Rabbit, Run - John Updike [107]
He walks home blind to the sunlight. Was she mad because he had turned down a proposition, or because he had shown that he thought she had made one? Or was it a mixture of these opposites, that had somehow exposed her to herself? His mother, suddenly caught in some confusion of her own, would turn on the heat that way. In either case he smiles; he feels tall and elegant and potential striding along under the trees in his Sunday suit. Whether spurned or misunderstood, Eccles’ wife has jazzed him, and he reaches his apartment clever and cold with lust.
His wish to make love to Janice is like a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached. The baby scrawks tirelessly. It lies in its crib all afternoon and makes an infuriating noise of strain, hnnnnnah ah ah nnnnh, a persistent feeble scratching at some interior door. What does it want? Why won’t it sleep? He has come home from church carrying something precious for Janice and keeps being screened from giving it to her. The noise spreads fear through the apartment. It makes his stomach ache; when he picks up the baby to burp her he burps himself; the pressure in his stomach keeps breaking and reforming into a stretched bubble as the bubble in the baby doesn’t break. The tiny soft marbled body, weightless as paper, goes stiff against his chest and then floppy, its hot head rolling as if it will unjoint from its neck. “Becky, Becky, Becky,” he says, “go to sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep.”
The noise makes Nelson fretful and whiny. As if, being closest to the dark gate from which the baby has recently emerged, he is most sensitive to the threat the infant is trying to warn them of. Some shadow invisible to their better-formed senses seems to grab Rebecca as soon as she is left alone. Rabbit puts her down, tiptoes into the living-room; they hold their breath. Then, with a bitter scratch, the membrane of silence breaks, and the wobbly moan begins again, Nnnh, A-nnnnnih!
“Oh my God,” Rabbit says. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
Around five in the afternoon, Janice begins to cry. Tears burble down her dark pinched face. “I’m dry,” she says. “I’m dry. I just don’t have anything to feed her.” The baby has been at her breasts repeatedly.
“Forget it,” he says. “She’ll conk out. Have a drink. There’s some old whisky in the kitchen.”
“Say; what is this Have a drink routine of yours? I’ve been trying not to drink. I thought you didn’t like me to drink. All afternoon you’ve been smoking one cigarette after another and saying, ‘Have a drink. Have a drink.’ ”
“I thought it might loosen you up. You’re tense as hell.”
“I’m no tenser than you are. What’s eating you? What’s on your mind?”
“What’s happened to your milk? Why can’t you give the kid enough milk?”
“I’ve fed her three times in four hours. There’s nothing there any more.” In a plain, impoverished gesture, she presses her breasts through her dress.
“Well have a drink of something.”
“Say what did they tell you at church? ‘Go on home and get your wife soused’? You have a drink if that’s on your mind.”
“I don’t need a drink.”
“Well you need something. You’re the one’s upsetting Becky. She was fine all morning until you came home.”
“Forget it. Just forget it. Just forget the whole stinking thing.
“Baby cry!”
Janice puts her arm around Nelson. “I know it honey. She’s hot. She’ll stop in a minute.”
“Baby hot?”
They listen for a minute and it does not stop; the wild feeble warning, broken by tantalizing gaps of silence, goes on and on. Warned, but not knowing of what, they blunder about restlessly through the wreckage of the Sunday paper, inside the apartment, whose walls sweat like the walls of prison. Outside, the sky holds a wide queenly state, blue through the hours, and Rabbit is further panicked by the thought that on such a day his parents used to take them on long pleasant walks, that they are wasting a beautiful Sunday. But they can’t get organized enough to get out. He and Nelson could go but Nelson’s strange fright makes him reluctant