by John Updike
And that’s not counting the restaurant bill. He takes the bill to the counter and gives the girl a ten. She makes change with a frown; the frightening vacancy of her eyes is methodically ringed with mascara. The purple simplicity of her kimono does not go with her frizzly permed hair and rouged, concave, deprived face. When she puts his coins on the pink cleats of the change pad, he flicks his band in the air above the silver, adds the dollar to it, and nods at the young Chinese waiter, who is perched attentively beside her. “Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much,” the boy says to him. But his gratitude does not even last until they are out of sight. As they move toward the glass door he turns to the cashier and in a reedy, perfectly inflected voice completes his story: “—and then this other cat says, ‘But man, mine was helium!’ ”
With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines: a shuffle of lights, a neon outline of a boot, of a peanut, of a top hat, of an enormous sunflower erected, the stem of green neon six stories high, along one building to symbolize Sunflower Beer, the yellow center a second moon, the shuffling headlights glowworms in the grass. One block down, a monotone bell tolls hurriedly, and as long as knives the red-tipped railroad-crossing gates descend, slicing through the soft mass of neon, and the traffic slows, halts.
Ruth turns left, toward the shadow of Mt. Judge, and Rabbit follows; they walk uphill on the rasping pavement. The slope of cement is a buried assertion, an unexpected echo, of the land that had been here before the city. For Rabbit the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri’s luminous transparence; he is gay, and skips once, to get in step with his love. Her eyes are turned up, toward where the Pinnacle Hotel adds it coarse constellation to the stars above Mt. Judge. They walk together in silence while behind them a freight train chuffs and screaks through the crossing.
He recognizes his problem; she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas. “Hey,” he says. “Have you ever been up to the top there?”
“Sure. In a car.”
“When I was a kid,” he says, “we used to walk up from the other side. There’s a sort of gloomy forest, and I remember once I came across an old house, just a hole in the ground with some stones, where I guess a pioneer had had a farm.”
“The only time I ever got up there was in a car with some eager beaver.”
“Well, congratulations,” he says, annoyed by the self-pity hiding in her toughness.
She bites at being uncovered. “What do you think I care about your pioneer?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t you? You’re an American.”
“How? I could just as easy be a Mexican.”
“You never could be, you’re not little enough.”
“You know, you’re a pig really.”
“Oh now baby,” he says, and puts his arm around the substance of her waist, “I think I’m sort of neat.”
“Don’t tell me.”
She turns left, off Weiser, out of his arm. This street is Summer. Brick rows, not so much run down as well worn. The house numbers are set in fanlights of stained glass above the doors. The apple-and-orange-colored light of a small grocery store shows the silhouettes of some kids hanging around the corner. The supermarkets are driving these little stores out of business, make them stay open all night.
He puts his arm around her and begs, “Come on now, be a pleasant piece.” He wants to show her that her talking tough won’t keep him off. She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers. To his surprise her arm mirrors his, comes around his waist. Thus locked, they find it awkward to walk, and part at the traffic light.
“Didn’t you kind of like me in the restaurant?” he asks. “The way I tried to make old Tothero feel good? Telling him how great he was?”
“All I heard was you telling how great you were.”
“I was great. It’s the fact. I mean, I’m not much good for anything now, but I really was good at that.”
“You know what I was good at?”
“What?”
“Cooking.”
“That’s more than my wife is. Poor kid.”
“Remember how in Sunday school they’d tell you everybody God made was good at something? Well, that was my thing, cooking. I thought, Jesus, now I’ll really be a great cook.”
“Well aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. All I do is eat out.”
“Well, stop it.”
“It’s in the trade,” she says, and this really stops him. He doesn’t think of her this bluntly. It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.
“Here I am,” she says. Her building is brick like all the others on the west side of the street. Across the way a big limestone church hangs like a gray curtain under the streetlamp. They go in, passing beneath stained glass. The vestibule has a row of doorbells under brass mailboxes and a varnished umbrella rack and a rubber mat on the marble floor and two doors, one to the right with frosted glass and another in front of them of wire-reinforced glass through which he sees rubber-treaded stairs. While Ruth fits a key in this door he reads the gold lettering on the other: F. X. PELLIGRINI, M.D. “Old Fox,” Ruth says, and leads him up the stairs.
She lives one flight up. Her door is the one at the far end of a linoleum hall, nearest the street. He stands behind her as she scratches her key at the lock. Abruptly, in the cold light of the streetlamp which comes through the four flawed panes of the window by his side, blue panes so thinseeming the touch of one finger might crack them, he begins to tremble, first his legs, and then the skin of his sides. The key fits and her door opens.
Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It’s insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely. By nature in such an embrace she grows rigid. The small moist cushion of slack willingness with which her lips had greeted his dries up and turns hard, and when she can get her head back and her hand free she fits her palm against his jaw and pushes as if she wanted to throw his skull back into the hall. Her fingers curl and a long nail scrapes the tender skin below one eye. He lets her go. The nearly scratched eye squints and a tendon in his neck aches.
