Authors: John Updike
Jerry resented this, too, the insistent note of self-pity. He told him, ‘You seem to be taking it philosophically.’
‘Oh, but I’m boiling inside, Jerry. I’m boiling.’
‘Why don’t you take him outside,’ Ruth suggested, ‘and beat him up?’
‘I’m sure you’d win,’ Jerry said. ‘You weigh twenty pounds more. It’d be like Liston and Patterson.’
‘I don’t operate that way,’ Richard told them. ‘What I
may
do, I’ll have to think about it, is
hire
somebody to beat you up. One thing about the liquor business, you know where the hoods are. Have some more wine.’
‘O.K., thanks. You’re right, it does grow on you.’
‘Ruthie babes?’
‘Just a splash. One of us
must
go back and take the babysitter home.’
‘You’ve just arrived,’ Richard said, filling her glass to
the brim. ‘We really haven’t seen very much of the Conants this summer, and I felt very hurt. I felt snubbed.’
‘I knew you would,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m sorry it was one of the reasons I wanted to tell you. My own life falling apart, and I was worried about your hurt feelings socially. But I just didn’t feel up to looking at Sally more than I had to. Volleyball was as much hell as I could take.’
‘You knew all summer they were fucking?’
‘No, I thought they’d
stopped.
I thought Jerry had promised to. So I was even dumber than you were.’
‘That’s pretty dumb,’ Richard said. ‘I guess I assumed Jerry was queer, I don’t know.’
Jerry called, ‘You’re sweet. How did you find out, anyway?’
‘Phone bills. I went back over the whole year. There was a collect call from the city this spring whose number hadn’t rung a bell, but I’d let it pass. They didn’t really get careless until August. A lot of a New York number that I figured out as his office and, the craziest thing, she charged a couple calls from Florida to him on
our
number.’
Ruth said, ‘She must have wanted you to find out then. She was angry with Jerry for not coming to Florida.’
Jerry said, ‘She wasn’t. He beat the truth out of her. He’s a bully. You heard him. He’s a big brave liquor store bully, probably he
hired
somebody to beat her up.’
Richard told him, ‘Watch it, Jerry. There’s such a thing as defamation of character. I never beat Sally, that’s one of her fantasies. She may believe it herself, Christ, though I didn’t think she was that far gone. You’ve been sold a bill of goods, sonny.’
‘I’ve seen the bruises on her.’
Ruth said, ‘Jerry. Must you?’
‘Let him talk, Ruth, let him spill it. Let the happy cock crow. I have seen my true love naked. How does it go? I have looked on beauty bare.’
Jerry said, ‘Once you hit her on the side of the head so hard she was deaf in that ear for a week.’
‘Eh? What’s that you say? You’ve heard of self-defence? I raised my hand to protect my eyeballs and she ran her head right into it. Want to see
my
bruises?’ Sweating and inspired, Richard stood and made as if to undo his belt. Sally, carrying Theodora, re-entered the room; she moved with wooden, disdaining dignity through the party that had been building in her absence. She sat in the wing-backed chair and swayed the bleary child back and forth on her knee. To Jerry they seemed two brilliant dolls.
Richard said, ‘Sally-O, pal Jerry here is wondering why you squealed on him.’
‘My sister-in-law told him,’ Sally told the Conants.
‘Horseshit,’ Richard said. ‘She told me you had a lover who called you in Florida every day, she didn’t know who it was, I knew fucking damn well you had a lover all summer from the crappy way you treated me. You just about drove me back into therapy.’ He explained to Ruth and Jerry, ‘She wouldn’t screw. And when Sally won’t have it sunny-side up, there must be a sunny-side down. I’d touch her and she’d run the other way, except once or twice when I guess Jerry hadn’t gotten to her for a while. I hope, dear,’ he said to Sally, ‘you haven’t deceived your lover into thinking you weren’t diddled at all?’
‘Weren’t what?’ Sally asked. She seemed sealed with
the child on her knee into a soundproof booth.
‘Diddled. Fucked. Carnally embraced,’ Richard said, not quite drunk enough to be unembarrassed.
‘See, she’s still deaf in that ear,’ Jerry said, and Ruth laughed.
