by John Updike
He asked her why not.
She said she would get an abortion.
He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun as they walked along, though the sun was too low to tan. He said that seemed ugly.
She agreed, but of the alternatives facing her it seemed least ugly. She did not think it was right to bring a child into the world without a father.
He gestured towards the children, dancing in space like spots of sun-dazzle, and said it would be like killing one of them. Which one would she choose, Joanna or Charlie or Geoffrey?
Ruth said it would not be like that at all, it would be less of a death than the death of a fish. As if participating in their talk, the forces of the sea had washed tiny silver bodies into their path, minnows caught in a tidal pool. She remembered, aloud, her miscarriage of six years ago; told again how she had held the embryo in her hands above the toilet, and had not been afraid.
But that, he said, had been God’s will. This would be their will.
Of course, she said, her father’s impatience with superstition quickening her voice, it would be not quite the same. But she knew she could do it, and wanted to. She wanted to, as a present to him. She would fly to Sweden, to Japan, if she had to.
But he felt it was his fault, for continuing to make love after he had ceased, or seemed to cease, to love her.
She told him she thought not; that it would have been unnatural for them to have kept living together and not made love.
He disagreed. But his disagreement, Ruth felt, was fundamentally an effort to extricate himself from any moral involvement with the abortion. His next effort, she sensed, would be an exaggeration, a parody. He stopped and waved his arms and proclaimed, ‘It would be no present to me to kill my child so when I die I’ll have this fish in Limbo staring at me.’
‘Oh, Jerry’ she sighed. ‘Anyway it may not have to happen.’
‘Three days is a long time,’ he said. ‘The world was half-made in three days.’ He gestured at the luminous world around them.
‘Not necessarily,’ Ruth said. ‘Women aren’t consistent. I feel kind of cranky and queer, like I do the day before it starts.’
‘You feel pregnant,’ he said, and suddenly stopped and put his arms around her hips and lifted her so her wet feet kicked in air. ‘Sweetie,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have a little baby!’
‘Put me down,’ she said; but when he did, she had to laugh at him, his peeling nose, his hot grin of fear. Laughing jarred things loose; next she began to cry, and turned to go back home, and he called to the children, and followed.
Jerry finished her lawn-mowing and ate an early supper with them. While Ruth did the dishes, he organized the children’s baths and pyjamas and read them bedtime stories. By the time Joanna was settled, it was after eight, and he seemed in a hurry to go. Perhaps he had prearranged something with Sally; Ruth doubted that their lack of communication was as total as he claimed. She invited him to stay a while longer with her, but he said no, they must be brave. He gathered together a few odds and ends he had forgotten the night before, and took two blankets because the cottage would be cold, and like an over-burdened hobo lurched out the door. No sooner had he left than Ruth wanted to telephone him, to share with him her sense of how absurd it all was. It was like one of those accidents – a stray arrow, a flying shred of steel – by which people lose the sight of an eye: a half-inch difference and no damage would have been done.
She resisted calling him, though his number stared up at her from the back of the unopened bill on the telephone table. She circled the house, picked up toys, threw a half-sipped glass of vermouth into the kitchen sink, took a painfully hot bath, and read erratically in Children of Divorce. She shut the book. The elm was a pillow of shadow against her eyes. She shut her eyes. Filaments of nonsense, the photo-stuff of dreams, were gathering in her inner darkness when, again, he called. His voice sounded coarse and drugged. He had prepared what he had to say. ‘I don’t want you to have an abortion. It clearly would be wrong. In this life we must seize on anything that is clearly right or wrong, so much is neither. If you’re pregnant, I’ll come back and be your husband and Sally and I will forget each other.’
‘That’s not the way it should be decided.’
‘I know, but please accept it. I’ve been waiting for an act of God and this is it. Absolutely, put abortion out of your mind.’
‘That’s very good and generous of you, Jerry, but I intend to have an abortion in any case. Even if you get over this woman, we’re in no condition to make another child welcome.’