“Get out,” she says, her chunky mussed face ugly in the light from the hall.
He kicks the door shut with a backwards flip of his leg. “Don’t,” he says. “I had to hug you.” He sees in the dark she is frightened; her big black shape has that pocket in it, that his instinct feels like a tongue probing a pulled tooth. The air tells him he must be motionless; for no reason he wants to laugh. Her fear and his inner knowledge are so incongruous; he knows there is no harm in him.
“Hug,” she says. “Kill felt more like it.”
“I’ve been loving you so much all night,” he says. “I had to get it out of my system.”
“I know all about your systems. One squirt and done.”
“It won’t be,” he promises.
“It better be. I want you out of here.”
“No you don’t.”
“You all think you’re such lovers.”
“I am,” he assures her. “I am a lover.” And on a tide of alcohol and stirred semen he steps forward, in a kind of swoon. Though she backs away, it is not so quickly that he cannot feel her socket of fear healing. The room they are in, he sees by streetlight, is small, and two armchairs and a sofa-bed and a table furnish it. She walks into the next room, a little larger, holding a double bed. The shade is half drawn, and low light gives each nubbin of the bedspread a shadow.
“All right,” she says. “You can get into that.”
“Where are you going?” Her hand is on a doorknob.
�
��In here.”
“You’re going to undress in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t. Let me undress you. Please.” In his concern he has come to stand beside her, and touches her arm now.
She moves her arm from under his touch. “You’re pretty bossy.”
“Please. Please.”
Her voice grates with exasperation: “I have to go to the john.”
“But come out dressed.”
“I have to do something else, too.”
“Don’t do it. I know what it is. I hate them.”
“You don’t even feel it.”
“But I know it’s there. Like a rubber kidney or something.”
Ruth laughs. “Well aren’t you choice? Do you have the answer then?”
“No. I hate them even worse.”
“Look. I don’t know what you think your fifteen dollars entitles you to, but I got to protect myself.”
“If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this, give me the fifteen back.”
She tries to twist away, but now he holds the arm he touched. She says, “Say do you think we’re married or something the way you boss me around?”
The transparent wave moves over him again and he calls to her in a voice that is almost inaudible, “Yes; let’s be.” So quickly her arms don’t move from hanging at her sides, he kneels at her feet and kisses the place on her fingers where a ring would have been. Now that he is down there, he begins to undo the straps of her shoes. “Why do you women wear heels?” he asks, and yanks her one foot up, so she has to grab the hair on his head for support. “Don’t they hurt you?” He heaves the shoe, sticky web, through the doorway into the next room, and does the same to the other. Her feet being flat on the floor gives her legs firmness all the way up. He puts his hands around her ankles and pumps them up and down briskly, between the boxy ankle bones and the circular solid fat of her calves. He has a nervous habit of massage.
“Come on,” Ruth says, in a voice slightly tense with the fear of falling, his weight pinning her legs. “Get into bed.”
He senses the trap. “No,” he says, and stands up. “You’ll put on a flying saucer.”
“No, I won’t. Listen, you won’t know if I do or don’t.”
“Sure I will. I’m very sensitive.”
“Oh Lord. Well anyway I got to take a leak.”
“Go ahead, I don’t care,” he says, and won’t let her close the bathroom door. She sits, like women do, primly. At home he and Janice had been trying to toilet-train Nelson, so leaning there in the doorway he feels a ridiculous paternal impulse to praise her. She is so tidy.
“Good girl,” he says when she rises, and leads her into the bedroom. The edges of the doorway they pass through seem very vivid and sharp. They will always be here. Behind them, the plumbing vibrates and murmurs. She moves with shy stiffness, puzzled by his will. Trembling again, shy himself, be brings her to a stop by the foot of the bed and searches for the catch of her dress. He finds buttons on the back and can’t undo them easily; his hands come at them reversed.
“Let me do it.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry; I’ll do it. You’re supposed to enjoy this. This is our wedding night.”
“Ha ha.”
He hates this mocking reflex in her. He turns her roughly, and, in a reflex of his own, falls into a deep wish to give comfort. He touches her caked cheeks; she seems small as he looks down into the frowning planes of her set, shadowed face. He moves his lips into one eye socket, gently, trying to say this night has no urgency in it, trying to listen through his lips to the timid pulse beating in the bulge of her lid. With a careful impartiality he fears she will find comic, he kisses also her other eye; then, excited by the thought of his own tenderness, his urgency spills; his mouth races across her face, nibbling, licking, so that she does laugh, tickled, and pushes away. He locks her against him, crouches, and presses his parted teeth into the fat hot hollow at the side of her throat. Ruth tenses at his threat to bite, and her hands shove at his shoulders, but he clings there, his teeth bared in a silent exclamation, crying out against her smothering throat that it is not her crotch he wants, not the machine; but her, her.
