Marry Me

by John Updike

  Jerry said to her, ‘Come on, get with it. You dance like there’s a stone in your shoe.’

  ‘I have a headache.’

  ‘You’re thinking too hard. I’ll get you a drink.’

  But the bourbon only made her dizzy, and now, whether she was dancing or standing, the room spun, and Sally’s bright shape with its mocking shadow of energy cut at her from one side and then another, whittling her smaller and smaller; she became a lump, a lump of pain. The light sickened her. The leader of the band rose up with an electric guitar and yipped and launched a Twist. The noise seemed to Ruth something solid the band was stuffing into the far corners of the hall, into the dusty mysterious spaces between the pipes and the ceiling. Jerry was leading Sally into the dance area. Ruth was not surprised. She noticed how, as they moved to the centre of the floor, Jerry and Sally took everyone’s eye; there was something striking about them as a couple, something adolescent and tall, vaguely comic and dramatically demanding, as actors are demanding of their audience. Not touching, they faced each other and dropped their angular bodies into the dance; a ring of people formed around them and hid them from Ruth’s view. David Collins came up to her, looked at her face, and moved away; she felt he was frightened. She felt she was contagious, foul, cursed, and about to give birth, through the pain in front of her head, to a monster like herself. When the Twist at last ended, she went up to Jerry and said, ‘Please take me home. I hate this.’

  His hectic face made eyes of surprise.

  ‘Please.’

  Jerry looked over her head towards Sally and asked her, ‘Can you fit the Collinses into your car? Evidently we have to leave.’

  ‘Sure. I’m sorry, Ruth, you don’t feel well.’ It was Sally’s voice at its most toney a delicate drawl beyond reproach.

  Ruth turned. ‘You lied to me,’ she said, determined to be distinct, though panic and nausea were tumbling inside her.

  The muscles in Sally’s face stiffened, and her eyes darkened so that their sockets seemed deep. But in reply she repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Ruth,’ as if she had heard nothing.

  Nothing. The dream was moving on without her now. Jerry drove back to Greenwood furiously fast; both could have been killed, and Ruth dared not lift her voice, lest he veer. Yet the danger bound them together, almost comfortably; Jerry was challenging his death, and their speed served to remove Ruth’s headache. She felt pain flying in sparks and clumps from the top of her skull like snow in winter from a car’s heaped roof. They didn’t speak, but his asthmatic breathing was loud. It was midnight when they got home, and later still when he got back from taking Mrs O home. Ruth had changed into her nightie and terrycloth robe and restored herself with a glass of milk. He came in the kitchen door gesturing. His wet shoes tracked dead leaves in. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, flinging down his hands, palms up, ‘I must leave you. She’s too lovely. I can’t let her go.’

  ‘Don’t use your hands in that affected way and keep your voice down. I can hear you.’

  He spoke in jerky gusts, striding back and forth on the linoleum. ‘I saw it tonight, very clearly. A revelation. I’ve been waiting for one, and there it was. I must go to her. I must go to that orange dress and dive in and disappear. I don’t care if it kills me, I don’t care if it kills you. Anything that gets in the way – the children, the money, our parents, Richard – none of it matters. It’s just stuff, bad stuff. Tough stuff. It needs faith. I’ve just lacked faith, in a funny way faith in you. I didn’t think you were a person, apart from me. But you are. God, Ruth, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. It’ll be more awful than I imagine, I know. But I am sure. Quite sure. It’s a great relief to be sure. I’m very thankful. I’m numb and scared, but glad. Be glad too. Please? I was just nibbling you to death this other way.’

  Her fingers felt huge, expanded like the noise of a gong, on the cold glass of milk. ‘All right,’ Ruth said. ‘If you’ve made up your mind, I promised to help you. How shall we do it? When will you tell the children?’

  ‘Don’t make me tell the children yet. Just don’t make me sleep here tonight. Don’t talk me into it. You probably can, but don’t. Let me go somewhere else. To the Collinses. To a motel.’

