by John Updike
Can you? I can’t feel anything.
Peter, stop pestering Mr Conant. He doesn’t want to play.
He’s trying to show me a shell. It’s neat, Peter. Do you have a safe pocket?
Should we wait for Theodora?
She walks like you, don’t you think?
I never noticed.
Want to go past the rocks, see what’s there?
You’d like to get back.
I can wait.
Jerry –
Say it.
I’m sorry I’ve been stupid, I’m sorry I couldn’t talk last night and can’t seem to do the right thing today –
You’ve been fine. You’re you.
No, I know I’ve felt wrong to you today; but I wouldn’t always. I know we’re all right together.
I know it too. It’s not you, Sally It’s things. We can’t lift them. You can’t lift them for me. I can’t lift them for you. I’d love to, but I can’t.
O.K., man. If you can’t, you can’t.
Are you sure I can’t?
It’s you who are sure.
God. This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen!
His headlights gathered in the Greenwood exit sign. He remembered that he was carrying, on the back seat, the bulky envelope Sally had given him, the corpse of their affair. He stopped the Mercury at the side of the turnoff road and opened the trunk with the key; deep inside, with the greasy lug wrench and a flap of plastic lining that had come unglued and some bailing rope left over from a Cub Scout paper drive Charlie had been active in, there was a cave that would do for now. The envelope was so bulky with tokens of romantic love that as he handled it the little clasp let go and the contents spilled, exposing like edges of broken glass glimpses of his agitated handwriting, on pieces of paper already beginning to yellow. A few fell to the road; the rest slid loose upon the rubber floor of the trunk. Headlights swept over him, again and again; he was afraid someone he knew would stop, seeing him on his knees in the road, pulling a love letter from beneath a tyre. With jerking, slippery hands he stuffed the letters back into the envelope; they had expanded; they would not go in, without crumpling. Between two letters in his handwriting were some strands of hair. He tried to examine them in the red glow of his tail lights, and couldn’t be certain of the colour. But they were too short to be hers. And he remembered that sometimes in her house she would comb his hair afterwards. She had saved the combings.
Your hair is so soft, Jerry.
I washed it last night. For you.
For me?
It was full of sand from the beach, and I thought to myself, tomorrow I might see Sally, and make love, and when I’m above her I don’t want sand to fall in her eyes.
You know, this is funny, but I knew that’s just what you’d say, I knew it just by watching your mouth before it opened.
As he tried to replace the hair, it slipped from his fingers, and joined the detritus at the side of the road. He slammed shut the trunk lid. He was late, late for somewhere, he didn’t know where. He was hunted. The road, seized again, wound down through Greenwood, its streets and trees, a maze that he knew better than his hunter. His house, his windows, his front steps, the voices of his children arose as a kind of dream out of the sleep of God.
Apparently in his absence a drama had occurred. Ruth met him with, ‘Where have you been? We’ve all been frantically trying to find you.’
‘All?’
‘Yes. They were both here. With the little girl, what’s-her-name. They all finally left a little while ago and I just got the food on the table for the children. Come in here and let’s talk.’ He accepted the order without questioning. Ruth led him into the library and shut the door after her. ‘She came first. She said she came to tell me the kind of man I’m married to, but it was clear to me she was looking for you. She kept looking around and listening for noises upstairs. I said I hadn’t seen you at all, just got your note and talked to you at your office. She couldn’t believe you’d gone to New York. She said you and she slept together, when would it have been, Saturday night, the night before the blow-up. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well that’s the last straw.’
‘Sweetie, it’s too late for the last straw. What else unpleasant did she say?’
‘Oh I don’t know. On and on. She was wild. She was like an actress who’d suddenly realized she was no longer the star of the show. She said you’d treated us both terribly and that if I had any pride I wouldn’t take you back. She said you were the devil and she would roast in Hell for what she’d done to Richard. She actually did say that. And she wouldn’t let go of Theodora, that’s her name, just kept holding on to this poor miserable confused child, and making me feed her. “Ruthie, your husband’s a real bastard, do you think you might have a cookie for Theo, he fucked me twice Saturday night, and could we have a little glass of milk?” ’
Jerry laughed, relieved to learn that Sally was a fool. And relieved, too, that she still lived; her life was his, always. ‘And when did Richard come into all this?’
