by John Updike
‘He never was any Al Capp, though.’
‘He was never trying to be.’
‘I like your loyalty,’ Richard said: there was an intense dead selfishness in Richard’s tone – the note the Mathiases shared.
She looked at her plate with caught breath, suspended miles above the possibility that she was making a dreadful mistake. ‘Not loyal enough,’ she said. ‘Now I have the feeling that you and I have filtered into his brain and made him worse. He says I’m not there.’
‘Not where?’
‘Not there. Anywhere. With him. You know.’
‘You mean you feel you’re my woman now instead of his?’
She wished to shield Richard from how repulsive this idea and his terminology were to her. She said, ‘I’m not sure I’m anybody’s woman. Maybe that’s my trouble.’
A grain of rice clung to his lower lip like a maggot. ‘Try to describe,’ he said, ‘this business of not being there. You mean in bed?’
‘I’m better in bed. Thanks. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The other night after we’d done it he woke me around three in the morning and asked me why I didn’t love him. Apparently he’d been running around the house reading the Bible and looking at a horror show on television. He has these fits where he can’t breathe lying down. You have some rice on your lip.’
He brushed it off, with a deliberation that struck her as comic. ‘How long has he had trouble breathing?’ he asked.
‘Since before I began with you. But it hasn’t gotten better. I guess I thought it would. Don’t ask me why.’
‘So. I’ve been screwing you just to cure Jerry’s asthma.’ Richard’s bitter laugh was one of his less persuasive effects.
‘Don’t twist what I mean.’
‘I’m not. It’s perfectly clear what you mean. You mean I’m a special type of patsy. Don’t apologize. I’ve been Sally’s patsy all these years, I might as well be yours too.’
He was begging her to tell him she loved him. She couldn’t form the words. She had always known she and Richard had no future; until now she hadn’t realized how short their present was. His head in the amber light seemed enormous – a false, defective head put on over a real head, whose words sounded hollow. ‘I’m sick,’ she told him suddenly. ‘I’m not built for affairs. I’ve had intestinal upsets all summer and I get terribly depressed after I’ve seen you. He doesn’t even listen to my lies. I keep wondering, if he knew, would he divorce me?’
Impatiently Richard set down his chopsticks with a click on his clean plate. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘He’ll never divorce you, you’re his mother. People don’t divorce their mothers, for Chrissake.’ It sounded so hopeless she wanted to cry; he must have sensed this, for his voice softened. ‘How’d you like the grub? The chow mein tasted like it came from a can.’
‘I thought it was all good,’ Ruth said resolutely.
He put his hand on hers. Their hands, it struck her, looked too much alike, his too small for his size and hers too big. ‘You’re very tough,’ he said. It seemed part compliment, part farewell.
She broke it off finally in September. Jerry had frightened her by overhearing the tag end of a phone conversation with Richard. She had thought he was raking in the back yard. Emerging from the kitchen, he asked her, ‘Who was that?’
She panicked. ‘Oh, somebody. Some woman from the Sunday school asking if we were going to enrol Joanna and Charlie.’
‘They’re becoming offensively efficient over there. What did you say?’
‘I said of course.’
‘But I heard you saying No.’
Richard had asked if she would have lunch with him next week. ‘She asked if we were going to send Geoffrey as well.’
‘Of course not,’ Jerry said, ‘he’s not even three,’ and sat down and flipped through the Saturday paper. He always opened it first to the comic page, as if expecting to find himself there. ‘Somehow,’ he said, not looking up, ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why not? What did you hear?’
‘Nothing. It was your tone of voice.’
‘Really? How?’ She wanted to giggle.
He stared off into space as if at an aesthetic problem. He looked tired and young and thin. His haircut was too short. ‘It was different,’ he said. ‘Warmer. It was a woman’s voice.’
‘I am a woman.’
‘Your voice with me,’ he said, ‘is quite girlish.’