  ‘What will I tell them in the morning? The children?’

  ‘Tell them the truth. Tell them I went somewhere. Tell them I’ll be home in the afternoon and give them a bath and put them to bed. I won’t leave at night until they’re asleep.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll have her with you.’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. I don’t want her to know. I don’t want her to know anything until it’s definite, she’ll just get herself stirred up.’

  ‘You mean this is not definite?’

  He hesitated, wide-eyed. He said, ‘I have to see how you and the kids take it.’

  ‘We’ll take whatever we have to. Isn’t that the idea?’

  ‘Now don’t be bitter. You promised to help. Give me the dignity of trying this.’

  Ruth shrugged. ‘Try anything you want.’ When she lifted the milk to her lips, it smelled sour. She saw little curdled flecks floating on the surface, and was unable to drink. ‘Suppose somebody invites us somewhere, what do I say?’

  ‘Accept, for now. I’ll go with you.’

  ‘So the only difference is you won’t be sleeping with me?’

  ‘Isn’t that the crucial difference? It’s a start, anyway. It’s right. No matter what happens, it’s right.’

  ‘Oh. What a curious thing to say.’

  ‘Sweetie, the bluebird has flown. We’re too young to sit around the rest of our lives waiting for it to fly back in the window. It won’t. It can’t fly backwards.’

  He was using his hands again in that disagreeable stagey way, and Ruth was angered by the flicker of conceit in his expression when he struck upon the image of the bluebird flying backwards – a piece of animation on the screen of his face. She rose and went to the sink.

  Jerry called plaintively, ‘Now don’t start drinking!’

  She poured the milk down the sink, rinsed the glass, and placed it mouth down in the drainer. She checked if there were any crumbs on the counter to attract ants and, finding a few by the toaster, brushed them with one hand into the other, and down the sink, after the milk. With a wet washcloth she erased a smear of jam she had noticed near the toaster. She switched off the counter lights and said, ‘I’m not drinking. I’m going to bed.’

  She had to pass Jerry to reach the stairs. ‘How’s your headache?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘My headache’s better, but if you touch me I’ll cry or scream, I don’t know which. I’m going to bed, it’s late. You going to pack, or what?’

  ‘Isn’t there something more we should say? I feel there is.’

  ‘We can say it later. There’ll be plenty of time. I’m not going to be hurried through this.’

  She brushed her teeth in the children’s bathroom, to keep away from Jerry. She used Charlie’s toothbrush, which was stiff and sharp from being rarely used; she must speak to him. She went to bed in her robe. Despairing, chilled, she bunched the two pillows under her head and made a burrow of the covers, curling up on her side. In the purple void, spangled with odd flashes, beneath her eyelids, the tingle of her own hair on her cheek and lips seemed an alien touch. She listened to the distant clicks and scrapes of Jerry’s packing. His footsteps approached, the light of their bedroom door opening bleached the purple beneath her lids a translucent blood-pink, he was rummaging in the drawer beside her head. ‘I better take my Medihaler,’ he said.

  His voice was reedy and the sound of his breathing shallow and forced. ‘If it’s so right,’ she asked, ‘why are you having an attack?’

  ‘My asthma,’ he said, ‘is a function of fatigue and dampness and the time of the year. It has nothing to do with you, or Sally, or right or wrong or God.’ He bent over, brushed back the strand of hair that had been touching her cheek, and kissed her cheek. ‘Shall I wait till you fall asleep?’

  �
�No. I’ll be all right. I’m fine. Go away.’

  Incredibly, he obeyed. She listened as his footsteps patrolled the house, visiting each child’s room, summing up their life together, making the decisive sounds of opening and closing doors; his footsteps diminished down the stairs, limping under the weight of something he was carrying. The front door eased open. There was a careful bump on the porch outside. He seemed to be hesitating here; she waited for the door to open again and admit him, for his footsteps to return up the stairs, with that way of his heels clattering he had. But she had misjudged the silence. He had descended the porch stairs without making a sound. A car door opened, and slammed. The starter churned, the motor roared inside her head, lifting in pitch as it diminished in volume. He was gone.

