by John Updike
"I said, don't get uptight. I'm flying back tomorrow. Charlie knows it and so does she."
"Mim. You can't, so soon. What about them?" He gestures at the house. From the back, it has a tenement tallness, a rickety hangdog wood-and-tar-shingle backside mismatched to its solid street face. "You'll break their hearts."
"They know. My life isn't here, it's there."
"You have nothing there but a bunch of horny hoods and a good chance of getting V.D."
"Oh, we're clean. Didn't I tell you? We're all obsessed with cleanliness."
"Yeah. Mim. Tell me something else. Don't you ever get tired of fucking? I mean" – to show the question is sincere, not rude "I'd think you would."
She understands and is sisterly honest. "Actually, no. I don't. As a girl I would have thought you would but now being a woman I see you really don't. It's what we do. It's what people do. It's a connection. Of course, there are times, but even then, there's something nice. People want to be nice, haven't you noticed? They don't like being shits, that much; but you have to find some way out of it for them. You have to help them."
Her eyes in their lassos of paint seem, outdoors, younger than they have a right to be. "Well, good," he says weakly; he wants to take her hand, to be helped. As her brother, once, he had been afraid she would fall in the quarry if he let go and he had let go and she had fallen and now says it's all right, all things must fall. She laughs and goes on, "Of course I was never squeamish like you. Remember how you hated food that was mixed up, when the peajuice touched the meat or something? And that time I told you all food had to be mushed like vomit before you could swallow it, you hardly ate for a week."
"I don't remember that. Stavros is really great, huh?"
Mim picks up her white gloves from the grass. "He's nice." She slaps her paten with the gloves, studying her brother. "Also," she says.
"What?" He braces for the worst, the hit that will leave nothing there.
"I bought Nelson a mini-bike. Nobody in this Godforsaken household seems to remember it, but tomorrow is his birthday. He's going to be thirteen, for Cry-eye. A teenager."
"You can't do that, Mim. He'll kill himself. It's not legal on the streets here."
"I'm having it delivered over to the Fosnachts' building. They can share it on the parking lot, but it'll be Nelson's. The poor kid deserves something for what you put him through."
"You're a super aunt."
"And you're so dumb you don't even know it's raining." In the darkening drizzle she sprints, still knock-kneed and speedy, up the walk through their narrow backyard, up the stairs of their spindly back porch. Harry hugs the ball and follows.
In his parents' house Rabbit not only reverts to peanut-butter sandwiches and cocoa and lazing in bed when the sounds of Pop and Nelson leaving have died; he finds himself faithfully masturbating The room itself demands it: a small long room he used to imagine as a railway car being dragged through the night. Its single window gives on the sunless passageway between the houses. As a boy in this room he could look across the space of six feet at the drawn shade of the room that used to be little Carolyn Zim's. The Zims were night owls. Some nights, though he was three grades ahead of her, Carolyn would go to bed later than he, and he would strain to see in the chinks of light around her shade the glimmer of her undressing. And by pressing his face to the chill glass by his pillow he could look at a difficult diagonal into Mr. and Mrs. Zim's room and one night glimpsed a pink commotion that may have been intercourse. But nearly every morning the Zims could be heard at breakfast fighting and Mom used to wonder how long they would stay together. People that way plainly wouldn't be having intercourse. In those days this room was full of athletes, mostly baseball players, their pictures came on school tablet covers, Musial and DiMag and Luke Appling and Rudy York. And for a while there had been a stamp collection, weird to remember, the big blue album with padded covers and the waxpaper mounts and the waxpaper envelopes stuffed with a tumble of Montenegro and Sierra Leone cancelleds. He imagined then that he would travel to every country in the world and send Mom a postcard from every one, with these stamps. He was in love with the idea of travelling, with running, with geography, with Parcheesi and Safari and all board games where you roll the dice and move; the sense of a railroad car was so vivid he could almost see his sallow overhead light, tulip-shaped, tremble and sway with the motion. Yet travelling became an offense in the game he got good at.
