by John Updike
“You want me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I want it over with.”
“You have all that crust on your face.”
“God, you’re insulting!”
“I just love you too much. Where’s a washrag?”
“I don’t want my God-damned face washed!”
He goes into the bathroom and turns on the light and finds a facecloth and holds it under the hot faucet. He wrings it out and turns off the light. As he comes back across the room Ruth laughs from the bed. He asks, “What’s the joke?”
“In those damned underclothes you do look kind of like a rabbit. I thought only kids wore those elastic kind of pants.”
He looks down at his T-shirt and snug underpants, pleased and further stirred. His name in her mouth feels like a physical touch. She sees him as special. When he puts the rough cloth to her face, it goes tense and writhes with a resistance like Nelson’s, and he counters it with a father’s practiced method. He sweeps her forehead, pinches her nostrils, abrades her cheeks and, finally, while her whole body is squirming in protest, scrubs her lips, her words shattered and smothered. When at last he lets her hands win, and lifts the washrag, she stares at him, says nothing, and closes her eyes.
Her wet face, relaxed into slabs, is not pretty; the thick lips, torn from most of their paint, are the pale rims of a loose hole. He stands and presses the cloth against his own face, like a man sobbing. He goes to the foot of the bed, throws the rag toward the bathroom, peels out of his underclothes, bobs, and hurries to hide in the bed. The long dark space between the sheets buries him.
He makes love to her as he would to his wife. After their marriage, and her nerves lost that fineness, Janice needed coaxing; he would begin by rubbing her back. Ruth submits warily when he tells her to lie on her stomach. To lend his hands strength he sits up on her buttocks and leans his weight down through stiff arms into his thumbs and palms as they work the broad muscles and insistent bones of the spine’s terrain. She sighs and shifts her head on the pillow. “You should be in the Turkish-bath business,” she says. He goes for her neck, and advances his fingers around to her throat, where the columns of blood give like reeds, and massages her shoulders with the balls of his thumbs, and his fingertips just find the glazed upper edges of her pillowing breasts. He returns to her back, until his wrists ache, and flops from astride his mermaid truly weary, as if under a sea-spell to sleep. He pulls the covers up over them, to the middle of their faces.
Janice was shy of his eyes so Ruth heats in his darkness. His lids flutter shut though she arches anxiously against him. Her hand seeks him, and angles him earnestly for a touch his sealed lids feel as red. He sees blue when with one deliberate hand she pries open his jaw and bows his head to her burdened chest. Lovely wobbly bubbles, heavy: perfume between. Taste, salt and sour, swirls back with his own saliva. She rolls away, onto her back, the precious red touch breaking, twists. Cool new skin. Rough with herself, she forces the dry other into his face, coated with cool pollen that dissolves. He opens his eyes, seeking her, and sees her face a soft mask gazing downward calmly, caring for him, and closes his eyes on the food of her again; his hand abandoned on the breadth of her body finds at arm’s length a split pod, an open fold, shapeless and simple. They enter a lazy space. He wants the time to stretch long, to great length and thinness. As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a wall. The body lacks voice to sing its own song. Impatience tapers; she floats through his blood as under his eyelids a salt smell, damp pressure, the sense of her smallness as her body hurries everywhere to his hands, her breathing, bedsprings’ creak, accidental slaps, and the ache at the parched root of his tongue each register their colors.
Nudge enters his softness, “Now?” Her voice croaky. He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs, her body blurred white, distended willingly under him. With her help their blond loins fit. Something sad in the capture. He braces himself on his arms above her, afraid, for it is here he most often failed Janice, by being too quick. Yet, what with the alcohol drifting in his system, or his good fortune stunning him, his love is slow to burst in her warmth. He hides his face beside her throat, in her mint hair. With thin, thin arms she hugs him and presses him down and rises above him. From her high smooth shoulders down she is one long underbelly erect in light above him; he says in praise softly, “Hey.”
She answers, “Hey.”
“You’re pretty.”
“Come on. Work.”
Galled, he shoves up through her and in addition sets his hand under her jaw and shoves her face so his fingers slip into her mouth and her slippery throat strains. As if unstrung by this anger, she tumbles and carries him over and he lies on top of her again, the skin of their chests sticking together; her breathing snags. Her thighs throw open wide and clamp his sides and throw open again so wide it frightens him, she wants, impossible, to turn inside out; the muscles and lips and bones of her expanded underside press against him as a new anatomy, of another animal. She feels transparent; he sees her heart. She suspends him, subsides, and in the folds of her withering, his love and pride revive. So she is first, and waits for him while at a trembling extremity of tenderness he traces again and again the arc of her eyebrow with his thumb. His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel. At each shudder her mouth smiles in his and her legs, locked at his back, bear down.
