by John Updike
‘Mr Conant?’ the other young cop asked, not smiling.
‘Mathias,’ Richard said. ‘I’m pinch-hitting. How is she?’
‘She’s a very lucky young lady’ the cop told him. To Ruth he said, ‘The wrecker looked it over and says you won’t be driving that car again. You totalled it.’
Richard, trying to fit himself to the cop’s solemnity, asked, ‘Should I take her to a doctor?’
‘If it were me, I would.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Ruth said, resentful, perhaps, at the way the policeman had been taken from her. His princely indifference had become a judicious stupidity; he handed her his report of the accident. At approximately 1.45 p.m…. the dark-blue four-door Ford station wagon driven by Mrs Gerald Conant, of… thirty-five miles per hour… suffered apparently superficial injuries… the vehicle was demolished. His handwriting was uncouth. She signed, and left with Richard. She had forgotten how much bulkier than Jerry he was. She surprised herself by taking his arm.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, settling into the driver’s side of his dear old Mercedes. She had forgotten also that curious dent in his upper lip, the jut of the lower, the vulnerable size of his cowardly-lion’s head.
‘What do you mean?’ Something strange was happening to Ruth’s throat; a silvery web had been engendered in it, and in her sinuses and eye-sockets, and all the hollows of her skull.
Richard’s mouth twitched impatiently. ‘You’ve got the wind up, Ruthie babes.’
‘The accident could have happened to anybody. The road –’
‘Fuck the accident. You’ve been hysterical all summer. You’ve been looking like a wallflower at a witch hunt. Jerry giving you the needle again because you can’t keep the boogeyman away?’
‘No, Jerry doesn’t talk about death much any more.’
‘Must be pretty quiet around the house then.’
‘Not really. How is it around yours?’
He quite missed the hint. The arc of frost sat on his cornea in profile like a cap. ‘O.K.,’ he said grimly. ‘You don’t want to talk. Screw me.’
‘I do want to talk, Richard. But –’
‘But the other fellow’s wife might get the word if you spilled the beans to me, right?’
‘What other fellow’s wife?’
‘My successor’s bride, dame, snatch, femme, what the hell. You’re playing games again, kee-recket? Davie Collins the lucky dog? He looks pretty woofy at folly ball. Jesus, Ruthie, when’re you going to give yourself a break and trade in that neurotic doodlebug you married for half a man? You’re just chewing yourself to pieces this way. You’re just giving it the old Count Masoch one-two-three.’
‘Richard, you do go on. I’m flattered you imagine it, but I’m not having an affair. I do not think Jerry is half a man. Maybe I’m half a woman.’
‘A woman and a half, as I remember it. But O.K. I’m soft in the head. Soggy in the nog. Screw me. Screw you, for that matter. What you think I am, a once-a-year taxi service?’
‘Where are we going?’
He was driving her out of town, to the woods, the buggy path, the pond where the motionless fisherman caught nothing. The web in her head broke and she began to cry; the tears were rapidly at full flood, she was shaking and trying to scream. She kept seeing the trees as she floated between them. The tears scrambled with words and wouldn’t stop. ‘No, take me home. Take me to my house and drop me. That’s what I asked you to do, that’s what you promised you’d do, I don’t want to neck, I don’t want to have a cosy talk, I just want to go home and die, Richard. Please. I’m sorry. I can’t take it. You’re so right and you’re so wrong it kills me. It does. You’re the only person I could talk to and you’re absolutely the worst person. Forgive me. I’ve liked this. I really have. It’s not you. I like you, Richard. Don’t make that silly hurt mouth. It’s not you. It’s – it!’
‘Easy easy’ he was saying, frightened, trying to back around in a driveway too narrow, where people had painted the stones and planted a family of plaster ducks on the lawn.
‘I can’t do it all over, I can’t go back into all that, into us; please. Do forgive me for calling you; I wasn’t thinking. I should have called Linda. It was nice. You’re so damn nice, somehow. You’re lovely.’
‘Stick to the facts,’ he said, grimacing as he fought with the wheel. ‘I get the picture.’
‘You don’t, as a matter of fact,’ Ruth told him. ‘That’s what’s so killing.’
He let her off under the elm. ‘Sure you don’t want to see a doctor? These concussions can be sneaky.’
Out of the car, she leaned back in and kissed him on the mouth. He had been a good kisser, firm but not too hungry like Jerry. Ruth’s tears were drying; her head felt scoured. ‘You are nice,’ she told Richard, adding with her needless love of truth, ‘funnily enough.’