She giggled and waited for him to strike deeper. But he had returned his attention to the comics page. She wanted to hug him in his ignorance. ‘Quite clear and cool and virginal,’ he added. Her impulse passed.
One day the following week she was shopping in Greenwood’s little downtown. The windows were full of back-to-school clothes and Gristede’s smelled keenly of apples. The air above the telephone wires seemed to have been laundered and changed. The policemen were back in long sleeves. The drugstore had taken down its awning. As she crossed to her Falcon, her arms hugging two paper bags of groceries, she saw Richard’s Mercedes parked in front of the barber shop. She hesitated by the open door, where the odours of hair oil spilled onto the pavement, and saw him, sitting bulkily in his lumberjack shirt in the row of waiting chairs. Her heart went out to him; she didn’t want him to get a haircut. Richard saw her, put down his True, left his place in line, and came out.
‘Want to go for a teeny ride?’ The ‘teeny’ she heard as a reproach. She had been evading him. He appeared, blinking there in the sunshine, exposed, uncertain of his next move – a phantom left stranded by a dissolved dream. How strange, it seemed to Ruth, that we can sleep with a person, and have him still be a person, no more. She pitied him and consented, settling her shopping bags into his front seat as cumbersome, rustling chaperones. The interior of his car smelled familiarly of German leather and American candy and spilled wine; great gasps of this aroma had once filled her when, making love, the obscene awkwardness and the pain of the door handle on her shoulder blade had tripped her into a climax while he was still drunkenly labouring. Richard drove out of the town’s centre, past the Connecticut houses tucked into deeper and more concealing blankets of green, to a nature preserve of ragged woods, on the edge of the town away from the water. ‘I miss you,’ he said.
Ruth felt forced to say, ‘I miss you too.’
‘Then what’s up? What’s not up, I mean. What have I done wrong?’
Here and there, Ruth noticed as they bumped down the unrepaired road that led to the pond where in winter children ice-skated, a few of the trees, the dry and the dying, were beginning to turn. ‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘It’s nothing I’ve planned, it’s just things are busier, summer is over. All the little animals are going back into their burrows.’
Patches of yellow scudded past the shaggy black cloud of his head. ‘You know,’ Richard said, ‘I could make things tough for you.’
‘How?’
‘Tell Jerry.’
‘Why would you bother?’
‘I want your ass.’
‘I don’t think that would get it for you.’
‘I know you, Ruthie babes. I could hurt you with what I know.’
‘But you wouldn’t. Anyway isn’t it about time you moved on, to another lady?’ He had told her about the affair that had precipitated his separation from Sally; and about other affairs. Ruth had been silently offended; they sounded like common women, and Richard spoke of them slightingly.
He turned up the dirt road, two tracks in the grass, that led to the pond. There was a barrier chain; he parked. The bags of groceries on the front seat stood between them. Across the pond a single fisherman communed with his reflection. It was morning; the children who congregated here all summer were in school; she had left Geoffrey in the care of the man scraping the living-room wallpaper, promising to return in half an hour. All this went through her as she waited for Richard to make a move. He asked her, ‘Is there somebody else?’
‘Besides Jerry? Another affair? Don’t be repulsive. If you kne
w me at all you wouldn’t even ask.’
‘Maybe I don’t know you. You fight being known.’
If he thought her a fighter, then she would fight. ‘Richard,’ she said, ‘I must ask you not to call me at the house any more. Jerry overheard a bit of your last phone call and said some very scary things.’
His face, turning to favour the good eye, showed alarm; it surprised Ruth, how distinctly this pleased her. ‘What sort of things?’
‘Nothing definite. Nothing about you. But I think he knows.’
‘Tell me exactly what he said.’
‘No. It doesn’t matter. It’s none of your business exactly what he said.’ It had become none of his business a moment ago, when he had seemed alarmed at Jerry’s knowing. Had he loved her, he would have been glad, anxious to come forward and fight.
