by John Updike
Sally turned, constricted in her movements by the wings of the chair and the child in her lap, to face him; anger lingered in her eyebrows and her voice: ‘It hardly seems to me you’re in a position.’ Her sentence dissolved, unfinished, in a slow wet smile, a deep smile that wryly filled the face beneath the angrily arched eyebrows and reached towards him with recognition of how it was, of how they had been, and of forgiveness, forgiveness for what had been done, what was being done, and even what must happen – requesting, too, in this same regretful smile, a like forgiveness from him.
What time is it?
Eight o’clock. Up, man.
Only eight? You’re kidding.
I’ve been up since seven.
I was up all night. Go away. Come back to bed.
It’s your own fault. I kept telling you, go to sleep.
I couldn’t. You were too lovely and strange. You breathed so quietly. I was afraid you’d disappear.
I’m hungry.
Hungry? In Heaven?
Listen. You can hear my stomach growl.
How stern you look standing there. How grand. You’re dressed.
Of course. Do I look all right for the street? Do I look too loved?
Not loved enough.
No you don’t. One thing I must tell you about myself, I’m a real bitch until I’ve had my coffee.
I can’t believe it. Anyway, I like you as a bitch.
I can smell coffee coming in through the air conditioner.
Come to me for one minute and I’ll buy you a million cups.
No, Jerry. Come on. Get up.
One half a minute, for half a million cups. No, wait. Stay by the window, I’m having a wonderful sleepy sensation, I’m making love to the sight of you standing there, where I can’t touch you; it’s very perverse. You look glorious.
Oh, Jerry. Go easy on me. You love me too hard. I keep trying to pull back, but you never do.
I know. It’s not fair. I’m afraid of death but not afraid of you, so I want you to kill me.
Isn’t it funny, that you’re not afraid of me? Everybody else sort of is.
Richard lifted his pencil above his pad of paper – each little blue sheet of which was headed with the name in 3-D lettering of the Cannonport liquor store and a tiny linecut of its façade. ‘Let’s nail down some facts. Which hotel did you take her to in Washington?’
In that hotel Jerry had lain with Sally fearing Richard’s knock on the door; now the knock sounded and Jerry had no wish to admit him into that remembered room. He said, ‘I don’t see that it matters.’
‘You won’t tell me. Very well. Sally what hotel?’
Yet he hardly gave her time to answer before asking, ‘Ruth?’
‘I have no idea. Why do you need to know?’
‘I need to know because I’ve been a horse’s-ass laughing-stock all fucking summer. I was sitting here remembering, there was something fishy all summer, everybody was too fucking jolly when I was around. I remember, what hurt at the time, down at the Hornungs’, going over to where Janet and Linda were talking about something very hush-hush and they looked at me and turned white. “What’s up?” I said, and from the look on their faces I might’ve let loose a walloping fart.’
‘Richard,’ Jerry interrupted, ‘I must tell you something. I’ve never liked you –’
‘I’ve always liked you, Jerry.’
‘– but being involved with Sally has involved loving you, if you’ll forgive my saying so. And don’t drink all that rotgut or whatever it is.’
‘Retsina. Cheers. L’Chaim! Salute! Prosit!’
Jerry accepted more wine and asked, ‘Richard, where did you learn all these languages?’
‘Ist wunderbar, nichts?’
‘You men may be having a good time but this is agony for the rest of us,’ Sally said. She was still sitting rigid as a madonna; in her lap Theodora, head wobbling gently, seemed hypnotized.
‘Take the brat to bed,’ Richard said.
‘No, if I leave the room you’ll all talk about me. You’ll talk about my soul.’
‘Tell me the hotel.’ Ruth spoke to no one in particular.
No one answered.
‘O.K., then. You want to play rough. Very good. Very good. I can play rough too. My Daddy played rough and I can play rough.’
Jerry said, ‘Well, why not? You don’t owe me anything.’
‘Goddammit, Jerry, you talk my language. Sköl.’
‘Bottoms up. Chinchin.’
‘You miserable bastard, I can’t get mad at you. I keep trying and you won’t let me.’
‘He’s awful that way,’ Ruth said.
‘How would you play rough?’ Jerry asked.