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Well, I’m around. Call me when you have your next wreck.’
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ she told him.
The busy signal had ceased; she reached Jerry at work and told him, making light of the accident. He came home from the city a half-hour earlier than usual and wanted to see the wreck before dinner. As he drove her along Orchard Road, kerbstones, porches, lawns, children, and trees melted into blurs beneath his speed, and she pleaded, ‘Don’t go so fast.’
‘I’m only going thirty.’
‘It seems faster.’
‘Do you want to drive?’
‘No thanks.’
‘I meant ever again. Have you lost your nerve, do you think?’
‘I don’t think so. It does seem wild, to be in a car again.’
‘How did you get back from the police station?’
‘A policeman drove me.’
‘And what about a doctor? How are your insides? Were you bounced around a lot?’
‘It seemed very smooth and easy. The one scary thing, I didn’t step on the brakes. It never occurred to me.’
‘Where were you going, anyway?’
She described her confusion and panic, the busy signals and the baby-sitters, her driving past Sally’s driveway and her frantic doubling back. She left out Richard. She told again, what was becoming as rigid as a sequence of film, of the skid, the skid the other way, the wall, the calm trees, the Edenlike beauty and intensity of the dripping woods when she got out of the halted, smouldering car. At each rerun the images deepened in colour; now they weirdly meshed with present reality, backward, end to end, as she and Jerry entered the accident scene from the opposite direction. He parked the car on the shoulder, got out, and began to cross the road. She said she didn’t want to see it, she’d wait in the car. He lifted his eyebrows and she changed her mind. He expected her to be sane. Together they crossed the asphalt. Were these skid marks hers? She couldn’t tell, there were so many. But here, where two interrupted ruts gouged the soft shoulder and a half-dozen rocks had been knocked from the top of the wall, was where she had leaped. The bark high on the trunk of a hickory had been skinned off; a little farther on, a maple sapling had been bent and patchily stripped. The car had tried to climb it, and had crashed it to the ground. Ruth could not coordinate her memory of gentle flight with these harsh scars. Deeper in the grove, more trees were skinned, and tyre tracks showed like the marks of giant fingers that had torn the soft earth of leaf mould and growing ferns. Jerry was impressed by how far the car had slithered, between the trees that could have stopped it, before its momentum surrendered to the mud and underbrush. ‘You travelled a hundred feet in there.’
‘It all seemed rather abstract.’ She wondered if he were inviting her to be proud.
Jerry climbed down to the car, opened the door, and took the maps and registration from the glove compartment and some towels and beach toys from the back. He walked once around the car, smiling, and laughed at the far side, the side Ruth could not see. Returning to her, hopping the wall, he said, ‘That whole right side is caved in. It looks like tinfoil.’
; ‘Can it be fixed?’
‘It’s had it. Once the frame is bent, you’re better off just collecting the insurance. Things never get right again.’
‘My poor old car.’ Metal crumpled within her and she felt a shape of grief. ‘It seems heartless just to leave it.’
‘The wrecker will come and tow it away. Come on. Get in.’ Into his old Mercury convertible: the car’s interior suddenly smelled of Sally. Ruth balked. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We have children.’
‘About time you thought of that,’ she said, sliding in.
‘I never stop thinking about it. How about you? If you were thinking about the children you wouldn’t go doing automotive stunts all over the country.’ He popped the clutch in, ‘burned rubber’ as teenagers say. It was ugly of him.
She said, determined to be calm, ‘It was an accident.’
‘It was a stunt,’ Jerry said. ‘A deliberate stunt. The death-defying housewife, with her great big death-wish. You didn’t even brake.’
‘I thought you shouldn’t brake in a skid. It seemed more important to steer.’
‘Steer! You couldn’t steer, how the hell could you steer?’
‘I felt I was steering. Then when I couldn’t steer any more, I lay down on the front seat.’
‘Yes, that’s the way you cope, isn’t it? You just lie down on the front seat and hope everything goes away. And the damnedest thing is, it works. Anybody else would have been killed barrelling into that woods.’
As she sat numb and frightened beside this angry, speeding man, the truth dilated until she felt all hollow with the simple seeing of it. The clouds of green again parted; she slid smoothly through the shuffle of tree trunks. The car nuzzled to a stop. She emerged and the tingling air touched her, loved her. She had had an accident. Jerry had been expecting this to happen. He had been praying for it. His prayer had been answered mockingly: only the car had been destroyed. She remembered his smile as he studied the wreck. ‘You’re mad,’ she said, testing the words carefully, like a ladder of rotten rungs, ‘that I wasn’t.’