The tablet covers were pulled from the wall while he was in the Army. The spots their tacks left were painted over. The tulip of frosted glass was replaced by a fluorescent circle that buzzes and flickers. Mom converted his room to her junk room: an old pushtreadle Singer, a stack ofReader's Digests and Family Circles, a bridge lamp whose socket hangs broken like a chicken's head by one last tendon, depressing pictures of English woods and Italian palaces where he has never been, the folding cot from Sears on which Nelson slept in his father's room while Mim was here. When Mim left Tuesday, the kid, dazed by his good fortune in owning a mini-bike over in West Brewer, moved back into her room, abandoning Rabbit to memories and fantasies. He always has to imagine somebody, masturbating. As he gets older real people aren't exciting enough. He tried imagining Peggy Fosnacht, because she had been recent, and good, all gumdrops; but remembering her reminds him that he has done nothing for her, has not called her since the fire, has no desire to, left her blue Fury in the basement and had Nelson give her the key, scared to see her, blames her, she seduced him, the low blue flame that made her want to be fucked spread and became the fire. From any thought of the fire his mind darts back singed. Nor can he recall Janice; but for the bird-like dip of her waist under his hand in bed she is all confused mocking darkness where he dare not insert himself. He takes to conjuring up a hefty coarse Negress, fat but not sloppy fat, .muscular and masculine, with a trace of a mustache and a chipped front tooth. Usually she is astraddle him like a smiling Buddha, slowly rolling her ass on his thighs, sometimes coming forward so her big cocoa-colored breasts swing into his face like boxing gloves with sensitive tips. He and this massive whore have just shared a joke, in his fantasy; she is laughing and good humor is rippling through his chest; and the room they are in is no ordinary room but a kind of high attic, perhaps a barn, with distant round windows admitting dusty light and rafters from which ropes hang, almost a gallows. Though she is usually above him, and he sometimes begins on his back, imagining his fingers are her lips, for the climax he always rolls over and gives it to the bed in the missionary position. He has never been able to shoot off lying on his back; it feels too explosive, too throbbing, too blasphemous upwards. God is on that side of him, spreading His feathered wings as above a crib. Better turn and pour it into Hell. You nice big purplelipped black cunt. Gold tooth.
When this good-humored goddess of a Negress refuses, through repeated conjuration, to appear vividly enough, he tries imagining Babe. Mim, during her brief stay, told him offhand, at the end of his story, that what he should have done was sleep with Babe; it had been all set up, and it was what his subconscious wanted. But Babe in his mind has stick fingers cold as ivory, and there is no finding a soft hole in her, she is all shell. And the puckers on her face have been baked there by a wisdom that withers him. He has better luck making a movie that he is not in, imagining two other people, Stavros and Mim. How did they do it? He sees her white Toronado barrelling up the steepness of Eisenhower Avenue, stopping at 1204. The two of them get out, the white doors slam punkily, they go in, go up, Mim first. She would not even turn for a preliminary kiss; she would undress swiftly. She would stand in noon windowlight lithe and casual, her legs touching at the knees, her breasts with their sunken nipples and bumpy aureoles (he has seen her breasts, spying) still girlish and undeveloped, having never nursed a child. Stavros would be slower in undressing, stolid, nursing his heart, folding his pants to keep the crease for when he returns to the lot. His back would be hairy: dark whirlpools on his shoulder blades. His cock would be thick and rop
ily veined, ponderous but irresistible in rising under Mim's deft teasing; he hears their wisecracking voices die; he imagines afternoon clouds dimming the sepia faces of the ancestral Greeks on the lace-covered tables; he sees the man's clotted cock with the column of muscle on its underside swallowed by Mim's rat-furred vagina (no, she is not honey-blonde here), sees her greedy ringless fingers press his balls deeper up, up into her ravenous stretched cunt; and himself comes. As a boy, Rabbit had felt it as a spaceflight, a squeezed and weightless toppling over onto his head but now it is a mundane release as of anger, a series of muffled shouts into the safe bedsheet, rocks thrown at a boarded window. In the stillness that follows he hears a tingling, a submerged musical vibration slowly identifiable as the stereo set of the barefoot couple next door, in the other half of the house.
One night while he is letting his purged body drift in listening Jill comes and bends over and caresses him. He turns his head to kiss her thigh and she is gone. But she has wakened him; it was her presence, and through this rip in her death a thousand details are loosed; tendrils of hair, twists of expression, her frail voice quavering into pitch as she strummed. The minor details of her person that slightly repelled him, the hairlines between her teeth, her doughy legs, the apple smoothness of her valentine bottom, the something prim and above-it-all about her flaky-dry mouth, the unwashed white dress she kept wearing, now return and become the body of his memory. Times return when she merged on the bed with moonlight, her young body just beginning to learn to feel, her nerve endings still curled in like fernheads in the spring, green, a hardness that repelled him but was not her fault, the gift of herself was too new to give. Pensive moments of her face return to hurt him. A daughterly attentiveness he had bid her hide. Why? He had retreated into protest and did not wish her to call him out. He was not ready, he had been affronted. Let black Jesus have her; he had been converted to a hardness of heart, a billion cunts and only one him. He tries to picture, what had been so nice, Jill and Skeeter as he actually saw them once in hard lamplight, but in fantasy now Rabbit rises from the chair to join them, to be a father and lover to them, and they fly apart like ink and paper whirling to touch for an instant on the presses. JILL COMES AGAIN. Angstrom -Senses Presence. She breathes upon him again as he lies in his boyhood bed and this time he does not make the mistake of turning his face, he very carefully brings his hand up from his side to touch the ends of her hair where it must hang. Waking to find his hand in empty mid-air he cries; grief rises in him out of a parched stomach, a sore throat, singed eyes; remembering her daughterly blind grass-green looking to him for more than shelter he blinds himself, leaves stains on the linen that need not be wiped, they will be invisible in the morning. Yet she had been here, her very breath and presence. He must tell Nelson in the morning. On this dreamlike resolve he relaxes, lets his room, with hallucinatory shuddering, be coupled to an engine and tugged westward toward the desert, where Mim is now.
