by John Updike
‘I haven’t been to bed. Is Ruth here? I expected Ruth to be here.’
Jerry called, ‘Ru-uth,’ but she was already coming down the stairs. Joanna and Charlie, dressed for school, clattered behind her, in a hurry. ‘Good morning,’ she said tranquilly. ‘Richard, I’ll be right with you, as soon as I find their lunch money. Jerry, do you have two dollar bills and two quarters?’
‘My wallet’s upstairs on the bureau,’ he said, offering to push past.
‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘mine’s in the kitchen. Charlie, go get the two dollars. It’s the quarters that are the problem, everybody keeps stealing them.’
‘Here are two,’ Richard said, having fished.
‘Great,’ Jerry said. ‘We’ll owe you.’ The silver felt chill, accepted from Richard’s hand. He had been out all night.
‘Mom, there is no wallet,’ Charlie was calling.
Geoffrey, overhearing the commotion, came into the busy hall and, surprisingly, butted his head between Richard’s knees. Months ago at the beach, when the surface of their lives was calm, Richard, who floated with an unmuscular ease in the water, had allowed the two little boys, Geoffrey and his own son Peter, to push him this way and that in the shallows, as if he were a large limp boat; recalling his good time, Geoffrey bumptiously offered to play again, and Richard had to unbend or be knocked down.
‘Easy skipper,’ he said, ruffling with a strained expression the woolly round head pushing at his thighs. Embarrassed, Jerry glanced at the headlines of the newspaper in his hand. Negro Admitted to Mississippi U.; 3 Dead in Campus Riot. Khrushchev Invites Kennedy to Moscow. Chou Is Adamant in Soviet Dispute. Giants and Dodgers Tie for Pennant.
‘Is Daddy going to play golf?’ Charlie asked, returning with Ruth’s green wallet after all. He could imagine no other reason why a man would come to the house so early in the morning, though Richard, in his gangsterish checked sports coat and pink button-down shirt and tightly knotted striped tie, was not dressed for golf.
‘Stupid,’ Joanna said. ‘Mr Mathias doesn’t play golf, only Mr Collins.’
‘Mr Mathias is here on business,’ Ruth said, exchanging money for kisses and reaching past Richard’s shoulder to open the door. Joanna and Charlie without looking back pattered down the steps and crossed the road. How serious they looked, Jerry thought, lifting his eyes from the paper to watch them through the window take their place, beneath the elm, in wait for the school bus. Unconscious of the dwarfing size of the tree above them, they kicked at the dead leaves. Around each fallen leaf on the asphalt of the road there was a damp spot, a kiss.
Ruth asked Richard, ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘If I may’ he said. The suffering sweating clown of last night had evaporated, leaving a husky, rigid presence who menaced their house. ‘I have something to say to Jerry, since he appears to be here, and some things to say to you, Ruth. What I have to say to you is very short,’ he told Jerry. ‘Where can we talk?’ Geoffrey was still clinging to Richard’s legs.
‘The back yard might be best,’ Jerry said. The words he spoke seemed to hang outside him; he felt like a scared actor reciting lines he had barely learned.
Ruth said, ‘I’ll make some fresh coffee. Geoff, go watch TV. Bozo’s on.’
Jerry led Richard through the kitchen into the air. They stood beneath a maple; from one of the branches Jerry had strung a monkey swing. The ground all around the swing was packed and scuffed bare; elsewhere, the lawn needed cutting, in the lank neglected way of autumn grass, that dies in August but revives in the September rains. Jerry asked, ‘Have you really been up all night? What did you do?’
Richard was not to be softened. He stood so the inch of height he enjoyed over Jerry was emphasized by the slope of the yard. ‘I drove into Cannonport and walked the streets. I had a drink here and there and watched the sun come up from the docks. I’ve been taking it cold turkey, boy.’
Jerry shrugged. ‘Join the club.’
‘I had breakfast with my lawyer,’ Richard went on. ‘Out of our discussions there emerged two – no, three – statements I must make to you.’
Jerry shrugged again; he felt there was a line here for him to say, but he had forgotten it.
