Marry Me: A Romance

by John Updike

  The other snapshot, black and white and several years older, taken in ’58 or ’59, shows Jerry, his skinny chest gleaming like metal in the dying light, submerged up to his waist in water, an incandescent kettle held balanced on his head. He is bringing mussels back to a boat where Sally Mathias had sat, snapping the picture. Ruth had been startled that this woman could operate a camera. They were all new in town, with tiny children and houses that felt like enormous playhouses, and the Mathiases had invited the Conants to go musselling in their boat. Another couple invited could not come. The Conants had shied from accepting; they distrusted the Mathiases, the little they knew of them. Sally, big blonde expensively dressed Sally, made a show of lugging gallon bottles of milk home from the supermarket to save a few pennies delivery would cost, yet they drank wine by the case. There was something excessive about the Mathiases, something both generous and greedy, violent and self-contradictory Richard was a big overweight man with dark wiry hair in need of a haircut, a deep voice that in every swollen syllable expressed oral conceit, and a blind eye, the result of a childhood accident. It didn’t show, except in the slightly anxious, over-watchful tilt of his somewhat leonine head. And if you dared look, you could see that the pupil, which should have been black, wore a kind of cap of frost. As if in pain, he drank a lot, smoked a lot, drove his Mercedes and philosophized a lot; but what did he do? He had money, and took trips about it. His dead father had owned a liquor store in Cannonport, which had fostered branches in shopping malls as the little city metastasized and merged with exurban New York. Unlike most of Greenwood’s young marrieds, Richard was native to the region. He loved the sea, and seafood. He had gone to Yale two years, and dropped out, as if half an education were enough for a man with one eye. He had married young, his wife was flashy and overanimated and highly visible. Both of them seemed determined to enjoy life; such determined hedonism seemed blasphemous to Jerry and vulgar to Ruth. Yet the day, which they had wanted to avoid, proved to be an idyll. The sun sparkled, the wine and words flowed. Jerry, an inland boy, squeamish and hydrophobic, consented to learn from Richard, and gathered the courage to press his face into the water and to tear clusters of mussels, purple and living, loose from submerged rocks. Proud of his exploit, he waded back to the whaler with a full kettle.

  His face is harshly shadowed and curiously savage. His eyes are hollow, a shadow dashes from his nose, his lips grin. A skinny slave, preoccupied and cruel. Above his left shoulder Richard’s legs, soft and fuzzy and shod in sopping tennis sneakers, grip a shelf of slippery rock. The smudge between his legs must be Grace Island.

  In the time that flowed from this frozen moment, they took the boat in to the little sandy cove on Grace Island. The four of them gathered wood and built a fire and boiled the mussels. Richard had packed butter, salt, garlic. They had gathered so many, they took to feeding them to each other as a game. Eyes shut, Jerry could not tell the difference between Ruth’s and Sally’s fingers in his mouth. As night thickened around them, they played word games, Indian-wrestled, finished the wine, undressed, and went swimming. Their naked shapes made chaste blurs in the whispering wet dark. Jerry was surprised how much warmer and less menacing the water felt when you were naked. When they regathered around the fire, Richard and Jerry put on trousers over their wet legs and the women held towels about their bodies. The drops of water on Ruth’s and Sally’s shoulders glinted with scarlet centres, reflected from the fire. How gorgeous she is, Ruth thought. But heedless, and vain. Readjusting her towel, Sally had showed her her breasts, and Ruth had envied their smallness, unembarrassed and firm. Since the age of thirteen Ruth had felt her breasts were too big. It was as if, Ruth felt, there had not been enough of her grown inside to carry them off; and this sensation had persisted; her life pushed on ahead of her, betraying an inner woman not quite ready to be unveiled. Across the fire, Jerry looked unfamiliar, happy in his skin, beside the bigger, softer man, who was benignly drunk, as were they all. Yet the idyll was not repeated. The rest of that summer, the Mathiases took other couples musselling, and that winter they separated – another piece of excess, it seemed to the Conants, another showy extravagance – over an affair Richard had evidently been conducting in Cannonport. By the time they reconciled in the spring, and Richard returned to Greenwood, the boat had been, in one of his mysterious financial manoeuvres, sold.

  He took satisfaction in being mysterious. He travelled to no apparent purpose, often overnight, and his money-making schemes – a local coffeehouse, a publishing firm specializing in Oriental erotica, a firm that would re-upholster automobiles in the same kind of tapestry-cloth being used in the newly fashionable ‘carpetbag’ suitcases – never came to much. In conversation with women, he would pretend not to understand the simplest statements, and his good eye would water, in sympathy with his bad, in sympathy with the sadness of what was being confessed to him.