‘Well, we can argue later. I just wanted to say that. Good night. Sleep tight. You’re very brave. You’re a beautiful Unitarian.’
He had sounded relieved at her firmness. She realized, as the receiver went dead in her hand, that his relief was two-edged. If she were pregnant, he would not leave her; if she were not pregnant, he would.
Sunday morning, at first light, before the children were awake, and the mechanical chimes of the Catholic church across town beckoned to the first Mass, she discovered that she was bleeding. In the bathroom she gazed down at the piece of toilet paper in her hand and experienced a clear perception in which the paper, the blood, the morning light intensified by the bathroom tiles, and her own veined hand were interlocked. A kind of photograph had been developed in the night. Her recent life, all her striving and confusion had come down to this, this spot of red on white, this simple stain. A letter from her body, a blank announcement of emptiness. In the manner of modern abstraction, what she held was not a hieroglyph or symbol of herself, it was herself, that to which she had been reduced; it was, indelibly, what she was. She flushed it down.
4
The Reacting of Richard
‘Hello?’
It was Richard’s voice.
Jerry had been about to go out the door. It was after nine, time for him to return to the cottage for the third night. The telephone had unexpectedly rung; unthinking, he had picked it up. Now he held Richard’s deep, hollow, pompous, terrible voice in his hand.
He answered, ‘Hello.’
‘Jerry,’ Richard said, ‘I think the four of us had better have a little talk.’
‘Why?’
‘I think you know why.’
‘I do?’ The voice was at his ear, there was nowhere to put it, no way to reverse this stream, or shut it off, this stream that seemed to be carrying away, one by one, the slippery elements of his sinking insides. He had lost control.
Richard said, ‘Is that really how you want to play the game, Jerry?’
‘What game?’
‘Oh, come on – let’s be grown-ups. Sally tells me you and she have been lovers for six months.’
Jerry hesitated, and in the vortex of silence kept wondering, around and around, if it was correct to call a female a ‘lover’.
‘Well?’ Richard asked. ‘Is she lying?’
It was a knight fork. When they had all first moved to town, he and Richard had played chess, until Jerry evaded the invitations. He evaded them not because they were not well-matched players – for they were, oddly – but because he displeased himself with his craven fear of losing. There was for Jerry no satisfaction in losing at chess, no pleasant aftermath of exercise, not even the camaraderie of poker – just a nicotine staleness, a heavy late hour, and the certainty of having been outsmarted. In a knight fork, one piece must be lost.
Ruth, pale with exhaustion, was making agitated signals by the fireplace and silently mouthing, Who is it?
Jerry sighed, relieved that there was nothing to do but let it go, let it go. ‘No,’ he told Richard. ‘She’s not lying.’
Now Ruth knew who it must be. Her shape in the side of his vision went still, like a freeze-frame.
‘Good,’ Richard said. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’
Jerry laughed. ‘Where?’
‘Exactly,’ Richard said, with the same comical satisfaction, scoring points in a game Jerry could not see. ‘Whe
re indeed. Wherever you want to take us, Jerry boy. Sally and I are very curious as to where that is.’
‘It depends,’ Jerry said, stalling. He felt betrayed. Sally had led him to think that somehow Richard didn’t matter. He mattered immensely, his knowing made an immense difference. She had lied.
‘Could you both come over here?’ Richard was asking. It was as if they had returned to the old days, before the Conants had conditioned themselves to refuse, when Richard or Sally would suddenly call and invite them to a Friday night movie, or a Sunday drink.
Jerry reverted to those days, replying, ‘It’s too late to get a sitter.’ Then he remembered, what he desperately wanted to forget, the situation. He asked, ‘Would you two like to come over here? You have Josie.’
‘This is Josie’s night off. Don’t you know our schedule?’
‘Not terribly well, really. What about tomorrow night? Could it wait until we’ve collected our thoughts?’
‘I have no thoughts to collect,’ Richard said smoothly. He seemed to have a script to read, while Jerry was improvising. ‘I’m just a bystander in this. Nobody’s consulted me, nobody’s expressed any interest in my opinion.’