Though there are no words she hears this, and says, “Don’t try to prove you’re a lover on me. Just come and go.”
“You’re so smart,” he says, and starts to hit her, checks his arm, and offers instead, “Hit me. Come on. You want to, don’t you? Really pound me.”
“My Lord,” she says, “this’ll take all night.” He plucks her limp arm from her side and swings it up toward him, but she manages her hand so that five bent fingers bump against his cheek painlessly. “That’s what poor Maggie has to do for your old bastard friend.”
He begs, “Don’t talk about them.”
“Damn men,” she continues, “either want to hurt somebody or be hurt.”
“I don’t, honest. Either one.”
“Well then undress me and stop screwing around.”
He sighs through his nose. “You have a sweet tongue,” he says.
“I’m sorry if I shock you.” Yet in her voice is a small metallic withdrawal, as if she really is.
“You don’t,” he says and, business-like, stoops and takes the hem of her dress in his hands. His eyes are enough accustomed to the dark now to see the cloth as green. He peels it up her body, and she lifts her arms, and her head gets caught for a moment in the neck-hole. She shakes her head crossly, like a dog with a scrap, and the dress comes free, skims off her arms into his hands floppy and faintly warm. He sails it into a chair hulking in a corner. “God,” he says, “you’re pretty.” She is a ghost in her silver slip. Dragging the dress over her head has loosened her hair. Her solemn face tilts as she quickly lifts out the pins. Her hair falls out of heavy loops.
“Yeah,” she says. “Pretty plump.”
“No,” he says, “you are,” and in the space of a breath goes to her and picks her up, great glistening sugar in her sifty-grained slip, and carries her to the bed, and lays her on it. “So pretty.”
“You lifted me,” she says. “That’ll put you out of action.”
Harsh direct light falls on her face; the creases on her neck show black. He asks, “Shall I pull the shade?”
“Please. It’s a dismal view.”
He goes to the window and bends to see what she means. There is only the church across the way, gray, somber, confident. Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath. He feels gratitude to the builders of this ornament, and lowers the shade on it guiltily. He turns quickly, and Ruth’s eyes watch him out of shadows that also seem gaps in a surface. The curve of her hip supports a crescent of silver; his sense of her weight seems to make an aroma.
“What’s next?” He takes off his coat and throws it; he loves this throwing things, the way the flying cloth puts him in the center of a gathering nakedness. “Stockings?”
“They’re tricky,” she says. “I don’t want a run.”
“You do it then.” In a sitting position, with the soft-pawed irritable deftness of a cat, she extricates herself from a web of elastic and silk and cotton; he helps clumsily. His uncertain touches gather in his own body, bending him into a forest smelling of spice. He is out of all dimension, and in a dark land, and a tender entire woman seems an inch away around a kind of corner. When he straightens up on his knees, kneeling as he is by the bed, Ruth under his eyes is an incredible continent, the pushed-up slip a north of snow.
“So much,” he says.
“Too much.”
“No, listen. You’re good.” He kisses her lips; her lips expect more than they get. Into their wet flower he drops a brief bee’s probe. Cupping a hand behind her hot sheltered neck, he pulls her up, and slides her slip over her head. In just the liquid ease it comes off with he feels delight; how clothes just fall fro
m a woman who wants to be stripped. The cool hollow his hand finds in the small of her back mixes in his mind with the shallow shadows of the stretch of skin that slopes from the bones of her shoulders. He kisses this expanse. Where her skin is whiter it is cooler. She shrugs off her bra. He moves away and sits on the corner of the bed and drinks in the pure sight of her. She keeps her arm tight against the one breast and brings up her hand to cover the other; a ring glints. Her modesty praises him; it shows she is feeling. The straight arm props her weight. Light lies along her right side where it can catch her body as it turns in stillness; this pose, embarrassed and graceful, she holds; rigidity is her one defense against his eyes and her figure does come to seem to him inviolable; absolute; her nakedness swings in tides of stone. So that when her voice springs from her form he is amazed to hear a perfect statue, unadorned woman, beauty’s home image, speak: “What about you?”
He is still dressed, even to his necktie. While he is draping his trousers over a chair, arranging them to keep the crease, she scurries under the covers. He stands over her in his underclothes and asks, “Now you really don’t have anything on?”
“You wouldn’t let me.”
He remembers the glint. “Give me your ring.”
She brings her right hand out from under the covers and he carefully works a thick brass ring, like a class ring, past her bunching knuckle. In letting her hand drop she grazes the distorted front of his Jockey shorts.
He looks down at her, thinking. The covers come up to her throat and the pale arm lying on top of the bedspread has a slight serpent’s twist. “There’s nothing else?”
“I’m all skin,” she says. “Come on. Get in.”