by John Updike
The dirty white Porsche is in the driveway, halfway into the garage, the way Janice used to do it, annoyingly. Jill is in the brown armchair, in her slip. From the slumped way she sits he sees she has no underpants on. She answers his questions groggily, with a lag, as if they are coming to her through a packing of dirty cotton, of fuzzy memories accumulated this day.
“Where’d you go so early this morning?”
“Out. Away from creeps like you.”
“You drop the kid off?”
“Sure.”
“When’d you get back?”
“Just now.”
“Where’d you spend all day?”
“Maybe I went to Valley Forge anyway.”
“Maybe you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“How was it?”
“Beautiful. A gas, actually. George was a beautiful dude.”
“Describe one room.”
“You go in a door, and there’s a four-poster bed, and a little tasselled pillow, and on it it says, ‘George Washington slept here.’ On the bedside tables you can still see the pills he took, to make himself sleep, when the redcoats had got him all uptight. The walls have some kind of lineny stuff on them, and all the chairs have ropes across the arms so you can’t sit down on them. That’s why I’m sitting on this one. Because it didn’t. O.K.?”
He hesitates among the many alternatives she seems to be presenting. Laughter, anger, battle, surrender. “O.K. Sounds interesting. I’m sorry we couldn’t go.”
“Where did you go?”
“I went to visit my mother, after doing the housework around here.”
“How is she?”
“She talks better, but seems frailer.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry she has that disease. I guess I’ll never meet your mother, will I?”
“Do you want to? You can see my father any time you want, just be in the Phoenix Bar at four-fifteen. You’d like him, he cares about politics. He thinks the System is shit, just like you do.”
“And I’ll never meet your wife.”
“Why would you want to? What is this?”
“I don’t know, I’m interested. Maybe I’m falling for you.”
“Jesus, don’t do that.”
“You don’t think much of yourself, do you?”
“Once the basketball stopped, I suppose not. My mother by the way told me I should let Janice screw herself and leave town.”
“What’d you say to that?”
“I said I couldn’t.”
“You’re a creep.”
Her lack of underpants and his sense that she has already been used today, and his sense of this unique summer, this summer of the moon, slipping away forever, lead him to ask, blushing for the second time this afternoon, “You wouldn’t want to make love, would you?”
“Fuck or suck?”
“Whichever. Fuck.” For he has come to feel that she gives him the end of her with teeth in it as a way of keeping the other for some man not yet arrived, some man more real to her than himself.
“What about Nelson?” she asks.
“He’s off with Janice, she may keep him for supper. He’s no threat. But maybe you’re too tired. From all that George Washington.”
Jill stands and pulls her slip to her shoulder and holds it there, a crumpled bag containing her head, her young body all there below, pale as a candlestick, the breasts hardened drippings. “Fuck me,” she says coolly, tossing her slip toward the kitchen, and, when under him and striving, continues, “Harry, I want you to fuck all the shit out of me, all the shit and dreariness of this shit-dreary world, hurt me, clean me out, I want you to be all of my insides, sweetheart, right up to my throat, yes, oh yes, bigger, more, shoot it all out of me, sweet oh sweet sweet creep.” Her eyes dilate in surprise. Their green is just a rim, around pupils whose pure black is muddied with his shadow. “You’ve gotten little.”
It is true: all her talk, her wild wanting it, have scared him down to nothing. She is too wet; something has enlarged her. And the waxen solidity of her young body, her buttocks spheres too perfect, feels alien to him: he grasps her across a distance clouded with Mom’s dry warm bones and Janice’s dark curves, Janice’s ribs crescent above where the waist dipped. He senses winds playing through Jill’s nerve-ends, feels her moved by something beyond him, of which he is only a shadow, a shadow of white, his chest a radiant shield crushing her. She disengages herself and kneels to tongue his belly. They play with each other in a fog. The furniture dims around them. They are on the scratchy carpet, the television screen a mother-planet above them. Her hair is in his mouth. Her ass is two humps under his eyes. She tries to come against his face but his tongue isn’t that strong. She rubs her clitoris against his chin upside down until he hurts. Elsewhere she is nibbling him. He feels gutted, silly, limp. At last he asks her to drag her breasts, the tough little tips, across his genitals, that lie cradled at the join of his legs. In this way he arouses himself, and attempts to satisfy her, and does, though by the time she trembles and comes they are crying over secrets far at their backs, in opposite directions, moonchild and earthman. “I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true. She is sitting on him, still working like some angry mechanic who, having made a difficult fit, keeps testing it.
