by John Updike
‘We’re not.’
‘You both act frantic.’
‘I can’t tell you what I love about her –’
‘Oh, do. She comes when you come.’
‘How’d you know that?’
‘I guessed.’
‘It’s true. She hasn’t made a religion out of sex, the way you have. She thinks it’s fun.’
‘How have I made a religion of it?’
‘Everything has to be perfect. Once a month you’re marvellous, but I don’t have that much patience. I’m running out of time. I’m dying, Ruth.’
‘Stop it. Don’t you see, it’s a problem any woman has, when she’s a wife; there are no obstacles. So she has to make them. I’ve felt that thing, of serving the penis, of existing to serve it, it’s wonderful. But only as a mistress. Sally is your mistress –’
‘No. She is, but I’m sure she makes love to Richard just the way she does to me. Anyway, it’s more than what happens in bed. Whenever I’m with her, no matter where, just standing with her on a street corner waiting for the light to change, I know I’m never going to die. Or if I know it, I don’t mind it, somehow.’
‘And with me?’
‘You?’ He was speaking to her as if to an audience he had ceased to see. ‘You’re death. Very calm, very pure, very remote. Nothing I can do will really change you. Or even amuse you, much. I’m married to my death.’
‘Shit.’ How could he sit there so complacently, so expectantly even, having said she was death? He spoke of her Unitarian smugness but he was smug, smug in his grief, in his hopeless love, in all his easy absolutes. ‘You owe us a lot of hard thought and you’re just letting your tongue run on. Suppose you did marry Sally? Would you be faithful to her?’
‘Is that your business?’
‘Of course it is, I’m being asked to give way to your wonderful love. How wonderful is it? You’ve discovered a fascinating thing about yourself – women like you.’
‘They do?’
‘Stop it. Be serious. Think. How much are you going to Sally, and how much leaving me? How much are you using her as a way out of marriage? Out of the children, out of the job?’
‘Do I want out of all that?’
‘I don’t know. I just can’t feel that Sally is my real rival. I think my rival is some idea of freedom you have. I’ll tell you this, as a wife Sally would be damn possessive.’
‘I know that. She knows that.’ Jerry lifted his hand, she thought to wipe his eyes; but he scratched his head instead. This conversation was drying him out. ‘In a way’ he said, ‘it does seem reckless to rush from one monogamy into another.’
‘Reckless, and expensive.’
‘I suppose.’
‘And if you did slip up, how long would it be before she paid you back in kind?’
‘Not long.’
‘That’s right. Now you let her alone for a while and think about what you’re really after – that one big-bottomed blonde, or –’
‘Or?’
‘Or many women.’
Jerry smiled. ‘You’re offering me many women?’
‘Not exactly. Not at all. I’m describing what the realities are.’
‘One nice thing about being a Unitarian, it doesn’t saddle you with too much bourgeois morality.’
‘Being a Lutheran doesn’t seem to either.’
‘It’s not supposed to. We live by faith alone.’
‘Anyway I’d expect a few men in return.’
This surprised him. ‘Which ones?’
‘I’ll let you know.’ She moved a few steps, unconsciously mocking the beginning of a dance, and the gold-framed mirror between the two windows gave her back an unexpected rectangle of herself – hip out-thrust, elbow cocked, lips pursed as if having bitten a fruit too succulent. While she was transfixed by this glimpse, Jerry came up behind her and enclosed her breasts in his hands.
‘I suppose you think,’ he said, ‘corruption becomes you.’
His embrace disgusted her; pity for the abandoned woman made Ruth dislike her own success. She pulled away from him and said, ‘I must go to the beach. I’ve been promising the children all afternoon. You want to come along, or’re you going to leave us?’
‘No. I’ll come. I have nowhere to go.’
‘Your suit is outdoors on the line.’
