Marry Me

by John Updike

  ‘I like you,’ she said, ‘and all the pigeons in that tree, and all the dogs in town except the ones that tip over our garbage cans, and all the cats except the one that got Lulu pregnant. And I like the lifeguards at the beach, and the policemen downtown except the one who bawled me out for my U-turn, and I like some of our awful friends, especially when I’m drunk…’

  ‘How do you like Dick Mathias?’

  ‘I don’t mind him.’

  ‘I know you don’t. I think that’s fascinating of you. He’s such a fathead. Literally. His head is literally fat. And that eye. Doesn’t it give you the creeps?’

  Ruth felt she owed it to her dignity, to the dignity of her secret, not to say anything, to let Jerry name it. Insulated by depression, she waited. He raised himself up on one elbow; she closed her eyes and pictured a knife in his hand. Hot weather brought on pain in her legs since she had carried Geoffrey. Jerry’s presence intensified the pain. She took a deep breath.

  What he said was nothing like what she expected, though it seemed to be the point of the conversation. ‘How do you feel about Sally? Tell me about Sally.’

  Ruth laughed, as if touched in an unguarded place. ‘Sally?’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  She laughed again. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Do you like her?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Baby you must at least like her. She likes you.’

  ‘I don’t think she likes me especially. I mean, she likes me as one more local female she can outshine –’

  ‘She doesn’t outshine you. She doesn’t think she does. She thinks you’re beautiful.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m O.K., if the light’s right and I’m feeling undepressed. But she’s almost great.’

  ‘Tell me about the “almost”. I agree. She’s spectacular, but something misses. What is it?’

  Ruth found it difficult to focus on Sally, who kept blurring into the conjoined image of Richard. The affair, she realized, had empowered her to dismiss his wife, though when they first came to Greenwood she had been struck by her – her blonde hair hanging down her wide back, her mannish walk and startled stare, her eager grin crimped at one corner. ‘I don’t think,’ Ruth said, ‘Sally’s ever been very happy. She and Dick aren’t right for each other, in all ways. They have the public things, but maybe aren’t supportive’ – she wanted to go on, ‘like we are,’ but shyness held her back.

  Jerry was off on his favourite tangent. ‘Well my God, who would be right for Richard? He’s a monster.’

  ‘He’s not. And you know it. Lots of women would be right for him. A lazy sexy woman who wasn’t ambitious –’

  ‘Sally’s ambitious?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For whatever she can get. For life. Just like you.’

  ‘And yet not sexy?’

  Ruth remembered Richard on the subject of Sally. In answering Jerry she must not sound like him. ‘My impression is,’ she said, ‘she’s not very warm or compassionate. She doesn’t let herself feel anything to the point where it would depress her. But I wouldn’t know how her sex is. What is this burst of interest, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Love of one’s neighbour, that’s all.’ He wormed closer to her, snuggling deeper under the puff, so that only the top of his head showed; his hair contained a sudden amount of grey. He began, a trick of his, to purr; a vibration deep in his throat reached her ears. It was a signal for her to turn to him, if she wished; she stayed on her back, though he had chased all sleepiness from her and all sacred magic from the elm. ‘It seems to me,’ his voice ventured from beneath the puff, ‘you and Sally have more in common than you think. Have you ever been very happy either?’

  ‘Of course I have. I’m happy most of the time, that’s my trouble. Everybody expects me to be calm and contented and, damn it, I am. I don’t know what my trouble is today.’

  ‘You think you’re pregnant?’ He accused: ‘You’ve been seeing the same tomcat Lulu has.’

  ‘I know I’m not.’

  ‘Then that’s it. You have the curse.’

  ‘I do feel,’ she volunteered, ‘protective of Sally now and then, really quite fond. She is shallow and selfish and I know if I ever got in her way she’d walk right over me, but then there’s something generous about all her showing-off, something she’s trying to give the world. Up at skiing, when she puts on the ridiculous tasselled hat and starts to flirt with the ski instructor, I have moments of just wanting to hug her, she’s making such a sweet fool of herself. And the time we went musselling, she seemed lovely. But I don’t feel this fondness when you and she are doing the Twist together, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  He had began to nibble her breast through her slip and after his imitation of a cat it felt uncomfortably close to being eaten. She pushed him off and took the puff away from his face and asked, ‘Is that what you’re asking?’