In the small slipping sound they make he hears their mixed liquids, imagines in the space of her belly a silver machine, spider-shaped, spun from the threads of their secretions, carefully spinning. This links them. He says, surrendering, “Oh cry. Do.” He pulls her down to him, puts their cheeks together, so their tears will mix.
Jill asks him, “Why are you crying?”
“Why are you?”
“Because the world is so shitty and I’m part of it.”
“Do you think there’s a better one?”
“There must be.”
“Well,” he considers, “why the hell not?”
By the time Nelson comes home, they have both taken baths, their clothes are on, the lights are on. Rabbit is watching the six-o’clock news (the round-up tally on summer riots, the week’s kill figures in Vietnam, the estimate of traffic accidents over the coming Labor Day weekend) and Jill is making lentil soup in the kitchen. Nelson spreads over the floor and furniture the unwrapped loot of his day with Janice: snappy new Jockey shorts, undershirts, stretch socks, two pairs of slacks, four sports shirts, a corduroy jacket, wide neckties, even cufflinks to go with a lavender dress shirt, not to mention new loafers and basketball sneakers.
Jill admires: “Groovy, groovier, grooviest. Nelson, I just pity those eighth-grade girls, they’ll be at your mercy.”
He looks at her anxiously. “You know it’s square. I didn’t want to, Mom made me. The stores were disgusting, all full of materialism.”
“What stores did she go to?” Rabbit asked. “How the hell did she pay for all this junk?”
“She opened charge accounts everywhere, Dad. She bought herself some clothes too, a really neat thing that looks like pajamas only it’s O.K. to wear to parties if you’re a woman, and stuff like that. And I got a suit, kind of grayey-green with checks, really cool, that we can pick up in a week when they make the alterations. Doesn’t it feel funny when they measure you?”
“Do you remember, who was the name on the accounts? Me or Springer?”
Jill for a joke has put on one of his new shirts and tied her hair in a tail behind with one of his wide new neckties. To show herself off she twirls. Nelson, entranced, can scarcely speak. At her mercy.
“The name on her driver’s license, Dad. Isn’t that the right one?”
“And the address here? All those bills are going to come here?”
“Whatever’s on the driver’s license, Dad. Don’t go heavy on me, I told her I just wanted blue jeans. And a Che Guevara sweatshirt, only there aren’t any in Brewer.”
Jill laughs. “Nelson, you’ll be the best-dressed radical at West Brewer Junior High. Harry, these neckties are silk!”
“So it’s war with that bitch.”
“Dad, don’t. It wasn’t my fault”
“I know that. Forget it. You needed the clothes, you’re growing.
“And Mom really looked neat in some of the dresses.”
He goes to the window, rather than continue to be heavy on the kid. He sees his own car, the faithful Falcon, slowly pull out. He sees for a second the shadow of Janice’s head, the way she sits at the wheel hunched over, you’d think she’d be more relaxed with cars, having grown up with them. She had been waiting, for what? For him to come out? Or was she just looking at the house, maybe to spot Jill? Or homesick. By a tug of tension in one cheek he recognizes himself as smiling, seeing that the flag decal is still on the back window, she hasn’t let Stavros scrape it off.
III. SKEETER
“We’ve been raped, we’ve been raped!”
– BACKGROUND VOICE ABOARD SOYUZ 5
ONE DAY in September Rabbit comes home from work to find another man in the house. The man is a Negro. “What the hell,” Rabbit says, standing in the front hall beside the three chime tubes.
“Hell, man, it’s revolution, right?” the young black says, not rising from the mossy brown armchair. His glasses flash two silver circles; his goatee is a smudge in shadow. He has let his hair grow out so much, into such a big ball, that Rabbit didn’t recognize him at first.
