by John Updike
‘You know why I’ve had all my babies?’ he said. ‘I never really understood until the other night, something Ruth said. You know she’s this great believer in natural childbirth. Well Joanna was really quite painful for her so now it turns out we had to have two more so she could perfect her technique.’
He had hoped Sally would laugh at this, and she did, and in a sudden mutual gush they cashed into the silver of laughter all the sad secrets they could find in their pockets. She had more secrets than he. The inequality of their exchange grieved him, and as the dunes looped longer shadows into their small valley he kissed her wrists and confessed, in a desperate attempt to balance their plights. ‘I did a very bad thing in marrying Ruth. Much worse, really, than if I’d married for money. I married her because I knew she’d make a good wife. And that’s what she’s done. God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Sally.’
‘Don’t be sad. I love you.’
‘I know, I know, and I love you. How can I not be sad? What can we do ?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Go on like this a little more?’
‘It won’t stand still.’ He gestured upwards and stared as if to blind himself. ‘The fucking sun won’t stand still.’
‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ she said.
Both on their knees, they began to gather up their equipment and to revolve in their minds the fragile lies they must deliver to their homes. She looked so calm and docile, his Sally, in the sandy light, her pale hair falling as she bowed into some tiny simplicity of this, their only housekeeping, that he angrily embraced her, for the last time this day. All their embraces felt to be the last. Almost lazily, she kneeled against him and flattened her body to his and encircled his back with her arms. Her shoulder tasted warm; his lips moved on her skin. ‘Baby I can’t swing it,’ he said, and the flutter of her nodding made their bodies vibrate together. I know. I know.
‘Hey? Jerry? Over your shoulder I can see the Sound, and there’s a little sailboat, and some town far off, and the waves are coming in to the rocks, and it’s so sunny, and just so beautiful? No. Don’t turn your head. Believe me.’
2
The Wait
‘Good-bye?’
‘Don’t say that word to me, Jerry Please don’t say it.’ Sally’s wrist ached from holding the receiver so long, and now her whole forearm began to tremble. She pinched the receiver between her shoulder and her ear and used her freed hands to button one of Peter’s straps; in the last few months he had learned to dress himself, all except for the buttons, and she had hardly found it in her scattered wits to praise him. Poor child, he had been standing there for ten minutes waiting for his mother to get through talking; waiting and listening, waiting and watching with that wary glimmering expression on his face – she began to cry. It came upon her like a gentle fit of retching; with clenched teeth she tried to keep her sobs from carrying into the telephone.
‘Hey? Don’t.’ Jerry laughed in embarrassment, faintly and far away. ‘It’s just for two days.’
‘Don’t say it, damn you. I don’t care what you mean, don’t say it.’ I’m crazy, she thought; I’m a crazy woman and he’ll start to hate me. At the thought of his hating her after she had given so much of herself to him, she became indignant. ‘If all you can do is laugh at me maybe we should say good-bye for good.’
‘Oh, Christ. I’m not laughing at you. I love you. I hate it that I can’t be there to comfort you.’
Peter nudged closer, to have the other strap buttoned, and she smelled a Life Saver on his breath. ‘Where did you get that candy?’ she asked. ‘We mustn’t eat candy in the morning.’
Jerry asked, ‘Who’s there?’
‘Nobody Just Peter.’
‘Bobby gave me,’ Peter said, and now his glimmering expression seemed about to resolve into fear.
‘You go find Bobby and tell him I want to talk to him. Go, sweetie. Go find Bobby and tell him. Mommy will be off the phone in just a minute.’
‘Poor Peter,’ Jerry said in her ear. ‘Don’t send him away.’
How could he say this, he who had robbed her of all joy in her children? Yet of course it was just that he could say it that enlarged her love so helplessly; he refused to remain fixed in the role of her lover as she imagined it should be played. A needless kindness kept shattering his shell. Tears burned her cheeks; she held silent to keep her soaked voice from him. Her abdomen and arms physically ached. God, could he be doing it on purpose?
‘Hey? Hi?’
‘Hi,’ she answered.
‘You O.K.?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can go to the Garden Club while I’m away, and take the children to the beach, and read Moravia –’
‘I’m reading Camus now.’
‘You’re so intelligent.’
‘Won’t you miss your plane?’