‘She was here about a half hour, it seemed longer, when he came to take her away. “Take her away” exactly describes it. He had the boys in the car. He looked exhausted.’
‘How was he with her?’
‘Tender, really. Gentle. Calm. He told her she was hysterical. When he came in the door she gave out this great whoop and tried to go down on her knees to him. I think she told him to beat her. It was wild.’
‘My poor doe.’
‘Listen. If I’m going to live with you, let’s have none of that stuff. You had your poor doe.’
‘Agreed. What else? Did he want to find me?’
‘He says he doesn’t want to see you, he can’t stand the sight of you right now, but there’s something he wants to say to you over the phone.’
‘How furious is he?’
‘He’s not furious. He’s very philosophical. He said he expected you to back out but thought you’d go to bed with her a few more times.’
‘He didn’t realize what an idealist I am.’
‘He talked about the philosophy of affairs. He said the woman’s responsibility was not to get pregnant and the man’s was to stop it when the woman began to get emotionally dependent, which I thought was a little odd coming from him.’
‘Why odd? It sounds like his kind of crap.’
‘I don’t know, forget I said it. When I said what agony the summer had been for you, he said, “Don’t be silly. He had a ball!” ’
‘And then he took her home.’
‘Eventually He had a drink. She was furious at his talking to me at all. She even made some crack about how I had to have all the men. Really, she was crazy.’
‘Well, maybe only crazy women know how to make love.’
‘You can cut out that kind of remark too. I felt sorry for her. I may love you, Jerry I don’t know, but I have very little respect for you right now.’
‘Would you have more if I’d gone ahead and left you and the children?’
‘In a way, yes. It wasn’t the children themselves that worried you.’
‘It was.’
‘It was your immortal soul or some inane thing like that.’
‘I don’t say it’s immortal, I just say it should be.’
‘At any rate, I’m sure of one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ve had it with her. She said some things so cruel that even Richard defended you.’
She watched, to see how he took it. He said, ‘Good.’
Jerry put the children to sleep. With Geoffrey, he always said the same prayer, as the child mumbled with him: ‘Dear God, thank you for this day – for the food we ate, the clothes we wore, the fun we had. Bless Mommy and Daddy, Joanna and Charlie –’
‘And Geoffrey’ the child usually inserted, seeing himself from outside, as one of a family.
‘– and Geoffrey, and our grandparents, and our teachers, and all our friends, Amen.’
&
nbsp; ‘Amen.’
Charlie, the most active of the children, slept deepest, and put himself to bed so quickly Jerry could only rub the child’s head and kiss his ear. There was no question of prayers. When had they ceased? Perhaps the boy’s rapid sleeping had developed as a way of avoiding them. Jerry was just as glad. He loved the child’s pride, this child the one of his three who saw most, and therefore must be bravest. ‘Good night,’ he said in the darkened room, and went unanswered.
Joanna, who no longer allowed her father to see her undressed, had settled herself in bed with Mr Popper’s Penguins. ‘Daddy?’ she asked as he paused in her doorway.
‘Yes, Jojo?’
‘Are Mr and Mrs Mathias going to get a divorce?’
‘Where did you learn the word “divorce”?’
‘Mrs O said. Her daughter divorced a man in the Army because he played cards too much.’
‘What makes you think the Mathiases want a divorce?’
‘She was here and she was awful mad.’
‘I don’t think she was mad at Mr Mathias.’
‘Who was she mad at? That bratty baby?’
‘No. Herself, maybe. Do you like Mrs Mathias?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Why only “kind of”?’
Joanna thought. ‘She never pays attention to anybody else.’
Jerry laughed, perhaps too warmly, for Joanna asked:
‘Is she your girlfriend?’