Jill rises, quick as smoke, from the chair with the silver threads. “You remember Skeeter?”
“How could I forget him?” He goes forward a step, his hand lifted ready to be shaken, the palm tingling with fear; but since Skeeter makes no move to rise, he lets it drop back to his side, unsullied.
Skeeter studies the dropped white hand, exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It is a real cigarette, tobacco. “I like it,” Skeeter says. “I like your hostility, Chuck. As we used to say in Nam, it is my meat.”
“Skeeter and I were just talking,” Jill says; her voice has changed, it is more afraid, more adult. “Don’t I have any rights?”
Rabbit speaks to Skeeter. “I thought you were in jail or something.”
“He is out on bail,” Jill says, too hastily.
“Let him speak for himself.”
Wearily Skeeter corrects her. “To be precise, I am way out on bail. I have jumped the blessed thing. I am, as they would say, desired by the local swine. I have become one hot item, right?”
“It would have been two years,” Jill says. “Two years for nothing, for not hurting anybody, not stealing anything, for nothing, Harry.”
“Did Babe jump bail too?”
“Babe is a lady,” Skeeter goes on in this tone of weary mincing precision. “She makes friends easy, right? I have no friends. I am known far and wide for my lack of sympathetic qualities.” His voice changes, becomes falsetto, cringing. “Ah is one baad niggeh.” He has many voices, Rabbit remembers, and none of them exactly his.
Rabbit tells him, “They’ll catch you sooner or later. Jumping bail makes it much worse. Maybe you would have gotten off with a suspended sentence.”
“I have one of those. Officialdom gets bored with handing them out, right?”
“How about your being a Vietnam veteran?”
“How about it? I am also black and unemployed and surly, right? I seek to undermine the state, and Ol’ Massah State, he cottons on.”
Rabbit contemplates the set of shadows in the old armchair, trying to feel his way. The chair has been with them ever since their marriage, it comes from the Springers’ attic. This nightmare must pass. He says, “You talk a cool game, but I think you panicked, boy.”
“Don’t boy me.”
Rabbit is startled; he had meant it neutrally, one outlaw to another. He tries to amend: “You’re just hurting yourself. Go turn yourself in, say you never meant to jump.”
Skeeter stretches luxuriously in the chair, yawns, inhales and exhales. “It dawns upon me,” he says, “that you have a white gentleman’s concept of the police and their exemplary works. There is nothing, let me repeat no thing, that gives them more pleasurable sensations than pulling the wings off of witless poor black men. First the fingernails, then the wings. Truly, they are constituted for that very sacred purpose. To keep me off your back and under your smelly feet, right?”
“This isn’t the South,” Rabbit says.
“Hee-yah! Friend Chuck, have you ever considered running for po-litical office, there can’t be a county clerk left who believes the sweet things you do. The news is, the South is everywhere. We are fifty miles from the Mason-Dixon line where we sit, but way up in Detroit they are shooting nigger boys like catfish in a barrel. The news is, the cotton is in. Lynching season is on. In these Benighted States, everybody’s done become a cracker.” A brown hand delicately gestures from the shadows, then droops. “Forgive me, Chuck. This is just too simple for me to explain. Read the papers.”
“I do. You’re crazy.”
Jill horns in. “The System is rotten, Harry. The laws are written to protect a tiny elite.”
“Like people who own boats in Stonington,” he says.
“Score one,” Skeeter calls, “right?”
Jill flares. “What of it, I ran away from it, I reject it, I shit on it, Harry, where you’re still loving it, you’re eating it, you’re eating my shit. My father’s. Everybody’s. Don’t you see how you’re used?”
“So now you want to use me. For him.”
She freezes, white. Her lips thin to nothing. “Yes.”
“You’re crazy. I’d be risking jail too.”
“Harry, just a few nights, until he can hustle up a stake. He has family in Memphis, he’ll go there. Skeeter, right?”
“Right, sugar. Oh so right.”
“It isn’t just the pot bust, the pigs think he’s a dealer, they say he pushes, they’ll crucify him. Harry. They will.”
