Authors: John Updike
She was aware of the policemen listening, yet was careless of what she said, as if, in breaking through van Huyten’s wall, she had come into a green freedom.
‘No successor, no successor,’ Richard was saying, in that maddening way of his, of playing at being
businesslike. ‘You’re at the Greenwood pokey, right? I’ll be there.’
‘You’re sweet to do this. Twenty minutes?’
‘Ten.’
‘Don’t speed. Please. One disaster a day is enough.’
‘Listen, I know that road like I know your ass.’
She supposed she had asked for that, Ruth thought, hanging up. What had possessed her, to call him? Anger, she supposed. She regretted that not Jerry nor Sally but Richard must be her victim. But then, we pick victims we can handle, that are our size. And how much victimizing was it, to ask an old lover to drive eight miles to drive her one mile more? The policeman offered her a Dixie cup of coffee, and told her that the wrecker had called back and wouldn’t be able to dig her car out until tomorrow. The police radio crackled on in a corner of the station, the cops revolved with sheaves of paper, she felt herself nudged from the centre of their attention. Pleasantly she let herself go blank. Thank God there was a world beyond the walls of her house where there were men paid to care about her, not too intensely. She must remember to tell Jerry, how happy she was in the police station.
When Richard came in, he announced himself at the desk by saying, ‘I’ve come to spring the broad.’
‘Mr Conant?’ the other young cop asked, not smiling.
‘Mathias,’ Richard said. ‘I’m pinch-hitting. How is she?’
‘She’s a very lucky young lady’ the cop told him. To Ruth he said, ‘The wrecker looked it over and says you won’t be driving that car again. You totalled it.’
Richard, trying to fit himself to the cop’s solemnity, asked, ‘Should I take her to a doctor?’
‘If it were me, I would.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Ruth said, resentful, perhaps, at the way the policeman had been taken from her. His princely indifference had become a judicious stupidity; he handed her his report of the accident.
At approximately 1.45 p.m…. the dark-blue four-door Ford station wagon driven by Mrs Gerald Conant, of… thirty-five miles per hour… suffered apparently superficial injuries… the vehicle was demolished.
His handwriting was uncouth. She signed, and left with Richard. She had forgotten how much bulkier than Jerry he was. She surprised herself by taking his arm.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, settling into the driver’s side of his dear old Mercedes. She had forgotten also that curious dent in his upper lip, the jut of the lower, the vulnerable size of his cowardly-lion’s head.
‘What do you mean?’ Something strange was happening to Ruth’s throat; a silvery web had been engendered in it, and in her sinuses and eye-sockets, and all the hollows of her skull.
Richard’s mouth twitched impatiently. ‘You’ve got the wind up, Ruthie babes.’
‘The accident could have happened to anybody. The road –’
‘Fuck the accident. You’ve been hysterical all summer. You’ve been looking like a wallflower at a witch hunt. Jerry giving you the needle again because you can’t keep the boogeyman away?’
‘No, Jerry doesn’t talk about death much any more.’
‘Must be pretty quiet around the house then.’
‘Not really. How is it around yours?’
He quite missed the hint. The arc of frost sat on his
cornea in profile like a cap. ‘O.K.,’ he said grimly. ‘You don’t want to talk. Screw me.’
‘I
do
want to talk, Richard. But –’
‘But the other fellow’s wife might get the word if you spilled the beans to me, right?’
‘What other fellow’s wife?’
‘My successor’s bride, dame, snatch,
femme
, what the hell. You’re playing games again, kee-recket? Davie Collins the lucky dog? He looks pretty woofy at folly ball. Jesus, Ruthie, when’re you going to give yourself a break and trade in that neurotic doodlebug you married for half a man? You’re just chewing yourself to pieces this way. You’re just giving it the old Count Masoch one-two-three.’
‘Richard, you do go on. I’m flattered you imagine it, but I’m
not
having an affair. I do
not
think Jerry is half a man. Maybe I’m half a woman.’
‘A woman and a half, as I remember it. But O.K. I’m soft in the head. Soggy in the nog. Screw me. Screw you, for that matter. What you think I am, a once-a-year taxi service?’
‘Where are we going?’