She asks in time, “O.K.?”
“You’re pretty.”
Ruth takes her legs from around him and spills him off her body like a pile of sand. He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows a sad expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair. Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little price leaves you with nothing. The sweat on his skin is cold in the air; he brings the blankets up from her feet.
“You were a beautiful piece,” he says from the pillow listlessly, and touches her soft side. Her flesh still soaks in the act; it ebbs slower in her.
“I had forgotten,” she says.
“Forgot what?”
“That I could have it too.”
“What’s it like?”
“Oh. It’s like falling through.”
“Where do you fall to?”
“Nowhere. I can’t talk about it.”
He kisses her lips; she’s not to blame. She lazily accepts, then in an afterflurry of affection flutters her tongue against his chin.
He loops his arm around her waist and composes himself against her body for sleep.
“Hey. I got to get up.”
“Stay.”
“I got to go into the bathroom.”
“No.” He tightens his hold.
“Boy, you better let me up.”
He murmurs, “Don’t scare me,” and snuggles more securely against her side. His thigh slides over hers, weight on warmth. Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat; he wants the heat his groin gave given back in gentle ebb. Best bedfriend, done woman. Bit of bowl about their bellies always. Oh, how! when she got up on him like the bell of a big blue lily slipped down on his slow head. He could have hurt her shoving her jaw. He reawakens enough to feel his dry breath drag through sagged lips as she rolls from under his leg and arm. “Hey get me a glass of water,” he says suddenly.
She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There’s that in women repels him; handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men’s dirt, insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows under the window shade. Its childish brightness seems the one kind of comfort left to him.
Light from behind the clo
sed bathroom door tints the air in the bedroom. The splashing sounds are like the sounds his parents would make when as a child Rabbit would waken to realize they had come upstairs, that the whole house would soon be dark, and the sight of morning would be his next sensation. He is asleep when like a faun in moonlight Ruth, washed, creeps back to his side, holding a glass of water.
During this sleep he has an intense dream. He and his mother and father and some others are sitting around their kitchen table. It’s the old kitchen. A girl at the table reaches with a very long arm weighted with a bracelet and turns a handle of the wood icebox and cold air sweeps over Rabbit. She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry’s eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its metal-black bulk the white partition that the cakes have when they come bumping down the chute at the ice plant. He leans closer into the cold breath of the ice, a tin-smelling coldness he associates with the metal that makes up the walls of the cave and the ribs of its floor, delicate rhinoceros gray, mottled with the same disease the linoleum has.
Having leaned closer he sees that under the watery skin are hundreds of clear white veins like the capillaries on a leaf, as if ice too were built up of living cells. And further inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube. The rusted ribs the cake rests on wobble through to his eyes like the teeth of a grin. Fear probes him; the cold lump is alive.
His mother speaks to him. “Close the door.”
“I didn’t open it.”
“I know.”
“She did.”
“I know. My good boy wouldn’t hurt anyone.” The girl at the table fumbles a piece of food and with terrible weight Mother turns and scolds her. The scolding keeps on and on, senselessly, the same thing over and over again, a continuous pumping of words like a deep inner bleeding. It is himself bleeding; his grief for the girl distends his face until it feels like a huge white dish. “Tart can’t eat decently as a baby,” Mother says.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Rabbit cries, and stands up to defend his sister. Mother rears away, scoffing. They are in the narrow place between the two houses; only himself and the girl; it is Janice Springer. He tries to explain about his mother. Janice’s head meekly stares at his shoulder; when he puts his arms around her he is conscious of her eyes being bloodshot. Though their faces are not close he feels her breath hot with tears. They are out behind the Mt. Judge Recreation Hall, out in back with the weeds and tramped-down bare ground and embedded broken bottles; through the wall they hear music on loudspeakers. Janice has a pink dance dress on, and is crying. He repeats, numb at heart, about his mother, that she was just getting at him but the girl keeps crying, and to his horror her face begins to slide, the skin to slip slowly from the bone, but there is no bone, just more melting stuff underneath; he cups his hands with the idea of catching it and patting it back; as it drips in loops into his palms the air turns white with what is his own scream.
The white is light; the pillow glows against his eyes and sunlight projects the flaws of the window panes onto the drawn shade. This woman is curled up under the blankets between him and the window. Her hair in sunlight sprays red, brown, gold, white, and black across her pillow. Smiling with relief, he gets up on an elbow and kisses her solid slack cheek, admires its tough texture of pores. He sees by faint rose streaks how imperfectly he scrubbed her face in the dark. He returns to the position in which he slept, but he has slept too much in recent hours. As if to seek the entrance to another dream he reaches for her naked body across the little distance and wanders up and down broad slopes, warm like freshly baked cake. Her back is toward him; he caresses her in an idle trance during which, without moving a muscle but those in her unseen eyelids, she awakes. Not until she sighs heavily and stretches and turns toward him does he know she has felt him.
