Authors: John Updike
‘It’s a deal.’
Richard was doodling numbers now. In the silence, a great immaterial weight shifted, like a tissue page in a Bible, unmasking the details of an infernal etching.
Jerry cried, ‘But what about
my
children!’
‘That’s your problem,’ Richard said, ceasing to be drunk.
Jerry addressed Ruth. ‘Give me one. Any one. Charlie or Geoffrey; you know how Charlie bullies him. They should be separated.’
Ruth was crying; her words issued trembling. ‘They need each other. We all need each other.’
‘Please. Charlie. Let me have Charlie.’
Sally jerked into speech. ‘Why won’t you? They’re as much his as yours.’
Ruth turned in her ladder-back chair. ‘I might if it were any other woman,’ she said. ‘But not you. I wouldn’t trust you with my children. I don’t think you’re a fit mother.’
Jerry protested, ‘How can you say that, Ruth? Look
at her!’ But even as he said it, he realized that perhaps only to him did she seem inhumanly kind, her face brimming with kindness, this face he had seen submerged – eyes closed, lips parted – in passion, hovering beneath his face like a reflection submerged in a pool. Having seen too much, he was as good as blind, and possibly it was they, Richard and Ruth, who saw her accurately.
You don’t believe I’m so simple. I am simple. I’m just like – that broken bottle.
‘Sundays, vacations, sure,’ Ruth said. ‘If I crack up or kill myself, take them. But for now they’re staying with me.’
‘Yes,’ Jerry said, unnecessarily. He had reached a strange state; his momentum, thrust upon him by a need to keep free of Richard, had outstripped his control; in this state of severed veering he had to exert his voice, to take soundings on the depth of his helplessness. The silence that followed this sounding seemed vast.
Richard abruptly said, ‘Well, Sally-O, congratulations. Congratulations, girl, you’ve done it. You’ve had your cap set for Jerry Conant for years.’
‘She has?’ Jerry asked.
‘Of course,’ Ruth told him. ‘Everybody could see it. It was embarrassing, even.’
Richard said, ‘Don’t knock it, Ruth. This may be the real thing, a true
amour de coeur.
Let’s wish the kids luck. Jerry, one thing you’re not going to be is bored. Sally is not tranquil. She has many fine qualities; she cooks well, dresses well, she’s good – well,
fairly
good – in bed. But she is not tranquil.’
‘Weren’t we discussing something else?’ Jerry asked.
‘The children’s educations,’ Ruth said. She stood up. ‘I’m going home. I can’t stand this.’
‘I should tell you,’ Jerry said, with a flicker of his old desire to annoy this man, ‘I’m a believer in public schools.’
‘So am I, Jerry boy,’ Richard said, ‘so am I. It’s Sally who insists on the kids being hauled in the bus to that snob school.’
Sally said primly, ‘These are my children and I want them to have the best education they can get.’
My:
the word, Jerry saw, had a beauty self-evident to her, her mouth never questioned the worth of this jewel of a word.
Ruth asked, falteringly seating herself again, ‘Suppose Jerry wants to quit his job? Are you willing to be poor with him?’
Sally considered her answer carefully, and seemed pleased with it. ‘No, I don’t want to be poor, Ruth; who does?’
‘
I
do. If we all had to sweat for our food we wouldn’t have time for this – this folly. We’re all so spoiled we stink.’
‘Ruthie,’ Richard said, ‘you’re speaking my heart. Let’s get back to nature and simple poverty. I’ve been a registered Democrat all my life. I voted for Adlai Stevenson twice.’
Now that Sally had found her tongue, she seemed determined to express everything that had crossed her mind while the others had talked. ‘You know, just signing a piece of paper doesn’t mean you stop being husband and wife.’ Jerry had heard her say this before,
in murmured exploration of their spiritual plight; in the present context it seemed irrelevant, brittle, not quite sane. Ruth caught his eye, then glanced at Richard. Sally, sensing this current of amusement, grew vehement: ‘And the person here who is going to lose most hasn’t gotten a
damn
bit of sympathy. Ruth will have her children and Jerry and I will have each other but Richard doesn’t get a Goddamn thing!’ She bowed her head; her hair fell forward to complete the rhetoric.
Richard watched the other two for their reaction, and seemed to teeter between complicity with them and a revived union with Sally. He took her tone, and attacked: ‘Jerry let me ask you something. Have you ever been alone? I mean real down-in-the-guts honest-to-Christ fuck-you-Jack
alone.