‘Killed?’
‘Yes.’
He considered. ‘No, not exactly. I’ve been waiting, I suppose, for God to do something, and this was it. His way of saying that nothing is going to happen. Unless you and I make it happen.’
‘Do you realize what you’re saying? You’re saying you want me dead.’
‘Am I?’ He smiled calmly. ‘It’s just a fantasy, I’m sure.’ He stopped smiling and patted her thigh solemnly. ‘Do you want to make something happen?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, relax. You’re indestructible. Nothing will happen.’
The day after the accident, on the beach, Sally came up to Ruth with a fixed smile and swarming eyes and said how glad she was that Ruth had not been hurt. Ruth believed her, and regretted being too startled to respond with much more than a nod. She had been baking the accident out of herself, the aches in her knees and shoulders (from gripping the wheel harder than she knew?) and the flickering sense of skidding and flying that came upon her whenever she closed her eyes. Sally’s face, tinted by the glare violently as a Bonnard – her lips purple, her hair ashen – seemed a pale, feral apparition striking into the cloudless blue to which Ruth had been yielding herself. ‘Ruth, I heard about your accident and just wanted to say how glad I am you weren’t hurt. Truly.’ Walking away, Sally looked thin; the backs of her thighs had developed a ripple of slack. When they had all been younger in Greenwood Sally’s body had seemed smooth as a model’s, as a machine. The two yellow pieces of her bathing suit receded and merged with the Prendergast dabs of the beach crowd. The next day, apparently, she packed her three children into a plane and flew to Florida, where her brother and his second wife had their home, in the orange grove country around Lake Wales. Ruth learned about it from Jerry, who apparently had encouraged her to go.
‘Why?’
‘The bind was getting to be too much for her.’
‘What bind? What is a bind, exactly?’
‘A bind is when all the alternatives are impossible. Life is a bind. It’s impossible to live forever, it’s impossible to die. It’s impossible for me to marry Sally, it’s impossible for me to live without her. You don’t know what a bind is because what’s impossible doesn’t interest you. Your eyes just don’t see it.’
‘Well, you’re looking pretty impossible to me right now. What right, what possible right, did you have to send her off to Florida on Richard’s money?’
Jerry laughed. ‘It is that bastard’s money, isn’t it?’
‘Jerry you are sick. Why should you hate Richard?’
‘Because he’s an atheist like everybody else and you’re all trying to put me in a coffin.’ Sally’s being far away had loosened his tongue unpleasantly; Ruth felt him hardening himself, for a desperate decision.
‘What is this trip to Florida supposed to prove?’ she asked. ‘Are you supposed to go after her?’
‘Gee, I never thought of that. I’ve never been to Florida.’
‘Don’t be funny.’
‘Is September when the orange blossoms come out?’
‘You’re not coming back into this house if you go.’
‘How could I go? Be reasonable. She’s there for a rest – from Richard, from me, from you, from the whole thing. She’s exhausted. This summer of waiting you asked for was the cruellest thing you could have done. We’re killing her, you and me and whatsisname. She’s been living on pills and she’s desperate.’
‘Pills, piffle. Any woman can work herself up into that kind of desperation when she wants something. She wants you to run off with her.’
He focused on this possibility, and his face took on the incisive set and sharpened lines – as if drawn by himself – that she remembered from the days when at their adjacent easels they were concentrating in parallel on the model. ‘I don’t think that’s the way to do it,’ he said now. ‘I think if it’s going to be done it has to be ground out with lawyers and trial separations and heartbroken parents and weeping kids and the works. How would our children feel if I just disappeared with Mrs Mathias and Bobby and Peter and teeny Theodora? Those awful children – they all look like Richard. They’re all ogres.’
‘Stop it,’ Ruth told him, ‘Don’t complain to me because Sally had children with her husband instead of with you.’
‘That’s the great thing about you,’ he said, ‘everybody else has all the problems. You don’t have any, do you? Poor Sally and I spend all our time on the phone wondering what dear old Ruth will do when she’s abandoned with all her children and you just fucking well don’t have any fucking problems, do you? How do you do it, baby? You smash the car up to brighten a dull day and don’t get a scratch. Your world’s coming to an end and you lie down on the fucking beach all summer happy as a clam. That old One-in-One God of yours must be a real cucumber up there.’
