by John Updike
Jerry ate standing above her, and the pose revived the actor in him. If the area was a stage, they were on the very lip. A constant shuffle of people passed a few feet from them. ‘I’ve figured out the bind I’m in,’ he told her. ‘It’s between death and death. To live without you is death to me. On the other hand, to abandon my family is a sin; to do it I’d have to deny God, and by denying God I’d give up all claim to immortality.’
Sally felt weak; what could she say to such an accusation? She tried to fit herself into his frame of mind; she could hardly believe that minds still existed in that frame.
Having gobbled his sandwich, he squatted, and murmured to her. She turned her head aside in embarrassment, and caught a familiar-looking man gazing at them from over by the bar. He averted his gaze; his little moustache, profiled against a neon advertisement, made a dab of green light under his nose. Jerry was murmuring, ‘I look at your face, and imagine myself lying in bed dying, and ask myself, “Is this the face I want at my death-bed?” And I don’t know. I honestly don’t know, Sally.’
‘You’re not going to die for a long time, Jerry, and you’ll have many women between me and then.’
‘I will not. You are my only woman, you’re the only woman I want. You were given to me in Heaven, and Heaven won’t let me have you.’
She felt he enjoyed making things impossible by carrying them into these absurd absolutes, and furthermore she felt he enjoyed it because it punished her. Punished her for loving him. And she knew that in his mind this punishing was a kindness; his conscience insisted that he keep abrading her on the edges of pain that bounded their love. Yet she knew also that he did it like a child who states the worst, hoping to be contradicted. ‘You’re not a woman, Jerry, so I think you exaggerate what your leaving would do to Ruth.’
‘Really? What would it do? Tell me.’ Ruth was the one earthly topic that never failed to interest him.
‘Well, she’d be stunned, and very lonely, but she’d have the children, and she’d have – this is hard to say, but I remember it from the times I’ve been alone – she’d have the satisfaction of getting through every day by herself. It’s something marriage doesn’t give you. And then, of course, she would remarry.’
‘Do you think she would? Say yes.’
‘Of course she would. But – Jerry? Now don’t get mad.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘You ought to do it if you’re going to do it. I don’t know how much she guesses, or how much you tell her, but if you torture her the way you torture me –’
‘Do I torture you? God. I mean to do just the opposite.’
‘I know. But it – I… I don’t want to sell myself. I’ll come to you as long as I can, and you don’t have to marry me. But you mustn’t keep teasing me with the possibility. If it’s possible, and you want it, do it, Jerry; leave her, and let her make a new life. She’ll live.’
‘I wish I was sure of that. If only there was some decent man who I know would marry her and take care of her – but every man we know, compared to me, is a clunk. Really. I’m not conceited, but that’s a fact.’
She wondered if that was why she loved him – that he could say something like that, and still look boyish, and expectant, and willing to be taught. ‘She won’t find another man until you leave her,’ Sally told him. ‘You can’t pick her new husband for her, Jerry; now that is conceited of you.’
Whenever she tried to puncture him, he seemed grateful. Come on, his grin seemed to say, hurt me. Help me. ‘Well,’ he said, and put his coffee cup inside hers. ‘This has been very interesting. We’re just full of home truths.’
‘I guess we’re talked out,’ she said, trying to apologize.
‘It’s nice, isn’t it? It would be so nice for us to have said everything, and just be quiet together. But we’d better go back. Back to Pandemonium.’
Standing up, she said, ‘Thank you for the sandwich. It was very good.’
He told her, ‘You’re great. You’re a great blonde. When you get up, it’s like the flag being raised. I want to pledge allegiance.’ And in front of everyone he solemnly placed his hand over his heart.
The crowd had swelled; around the ticket counters it was impenetrable. The enormous hopelessness of their position broke upon her, and for the first time since noon Sally wanted to cry. Jerry turned to her and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you home. What about renting a car?’
‘And driving all that way? Jerry, how can we?’
‘Well, don’t you feel we’ve had it, planewise?’
She nodded, and tears burned in her throat like a regurgitation. Jerry virtually ran; the skin of her heels seemed to be tearing loose as she chased him down the corridor. The automobile-rental booths were far away, three lonely islands side by side.
