Marry Me

by John Updike

  Saturday Jerry said he had some errands to run downtown and an hour later called her on the telephone. ‘Ruth,’ he said, in a voice two tones lower than normal – she could imagine that open pay phone in the drugstore – ‘could I come back and talk to you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Her knees began to tremble.

  ‘How many children are home?’

  ‘Just Charlie. Joanna took Geoffrey to the Cantinellis’ garage sale.’

  She went into the kitchen and filled an orange-juice glass with vermouth and drank it as if it were water, water tasting of fire. She was still in the kitchen when he came in the back door; the cry of cicadas, the dry football smell of summer’s end, followed him in.

  ‘I’ve talked to Sally’ he said, ‘and she must leave Florida. Her children are miserable. School starts in a week.’

  ‘Yes. Well?’ He hung there, expecting something. She asked, ‘You said all this over that phone in the drugstore?’

  ‘I used the one at the back of the Texaco place. She wants to know if I’m coming to her now. The summer’s over.’

  ‘It’s not Labour Day yet.’

  ‘It’s September.’

  The trembling had spread up her legs into Ruth’s belly; the dash of vermouth there felt like a knife plunged in so tightly she could not bleed around it.

  Jerry blurted, ‘Please don’t look so pale.’ His own face was wrapped in the look of abstracted compassion with which he would remove a splinter or a thorn from her hand or one of the children’s feet.

  She asked, wanting him to approve of her control, ‘Where would you go to meet her?’

  He shrugged and laughed, conspiratorially ‘I don’t know. Washington? Wyoming? She’d have all the damn children of course. It’s awkward, but it could be managed. Other people do it.’

  ‘Not many.’

  He gazed at their worn linoleum floor.

  She asked him, ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘I’m scared, but yes. I want to go, tell me to go.’

  She shrugged now, leaning against the sink counter, the little glass in her hand, with its tilting remnant of liquor. ‘Then go.’

  ‘Will you be all right? There’s over a thousand in the checking account and I think about eighty-five hundred in the savings bank.’ He made as if to touch her, lifting his hands in unison; his body seemed to her a stiff machine determinedly set in motion while the helpless passenger screamed behind his eyes.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, drained the glass of its last sip, and in afterthought threw it to the floor. The fragments and drops flew in a stopped star across the marbled pattern of the old green linoleum.

  Charlie ran into the kitchen at the noise; Ruth had forgotten he was in the house. He was fine and small for his age, with an eager fine face and Jerry’s uncombable cowlick. ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked, smiling in readiness to be told it was a joke. He was the most logical of their children, and without a theory of ‘jokes’ grown-ups would not have fitted into his universe at all. He stood waiting, small and smiling. He was seven. He wore khaki shorts, and his bare chest bore a summer’s tan.

  Ruth burst: she felt salt water spring from her eyes like spray. She told the child, ‘Because Daddy wants to leave us and go live with Mrs Mathias!’

  With the silent quickness of a whipped cat Charlie fled the kitchen; Jerry chased him, and Ruth saw them together in the living room, framed by a doorway as in one of the domestic Dutch masters, the boy sitting on the wing chair, his bare feet sticking out straight, his head stubborn and radiant, his father in his Saturday Levi’s and sneakers kneeling and trying to embrace him. Charlie was not making himself easy to hold. Ruth’s elm added to the scene a window of yellow and green.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Jerry pleaded. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Mommy said – Mommy said you want to live’ – a suppressed sob made his bony chest heave – ‘with those children.’

  ‘No I don’t. I want to live with you.’

  She couldn’t watch. Carefully for her own feet were bare, Ruth swept up the broken glass. The shards, some of them fine as powder, chimed from the pan into the wastebasket. Dust to dust. When she was done, Charlie padded to her across the clean floor and said, ‘Daddy went out. He said he’d be back.’ He delivered the message full of dignity, as if he were ambassador to an enemy.

