by John Updike
Harrison, too slow to feel that be means it, knocks his hand away and says, “When are you gonna grow up?” It’s telling that lousy story that has rattled him.
Outside on the summer-warm steps of the place Rabbit starts laughing. “Looking for my motorcycle,” he says, and lets go, “Hwah hwah hyaaa,” under the neon light.
Ruth is in no humor to see it. “Well you are a nut,” she says.
It annoys him that she is too dumb to see that he is really furious. The way she shook her head “No” at him when he was gagging it up annoys him; his mind goes back over the minute again and again and every time snags on it. He is angry about so many things he doesn’t know where to begin; the only thing clear is he’s going to give her hell.
“So you and that bastard went to Atlantic City together.”
“Why is he a bastard?”
“Oh. He’s not and I am.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You did too. Right back in there you did.”
“It was just an expression. A fond expression, though I don’t know why.”
“You don’t.”
“No I don’t. You see your sister come in with some boy friend and practically pee in your pants.”
“Did you see the punk she was with?”
“What was the matter with him?” Ruth asks. “He looked all right.”
“Just about everybody looks all right to you, don’t they?”
“Well I don’t see what you’re doing going around like some almighty judge.”
“Yes sir, just about anything with hair in its armpits looks all right to you.”
They are walking up Warren Avenue. Their place is seven blocks away. People are sitting out on their steps in the warm night; their conversation is in this sense public and they fight to keep their voices low.
“Boy, if this is what seeing your sister does to you I’m glad we’re not married.”
“What brought that up?”
“What brought what up?”
“Marriage.”
“You did, don’t you remember, the first night, you kept talking about it, and kissed my ring finger.”
“That was a nice night.”
“All right then.”
“All right then nothing.” Rabbit feels he’s been worked into a corner where he can’t give her hell without giving her up entirely, without obliterating the sweet things. But she did that by taking him to that stinking place. “You’ve laid for Harrison, haven’t you?”
“I guess. Sure.”
“You guess. You don’t know?”
“I said sure.”
“And how many others?”
“I don’t know.”
“A hundred?”
“It’s a pointless question.”
“Why is it pointless?”
“It’s like asking how many times you’ve been to the movies.”
“They’re about the same to you, is that it?”
“No they’re not the same but I don’t see what the count matters. You knew what I was.”
“I’m not sure I did. You were a real hooer?”
“I took some money. I’ve told you. There were boy friends when. I was working as a stenographer and they had friends and I lost my job because of the talk maybe I don’t know and some older men got my number I guess through Margaret, I don’t know. Look. It’s by. If it’s a question of being dirty or something a lot of married women have had to take it more often than I have.”
“Did you pose for pictures?”
“You mean like for high-school kids? No.”
“Did you blow guys?”
“Look, maybe we should say bye-bye.” At the thought of that her chin softens and eyes burn and she hates him too much to think of sharing her secret with him. Her secret inside her seems to have no relation to him, this big body loping along with her under the street lamps, hungry as a ghost, wanting to hear the words to whip himself up. That was the thing about men, the importance they put on the mouth. Rabbit seems like another man to her, with this difference: in ignorance he has welded her to him and she can’t let go.
With degrading gratitude she hears him say, “No I don’t want to say bye-bye. I just want an answer to my question.”
“The answer to your question is yes.”
“Harrison?”
“Why does Harrison mean so much to you?”
“Because he stinks. And if Harrison is the same to you as me then I stink.”
They are, for a moment, the same to her—in fact she would prefer Harrison, just for the change, just because he doesn’t insist on being the greatest thing that ever was—but she lies. “You’re not at all the same. You’re not in the same league.”
“Well I got a pretty funny feeling sitting across from you two in that restaurant. What all did you do with him?”
“Oh, I don’t know, what do you do? You make love, you try to get close to somebody.”
“Well, would you do everything to me that you did to him?”
This stuns her skin in a curious way, makes it contract so that her body feels squeezed and sickened inside it. “If you want me to.” After being a wife her old skin feels tight.
His relief is boyish; his front teeth flash happily. “Just once,” he promises, “honest. I’ll never ask you again.” He tries to put his arm around her but she pulls away. Her one hope is that they aren’t talking about the same thing.
