by John Updike
‘A little. That upset me.’
‘Does he see Richard often?’
‘Almost never. He snubs Richard.’
‘He won’t say anything. There’d be no percentage in it for him. He’ll save this on the chance he can use it with you.’
‘He’s right, isn’t he? I mean, what he saw me as, I am.’
‘What did he see you as?’
‘Don’t make me say it, Jerry.’
Jerry mulled this refusal. ‘Actually’ he said, ‘you’d be much better off with him than with me. He’d get you on a Goddamn plane, I know that.’
‘Jerry.’
‘Mm?’
‘Don’t blame yourself. You told me not to come.’
‘But I wanted you to come. You know that. That’s why you came.’
‘I came for myself, too.’
He sighed. ‘Oh, Sally’ he said. ‘You’re so kind to me.’ He looked at the tickets in his hand and put them into his side coat pocket and looked up at her wearily. A little smile of regret brightened his face. ‘Hey?’
‘Hi.’
‘Let’s get married.’
‘Please, Jerry.’
‘No, let’s. The hell with this. We can’t get back. God has spoken.’
‘I don’t think you mean it.’
His voice was listless. ‘No. I do. You act like a wife to me. You look like Mrs Conant to me.’
‘But I’m not, Jerry. I’d like to be.’
‘O.K., then. Proposal accepted. I don’t see any other way but to go back to the hotel and call up Ruth and Richard and eventually get married. It’s the only thing I can think of. I’m tired right now, but I think I’ll be very happy.’
‘I’ll try to make you happy.’
‘I think we can get your children. The courts don’t really care who commits the adultery any more.’
‘Are you sure it’s what you want?’
‘Of course. I didn’t think it would come quite this way, but I’m glad it’s come.’ Still he didn’t move. She waited there beside him, her heart a perfect blank. Joy and sorrow, fear and hope – all the things that had been crowding upon her had dispersed. There was even an empty space of floor around them. People were clamouring and gesturing, but she heard only silence. She became aware that she was thirsty and that the blisters on her heels hurt. She could take off her shoes in the hotel room. Later, they could get a drink in the bar.
The girl with unnaturally white hair advanced into the empty space around them. ‘Mr and Mrs Conant? I’ve found Mr Cardomon.’ She was followed by a sandy man wearing an airlines jacket and carrying a clipboard. Sally had seen him before; when?
Jerry lurched explosively away from her. He pulled out his tickets. They were tattered and looked worthless. He explained, stammering, ‘We’ve been trying to get on a New York plane since three this afternoon and turned down a car rental because we were told there was going to be a section.’
Mr Cardomon asked, ‘Could I have your numbered standby passes?’ While he examined them, he rubbed the underside of his nose with a knuckle. Then he examined both their faces, constantly returning his fingers to the itch on his nose. Sally felt that she and the white-haired girl were standing on tip-toe. A tender, very distant scent of sweat came to her from Jerry’s neck. Mr Cardomon wrote on the clipboard, saying to himself, ‘Conant, two.’ Then he lifted up his youthful head of sandy curly hair and showed Sally that his eyes were grey, the colour of aluminium. He knew. He told Jerry, ‘Miss March will staple boarding passes to your tickets.’
‘You mean there is a plane?’ Jerry asked.
Cardomon looked at his wristwatch. ‘It should be leaving in thirty minutes, from Gate Twenty-eight.’
‘And we’re on it? My God, thank you. Thank you. We had just decided to go back to the hotel.’ And, unable to convey his gratitude sufficiently to Mr Cardomon, who had turned his back, Jerry turned to the girl and gushed, ‘You know, I’ve grown to love your hair. Don’t ever dye it back.’
He went off with her and came back with two blue squares stapled to the tickets and picked up his suitcase containing toys for his children and walked with Sally down the corridor. She knew all the posters by now. Shows she would not see, islands she would not visit. An apprehensive mob, scenting redemption, had gathered at Gate 28, and in time the Negro appeared, his sunglasses tucked into his shirt pocket, and slowly, enjoying it, read off a list of names. Theirs was the last name on the list. Conant. They passed through the gate, and in glancing behind her Sally thought she saw, amid the press of those who had been left behind, the worried moustached face that should have been in Newark.
