by John Updike
She awakes. The curtains at the window are silver. The moon is a cold stone above Mt. Judge. The bed is not her bed, then she remembers it has been her bed since, when? July it was. For some reason she sleeps with Charlie on her left; Harry was always on her right. The luminous hands of the electric clock by Charlie’s bedside put the time at after two. Charlie is lying face up in the moonlight. She touches his cheek and it is cold. She puts her ear to his mouth and hears no breathing. He is dead. She decides this must be a dream.
Then his eyelids flutter as if at her touch. His eyeballs in the faint cold light seem unseeing, without pupils. Moonlight glints in a dab of water at the far corner of the far eye. He groans, and Janice realizes this is what has waked her. A noise not freely given but torn from some heavy mechanism of restraint deep in his chest. Seeing that she is up on an elbow watching, he says, “Hi, tiger. Jesus it hurts.”
“What hurts, love? Where?” Her breath rushes from her throat so fast it burns. All the space in the room, from the corners in, seems a crystal a wrong move from her will shatter.
“Here.” He seems to mean to show her but cannot move his arms. Then his whole body moves, arching upward as if twitched by something invisible outside of him. She glances around the room for the unspeaking presence tormenting them, and sees again the lace curtains stamped, interwoven medallions, on the blue of the streetlamp, and against the reflecting blue of the bureau mirroring the square blank silhouettes of framed aunts, uncles, nephews. The groan comes again, and the painful upward arching: a fish hooked deep, in the heart.
“Charlie. Is there any pill?”
He makes words through his teeth. “Little white. Top shelf. Bathroom cabinet.”
The crowded room pitches and surges with her panic. The floor tilts beneath her bare feet; the nightie she put on after her disgraceful scene taps her burning skin scoldingly. The bathroom door sticks. One side of the frame strikes her shoulder, hard. She cannot find the light cord, her hand flailing in the darkness; then she strikes it and it leaps from her touch and while she waits for it to swing back down out of the blackness Charlie groans again, the worst yet, the tightest-sounding. The cord finds her fingers and she pulls; the light pounces on her eyes, she feels them shrink so rapidly it hurts yet she doesn’t take the time to blink, staring for the little white pills. She confronts in the cabinet a sick man’s wealth. All the pills are white. No, one is aspirin; another is yellow and transparent, those capsules that hold a hundred little bombs to go off against hayfever. Here: this one must be it; though the little jar is unlabelled the plastic squeeze lid looks important. There is tiny red lettering on each pill but she can’t take the time to read it, her hands shake too much, they must be right; she tilts the little jar into her palm and five hurry out, no, six, and she wonders how she can be wasting time counting and tries to slide some back into the tiny round glass mouth but her whole body is beating so hard her joints have locked to hold her together. She looks for a glass and sees none and takes the square top of the Water Pik and very stupidly lets the faucet water run to get cold, wetting her palm in turning it off, so the pills there blur and soften and stain the creased skin they are cupped in. She has to hold everything, pills and slopping Water Pik lid, in one hand to free the other to close the bathroom door to keep the light caged away from Charlie. He lifts his large head a painful inch from the pillow and studies the pills melting in her hand and gets out, “Not those. Little white.” He grimaces as if to laugh. His head sinks back. His throat muscles go rigid. The noise he makes now is up an octave, a woman’s noise. Janice sees she does not have time to go back and search again, he is being tuned too high. She sees that they are beyond chemicals; they are pure spirits, she must make a miracle. Her body feels leaden on her bones, she remembers Harry telling her she has the touch of death. But a pressure from behind like a cuff on the back of her head pitches her forward with a keening cry pitched like his own and she presses herself down upon his body that has been so often pressed upon hers; he has become a great hole nothing less large than she wild with love can fill. She wills her heart to pass through the walls of bone and give its rhythm to his. He grits his teeth “Christ” and strains upward against her as if coming and she presses down with great calm, her body a sufficiency, its warmth and wetness and pulse as powerful as it must be to stanch this wound that is an entire man, his length and breadth loved, his level voice loved and his clever square hands loved and his whirlpools of hair loved and his buffed fingernails loved and the dark gooseflesh bag of his manhood loved and the frailty held within him like a threat and lock against her loved. She is a gateway of love gushing from higher ground; she feels herself dissolving piece by piece like a little mud dam in a sluice. She feels his heart kick like pinned prey and keeps it pinned. Though he has become a devil, widening now into a hole wider than a quarry and then gathering into a pain-squeezed upward thrust as cold as an icicle she does not relent; she widens herself to hold his edges in, she softens herself to absorb the spike of his pain. She will not let him leave her. There is a third person in the room, this person has known her all her life and looked down upon her until now; through this other pair of eyes she sees she is weeping, hears herself praying, Go, Go, to the devil thrashing inside this her man. “Go!” she utters aloud.