‘Take Peter to the beach, and play with the baby, and lie in the sun, and be nice to Richard…’
‘I can’t. I can’t be nice to Richard. You’ve ruined him for me.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘I know, I know.’ Jerry’s fault as a lover, his cruel fault, was that he acted like a husband. She had never had a husband before. It seemed to Sally now in the light of Jerry that she had been married ten years to a man who wanted only to be her lover, keeping between them the distance that lovers must cross. Richard was always criticizing her, analysing her. When she was young it had been flattering; now it just seemed mean. Out of bed he must always try to strip her down to some twisted core, some mistaken motive. Whereas Jerry kept trying to dress her, flinging her sad little scarves of comfort and advice. He saw her as pathetically exposed.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I love you. I wish you could come to Washington with me. But it can’t be. We were very lucky to get away with it once. Richard knows something. Ruth knows.’
‘She does?’
‘Her glands do.’
‘Do what?’
‘Know. Now don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t have been so lovely the second time anyway. I’ll miss you constantly and won’t sleep at all in the bed by myself. The air conditioner going whoosh, whoosh.’
‘You’ll miss Ruth too.’
‘Not so much.’
‘No? Hey I love you for saying, “Not so much.” A real lover would have said, “Not at all.” ’
He laughed. ‘That’s what I am. An unreal lover.’
‘Then why can’t I shut you out? Jerry I hurt, physically hurt. Even Richard feels sorry for me and gives me sleeping pills from his own prescription.’
‘Greater love hath no man than to give sleeping pills from his own prescription.’
‘I could call Josie this evening and say I’m in the city and the Saab has broken down. It’s been acting funny lately I know they’d believe me.’
‘Oh, sweetie. You’re so gallant. It would never swing. They’d find out and he wouldn’t let you have the children.’
‘I don’t want the children, I want you.’
‘Don’t say that. You love your children very much. Just looking at Peter made you cry.’
‘It was you who made me cry.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
She didn’t know how to answer this; she could never tell him that you were responsible for things you didn’t mean to do as well as things you did. He believed in God, and that inhibited her from giving him instruction on anything. Through the kitchen window she saw Peter finding Bobby. Peter had forgotten the message she had given him, and his older brother led him out of sight into the woods.
She asked, ‘Will you be at the State Department all afternoon? Could I call you there if I come?’
‘Sally don’t come. You’ll just crucify yourself for nothing. We’d only be there one night.’
‘You’ll forget me.’
His laugh shocked her, she had meant this so seriously.
‘I don’t think in two days I’ll forget you.’
‘You think a night with me is nothi
ng.’
He paused; she felt in the unreeling seconds that she was being given line. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think a night with you is almost everything. I’m hoping for a lifetime of them.’
‘Hoping’s a nice safe thing to do.’
‘I don’t want to fight with you. I never fight with women. I don’t think we should take any risks until we know what we’re going to do.’
She sighed. ‘You’re right. I say to myself, “Jerry’s right.” We mustn’t be reckless. There are too many other people involved.’
‘Hordes of them. I wish there weren’t. I wish the world was just you and me. Listen. You don’t want to come. The airlines are all messed up by this strike at Eastern. Right now I can see six four-star generals and two hundred guys in Dacron suits shoving towards Gate Seventeen. My plane must be about to board.’ He was in a phone booth at LaGuardia. The flight he had planned to take had been full; he had killed the time of delay by calling her. She thought, If he had gone on the right plane he wouldn’t have called me; and this casualness, the implied smallness of her place in his life, enlarged him, scooped wider with its insult the aching hollow of her love.
He was waiting for her to laugh or agree, she couldn’t remember which. ‘I love you so much,’ she said limply.
‘Hey how will you explain this on your phone bill? I wouldn’t have called collect if I’d known we’d talk so long.’
‘Oh, I’ll just say – I don’t know what I’ll say. He never listens to what I say anyway.’ Sally sometimes wondered how many of her accusations of her husband were unfair. Her conversation was like a garden gone wild; surprising weeds sprang up in it every day.
‘They are boarding. Good-bye?’
‘Good-bye, darling.’
‘I’ll call you Wednesday morning.’
‘Very good.’
He heard a rebuke in her tone and asked, ‘Shall I call you from Washington? Tomorrow morning?’
‘No, you’ll have things to do. Be busy. Just think of me a little.’