The plane was a little DC-3 with a steep tilt to its aisle. Inside, all the men, coats off, briefcases tucked away, were laughing. ‘I wonder what attic they got this out of,’ one man called, and Jerry laughed, and tapped her bottom. His delight and relief were so vivid she tried to share them, but she had little capacity for sharing left. She took the inside seat and through the oval window studied the mechanics waving flashlights while Jerry stroked her arms and begged to be praised for having got them a plane. She thought of the Camus in her pocketbook and closed her eyes. Her painful shoes slipped off. Behind her she could hear a stewardess talking, and below her window a machine whined. It was chilly in the plane, as if it had been brought to them from a great cold height. Jerry laid something over her – his suit coat. The collar rubbed her chin. He stroked her arms and the backs of her hands and she felt the metal curving close around her; men were murmuring and she was the only woman in the plane and Jerry’s coat smelled faintly of him and she was nearly asleep before the plane moved.
Oh, Sally, it was such a beautiful ride! Do you remember at what a low altitude we flew? How our little plane, like a swan boat mildly bobbing in an occasional current, carried us through the middle air that was spangled with constellations above and cities below? I saw, past the halo of your sleeping hair, the capital’s spoked wheel of light expand, tilt, and expand again: Dante could not have dreamed such a rose. Our DC-3, fetched from Heaven knows where to carry us home, was chilly – unheated, unpressurized; it was honest ether we inhaled. We floated, our two engines beating, just high enough to be high, across Baltimore, the Chesapeake Bay, New Jersey dark with farms. Any higher, and we could not have seen each forked car sliding home, each house embedded in its nest of light. Each bridge was a double strand of diamonds, each roadhouse a sunken ruby, each town a scarf of pearls. And the stars level with our windows rode along motionless to keep us company.
And it was you, your beauty. Through the strait gate between your legs I had entered this firmament. You seemed, asleep beside me while the band of men guarding us rustled newspapers and accepted coffee, you seemed – what? You were not my wife, you were not my sister, nor my child. I stroked your forearms to tell you, even in your sleep, that I was there. Your arms seemed wonderfully long, Sally; your physical size as you slept was a great pride to me. How proud I was, for the hour and more that it took our pilot to pedal our quaint craft from star to star, to be your protector. Never before, never since, did I so surely protect you. For if you were to fall, and die, I would come with you, and into that fabulous kingdom we would pass together, my coat laid over you, my sperm still alive in your warm turns. Two struggling horses pulled us, swaying, up the still black hill of air northward. Oblivious, you were mine. I loved the oval of black Heaven beside your face. I loved the chill that brought your head to my shoulder. I loved your rough knuckles, and your downy forearms, and the way you were lost in the shape of my coat.
Then I left you. The engines roared in a graver key, Manhattan bristled, the ocean lifted to swallow us, the wheels smacked the runway, our moment passed, we did not die. I hated our failure to die. I hated my haste in taking my coat from you and pulling my suitcase from under the seat and shoving down the aisle to be first off. Ruth would be meeting me; it was after ten. I left you half asleep, pushing the hair back from your lips, abandoned, the prey of feeding eyes.
I felt you watching me race, cowardly, across the cement, diminishing, flickering in the whirling lights. Already I had seen Ruth’s face lifted in the crowd behind the glass doors. I felt myself disappear in your eyes. I remembered her.
When the telephone rang the next morning at ten, Josie blushed angrily and left the kitchen. Sally answered it in her bathing suit; Peter had been waiting to go to the beach for half an hour. ‘Hi,’ she said. If it were someone else calling, her tone of voice would seem a joke.
‘Hi,’ Jerry said. His voice was frightened. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ Sally said. ‘I got home before midnight and he was in bed asleep. This morning, before going off, he asked me how the Fitches were, and I said fine, and that was all we said.’
‘You’re kidding. He must know something.’
‘I don’t think so, Jerry. I just think we’ve got to such a point he doesn’t really care what I do.’
‘No. He cares.’
‘How did it go with Ruth?’
‘Fine. The plane mix-up gave me something to talk about, leaving you out, of course. I told her about the rent-a-car girls and Fancher and Wigglesworth. It made me sort of sad, how happy she was to see me. She was about to give up hope.’
Sunlight lay sharply on the salt and pepper shakers on the windowsill. Sally wondered vaguely if the salt would melt. ‘I saw her meet you,’ she said.
‘Did you? I wasn’t sure how much you could see.’
‘The way you hustled her out of the waiting room, it looked like she was under arrest.’
He laughed. ‘Yes, she said, “What’s the rush?” She’s actually kind of depressed. Geoffrey broke his collarbone while I was away.’
‘My God, Jerry. His collarbone?’