Up in the apartment he asks plaintively, “Are you going to?” She is struck by the helplessness in his posture; in the interior darkness, to which her eyes have not adjusted, he seems a suit of clothes hung from the broad white knob of his face.
She asks, “Are you sure we’re talking about the same thing?”
“What do you think we’re talking about?” He’s too fastidious to mouth the words.
She says.
“Right,” he says.
“In cold blood. You just want it.”
“Uh-huh. Is it so awful for you?”
This glimmer of her gentle rabbit emboldens her. “May I ask what I’ve done?”
“I didn’t like the way you acted tonight.”
“How did I act?”
“Like what you were.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Even so. I saw you that way tonight and I felt a wall between us and this is the one way through it.”
“That’s pretty cute. You just want it, really.” She yearns to hit out at him, to tell him to go. But that time is past.
He repeats, “Is it so awful for you?”
“Well it is because you think it is.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Look, I’ve loved you.”
“Well I’ve loved you.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. I want to still.”
Now those damn tears again. She tries to hurry the words out before her voice crumbles. “That’s good of you. That’s heroic.”
“Don’t be smart. Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees.”
“Well just that—”
“No. Not just that.”
The two tall drinks have been a poor experiment; she wants to go to sleep and her tongue tastes sour. She feels in her stomach her need to keep him and wonders, Will this frighten him? Will this kill her in him?
“If I did it what would it prove?”
“It’d prove you’re mine.”
“Shall I take my clothes off?”
“Sure.” He takes his off quickly and neatly and stands by the dull wall in his brilliant body. He leans awkwardly and brings one hand up and hangs it on his shoulder not knowing what to do with it. His whole shy pose has these. wings of tension, like he’s an angel waiting for a word. Sliding her last clothes off, her arms feel cold touching her sides. This last month she’s felt cold all the time; her temperature being divided or something. In the growing light he shifts slightly. She closes her eyes and tells herself, They’re, not ugly. No
t.
Mrs. Springer called the rectory a little after eight. Mrs. Eccles told her Jack had taken the young people’s softball team to a game fifteen miles away and she didn’t know when he’d be home. Mrs. Springer’s panic carried over the wire and Lucy spent nearly two hours calling numbers in an attempt to reach him. It grew dark. She finally reached the minister of the church whose softball team they were playing and he told her the game had been over for an hour. The darkness thickened outside; the window whose sill held the phone became a waxy streaked mirror in which she could see herself, hair unpinning, slump back and forth between the address book and the phone. Joyce, hearing the constant ticking of the dial, came downstairs and leaned on her mother. Three times Lucy took her up to bed and twice the child came down again and leaned her damp weight against her mother’s legs in frightened silence. The whole house, room beyond room surrounding with darkness the little island of light around the telephone, filled with menace and when, the third time, Joyce failed to come down from her bed, Lucy felt guilty and forsaken both, as if she had sold her only ally to the shadows. She dialed the number of every problem case in the parish she could think of, tried the vestrymen, the church secretary, the three co-chairmen of the fund-raising drive, and even the organist, a piano-teaching professional who lived in Brewer.
The hour-hand has moved past ten; it’s getting embarrassing. It’s sounding as if she’s been deserted. And in fact it frightens her, that her husband seems to be nowhere in the world. She makes coffee and weeps weakly, in her own kitchen. How did she get into this? What drew her in? His gaiety, he was always so gay. To know him back in seminary you would never think he would take all this so seriously; he and his friends sitting in their drafty old rooms lined with handsome blue exegetical works made it all seem an elegant joke. She remembers playing with them in a softball game that was the Athanasians against the Arians. And now she never saw his gaiety, it was all spent on other people, on this grim gray intangible parish, her enemy. Oh, how she hates them, all those clinging quaint quavering widows and Christing young people; the one good thing if the Russians take over is they’ll make religion go extinct. It should have gone extinct a hundred years ago. Maybe it shouldn’t have, maybe our minds need it, but let somebody else carry it on. On Jack it was so dreary. Sometimes she feels sorry for him and abruptly, this is one of the times.