"That bitch," Janice said. "How many times did you screw her?"
"Three times," Charlie said. "That ended it. It's one of her rules."
This ghost of conversation haunts Janice this night she cannot sleep. Harry's witch of a sister has gone back to whoring but her influence is left behind in Charlie like a touch of disease. They had it so perfect. Lord they had never told her, not her mother or father or-die nurses at school, only the movies had tried to tell her but they couldn't show it, at least not until recently, how perfect it could be. Sometimes she comes just thinking about him and then other times they last forever together, it is beautiful how slow he can be, murmuring all the time to her, selling her herself. They call it a piece of ass and she never understood why until Charlie, it wasn't on her front so much where she used to get mad at Harry because he couldn't make their bones touch or give her the friction she needed long enough so then he ended blaming her for not being with him, it was deeper inside, where the babies happened, where everything happens, she remembers how, was it with Nelson or poor little Becky, they said push and it was embarrassing like forcing it when you haven't been regular, but then the pain made her so panicky she didn't care what came out, and what came out was a little baby, all red-faced and cross as if it had been interrupted doing something else in there inside her. Stuff up your ass, she had hated to hear people say it, what men did to each other in jail or in the Army where the only women are yellow women screaming by the roadside with babies in their arms and squatting to go to the bathroom anywhere, disgusting, but with Charlie it is a piece of ass she is giving him, he is remaking her from the bottom up, the whole base of her feels made new, it's the foundation of life. Yet afterwards, when she tries to say this, how he remakes her, he gives that lovable shrug and pretends it was something anybody could do, a trick like that little trick he does with matches to amuse his nephews, making them always pick the last one up, instead of the sad truth which is that nobody else in the whole wide (Harry was always worrying about how wide the world was, caring about things like how far stars are and the moon shot and the way the Communists wanted to put everybody in a big black bag so he couldn't breathe) world but Charlie could do that for her, she was made for him from the beginning of time without exaggeration. When she tries to describe this to him, how unique they are and sacred, he measures a space of silence with his wonderful hands, just the way his thumbs are put together takes the breath out of her, and slips the question like a cloak from his shoulders.
She asked, "How could you do that to me?"
He shrugged. "I didn't do it to you. I did it to her. I screwed her."
"Why? Why?"
"Why not? Relax. It wasn't that great. She was cute as hell at lunch, but as soon as we got into bed her thermostat switched off. Like handling white rubber."
"Oh, Charlie. Talk to me, Charlie. Tell me why."
"Don't lean on me, tiger."
She had made him make love to her. She had done everything for him. She had worshipped him, she had wanted to cry out her sorrow that there wasn't more she could do, that bodies were so limited. Though she had extracted her lover's semen from him, she failed to extract testimony that his sense of their love was as absolute as her own. Terribly – complainingly, preeningly – she had said, "You know I've given up the world for you."
He had sighed, "You can get it back."
"I've destroyed my husband. He's in all the newspapers."
"He can take it. He's a showboat."
"I've dishonored my parents."
He had turned his back. With Harry it had been usually she who turned her back. Charlie is hard to snuggle against, too broad; it is like clinging to a rock slippery with hair. He had, for him, apologized: "Tiger, I'm bushed. I've felt rotten all day."
"Rotten how?"
"Deep down rotten. Shaky rotten."
And feeling him slip away from her into sleep had so enraged her she had hurled herself naked from bed, shrieked at him the words he had taught her in love, knocked a dead great-aunt from a bureau top, announced that any decent man would at least have ofered to marry her now knowing she would never accept, did things to the peace of the apartment that now reverberate in her insomnia, so the darkness shudders between pulses of the headlights that tirelessly pass below on Eisenhower Avenue. The view from the back of Charlie's apartment is an unexpected one, of a bend in the Running Horse River like a cut in fabric, of the elephant-colored gas tanks in the boggy land beside the dump, and, around a church with twin blue domes she never knew was there, a little cemetery with iron crosses instead of stones. The traffic out front never ceases. Janice has lived near Brewer all her life but never in it before, and thought all places went to sleep at ten, and was surprised how this city always rumbles with traffic, like her heart which even through dreams keeps pouring out its love.