The Hertz girl wore yellow, the Avis girl red, the National girl green. Jerry had a Hertz credit card, and the girl in yellow said, ‘I’m sorry, all our cars have been taken. Everybody wants to go to New York.’
It was their destiny to be late. Everywhere they went, crowds had been there before them. Jerry protested ineffectually; indeed, he seemed relieved to have one more possibility closed, one more excuse for inaction provided. Richard would somehow have managed; nothing was too complicated for him to finagle, finagling was a sensuous pleasure for him. Richard’s shape, stocky but quick, moved in the corner of her eye; a man came up to them and said, ‘Did I hear you say New York? I’d be happy to share expenses with you.’ He was the man who had to be in Newark by seven o’clock. It was twenty of seven now.
The girl at Hertz called across the aisle to the girl at Avis, ‘Gina, do you have any more cars you can let go to New York?’
‘I doubt it but let me call the lot.’ Gina dialled, bracing the receiver between her shoulder and ear. Sally found herself wondering if Gina had ever been in love. She was a young girl, but with that sluggish facial expression, of satiety and discontent, that Italian girls got, Sally imagined, from being pressed too long against the breast of a sorrowing mother. Sally had run away from her own sorrowing mother as soon as she could, fled into school and then marriage, and maybe that was why every sorrow came to her new, jagged and fresh and undreamed-of; she wondered, if every woman in the world carries this ache, how can it go on? How does anything in the world get done?
The tall green girl at the National desk asked, ‘Why does everybody want to go to New York. What’s in New York?’
‘The Liberty Bell,’ Jerry told her.
‘If I were you two,’ she said to him, ‘I’d take a cab back into the city and see a movie.’
Jerry asked her, ‘What’s good?’
The Hertz girl said, ‘My boyfriend liked Last Year at Marienbad but I thought it was terrible. The bushes didn’t have any shadows. “They call this art,” I said to him, and he said, “It is art.” ’
The Avis girl called over, ‘There’s a new Doris Day and Rock Hudson downtown that everybody likes.’
Jerry said, ‘I love Doris Day. Hollywood should let her sing more.’ It saddened Sally to see how easily he talked with women, any women.
Gina put down the phone and said, ‘Alice, they have one just came in they’ll let go.’
And Alice, sweet chinless Alice with her easily pleased boyfriend, smiled bucktoothed and said, ‘There you are, sir. She’ll take care of you.’
‘Don’t forget me,’ the man who had to go to Newark said.
Jerry turned to the man, blushed, and explained, ‘My wife and I, I guess, would prefer to drive alone.’
The man stepped forward and shook Jerry’s hand. ‘My name’s Fancher. I make my home in Elizabeth, New Jersey and I’m in the chemical additives line. I don’t want to pressure you one way or another, but it would be a great kindness to me if I could ride along.’
Jerry gracefully clapped his long hand to the top of his head and said, ‘Well, let’s think about it. Let me get the car first.’
He dropped his Hertz credit card on Gina’s desk and
she explained that since this was an Avis car she would need a cash deposit of twenty-five dollars.
‘But we don’t have twenty-five dollars, do we?’ Jerry asked Sally.
‘The tickets,’ she said.
Fancher stepped forward. ‘You want twenty-five dollars?’
She and Jerry studied each other, and the romance of driving together alone under moonlight, towards midnight and their fate, hung between them like a painted screen. ‘I’ll cash in the tickets,’ he said, ‘I’ll turn that girl’s hair really grey.’ To Gina he said, ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ To Sally he said, ‘You wait here and guard the car.’ He winced apologetically in Fancher’s face and flew away.
Long minutes passed. Mr Fancher stayed with her silently, touching his moustache, guarding her while she guarded the phantom automobile. The three girls, in the lull that had settled over their islands, chatted back and forth, about boyfriends and bathing suits. Sally felt dizzy. The acid taste kept rising in her throat; she felt sick of love. Love, love was what had clogged the world, it was love that refused to let the planes leave, love that hid her children from her, love that made her husband look senile in profile. Fancher hovered close to her; he was in the chemical additives line and should be in Newark, yet she had promised to love and obey this man till death did them part. Dear God, let go. She held herself very upright and quiet, wondering if she would throw up. The cement floor was littered with cigarette filters and heel marks. The green girl from National was saying that she didn’t think she had the right figure for a bikini, being so tall, but her boyfriend bought her one for a joke, and now she wouldn’t wear anything else, it felt so free.