Richard fingered a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. ‘Well.’ He put the cigarette, a bit bent, into his mouth, lit it, and exhaled towards the car roof an extensive upward steam. His lower lip jutted like the lip of a spout. He was hollow. She felt him searching himself for a response that would not embarrass him. ‘Want to thank me,’ he asked at last, ‘for a very nice ride?’
‘Don’t you think it’s best?’
The distant fisherman twitched his pole and birds in the trees around them released a shower of commentary. The grocery bags by her elbow rustled – the ice cream melting, the cans of frozen orange juice thawing. Affairs, Ruth saw, like everything else, ask too much. We all want a fancy price, just for existing. In the corner of her abstracted vision, Richard lunged; she flinched, expecting to be hit. He angrily, mock-decisively stubbed out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray.
‘Come on, Ruth babes,’ he sighed. ‘This isn’t us. Let’s take a walk. Don’t look like that, I won’t strangle you.’ He did have a clairvoyant streak; the thought had crossed her mind.
Afterwards she would remember how they walked down a buggy little path through swarms of midges revolving upon themselves in patches of sunlight. Hidden by some swamp maples from the fisherman, they kissed. Her feet grew cold as her tennis sneakers absorbed dampness from the turf. His bulk above her felt like some strange warm tree she was hugging because she was ‘it’ at hide-and-seek. Out of doors, in nature, the queerness of being kissed was clarified; it was something done to her, like the shampoos her mother used to give her at the kitchen sink with its long brass faucet, or like the boy at Gristede’s pressing, a half-hour ago, her change into her hand. Richard’s hands, rather sadly, stayed on the small of her back, not cupping her bottom as was his habit. ‘Please forgive me,’ she said.
‘We’ll never sleep together again? This is quitsies?’
She had to laugh at his phrasing, before pleading, ‘Let me go. I’m losing weight.’
He squeezed her waist testingly ‘Still lots left.’
They must have talked more, but what else they said remained hidden from Ruth behind the vibrating veils of midges, the chill in her feet, the image of the fisherman presiding above their parting from the far shore, his pole and its reflection like the two sides of a precarious arch. Though some idle mornings she wished for the phone to ring, she was grateful to Richard for taking her at her word, and for continuing to lurch up to her at parties as if she still had a secret to give him. On the whole she was well satisfied with her affair, and as she zipped up the children’s snowsuits, or closed a roast into the oven, thought of this adventure snug in her past with some complacence. She judged herself improved and deepened in about the normal amount – she had dared danger and carried wisdom away, a more complete and tolerant woman. She had had boyfriends, a husband, a lover; it seemed she could rest.
She had not quite intended Jerry never to know. She had done it, her conviction grew in retrospect, less for herself than for him; her surrender to another man came to seem a kind of martyrdom, a martyrdom without an audience. While the affair was on she had pictured Jerry’s knowing as a thunderbolt, a burst of noise and revealing light, a cleansing destruction. Instead, her marriage had stood with the stupid solidity of an unattended church, and when she returned to it – guiltily scrubbing the floors, recovering the sofa with blue sailcloth, cooking with a newly bought rack of spices, studying the children’s school papers as if each were a fragment of Gospel – Jerry gave no sign of noticing she had been gone. Awareness of Richard, physical memory of him and physical anticipation of their next meeting, had filled every vein; trembling and transparent and brimming she had stood before the mirror of their marriage and was given back – nothing. The sensation was familiar. Her father had been absorbed by love of his fellow-man, and her mother by love for her father, and Ruth had grown up with the suspicion of being overlooked. She was a Unitarian, and what did this mean, except that her soul was one unit removed from not being there at all?
Her invisible restoration to fidelity was achieved in a world of evolving forms. Charlie entered the first grade of the Greenwood elementary school; Joanna became a broad-browed, confident third-grader. This child would never be embarrassed by womanhood; the full brunt of her parents’ art-school love had fallen upon her, their first creation in flesh. Gradually Ruth regained the weight she had lost to a nervous stomach during the summer. Winter like a bandage was applied to the flaming fall. That year, the first of Kennedy’s presidency, the rivers and ponds froze early and black-smooth for beautiful skating. Skating, Ruth flew and, flying, she was free. She drove cars too fast, and drank too much, and skated upriver away from Jerry and the children – darting, swooping strides, between hushed walls of thin silver trees. This will to fly had come upon her since her failure with Richard – for it was a failure, any romance that does not end in marriage fails.