He laughed. ‘How could I help but?’ He waited, said, ‘You’re the one,’ pecked a little flat kiss into the telephone, and hung up. She replaced the receiver quickly, as if stoppering a bottle from which Jerry might escape.
Her hair uncombed, her bathrobe flapping, Sally went outdoors and screeched at the edge of the woods, ‘Bo-oys! Bee-each!’
The woods screening the houses of the neighbourhood from one another smelled profoundly of summer, not the usual delicate Connecticut scent of thinned underwood and grass but a rich warm odour of layered leaf mould and mouldering logs – the way vacations had smelled when she was a child from Seattle summering in the Cascades. She went upstairs to change, and this nostalgic ferny fragrance, persisting through the bedroom window, intersected the faintly corrupt tang of salt water on her bathing suit. Sally bundled and pinned her hair. Alone in her bathroom, she conjured up Jerry; she gave the air his eyes. In making love his first motion was always to remove her hairpins and in the daily details of her toilet she seemed to bend close to him, sharing with him his careful love of her body.
She mixed a thermos of lemonade, scolded the boys into their bathing suits, and got into the car. The Saab had lately developed a reluctance to start, so she parked it pointed downhill and used momentum to turn the engine over. Josie was laboriously pushing the baby carriage, with a bag of groceries propped at Theodora’s feet, up the driveway as Sally coasted down; she had reached the steep place where Sally let out the clutch. The women could exchange only frightened looks in the precarious moment as the spark ignited and the engine jerked into power. Sally felt that Josie had something to ask her, something about meals or naps, but Josie knew the routine as well as she – better, because she was less distracted, was middle-aged and past love.
Under the tranquillizing June sun the Sound was a smooth plane reflecting the command, Don’t go. She led Peter and Bobby well down the beach. Sally thought she spotted Ruth in the pack of mothers at the other end, and Bobby said, ‘I want to go play with Charlie Conant.’
‘You can find him after we get settled,’ Sally said. She discovered herself crying again; she didn’t notice until her cheeks registered the wetness. Don’t go. Everything agreed on this – the grains of sand, the chorus of particles alive on the water, the wary glances of her sons, the distant splashes and shouts that came to her when she lay down and closed her eyes, like the smooth clatter of an ethereal sewing machine. Don’t go, you can’t go, you are here. The unanimity was wonderful. He didn’t want her to go, he thought a night with her was nothing, he told her she was crucifying herself, he said it would not be as good as the first time. She grew furious with him. Her breathing felt oppressed under the tyranny of the sun; a rough touch gouged and abraded the skin of her exposed midriff, and she opened her eyes prepared to scream. Peter had brought her a crab claw, weathered and fragrant. ‘Don’t go, Mommy’ he pleaded, holding out close to her eyes his fragile dead gift. Her ears must be deceiving her.
‘It’s lovely, sweetie. Don’t put it in your mouth. Now go away and play with Bobby.’
‘Bobby hates me.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling, he likes you very much, he just doesn’t know how to show it. Now please go away and let Mommy think.’
Of course she shouldn’t go. As Jerry said, they had been lucky the first time. Richard had been on one of his trips. Jerry had waited for her at National Airport and they had taken a taxi into Washington. Their taxi driver, a solemn tea-coloured man who drove his cab with a proprietorial gentleness, had noticed the quality of their silence and asked if they wanted to go through the park, around the Tidal Basin, to see the cherry trees. Jerry told him yes. The trees were in blossom, pink, mauve, salmon, white; tremblingly Jerry’s fingers kept revolving Richard’s wedding ring on her finger. A black nurse was playing catch with some small boys in a shady clearing and the smallest of them held out his hands and the ball fell untouched at his feet. The hotel lobby was dark-carpeted and rich with Southern accents. With a lowering of his eyelashes the desk clerk accepted her as Mrs Conant. Perhaps her face had been too radiant. Their room had white walls and framed flower prints, and looked out on an airshaft. Jerry shaved with a brush and soap bowl, which she would not have guessed. She thought all men used electric razors, because Richard did. Nor would she have guessed that the first evening, while she was painting her eyes in the bathroom and he was watching Arnold Palmer sink the winning putt on television, he would fall into a depression, and that for fifteen minutes she would have to hold him on the bed while he stared at the white wall and murmured about pain and sin, before he gathered the courage to button his