by John Updike
‘He said you seemed frightened.’
‘How funny. He was doing his bully-boy act.’
‘He’s been so hurt, Jerry.’
‘Hey Do you want me to come over?’
‘If you want to, I’d like it.’
‘Of course I want to. Why wouldn’t I?’ When she didn’t supply the answer, he added, ‘You sound bruised.’
‘Yes, I guess that’s what it is. Bruised.’
‘Well don’t bump into anything more, just stand in the middle of the room. I’ll be right there.’
‘I love you.’
He had to do things quickly, or he would sink. Jerry put on sneakers but neglected to tie them and rushed into his back yard with the laces bouncing and flipping. He mistakenly pulled out the choke of the Mercury as if it were winter, and, half-flooded, it was reluctant to start. He made the engine roar and drove past mailboxes, garages with gaping doors, heaps of leaves smouldering untended, empty yards. The entire town felt vacated; he imagined that atomic war had been declared, and glanced at the sky for a telltale change of appearance. But the clouds there only mirrored the desolation of the uneventful. The Mathiases’ house silhouetted on its hill seemed a ruin, a stark unturning windmill. Caesar lumbered from the woods and barked, but without heart; by the kitchen doorway the asters swallowed by darkness last night showed russet shades. Inside the door, Sally came shyly into his arms. She was his. Her body startled him by being so real, so solid, so big and stiff; she rested her forehead woodenly on the side of his neck and the heat of her face felt dry. He held her tightly to him; it was expected. Theodora toddled into the hall and stared at them. Her eyebrows, like Sally’s, were shaped – high-arched, and darkening towards the bridge of the nose – so that their natural expression was, if not anger, the alertness of a wild and perpetually threatened animal. The lower half of the child’s face held Richard’s thin, birdy mouth. Her gaze, great-eyed and steady, reflected the vivid transparence all around them; they were exposed, he and Sally, in this high house. He asked, ‘Hey?’
For answer she tightened her arms at his back and involved him deeper in her stricken rigidity. She wore her amber-striped jersey and white St Tropez pants, her playful sailor costume.
He asked her, ‘Don’t you feel like we’re two children caught with our hands in the cookie jar?’
She pulled back and looked at him humourlessly ‘No. Is that what you feel like?’
He shrugged. ‘Sort of. A little. I’m sure it will pass.’
She returned the weight of her face to his neck and asked, ‘Would you like anything?’
Was she offering, incredibly, to make love, here, with all the world watching? Over her shoulder, he asked the child, to remind Sally that she was there, ‘No nap, Theodora?’
‘She won’t take her morning nap any more,’ Sally said. Trying, what had never before been an effort, to find the stance that fit his body, she backed off slightly, letting a little air between them, but keeping her head bowed, as if frightened to show him her face. Looking down, she laughed. ‘You forgot to tie your sneakers.’
‘Yeah, and I forgot my cigarettes.’
She decided to back off from him completely. ‘I think Richard left some in the living room. Where do you want to sit?’
‘Anywhere.’
Where?
We could meet for coffee sometime, if you’d like. Somewhere outside of Greenwood. Would that be wrong?
No. Well, yes. Wrong but right. When? When, dear Sally? Don’t tease me.
It’s you who tease me, Jerry.
‘How many cups of coffee have you had this morning?’ Sally smiled in complicity.
‘Not so many. Two,’ he said, irritated to think that he had betrayed her by not having more. She had not slept, she had drowned in coffee while he had been swimming in his wife’s warmth and colouring on the floor like a child.
He sat in her bright kitchen, the glitter of its knives and counter edges and pâté moulds at intervals dulled as clouds swallowed the sun, and talked of Richard and Ruth; they found it difficult to talk of themselves. Their love, their affair, had become a great awkward shape, jagged, fallen between them. Jerry was ashamed of his desire not to touch her; he wanted to explain that it was not a change in her, but a change in the world. Richard’s knowing had swept through things and left them bare; the trees were stripped, the house was polished and sterile like a shop-window, the hills dangled as skeletons of stones, so that lying embraced even in the earth Jerry and Sally would be seen. His modesty made her repulsive, nothing else; but to plead this, as excuse for not touching her, that same modesty forbade. He was bewildered to be locked with her in a relation demanding tact. She stood; he stood; they seemed, the two of them, bombarded by light perilously. He wanted to hush her brilliance, for it cried out, declared, through the miraculous transparence around them, their position, when they most needed to hide.