∗
The young marrieds of Greenwood, in what had grown to be, as the women had ceased to bear new babies, a ritual need to keep in touch, had arranged constant excuses for congregating. The beach, dances, tennis, committee meetings – to these had been added a Sunday afternoon volleyball game. In all this mingling it was inevitable that the Conants and the Mathiases should meet. Sally, who wore pale colours all summer, white slacks and ivory armless jerseys and a bathing suit whose yellow had sun-faded to the colour of lemonade, seemed to Ruth to have frozen, to have become precariously brittle, and to regard Jerry with an inflexible dread and fascination. Ruth was curious about her husband’s potency, that it could produce such an effect. The wind that had broken this woman like a tree in an ice storm passed through her sometimes without stirring a leaf, and Ruth naturally wondered if she were alive at all. From an anxious depth within her there reawakened the suspicion that the people around her – mother, father, sister – were engaged in a conspiracy, a conspiracy called life, from which she had been excluded. In the night, lying beside Jerry, she considered running away, taking another lover, getting a job, winning back Richard, attempting suicide: all were methods of hurling herself against the unseen resistance and demonstrating, by the soft explosion, the flower of pain, that she existed. She found herself in the impossible position of needing to will belief; somehow she could not quite believe in Jerry and he, feeling this inability, nurtured it, widened it, for it was the opening by which he would escape. He encouraged her illusion that there was a world into which she had never been born.
On Sunday evenings, when the game was over, the home the Conants returned to seemed all unravelled, all confusion and unmade beds and broken toys and dirty cushions askew. He would sit in a chair and exude grief. His volleyball style involved flinging himself around and diving and falling, and the Collinses’ lawn, as feet wore the grass away, yielded bits of old rubbish, bottle caps, and shards of broken bottles, so he often cut himself; he sat there in his sawed-off khaki shorts with a bloody knee like a boy fallen from a bicycle, and as she watched his downcast face a drop of water appeared on his nose, fell, and was replaced by another. She could not take him seriously.
‘For God’s sake, Jerry. Shape up.’
‘I’m trying, I’m trying. I really shouldn’t see her at all. I get this hangover.’
‘Well then let’s not go to volleyball.’
‘We have to, because of the children.’ The children were asleep, or lost in the rustle of television.
‘The children, my foot! My God, how you use them! We have to go so you and she can exchange sweet sad little looks under the net.’
‘Those aren’t sweet sad looks. Her eyes are very cold now.’
‘They always were.’
‘She hates me now. I’ve lost her love, which is fine. It’s what we wanted, it takes any decision from me, I don’t know why I should mind it. I apologize.’
‘Don’t be silly, you haven’t lost her love at all. She’s doing what you asked her to do, and I think she’s doing it very well.’
‘She’s doing what you asked her to do.’
‘Phooey. She doesn’t give a’ – the next word surprised her, it was so quaint, a favourite of her father’s – ‘hoot about me and you don’t either. I’m nothing in this, it’s between her and the children, so don’t try to make me feel guilty. I can’t hold you here, get up and go to her. Go.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jerry said, and he seemed so. ‘It’s just that a certain angle of her face this afternoon, when I spiked at her, snagged in my head; it’s such a humiliating position I’ve put her in.’
‘But she asked for it,
sweetie. Women gamble; they know they can’t always win. I think she’s being pretty brave and straight about it, so why don’t you stop being a baby? You’re not doing her any favours by this performance every Sunday.’
He looked up, with wet cheeks, a cut knee, a hopeful smirk. ‘You really think she still loves me?’
‘She’d be a fool to,’ Ruth told him.
Usually on Sunday nights, stirred up, he would insist on making love, and she would accede, and fail to come, because she was not there: it was Sally under his hands. His touch fluttered over her as if conjuring her body to become another’s, and that in her which was his, wifely, would try to obey. In the dark twist of this effort of obedience she would lose all orientation. Finally he would force her as one forces a hopeless piece of machinery and, sighing from the effort, would fall away pleased. Her failure satisfied him, he desired her to fail, it confirmed his eventual escape. ‘You smoke too much,’ he told her. ‘It’s an anti-aphrodisiac.’
‘You’re the anti-aphrodisiac.’
