Rabbit, Run - John Updike [119]
He had ridden one of these buses last night into Brewer and gone to Ruth’s apartment but there was no light on and nobody answered his ring, though there was a dim light behind the frosted glass lettered F. X. Pelligrini. He sat around on the steps, looking down at the delicatessen until the lights went out and then looking at the bright church window. When the lights went out behind that he felt cramped and hopeless and thought of going home. He wandered up to Weiser Street and looked down at all the lights and the great sunflower and couldn’t see a bus and kept walking, over to the south side, and became afraid of getting knifed and robbed and went into a low-looking hotel and bought a room. He didn’t sleep very well with a neon tube with a taped connection buzzing outside and some woman laughing and woke up early enough to go back to Mt. Judge and get a suit and go to work but something held him back. Something held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasn’t there probably off to Atlantic City with some madman and still he wandered around Brewer, going in and out of department stores with music piping from the walls and eating a hot dog at the five and ten and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. He kept expecting to see her shoulders that he kissed jostle out of a crowd and the ginger hair he used to beg to unpin shining on the other side of a rack of birthday cards. But it was a city of over a hundred thousand and the odds were totally against him and anyway there was tons of time he could find her another day. No, what kept him in the city despite the increasing twisting inside that told him something was wrong back home, what kept him walking through the cold air breathed from the doors of movie houses and up and down between counters of perfumed lingerie thinking of all the delicate ass these veils would flavor the little tits to be tucked into these cups and jewelry and salted nuts poor old Jan and up into the park along paths he walked once with Ruth to watch from under a horse-chestnut tree five mangy kids play cat with a tennis ball and a broomstick and then finally back down Weiser to the drugstore he called from, what kept him walking was the idea that somewhere he’d find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice wasn’t so much that she was in the right for once and he was wrong and stupid but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And the feeling that he wouldn’t always be able to produce this flame. What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it’s this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus, he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it. The kink in his stomach starts to take the form of nausea and he clings to the icy bar bitterly as the bus swings around the mountain. He gets off, in a sweat, blocks too soon. Here in Mt. Judge the shadows have begun to grow deep, the sun baking Brewer rides the crest of the mountain, and his sweat congeals, shortening his breath. He runs to keep his body occupied, to joggle his mind blank. Past a dry-cleaning plant with a little pipe hissing steam at the side. Through the oil and rubber smells riding above the asphalt pond around the red pumps of an Esso station. Past the Mt. Judge town-hall lawn and the World War II honor roll with the name plaques crumbled and blistered behind glass.
When he gets to the Springers’ house Mrs.