Skeeter softly croons the start of “That Old Rugged Cross.”
“Well, does he? Push.”
Skeeter grins under his great ball of hair. “What can I get for you, Chuck? Goof balls, jolly beans, red devils, purple hearts. They have so much Panama Red in Philly right now they’re feeding it to cows. Or want to sniff a little scag for a real rush?” From the gloom of the chair he extends his pale palms cupped as if heaped with shining poison.
So he is evil. Rabbit in his childhood used to lift, out of the same curiosity that made him put his finger into his belly-button and then sniff it, the metal waffle-patterned lid on the back yard cesspool, around the corner of the garage from the basketball hoop. Now this black man opens up under him in the same way: a pit of scummed stench impossible to see to the bottom of.
Harry turns and asks Jill, “Why are you doing this to me?”
She turns her head, gives him that long-chinned profile, a dime’s worth. “I was stupid,” she says, “to think you might trust me. You shouldn’t have said you loved me.”
Skeeter hums “True Love,” the old Crosby–Grace Kelly single.
Rabbit re-asks, “Why?”
Skeeter rises from the chair. “Jesus deliver me from puking uptight honky lovers. She’s doing it because I been screwing her all afternoon, right? If I go, she comes with me, hey Jill honey, right?”
She says, again thin-lipped, “Right.”
Skeeter tells her, “I wouldn’t take you on a bet, you poor cock-happy bitch. Skeeter splits alone.” To Rabbit he says, “Toodle-oo, Chuck. Goddam green pickles, but it’s been fun to watch you squirm.” Standing, Skeeter seems frail, shabby in blue Levis and a colorless little Army windbreaker from which the insignia have been unstitched. His ball of hair has shrunk his face.
“Toodle-oo,” Rabbit agrees, with relief in his bowels, and turns his back.
Skeeter declines to go so simply. He steps closer, he smells spicy. He says, “Throw me out. I want you to touch me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it.”
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“I screwed your bitch.�
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“Her decision.”
“And a lousy little cunt she was, too. Like putting your prick in a vise.”
“Hear him, Jill?”
“Hey. Rabbit. That’s what they used to call you, right? Your mamma’s a whore, right? She goes down on old black winos behind the railroad station for fifty cents, right? If they don’t have fifty cents she does it free because she likes it, right?”
Remote Mom. The quilty scent of her room, medicine, bed-warmth. Of all those years when she was well he can only remember her big bones bent above the kitchen table with its four worn places; she is not sitting down, she has already eaten, she is feeding him supper, he has come home from practice late, it is after dark, the windows are glazed from within.
“Your daddy’s a queer, right? You must be too to take all this shit. Your wife couldn’t stand living with a queer, it was like being balled by a mouse, right? You’re a mouse down there, hey, ain’t that right, gimme a feel.” He reaches and Rabbit bats his hand away. Skeeter dances, delighted. “Nothin’ there, right? Hey. Rabbit. Jill says you believe in God. I got news for you. Your God’s a pansy. Your white God’s queerer than the Queen of Spades. He sucks off the Holy Ghost and makes his son watch. Hey. Chuck. Another thing. Ain’t no Jesus. He was a faggot crook, right? They bribed the Romans to get his carcass out of the tomb ’cause it smelled so bad, right?”
“All you’re showing me,” Rabbit says, “is how crazy you are.” But a creeping sweetness, rage, is filling him solid. Sunday school images – a dead man whiter than lilies, the lavender rocks where he was betrayed by a kiss – are being revived in him.
Skeeter dances on, he is wearing big creased Army boots. He bumps Harry’s shoulder, tugs the sleeve of his white shirt. “Hey. Wanna know how I know? Wanna know? Hey. I’m the real Jesus. I am the black Jesus, right? There is none other, no. When I fart, lightning flashes, right? Angels scoop it up in shovels of zillion-carat gold. Right? Kneel down, Chuck. Worship me. I am Jesus. Kiss my balls – they are the sun and the moon, and my pecker’s a comet whose head is the white-hot heart of the glory that never does fail!” And, his head rolling like a puppet’s, Skeeter unzips his fly and prepares to display this wonder.