‘How could we? What could we have said?’
Richard’s voice continued, insinuating, semi-fluid, as if squeezed from a tube. ‘I have no idea, no idea whatsoever. I want you to say whatever you want to say, Jerry. My impression is, this is not a healthy situation as it stands.’
‘It sure isn’t.’ Jerry felt himself grappling for a hold on some point on the high side of grovelling; his wish was to grovel, to bleat, plead, take Ruth to bed, pull the covers over their heads, and giggle.
But now impatience and consciousness of power were making lumps in the oily voice; Richard asked him, ‘Why haven’t you asked how Sally is? I understand she tells you that I abuse her. Wouldn’t you think, if I were such a person, this might be a time when I was justified?’
It’s better outdoors, isn’t it? You get more oxygen.
Now leave me?
‘How is she?’
Richard said, ‘Untouched. Are you coming over or not?’
‘Hold on. I’ll talk to Ruth.’ To Ruth he said, ‘We’ve had it. Richard knows.’
‘How?’ – half-mouthed, half-said.
‘Apparently Sally told him. Could we get Mrs O?’
Ruth said, ‘I hate to bother her. Let me talk to Richard.’
He gave her the receiver and she said, in a shy and strangely comfortable voice, ‘Hi. It’s me. The other woman.’ Jerry thought that she was trying, as she listened, not to smile. ‘I’m sorry’ she said, ‘I wanted to, at times I almost did, but I didn’t know what you’d do. I was afraid you’d make them run off together…’ As she listened, her neck, and then her cheeks, grew pink. ‘… I am realistic.’ Ruth laughed, and answered some question with, ‘Vermouth and bourbon. You too.’ She hung up smiling.
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “Baby you should have told me. I’m a big boy.” ’
‘He really never guessed? It seems fantastic.’
‘He thought she might have somebody, but he never considered you. Except once at volleyball, he said – some look she and you gave each other that he saw. But, if you must know the unflattering truth, he didn’t think you were capable of it.’
‘That son of a bitch. How could I not be capable?’
‘He also said he thought I handled it all wrong. I should have told you to go; he’s sure you would have chickened out, as he put it.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘He said she said you and she have been sleeping together all summer, that you didn’t stop last May at all. Is that right?’
‘Kind of. I guess.’
‘How often?’
‘I don’t know. Once a week. Less. I’ve only seen her twice since she went to Florida.’ His face felt hot, as if being compressed into a smaller and smaller space.
‘Then that bargain,’ Ruth said, ‘the bargain we made on the beach, you never had any intention of keeping? It was just a trick on me?’
It’s "wrong, isn’t it?
Yes. We’re right, but it’s "wrong
Don’t agree with me, Jerry. You make me feel like such a sinner.
‘Of course I had an intention of keeping it. But after a week it seemed silly. How could I judge between you, if I never saw her? Don’t cry. Richard knows now. You’re not alone any more.’
Mrs O walked the quarter-mile down the road to their house and arrived slightly breathless, her bosom lifting and falling beneath her faded cotton dress, pale and innocent in pattern, like a dress she had worn as a child and that had enlarged and aged with her. She came into the house releasing the scent of autumn and apples. The Conants settled her before the television set with the assurance that all the children were asleep. ‘You’re good to do this,’ Ruth told her. ‘We’ll try to be back before midnight. It’s some friends of ours, they’re having trouble.’
Jerry was startled; he had not known that Ruth could lie. But then, it wasn’t a lie. In the car – they took her new car, a pumpkin-coloured Volvo – he asked her, ‘Did he say why Sally had spilled?’
‘No. All he said was, once he got her started, she couldn’t stop. They’ve been talking since suppertime.’
‘It seems so unlike her, to tell. But maybe in a way it’s good.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. It kind of depends on what Richard does. Do you think he’s going to shoot me?’
‘I doubt it. He’s had affairs himself, after all.’
‘What did you say “bourbon and vermouth” about?’
‘He asked me what we wanted to drink.’