Again, then, they make love, in morning light with cloudy mouths, her tits silky sacs of milk floating shallow on her ridged rib cage. The nipples sunken brown buds. Her bush a froth of tinted metal. It is almost too naked; his climax seems petty in relation to the wealth of brilliant skin, and he wonders if she pretends. She says not; no, it was different but all right. Really all right. In his shame he goes back under the covers while she pads around on bare feet getting dressed. Funny how she puts on her bra before her underpants. Her putting on her underpants makes him conscious of her legs as separate things, thick pink liquid twists diminishing downward into her ankles. Taking pink light from the reflection of each other as she moves. Her accepting his watching her flatters him, shelters him. They have become domestic.
Church bells ring loudly. He moves to her side of the bed to watch the crisply dressed people go into the limestone church across the street, whose lit window had lulled him to sleep. He reaches and pulls up the shade a few feet. The rose window is dark now, and above the church, above Mt. Judge, the sun glares in a façade of blue. It strikes a shadow down from the church steeple, a cool stumpy negative in which a few men with flowers in their lapels stand and gossip while the common sheep of the flock stream in, heads down. The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny Ruth won’t notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.
He opens his eyes to the day and says, “That’s a pretty big congregation.”
“Sunday morning,” she says. “I could throw up every Sunday morning.”
“Why?”
She just says, “Fuh,” as if he knows the answer. After thinking a bit, and seeing him lie there looking out the window seriously, she says, “I once had a guy in here who woke me up at eight o’clock because he had to teach Sunday school at nine-thirty.”
“You don’t believe anything?”
“No. You mean you do?”
“Well, yeah. I think so.” Her rasp, her sureness, makes him wince; he wonders if he’s lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him, makes his heart tremble. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement past the row of worn brick homes; are they walking on air? Their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of the unseen world.
“Well, if you do what are you doing here?” she asks.
“Why not? You think you’re Satan or somebody?”
This stops her a moment, standing there with her comb, before she laughs. “Well you go right ahead if it makes you happy.”
He presses her. “Why don’t you believe anything?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Doesn’t it ever, at least for a second, seem obvious to you?”
“God, you mean? No. It seems obvious just the other way. All the time.”
“Well now if God doesn’t exist, why does anything?”
“Why? There’s no why to it. Things just are.” She stands before the mirror, and her comb pulling back on her hair pulls her puffy upper lip up so her wet teeth show grayly.
“That’s not the way I feel about you,” he says, “that you just are.”
“Hey, why don’t you get some clothes on instead of just lying there giving me the Word?”
This, and her turning, hair swirling, to say it, stir him. “Come here,” he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him.
“No,” Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her.
“You don’t like me now?”
“What does it matter to you?”
“You know it does.”
“Get out of my bed.
”
“I guess I owe you fifteen more dollars.”
“All you owe me is getting the hell out.”
“What! Leave you all alone?” He says this as with comical speed, while she stands there startled rigid, he jumps from bed and gathers up some of his clothes and ducks into the bathroom and closes the door. When he comes out, in underclothes, he says, still clowning, “You don’t like me any more,” and moves sadly to where his trousers are neatly laid on the chair. While he was out of the room she made the bed.
“I like you enough,” she says in a preoccupied voice, tugging the bedspread smooth.
“Enough for what?”
“Enough.”
“Why do you like me?”
“ ‘Cause you’re bigger than I am.” She moves to the next corner and tugs. “Boy that used to gripe hell out of me, the way these little women everybody thinks are so cute grab all the big men.”
“They have something,” he tells her. “They seem easier to get to.”
She laughs and says, “I guess that’s right.”
He pulls up his trousers and buckles the belt. “Why else do you like me?”
She looks at him. “Shall I tell you?”
“Tell me.”
“ ‘Cause you haven’t given up. ‘Cause in your stupid way you’re still fighting.”
He loves hearing this; pleasure spins along his nerves, making him feel very tall, and he grins. But the American protest of modesty is instinctive with him, and “The will to achievement” glides out of his mouth mockingly.
“That poor old bastard,” she says. “He really is a bastard too.”
“Hey, I’ll tell you what,” Rabbit says. “I’ll run out and get some stuff at that grocery store you can cook for our lunch.”
“Say, you settle right in, don’t you?”
“Why? Were you going to meet somebody?”
“No, I don’t have anybody.”
“Well, then. You said last night you liked to cook.”
“I said I used to.”
“Well, if you used to you still do. What shall I get?”