She awakes. The curtains at the window are silver. The moon is a cold stone above Mt. Judge. The bed is not her bed, then she remembers it has been her bed since, when? July it was. For some reason she sleeps with Charlie on her left; H
arry was always on her right. The luminous hands of the electric clock by Charlie's bedside put the time at after two. Charlie is lying face up in the moonlight. She touches his cheek and it is cold. She puts her ear to his mouth and hears no breathing. He is dead. She decides this must be a dream.
Then his eyelids flutter as if at her touch. His eyeballs in the faint cold light seem unseeing, without pupils. Moonlight glints in a dab ofwater at the far corner of the far eye. He groans, and Janice realizes this is what has waked her. A noise not freely given but torn from some heavy mechanism of restraint deep in his chest. Seeing that she is up on an elbow watching, he says, "Hi, tiger. Jesus it hurts."
"What hurts, love? Where?" Her breath rushes from her throat so fast it burns. All the space in the room, from the comers in, seems a crystal a wrong move from her will shatter.
"Here." He seems to mean to show her but cannot move his arms. Then his whole body moves, arching upward as if twitched by something invisible outside of him. She glances around the room for the unspeaking presence tormenting them, and sees again the lace curtains stamped, interwoven medallions, on the blue of the streetlamp, and against the reflecting blue of the bureau mirroring the square blank silhouettes of framed aunts, uncles, nephews. The groan comes again, and the painful upward arching: a fish hooked deep, in the heart.
"Charlie. Is there any pill?"
He makes words through his teeth. "Little white. Top shelf. Bathroom cabinet."
The crowded room pitches and surges with her panic. The floor tilts beneath her bare feet; the nightie she put on after her disgraceful scene taps her burning skin scoldingly. The bathroom door sticks. One side of the frame strikes her shoulder, hard. She cannot find the light cord, her hand flailing in the darkness; then she strikes it and it leaps from her touch and while she waits for it to swing back down out of the blackness Charlie groans again, the worst yet, the tightest-sounding. The cord fords her fingers and she pulls; the light pounces on her eyes, she feels them shrink so rapidly it hurts yet she doesn't take the time to blink, staring for the little white pills. She confronts in the cabinet a sick man's wealth. All the pills are white. No, one is aspirin; another is yellow and transparent, those capsules that hold a hundred little bombs to go off against hayfever. Here: this one must be it; though the little jar is unlabelled the plastic squeeze lid looks important. There is tiny red lettering on each pill but she can't take the time to read it, her hands shake too much, they must be right; she tilts the little jar into her palm and five hurry out, no, six, and she wonders how she can be wasting time counting and tries to slide some back into the tiny round glass mouth but her whole body is beating so hard her joints have locked to hold her together. She looks for a glass and sees none and takes the square top of the Water Pik and very stupidly lets the faucet water run to get cold, wetting her palm in turning it off, so the pills there blur and soften and stain the creased skin they are cupped in. She has to hold everything, pills and slopping Water Pik lid, in one hand to free the other to close the bathroom door to keep the light caged away from Charlie. He lifts his large head a painful inch from the pillow and studies the pills melting in her hand and gets out, "Not those. Little white." He grimaces as if to laugh. His head sinks back. His throat muscles go rigid. The noise he makes now is up an octave, a woman's noise. Janice sees she does not have time to go back and search again, he is being tuned too high. She sees that they are beyond chemicals; they are pure spirits, she must make a miracle. Her body feels leaden on her bones, she remembers Harry telling her she has the touch of death. But a pressure from behind like a cuff on the back of her head pitches her forward with a keening cry pitched like his own and she presses herself down upon his body that has been so often pressed upon hers; he has become a great hole nothing less large than she wild with love can fill. She wills her heart to pass through the walls of bone and give its rhythm to his. He grits his teeth "Christ" and strains upward against her as if coming and she presses down with great calm, her body a sufficiency, its warmth and wetness and pulse as powerful as it must be to stanch this wound that is an entire man, his length and breadth loved, his level voice loved and his clever square hands loved and his whirlpools of hair loved and his buffed fingernails loved and the dark gooseflesh bag of his manhood loved and the frailty held within him like a threat and lock against her loved. She is a gateway of love gushing from higher ground; she feels herself dissolving piece by piece like a little mud dam in a sluice. She feels his heart kick like pinned prey and keeps it pinned. Though he has become a devil, widening now into a hole wider than a quarry and then gathering into a pain-squeezed upward thrust as cold as an icicle she does not relent; she widens herself to hold his edges in, she softens herself to absorb the spike of his pain. She will not let him leave her. There is a third person in the room, this person has known her all her life and looked down upon her until now; through this other pair of eyes she sees she is weeping, hears herself praying, Go, Go, to the devil thrashing inside this her man. "Go!" she utters aloud.