Authors: John Updike
‘Oh, it’s very subtle and delicate when you do it, but
she
has no problems.’
‘Oh, go to her, go and carry her off to Arizona or wherever you think you’re going – Wyoming. Right? If you could see your face when you talk about her, Jerry, you’d hate yourself. You’d laugh at yourself.’
‘You were saying something.’
‘I was saying, go, because I can’t take these phone calls. I’m sorry, I can’t. When I hear that busy signal, it’s like a door shut in my face, I get so low I can’t describe it. This morning I went into the kitchen and just said the children’s names, Joanna Charlie Geoffrey, Joanna Charlie Geoffrey, over and over to myself. It was the only thing I could think of to keep myself alive.’
He hesitantly came forward and lightly embraced her. ‘Don’t say that. You have yourself to live for.’
‘I have no self. I gave it away eight years ago.’
‘Nobody asked you to do that.’
‘Everybody did.’
‘Then it must have been a shaky self to begin with.’
His tone was level, vengeful; how dare he gloat! Outraged, she made a vow. ‘The next time I come across you two talking like that, I’m going to get into the car and drive to the Mathiases and I don’t give a damn if Richard is there or not. Now I mean it.’
Jerry stepped back, shrugged, and said, ‘Of course you mean it,’ suggesting by his smile that of course she didn’t. ‘But if because of you Sally needs to be rescued, I’ll have to do it.’
‘I think you’ve used that stick on me often enough; it’s worn out. I have nothing to lose; I’m losing my mind this way.’
‘Don’t be silly. We’re all depending on your sanity.’ Jerry was always saying things like that, compliments
that cut like insults, thrown to trip her mind, which never failed to stop and puzzle over what was meant. For he did not invariably mean the opposite of what was said. In this instance she suspected it was true, they were all in their craziness and infatuation and self-deception depending on her sad, defeated sanity to hold them back from disaster. Well, she was tired of it.
The next time she called Jerry and got a busy signal, and dialled Sally’s number and got the same, it was quarter of eleven on a weekday morning, and the children were playing in the neighbourhood. Ruth called the teenaged sitter, and the girl was at the beach. Her next choice, Mrs O, was sitting for Linda Collins, who had gone to the city to shop. And Miss Murdock, homely as she was, was at the beauty parlour. Then rain fell, and Ruth, watching the drops sift through the elm, cooled. Let it pass, she decided. Let everything pass.
But the sudden summer storm brought the young sitter back from the beach, and she returned Ruth’s call. Ruth asked her to come after lunch. Why? The momentum of her anger had dissipated. If she went to see Sally in her present mood, she would appear flustered and foolish. Perhaps she should go talk to Richard instead. She would be vague, betray no one, yet get a rub of advice, of wisdom. He kept an office in Cannonport, above his father’s first liquor store; Ruth had been there, had made love there, on a sticky sofa of imitation leather, beneath a framed print of mallards flying, while the secretary of the realtor next door pounded her typewriter and the machinery of the dry-cleaning establishment nearby hissed and clattered. She
liked noises that could not touch her; she liked the sensation of being naked behind a frosted-glass door locked from the inside. Cannonport was twenty minutes away – fifteen, with a push. She put on a seersucker skirt and a decent blouse, so she would look respectable for Cannonport, yet not too dressed up in case she decided to visit Sally after all.
Her Falcon seemed lightheaded under her touch, in the drizzly, wanly sunny atmosphere that had followed the rainstorm. The so-intensely green trees beside the road – she had seen them before, in a Monet, or was it a Pissarro? The bits of salmon pink along the birch trunks were Cézanne’s. At the place where she could have slowed to turn up Sally’s uphill driveway, Ruth accelerated. The road towards Cannonport licked her tyres with an eager noise. Then, one by one, a series of images pulled her back towards Greenwood. Richard’s dusty desk, an Army green: he was lazy, it was unlikely she would find him in his office. And suppose – she envisioned their naked bodies on the sofa: impossible, but what else might he think? Her children’s round, vulnerable heads: they would wonder why she was gone, leaving them to fret in a rainbound house. Her father’s tired way of shrugging on his overcoat, chin tucked down upon his muffler, to go out at night to a bi-racial meeting:
Face things.