Charlie’s body changes tone. He is dead. No, at his mouth she eavesdrops on the whistle of his breathing. Sudden sweat soaks his brow, his shoulders, his chest, her breasts, her cheek where it was pressed against his cheek. His legs relax. He grunts, “O.K.” She dares slide from him, tucking the covers, which she had torn down to bare his chest, back up to his chin.
“Shall I get the real pills now?”
“In a minute. Yes. Nitroglycerin. What you brought me was Coricidin. Cold pills.”
She sees that his grimace had meant to be laughter, for he does smile now. Harry is right. She is stupid.
To ease the hurt look from her face Stavros tells her, “Rotten feeling. Pressure worse than a fist. You can’t breathe, move anything makes it worse, you feel your own heart. Like some animal skipping inside you. Crazy.”
“I was scared to leave you.”
“You did great. You brought me back.”
She knows this is true. The mark upon her as a giver of death has been erased. As in fucking, she has been rendered transparent, then filled solid with peace. As if after fucking, she takes playful inventory of his body, feels the live sweat on his broad skin, traces a finger down the line of his nose.
He repeats, “Crazy,” and sits up in bed, cooling himself, gasping safe on the shore. She snuggles at his side and lets her tears out like a child. Absently, still moving his arms gingerly, he fumbles with the ends of her hair as it twitches on his shoulder.
She asks, “Was it me? My throwing that awful fit about Harry’s sister? I could have killed you.”
“Never.” Then he admits, “I need to keep things orderly or they get to me.”
“My being here is disorderly,” she says.
“Never mind, tiger,” he says, not quite denying, and tugs her hair so her head jerks.
Janice gets up and fetches the right pills. They had been there all along, on the top shelf; she had looked on the middle shelf. He takes one and shows her how he puts it under his tongue to dissolve. As it dissolves he makes that mouth she loves, lips pushed forward as if concealing a lozenge. When she turns off the light and gets into bed beside him, he rolls on his side to give her a kiss. She does not respond, she is too full of peace. Soon the soft rhythm of his unconscious breathing rises from his side of the bed. On her side, she cannot sleep. Awake in every nerve she untangles her life. The traffic ebbs down below. She and Charlie float motionless above Brewer; he sleeps on the wind, his heart hollow. Next time she might not be able to keep him up. Miracles are granted but we must not lean on them. This love that has blown through her has been a miracle, the one thing worthy of it remaining is to leave. Spirits are insatiable but bodies get enough. She has had enough, he ha
s had enough; more might be too much. She might begin to kill. He calls her tiger. Toward six the air brightens. She sees his square broad forehead, the wiry hair in its tidy waves, the nose so shapely a kind of feminine vanity seems to be bespoken, the mouth even in sleep slightly pouting, a snail-shine of saliva released from one corner. Angel, buzzard, floating, Janice sees that in the vast volume of her love she has renounced the one possible imperfection, its object. Her own love engulfs her; she sinks down through its purity swiftly fallen, all feathers.