He was driving her out of town, to the woods, the buggy path, the pond where the motionless fisherman caught nothing. The web in her head broke and she began to cry; the tears were rapidly at full flood, she was shaking and trying to scream. She kept seeing the trees as she floated between them. The tears scrambled with words and wouldn’t stop. ‘No, take me home. Take me to my house and drop me. That’s what I asked you to do, that’s what you promised you’d do, I don’t want to neck, I don’t want to have a cosy talk, I just
want to go home and die, Richard. Please. I’m sorry. I can’t take it. You’re so right and you’re so wrong it kills me. It does. You’re the only person I could talk to and you’re absolutely the worst person. Forgive me. I’ve liked this. I really have. It’s not you. I like you, Richard. Don’t make that silly hurt mouth. It’s
not
you. It’s –
it!’
‘Easy easy’ he was saying, frightened, trying to back around in a driveway too narrow, where people had painted the stones and planted a family of plaster ducks on the lawn.
‘I
can’t
do it all over, I
can’t
go back into all that, into us;
please.
Do forgive me for calling you; I wasn’t thinking. I should have called Linda. It was nice. You’re so
damn
nice, somehow. You’re lovely.’
‘Stick to the facts,’ he said, grimacing as he fought with the wheel. ‘I get the picture.’
‘You
don’t
, as a matter of fact,’ Ruth told him. ‘That’s what’s so killing.’
He let her off under the elm. ‘Sure you don’t want to see a doctor? These concussions can be sneaky.’
Out of the car, she leaned back in and kissed him on the mouth. He had been a good kisser, firm but not too hungry like Jerry. Ruth’s tears were drying; her head felt scoured. ‘You
are
nice,’ she told Richard, adding with her needless love of truth, ‘funnily enough.’
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Well, I’m around. Call me when you have your next wreck.’
‘You’ll be the first to know,’ she told him.
The busy signal had ceased; she reached Jerry at work and told him, making light of the accident. He came
home from the city a half-hour earlier than usual and wanted to see the wreck before dinner. As he drove her along Orchard Road, kerbstones, porches, lawns, children, and trees melted into blurs beneath his speed, and she pleaded, ‘Don’t go so fast.’
‘I’m only going thirty.’
‘It seems faster.’
‘Do you want to drive?’
‘No thanks.’
‘I meant ever again. Have you lost your nerve, do you think?’
‘I don’t think so. It does seem wild, to be in a car again.’
‘How did you get back from the police station?’
‘A policeman drove me.’
‘And what about a doctor? How are your insides? Were you bounced around a lot?’
‘It seemed very smooth and easy. The one scary thing, I didn’t step on the brakes. It never occurred to me.’
‘Where were you going, anyway?’
She described her confusion and panic, the busy signals and the baby-sitters, her driving past Sally’s driveway and her frantic doubling back. She left out Richard. She told again, what was becoming as rigid as a sequence of film, of the skid, the skid the other way, the wall, the calm trees, the Edenlike beauty and intensity of the dripping woods when she got out of the halted, smouldering car. At each rerun the images deepened in colour; now they weirdly meshed with present reality, backward, end to end, as she and Jerry entered the accident scene from the opposite direction. He parked the car on the shoulder, got out, and
began to cross the road. She said she didn’t want to see it, she’d wait in the car. He lifted his eyebrows and she changed her mind. He expected her to be sane. Together they crossed the asphalt. Were these skid marks hers? She couldn’t tell, there were so many. But here, where two interrupted ruts gouged the soft shoulder and a half-dozen rocks had been knocked from the top of the wall, was where she had leaped. The bark high on the trunk of a hickory had been skinned off; a little farther on, a maple sapling had been bent and patchily stripped. The car had tried to climb it, and had crashed it to the ground. Ruth could not coordinate her memory of gentle flight with these harsh scars. Deeper in the grove, more trees were skinned, and tyre tracks showed like the marks of giant fingers that had torn the soft earth of leaf mould and growing ferns. Jerry was impressed by how far the car had slithered, between the trees that could have stopped it, before its momentum surrendered to the mud and underbrush. ‘You travelled a hundred feet in there.’
‘It all seemed rather abstract.’ She wondered if he were inviting her to be proud.
Jerry climbed down to the car, opened the door, and took the maps and registration from the glove compartment and some towels and beach toys from the back. He walked once around the car, smiling, and laughed at the far side, the side Ruth could not see. Returning to her, hopping the wall, he said, ‘That whole right side is caved in. It looks like tinfoil.’