She turned left on a byway that would take her to Orchard Road, which by a slightly roundabout route would take her back to Greenwood and her children, Jerry, and Sally. She would revert to her first plan and face Sally again; this time of the day, they could have vermouth instead of coffee, and it might help. Her few miles in the direction of
Richard had been a sinful waste of time, a mistake that must be quickly erased; she sped as if Sally were waiting for her. Afterwards, she doubted she was going over forty.
Ruth skidded on the S-curve just beyond the Rotary-Lions-Kiwanis sign welcoming all to Greenwood; an average of an accident a month occurred here. Not only did the town road crew patch with an oil that was slippery when wet, but the original roadbed had been banked the wrong way. Straightening the road, often proposed, would have meant cutting off a small corner of the van Huyten estate, which had been intact a century and a half; and the present Mr van Huyten, a graceful, patriotic, long-divorced gentleman of seventy with coal-black hair and all his front teeth, resisted incursions. Since Ruth had been active in the citizens’ group that had helped Mr van Huyten defeat the power lines two years ago, she could not in principle blame him, even as death leaped up in front of her.
The Falcon, with a little skating skip like a sailboat with its centreboard pulled, slid to the left. Ruth steered to the right and was surprised to feel nothing answer her touch; it was as if she looked into a mirror that then turned transparent. Then, in a later portion of the same distended moment, her attempt at control was gigantically distorted; the car slewed heavily around to the right and she saw, omitting to brake, that she was going to go over the wall. A low fieldstone wall separated the roadway from a sunken stand of trees, elm and red maple and swamp oak. Softly bumping, the car coasted over the wall and travelled through swaying, scratching widths of green accented by upright trunks. For a
section of her glide Ruth steered between the trunks; when the number of trees seemed to multiply hopelessly, she lay down on the front seat and shut her eyes. The car nuzzled obliquely to a stop. She searched the floor for the burning cigarette she had been holding. It had disappeared. A bird was chirping near at hand, unusually loud. She opened her door, which wanted to stick, and got out, closing it carefully. The rain had diminished to the daintiest touch of blowing moisture. Bluish-brown smoke poured steadily from the rear of the car, and the front wheel on the driver’s side was set in its socket at an unexpected angle; she thought of Geoffrey’s collarbone. In the damp green hush the engine ticked, insulted, and she supposed that if the car was going to explode she had better save her pocketbook. It had her driver’s licence in it.
Opening the car door again and reaching across the front seat for her pocketbook, Ruth noticed for the first time, by the caress of air on her arm and the extreme clarity of the leaves she saw, that the front window on the passenger’s side was smashed. Shattered. The edges of it that hung in the frame were crazed fine as lace, and the front seat was strewn with fragments like a pale coarse confetti. Touching her hair, she found such fragments adhering to it. Her pocketbook, sitting on the seat mouth up, was filled with broken glass. She thought of emptying it, but imagined it might be some sort of evidence. She extracted her wallet, brushed glass from its leather, and checked that the ignition key was upright in the lock. She admired her own presence of mind, and moved away from the car. Wet branches brushed her. Each veined leaf and jointed twig seemed brightly
poised in a sharp space somewhat artificial, like the depth of a stereoscope, unnaturally fresh and clean; but from the sodden, casual swish of the car that passed, unseen and unseeing, on the road beyond the wall, Ruth deduced that this was not Paradise and she was not dead.
She was trespassing, she perceived; she should get off of van Huyten’s precious land. She had hurt his wall and his trees. The woods swerved about her with the unmoving motion of a scene painted on the awning of a carousel. She took a few steps farther, in soaked high-heeled pumps that found the ferny earth strange. From the fact of her walking she deduced that no bone was broken. She looked down, smoothed the front of her seersucker skirt, and saw that both her knees were cut; she could not imagine how. The bleeding was slight but she was grateful she had not worn stockings and ruined them. Her right wrist felt stiff. She studied her hands and the longer she held them under her eyes the worse they trembled. Behind her, the motor’s ticking blended with the ticking of water drops and inquisitive, repetitive birdsong. She straightened and inhaled; the fine hair of the drizzle tingled on her face. Ruth attempted a prayer, but in the agitated grip of her mind the ambition was crushed. Grabbing a low branch, she pulled herself up the bank. Packed dead leaves made a slippery mulch and moss spongily trapped her spike heels. Level with the road, she found a place where, using a mouldering log and a toppled stone, she could step across the wall. Safe and firm, she looked back and was delighted, delightedly grieved, by the sight of her car – her hundred horses, her freedom – parked so
strangely and docilely deep and low in the woods. It seemed a Rousseau: the literal leafage, the air of static benevolence, the peaceful monster browsing, self-forgetful, on ferns and soft weeds. She could hear Jerry laughing, and the shy notion formed that he would be proud of her, for having dared do this, and for having survived, which made her as reckless, and miraculous, as Sally.
