by John Updike
“That was just coincidence he showed up. I admit it was Charlie who recommended it, is there anything wrong with that? And you were certainly rude to him. You were incredible.”
“I wasn’t rude, we had a political discussion. I like Charlie. He’s an O.K. guy, for a left-wing mealy-mouthed wop.”
“You are really very strange lately, Harry. I think your mother’s sickness is getting to you.”
“In the restaurant, you seemed to know your way around the menu. Sure he doesn’t take you there for lunch? Or on some of those late-work nights? You been working a lot of nights, and don’t seem to get much done.”
“You know nothing about what has to be done.”
“I know your old man and Mildred Kroust used to do it themselves without all this overtime.”
“Having the Toyota franchise is a whole new dimension. It’s endless bills of lading, import taxes, customs forms.” More fending words occur to Janice; it is like when she was little, making snow dams in the gutter. “Anyway, Charlie has lots of girls, he can have girls any time, single girls younger than me. They all go to bed now without even being asked, everybody’s on the Pill, they just assume it.” One sentence too many.
“How do you know?”
“He tells me.”
“So you are chummy.”
“Not very. Just now and then, when he’s hung or needing a little mothering or something.”
“Right – maybe he’s scared of these hot young tits, maybe he likes older women, mamma mia and all that. These slick Mediterranean types need a lot of mothering.”
It’s fascinating to her, to see him circling in; she fights the rising in her of a wifely wish to collaborate, to help him find the truth that sits so large in her own mind she can hardly choose the words that go around it.
“Anyway,” he goes on, “those girls aren’t the boss’s daughter.”
Yes, that is what he’d think, it was what she thought those first times, those first pats as she was standing tangled in a net of numbers she didn’t understand, those first sandwich lunches they would arrange when Daddy was out on the lot, those first five-o’clock whisky sours in the Atlas Bar down the street, those first kisses in the car, always a different car, one they had borrowed from the lot, with a smell of new car like a protective skin their touches were burning through. That was what she thought until he convinced her it was her, funny old clumsy her, Janice Angstrom née Springer; it was her flesh being licked like ice cream, her time being stolen in moments compressed as diamonds, her nerves caught up in an exchange of pleasure that oscillated between them in tightening swift circles until it seemed a kind of frenzied sleep, a hypnosis so intense that later in her own bed she could not sleep at all, as if she had napped that afternoon. His apartment, they discovered, was only twelve minutes distant, if you drove the back way, by the old farmers’ market that was now just a set of empty tin-roofed sheds.
“What good would my being the boss’s daughter do him?”
“It’d make him feel he was climbing. All these Greeks or Polacks or whatever are on the make.”
“I’d never realized, Harry, how full of racial prejudice you are.”
“Yes or no about you and Stavros.”
“No.” But lying she felt, as when a child watching the snow dams melt, that the truth must push through, it was too big, too constant: though she was terrified and would scream, it was something she must have, her confession like a baby. She felt so proud.
“You dumb bitch,” he says. He hits her not in the face but on the shoulder, like a man trying to knock open a stuck door.
She hits him back, clumsily, on the side of the neck, as high as she can reach. Harry feels a flash of pleasure: sunlight in a tunnel. He hits her three, four, five times, unable to stop, boring his way to that sunlight, not as hard as he can hit, but hard enough for her to whimper; she doubles over so that his last punches are thrown hammerwise down into her neck and back, an angle he doesn’t see her from that much – the chalk-white parting, the candle-white nape, the bra strap showing through the fabric of the back of the blouse. Her sobbing arises muffled and, astonished by a beauty in her abasement, by a face that shines through her reduction to this craven faceless posture, he pauses. Janice senses that he will not hit her anymore. She abandons her huddle, flops over to her side, and lets herself cry out loud – high-pitched, a startled noise pinched between sieges of windy gasping. Her face is red, wrinkled, newborn; in curiosity he drops to his knees to examine her. Her black eyes flash at this and she spits up at his face, but misjudges; the saliva falls back into her own face. For him there is only the faintest kiss of spray. Flecked with her own spit Janice cries, “I do, I do sleep with Charlie!”