‘I’m a Judaeo-Christian, just like you are,’ Ruth said.
The children, especially Charlie, were growing disturbed. Back from work, Jerry used to play catch with the boys in the back yard, or take all three for an evening swim at the Hornungs’ pool, but now he did nothing at home but sit and stare and drink gin-and-tonics and listen to his Ray Charles records and talk to Ruth, trying, by now wearily, to arrange their words and states of mind in the combination that would unlock his situation and free his heart. At meals his eyes kept going out of focus: he was seeing Sally. Days passed, became a week, then ten days, and neither Jerry nor Richard knew when she would return. A gaudy bird, outlandish in her plumage, she had flown to the tropics; from there, dwindled but unforgettable, she sang to them, and the busy signal at Jerry’s office was her song. In intermittances of rage and despair Ruth felt sorry for him, he looked so ‘torn’. His speckled irises looked ragged, and outdoors he held his head at an odd angle, as if listening for a signal, or offering himself like Isaac to a blow from above. ‘Decide, please,’ Ruth pleaded. ‘We’ll all survive, just do wha
t you want and stop caring about us.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘What I want is too tied up with how it affects everybody else. It’s like one of those equations with nothing but variables. I can’t solve it. I can’t solve it. She cries over the telephone. She doesn’t mean to cry. She’s quite funny and brave about it. She says it’s a hundred and ten and her sister-in-law walks around stark naked.’
‘When is she coming back?’
‘She’s afraid it has to be soon. She and the kids have filled the house and their welcome is wearing thinner and thinner.’
‘Has she told them why she’s there?’
‘Not really. She’s admitted being unhappy with Richard and her brother tells her to stop being silly and spoiled. Richard takes care of her and anyway her duty is to her children.’
‘Which is true.’
‘Why is it true? How does he take care of her? He sent her off with hardly enough money for the aeroplane tickets.’
‘Have you sent her money?’ It made Ruth weak, the thought that Jerry was pouring the children’s education away, that this expensive woman was haunting their bank account as well as their bed.
‘No, I think I’m supposed to send myself. And I can’t. I keep wanting to, but I never quite can, there’s always something, Joanna’s piano recital or having the Collinses to dinner or some damn dental appointment. God, it’s awful. It’s awful talking to her. I wish you’d talk to her since you’re so interested.’
‘I’d be happy to. Just put me on the line. I have lots to say to that woman suddenly.’
‘The reason she went to Florida was to stop hurting you. She hated your accident.’
‘I thought you said she went hoping you’d follow.’
‘I think both ideas were in her mind. She’s mixed up.’
‘Well she’s not the only one.’
While her waking life was consciously occupied by concern for her children and home, an unaccustomed ferocity entered Ruth’s dreams. Violence, amputation, and mad velocity hurled together scenes and faces from remote corners of her life. In one dream, she was riding along the road in Vermont that led to the summer place they used to rent. It seemed to be the stretch below the abandoned sawmill, where the ruts were deepest because the sun never broke through the overhanging branches to dry the mud. They were in a race. Up ahead, in a spindly black open buggy, her father, David Collins, and the little old lady in the Babar books were sitting in a prim-backed row; her father was driving, which frightened her, because he was so reckless, as ministers tend to be, and, lately, being deafer and deafer, oblivious to cars approaching from the side and behind. She and Geoffrey were following in a strange low cart without any visible means of propulsion. They were smoothly flying and yet their wheels were touching the rutted road. She felt her son’s anxiety as hers; his tears burned in her throat. Suddenly the buggy stopped, stopped like a frozen film. David and Daddy held on to the sides, but the old lady, between them, had nothing to hold to, and instantly slipped out of sight. They all gathered around her. She lay on the side of the road, in the scruffy grass, a little withered heap of bones. The impact had foreshortened her body within her black dress, and her legs had been hideously broken, so they radiated from her body like the legs of a spider. Her face, yellow and matted in its flowing hair, was bent backwards, and as she opened her mouth her teeth, elongated dentures, slipped down like a drawgate. She was dying, crushed. She was trying to speak. Ruth bent down to listen, and the dream shifted to a watery realm, a realm of blue-green water tinted alkaline by a white bottom of coral sand, the water of the Caribbean, of St John’s, where she had once gone with Jerry, years ago, when she was pregnant with Geoffrey. Perhaps she had meant to dream of Florida.