‘Firstly,’ Richard stated, ‘I’ve just come from my home, my ex-home, where I left Sally in excellent physical health.’
‘Good.’
‘I in no way molested her. I showered, shaved, and described to her my decisions as they pertained to her.’
‘Had she gotten to sleep finally?’
Richard squinted, a little puzzled here, by the implication that Jerry knew more than he did. ‘She was sleeping like a baby. I could hardly wake her up. She’s a late riser, better get used to it. My intention is, in regard to the house, to live in it. I assume you and she will locate a new place for her as soon as possible; until such time, she and I will continue to live together, but not, so to speak, as man and wife.’
‘So to speak. Are these the lawyer’s phrases?’
‘This is serious business, Jerry.’
‘Sure is.’ He looked up, scanning; the sky was the blue of faded velvet and was being invaded by serious grey clouds from the west.
‘Secondly I will divorce Sally if you agree to marry her.’
‘If? I thought I had agreed.’ His voice scratched, to hold fast against the sliding sensation that came with these words.
‘The divorce will be out-of-state and on grounds agreed upon by her lawyer and mine. I will not press any claim to the children, though naturally I expect adequate visiting privileges and a continued voice in their upbringing.’
‘Of course. I can’t take your place with them. We’re all going to need each other’s help to get the kids through this.’
‘Just so,’ Richard said, pinching his lips together in a toothless bite. ‘Thirdly if you do not marry Sally, I intend to sue you for alienation of affections.’
It felt like a pillow blow, something more to hide behind than be hurt by; Jerry was distracted, intensely conscious of the yard, the unmoved growth, the paper scraps and toys that needed picking up, the little bumps and granular accumulations at their feet that proved the existence of insect-cities that had their own hierarchies and daily routines and trade routes and queens and five-year plans. Jerry said, ‘I don’t know exactly what alienation of affections means. I suppose I can get a lawyer to tell me. But I think it’s a mistake for you to imagine the attraction wasn’t mutual.’
Richard said, suddenly cosy, ‘You know and I know, Jerry, that Sally was just as aggressive as you were in this affair and probably more so. But in the eyes of the law, she’s not a free agent. She’s a chattel. In the eyes of the law, by turning my wife against me, you’ve caused me a great deal of mental suffering, mental and some physical, for which I have a right to be reimbursed. She threw a brass bookend at my head and could have killed me; that’s damages. For a while now I may have to hire prostitutes to satisfy my manly needs; that’s more damages. These lawyers are wicked people, Jerry boy.’
‘Shit,’ Jerry said. ‘She wouldn’t have come to me if she hadn’t turned against you in the first place. She was your wife, it was your job to keep her. Because of you, my children are going to grow up crippled. Because you’re a shit, my wife wants to die.’
‘I think that’s enough. Don’t flatter yourself about Ruth, she can take care of herself. Watch where you throw that word “shit”. Don’t get me mad, Jerry boy. You’re playing with grown-ups now.’
‘I have a question.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘About these affections of Sally’s you say I’ve alienated. If I were out of the picture, do you think you could get them back?’
Richard’s face appeared to jerk, as when a few frames of a film strip have been lost; or perhaps it was that Jerry blinked, having touched the nerve of the matter. Richard said slowly, ‘If you desert Sally, I will dispose of her in my own way. I am proceeding on the assumption that you will marry her
. Am I wrong?’
It’s "wrong, isn’t it?
‘Am I wrong? Yes or no, Jerry.’
‘I’ll send Ruth out to you. I think you’ve said your piece to me.’
‘For now, yes.’
Inside the house, Ruth asked him, ‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing. Stuff. If I don’t marry Sally he’ll sue me.’
‘For what? Sleeping with her?’
‘Alienation of affections, it’s called.’
‘But it was her idea.’
‘It’s a bluff, Ruth. The silly bastard won’t talk straight, he has to bluff.’
‘Well, he’s been hurt. He’s a weak man.’
‘Who isn’t?’
‘We can’t leave him standing in the yard. Turn off the coffee water when it sings.’