They did not hear Richard’s car come up the drive. He found them standing in the kitchen, as if they had just touched. His lips were pinched in like the lips of the elderly. ‘Here, here,’ he said. ‘This is too much.’
Jerry, to make himself smaller, sat down on a hard kitchen chair. Sally remained standing and said, ‘We have to talk. Where can we go?’
Richard still wore his coat and tight tie, as if he had become, through intense consultation, himself a lawyer. ‘Of course, of course,’ he conceded. His saying things twice had taken on an air of legal force. ‘You have to talk, to hash things over. Forgive me, we may not always be rational, but we shall try, we shall try. I came back to get some papers – bankbooks and insurance policies; Sally, you know the folder. Do I have your permission to go upstairs to what used to be our bedroom?’
‘We were talking very sadly,’ Sally offered him, ‘about you.’
‘That’s very kind of you both, I’m sure. You are both, I am sure, very concerned about my welfare.’
‘Oh Richard, relax,’ Sally said. ‘We’re all still people.’
‘I appreciate that. I appreciate that. I have never denied, so far as I know, that the parties involved in this negotiation are people. Jerry, are those your cigarettes you’re smoking, or mine?’
‘Yours.’
‘So I thought.’
‘Here, I’ll give you twenty-eight cents.’
‘Keep your money, you’ll need it. Make yourself at home, Jerry boy. Sally-O, see that Jerry here gets a good lunch, will you? I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to join you, though I know you’re begging me to.’
Jerry stood, saying, ‘I’ll leave.’
‘Don’t,’ Sally commanded.
‘It’s not my house,’ Jerry told her. ‘It’s his. He’s right. I shouldn’t be here.’
Richard stepped over to him and put his arm around him bearishly and hugged; his breath, close, smelled of whiskey, a heavy, helpless, sepia smell. ‘Of course you should, Jerry. Jesus Christ, of course you should. Forgive me, huh? I had an irrational moment when I walked in, but I’m O.K. now. What’s mine is yours, eh? You really put it into her, didn’t you?’ His hug tightened, and Jerry fought a vivid delusion of himself as infantile, small enough to be crushed, lifted, and tossed. His palms began to tingle, his mouth felt dry. Richard was urging him, ‘Enjoy your meal. That’s one thing about Sally, I can’t take it from her, she’s a good cook. She’s given me one hell of a time, boy, but she’s kept those meals coming, three times a day, boy, bang bang bang. She’s a good kid, Jerry, you lucky son of a bitch; you really had it into her, didn’t you? I can’t get over it, I know it’s irrational as hell, I know it’s a defence mechanism of some kind, but I can’t get it into my thick head.’
Jerry said, ‘She never stopped being fond of you.’ Jerry’s heart was pounding, he was trying to make an ascent, up into Richard’s approval, his forgiveness. ‘I didn’t realize,’ he went on, ‘until last night, how fond of you she is.’
‘Horseshit,’ Richard said. ‘Merde. Caca. Take her out of my sight, the sight of her ma
kes me sick, frankly. Good luck, buddy. I give you two butchers three years at the outside.’
‘Leave him alone,’ Sally told Richard. ‘Can’t you see he’s in hell over his children?’
‘I feel sorry for his kids myself,’ Richard said. ‘I feel sorry for mine, too. I feel sorry for everybody except you, Sally-O. You’ve got it made.’
‘Jerry can go any time,’ Sally said, her chin proudly tilted. ‘I have no claims on him. I want a man to want me.’
But Richard had turned and gone upstairs, three steps at a time. He shouted down, ‘Where’s my fucking bathrobe?’
Sally went to the foot of the stairs and screamed as fiercely, ‘Stay out of my closet!’
Richard’s heavy steps dragged this way and that above them and soon he came down carrying a suitcase; he barged into the open air without a sideways glance in their direction, though they had gone into the hall like servants to receive his orders.
Sally smoothed her long hair back from her ears and sighed. ‘Everybody’s getting so melodramatic.’