‘Can it be fixed?’
‘It’s had it. Once the frame is bent, you’re better off
just collecting the insurance. Things never get right again.’
‘My poor old car.’ Metal crumpled within her and she felt a shape of grief. ‘It seems heartless just to leave it.’
‘The wrecker will come and tow it away. Come on. Get in.’ Into his old Mercury convertible: the car’s interior suddenly smelled of Sally. Ruth balked. ‘Let’s
go,’
he said. ‘We have children.’
‘About time you thought of that,’ she said, sliding in.
‘I never stop thinking about it. How about you? If you were thinking about the children you wouldn’t go doing automotive stunts all over the country.’ He popped the clutch in, ‘burned rubber’ as teenagers say. It was ugly of him.
She said, determined to be calm, ‘It was an accident.’
‘It was a
stunt,’
Jerry said. ‘A deliberate stunt. The death-defying housewife, with her great big death-wish. You didn’t even
brake.’
‘I thought you shouldn’t brake in a skid. It seemed more important to steer.’
‘Steer!
You couldn’t steer, how the hell could you steer?’
‘I felt I was steering. Then when I couldn’t steer any more, I lay down on the front seat.’
‘Yes, that’s the way you cope, isn’t it? You just lie down on the front seat and hope everything goes away. And the damnedest thing is, it
works.
Anybody else would have been
killed
barrelling into that woods.’
As she sat numb and frightened beside this angry, speeding man, the truth dilated until she felt all hollow with the simple seeing of it. The clouds of green again
parted; she slid smoothly through the shuffle of tree trunks. The car nuzzled to a stop. She emerged and the tingling air touched her, loved her. She had had an accident. Jerry had been expecting this to happen. He had been praying for it. His prayer had been answered mockingly: only the car had been destroyed. She remembered his smile as he studied the wreck. ‘You’re mad,’ she said, testing the words carefully, like a ladder of rotten rungs, ‘that I wasn’t.’
‘Killed?’
‘Yes.’
He considered. ‘No, not exactly. I’ve been waiting, I suppose, for God to do something, and this was it. His way of saying that nothing is going to happen. Unless you and I make it happen.’
‘Do you realize what you’re
saying?
You’re saying you want me dead.’
‘Am I?’ He smiled calmly. ‘It’s just a fantasy, I’m sure.’ He stopped smiling and patted her thigh solemnly. ‘Do
you
want to make something happen?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, relax. You’re indestructible. Nothing will happen.’
The day after the accident, on the beach, Sally came up to Ruth with a fixed smile and swarming eyes and said how glad she was that Ruth had not been hurt. Ruth believed her, and regretted being too startled to respond with much more than a nod. She had been baking the accident out of herself, the aches in her knees and shoulders (from gripping the wheel harder than she knew?) and the flickering sense of skidding and flying that came
upon her whenever she closed her eyes. Sally’s face, tinted by the glare violently as a Bonnard – her lips purple, her hair ashen – seemed a pale, feral apparition striking into the cloudless blue to which Ruth had been yielding herself. ‘Ruth, I heard about your accident and just wanted to say how glad I am you weren’t hurt. Truly.’ Walking away, Sally looked thin; the backs of her thighs had developed a ripple of slack. When they had all been younger in Greenwood Sally’s body had seemed smooth as a model’s, as a machine. The two yellow pieces of her bathing suit receded and merged with the Prendergast dabs of the beach crowd. The next day, apparently, she packed her three children into a plane and flew to Florida, where her brother and his second wife had their home, in the orange grove country around Lake Wales. Ruth learned about it from Jerry, who apparently had encouraged her to go.
‘Why?’
‘The bind was getting to be too much for her.’
‘What bind? What
is
a bind, exactly?’
‘A bind is when all the alternatives are impossible. Life is a bind. It’s impossible to live forever, it’s impossible to die. It’s impossible for me to marry Sally, it’s impossible for me to live without her. You don’t know what a bind is because what’s impossible doesn’t interest you. Your eyes just don’t see it.’
‘Well, you’re looking pretty impossible to me right now. What right, what possible right, did you have to send her off to Florida on Richard’s money?’
Jerry laughed. ‘It
is
that bastard’s money, isn’t it?’