Richard began to doodle on his pad. ‘Well, I could refuse to divorce Sally. That means she couldn’t remarry.’
Sally sat even more upright and her lips drew back along her teeth; Jerry saw that, far from reluctant, she was relieved to fight with Richard. ‘Yes,’ she said sharply, ‘and your children wouldn’t have a father. Why would you hurt your own children?’
‘What makes you think I’ll let you have the children?’
‘I know damn well you don’t want them. You never did. We had them because our analysts thought it was healthy.’
They spoke back and forth so rapidly that Jerry gathered they had been over this ground often before.
Richard smiled and continued his design on the pad. Jerry wondered what it would be like to see with only one eye. He closed one of his and looked at the room – the chairs, the women, the glasses invisibly shed a dimension. Things were just so, flat, with nothing further to be said about them; it was the world, he realized, as seen without the idea of God lending each thing a roundness of significance. It was terrible. He had always hated Richard’s looks, the tilted ponderous head, the unctuous uncertain mouth, the crazy lack in one socket. Was this why – because this face presented him with this possibility, of his own lacking one eye? He opened it, and a roundness sprang, vibrating, around things, and Richard was lifting his head and saying to Sally, ‘You’re right. My lawyer would talk me out of it anyway. Let’s try to be rational. Let’s try to be rational, folks. Let’s all try together to keep those little green-eyed devils down. Jerry, I know you’ll be a good father to my children. I’ve seen you with yours, and you’re a good father.’
‘He’s not,’ Ruth said. ‘He sadistic. He teases them.’
Richard kept nodding. ‘He’s not perfect, but he’s O.K., Ruthie babes. He’s immature, but who isn’t?’
Ruth went on, ‘He makes them go to Sunday school when they don’t want to.’
‘Children need,’ Richard said, droning in a doodling drunken trance, ‘children need a basis for life, however idiotic. Jerry, I’ll pay for their educations and their clothes.’
‘Well, their educations certainly.’
‘It’s a deal.’
Richard was doodling numbers now. In the silence, a great immaterial weight shifted, like a tissue page in a Bible, unmasking the details of an infernal etching.
Jerry cried, ‘But what about my children!’
‘That’s your problem,’ Richard said, ceasing to be drunk.
Jerry addressed Ruth. ‘Give me one. Any one. Charlie or Geoffrey; you know how Charlie bullies him. They should be separated.’
Ruth was crying; her words issued trembling. ‘They need each other. We all need each other.’
‘Please. Charlie. Let me have Charlie.’
Sally jerked into speech. ‘Why won’t you? They’re as much his as yours.’
Ruth turned in her ladder-back chair. ‘I might if it were any other woman,’ she said. ‘But not you. I wouldn’t trust you with my children. I don’t think you’re a fit mother.’
Jerry protested, ‘How can you say that, Ruth? Look at her!’ But even as he said it, he realized that perhaps only to him did she seem inhumanly kind, her face brimming with kindness, this face he had seen submerged – eyes closed, lips parted – in pas
sion, hovering beneath his face like a reflection submerged in a pool. Having seen too much, he was as good as blind, and possibly it was they, Richard and Ruth, who saw her accurately.
You don’t believe I’m so simple. I am simple. I’m just like – that broken bottle.
‘Sundays, vacations, sure,’ Ruth said. ‘If I crack up or kill myself, take them. But for now they’re staying with me.’
‘Yes,’ Jerry said, unnecessarily. He had reached a strange state; his momentum, thrust upon him by a need to keep free of Richard, had outstripped his control; in this state of severed veering he had to exert his voice, to take soundings on the depth of his helplessness. The silence that followed this sounding seemed vast.
Richard abruptly said, ‘Well, Sally-O, congratulations. Congratulations, girl, you’ve done it. You’ve had your cap set for Jerry Conant for years.’
‘She has?’ Jerry asked.
‘Of course,’ Ruth told him. ‘Everybody could see it. It was embarrassing, even.’
Richard said, ‘Don’t knock it, Ruth. This may be the real thing, a true amour de coeur. Let’s wish the kids luck. Jerry, one thing you’re not going to be is bored. Sally is not tranquil. She has many fine qualities; she cooks well, dresses well, she’s good – well, fairly good – in bed. But she is not tranquil.’
