Rabbit, Run - John Updike [109]
“Well why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“I didn’t know what you were doing. I thought you were just being nice.”
“So this isn’t nice.”
“Well, it’s not nice when I can’t do anything.”
“You can do something.”
“No I can’t. Even if I wasn’t all tired and confused from Rebecca’s crying all day I can’t. Not for six weeks. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know, but I thought—” He’s terribly embarrassed.
“What did you think?”
“I thought you might love me anyway.”
After a pause she says, “I do love you.”
“Just a touch, Jan. Just let me touch you.”
“Can’t you go to sleep?”
“No I can’t. I can’t. I love you too much. Just hold still.”
It would have been easy a minute ago to get it over with but all this talk has taken the fine point off. It’s a bad contact and her stubborn limpness makes it worse; she’s killing it by making him feel sorry for her and ashamed and foolish. The whole sweet thing is just sweat and work and his ridiculous inability to finish it against the dead hot wall of her belly. She pushes him back. “You’re just using me,” she says. “It feels horrible.”
“Please, baby. I’m almost there.”
“It feels so cheap.”
Her daring to say this infuriates him; he realizes she hasn’t had it for three months and in all that time has gotten an unreal idea of what love is. She exaggerates its importance, has imagined it into something rare and precious she’s entitled to half of when all he wants is to get rid of it so he can move on, on into sleep, down the straight path, for her sake. It’s for her sake.
“Roll over,” he says.
“I love you,” she says with relief, misunderstanding, thinking he’s dismissing her. She touches his face in farewell and turns her back.
He scrunches down and fits himself between her buttocks, cool. It’s beginning to work, steady, warm, when she twists her head and says over her shoulder, “Is this a trick your whore taught you?”
He thumps her shoulder with his fist and gets out of bed and his pajama bottoms fall down. The night breeze filters in through the window screen. She turns on her back into the center of the bed and explains out of her dark face, “I’m not your whore, Harry.”
“Damn it,” he says, “that was the first thing I’ve asked from you since you came home.”
“You’ve been wonderful,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“Where are you going?”
He is putting on his clothes. “I’m going out. I’ve been cooped up in this damn hole all day.”
“You went out this morning.”
He finds his suntans and puts them on. She asks, “Why can’t you try to imagine how I feel? I’ve just had a baby.”
“I can. I can but I don’t want to, it’s not the thing, the thing is how I feel. And I feel like getting out.”
“Don’t. Harry. Don’t.”
“You can just lie there with your precious ass. Kiss it for me.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” she cries, and flounces under the covers, and smashes her face down into her pillow.
Even this late he might have stayed if she hadn’t accepted defeat by doing this. His need to love her is by, so there’s no reason to go. He’s stopped loving her at last so he might as well lie down beside her and go to sleep. But she asks for it, lying there in a muddle sobbing, and outside, down in the town, a motor guns and he thinks of the air and the trees and streets stretching bare under the streetlamps and goes out