  The breadth of the bed felt huge. Ruth uncurled a little into the white. She was skiing, doing a slow traverse across a broad, rather bare and icy slope, concentrating on keeping her weight well forward and on the downhill ski. A patch of brown grass showed through the snow cover, but she glided over it easily, and planted her pole for the turn. The turn felt right; though her speed was not great she lifted smoothly, perhaps because there was no loose powder to snag the heels of her skis.

  She awoke Saturday morning with Geoffrey in bed beside her. In the oblivious egoism of his small body he had taken the centre of the bed and pushed her to one edge; with Jerry, he being heavier, it was she who was pulled into the middle. Geoffrey’s face, slack and still, was in texture like some dense pale marble into which light penetrates a millimetre. The solemnity of his face, the utterly humourless perfection with which the eyebrows, the eyelids, the fat whorls of the nostrils and the ears had been worked out frightened her, as if, in the night, a stolen masterpiece had been dumped in her bed. She fought down panic.

  Joanna came into the bedroom, grumpy and rub-eyed, and asked where Daddy was. ‘Daddy got up early because he had some special work.’ The children accepted her explanation without doubt and without much interest. Ruth rose and the fixtures in the bathroom had the unreal sheen of a Christmas decoration. In the kitchen she checked the calendar again and verified her count; she was five days late. After feeding the children breakfast she carried the vacuum cleaner downstairs. Jerry called around ten.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘Not badly. Geoffrey at some point got into bed with me and I didn’t even wake up.’

  ‘See? I told you you’d like having the bed to yourself.’

  But she hadn’t had it all to herself was what she had just told him. She suppressed the impulse to quarrel and asked him, ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Awful. The ice-making machine in the motel kept switching on and off outside my door. The lady at the desk couldn’t believe I didn’t have a woman with me. I thought for tonight, Ned Hornung’s parents have a cottage over on Jacob’s Point, they’ve gone back to the city, maybe I could stay there. I’ll call him.’ He was talking rapidly, harried, amused, having an adventure. She shut her eyes. At last he remembered to ask, ‘Were the children upset?’

  ‘No, they took it very casually. For now.’

  ‘Wonderful. It’s really so unreal. I’ll come home around four.’

  ‘That late? It’d be a lovely day for a walk on the beach.’

  ‘Ruth, please don’t. I’d love to but let’s try to feel a little separated. Maybe Charlie and Joanna would like to walk over to the football game at the high school.’

  ‘It’s just so awkward to begin on a weekend. Why don’t you come home for tonight and Sunday and start this regime on Monday?’

  ‘Goddammit, woman, I can’t. I can’t. I wouldn’t have the guts to get out again. It was horrible, going down those stairs with my suitcase. When should we level with the kids?’ Without waiting for an answer, Jerry said, ‘I’ll have to say something to the Hornungs, asking about the cottage.’

  She was silent, amazed at the fissures as they widened in the earth of everyday. And Jerry had sounded happy.

  The day was fair and clean, the sky pale, a day to be outdoors, though too early to rake leaves. Ruth mowed the lawn, in dungarees and a grey sweatshirt of Jerry’s and without shoes; the earth to her feet felt slightly contracted, commencing to harden, to withdraw. The lawn hardly needed mowing, but Ruth wanted to be working. Exercise might bring on her period. And this was the kind of job she must now learn to do. But it was too sad; in his sweatshirt she reminded herself of Jerry too much, and the grass to be cut, the weary plantain and chicory obedient to the obsolete command to grow, reminded her of herself. Her father was fond of saying from his pulpit that man is as grass, to be thrown into the oven, and it was truer than he knew, he who had so confidently expected to be loved, and who had been.