‘What a funny question. Grown-ups don’t have girlfriends. They have wives and husbands and little children.’
‘Mommy has a boyfriend.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Mathias.’
Jerry laughed at the absurdity. ‘They like to talk sometimes,’ he told her, ‘but she thinks he’s a jerk.’
She looked at him respectfully ‘O.K.’
‘Aren’t you sleepy?’
‘Kind of. This book has too many words in it I don’t know. I mean, I almost know them, but then they don’t make sense.’
‘That’s like a lot of books. Don’t tire your eyes. Dr Albany says you shouldn’t read in bed at all.’
‘He’s a jerk.’
‘Your eyes are very precious. Sleep tight, sweetie. Here’s a kiss.’ And in clasping her he discovered that her head was the size of an adult’s nearly, and the curves of her cheek and bare shoulder as she turned her face into the pillow were those of a woman. She had grown, since he had last looked at her.
The rooms downstairs, empty of children, streaked with silence and headlights passing, were vast. On the kitchen table Ruth had set two places. He entered the kitchen timidly; when a child, and his mother was sick, he would enter the bedroom this timidly, fearful that she had been turned, as in a fairy tale, into a bear, or a witch, or a corpse. Ruth handed him a glass of vermouth. Her air was of waiting, while he tried, pacing, sipping, eating the lamb chop and salad she served him, to populate the silence, the theatre of loss, with explanations of himself. He said:
‘I don’t understand what quite happened. As an actual wife or whatever, she stopped being an idea, and for the first time, I saw her.’ He said:
‘I wanted her to give me no choice. Sally shouldn’t have kept giving me a choice; I went over there this morning convinced this is what had to be, and then talking to her I discovered that it didn’t have to be. It was all still terribly open. She didn’t want me enough, she didn’t want me as much as you did.’
Or:
‘It’s really all Richard. Sitting there last night, looking at him, I said to myself, He’s not so bad. Everything I had felt about him through her descriptions and complaints was wrong; he was human; he was trying. I said to myself, My God, if he can’t make her happy, I can’t either.’
Or:
‘She presumed.’
Between these attempts of his, embarrassed and strenuous, awkward and vague, to explain, there were intervals of Ruth’s voice, gentle yet with something sharp, something Unitarian and confident and even destructive, about its search for truth:
‘I didn’t like the way they ganged up on you.’ And:
‘If she loved you so much, why wasn’t she willing to just have an affair?’ And:
‘They’re both presumptuous people.’
And intervals of twinned silence, which did not pain them, for they had begun in silence, side by side, contemplating, by fits and starts, an object posed before them, a collection of objects, a mystery assembled of light and colour and shadow. In their willingness to live parallel lay their weakness and their strength.
During coffee, with the night outside as dark as coffee, the telephone rang. By his frightened immobility Jerry made Ruth answer it; in the living room she picked up the receiver, listened, and said, ‘He’s here.’ She called softly into the kitchen, ‘Jerry it’s Richard.’
He heaved up from the table and walked through streaks of shadow to the phone. Ruth, listening, circled the living room turning on lights. ‘Yes, Richard’: ironically, wearily, conciliatingly.
Richard’s voice was narrowed, its expansiveness gone. ‘Jerry, we didn’t talk for very long this afternoon and I may not have understood something. Do I understand you correctly in that if I divorce Sally you will not stand by her? Repeat, will not?’
The old knight fork.
Jerry could have put out the weak whine of reasonableness he had always found useless against bullies, and argued that life unlike a chessboard was never black or white. Instead he said, ‘That is correct. I will not stand by her.’
Richard waited for him to qualify, then, since he did not, said, ‘That’s what I thought the situation was, but, frankly, Jerry, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe you had so little compassion, though Sally assures me you’re right in character. You will not stand by her, no matter what?’
From the stagey clarity of Richard’s diction, Jerry guessed Sally was on the upstairs extension listening. He sighed. ‘You stand by her. She’s your wife. I have a wife.’