When he does come in, at quarter of eleven, it turns out he’s been sitting in a drugstore gossiping with some of his teenagers; the idiotic kids tell him everything, all smoking like chimneys, so he comes home titillated silly with “how far” you can “go” on dates and still love Jesus.
Eccles sees at once she is furious. He had been having far too happy a time in the drugstore. He loves kids; their belief is so real to them and sits so light.
Lucy delivers her message as sufficient rebuke, but it fails as that; for, with hardly a backward glance at the horrid evening she has, implicitly, spent, he rushes to the phone.
He takes his wallet out and between his driver’s license and his public-library card finds the telephone number he has been saving, the key that could be turned in the lock just once. He wonders, dialing it, if it will fit, if he was a fool to lean the entire weight of the case on the word of young Mrs. Fosnacht, with her mirroring, perhaps mocking sunglasses. The distant phone rings often, as if electricity, that amazingly trained mouse, has scurried through miles of wire only to gnaw at the end of its errand on an impenetrable plate of metal. He prays, but it is a bad prayer, a doubting prayer; he fails to superimpose God upon the complexities of electricity. He concedes them their inviolable laws. Hope has vanished, he is hanging on out of numbness, when the gnawing ringing stops, the metal is lifted, and openness, an impression of light and air, washes back through the wires to Eccles’ ear.
“Hello.” A man’s voice, but not Harry’s. It is heavier and more brutal than that of his friend.
“Is Harry Angstrom there?” Sunglasses mock his sunk heart; this is not the number.
“Who’s this?”
“My name is Jack Eccles.”
“Oh. Hi.”
“Is that you, Harry? It didn’t sound like you. Were you asleep?”
“In a way.”
“Harry, your wife has started to have the baby. Her mother called here around eight and I just got in.” Eccles closes his eyes; in the dark tipping silence he feels his ministry, sum and substance, being judged.
“Yeah,” the other breathes in the far corner of the darkness. “I guess I ought to go to her.”
“I wish you would.”
“I guess I should. It’s mine I mean too.”
“Exactly. I’ll meet you there. It’s St. Joseph’s in Brewer. You know where that is?”
“Yeah, sure. I can walk it in ten minutes.”
“You want me to pick you up in the car?”
“No, I’ll walk it.”
“All right. If you prefer. Harry?”
“Huh?”
“I’m very proud of you.”
“Yeah. O.K. I’ll see you.”
Eccles had reached for him, it felt like, out of the ground. Voice had sounded tinny. Ruth’s bedroom is dim; the street lamp like a low moon burns shadows into the inner planes of the armchair, the burdened bed, the twisted sheet be tossed back finally when it seemed the phone would never stop. The bright rose window of the church opposite is still lit: purple red blue gold like the notes of different bells struck. His body, his whole frame of nerves and bone, tingles, as if with the shaking of small bells hung up and down his silver skin. He wonders if he had been asleep, and how long, ten minutes or five hours. He finds his underclothes and trousers draped on a chair and fumbles with them; not only his fingers but his vision itself trembles in the luminous gloom. His white shirt seems to crawl, like a cluster of glow-worms in grass. He hesitates a second before poking his fingers into the nest, that turns under his touch to safe cloth, dead. He carries it in his hand to the sullen laden bed.
“Hey. Baby.”
The long lump under the covers doesn’t answer. Just the top of Ruth’s hair peeks up out of the pillow. He doesn’t feel she is asleep.
“Hey. I got to go out.”
No answer, no motion. If she wasn’t asleep she heard everything he said on the phone, but what did he say? He remembers nothing except this sense of being reached. Ruth lies heavy and silent and her body hidden. The night is hot enough for just a sheet but she put a blanket on the bed saying she felt cold. It was just about the only thing she did say. He shouldn’t have made her do it. He doesn’t know why he did except it felt right at the time. He thought she might like it or at least like the humbling. If she didn’t want to, if it made her sick, why didn’t she say no like he half-hoped she would anyway? He kept touching her cheeks with his fingertips. He kept wanting to lift her up and hug her in simple thanks and say Enough you’re mine again but somehow couldn’t bring himself to have it stop and kept thinking the next moment, until it was too late, done. With it went instantly that strange floating feeling of high pride. Shame plunged in.
