Marry Me

by John Updike

Yes, Jerry?

  How was it? Was it so bad?

  At times. But you were right, I knew that. You were very clever that day to know what I really wanted, I thought I wanted the opposite.

  I wish I hadn’t been so clever. I wish you had really wanted me.

  I did, I do. I do have you, like the sea has Orion.

  But they’re gods, and we were very simple, as you once said. We were caught at being human. It was a matter of children, mostly.

  No, I’d like to think that, it’s kind of you to lie to me. But if it hadn’t been the children it would have been something else. It would have been Ruth. And if Ruth hadn’t reacted like she did you would have found another way. You wanted to keep me pure.

  That’s it, isn’t it? You’ll always be pure for me now.

  Not always, darling – you don’t like me to call you ‘darling’, do you? You never did, you thought it was phony. I never knew what to call you, and when you used to fill me I wanted so much to have the right name for you that I said nothing.

  You should have said something. Anything.

  I felt shy.

  You?

  Yes.

  And now, how do you feel? I feel dead.

  I’m still very shaken, but it’s less bad. I’m not yours any more. You should know that. After a while I’ll probably get bitter about you and hate you because you humiliated me, and then that will go too, and I won’t care either way very much. You’ll be my ex-lover and we might even be friends.

  Sounds awful. Awful.

  Women try to be like men, Jerry, and imagine things, but in the end we’re all practical, we have to be. You must go on alone.

  No. I don’t believe you. I loved you because you believed what I believed. There was a place I went to with you.

  Any woman in bed will take you there. There’s no place, darling, but right here, here and now, with Richard and Ruth. Love Ruth, Jerry. Now I must stop talking to you, because people will say I’m a whore.

  His imagined conversation, between himself and the Sally he carried inside him, ended with words she really had said. It had been at the Collinses’ party before the Heart Fund dance, in February. Entering the crowded room, he had seen her, and had the sensation of clasping her to his eyes, of fitting her to the matrix his entire life, including the months in France, had prepared. They had returned from France because the children were homesick and needed school. Linda Collins had written that Richard wouldn’t care, Sally had pacified him. The painting had not gone well; the weather had been slightly too cold for an easel outdoors, and once it had even snowed, trimming the cacti in their yard with snow. So though his leave from the commercials firm had been for six months, they stayed in France less than three. He drew cartoons at home, and enjoyed it, though the cartoons all came back. As he had come back. But after a brief exchange, through the smoke of his cigarette, about health, and skiing, and children, Sally had said, ‘Now I must stop talking to you, because people will say I’m a whore,’ and had turned away. In the hotel in Washington, she had turned her back and slept, while he had insomnia. While he roamed the party grieving, she stayed close by Richard’s side. Richard had grown fatter, puffed up with maturity, and his hair had gone so long uncut it was curling on his neck, and perhaps to make an impression at the party he was wearing a black patch over the blind eye. He looked heroic and huge. From the safety of his side Sally’s voice rang shrilly into every corner of the party. Ruth came to Jerry’s side and whispered that Sally seemed her old self. He agreed, yes, and wondered if he had attempted, wrongly, to tear her from her true self.

  ‘Is you comin’ to St Croix for a rest?’

  ‘For a change.’

  They were coming into a town. Sun-bleached wooden houses, lacy with old jigsawing, were surrealistically spaced along a straight blank street. A Negro without a shadow lopsidedly loped across their path. On the right the milky green sea quivered and sparkled, and a smoke-grey freighter rode at anchor. At the end of the street stood a fort with sloping walls painted red as a valentine. ‘Where am I?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘Fredericksted,’ the driver answered.

  ‘Am I east or west?’

  ‘West, mon. The end of the islond. Did you want east?’

  ‘No, this is good. This is great. Can we find a place for me?’

  ‘We’re almost there this minute now. Don’t lose your pay-shunce.’

  Jerry had rolled down his window, in his impatience to be free, to mix himself up with the spaced houses, the drab and patient shops, the Lutheran church left by the Danes, the fort – all of it lying in the tranquil pink shadow cast by the high green sea. He inhaled the air. This was the place, it tasted right. He had always told her there was a place, and now he had found it, made good his promise, and brought them here. He was intensely, passingly happy. The existence of this place satisfied him that there was a dimension in which he did go, as was right, at that party, or the next, and stand, timid and exultant, above the downcast eyes of her gracious, sorrowing face, and say to Sally, Marry me.