‘You shouldn’t stay here,’ Jerry said. ‘I can’t visit you, Richard will keep coming in and out. He told me he’s going to live here.’
‘It’s as much my house as his,’ Sally said.
‘Not really, since it’s you and not Richard who wants the divorce.’
She stared; her eyes went wide in mock innocence. ‘Just me! I thought we all wanted it.’
‘Well, some more than others.’
‘Perhaps I misunderstood last night,’ Sally persisted. ‘I thought I heard you say you wanted to marry me.’
‘I did. And I don’t like you here. I feel you’re in danger.’
‘Oh, Richard,’ she said, mildly, brushing back her hair again. ‘I can manage him.’ And in the emphasis of him strange territories unfolded for Jerry. There was something he could almost glimpse, if Sally would cease setting herself and her solid concerns, her desperate practicality, in the path of his vision. She said, ‘Want to go look at the painter’s house? Remember, I mentioned him?’
He’s beautiful, Jerry, you’d love him, he’s a beautiful old guy I don’t know how old he is, he’s so young at heart.
He sounds pretty sexy.
He likes me. He calls me his daughter.
How nice. For him. And you.
Jerry had hated her flirtation, this summer of their affair, with the old painter, who taught winters in the city and who was what Jerry might have been: an artist, a free spirit. ‘How could I forget?’
‘It’s probably much too expensive for us. He fixed it up himself, did all the carpentry.’ She lowered her voice, which had lifted in admiration. ‘It could be a place to put me until we’re ready to live together. He wouldn’t charge us much. The children wouldn’t have to change schools.’
‘How far is it from here?’
‘Only a mile.’
Jerry laughed. ‘Not very far on the way to Wyoming.’
Because Jerry’s Mercury had a noisy noxious broken muffler, they went in Sally’s grey Saab, whose starter had been fixed. Sally drove; Theodora sat uneasily in Jerry’s lap. The painter had built this high little house, a pagoda without dragons, on a slope of pines on the first of the hills behind Greenwood; rocks kicked loose from the road under the Saab’s wheels as it climbed. It was a cocky wood structure, three stories each smaller than the one beneath, as if a giant child had arranged them there. Jerry held Theodora uncomfortably in his arms; she was younger and lighter than Geoffrey, but holding her reminded Jerry of his own infant, and then he remembered how years before, in irrecoverable innocent days, Sally and Ruth swapped maternity clothes, their pregnancies tending to alternate, and he would come home to find Ruth in a russet wool dress, with pimento flecks, or a forest-green expandable skirt in which his eye expected Sally, whom he already, in an uncondensed undeclared way, did love.
The key was kept in a house a hundred yards down the road. As he and Theodora waited for Sally to return, the child leaned so far out from this strange man holding her that his shoulders began to ache with the pull, and he set her down on her own feet. She toddled onto the new lawn and made little footprints, at first accidentally, then purposely. He thought of scolding her, but this seemed a betrayal of the children that were his to shape, and the rebuke stayed in his brain. Sally walking with her wide farm-girl gait uphill, arrived breathless, and let them in. The house was cold, colder than the outdoors.
‘He has electric heat,’ she said.
‘It’s not turned on.’
‘It’s turned low.’
Redwood beams and pine boards shellacked to an orange lustre clashed with elements of glass and flagstone; the space had the mystery of space enclosed within a tent. Between big windows set askew, rectilinear furniture had its angles under Oriental pillows. Wool throw-rugs tried to soften the flagstone floor. Pine branches just outside, shadows and reflections, entered the room like the spirits of animals, so the slats of the lean Danish furniture had the look of perches and ladders.
‘It’s a lovely house,’ he said, meaning it could not be lived in by him. It was the house of a man who had stripped his mind clean of everything but himself, his needs, his body, his pride.
‘The kitchen,’ Sally said, continuing the tour without inflection, a house agent persisting in a hopeless duty. ‘It’s small,’ she said, ‘but terribly workable. A typical man’s kitchen.’
‘He lives alone?’
‘With guests sometimes.’
‘Is he queer?’
‘Sometimes. He’s old, Jerry; he’s a philosopher. See all the bookshelves? There would be plenty of room for our books.’
