted and rode away." Staring over Harry's head, seeing her little boy across the street, so patient and puzzled and hopeful, her dark eyes fill with tears.
"Well, hell," Rabbit says, "nobody asked him to go over there spying on you. 1 was taking care of him."
"With that poor crazy girl and perfectly hideous black man you were. It's just dumb luck the house didn't bum down with Nelson in it too."
"I would have got him out. If I'd been there I would have got them all out."
"You don't know," she says, "you don't know what you would have done. And you don't know now what the real story is, it's all just your suspicions, somebody's been poisoning your mind against Nelson. I bet it was Thelma."
"Thelma? We never see her anymore, we ought to have the Harrisons over sometime."
"Pfaa!" She spits this refusal, he has to admire her fury, the animal way it fluffs out her hair. "Over my dead body."
"Just a thought." This is not a good topic. He reverts: "I don't know what the real story is, but you do, huh? What has Nelson told you?"
She pinches her mouth shut so she seems to have no lips at all, like Ma Springer used to look. "Nothing really," she lies.
"Nothing really. Well O.K. then. You know more than I do. Good luck. It's you he's ripping off. It's your father's company he and his queer buddies are taking down the tube."