Richard was humourlessly intent upon his grievance; his good eye and bad eye together focused on remembrance of his maddening summer. ‘I couldn’t understand it,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t done anything. We’d had our troubles, but then we’d come to terms. It was just me, old horseshit me, everybody’s patsy.’
‘Quit it,’ Ruth said. Her sisterly directness was a revelation to Jerry; he felt now that all four of them had been pressed into a single family and he, an only child, at last had sisters and a brother. He was happy and excited. He wanted never to leave them.
‘That woman’ – Richard pointed dramatically to Sally, and a smile dawned on Theodora’s puffy puzzled face – ‘put me through hell.’
‘You’re repeating yourself,’ Jerry said.
‘And then,’ Richard went on,
‘then
to complain to her fucking boyfriend that I beat her when I never lifted my hand against her except to keep myself from being brained – Sally, remember that bookend?’
Sally answered him with a cold stare and a prolonged, almost asthmatic sniffle.
‘A
brass
bookend,’ Richard explained to Jerry and Ruth,
‘lead
for Chrissakes it felt like, I caught it on my forearm, just because I asked her why she’d stopped fucking me. Remember, Sally-O?’
Sally stiffened, shivering, and cried, ‘You talk as if I did everything deliberately. I
hate
being in love; I wish
I
didn’t
love Jerry. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt Ruth and the ch-children.’
‘Don’t cry on my account,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s too late for that.’
‘I’ve cried plenty on your account. I feel sorry for anybody who’s so selfish, who’s so weak she won’t let a man go when he wants to go.’
‘I tried to hold my children’s father with them. Was that so contemptible?’
‘Yes!’
‘You can say that because you treat your own children like, like baggage, like little trinkets to set you off when it suits you.’
‘I love my children but I have respect for my husband too, enough respect that if he made up his mind I’d let him do what he decided.’
‘Jerry never decided anything.’
‘He’s too
kind.
You abused that kindness. You used it. You can’t give him what I can give him, you don’t love him. If you loved him, you wouldn’t have had this
affair
we all keep hearing about.’
‘Girls, girls,’ Richard said.
‘He wanted me to,’ Ruth cried, leaning from her chair as if refracted in water, ‘I thought it would make me a better
wife
!’ She was pulled by her tears into an abject forward-twisted shape; it seemed to Jerry her grief and humiliation were trying to fly her body away. Exposed, rosily flushed, she bit her knuckle in shame. Jerry spoke to shield her.
He said to Sally carefully, ‘Haven’t you been listening? It’s all over, don’t keep fighting. I’m asking you to marry me.’
Sally turned, constricted in her movements by the wings of the chair and the child in her lap, to face him; anger lingered in her eyebrows and her voice: ‘It hardly seems to me you’re in a position.’ Her sentence dissolved, unfinished, in a slow wet smile, a deep smile that wryly filled the face beneath the angrily arched eyebrows and reached towards him with recognition of how it was, of how they had been, and of forgiveness, forgiveness for what had been done, what was being done, and even what must happen – requesting, too, in this same regretful smile, a like forgiveness from him.
What time is it?
Eight o’clock. Up, man.
Only eight? You’re kidding.
I’ve been up since seven.
I was up all night. Go away. Come back to bed.
It’s your own fault. I kept telling you, go to sleep.
I couldn’t. You were too lovely and strange. You breathed so quietly. I was afraid you’d disappear.
I’m hungry.
Hungry? In Heaven?
Listen. You can hear my stomach growl.
How stern you look standing there. How grand. You’re dressed.
Of course. Do I look all right for the street? Do I look too loved?
Not loved enough.
No you don’t. One thing I must tell you about myself, I’m a real bitch until I’ve had my coffee.
I can’t believe it. Anyway, I like you as a bitch.
I can smell coffee coming in through the air conditioner.
Come to me for one minute and I’ll buy you a million cups.
No, Jerry. Come on. Get up.
One half a minute, for half a million cups. No, wait. Stay by the window, I’m having a wonderful sleepy sensation, I’m making love to the sight of you standing there, where I can’t touch you; it’s very perverse. You look glorious.
Oh, Jerry. Go easy on me. You love me too hard. I keep trying to pull back, but you never do.
I know. It’s not fair. I’m afraid of death but not afraid of you, so I want you to kill me.
Isn’t it funny, that you’re not afraid of me? Everybody else sort of is.