‘You know,’ Jerry said, ‘I’m really afraid I’m a coward. Did I sound shaky on the phone with him?’
‘No, you sounded rather arrogant, I thought.’
‘Aren’t you nice? I think I sounded shaky. Something about angry people, it reminds me of grade school. I was always being beaten up in the playground.’
‘You’ve a much firmer body than Richard.’
‘How do you know?’
They came to the driveway, and turned in, and up the hill. Their headlights made the Mathiases’ bushes leap forward murderously. Jerry, his throat feeling warped, as in the moment before vomiting, turned to the shadow sitting beside him. ‘I don’t agree with Richard,’ he said, ‘that you handled it badly. You did the best anybody could have this summer. You mustn’t blame yourself, whatever happens.’
‘You’re going to marry her, aren’t you?’ She had cried out as if he were running off the road, or had struck a rabbit. He stopped the car where the driveway ended at the garage. Caesar came bounding and barking at them from the darkness of the side lawn; the dog went quiet when he smelled Jerry. His tongue licked the familiar hand. The three spaced stars of Orion’s belt hung bright and pure above the woods of the hill. The Mathiases had turned the back-door light on but left them to grope their way in alone, over the uneven flagstones, past the entanglements of grapevines and roses that had escaped the trellises. Asters, still blooming, flanked Sally’s granite stoop, an old millstone. In a little window high on the moonstruck house, Theodora began to cry, waked by Caesar’s barking. Jerry remembered:
Is Theodora’s nap usually now?
No, but she loves to sleep. She’s like me. Lazy.
You’re not lazy. You’re lovely.
You just like my costume.
Any kid of mine would be barging in right about now.
You and Ruth don’t discipline your children.
Is that what everybody says?
I say it.
You’re tough.
‘Jerry boy!’ Richard came down the hall and Jerry flinched in self-defence; but the bigger man merely squeezed Jerry’s shoulders, as if to possess some fact offered for his understanding. His wiry dark hair looked tousled, enlarging his already large head. ‘Dear Ruth.’ He kissed her hand, a gra
ve antic in the dim colonial hall.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘How are you, Richard?’
‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Sally called, unseen and shrill from beyond the hall. ‘He hasn’t been so happy in ages. Look at him, look!’ And it was true, Jerry saw, as they moved to the bright living room, that Richard, glazed with sweat, pranced, or minced, with the unnatural freedom of motion of a bear on roller skates.
But Sally’s beauty took Jerry’s eyes. In the intervals between seeing her, no matter how brief, he lost full knowledge of how she brimmed for him. At volleyball, amid the dodging and shuffle, each time he glimpsed her face through the net and dust he was freshly filled, a few drops of his knowing having evaporated in the seconds since his last vision of her. She sat primly upright in their wing-backed chair, the one covered with yellow gabardine. Her legs were crossed, so the full length of one shin gleamed in the room, and her long hands lay crossed in her lap. She was tall in the chair. Jerry always forgot, how tall she was, how wide in the hips, as if he could not believe that his immaterial need to love had been given such body. He called to her softly, ‘Hi.’
She echoed, ‘Hi,’ and made the mouth that he loved, the humorous and fearful now-what? mouth that would come after a confession.
But why tell me?
I thought you should know. I want you to know me. If we must fall in love, I want you to love me as I am. As I was.
How many were there?
We were separated, Jerry. It didn’t seem too many. At first, I was so proud of myself, I went a whole month without a man.
‘What would we like to drink?’ Richard asked. He was wearing dirty suntans and a striped button-down shirt whose sleeves he had rolled up above his elbows, proletarian-style. The back of his shirt was dark with sweat, as if he were still living in the summer that was over. ‘I’ve already had a drink,’ he went on, speaking mostly to Ruth. ‘In fact, more than a drink. I feel like celebrating, it’s like becoming a father. I’ve become the proud daddy of two fine horns. True, the little devils are six months old, but I was away on business when they were born, and somehow they’ve been growing up without me, just jutting and poking along.’