  It made Ruth blush, as if a secret were being pried from her, and then blush with anger, anger at herself for blushing, and at Richard, for being an intrusive fool. Yet not merely that. Possibly she was betraying a secret, the secret of herself that she had kept from Jerry these eight years of being his wife. It was a wordless secret, that is, one that Ruth did not seek words for. She liked Richard’s smell, tobacco and liquor and a leathery staleness reminding her of her father’s study after one of his weary Saturdays writing a sermon; she liked the protective baffled way he hunched and lurched at parties, and always, sooner or later, came to talk to her. Jerry noticed this; he hated Richard. Richard was one of the few people they had ever met, in their thirty years in materialist America, who professed being an atheist. When she had mentioned to him Jerry’s insistence that the children go to Sunday school, Richard’s wiry eyebrows arched and the live eye widened and he laughed disbelievingly ‘For God’s sake, why?’

  ‘Because it matters to him,’ Ruth said, loyally – though perhaps such clearly reflexive loyalty was disloyalty.

  After this, Richard didn’t always pass up a chance to ‘bug’ Jerry, as he put it. Once, on the Mathiases’ side lawn in the pride of a summer afternoon, Richard produced a plastic dashboard Christ that had arrived unsolicited in the mails, and proceeded to clean his fingernails with the tip of the hand upraised in blessing. ‘Look, Sally-O,’ he had said, ‘doesn’t Christ make a good fingernail-picker?’ Sally, who had been raised, Ruth had gathered, as a Catholic, snatched the little doll from Richard’s hand and said something to the effect that she didn’t know what she believed, but … really, Richard. Jerry had turned pale under the sun. He always used the incident afterwards to illustrate how sadistic that bastard Mathias was to his wife.

  Whereas in truth Richard was too good to Sally. As her voice rose shrill from a corner of a rumpus room or the patio of a lawn party, he would wince, but clamp his lips shut on the conclusion of a bargain, the price he was paying for her high visibility. He had a family sense that Jerry quite lacked. No matter how late the night’s drinking, he rose early, often cooking breakfast for his wife and children, while Jerry didn’t get up until the children were fed and out of the house and there were minutes to make the 8.17. Though Jerry mocked Richard’s lack of vocation, he did do things: build bookcases, refinish furniture, grow tomatoes and lettuce and pumpkins, go musselling. He helped Sally bring their old colonial farmhouse into a state of polished modernity; dozens of touches in the house were his. Often at home all day, he gave Sally, what Ruth envied, an audience for her housework. Though it strained his good eye, he read, and read books women read – novels, biographies, psychology. He saw the raising of children as a kind of problem, where Jerry saw none: he was the original, and in the children God had made some reproductions which in time would be distributed. Jerry loved duplication and its instruments – cameras, printing presses – but did that make Ruth one? Richard, half-blind as he was, saw through her, to a secret no one else had seen since Martha, the fat black woman her mother had hired to cook and clean in the days of the Buffalo parish. In her reig
n the kitchen had become a haven, a cave of what only had been whispered inside her before. ‘Ruthie,’ Martha would sigh, ‘you’re a magical girl but the world’s going to do you in. You don’t fear the right things.’ The more dire the pronouncement, the more cherished Ruth had felt. Richard, too, saw through her to some doom. And she saw through him, to the truth that Sally was hard on him, made him pay for her beauty; with her cool painterly vision Ruth watched him clown and drink and be a fool and saw that she could have eased him in a way he was not being eased, though the Mathiases did share a love of parties and the things money bought and a certain callowness that was reflected in the faces of their children, which were lifted towards their parents like bright empty plates. Yet he would talk Piaget and Spock and Anna Freud with Ruth, and Iris Murdoch and Julia Child, and furniture and cooking and style. He noticed her clothes, sometimes with a compliment, sometimes with an insult. He complained when she cut her hair; Jerry had asked her to, and had wanted it even shorter, ‘to show off her skull.’

  Why should he want to show off her skull? Dancing with her at a party, Richard stroked, not patted, her buttocks and told her he had always thought she had the sexiest bottom in town. ‘He talks to me woman to woman,’ Ruth replied, when Jerry complained of how much time she spent with Richard at parties; she knew as she said it that this was the first deliberate lie of her married life. At another party Richard invited her to have lunch with him, and even named the restaurant, a Chinese one towards Cannonport. She thanked him, and refused. She wondered afterwards if it had been proper to thank him. To be grateful seemed to be half-willing. Again, she having told him (why?) that she was distressed by Jerry’s ‘religious crisis’, Richard had offered to make a date with her so they could discuss it fully. ‘He sounds neurotic as hell, and I’ve read some books.’ She was sorry, she thought not. He didn’t press her. She liked that. His propositions were like a rather flat joke that, through being repeated, comes to be funny; she came to look forward to the moment at parties when Richard, his slightly pinched and lipless mouth prim with earnestness and his head atilt like a lame god’s, would put the jaded question to her.

  But away from parties, in hours of sudden privacy, in the weird solitude she would awake to in the middle of the night, as if in answer to a shout, Richard became an incubus upon her. She felt him fumbling and butting his way towards a secret that ached to be discovered. The unpleasant frost in his eye, where other people had a black point feeding on the light, chilled her; defensively a wild towering love for Jerry would rise up. She would give his dead body a hug, and he would stir, rotate, and fall asleep again. They slept differently; Jerry was an insomniac and slept deeply and late, Ruth fell asleep without effort and woke too early.