‘I wouldn’t live with you here, would I?’
‘You could visit me. I think you should visit me, so the children would get used to you. Does that offend your scruples?’
‘Scruples? Do I have any?’
‘Please try not to be sad. Come. This is what I really want to show you.’ She led him up stairs that were polished boards hung in a spiral; she led him down a hall. Through doorways of untreated pine he saw beds of teak and airfoam, unmade. ‘The boys would have to double up,’ Sally explained. The hall ended at a bathroom whose fixtures were on a Roman scale. Beside the door a ladder had been fitted; Sally climbed it. Her bottom in its white pants sailed away above him like a balloon. ‘Come look,’ she called down.
She was standing in an octagonal room, the southern sides windowless, but the other sides open, to the tops of the pines and the sky, whose northern light was gathered by a tilted array of leaded panes that suggested, to Jerry, a man tipping a bowl to drain it, while others stood by thirsty. Clouds moved rapidly across these fixed panes. A large easel stood beneath them, vacant and new; only one season’s worth of palette scrapings smeared the sill. The absent painter was a tidy man, fond of good equipment – glass shelves, a drawing board of frosted Plexiglas, swivelling drafting lamps of German or Swedish manufacture. Jerry imagined the man’s paintings as abstract, lavish of canvas, hard-edged in the newest mode. He thought of a drawing board from his childhood; the pencil kept poking through the paper because he and a playmate had used it as a dart-board and as a workbench, and the hammered nails had left holes.
‘You hate it, don’t you?’ Sally asked.
‘No, of course I don’t. I admire it. When I was a kid I dreamed of having a place like this.’
Sally waited for him to go on, then said, ‘Well, it’s much too expensive for us. He wants two-twenty a month, and the heating bill would be awful.’
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘It – it almost seems too nice for us. Right now.’
He watched her anxiously, to see if she understood. She nodded rapidly, yes yes, like an absent-minded machine. Sally said, ‘We must go back. Peter will be home from kindergarten and I must make lunch. Do you want to have lunch with us?’
‘Sure,’ Jerry said. ‘We – I have a baby-sitter.’
Peter was not yet back. Ruth drove this same car pool Thu
rsdays. It seemed another belt of time altogether in which Jerry had seen Ruth, in her soft black dress, smile and disappear, saying ‘Car keys, car keys’ comically to herself. Sally was saying, as she set four places at the heavy walnut kitchen table, ‘I asked the boys this morning if they would like to have Mr Conant come live with them, and they thought for a while and then Bobby said, “Charlie Conant.” They love Charlie, everybody does.’
‘Except poor Geoffrey.’
‘It’s because you don’t discipline them, Jerry. Bobby tries to pick on Peter but I just won’t have it. I will not stand for it, and I tell him why. I think it’s very important, that children be told the why of everything.’
‘How shall I tell mine why I’m leaving them?’
She took it as a serious question. ‘Just tell them, you and Mommy like each other very much but think you’d be happier living apart. That you love them very much and will see them often and give them all the security you can.’
‘Security. That’s sort of your operational word, isn’t it?’
She looked up with darkened eyes. ‘Is it?’
‘I don’t mean it unkindly. Everybody has to have a word. Mine is faith. Or is it fear? Ruth’s, in a funny way, is freedom. Going off this morning, she seemed happy. She was getting a divorce from everything.’
‘You’ve given her a pretty bad time,’ Sally said.
‘I did it for you.’
‘No. I don’t think so. You did it because you like doing it. You’ve given me a pretty bad time, too.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
She smiled, wryly, then widely. ‘Don’t look so sad, man. We expect it.’ She was tearing leaves of lettuce from the head for sandwiches. He found himself irritated by her wasteful way of cutting out the heart first. She was full of faintly ruthless kitchen tricks like that. Everything in her kitchen glittered, glinted; whereas his kitchen at home was dim and cool even in summer.
Sally handed Theodora a slice of buttered bread and asked, ‘What’s Richard’s word?’
Jerry felt relieved, to have Richard named, to have him brought back into the house this way. ‘Richard? Does he have a word? I was struck last night by how responsible he is. I mean, he saw everything instantly in its social context – lawyers, schools for the children.’