  He hid his face against her shoulder, his big nose cold, and shut his eyes. He seemed about to take the nap he had robbed her of. A broadening smile tickled the skin of her arm. ‘I love you,’ he sighed. ‘You see everything so clearly.’

  Later she wondered how she could have been so blind, and blind so long. The signs were abundant: the sand, his eccentric comings and goings, his giving up smoking, his triumphant exuberance whenever Sally was at the same party, the tender wifely touch (this glimpse had stung at the time, to endure in Ruth’s memory) with which Sally on one occasion had picked up Jerry’s wrist, inviting him to dance. Jerry’s obsession with death the spring before had seemed to her so irrational, so unreachable, that she dismissed as also mysterious his new behaviour: his new timbre and strut, his fits of ill temper with the children, his fits of affection with her, the hungry introspective tone he brought to their private conversations, his insomnia, the easing of his physical demands on her, and a new cool authority in bed, so that at moments it seemed she was with Richard again. How could she have been so blind? At first she thought that, having gazed so long at her own guilt, she mistook for an after-image what was in truth a fresh development. She admitted to herself, then, what she could never admit to Jerry, that she did not think him capable of it.

  Jerry asked for a divorce on a Sunday, the Sunday after a week in which he had been two days in Washington, and had returned to her in an atmosphere of hazard, on a late flight. There had been a delay, the airlines were jammed-up, and she met plane after plane at LaGuardia. When at last his familiar silhouette with its short hair and thin shoulders cut through the muddled lights of the landing field and hurried towards her, her heart surprised her with a grovelling gladness. Had she been a dog, she would have jumped and licked his face; being only a wife, she let herself be kissed, led him to the car, and listened as he described his trip – the State Department, a hurried visit to the Vermeers in the National Gallery, his relative lack of insomnia in the hotel, the inadequate gifts for the children he bought at a drugstore, the maddening wait in the airport. As the city confusion diminished behind them, his talking profile, in the warm vault of the car, shed its halo of wonder for her, and by the time they crackled to a stop in their driveway, both felt tired; they had chicken soup and bourbon and fumbled into a cold bed. Yet afterwards this homecoming of his was to seem enchanted, a last glimpse of solid headland before, that rainy Sunday afternoon, she embarked on the nightmare sea that became her habitat.

  In the morning, she and the children went to the beach. Jerry wanted to go to church. The summer services began at nine-thirty and ended at ten-thirty. She did not think it fair to the children to make them wait that long, especially since the pattern of the summer days was to dawn clear and cloud over by noon. So they dropped him off in his good suit and drove on.

  The clouds materialized earlier than usual; little upright puffs at first, like puffs of smoke from a locomotive starting its run around the horizon, then clouds, increasingly structural and opaque, castles, continents that, overhead, g
rew as they moved, keeping the sun behind them. Waiting for the gaps of sunshine between the clouds was a game for the beach mothers. The clouds blew eastward, so their eyes scouted the west, where a swathe of advancing gold would first ignite the roofs of the cottages on Jacob’s Point; then the great green water-tower that supplied the cottages would be liberated into light, and like an arrived Martian spaceship the egg of metal on its stilts would glow; then an onrushing field of unearthly wheat the brightness would roll, in steady jerks like strides, up the mile of sand, and overhead the sun would burn free of the struggling tendrils at the cloud’s edge and skyey loops of iridescence would be spun between the eyelashes of the mothers. On this Sunday morning the gaps between the clouds closed more quickly than usual and by eleven-thirty it was clearly going to rain. Ruth and the children went home. They found Jerry sitting in the living room reading the Sunday paper. He had taken off his suit coat and loosened the knot of his tie, but his hair, still combed flat with water, made him look odd to Ruth. He seemed distracted, brittle, hostile; he acted as if they personally had consumed the few hours of beach weather there would be that day. But often he was irritable after attending church.