Red-faced from running, Jerry came back, Jerry with his sun-burned nose and elusive eyes and his beautiful look of being a kite. ‘Forget it,’ he announced, making a triumphant V with his arms, and including all four women in his emblematic embrace. To Fancher he said, ‘You can have the car. Good luck in Newark.’ He touched Sally’s arm and told her, ‘The girl at United says there’s going to be a section and to see a name she gave me.’ He showed her a slip of paper on which a hasty female hand had scribbled the one word ‘Cardomon’.
‘Have you seen him yet?’
‘No, he wasn’t there at the moment. Let’s go back and find him.’
‘Jerry your suitcase.’
‘Oh. Right. God, you’re so competent, Sally.’
Fancher said, ‘You said there’s a section? Then I don’t want the car either.’ He knifed past them and, moving with a quickness surprising in a stout man, beat them back to the waiting room.
Here an instinct of movement seemed to have seized the human tides; almost all the people were moving towards the boarding gates. Jerry and Sally, alarmed, followed them out of the doors and down the corridor. A crowd had accumulated. A strange chant was going up; it seemed to Sally to be ‘The bridesmaid, the bridesmaid.’ She thought it was another hallucination, but it proved to be exactly what they were shouting. At the centre of the crowd the Negro in blue sunglasses was conferring with a sandy-haired man wearing a company coat and carrying a clipboard. Beside them, a shinily dressed arc of the middle-aged was urging forward, with deep Dixie accents, a girl in a flowered hat and a shimmering dress of yellow silk. Sally understood: she was a bridesmaid, and had to be on the plane or miss a wedding; or had she come from a wedding? The chant deepened. Jerry joined in. ‘The bridesmaid, the bridesmaid!’ Indignation bit into Sally’s stomach, and the press of tears overwhelmed her eyes. What was so unfair, the girl was not even pretty. She had a strawberry birthmark beside her nose and a tense wrinkled simper. The sandy man nodded to the Negro, who flashed his deep ironic smile and took the bridesmaid’s ticket. A cheer went up. The girl passed through the door. The gate clanged shut. The seven-fifteen flight to New York had departed.
Back in the waiting room, Jerry left Sally and went to look for Mr Cardomon. As she stood alone by the tired blue wall, a tall man came up to her and said gently, ‘Aren’t you Sally Mathias?’
It was Two Initials Wigglesworth. The two initials abruptly came to her: A.D. He asked, ‘Are you here with Dick?’ He spoke with a velvet smoothness; he was well shaped and very combed, and so wealthy that Richard had fairly danced the few times he had come to the house.
‘No, I’m here by myself,’ she said. ‘I do this every so often. My mother lives in Georgetown. Are you trying to get to New York?’
‘No, I’m en route to St Louis. My flight leaves in half an hour. Could I get you a drink?’
‘That would be lovely,’ Sally said, ‘but I’m a standby and I think I’d better stay here. We’re waiting for a section.’ She adjusted the pronoun. ‘I’ve been here since three o’clock. It’s a grotesque mess.’
‘I do think you could use a drink.’ He smiled like a great brushed cat purring; he was perfectly handsome and perfectly repulsive, and beneath all his grooming he knew it.
‘I think I could too,’ she said, glancing around for Jerry. He wasn’t anywhere.
Wigglesworth interpreted her glancing around as acquiescence, and took her arm. She snapped it away. She hadn’t realized how tense she was. ‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I’m honestly on the verge of tears; Richard expected me back by supper.’
‘It makes one rather miss the dear old trains, doesn’t it?’ he said soothingly, offended.
‘What are you going to do in St Louis?’ she asked. She felt the tight mask of charm fitting across her face; felt herself, unstoppably beginning to flirt.