Through the kitchen window Jerry watched Ruth and Richard talk. Relaxed by her company, Richard did a strange tame thing; he sat on the monkey swing and let himself drift back and forth, exhausted. After a while, at some gestures from Ruth, he got up, took off his checked coat, and spread it on the grass, over near the shed where the bicycles and ladder and garden tools were kept, so they could sit down. Side by side, they shared a cigarette. When Richard inhaled, an elderly jut deformed his lower lip; Ruth, nodding as words and smoke came together out of his mouth, seemed pink in the face, her attention heightened almost sexually, as it used to be in art school, when the teacher paused by her easel. The clouds advancing from the west brought wind with them; leaves scuttled and swirled about the absorbed couple, and Jerry wished they would remain like this forever, in his back yard, garden statues, guardian demigods. The coffee water sang; he turned off the burner. Behind him in the house, Geoffrey was squawking; he had attempted to dress himself, and couldn’t do up the buttons. Jerry buttoned his corduroy coveralls and phoned the office, telling them he had wakened with a terrible cold. It was true, his throat was hoarse and his nose watery, for lack of sleep. He found the cardboard behind Ruth’s bureau and some dried bottles of Sho-card colour in the playroom, and a hardened brush that he washed in the kitchen sink. When Ruth and Richard finally came back into the house, they found him settled on the living-room floor doing the Congregational posters. ‘Good for you,’ Ruth said, and served coffee. Richard sat on the sofa and stared incredulously as Jerry with fluid confident strokes lettered RUMMAGE SALE in jiggling Disneyesque capitals and the date and place and drew a cartoon lamp, battered, and an empty picture frame, and a pair of comically patched socks. Ruth went to the telephone.
Jerry asked, ‘Who are you calling?’ He had expected her to sit still, admiring his creative labour.
‘Mrs O again,’ she said. ‘Richard thinks I should go to Cannonport and talk to his lawyer.’
‘Why talk to Richard’s lawyer?’
‘He’ll get me a lawyer of my own.’
Richard said, ‘I certainly think Ruth should have a lawyer.’
‘I guess,’ Jerry said, dipping his brush in water and then in purple.
‘If she had had a lawyer six months ago, a great deal of pain could have been avoided, and we’d all be advanced on the healing process.’
Unctuous, the purple seemed as it went on.
The men held silent as Ruth arranged with Mrs O to come in half an hour. When she hung up, Richard told her, ‘He’s expecting you. I guessed you’d be in before noon, can you make it?’
‘Sure. I have to be back by three to see that Joanna gets off to her piano lesson.’
‘I’ll call and confirm. You have his address.’
‘Yes, Richard, yes. I’m not an idiot. You just gave it to me.’
‘I’m tired. Christ, I need to hit the hay. Let’s keep in touch.’ Richard heaved himself up from the sofa and the effort of standing appeared to impose upon him an obligation to make a statement. ‘It’s a dark day’ he said, ‘but perhaps there’s a brighter ahead.’
Jerry looked up, and obscurely felt his low position on the floor as an advantage. Without rising, he said, ‘Richard, I’d like to thank you for being such a help to Ruth, and for reacting to all this in such a manly and practical way.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Richard said grimly Jerry saw, what the familial intimacy of last night’s revelations had concealed, that Richard had emerged from that soft tunnel with a wound he was determined to turn, in the hard days ahead, to a profit.
When his footsteps had died from the porch steps, Jerry asked Ruth, ‘What the hell was he saying to you for so long?’
‘Oh – you know. Stuff. He told me I was young and good-looking and had a lot to live for. That you weren’t the only man in the world and that you had legal obligations to me and the children.’
‘I’ve never denied that.’
‘He said I’d been begging you all summer to stay with me and now I should try something else. I should give you the divorce. He told me to stop thinking about you and to start thinking about whatiwas, and what! wanted.’
‘He sounds like a Chamber of Commerce.’
‘He made sense.’
‘What did he say about the children?’