  At the end of the mower handle Ruth felt suspended at a great lost height above the earth, the earth with its tangle of tiny lives and deaths that from a distance appears a lawn but up close is unendurably confused and cruel. Face things. We age and are discarded. We weaken and are eaten. Her children’s voices as they scrimmaged with the Cantinellis preyed upon her. Charlie tackled Geoffrey, who was hugging the football as if it were a doll to hug, a prize that was his to keep, not understanding the game; he fell heavily and began to cry. Ruth ran to them. His collarbone was not broken again, but she slapped Charlie square on his uplifted face as it challenged her with a sly half-smile like one of Jerry’s. He burst into tears so heartfelt that Geoffrey in surprise stopped his own crying, then began again, in sympathy with his brother. ‘He didn’t mean to!’ the child sobbed. Dizzy, dismayed at herself, Ruth fled her children and went into her house. She poured herself some vermouth in the kitchen. She walked through the lower rooms marvelling at the furniture she and Jerry had accumulated, as if these common things were extravagant shapes eroded into semblances in a grotto. The mail had come; it lay where it had flopped in the front hall. Jerry would have scooped it up. If she bent over, would she faint? She listened for a voice, and wondered if she were praying. The telephone rang, enormously.

  It was Jerry. ‘Hi. Good news, I guess.’ But he sounded distant, frightened, boxed into a phone booth and an escapee’s bravado. ‘The Hornungs are delighted to let me use their parents’ cottage. Apparently it was robbed twice last fall and they’d love to have me in it. They gave me the keys along with coffee and condolences about us. I told them it was just an experiment. There’s no furnace but there is an electric heater and the phone hasn’t been disconnected yet. They say everything about it is tacky except the view. I said I was big on views. You want the phone number?’

  Ruth picked up the mail and wrote the number down on the back of a bill envelope. She asked, ‘Could you come back here for lunch?’

  ‘I said I’d be back at four. Why don’t you take anything I say seriously?’

  She said, ‘I want to walk on the beach and the children don’t want to go to the football game. We need you.’

  ‘We’re separated, damn it!’

  ‘I have something to tell you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t tell you over the phone.’

  ‘Why not? Is it bad?’

  ‘It’s bad now. It might have been good once. Anyway it’s nothing definite. It’s more of a warning than anything.’

  ‘What can it be?’

  ‘Use your imagination.’

  ‘Is it about Sally?’

  ‘No. For God’s sake. You have a boring one-track mind, Jerry. Think about us for a change.’

  ‘I’ll be over in a while.’

  She waited at the window. Her elm, her sacred elm, was flooding the road with golden leaves and resuming the nakedness in which its arabesques and tracery were all revealed, leading her eye upward and inward, homeward to some undivided principle of aspiration. Jerry’s old maroon Mercury, its tattered top down as if to celebrate his escape, wheeled and crunched into their drive; at the same moment Richard’s Mercedes slowly passed, and kept going. Jerry came in grinning: ‘That son of a bitch would have stopped if I hadn’t pulled up. H
ow can he smell a rat so soon?’

  Ruth ran to him and made him take her into his arms, in the front hall. She felt flustered, erotic. Though he leaned backwards and touched her guardedly, he seemed pleased. ‘What baby? How can you miss me so soon?’ He stroked her back, through his own sweatshirt.

  ‘Take me to the beach,’ she pleaded. ‘Take us all to the beach.’

  Long Island Sound was such a blue as could never be painted, a colour that would swallow all colours, tube after tube, a blue darker than carbon and brighter than titanium white. The high fall tides had swept wrack up towards the dunes; a massive keel beam had been deposited by a storm and in the shelter of its girth bonfires had been set, leaving black traces. The children raced ahead, and beyond them an unleashed dog ran in wide circles, its barks arriving at their ears tardily. When water seized Ruth’s ankles it seemed happiness that made her shiver. She leaned on Jerry and took his arm and told him, as the bobbing heads of their children intersected the circles the dog was tracing, that her period was three or four days late, but that he wasn’t to worry.