  Jerry returned while Ruth was putting the toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch into the oven. He looked breathless, weightless, scarecrowlike, staring. A car squealed out on the road. ‘I called Sally again.’

  She closed the oven door, checked the setting, and said, ‘And?’

  ‘I told her I can’t come to her. I described the incident with Charlie and said I just couldn’t do it. She’s flying back to Richard tomorrow. She said she wasn’t too surprised. She was pretty sore at you for using the children but I told her you hadn’t meant to. She got pretty shrill, I thought.’

  ‘Well in her circumstances who could blame her?’

  ‘I could,’ Jerry said. ‘I loved that woman, and she shouldn’t have pushed.’ His mouth was small and his voice cold, tired of passion as the summer was tired of sun. Ruth wondered if she dared mourn for Sally; together they had inhabited this man, and banishment of this other seemed too arbitrary and too harsh. Ruth wanted to know more, to hear every word Sally said, to hear her shrieks; but Jerry clamped shut his treasure. Joanna brought Geoffrey back from the sale – they had bought an ashtray shaped like a chicken – and there was no more talking.

  Sally came to volleyball next day. It was a September Sunday of light grey clouds, not so much cool as draughty, as if a door had been left open somewhere in the weather. Sally, who in July would come wearing her yellow bathing suit under one of Richard’s shirts, the tails knotted at her belly, had reverted to the white slacks and boatneck jersey she had worn at summer’s outset. The skin of her face appeared stiff; the Florida tan had placed tiny white wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She was greeted on all sides, as if her return were a spectacular self-rescue. Richard, in tartan Bermudas, looked softer than the day he had breezed into the police station. Ruth wondered what he and Sally had done to each other, to make him so amiably dazed. With no depth perception, he kept playing easy shots into the net and lurching into people. Once he bumped into Ruth and, in the jarring, she smelled gin. Once Jerry shouted, ‘Sally!’, for a save, when a ball he had hit badly sailed in her direction; she stretched, attempting to leap, but the ball fell untouched between her body and the net. His shout, a plea to be rescued, hung in the air a long time, untouched by the silence of the others. What had been between them had vanished beneath the surface of the game, leaving stranded Jerry’s disjointed, desperate style of play. Leaping, diving, dropping again into the dirt and broken glass to make impossible saves, he seemed a madman detached from reality, a fish out of water. It was all for Sally’s benefit, but the woman’s sun-stiffened heart-shaped face was dead towards him. For the last time, Jerry poisoned a Sunday evening with the sorrow that followed a volleyball game; the next day was Labor Day. Volleyball, the summer, the affair were over. The children went back to school; the casual gatherings on the grass or by the water on the excuse of the children ceased. Weeks passed without the Conants and the Mathiases meeting.

  Ruth felt cheated. She had waited for defeat behind the weak and random defences she had thrown up, and been cheated of it by her own tears, and the tears of her son – in what right scale do a child’s tears weigh more than a man’s? Jerry devalued himself by not acting on the strength of his unhappiness. She found in his car a paperback called Children of Divorce. He was trying to estimate the cost of an incalculable action: if Joanna and Charlie and Geoffrey each cried a quart of tears, he would stay; if merely a pint, he would go. If the odds on her remarrying were seven out of ten, he would go; if they were worse than fifty-fifty, he would stay. It was humiliating; a man shouldn’t stay with a woman out of pity, or if he did he shouldn’t tell her. Jerry neither told her nor told her otherwise, o
r, rather, he told her both at various times. What he said lost all specific point; she hardly listened, gathering only from the churn of words that things were not yet settled, there had been no climax, he was not resigned, he was still in love, though Sally had been lost she lived within him more than ever, the thing was unfinished, Jerry was unsatisfied, his wife had failed him, in clumsily refusing to die she had failed, it was all her fault, she would get no rest ever.

  Each evening, coming home from work, he would hopefully ask, ‘Did anything happen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nobody called or anything?’