“Ah, shit,” Rabbit says softly, “of course you do,” and bows his head into her chest, to protect himself from her scratching, while he half-pummels her sides, half-tries to embrace her and lift her.
“I love him. Damn you, Harry. We make love all the time.”
“Good,” he moans, mourning the receding of that light, that ecstasy of his hitting her, of knocking her open. Now she will become again a cripple he must take care of. “Good for you.”
“It’s been going on for months,” she insists, writhing and trying to get free to spit again, furious at his response. He pins her arms, which would claw, at her sides and squeezes her hard. She stares into his face. Her face is wild, still, frozen. She is seeking what will hurt him most. “I do things for him,” she says, “I never do for you.”
“Sure you do,” he murmurs, wanting to have a hand free to stroke her forehead, to re-enclose her. He sees the gloss of her forehead and the gloss of the kitchen linoleum. Her hair wriggles outward into the spilled wriggles of the marbled linoleum pattern, worn where she stands at the sink. A faint rotten smell here, of the sluggish sink tie-in. Janice abandons herself to crying and limp relief, and he has no trouble lifting her and carrying her in to the living-room sofa. He has zombie-strength: his shins shiver, his palm sore from the clipper handles is a stiff crescent.
She sinks lost into the sofa’s breadth.
He prompts her, “He makes better love than me,” to keep her confession flowing, as a physician moistens a boil.
She bites her tongue, trying to think, surveying her ruins with an eye toward salvage. Impure desires – to save her skin, to be kind, to be exact – pollute her primary fear and anger. “He’s different,” she says. “I’m more exciting to him than to you. I’m sure it’s just mostly our not being married.”
“Where do you do it?”
Worlds whirl past and cloud her eyes – car seats, rugs, tree undersides seen through windshields, the beigy-gray carpeting in the narrow space between the three green steel desks and the safe and the Toyota cutout, motel rooms with their cardboard panelling and scratchy bedspreads, his dour bachelor’s apartment stuffed with heavy furniture and tinted relatives in silver frames. “Different places.”
“Do you want to marry him?”
“No. No.” Why does she say this? The possibility opens an abyss. She would not have known this. A gate she had always assumed gave onto a garden gave onto emptiness. She tries to drag Harry down closer to her; she is lying on the sofa, one shoe off, her bruises just beginning to smart, while he kneels on the carpet, having carried her here. He remains stiff when she pulls at him, he is dead, she has killed him.
He asks, “Was I so lousy to you?”
“Oh sweetie, no. You were good to me. You came back. You work in that dirty place. I don’t know what got into me, Harry, I honestly don’t.”
“Whatever it was,” he tells her, “it must be still there.” He looks like Nelson, saying this, a mulling discontented hurt look, puzzling to pry something open, to get something out. She sees she will have to make love to him. A conflicted tide moves within her – desire for this pale and hairless stranger, abhorrence of this desire, fascination with the levels of betrayal possible.
He shies, afraid of failing her; he falls b
ack from the sofa and sits on the floor and offers to talk, to strike a balance. “Do you remember Ruth?”
“The whore you lived with when you ran away.”
“She wasn’t a whore exactly.”
“Whatever she was, what about her?”
“A couple of years ago, I saw her again.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Oh God no. She had become very straight. That was the thing. We met on Weiser Street, she was shopping. She had put on so much weight I didn’t recognize her, I think she recognized me first, something about the way this woman looked at me; and then it hit me. Ruth. She still had this great head of hair. By then she had gone by, I followed her for a while and then she ducked into Kroll’s. I gave it an even chance, I waited there at the side entrance figuring if she came out of that one I’d say hello and if she went out one of the others, O.K. I gave it five minutes. I really wasn’t that interested.” But in saying this, his heart beats faster, as it had beat then. “Just as I was going away she came out lugging two shopping bags and looked at me and the first thing she said was, ‘Let me alone.’ ”
“She loved you,” Janice explains.