  She took the roast out of the oven and all except Jerry ate Sunday dinner in bathing suits. This was the one meal of the week for which Jerry asked grace. As he began, ‘Heavenly Father,’ Geoffrey, who was being taught bedtime prayers, said aloud, ‘Dear God…’ Joanna and Charlie burst into giggling. Jerry hurried his blessing through the interference, and Geoffrey, eyes tight shut, fat hands clasped at his plate, tried to repeat it after him and, unable, whimpered, ‘I can’t say it!’

  ‘Amen,’ Jerry said and, with stiff fingers, slapped Geoffrey on the top of his head. ‘Shut up.’ Earlier that week the boy had broken his collarbone. His shoulders were pulled back by an Ace bandage; he was tender all over.

  Swallowing a sob, Geoffrey protested, ‘You said it too fast!’

  Joanna explained to him, ‘You’re stupid. You think you’re supposed to say grace after Daddy.’

  Charlie turned and a gleeful taunting sound, ‘K-k-k,’ scraped from the roof of his mouth.

  The insults were coming too fast for Geoffrey to absorb; he overflowed. His face blurred and crumpled into tears.

  ‘Jerry I’m amazed,’ Ruth said. ‘That was a sick thing to do.’

  Jerry picked up his fork and threw it at her – not at her, over her head, through the doorway into the kitchen. Joanna and Charlie peeked at each other and their cheeks puffed out in identical smothered explosions. ‘Goddamn it all,’ Jerry said, ‘I’d rather say grace in a pigpen. You all sitting here stark naked.’

  ‘The child was trying to be good,’ Ruth said. ‘He doesn’t understand the difference between grace and prayers.’

  ‘Then why the fuck don’t you teach him? If he had any decent even half-ass Christian kind of a mother he’d know enough not to interrupt. Geoffrey,’ Jerry turned to say, ‘you must stop crying, to make your collarbone stop hurting.’

  Stunned by his father’s unremittingly angry tone, the child tried to enunciate a sentence: ‘I – I – I ’

  ‘I – I – I ’ Joanna mocked.

  Geoffrey screamed as if stabbed.

  Jerry stood and tried to reach Joanna to slap her. She shied away, upsetting her chair. Something about her expression of terror made Jerry laugh. As if this callous laugh released all the malign spirits at the table, Charlie turned, said ‘Crybaby’ and punched Geoffrey in the arm, jarring his collarbone. Before the child could react, his mother screamed for him; Charlie shouted, ‘I forgot, I forgot!’ Wild to stop this torrent of injury at its source, Ruth, still holding the serving spoon, left her place and moved around the table, so swiftly she felt she was skating. She swung the hand not holding the spoon at Jerry’s face. He saw it coming and hid his face between his shoulders and hands, showing her the blank hairy top of his skull, with its helpless amount of grey. His skull was harder than her hand; she jammed her thumb; pain pressed behind her eyes. Blindly she flailed, again and once again, at the obstinate lump of his cowering head, unable with one hand, while the other still clutched the serving spoon, to claw her way into his eyes, his poisonous mouth. The fourth time she swung, he stood up and caught her wrist in mid-air and squeezed it so hard the fine bones ground together.

  ‘You pathetic frigid bitch,’ he said levelly ‘Don’t touch me again.’ He gave each word an equal weight, and his face, uncovered at last, showed a deadly level calm, though flushed – the face of a corpse, rouged. The nightmare had begun.

  The two older children had fallen silent. Geoffrey’s crying flowed on and on, mercilessly. The double loop of elastic bandage held his naked shoulders back in such a way that his plump arms had an apish defenceless hang. Jerry sat down and took Geoffrey’s hand. ‘You were a good boy’ he said, ‘to want to say grace with me. But only one person at a time can say grace. Maybe this week I’ll teach you a grace and you can say it instead of Daddy next Sunday. O.K.?’

  ‘O – O – O –’ the child tried to agree, still sobbing.

  ‘O – O – O –’ Joanna whispered to Charlie, who sputtered, glanced sideways at Ruth, and sputtered again.