This big dumb broad here was the only friend I ever had and she wants to leave me for you.’
‘You
do
love her,’ Ruth said.
Richard pulled back. ‘Oh, I love her, of course I love the crazy bitch, but – what the hell. I’ve had my ups.
Que será, será.’
‘Well I think two perfectly good marriages are being broken up by a hideous mistake – by the most pathetic kind of greed,’ Ruth said, rising again, ‘but nobody agrees with me so I really am getting out of here.’
‘It’s settled?’ Jerry asked.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘If you say so. How do we do this? We can’t go back. Sally, you go with Ruth and spend the night in our house.’
‘No,’ was Sally’s simple, startled answer.
‘She won’t hurt you. Trust us. Please, it’s the only
place I can think of to put you. You go with her and I’ll stay with Richard.’
‘No. I won’t leave my children.’
‘Just for one night? I’ll be here, Richard and I can make them breakfast. I don’t see the problem.’
‘He’ll take my children and say I deserted them.’
‘You’re not serious, Sally. You know your own husband better than that. Richard, you wouldn’t do that.’
‘Of course not,’ Richard said, and in his face Jerry read an unexpected expression, of embarrassment, for Sally.
Jerry pleaded with her, ‘Haven’t you been listening to him? He won’t kidnap your children. He loves you, he loves them. He’s not a monster.’ He turned to Richard. ‘We can play chess. Remember the chess games we used to have?’
‘I don’t think I should leave,’ Sally said. She tightened her arms around Theodora as around a prize.
‘Well I can’t ask
Richard
to go home with Ruth.’ The others laughed, which angered Jerry; this wrangle on the edge of the grave was so unworthy of them all, and his finagling position such a poor reward for the sacrifice and fatal leap he had at last made.
‘Sally-O, I promise I won’t kidnap the kids,’ Richard said.
‘But if I leave her with you you’ll beat her,’ Jerry said.
‘Jesus, Jerry, I’m beginning to hate your guts. She’s not your fucking wife yet and I’ll beat her if I fucking well please. This is my house and I’m not getting out of it because my wife’s turned into a whore.’
‘Who’s ever coming, come,’ Ruth said. ‘Jerry I don’t think they want us any more.’
Jerry asked Sally, ‘Will you be all right?’
‘Yes. I will.’
‘You’d really rather have it this way?’
‘I think so.’ For the first time tonight, their eyes met.
Jerry, your eyes are so sad!
How can they be sad when I’m so happy?
They’re so sad, Jerry.
You shouldn’t watch people’s eyes when they make love.
I always do.
Then I’ll close mine.
Jerry sighed. ‘Well I guess we’ve all spent enough nights together one more won’t kill us. Call me,’ he told Sally, ‘if you need me.’
‘Thank you, Jerry. I won’t. Sleep well.’ She smiled and her eyes went elsewhere. ‘Ruth –?’
Ruth was already down the hall. ‘Save it,’ she called back to Sally. ‘We’re all too tired.’
Jerry felt dirty; in the beginning, when they were all new couples in town, being at the Mathiases, amid their expensive things, had made him feel gauche and unclean. Now, he needed to urinate, but Richard’s silence loomed at his side as a social impatience, and he did not dare delay in the downstairs lavatory. Outdoors, the three spaced stars of Orion’s belt had slipped to a steeper tilt beyond the woods and the moon moved illumining through an ashen mackerel sky. The Conants heard Caesar whine and scratch in the garage, but he did not bark. The noise of their motor polluted the night. As they went down the curving driveway, Ruth lit a cigarette. Jerry twiddled his fingers. She passed it to him for a puff. ‘The odd thing is,’ she said, ‘I feel as though I’m coming back from one more evening at Sally
and Richard’s. At least I wasn’t bored. Richard didn’t talk about stocks and bonds.’
‘Yes, he didn’t seem as awful as usual. In fact he had his rather grand moments. I felt just overwhelmed. How did I seem? Outclassed?’
‘You were you,’ Ruth said.
His bladder burned. He asked his wife, ‘Do you mind if I stop the car a minute?’
‘We’re almost home,’ she said. ‘Can’t you wait?’
‘No.’