* * *
Mom has the phone by her bed; downstairs Rabbit hears it ring, then hears it stop, but some time passes before she makes him understand it is for him. She cannot raise her voice above a kind of whimper now, but she has a cane, an intimidating knobby briar Pop brought home one day from the Brewer Salvation Army store. She taps on the floor with it until attention comes up the stairs. She is quite funny with it, waving it around, thumping. “All my life,” she says. “What I wanted. A cane.”
He hears the phone ring twice and then only slowly the tapping of the cane sinks in; he is vacuuming the living-room rug, trying to get some of the fustiness up. In Mom’s room, the smell is more powerful, the perverse vitality of rot. He has read somewhere that what we smell are just tiny fragments of the thing itself tickling a plate in our nose, a subtler smoke. Everything has its cloud, a flower’s bigger than a rock’s, a dying person’s bigger than ours. Mom says, “For you.” The pillows she is propped on have slipped so she sits at a slant. He straightens her and, since the word “Janice” begins with a sound difficult for her throat muscles to form, she is slow to make him understand who it is.
He freezes, reaching for the phone. “I don’t want to talk to her.”
“Why. Not.”
“O.K., O.K.” It is confusing, having to talk here, Janice’s voice filling his ear while Mom and her rumpled bed fill his vision. Her blue-knuckled hands clasp and unclasp; her eyes, open too wide, rest on him in a helpless stare, the blue irises ringed with a thin white circle like a sucked Life Saver. “Now what?” he says to Janice.
“You could at least not be rude right away,” she says.
“O.K., I’ll be rude later. Let me guess. You’re calling to tell me you’ve finally gotten around to getting a lawyer.”
Janice laughs. It’s been long since he heard it, a shy noise that tries to catch itself halfway out, like a snagged yo-yo. “No,” she says, “I haven’t gotten around to that yet. Is that what you’re waiting for?” She is harder to bully now.
“I don’t know what I’m waiting for.”
“Is your mother there? Or are you downstairs?”
“Yes. Up.”
“You sound that way. Harry – Harry, are you there?”
“Sure. Where else?”
“Would you like to meet me anyplace?” She hurries on, to make it business. “The insurance men keep calling me at work, they say you haven’t filled out any of the forms. They say we ought to be making some decisions. I mean about the house. Daddy already is trying to sell it for us.”
“Typical.”
“And then there’s Nelson.”
“You don’t have room for him. You and your greaseball.”
His mother looks away, shocked; studies her hands, and by an effort of will stops their idle waggling. Janice has taken a quick high breath. He cannot bump her off the line today. “Harry, that’s another thing. I’ve moved out. It’s all decided, everything’s fine. I mean, that way. With Charlie and me. I’m calling from Joseph Street, I’ve spent the last two nights here. Harry?”
“I’m listening. I’m right here. Whatcha think – I’m going to run away?”
“You have before. I was talking to Peggy yesterday on the phone, she and Ollie are back together, and he had heard you had gone off to some other state, a newspaper in Baltimore had given you a job.”
“Fat chance.”
“And Peggy said she hadn’t heard from you at all. I think she’s hurt.”
“Why should she be hurt?”
“She told me why.”
“Yeah. She would. Hey. This is a lot of fun chatting, but did you have anything definite you want to say? You want Nelson to come live with the Springers, is that it? I suppose he might as well, he’s –” He is going to confess that the boy is unhappy, but his mother is listening and it would hurt her feelings. Considering her condition, she has really put herself out for Nelson this time.
Janice asks, “Would you like to see me? I mean, would it make you too mad, looking at me?”
And he laughs; his own laugh is unfamiliar in his ears. “It might,” he says, meaning it might not.
“Oh, let’s,” she says. “You want to come here? Or shall I come there?” She understands his silence, and confirms, “We need a third place. Maybe this is stupid, but what about the Penn Villas house? We can’t go in, but we need to look at it and decide what to do; I mean somebody’s offering to buy it, the bank talked to Daddy the other day.”