‘Am I so bad? Take a lover. Or go back to the one you had. I know you could be great for somebody.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I mean it. You’re a beautiful woman. Even if your mouth does smell like a tobacco shed.’
‘Now you let up on me! You let up!’ Exclaiming this excited rather than relieved her fury; she hit at him and kicked with her knees: he seized her wrists, and pinned her body under his. His face was inches above hers, swollen in the dark, a Goya.
‘You dumb cunt,’ he said, and bounced her into the mattress again and again, ‘you get a fucking grip on yourself. You got what you wanted, didn’t you? This is it. Married bliss.’
She spat in his face, ptuh, like a cat, a jump ahead of thought; saliva sprayed back down upon her own face and as it were awakened her. She felt his body like iron on her; her eyes, seeing in the thin light, saw him blink and grin. His grip relaxed and his body slid from hers. As it slid, a flutter from between her legs seemed to rise in pursuit of his retreating weight. He turned his back, curling up tightly as if to protect himself against a renewal of fists. ‘Well, that was a new sensation,’ he said, of her spitting.
‘I did it without thinking. It must be pretty basic.’
‘It felt pretty basic.’
‘Well you were holding my arms. I had to express myself somehow.’
‘Don’t apologize. By all means express yourself.’
‘Did it offend you?’
‘No. I kind of liked it. It showed you care.’
‘Most of it came back into my own face.’
‘Spitting into the wind, it’s called.’
‘Jerry?’ She was reaching out to him, encircling him with her arm, his potency proved by the languor of her muscles.
‘Huh?’
‘Are we perverse, do you think?’
‘Normally perverse. Human, I’d say.’
‘You’re a nice man.’ She hugged him, having suppressed a declaration of love.
Wary, he wanted to sleep. ‘Good night, sweetie.’
‘Good night.’
Their sleep together had a strange sanity, as their waking life together had the drifting unreason of somnolence.
Everyone knew. All their friends, as July slipped by, came to know. Ruth felt it at volleyball, she felt their knowledge touching her; whenever she leaped or laughed or fell she felt the fine net of knowing that enclosed her. Men began to touch her at parties. Through all their previous years in Greenwood only Richard had ever asked her to lunch; now in one week she received two invitations, one at a party and one by phone. She turned them both down, but discovered that the refusal was an effort. Why refuse? Jerry was begging her to help him, to betray him, to desert him. She refused to be panicked into another man. Men, she saw for the first time, would always be there for her. In her very emptiness, her serenity, she had value for them. They could wait.
The women, too, began to touch her; after one especially unhappy Sunday, she had confessed to Linda Collins over Monday coffee that she and Jerry were passing through a ‘rough time’; after that, there was a fresh vivacity in the greetings from the group of mothers on the beach, and singly they would stand beside her making moments of silence, in case she wished to talk. She had been admitted to a secret sorority of suffering. Ruth wondered for how long this sorority had existed, and what lack or dullness in her had delayed her admission. Sally, she saw now, had always been a member. But now Sally was rarely on the beach, and when she was, two packs of mothers discreetly formed, one around each, this summer’s tragic queens. Imitating Sally in this role new to her, Ruth, after her vague confession to Linda, drew a mantle of reserve about herself, saying little, denying nothing.
Nor did she speak to her parents, though they visited from Poughkeepsie. The sight of her father’s bespectacled, benign, pontifical face reminded her of an old anger, at his impervious public goodness, and his absent-minded way, increasing as he aged, of turning his public face to private matters. She would not be counselled like a parishioner, like the Cuckolded Wife card from the deck of human troubles. She knew that in his deliberate way he would try to rise to her call and give her advice as good as anyone else’s (don’t panic, let things run their course, keep your dignity, think of the children); she felt guilty that, by denying him the opportunity to pontificate (outside of his family he was considered a shrewd counsellor, and at the time of Ruth’s engagement he had observed of Jerry, in mild warning, that ‘he seems even younger than he is’), she was denying him the one gift, a grown daughter’s trust, that was hers still to give. But he had failed her, hurt her, in the dark hallways of their parsonages, by acutely preferring her mother, by leaning on her, which made him forever obtuse towards his daughters. In quaint deference to their femaleness he had changed clothes in closets, he had been a sacred presence, he had hid. He had bred into her the reflexes of failure, the instinctive expectation which, when Jerry swung his leg over her like a little boy mounting his unsteady bicycle, sealed a stubbornness in her blood. She sent the old man back to Poughkeepsie untroubled.