  If there was a supreme Unitarian commandment, it was Face things. ‘Having things out’ had been her father’s phrase, returning post-midnight from some ecumenical, interracial scrimmage in Poughkeepsie. One empty winter afternoon, two children at school and Geoffrey asleep, the whole house ticking like a clock, the furnace heaving, the floorboards drying, the outdoors brilliant with snow, Richard appeared at the door. Seeing his old tan Mercedes from the living-room windows as she went to answer the ring, she knew who it would be. The door was stuck and the wrench it took to pull it open startled them both. Framed in the doorway, wearing a raincoat and a plaid lumber-jack shirt open at the neck, he seemed a huge, woeful apparition. He had brought her a book they had discussed, the new Murdoch, as an excuse. As an excuse, it was cursorily offered; his instinct had told him he would not need much of one.

  She grew used to him, as winter yielded to spring.

  Under his corpulent weight, his shoulders filling her vision with soft black hairs, Ruth felt herself responding matter-of-factly to the thick, careful pounding of Richard’s carnal attack. It was all matter-of-fact, controlled, satisfactory; under this alien man there was time, time in which to make the trip to the edge and fall, fall and arrive where she had begun, pressed to the earth as if safe. The earth was her bed, hers and Jerry’s. The light of early afternoon opened around her. Geoffrey was having his nap at the other end of the upstairs. Curiously Ruth touched the little arc of purplish marks in the fat of Richard’s shoulder, teeth-marks left there, it seemed, by a third person. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Sweet pain, as they say.’

  He had a phrase for everything. Unwilling to test herself against his eyes, she studied his lips. There was a disturbing elderly jut to the lower one, and lovemaking had left them liquid with saliva. ‘It’s so unlike me,’ she said.

  His lips hardly moved when he talked. ‘It’s part of the act. Mistresses bite. Wives don’t.’

  ‘Don’t.’ She wriggled to shift his weight, which was beginning to crush. ‘Don’t poke fun.’

  His breath, sourly crested with whiskey, though he had come in the back door at noon and they had gone straight to bed, was still scattered, panting. ‘Poke fun, my ass,’ he said. ‘I’m drunk. I’m fucked out.’

  She turned her eyes down, to where the skin of their chests melted together, her breasts half-clothed in the fur that made him feel in her embrace like unevenly woolly bear. Jerry by comparison felt smooth as a snake.

  Richard asked, clairvoyant, ‘Do I seem freaky to you?’

  ‘I seem that way to myself.’

  ‘Why have you let me in, Ruthie babes?’

  ‘Because you asked.’

  ‘Nobody ever asked before?’

  ‘Not that I noticed.’

  Richard’s heavy breath gathered for an effort; he pushed himself up from her chest; sadly she felt him receding into the perspective of their lives. ‘I don’t know why’ he said, ‘you and Jerry don’t work in bed. You throw a great piece.’

  She lifted her knees and cradled him in her thighs and rocked him back and forth, a touch impatiently, as if he were a baby refusing its nap. He had been naughty to mention Jerry; it threatened to spoil it. The house shuddered, and a moment later a jet breaking the sound barrier boomed above them, in the blue that stood unbroken at the windows. On the other side of the house Geoffrey began to fret in his crib. Richard must go; she must use him while he was with her. She must learn. ‘Is that really a phrase?’ she asked. ‘Throw a piece?’ The words sounded so strange in her voice that she blushed, though naked.

  Richard looked down; his rather boneless hand stroked her hair and his good eye tried to feed on her face, which was afraid. She brought her eyes to his; she owed him that much. ‘No one’s ever told you,’ he said, stroking, ‘how cunty you are.’

  He had this conception of himself as a teacher, a teacher of worldliness. In that spring and summer of 1961, they met more often to talk than to make love. Ruth, knowing Jerry’s contempt for Richard and his proud passion for himself, felt most faithless when she disclosed, not her body, which seemed hers to share, but the private terror Jerry shared only with her. ‘He says he sees death everywhere – in the newspapers, in the grass. He looks at the children and says they’re sucking the life out of him. He says there’re too many.’

  ‘Has he ever seen a psychiatrist?’ Richard pinched a slice of water chestnut between his chopsticks and carried it to his mouth. They had reached the Chinese restaurant, on a brilliant July day. The curtains of the restaurant were all drawn, making a kind of amber evening out of noon.

  ‘He despises psychiatry. He hates it if I suggest there’s anything abnormal about his state. When I say I’m not afraid of death, he tells me I’m a spiritual cripple. He says I’m not afraid because I have no imagination. No soul, I think is what he means.’

  Richard sipped his Martini, his third, and rubbed his mouth with a knuckle. ‘I’d never appreciated how neurotic this guy is. I would have written him off as a simple manic depressive, but his death-wish sounds pretty psychotic. Has it affected his work?’

  ‘He says he can still do it, though it takes him twice as long. A lot of what he does now is conferences and thinking up ideas for other people to execute. He neve
r draws at home any more; I miss it. Even when everything would come back in the mail it was nice to see him work. He always drew to the radio; he said it helped loosen up the inking in.’