“She did and she didn’t,” he says, and loses her sympathy with this complacence. “I offered to buy her a drink but all she’d let me do is walk her up toward the parking lot where the old Acme used to be. She lived out toward Galilee, she told me. Her husband was a chicken farmer and ran a string of school buses, I got the impression he was some guy older than she was, who’d had a family before. She told me they had three children, a girl and two boys. She showed me their pictures in a wallet. I asked how often she got into town and she said, ‘As far as you’re concerned, never.’ ”
“Poor Harry,” Janice says. “She sounds awful.”
“Well, she was, but still. She’d gotten heavy, as I said, she was sort of lost inside this other person who pretty much blended in with those other fat bag-luggers you see downtown, but at the same time, still, it was her.”
“All right. You still love her,” Janice says.
“No, I didn’t, I don’t. You haven’t heard the worse thing she did then.”
“I can’t believe you never tried to get in touch with her after you came back to me. At least to see what she did about her . . . pregnancy.”
“I felt I shouldn’t.” But he sees now, in his wife’s dark and judging eyes, that the rules were more complicated, that there were some rules by which he should have. There were rules beneath the surface rules that also mattered. She should have explained this when she took him back.
She asks, “What was the worse thing?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you.”
“Tell me. Let’s tell each other everything, then we’ll take off all our clothes.” She sounds tired. The shock of having given it all away must be sinking in. He talks to distract, as we joke with a loser at poker.
“You already said it. About the baby. I thought of that and asked her how old the girl was, her oldest child. She wouldn’t tell me. I asked to see the wallet pictures again, to see if there was, you know, a resemblance. She wouldn’t show them to me. She laughed at me. She was really quite nasty. She said something very strange.”
“What?”
“I forget exactly. She looked me over and said I’d gotten fat. This from her. Then she said, ‘Run along, Rabbit. You’ve had your day in the cabbage patch.’ Or something like that. Nobody ever calls me Rabbit, was what sort of got me. This was two years ago. I think in the fall. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Tell me the truth now. These ten years, haven’t you had any other women?”
He runs his mind backward, encounters a few dark places, a room in a Polish-American Club where Verity was having its annual blast, a skinny flat-chested girl with a cold, she had kept her bra and sweater on; and then a weird episode at the Jersey shore, Janice and Nelson off at the amusement park, him back from the beach in his trunks, a knock at the door of the cabin, a chunky colored girl, two skinny boys escorting her, offering herself for five or seven dollars, depending what he wanted done. He had had trouble understanding her accent, had made her repeat – with downcast eyes, as the boys with her sniggered – “screwin’,” “suck-off.” Frightened, he had quickly shut the flimsy door on them, locked it as if they had threatened to harm him, and jerked off facing the wall; the wall smelled of damp and salt. He tells Janice, “You know, ever since that happened to Becky, I haven’t been that much for sex. It comes on, wanting it, and then something turns it off.”
“Let me up.”
Janice stands in front of the television set, the screen green ashes, a dead fire. Efficiently she undresses herself. Her dark-tipped breasts droop tubular and sway as she disengages her pantyhose. Her tan stops below her throat. Other summers they used to go to the West Brewer pool some Sundays but the kid became too big to go with his parents so none go now. They haven’t gone to the Shore since the Springers discovered the Poconos. Buggy brown lakes imprisoned among dark green trees: Rabbit hates it there and never goes, never goes anywhere, takes his vacation around the house. He used to daydream about going South, Florida or Alabama, to see the cotton fields and the alligators, but that was a boy’s dream and died with the baby. He once saw Texas and that has to be enough. Tongue pinched between her lips, naked Janice unbuttons his shirt, fumbling. Numbly he takes over, completes the job. The pants, the shoes last. Socks. Air knows him, air of day still lingering, summer air tingling along the skin that never knows the light. He and Janice have not made love in the light for years. She asks him in the middle of it, “Don’t you love seeing? I used to be so embarrassed.”