“O.K. I got to make Mom lunch now. How about two?”
“And I want to give you something,” Janice is going on, while Mom is signalling her need to be helped to the commode; her blue hand tightens white around the gnarled handle of the cane.
“Don’t let her wriggle,” is her advice, when he hangs up, “her way. Around you.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, Mom thumps the floor with her cane for emphasis, drawing an arc with the tip as illustration.
After putting the lunch dishes in the drainer Harry prepares for a journey. For clothes, he decides on the suntans he is wearing and has worn for two weeks straight, and a fresh white shirt as in his working days, and an old jacket he found in a chest in the attic: his high school athletic jacket. It carries MJ in pistachio green on an ivory shield on the back, and green sleeves emerge from V-striped shoulders. The front zips. Zipped, it binds across his chest and belly, but he begins that way, walking down Jackson Road under the chill maples; when the 12 bus lets him out at Emberly, the warmer air of this lower land lets him unzip, and he walks jauntily flapping along the curving street where the little ranch houses have pumpkins on their porchlets and Indian corn on their doors.
His own house sticks out from way down Vista Crescent: black coal in a row of candies. His station wagon is parked there. The American flag decal is still on the back window. It looks aggressive, fading.
Janice gets out of the driver’s seat and stands beside the car looking lumpy and stubborn in a camel-colored loden coat he remembers from winters past. He had forgotten how short she is, how the dark hair has thinned back from the tight forehead, with that oily shine that puts little bumps along the hairline. She has abandoned the madonna hairdo, wears her hair parted way over on one side, unflatteringly. But her mouth seems less tight; her lips have lost the crimp in the corners and seem much readier to laugh, with less to lose, than before. His instinct, crazy, is to reach out and pet her – do something, like tickle behind her ear, that you would do to a dog; but they do nothing. They do not kiss. They do not shake hands. “Where’d you resurrect that corny old jacket? I’d forgotten what awful school colors we had. Ick. Like one of those fake ice creams.”
“I found it in an old trunk in my parents’ attic. They’ve kept all that stuff. It still fits.”
“Fits who?”
“A lot of my clothes got burned up.” This note of apology because he sees she is right, it was an ice-cream world he made his mark in. Yet she too is wearing something too young for her, with a hairdo reverting to adolescence, parted way over like those South American flames of the Forties. Chachacha.
She digs into a side pocket of the loden coat awkwardly. “I said I had a present for you. Here.” What she hands him twinkles and dangles. The car keys.
“Don’t you need it?”
“Not really. I can drive one of Daddy’s. I don’t know why I ever thought I did need it, I guess at first I thought we might escape to somewhere. California. Canada. I don’t know. We never even considered it.”<
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He asks, “You’re gonna stay at your parents’?”
Janice looks up past the jacket to him, seeking his face. “I can’t stand it, really. Mother nags so. You can see she’s been primed not to say anything to me, but it keeps coming out, she keeps using the phrase ‘public opinion.’ As if she’s a Gallup poll. And Daddy. For the first time, he seems pathetic to me. Somebody is opening a Datsun agency in one of the shopping centers and he feels really personally threatened. I thought,” Janice says, her dark eyes resting on his face lightly, ready to fly if what she sees there displeases her, “I might get an apartment somewhere. Maybe in Peggy’s building. So Nelson could walk to school in West Brewer again. I’d have Nelson, of course.” Her eyes dart away.
Rabbit says, “So the car is sort of a swap.”
“More of a peace offering.”
He makes the peace sign, then transfers it to his head, as horns. She is too dumb to get it. He tells her, “The kid is pretty miserable, maybe you ought to take him. Assuming you’re through with Whatsisname.”
“We’re through.”
“Why?”
Her tongue flicks between her lips, a mannerism that once struck him as falsely sensual but seems inoffensive now, like licking a pencil. “Oh,” Janice says. “We’d done all we could together. He was beginning to get jittery. Your sweet sister didn’t help, either.”