‘Apparently it’s not as serious as it sounds. Charlie pushed him down on the grass and he cried all day and held his arm funny, so she took him to the hospital and all they did was wrap an Ace bandage around his shoulders, to hold it back. Now he walks around like a little old man and he doesn’t want you to touch him.’
Peter came into the kitchen and began bumping, infuriatingly, against her bare legs. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Don’t be. You didn’t do it. Hey?’
‘Yes?’
‘You were lovely. Just killingly lovely.’
‘So were you. It was even nicer than the first time.’
‘I felt rotten about the ordeal in the airport. I’m amazed you survived it.’
‘I didn’t mind it, Jerry. It was fun.’
‘You’re great. You’re really so great, Sally, I just don’t know what to do with you. You were so beautiful in the plane back, I’m all upset.’
‘I felt badly about falling asleep. It’s such a waste of my time with you.’
‘No. It’s not a waste. It was right.’
‘I was really feeling quite weak. You made me weak, Jerry.’
‘Hey Was it really all right? Are you sorry you came?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It was sort of a sad lunch in the museum, and then the business about the toys was very sad.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I wish I were a bigger person. I’m just not big enough to be your cheerful broad.’
‘Listen –’
‘And you make me feel terribly guilty about Geoffrey’s collarbone.’
‘Why? Don’t. It has nothing to do with you.’
‘Yes it does. It’s the sort of thing I make happen. I’m bad luck. I’m destroying Richard, and my children, and your children, and Ruth –’ Her eyes smarted and shewondered again if the salt in the sunstruck salt-cellar were melting.
‘No, listen. You’re not. It’s me. I’m the man, and you’re the woman, and it’s up to me to control this, and I can’t. You’re good. You must know you’re great; but do you know that you’re good?’
‘Sometimes when you tell me I feel it.’
‘Good. Right. Do.’
Peter began plucking at her dangling arm, and his voice began to grind. ‘Go, Mom. Go-o.’ His soft plucking body was jogging in exasperation.
She told Jerry, ‘Peter’s being horrible and Josie is throwing one of her fits in the living room so I’d better hang up.’
‘Sure. In a minute I have to go to tell the big cheese what they told me in Washington about seducing the Third World. I’m sorry about Josie. If we get married, must we keep her?’
‘We aren’t going to get married, Jerry.’
‘Don’t say that. I live by thinking that somehow we will. Are you sure we won’t?’
He wanted to know, he wanted to be told she was sure. ‘Not always,’ she said.
He paused and then said, ‘Good.’
‘I’ll be appreciating all day tomorrow, so don’t call me until Friday. I think we should take it easy now for a while, so I don’t know when I’ll see you again.’
‘Yeah. I suppose we shouldn’t press our luck.’
She had hoped he would argue, and set a day soon. ‘Peter,’ she snapped. ‘Shall Mommy have to smack you?’
‘Don’t be cross with Peter,’ Jerry’s voice said in her ear. ‘He worries about you.’
‘I must hang up. Good-bye?’
‘Good-bye. I love you. Don’t be too lovely for anybody else.’
‘Have a good day, Jerry.’ She hung up, quickly, for she knew they could go on and on, and she would never tire of hearing his voice say things she doubted he believed. Don’t be too lovely for anybody else – this was a favourite concept of his, that she would take another man. He thought she was a whore; Sally experienced a flash of hating him, and stood there, desperate, beautiful in her bathing suit, her naked feet caught in a warm slant of sun. Was she wicked or crazy? How could she possibly take this man away from his blameless wife and helpless children? Though Peter was frantic, she stood a moment longer, waiting to be told how.
3
The Reacting of Ruth
Two snapshots, curled together in a box.
One, in colour, shows the Conant family back from church, on a raw clear Palm Sunday, the Palm Sunday of 1961. Geoffrey, a toddler of two, has just been baptized; there is a slick place in his hair. Ruth is squatting, in a white coat, on the dead lawn in front of their house, between Charlie and Geoffrey, both of whom, with their slack expressions and winter pallor, look chunky and uncomfortable in matching grey shorts, bow ties, and blue blazers. Joanna, seven years old at the time, stands behind her mother, wearing in the year’s young sunlight an apprehensive squint and a green beret. Ruth’s upward smile is rather mischievous; light shines baldly on her knees, and her hat is crooked. She had borrowed the hat from Linda Collins. Beneath the game try at a cheerful expression, she looks tired and drawn. The Conants had returned from a party at the Mathiases’ at two o’clock that same morning. Above her head, beside Joanna’s shoulder, like a blurred yellow moth, or an impending star, is the year’s first crocus. It had opened early in the warmth reflected from the white clapboards of the house, and Jerry had posed the picture to include it.