  Jerry told Geoffrey, ‘You’re a good boy. Now stop crying, and eat your lima beans. Children, isn’t Mommy good to cook us such nice lima beans? Now Daddy will carve the nice roast. Where’s the Goddamn carving fork? I apologize to everybody. Geoffrey, do shut up.’

  But Geoffrey could not quite quit shuddering; the events of the last minutes kept recurring in his head. Ruth discovered she too was trembling, and tongue-tied. Unable to join in as Jerry joked the children into good humour, into loving him, she felt excluded. In the kitchen, washing the dishes, she cried. Through windowpanes beginning to register the first broken dashes of rain, she watched Joanna and Charlie and two neighbour children kick and chase a great green ball under a deep violet sky. She had put Geoffrey down for a nap upstairs. Jerry came into the kitchen, picked up the fork from the floor, and, silent at her side, picked up a towel and began to dry. It had been she didn’t know how many months since he had offered to help with the dishes. His offering now, so gravely, felt menacing, and aggravated her tears.

  He asked, ‘What’s the matter, exactly?’

  Her throat felt too sore to speak.

  ‘I’m sorry’ he said, ‘about that fit. I’m all upset these days.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh – a variety of things. Dying? I’ve stopped thinking about it and started doing it. Look at my hair.’

  ‘It’s nice. You’re getting handsome.’

  ‘At last, huh? And the job. The less I draw, the more they love me. They like me to talk. I’ve become Al’s front man.’

  ‘You could quit.’

  ‘With all these kids?’

  ‘Don’t dry those. Let’s let the rest sit in the drainer.’

  ‘Should the kids be out in the rain?’

  ‘It’s not raining that hard yet.’

  ‘I thought I’d take them bowling when it does.’

  ‘They’d love that.’

  ‘Getting handsome. What made you marry such an ugly duckling?’

  ‘Is it really the job that’s bothering you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Should we really talk about it?’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid. Once we start talking, we may never be able to stop.’

  ‘Come on. Sock it to me.’

  Confronted with this command, his face took on a rapture; she had this sense, through the blur of her tears, of his body expanding in release, of gathering mass out of nothing, like the clouds at the beach. ‘Walk with me,’ he said, and led her out of the kitchen, into the living room, past the huge old fireplace, to the front windows, which looked up at the elm. On the edge where the sashes met rested a small brown stack of pennies, an orange bead from an Indian necklace Joanna had been making in school, a tarnished brass ke
y to something it would never unlock again – a suitcase, a trunk, a child’s bank. Jerry kept toying with these objects during their talk, as if trying to extract from them an inevitable order, a final arrangement. ‘Does it ever seem possible to you,’ he asked, in the voice of dogged precision he used for reading aloud to the children, ‘that we made a mistake?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When we got married.’

  ‘Weren’t we in love?’

  ‘Is that what it was?’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘I thought so too.’ He waited.

  She answered him, ‘Yes, it has seemed possible to me.’

  ‘But it doesn’t now.’

  ‘It didn’t, no. I thought we’ve been getting better.’

  ‘In bed?’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re talking about?’

  ‘Part of me. Ruth, are you ever tempted to quit while we’re ahead?’

  ‘Jerry, what are you saying to me?’

  ‘Baby I’m just asking you if we aren’t making a terrible mistake in staying married forever.’

  Breath left her; she felt the skin of her face as one wall of a sealed chamber bounded by the brown ledge holding the pennies, the low violet clouds against which the elm’s twigs showed pale, the rectangle of glass slashed by raindrops. Jerry’s voice called, ‘Hey?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t be upset,’ he said. ‘It’s just a suggestion. An idea.’

  ‘That you leave me?’

  ‘That we leave each other. You could go back to the city and be an artist again. You haven’t painted for years. It’s a waste.’

  ‘What about the children?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, couldn’t we divide them up somehow? They could see each other and us all they wanted and it really wouldn’t be so bad if we both wanted it.’

  ‘What is this we’re both supposed to want?’

  ‘What we’re talking about. You could paint and go barefoot and be a Bohemian again.’

  ‘A middle-aged Bohemian with wrinkles and varicose veins and a belly that sticks out.’