‘I don’t know, Jerry boy, I just don’t know. After the way she’s treated me, I don’t know if she should be my wife or not.’
‘That’s your decision. As you would say.’
Richard said, ‘I’m going to make you pay for this, Jerry boy. I’m going to make you suffer like you’ve made us suffer. You’re an amazing guy. Amazingly cruel.’
Jerry cast his mind back, to the beach, the dunes, the yellow bathing-suit bottom, the warm wine, the smell of their skins, and asked, honestly curious, ‘Am I?’
Richard hung up.
Ruth asked, ‘What was that about?’
‘I think he just wanted to put me on show as rat in front of Sally. She was on the extension.’
‘Did she speak? Did you hear her breathing?’
‘No.’
‘How do you know she was there?’
Jerry turned and shouted, ‘Because she’s everywhere!’
Ruth gazed at him frightened. Though she had turned on lights on the tables along the walls, there was left in the centre of the large room a core of darkness and it was here that she stood.
Jerry explained, ‘Richard was sore because now he has to make a decision and he doesn’t like it any better than I did; men don’t like to make decisions, they want God or women to make them.’
‘Some men,’ Ruth said.
She went into the kitchen and Jerry went to the window. The darkness outside the cool glass held Richard; the arms of the elm crawled and rotted in a godless element that was his enemy’s essence. Richard was the world. I’m going to make you pay for this, Jerry boy. An automobile that had been parked up the road roared by; Jerry flinched, conscious of himself as silhouetted. Its tyres screeching, the car went by, kids, nobody; there was no gunshot. Jerry smiled. You’re an amazing guy Amazingly cruel. He had never been hated before. He had been disliked and dismissed but he had never been hated; it was a way, he saw, of being alive. Look, Sally-O, doesn’t Christ make a good fingernail-picker? Gazing through the half-mirror
ing black glass, glass that seemed the cold skin of his mind, Jerry rejoiced that he had given his enemy the darkness an eternal wound. With the sword of his flesh he had put the mockers to rout. Christ was revenged.
5
Wyoming
Jerry and Sally disembarked from the plane at Cheyenne.
As they descended, a bit stiffly the resounding steel steps, he inhaled and knew that he was home; the mythical western air released his lungs he felt forever from the threat of suffocation. Grateful, anxious to know if she too scented the blessing, he turned to look back at Sally; she was above him, leading the boys, one on each hand, while he carried Theodora and their plastic flight bag bulky with stuffed toys and small books. Again, and still, the sight of her gladdened him. She was wearing a pencil-striped linen suit; its sleeves came halfway down her long downy forearms and the horizontal wrinkles across the front of her skirt, left by long sitting, made vivid the beautiful breadth of her hips. She grinned and said, ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’
‘The sky’ he said. ‘Fantastic sky.’ All around them the palest of blues, powdery and demure, was boiling, boiling with thunderheads whose roots were translucent and whose crowns were a white so raw and pure their mass seemed emphasized by a fine black outline, etched by the eye. Though there was superabundant shape in these clouds there was no weight or burden of rain in them; Jerry felt that the slightest change in the air, the smallest alteration in its taste, would evaporate them utterly.
The west was rimmed with mountains, violet and brushed with chalk or, most likely, snow; the clarity of the air brought these distant peaks near yet rendered them unreal, uninhabitable, like the jumpy visions, with compressed perspective, obtained from a telescope. In the tawny middle distance a single horse, apparently riderless, was running, and a line of trees, perhaps cottonwoods, declared the presence of water. The plain was overspread with a youthful, silvery, aristocratic green – sage, Jerry imagined. A constellation of far rocks became a herd of sheep. In the foreground, there were lakes, a golf course, a red fort. Immediately under them like a glaring black page lay the macadam of the airfield, printed with stripes and oil-splotches, numerals and arrows and multicoloured lids of buried tanks, symbols in a cumbersome language employed by a worldwide race of myopic giants. His feet on firm ground, Jerry lifted his eyes and said, ‘Hi?’