In twilight they eat, still naked, salami sandwiches she makes, and drink whisky. Their house stays dark, though the others around them, that mirror it, turn on their lights. These neighboring lights, and the cars that pass along Vista Crescent, throw sliding soft witnesses into their room: the open shelves lunge like parallel swords, the driftwood lamp throws a rhinoceros-shadow, the school portrait of Nelson, in its cardboard frame on the mantel, from beneath the embalming tints of its color wash, smiles. To help them see when darkness comes, Janice turns on the television set without sound, and by the bluish flicker of module models pantomiming flight, of riot troops standing before smashed supermarkets, of a rowboat landing in Florida having crossed the Atlantic, of situation comedies and western melodramas, of great gray momentary faces unstable as quicksilver, they make love again, her body a stretch of powdery sand, her mouth a loose black hole, her eyes holes with sparks in them, his own body a barren landscape lit by bombardment, silently exploding images no gentler than Janice’s playful expert touches, that pass through him and do him no harm. She inverts herself and pours out upon him the months of her new knowledge; her appetite frightens him, knowing he cannot fill it, any more than Earth’s appetite for death can be satisfied. Her guilt became love; her love becomes rage. The first time was too quick but the second was sweet, with work and sweat in it, and the third time strainingly sweet, a work of the spirit almost purely, and the fourth time, because there was no fourth time, sad; straddling his thighs, her cunt revealed by the flickering touch of the television to be lopsidedly agape, she bows her head, her hair tickling his belly, and drops cold tears, starpricks, upon the slack flesh that has failed her.
“Jesus,” he says, “I forgot. We were supposed to go over to Mom’s tonight!”
* * *
He dreams of driving north with Charlie Stavros, in a little scarlet Toyota. The gear shift is very thin, a mere pencil, and he is afraid of breaking it as he shifts. Also, he is wearing golf shoes, which makes operating the pedals awkward. Stavros sits in the driver’s seat and, with that stolid way of muttering, his square ringed hands masterfully gesturing, discusses his problem: Lyndon Johnson has asked him to be his Vice-President. They need a Greek. He would like to accept, but doesn’t want to leave Brewer. So they are negotiating to have at least the summer White House moved to Brewer. The
y have lots of vacant lots they could build it on, Charlie explains. Rabbit is thinking maybe this is his chance to get out of the printing plant and into a white-collar job. Services and software are where the future lies. He tells Stavros hopefully, “I can lick stamps.” He shows him his tongue. They are on a superhighway heading north, into the deserted coal regions and, beyond that, the wilds of northern Pennsylvania. Yet here, in this region of woods and lakes, a strange white city materializes beside the highway; hill after hill of tall row houses white as bedsheets, crowding to the horizon, an enormous city, strange it seems to have no name. They part in a suburban region beside a drugstore and Stavros hands him a map; with difficulty Rabbit locates on it where they are. The metropolis, marked with a bull’s-eye, is named, simply, The Rise.
The Rise, The Rise . . . the dream is so unpleasant he awakes, with a headache and an erection. His prick feels glassily thin and aches from all that work with Janice. The bed is empty beside him. He remembers they went to bed after two, when the television screen became a buzzing test-signal. He hears the sound of the vacuum cleaner downstairs. She is up.
He dresses in his Saturday clothes, patched chinos and apricot polo shirt, and goes downstairs. Janice is in the living room sweeping, pushing the silver tube back and forth. She glances over at him, looking old. Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. She says, “There’s orange juice on the table, and an egg in the pan. Let me finish this room.”
From the breakfast table he surveys his house. The kitchen on one side, the living room on the other are visible. The furniture that frames his life looks Martian in the morning light: an armchair covered in synthetic fabric enlivened by a silver thread, a sofa of airfoam slabs, a low table hacked to imitate an antique cobbler’s bench, a piece of driftwood that is a lamp, nothing shaped directly for its purpose, gadgets designed to repel repair, nothing straight from a human hand, furniture Rabbit has lived among but has never known, made of substances he cannot name, that has aged as in a department store window, worn out without once conforming to his body. The orange juice tastes acid; it is not even frozen orange juice but some chemical mix tinted orange.