He stopped her pumpkin-coloured Volvo and opened its door and the colourless dry grass and roadside weeds seemed rendered precious by this halt in his motion. There was a telephone pole. Drawing near to it, he tore at his zipper and yielded his pain to the earth. The moon set a thorn of shadow beside each splinter of the pole; a silver ghost of frost glistened in the tall grass. Everything, Jerry saw, was painted on black, engraved on our dull numb terror. An unseen V of geese honked, a car on another road whispered itself into nothing, a smell of apples haunted the air. Beyond his awareness of the night he tried to make himself conscious, as if of the rotation of the earth, of the huge and mournful turn his life had taken. But there seemed to be only this grass, and Ruth waiting for him in the car, and his diminishing arc of relief.
Past many dark houses, they arrived at their own; all of its lights were on. Mrs O, though sweet with the children, never cleared a dish or switched off a light. As they paid her, she told them, ‘A woman from the Congregational church called about some posters.’
‘Oh my Lord,’ Ruth said. ‘I’d forgotten. They were supposed to be ready Saturday.’
‘Those people are turning into tyrants,’ Jerry said, and asked Mrs O, ‘Didn’t you wear a coat?’ The babysitter shook her head silently; her face was flushed, and as she stepped onto the porch she dabbed at her eyes. Closing the door, Ruth said, ‘Poor soul. I wonder how much she knows.’
‘Why would she know anything?’
‘She’s of the town, Jerry. The whole town knows we’re in trouble. I’ve seen it all summer on the faces of the boys at Gristede’s.’
‘Huh. It never seemed to me that
we
were in trouble. I was, and you were, but not
us.’
‘Let’s go to bed. Or are you off to the cottage?’
‘I couldn’t. Want some milk?’
‘Do you?’
‘If you’ll make toast.’
‘Oh, sure. What the hell. What time is it anyway?’
‘One ten.’
‘That early? Amazing. It seemed we were there for a lifetime.’
‘Should I call?’ Jerry asked. ‘Do you think she’s all right?’
‘She’s chosen; let her alone.’
‘She seemed such a waif.’
‘That’s her pose.’
‘No, I never saw her like that before. I felt there were three people with sense there, and we were all debating the fate of this beautiful –
child.’
‘The toast’s popped. Want to butter it? It’s your toast.’
He needed to talk about Sally, and the night past, with its intricate transactions; he needed to render the details aloud, and to have Ruth’s light on them. But she
went upstairs, refusing discussion. In their cold room, the unexpressed congested his lungs, and his breathing grew tight. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he gasped, ‘my Medihaler’s over at the cottage.’
‘Just relax,’ Ruth said, in a far-off, singing voice. ‘Let yourself go, don’t think about anything.’
‘It’s cold – up here,’ he said. ‘Why do we live – in such a crummy house?’
‘Get under the covers,’ she said, ‘get nice and warm, take easy breaths, don’t think about your lungs.’
‘My poor – children,’ he said. The bed, as he climbed into it, seemed a trap in which he would smother face down. Ruth turned off the light, the last light in the house that was burning. Through the window, through the heavy lace of the elm, pierced apertures that were stars slowly readmitted the possibility of his breathing. Ruth got into the other side of the bed and huddled against him, lying with one arm across his chest. Enclosed in slowly growing warmth, warmth he was tasting for the last time in eternity Jerry felt his chest expand; his limbs relaxed and flowered outward; the wall within his lungs, nudged by each inhalation, was crumbling. Ruth’s body against his felt solid, dense, asleep. ‘I’m so sorry’ he said aloud, ‘but it must be right.’ The sentence, wrapped in his voice, seemed to be repeated indefinitely, like images in a doubled mirror, like days, like breathing. He opened his eyes. The crosses of the mullions, rigid benedictions, stood guard against the night; an unbounded kingdom of ease and peace had been established within his lungs. This delicious realm he leisurely began lazily to explore.
∗
The telephone shrilled, and shrilled, in the upstairs hall; it was as if a pipe had burst, filling the dark with a shocking fountain. ‘Oh my god,’ Ruth said.
She and Jerry had long ago agreed that if she rose with the children in the morning, he would tend to disturbances at night. He pulled his body up from the warm hole where it had found escape; from the strength of the effort he estimated he had not been asleep long. First plunge is deepest. His limbs and face felt coated in dust. He reached the phone by its fourth peal, which he broke in the middle. A child’s bed creaked somewhere. ‘Hello?’
‘Jerry? It’s me.’ Sally’s voice sounded impossibly near – a comet that presses from the sky though millions of miles away.
‘Hi.’
‘Were you asleep?’
‘Kind of. What time is it?’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be able to go to sleep.’
‘I didn’t either.’
‘I called you at the cottage, but you didn’t answer. I was terribly hurt.’