‘Weren’t we discussing something else?’ Jerry asked.
‘The children’s educations,’ Ruth said. She stood up. ‘I’m going home. I can’t stand this.’
‘I should tell you,’ Jerry said, with a flicker of his old desire to annoy this man, ‘I’m a believer in public schools.’
‘So am I, Jerry boy,’ Richard said, ‘so am I. It’s Sally who insists on the kids being hauled in the bus to that snob school.’
Sally said primly, ‘These are my children and I want them to have the best education they can get.’ My: the word, Jerry saw, had a beauty self-evident to her, her mouth never questioned the worth of this jewel of a word.
Ruth asked, falteringly seating herself again, ‘Suppose Jerry wants to quit his job? Are you willing to be poor with him?’
Sally considered her answer carefully, and seemed pleased with it. ‘No, I don’t want to be poor, Ruth; who does?’
‘ I do. If we all had to sweat for our food we wouldn’t have time for this – this folly. We’re all so spoiled we stink.’
‘Ruthie,’ Richard said, ‘you’re speaking my heart. Let’s get back to nature and simple poverty. I’ve been a registered Democrat all my life. I voted for Adlai Stevenson twice.’
Now that Sally had found her tongue, she seemed determined to express everything that had crossed her mind while the others had talked. ‘You know, just signing a piece of paper doesn’t mean you stop being husband and wife.’ Jerry had heard her say this before, in murmured exploration of their spiritual plight; in the present context it seemed irrelevant, brittle, not quite sane. Ruth caught his eye, then glanced at Richard. Sally, sensing this current of amusement, grew vehement: ‘And the person here who is going to lose most hasn’t gotten a damn bit of sympathy. Ruth will have her children and Jerry and I will have each other but Richard doesn’t get a Goddamn thing!’ She bowed her head; her hair fell forward to complete the rhetoric.
Richard watched the other two for their reaction, and seemed to teeter between complicity with them and a revived union with Sally. He took her tone, and attacked: ‘Jerry let me ask you something. Have you ever been alone? I mean real down-in-the-guts honest-to-Christ fuck-you-Jack alone. This big dumb broad here was the only friend I ever had and she wants to leave me for you.’
‘You do love her,’ Ruth said.
Richard pulled back. ‘Oh, I love her, of course I love the crazy bitch, but – what the hell. I’ve had my ups. Que será, será.’
‘Well I think two perfectly good marriages are being broken up by a hideous mistake – by the most pathetic kind of greed,’ Ruth said, rising again, ‘but nobody agrees with me so I really am getting out of here.’
‘It’s settled?’ Jerry asked.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘If you say so. How do we do this? We can’t go back. Sally, you go with Ruth and spend the night in our house.’
‘No,’ was Sally’s simple, startled answer.
‘She won’t hurt you. Trust us. Please, it’s the only place I can think of to put you. You go with her and I’ll stay with Richard.’
‘No. I won’t leave my children.’
‘Just for one night? I’ll be here, Richard and I can make them breakfast. I don’t see the problem.’
‘He’ll take my children and say I deserted them.’
‘You’re not serious, Sally. You know your own husband better than that. Richard, you wouldn’t do that.’
‘Of course not,’ Richard said, and in his face Jerry read an unexpected expression, of embarrassment, for Sally.
Jerry pleaded with her, ‘Haven’t you been listening to him? He won’t kidnap your children. He loves you, he loves them. He’s not a monster.’ He turned to Richard. ‘We can play chess. Remember the chess games we used to have?’
‘I don’t think I should leave,’ Sally said. She tightened her arms around Theodora as around a prize.
‘Well I can’t ask Richard to go home with Ruth.’ The others laughed, which angered Jerry; this wrangle on the edge of the grave was so unworthy of them all, and his finagling position such a poor reward for the sacrifice and fatal leap he had at last made.
‘Sally-O, I promise I won’t kidnap the kids,’ Richard said.
‘But if I leave her with you you’ll beat her,’ Jerry said.
‘Jesus, Jerry, I’m beginning to hate your guts. She’s not your fucking wife yet and I’ll beat her if I fucking well please. This is my house and I’m not getting out of it because my wife’s turned into a whore.’