As Ruth stood at the side of the road, three cars passed her. The passengers of one of them, a station wagon, frowned at her indignantly as she waved. They thought she was a prostitute. Then a town truck heading into Greenwood stopped, and they understood just by glancing at her cut knees and dishevelled hair and at the damaged wall. They gave her a ride to the police station. She sat up high between the two men, who continued their conversation – some scandal about the town manager, his insistence on sewering his own street in contravention of the master plan – as if she were one of them. The truck muttered and rumbled reminiscently: years ago, the summer before she went to art school, she had had a boyfriend who drove a farm truck. Billy had had cup ears, a beautiful back when he worked barechested, and little ambition, which had annoyed her father. He had loved her, in his low-key, comfortable way. Everything had been comfortable about them – their petting, their silences – and he had been amiably hopeless about their futures; she was ‘going on’, beyond him. She had wanted to argue, but it seemed presumptuous, and then it had been too late, that summer was over. Now, swaying back and forth so that her body touched now one and now the other
of these middle-aged, solid, oblivious, accepting men, Ruth felt more cheerful than she had for weeks. She must tell Jerry.
At the police station a tall blond cop took her statement. Ruth knew him slightly; he had a Polish name, and looked like an exiled prince in winter, standing at the school intersection in a high fur hat with black earflaps. She had never been this close to him before; she explained, ‘I was driving along I thought very nicely, when the car took it into its head to leave the road and jump the wall.’ The windows were open to the sunshine that was returning as the afternoon lengthened and the officer wrote very slowly, his ballpoint denting the paper. She described skidding first this way, then that, bumping over the wall so softly, and seeming to herself to be steering through the interwoven trees until the car, of its own desire, stopped. She had no memory of braking. She supposed she thought it would do no good; isn’t that what people say about skids? She got out, glass in her hair. Smoke was pouring from underneath the car, so she made sure the ignition was off. The front wheel looked hopelessly twisted, or she would have tried backing out. The officer asked her how fast she had been going. She guessed about forty, it couldn’t have been much faster than that. ‘Since thirty-five,’ he said, writing slowly, ‘is the speed limit at that curve, let’s say you were going thirty-five.’
The elegance of this flat manoeuvre dazzled her. All summer she had been struggling with inequalities like the one between the speed limit and her actual speed, and this Polish prince showed her how to abolish them, to make the real ideal. Attempting to express her gratitude,
she blushed – she felt not only her face heat, but her throat, breasts, thighs. The policeman said he would call the wrecker while she called her husband.
‘But he’s at work in New York. I can walk home from here. It’s less than a mile.’
‘No,’ the young cop said, with no more inflection than a traffic light.
‘I’m really perfectly all right,’ she insisted, knowing he would hold her to the truth, that she was not all right.
‘You’re in shock,’ he told her. ‘Is there anybody in town you could call to come for you? A woman friend?’
I have no woman friends:
Ruth felt it would horrify him if she said this aloud. She said, ‘There is somebody. I’m not sure if I can reach him though.’
But Richard did answer the Cannonport number, immediately. He had been sitting there, waiting for her silence to end.
‘Dick? Hi. It’s me. Ruth. This is pretty embarrassing, but I just ran my car off the road and Jerry’s in the city and they won’t let me out of the police station unless somebody comes for me. They say I’m in shock.’
‘In minor shock,’ the policeman said.
‘Ruthie babes,’ Richard said. ‘This is fantastic, hearing your voice. I’m all shook up.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said, ‘it’s purely practical. Are you free, or is my successor on the job?’