‘He said children were important but they shouldn’t be the basis of a decision. I mean, he didn’t really say anything we don’t know already, but it cleared the air to hear somebody else say it.’
‘The gay divorcée. I’ll be damned. O.K., when do you start doing your own fucking Rummage Sale posters?’
‘Don’t be mean to me about them, I can’t possibly do them now. Mrs O is coming in fifteen minutes. You’ve already done one and it’s beautiful; do four more just like it. Don’t try to be original, it’ll take you five minutes. What else are you going to do today? Are you going to go over to her?’
‘I suppose I should.’
‘Just do the posters, I’ll never ask you to do another thing.’
‘“Keep in touch” – that unctuous son of a bitch telling my wife to keep in touch.’
‘Jerry, I must get dressed.’
As if he was detaining her. Was he? Though his hand was trembling and the floor under the cardboard rolled like the deck of a ship, he could not help trying to make each poster better than the one before – funnier, vivider, more invitingly rummagy. It took him longer than five minutes; Ruth showered and dressed and came down to find him still working. She was wearing the plain black dress he had always liked; its knit hugged her hips and its blackness dramatized the something pliant about her pale flesh. She kissed him good-bye. Because of the Sho-card colour on his fingers he could not touch her with his hands. He asked, ‘Is this what Richard told you ladies should wear to see their lawyers in?’
‘Does it seem right? I suppose I should wear a hat with a veil like for church but I don’t have any. I could borrow Linda’s again. Do you think he’ll want to talk money already?’
‘Probably. What does Richard think you should ask?’
‘He mentioned fifteen. That seems like a lot. I don’t think my father ever made that much in all his life.’
‘Well, get what you can. I’m sure Richard’s lawyer will have lots of good ideas.’
‘Are you mad? Isn’t this right? I mean, I have no choice any more, do I?’
‘Of course I’m not mad. I’m sad. I think you’re very spunky and look great. Give me another kiss.’ He leaned forward, handless. Her nose was cool and her tongue warm. The porch steps thumped. Mrs O had arrived. As Ruth left, she was searching her pocketbook and Jerry heard her saying, ‘Car keys, car keys,’ to herself.
He finished the posters while Mrs O fed Geoffrey a second breakfast. Alone at last with a person perfectly kind, Geoffrey prattled. Jerry heard the murmur and realized there was a tone, a muffling amplification, that altered the voices of his children when he listened to them through the thought that he was going to leave them – as the eye would be disturbed by a drawing, meticulously carried out, where perspective nevertheless lapses on one semi-distant building, whose roof is impossibly awry, giving to the surface of the whole a vague churning,
an unwanted resonance. All summer, from other rooms, across widths of asphalt and grass, Jerry had heard that sound, and it had joined as a species of discomfort the curious flatted impression made upon him when, awaking each morning from a sleep permeated with schemes and desires centred upon Sally, he would see, first thing, the lightly smiling self-portrait, executed with exquisitely true touches of colour but in line and drawing not really resembling her at all, given to him by Ruth, blushing, on his thirtieth birthday last winter. In this way, the way in which she could, she had given herself to him.
Only when the posters were finished, laid in a row on the sofa to dry, and brush washed and the paints put away in the playroom, did Jerry feel obliged to call Sally. Mrs O had taken Geoffrey for a walk to the candy store in the leaves; Jerry was alone in the house. It felt strange, dialling her number from his house. He misdialled a six for a seven, replaced the receiver as if hushing a mouth about to scream, and dialled again. ‘Hello’: her voice no longer lifted syllables upward into questions.
‘Hi there, you crazy Miss Mathias. It’s me. How are you?’
‘Fa-air.’ Her voice dragged the word into two syllables.
‘Richard there sleeping?’
‘No, he went out again, he’s terribly excited. Having anything to do with lawyers always makes him excited. How are you?’
‘Alone. Ruth’s gone to see your husband’s lawyer and the babysitter has taken Geoffrey for a walk.’
‘Have you told your children yet?’
‘Oh God, no. Everything’s been too confused. Richard’s been here, issuing ultimatums and giving advice all around.’