Richard lifted his pencil above his pad of paper – each little blue sheet of which was headed with the name in 3-D lettering of the Cannonport liquor store and a tiny linecut of its façade. ‘Let’s nail down some facts. Which hotel did you take her to in Washington?’
In that hotel Jerry had lain with Sally fearing Richard’s knock on the door; now the knock sounded and Jerry had no wish to admit him into that remembered room. He said, ‘I don’t see that it matters.’
‘You won’t tell me. Very well. Sally what hotel?’
Yet he hardly gave her time to answer before asking, ‘Ruth?’
‘I have no idea. Why do you need to know?’
‘I need to know because I’ve been a horse’s-ass laughing-stock all fucking summer. I was sitting here remembering, there was something fishy all summer, everybody was too fucking jolly when I was around. I remember, what hurt at the time, down at the Hornungs’, going over to where Janet and Linda were talking about something very hush-hush and they
looked at me and turned white. “What’s up?” I said, and from the look on their faces I might’ve let loose a walloping fart.’
‘Richard,’ Jerry interrupted, ‘I must tell you something. I’ve never liked you –’
‘I’ve
always
liked
you
, Jerry.’
‘– but being involved with Sally has involved loving you, if you’ll forgive my saying so. And don’t drink all that rotgut or whatever it is.’
‘Retsina. Cheers.
L’Chaim! Salute! Prosit!’
Jerry accepted more wine and asked, ‘Richard, where did you learn all these languages?’
‘Ist wunderbar, nichts?’
‘You men may be having a good time but this is agony for the rest of us,’ Sally said. She was still sitting rigid as a madonna; in her lap Theodora, head wobbling gently, seemed hypnotized.
‘Take the brat to bed,’ Richard said.
‘No, if I leave the room you’ll all talk about me. You’ll talk about my soul.’
‘Tell me the hotel.’ Ruth spoke to no one in particular.
No one answered.
‘O.K., then. You want to play rough. Very good.
Ve
ry good. I can play rough too. My Daddy played rough and I can play rough.’
Jerry said, ‘Well, why not? You don’t owe me anything.’
‘Goddammit, Jerry, you talk my language.
Sköl.’
‘Bottoms up. Chinchin.’
‘You miserable bastard, I can’t get mad at you. I keep trying and you won’t let me.’
‘He’s awful that way,’ Ruth said.
‘How would you play rough?’ Jerry asked.
Richard began to doodle on his pad. ‘Well, I could refuse to divorce Sally. That means she couldn’t remarry.’
Sally sat even more upright and her lips drew back along her teeth; Jerry saw that, far from reluctant, she was relieved to fight with Richard. ‘Yes,’ she said sharply, ‘and your children wouldn’t have a father. Why would you hurt your own children?’
‘What makes you think I’ll let you have the children?’
‘I know damn well you don’t want them. You never did. We had them because our analysts thought it was healthy.’
They spoke back and forth so rapidly that Jerry gathered they had been over this ground often before.
Richard smiled and continued his design on the pad. Jerry wondered what it would be like to see with only one eye. He closed one of his and looked at the room – the chairs, the women, the glasses invisibly shed a dimension. Things were just so, flat, with nothing further to be said about them; it was the world, he realized, as seen without the idea of God lending each thing a roundness of significance. It was terrible. He had always hated Richard’s looks, the tilted ponderous head, the unctuous uncertain mouth, the crazy lack in one socket. Was this why – because this face presented him with this possibility, of his own lacking one eye? He opened it, and a roundness sprang, vibrating, around things, and Richard was lifting his head and saying to Sally, ‘You’re right. My lawyer would talk me out of it anyway. Let’s try to be rational. Let’s try to be rational, folks. Let’s all try together to keep those
little green-eyed devils down. Jerry, I know you’ll be a good father to my children. I’ve seen you with yours, and you’re a good father.’
‘He’s not,’ Ruth said. ‘He sadistic. He teases them.’
Richard kept nodding. ‘He’s not perfect, but he’s O.K., Ruthie babes. He’s immature, but who isn’t?’
Ruth went on, ‘He makes them go to Sunday school when they don’t want to.’
‘Children need,’ Richard said, droning in a doodling drunken trance, ‘children need a basis for life, however idiotic. Jerry, I’ll pay for their educations and their clothes.’
‘Well, their educations certainly.’