It never occurred to her to tell her mother. Her mother had been born to be a wife. She would have been horrified.
Ruth did think of turning to Richard. He, oddly, in his half-blind bluffing way, had not quite failed her. Or, rather, his deficiencies were in areas, of courage and clarity of vision, where she could easily compensate. But the other woman was his wife. Ruth could see, from the way he blinked and grinned and sweated royally at parties, even when Jerry and Sally were being most flagrant, that in the sea of knowing, Richard was islanded, lost. And there was no predicting how he would react, in his lurching way. The consequences might be dangerous to her too, and this checked her chronic impulse to take his familiar hand, under cover of a party’s confusion, and lead him to privacy. Also, she was protecting herself from an intuition that he would make a fool of himself or, worse, of Jerry.
So by default she would talk only to Jerry; her assassin was her only confidant. As she studied him, came to know him as another’s lover, possibilities that in the first shocks she had suppressed acquired cool shape in her mind. It was possible that she did not love him, it was possible that she would soon lose him. Their sex together greatly improved.
‘Heaven,’ Jerry said one night, entering her as she crouched above him. Afterwards, he explained, ‘I had this very clear vision of the Bodily Ascension, of me going up and up into this incredibly soft, warm, boundless sky; you.’
‘Isn’t that blasphemous?’ She had acquired the courage to be curious about his ultimate intimacy, so opaque and hostile to her, his religion.
‘Because it makes my prick Christ? I wonder. They both have this quality, of being more important than they should be. As Christ relates to the universe, my prick relates to me.’
‘Then when I’m under you is that the descent into Hell?’
‘No. You’re Heaven in every direction, except sideways it sometimes hurts.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘It’s not so bad. I love you.’
Her reaction was fear. He had taken care, recently, not to say this. ‘You do?’
‘It seems so. I said it.’
‘Then you don’t want to leave me?’
‘No, I do, I do. In the morning I’ll be furious because you’re making me betray Sally by being so sweetly whorish.’
‘Am I more whorish,’ she asked, ‘than Sally?’
‘Oh, much. She’s very demure. With you, it’s a roll in the mud. Mother Mud. With her’ – she felt his body beneath her gather into itself, thinking – ‘it’s a butterfly alighting on a little flower.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘The stem bends, a single drop of dew falls to the ground. Blip.’
‘I don’t believe you at all. I think you say to me just the opposite of what you mean. Why do you insult me just after I’ve made such good love to you?’
‘Clearly because it’s confusing. Anyway, Ruth, why was it good? What’s the matter with you lately?’
‘I don’t know; I figure, why not. I have nothing to lose. Each time, I think it may be the last time, and it’s my aesthetic duty to really enjoy it.’
‘That makes me sad. Are you so sure I’m going to leave?’
She felt him wanting to be sure, and thereby to place his decision behind them, in the realm of the inevitable. ‘No, I’m not sure. I think it would be silly for you to go now that I’m getting better in bed.’
‘Maybe I feel I shouldn’t leave you until you have enough confidence in bed to catch the next man.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage.’
‘But how? I can’t picture it. Who could you possibly marry, after me?’
‘Oh – some idiot.’
‘Exactly He would be an idiot. He wouldn’t be good enough for you.’
‘Then don’t leave me.’
‘But Richard’s not good enough for Sally.’
‘He’s ideal. They’re made for each other. Let them alone.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I thought you were.’
‘In my mind. It’s a terrible responsibility being the only man who’s good enough for anybody.’