  ‘Did you expect somebody to call?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  He turned to the day’s mail.

  She asked, ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘O.K. Fine.’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Tired.’

  ‘Physically tired?’

  ‘That’s the final effect, yes.’

  ‘Just from living with me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that way.’

  ‘From living without her?’

  ‘Not really. I was never so sure I would have enjoyed living with her. She could be pretty pushy.’

  ‘Then what’s eating you? This suffering in silence is worse than anything yet. I think I’m losing my mind.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re the sanest person I know.’

  ‘I was the sanest person you knew. “Did anything happen?” Every time you ask me that I want to pick up a plate and smash it, I want to put my fist through one of these windowpanes. What do you expect to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. I suppose I’m expecting her to do something. But what can she do?’

  Ruth moved across the room and took him by the arms as if to shake him, but instead gripped him weakly; his arms felt so thin. ‘Don’t you understand? You’ve had it with her. You’ve had it.’

  Jerry gazed over her head, through her hair. ‘That can’t be.’ He spoke with the heaviness of a sleepwalker. ‘You can’t go from so much to nothing so quickly.’

  ‘Please focus,’ she said, trying to shake him now like a child and discovering him too big, so that in the effort it was she who was shaken. ‘Women are at the mercy of men. She loved you, but you failed her, and now she must hold on to Richard. She needs Richard. She’s had her children by Richard. You mustn’t interfere any more.’

  ‘She’ll try somebody else now, to get her out.’

  ‘All right, let her. You have no claim on her, Jerry.’

  ‘I had to fail somebody. I had to fail either her or you and the children.’

  ‘I know that. Don’t rub it in. I know if it had been between her and me alone you wouldn’t have hesitated.’

  ‘That’s not true. I would have hesitated.’

  ‘Very funny. Why do you say things like that? Why do you bother?’

  ‘I pay you the compliment,’ he said, ‘of trying to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Well stop it. It’s no longer a compliment. I don’t want the truth any more. What are you doing to me, Jerry?’

  ‘I’m doing nothing to you. I’m being your husband.’

  ‘You’ve stopped making love to me. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Why should I be pleased?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like it.’

  ‘Of course I like it.’

  ‘You used to turn your back.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘We’ll make love tonight.’

  ‘No. It’ll be her. It’ll be her in your mind. It’s too degrading.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Stop thinking of her.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then don’t let me see you thinking. Do it in New York. Do it at the beach. When you’re in my house, think of me. If you’re going to make love to me, make me think it’s me. Lie to me. Seduce me.’

  ‘You’re my wife. I shouldn’t have to seduce you.’

  ‘Make me your wife. Hold me. Hold me.’

  She pressed herself against him but his arms remained limp. ‘Why Ruth,’ Jerry said. ‘Poor Ruth. You have me. I thought that would make you happy. Aren’t you happy?’

  ‘No, I’m frightened.’

  ‘You’re never frightened.’

  ‘I’m sick.’

  ‘Physically?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘How then?’

  ‘Let me confess something. The other Saturday when you went to get a haircut without telling me and it took all afternoon I kept looking out the window – I remember how the elm looked so clearly – and around five-thirty I thought, “He’s gone. He’s left me.” And it was a relief.’

  He hugged her at last, and there was warmth in the pressure of their bodies, but she could not yield altogether to it, for she felt his pull a malevolence like that of gravity; he was pleased because she was falling, her mind was letting go.

