Rabbit, Run - John Updike [118]
“It’s all right, Lucy. The truth shouldn’t be able to hurt us.” These words are a shadow of his idea that if Faith is true, then nothing that is true is in conflict with Faith.
“Oh mercy, the martyr. Well I can see it’s an idea you have that it’s your fault and nothing I can say will change your mind. I’ll save my breath.”
He keeps silent to help her save her breath but after a moment she asks in a softer voice, “Jack?”
“What?”
“Why were you so anxious to get them back together?”
He picks the slice of lemon up from the saucer of his teacup and tries to squint through it into the room. “Marriage is a sacrament,” he says.
He half-expects her to laugh but instead she asks earnestly, “Even a bad marriage?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s ridiculous. That’s not common sense.”
“I don’t believe in common sense,” be says. “If it’ll make you happy, I don’t believe in anything.”
“That doesn’t make me happy,” she says. “You’re being psychopathic. But I’m sorry this has happened.” She takes away their cups and swishes into the kitchen and leaves him alone. Afternoon shadows gather like cobwebs on the walls of books, most of them belonging not to him but to his predecessor in the rectory, the noble and much admired Dr. Langhorne. He sits waiting numbly but not too long. The phone rings. He hurries to answer it before Lucy can; through the window above the sill where the phone rests he can see his neighbor unpinning her wash from the line.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jack? This is Harry Angstrom. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You don’t have any old ladies sitting around sewing or anything, do you?”
“No.”
“Why, I’ve been trying to call my apartment and nobody answers and I’m kind of nervous about it. I didn’t spend last night there and I’m getting sort of a prickly feeling. I want to go home but I want to know if Janice has done anything like call the cops or anything. Do you know?”
“Harry, where are you?”
“Oh, at some drugstore in Brewer.”
The neighbor has bundled the last sheet into her arms and Jack’s sight leans on the bare white line. One of the uses society seems to have for him is to break tragic news and the cave of his mouth goes dry as he braces for the familiar duty. No man, having put his hand to the plough … He keeps his eyes wide open so he will not seem too close to the presence by his ear. “I guess to save time I’d better tell you over the phone,” he begins. “Harry. A terrible thing has happened to us.”
When you twist a rope and keep twisting, it begins to lose its straight shape and suddenly a kink, a loop leaps up in it. Harry has such a hard loop in himself after he hears Eccles out. He doesn’t know what he says to Eccles; all he is conscious of is the stacks of merchandise in jangling packages he can see through the windows of the phone-booth door. On the drugstore wall there is a banner bearing in red the one word PARADICHLOROBENZENE. All the while he is trying to understand Eccles he is rereading this word, trying to see where it breaks, wondering if it can be pronounced. Right when he finally understands, right at the pit of his life, a fat woman comes up to the counter and pays for two boxes of Kleenex. He steps into the sunshine outside the drugstore swallowing, to keep the loop from rising in his body and choking him. It’s a hot day, the first of summer; the heat comes up off the glittering pavement into the faces of pedestrians, strikes them sideways off the store windows and hot stone façades. In the white light faces wear the American expression, eyes squinting and mouths sagging open in a scowl, that makes them look as if they are about to say something menacing and cruel. In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic. Above, milk hangs in a sky that seems too exhausted to clear. Harry waits at a corner with some red sweating shoppers for a Mt. Judge bus, number 16A; when it hisses to a stop it is already packed. He hangs from a steel bar in the rear, fighting to keep from