‘Who’s ever coming, come,’ Ruth said. ‘Jerry I don’t think they want us any more.’
Jerry asked Sally, ‘Will you be all right?’
‘Yes. I will.’
‘You’d really rather have it this way?’
‘I think so.’ For the first time tonight, their eyes met.
Jerry, your eyes are so sad!
How can they be sad when I’m so happy?
They’re so sad, Jerry.
You shouldn’t watch people’s eyes when they make love.
I always do.
Then I’ll close mine.
Jerry sighed. ‘Well I guess we’ve all spent enough nights together one more won’t kill us. Call me,’ he told Sally, ‘if you need me.’
‘Thank you, Jerry. I won’t. Sleep well.’ She smiled and her eyes went elsewhere. ‘Ruth –?’
Ruth was already down the hall. ‘Save it,’ she called back to Sally. ‘We’re all too tired.’
Jerry felt dirty; in the beginning, when they were all new couples in town, being at the Mathiases, amid their expensive things, had made him feel gauche and unclean. Now, he needed to urinate, but Richard’s silence loomed at his side as a social impatience, and he did not dare delay in the downstairs lavatory. Outdoors, the three spaced stars of Orion’s belt had slipped to a steeper tilt beyond the woods and the moon moved illumining through an ashen mackerel sky. The Conants heard Caesar whine and scratch in the garage, but he did not bark. The noise of their motor polluted the night. As they went down the curving driveway, Ruth lit a cigarette. Jerry twiddled his fingers. She passed it to him for a puff. ‘The odd thing is,’ she said, ‘I feel as though I’m coming back from one more evening at Sally and Richard’s. At least I wasn’t bored. Richard didn’t talk about stocks and bonds.’
‘Yes, he didn’t seem as awful as usual. In fact he had his rather grand moments. I felt just overwhelmed. How did I seem? Outclassed?’
‘You were you,’ Ruth said.
His bladder burned. He asked his wife, ‘Do you mind if I stop the car a minute?’
‘We’re almost home,’ she said. ‘Can’t you wait?’
‘No.’
He stopped her pumpkin-coloured Volvo and opened its door and the colourless dry grass and roadside weeds seemed rendered precious by this halt in his motion. There was a telephone pole. Drawing near to it, he tore at his zipper and yielded his pain to the earth. The moon set a thorn of shadow beside each splinter of the pole; a silver ghost of frost glistened in the tall grass. Everything, Jerry saw, was painted on black, engraved on our dull numb terror. An unseen V of geese honked, a car on another road whispered itself into nothing, a smell of apples haunted the air. Beyond his awareness of the night he tried to make himself conscious, as if of the rotation of the earth, of the huge and mournful turn his life had taken. But there seemed to be only this grass, and Ruth waiting for him in the car, and his diminishing arc of relief.
Past many dark houses, they arrived at their own; all of its lights were on. Mrs O, though sweet with the children, never cleared a dish or switched off a light. As they paid her, she told them, ‘A woman from the Congregational church called about some posters.’
‘Oh my Lord,’ Ruth said. ‘I’d forgotten. They were supposed to be ready Saturday.’
‘Those people are turning into tyrants,’ Jerry said, and asked Mrs O, ‘Didn’t you wear a coat?’ The babysitter shook her head silently; her face was flushed, and as she stepped onto the porch she dabbed at her eyes. Closing the door, Ruth said, ‘Poor soul. I wonder how much she knows.’
‘Why would she know anything?’
‘She’s of the town, Jerry. The whole town knows we’re in trouble. I’ve seen it all summer on the faces of the boys at Gristede’s.’
‘Huh. It never seemed to me that we were in trouble. I was, and you were, but not us.’
‘Let’s go to bed. Or are you off to the cottage?’
‘I couldn’t. Want some milk?’
‘Do you?’
‘If you’ll make toast.’
‘Oh, sure. What the hell. What time is it anyway?’
‘One ten.’
‘That early? Amazing. It seemed we were there for a lifetime.’
‘Should I call?’ Jerry asked. ‘Do you think she’s all right?’
‘She’s chosen; let her alone.’