Rabbit, Run - John Updike [106]
What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn’t know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. He doesn’t know if she’s a conscious or unconscious flirt. He always thinks when they meet again he will speak firmly, and tell her he loves her, or something as blunt, and lay the truth bare; but in her presence he is numb; his breath fogs the glass and he has trouble thinking of anything to say and what he does say is stupid. He knows only this: underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance. But between that preparedness and him everything reasonable intervenes. He asks, “Like what?”
“Oh—like the fact that you’re not afraid of women.”
“Who is?”
“Jack.”
“You think?”
“Of course. The old ones, and the teenagers, he’s fine with; the ones who see him in his collar. But the others he’s very leery of; he doesn’t like them. He doesn’t really think they even ought to come to church. They bring a smell of babies and bed into it. That’s not just in Jack; that’s in Christianity. It’s really a very neurotic religion.”
Somehow, when she fetches out her psychology, it seems so foolish to Harry his own feeling of foolishness leaves him. Stepping down off a high curb, he takes her arm. Mt. Judge, built on its hillside, is full of high curbs difficult for little women to negotiate gracefully. Her bare arm remains cool in his fingers.
“Don’t tell that to the parishioners,” he says.
“See? You sound just like Jack.”
“Is that good or bad?” There. This seems to him to test her bluff. She must say either good or bad, and that will be the fork in the road.
But she says nothing. He feels the effort of self-control this takes; she is accustomed to making replies. They mount the opposite curb and he lets go of her arm awkwardly. Though he is awkward, there is still this sense of being nestled against a receptive grain, of fitting.
“Mommy?” Joyce asks.
“What?”
“What’s rottic?”
“Rottic. Oh. Neurotic. It’s when you’re a little bit sick in the head.”
“Like a cold in the head?”
“Well yes, in a way. It’s about that serious. Don’t worry about it, sweetie. It’s something most everybody is. Except our friend Mr. Angstrom.”
The little girl looks up at him across her mother’s thighs with a spreading smile of self-conscious impudence. “He’s naughty,” she says.
“Not very,” her mother says.
At the end of the rectory’s brick walk a blue tricycle has been abandoned and Joyce runs ahead and mounts it and rides away in her aqua Sunday coat and pink hair ribbon, metal squeaking, spinning ventriloquistic threads of noise into the air. Together they watch the child a moment. Then Lucy asks, “Do you want to come in?” In waiting for his reply, she contemplates his shoulder; her white lids from his angle hide her eyes. Her lips are parted and her tongue, a movement in her jaw tells him, touches the roof of her mouth. In the noon sun her features show sharp and her lipstick looks cracked. He can see the inner lining of her lower lip wet against her teeth. A delayed gust of the sermon, its anguished exhortatory flavor, like a dusty breeze off the desert, sweeps through him, accompanied grotesquely by a vision of Janice’s breasts, green-veined, tender. This wicked snip wants to pluck him from them.
“No thanks, really. I can’t.”
“Oh come on. You’ve been to church, have a reward. Have some coffee.”
“No, look.” His words come out soft but somehow big. “You’re a doll, but I got this wife now.” And his hands, rising from his sides in vague explanation, cause her to take a quick step backward.
“I beg your pardon.”
He is conscious of nothing but the little speckled section of her green irises like torn tissue paper around her black pupildots; then he is watching her tight round butt jounce up the walk. “But thanks anyway,” he calls in a hollowed, gutless voice. He dreads being hated. She slams the door behind