And Jerry’s religion crisis ebbed. By spring his shelf of theology stood neglected, scraps of torn paper marking where he had read enough in each volume. Dread had left him unchastened. He became crazy about the Twist, and at parties his contorted, rapt, perspiring figure seemed that of a mysterious son in whom she could take only an apprehensive pride, his energy so excessive. He gave up smoking, and took to buying popular records, which he would play to himself until he could mouth the words in unison: ‘Born to lose, I’ve lived my life in vain…’ It was grotesque and would have been pitiful, in a man of thirty, if he did not seem, in a frantic way, happy. A quality she remembered from their courtship, a skittering heedless momentum, had returned to him; she could not remember when she had last thought him handsome, but now an edge of good looks cut her when he turned. His colour seemed higher, his green eyes foxy. His paralysis and fear had made her feel so helpless and guilty she rejoiced in this renewal of his liveliness, though it bore towards her a glitter of hostility of unpredictability. Hanging up his suit pants while he was having an evening game of catch with the children in the yard, she was surprised by the gentle, semi-musical patter of sand on the floor. It had fallen from his cuffs. Oh yes, he explained after supper, he had stopped off at the beach, not the Greenwood beach but the one with the Indian name, the other day when it was so warm, swung by on the way back from the station, having caught the earlier train. Why? Why, because it was a lovely May day – did there have to be another reason? What was she, a wife or a warden? Feeling the need to taste salt air, he had walked along the water and sat on a dune for a minute, there was hardly anybody else there, just a little sailboat in the Sound. It had been very beautiful.
‘The children might have enjoyed going with you.’
‘You have all afternoon to take them.’
As he looked at her, his eyes very green in their boldness and his expression rakishly accented by a tiny cut on the bridge of his nose, the reason for his insolence came to her: he knew. He had learned. How? Richard must have gossiped. Did everybody know? Let them. Jerry was the one that mattered, and that he knew without releasing a thunderbolt was a relief. All evening, as the children and the dishes and Jerry’s face rotated, she composed confessions and explanations in her head. What was the explanation?
The best she could say was she had done it to become a better woman and therefore a better wife. And the affair had been kept under control. And had made rather little impression on her. These truths, and the prospect of speaking them, frightened her, and she fell asleep to escape the fright, while Jerry rattled the pages of Art News and said nothing. Again, the mirror had looked through her.
Outside their bedroom windows, beside the road, stood a giant elm, one of the few surviving in Greenwood. New leaves were curled in the moment after the bud unfolds, their colour sallow, a dusting, a veil not yet dense enough to conceal the anatomy of branches. The branches were sinuous, stately, constant: an inexhaustible comfort to her eyes. Of all things accessible to Ruth’s vision the elm most nearly persuaded her of a cosmic benevolence. If asked to picture God, she would have pictured this tree. On the breadth of the lower crotches pigeons walked like citizens on the floor of a cathedral; in the open air above the road vinelike twigs hung down, languidly greedy, drinking the light, idle as fingers trailed from a canoe. Ruth realized it would not be such a drastic thing, to die. She lay beneath a quilted puff, hoping to have a nap.
Energetic footsteps marched through the downstairs, searching, and came upstairs. Uninvited, Jerry got under her puff. She hoped, guessing it was too much to hope, that he wouldn’t try to make love. He laid his arm across her waist and asked, ‘Are you happy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you tired?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go to sleep.’
‘You didn’t come up to pester me?’
‘Never. I came up because you’re so sad lately.’
The wandering curves of the tree, solid as rock and random as wind, seemed far away, like a whispered word. ‘I’m not sad,’ she said.