‘Oh, very dreary. Banking business, a rail merger. A desperation move. I loathe the Midwest.’
‘Do you?’
‘Tell me, how did Dick do with his Canadian oil issue? I was fascinated, but I couldn’t interest Father.’
‘I never heard about it. He never tells me anything. How is Bea?’ She had been groping for his wife’s name, remembering only the woman’s waxen ballerina’s face and that her name, too, was some sort of initial.
‘Very well. We have two children now.’
‘Do you? That’s wonderful. Another girl?’
‘Another boy. Are you sure you wouldn’t like that drink?’
‘It’s tempting,’ Sally said.
‘Have you heard about Jamie Babson? He’s married again – a spectacular Indonesian girl. She does simultaneous translation at the U.N.’
‘Yes. He would like that.’
Wigglesworth laughed; his teeth were immaculate, but small for his face. ‘And Bink Hubbard – I know Richard has met him – has disappeared in Florida; the rumour has it he’s shipped out on a Liberian freighter again.’
‘I don’t think I know him.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. He’s one of those men other men rather envy.’
‘Yes, there is that kind of man.’ Sally sounded mechanical to herself. Push, pull, push, pull: a real whore.
Wigglesworth gazed over her head and asked, ‘Isn’t that Jerry Conant?’
‘Where? Do you know Jerry?’
‘Of course. Doesn’t he live rather near you out there?’
He glanced down, his immaculate eyebrows (did he pluck between them?) lifted at the intensity of her concern. ‘Through Ruth,’ he explained. ‘My parents went to her father’s church. She was considered quite a beauty.’
‘She still is.’
‘Nobody ever understood quite why she married Jerry.’
And there he was. She felt him in the side of her vision when he was still far away coming back from the counters. She felt him hesitate, then decide to approach. His voice, close to her ear, harshly announced, ‘Anno Domini Wigglesworth, the Rock of Ages himself.’
‘Jerry Are you stranded here too?’
‘Apparently I’ve been looking for a mythical man called Cardomon who’s supposed to unstrand us.’
‘You and Mrs Mathias?’
‘Yes, Mrs Mathias and I seem to be caught in the same pickle.’ He looked down at his hand, which held two tickets. He held them up. ‘I’ve taken over ne
gotiations for her. Do you have a reservation?’
‘Yes.’
‘How would you feel about giving it to Sally?’
‘Splendid – but I’m going to St Louis.’
Jerry turned to Sally and said, ‘Maybe we should go to St Louis. We could get on a raft and float down the Mississippi.’
She laughed, shocked. How dare he tease her, right in the teeth of disaster!
Wigglesworth’s smile had become fixed, and from the heightened composure of both men’s faces she knew she had become an object, a body, between them. ‘I was just telling Sally,’ Wigglesworth said, ‘that Jamie Babson has married an Indonesian.’
‘Excellent,’ Jerry said. ‘Miscegenation is the only permanent solvent for world tensions. Kennedy knows it, too.’
‘Come, Jerry,’ the other man said. ‘When did you get religion? I thought you were stooging for the State Department.’
They were fighting over her. Sally’s sick dread returned, a desire to sleep; she thought of Richard’s sitting alone, puzzled, worried for her, sipping his second Martini, and she yearned to faint, to sink down into the trafficked, dirty floor, into the spaces between the cigarette filters, and awake at his feet. The men talked on, bantering angrily through her daze, until Wigglesworth, routed by Jerry’s superior rudeness, said, ‘I believe it’s time for me to board. Good luck to both of you.’ And in his farewell, in the way he bowed from his rigid height, there was something genuinely gracious, almost a blessing. Only a stuffed shirt could have brought it off.
Jerry was sulky and opaque. Had it come, his hating her? She asked him, ‘You didn’t find Cardomon?’
‘No. He doesn’t exist. Do you think it’s a code? Cardomon spelled backwards is Nom-o-drac.’ The eight o’clock flight to St Louis was announced and Wigglesworth, staring straight ahead, chin high, was carried out of the waiting room on a river of briefcases. Jerry took Sally’s hands. ‘You’re trembling.’