shirt and put on his coat and take her to a restaurant. In an eye-whipping spring wind they walked block after block on the wide, diagonally intersecting streets, looking for a restaurant. Away from the illuminated monuments and façades, Washington seemed dark and secret, like the rear of a stage set. Limousines swished by with a liquid, lonely sound heard in Manhattan only very late at night. She felt the curse slowly lift from Jerry’s mind. He became manicky and leap-frogged a parking meter, and in the restaurant, a fancy-priced steakhouse catering to Texans, he impersonated a Congressman escorting the Queen of the Minnesota Dairyland. Honeh, Ah could take a shaaan to you. Their waiter, eavesdropping, had expected a huge tip, had been plainly disappointed. Strange, how fondly she remembered the awkwardnesses. In a narrow little gift shop, where Jerry had insisted on buying toys to take home to his children, the saleswoman kept turning to her as if she were their mother, tentatively, puzzled by her silence. On the last morning, by the elevator, on their way to breakfast, she had been asked by the head chambermaid if the room might be cleaned, and she had said yes; this woman was the first person to treat her without a flicker of doubt as Jerry’s wife. When they returned at noon, the venetian blinds had been torn away from the window, their bed was stripped and shoved against the bureau, and a slouching Negro was lathering the carpet with a softly screaming machine. Jerry and Sally
left the hotel in one taxi and took separate planes home and found that the coincidence of their absences had not been noticed. Their momentary marriage, a wedding ring overboard, sank greener and greener into the past and became irretrievable. No matter what happened, it would never happen again, never happen the same, in all of time. It would be silly – insane – to risk everything and go to him now. For now the venetian blinds of their affair were, if not quite torn off, at least set at a revealing tilt: Josie blushed and stiffly left the kitchen when Jerry’s usual ten o’clock call began ringing; Richard sat drinking the evenings away with a thoughtful dent in his upper lip; and the glimmering, watchful expression almost never left Peter’s face. Even the baby, who was learning to walk, seemed shy of her and preferred to lean on space. Perhaps this was a hallucination – at times Sally feared for her sanity.
She stood up. The seam of water and sky, marked by the thin beige line of the Island, seemed to exclude an immense possibility. Panic struck her. ‘Bo-oys,’ she called. ‘Time to go-o!’
Bobby’s body twisted and dropped to the sand in a tantrum. He shouted, ‘We just came, you nut!’
‘Don’t you ever call people that,’ she told him. ‘If you’re rude, people won’t know what a nice little boy you are.’ It was one of Jerry’s theories that if you often enough told someone he was nice he would become nice. In a way it did work. Peter came to her, and Bobby afraid of being left alone, sulkily followed to the Saab.
Don’t go. No. Yet the command had no weight, no weight whatsoever, and though she read it in a dozen obstructive omens that bristled about her as she dressed and lied her way out of the house and drove to the airport and paid her way onto the aeroplane, it remained a weightless sentence, afloat on the deep certainty that she should go, that going was the only possible thing to do, and absolutely right. A righteous tide lifted her over the snag of Josie’s surprise, carried past the children’s upturned faces, pushed her through the choked hurry of dressing and the ominous clogging of the Saab’s starter, urged her down the swerving allées of the Merritt Parkway and the metal-strewn boulevards of Queens, and sustained her nerve during the wait at LaGuardia while United found her a seat on a Washington flight. Then Sally flew; she became a bird, a heroine. She took the sky on her back, levelled out on the cloudless prairie above the clouds – boiling, radiant, motionless – and held her breath for twenty pages of Camus while the air-conditioner nozzle whispered into her hair. The plane canted above a continent of loamy farms where dot-like horses galloped. Acres of pastel houses in curved rows swung into view, and then a city composed of diagonal avenues and miniature monuments. Washington’s shaft was momentarily aligned down a breadth of Mall with the Capitol dome. The plane skimmed water, thumped, reversed its engines, shuddered, and with a stately swaying waddled to a stop. A departed shower had left the runway damp in patches. The afternoon sun struck from the cement a humid warmth more tropical than the warmth she had left on the beach. It was three o’clock. Within the terminal, people were rapidly threading their way through the interwoven aromas of floor wax and hot dogs. She found the empty phone booth. Her hand fumbled inserting its dime. The quick of her index fingernail hurt as she dialled the necessary numerals.