He himself is present only as a purple shadow in the lower left corner of the snapshot. What does not show is how Joanna, when her parents had returned to the pew of the tall white Congregational church, reached over and wonderingly touched the wet spot on her brother’s head. Or how Ruth, attempting a nap that afternoon, while Jerry walked the kids on the beach, had cried, thinking she had betrayed her father and emptied herself of all identity.
She was the daughter of a Unitarian minister. When she met and married a Lutheran, Jerry Conant from Ohio, religion didn’t matter to either of them. They were students at an art school in Philadelphia, naïvely immersed in the cult of true colour, of vital line. They adored the silent gods of the museum-temple that floated above the city. When they first saw each other naked, it was as if a new object of art had been displayed to each, and their marriage carried forward this quirk of detachment, having more in it of mutual admiration than mutual possession. Each admired the other’s talent. R
uth, though her perspective was always awry and her formal definition vague, so that even the bottle and bowl of her still lifes had a vegetable softness, showed a rare colour touch. Her paintings were remarkably unafraid. Cadmium yellow danced boldly through her pears, her skies were an intense solid blue that yet stayed airborne, and the tint of her shadows bodied forth a colour not nameable, simply itself, the shadow, now luminous for having passed through a mind. The tone of truth rang through the shuffle, neither careless nor careful, of her calm, squarish strokes. Her talent struck Jerry as remarkable because his lay the other way. His gift was for line, for outline. Each subject, when he sat down to it, became a kind of overanimated ghost, wherein swerve and energetically ‘worked’ detail replaced the dense and placid life of substance. Though he worked hard at colour, trying to learn from Ruth’s unstudied candour, his paintings, when seen next to hers, fell, for all the ardour of the drawing, on one side or the other of the fine line that divides the garish from the muddy. Their easels, the last year of art school, were always side by side. Someone viewing their paintings thus might well have concluded, as did they, that between them they had everything.
Their merger was perhaps too easy, too aesthetic. As the art school receded, and Jerry became an unsuccessful cartoonist and then a successful animator of television commercials, and Ruth became a housewife and mother, too harassed to unpack the paintbox and load the palette, unexpected shadows deepened, emphasizing differences overlooked in the ideal overhead light they had once painted by.
The baptism of the children became a sore point. The first, Joanna, was christened by Ruth’s father, in their first apartment, on West Twelfth Street. Jerry had been shocked by the ceremony, which seemed to him a parody of the sacrament; his father-in-law, a civic-minded man active in the interracial councils of Poughkeepsie, had joked about ‘holy water’, drawing it from the kitchen tap. So the next child, a boy, was baptized as a Lutheran in the dour country church, smelling of apple blossoms and mouldy velvet, where Jerry as a boy had been confirmed. The score thus tied, the third child hung two years above the mouth of Limbo while his parents fought to a standstill on behalf of their heritages. Ruth was surprised by their passion; she had put religion behind her. Having been obliged to attend church automatically as a girl, she felt faint, guilty, and disoriented whenever she entered a church now. Just one stanza of a hymn would make her voice falter, and by the third stanza she was fighting tears, while the organ thundered at her like a pompous, hurt father. Whereas Jerry, defeated in his ambition to become a ‘name’ cartoonist, and immersed, with their move to Greenwood, in the organic and the mediocre and the familial, suddenly dreaded death. Only religion helped. He read theology, Barth and Marcel and Berdyaev; he taught the children bedtime prayers. Each Sunday he deposited Joanna and Charlie in the Sunday school of the nearby Congregational church, sat through the sermon, and came home cocky, ready to fight. He hated Ruth’s pale faith, which receded and evaporated still further under his hatred. There was a goodness, she did feel, a diaphanous truth and excellence floating in the world, like the dust of buds in the elm outside their bedroom windows. Otherwise, we must not hurt others deliberately, and we should take pleasure in each day. That was all. Wasn’t it enough? Once, wakened from sleep to hear him protest that some day he would die, Ruth had said, ‘Dust to dust,’ and rolled over and gone back to sleep. Jerry never forgave this. She regretted it, that when he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, and when he moved through the midnight house as if his whole body were sore, fighting for breath, she could not enclose his terror, and withdraw it from him as she did his seed. The child’s non-baptism tormented him, as a face of his own extinction. Ruth pitied and yielded. Geoffrey was baptized in his father’s arms, while she stood beside, in a borrowed hat, vowing never to attend church again, trying not to cry.