  She had ceased to understand herself; the distinction between what she saw and what she was had ceased to be clear. As September wore thin, the heating man came and reactivated the furnace, and in the cooling nights it switched itself on and off. Lying awake, Ruth was troubled by the unaccustomed murmur, and uncertain if it were real and, if it were, whether it came from the furnace beneath her, an aeroplane overhead, or the transformers on the pole outside the bedroom window. Somewhere in the spaces of her life an engine was running, but where? Jerry and Sally, she was sure, had wounded each other beyond the possibility of collaboration, but Ruth felt a fate working, a pattern of external events generated by the dark shapes within her mind. The world is composed of what we think it is; what we expect tends to happen; and what we expect is really what we desire. As a negative wills a print, she had willed Sally. Why else the impatience with which she viewed the imperfections in Sally’s beauty – the bitter crimp in one corner of her mouth, the virtual fattiness of her hips? She wanted her to be perfect, as she wanted Jerry to be decisive. Ruth disliked, religiously, the satisfaction he took in being divided, confirming thereby the split between body and soul that alone can save men from extinction. It was all too religious, phantasmal. The beast of his love had been too easily led by the motions of Ruth’s mind. It had halted three months at her merely asking by moonlight, and had altogether vanished in another weak wave of her hand, at the sparkle of Charlie’s tears. Too easy, too strange. Ruth suspected some residue of momentum in the summer that, now that the nights had drawn equal to the days in length, must be discharged by some last act of her will. She was a prisoner; the crack between her mind and the world, bridged by a thousand stitches of perception, had quite closed, leaving her embedded, as the white unicorn is a prisoner in the tapestry.

  The last Friday of the month, the Collinses persuaded them to come Greek dancing in Cannonport. Old Cannonport, clinging to the sea with its creaking docks and weeping gulls. The dance was in the basement of a VF.W. Hall, a big clapboard building with a square belfry, on the side of a hill of shingled four-storey tenements. Salt water showed black at the foot of the street. The frosted basement windows of the hall were aglow with a milky fire, of a tumultuous cavern within; music penetrated the walls. Jerry and Ruth and David and Linda descended the concrete steps of a side entrance; a man so shinily bald the sutures of his skull declared their pattern sold them scarlet tickets. Inside, there was light and heat and noise, and people packed solid, sitting, standing, drinking beer, dancing in crammed sinuous lines, their faces glazed, foolish, devilish. The Mathiases were here. They were with the Hornungs. ‘I mentioned it to them but didn’t think they’d come,’ Linda said quickly to Ruth, as Richard came forward, Sally following.

  Richard looked drunk and sheepish; Ruth saw he was having an affair, or about to have one, with Janet Hornung. Sally was wearing an orange dress, its colour both dramatic and flattering. Ruth’s temples began to ache. Richard took her hand and they joined the dance line winding pas
t them, dragging her away, merging her into the mass.

  The orange of Sally’s dress kept cutting into the corners of her vision as she danced. At moments they would be opposite in the spiralling lines, Sally’s face downcast, her figure seeming intact with those around her, so that she seemed secure in a section of a frieze; whereas Ruth felt pinned, pulled, contrary, and clumsy. Hands copulated with hers. Richard’s boneless fingers kept flipping to renew his grip. An unknown man, a hopping, jerking man with hair bubbling from his sleeves, seized her wrist and flashed a snaggled, meaningful grin. Some hands felt thick as buns, some limp as dough. For some moments Ruth danced beside a squat Greek matron in black, her nose hooked and her eyes hooded, and the woman’s hand was a little flat bird, trembling with a terrible, inhumanly rapid pulse. The dance over, Ruth released the hand and stared with wonder at the woman’s ordinarily weary and stupid face. With the same wonder she looked at Sally and imagined that she had often come to meet Jerry in that dress, that Jerry had often removed it to make love. The bouzouki and the clarinet slashed into another tune; Ruth’s headache sharpened. Jerry came and took her hand. His touch was so gentle it kept breaking; she groped for his hand and her feet groped for the steps. Kick with the left foot, left behind right, step, reverse, yes, feet together, rest on the heels one beat. Kick. Orange flickered at the right edge of her vision and, moments later, on her left. Jerry’s hand slipped from hers, Richard smirked going by, the percussion increased the tempo, Jerry took her hand again. The music halted. The ceiling of the hall was a network of pipes painted a poisonous green; it was lowering upon her.