“My wife’s having her baby. I got to go see her through it I guess. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I love you.”
Still the body under the covers and the frizzy crescent of hair peeking over the top edge of the blanket don’t move. He is so sure she is not asleep he thinks, I’ve killed her. It’s ridiculous, such a thing wouldn’t kill her, it has nothing to do with death; but the thought paralyzes him from going forward to touch her and make her listen.
“Ruth. I got to go this once, it’s my baby she’s having and she’s such a mutt I don’t think she can do it by herself. Our first one came awfully hard. It’s the least I owe her.”
Perhaps this wasn’t the best way to say it but he’s trying to explain and her stillness frightens him and is beginning to make him sore.
“Ruth. Hey. If you don’t say anything I’m not coming back. Ruth.”
She lies there like some d
ead animal or somebody after a car accident when they put a tarpaulin over. He feels if he went over and lifted her she would come to life but he doesn’t like being manipulated and is angry. He puts on his shirt and doesn’t bother with a coat and necktie but it seems to take forever putting on his socks; the soles of his feet are tacky.
When the door closes the taste of seawater in her mouth is swallowed by the thick grief that mounts in her throat so fully she has to sit up to breathe. Tears slide from her blind eyes and salt the corners of her mouth as the empty walls of the room become real and then dense. It’s like when she was fourteen and the whole world trees sun and stars would have swung into place if she could lose twenty pounds just twenty pounds what difference would it make to God Who guided every flower in the fields into shape? Only now it’s not that she’s asking she knows now that’s superstitious all she wants is what she had a minute ago him in the room him who when he was good could make her into a flower who could undress her of her flesh and turn her into sweet air Sweet Ruth he called her and if he had just said “sweet” talking to her she might have answered and he’d still be between these walls. No. She had known from the first night the wife would win they have the hooks and anyway she feels really lousy: a wave of wanting to throw up comes over her and washes away caring much about anything. She goes into the john and kneels on the tiles and watches the still oval of water in the toilet as if it’s going to do something. She doesn’t think after all she has it in her to throw up but stays there anyway because it pleases her, her bare arm resting on the icy porcelain lip, and grows used to the threat in her stomach, which doesn’t dissolve, which stays with her, so in her faint state it comes to seem that this thing that’s making her sick is some kind of friend.
He runs most of the way to the hospital. Up Summer one block, then down Youngquist, a street parallel to Weiser on the north, a street of brick tenements and leftover business places, shoe-repair nooks smelling secretively of leather, darkened candy stores, insurance agencies with photographs of tornado damage in the windows, real-estate offices lettered in gold, a bookshop. On an old-fashioned wooden bridge Youngquist Street crosses the railroad tracks, which slide between walls of blackened stone soft with soot like moss through the center of the city, threads of metal deep below in a darkness like a river, taking narrow sunset tints of pink from the neon lights of the dives along Railway Street. Music rises to him. The heavy boards of the old bridge, waxed black with locomotive smoke, rumble under his feet. Being a small-town boy, he always has a fear of being knifed in a city slum. He runs harder; the pavement widens, parking meters begin, and a new drive-in bank faces the antique Y.M.C.A. He cuts up the alley between the Y. and a limestone church whose leaded windows show the reverse sides of Biblical scenes to the street. He can’t make out what the figures are doing. From a high window in the Y.M.C.A. fall the clicks of a billiard game; otherwise the building’s broad side is lifeless. Through the glass side door he sees an old Negro sweeping up in green aquarium light. Now the pulpy seeds of some tree are under his feet. Its tropically narrow leaves are black spikes against the dark yellow sky. Imported from China or Brazil or somewhere because it can endure soot and fumes. The St. Joseph’s parking lot is a striped asphalt square whose sides are lined with such city trees; and above their tops, in this hard open space, he sees the moon, and for a second stops and communes with its mournful face, stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the stone that has risen inside his hot skin. Make it be all right, he prays to it, and goes in the rear entrance.