Rabbit, Run - John Updike [124]
“You mean to earn forgiveness? I’m sure it is, carried out through a lifetime.”
“I mean”—he’s never before felt pleading with Eccles—“remember that thing we used to talk about? The thing behind everything.”
“Harry, you know I don’t think that thing exists in the way you think it does.”
“O.K.” He realizes that Eccles wants to get away too, that the sight of himself is painful, disgusting.
Eccles must see that he senses this, for he abruptly summons up mercy and makes an attempt. “Harry, it’s not for me to forgive you. You’ve done nothing to me to forgive. I’m equal with you in guilt. We must work for forgiveness; we must earn the right to see that thing behind everything. Harry, I know that people are brought to Christ. I’ve seen it with my eyes and tasted it with my mouth. And I do think this. I think marriage is a sacrament, and that this tragedy, terrible as it is, has at last united you and Janice in a sacred way.”
Through the next hours Rabbit clings to this belief, though it seems to bear no relation to the colors and sounds of the big sorrowing house, the dabs and arcs of late sunshine in the little jungle of plants on the glass table, or the almost wordless supper he and Janice share in her bedroom.
He spends that night in the Springers’ house, sleeping with Janice. Her sleep is so solid. A thin snore out of her black mouth sharpens the moonlight and keeps him awake. He gets up on an elbow and studies her face; it is frightening in the moonlight, small and smeared by patches of dark cut it seems in a soft substance that lacks the edges of a human presence. He resents her sleep. When, in sunlight, he feels her weight stir and slide off the bed, he turns his face deeper into the pillow, retracts his head half under the covers, and goes back to sleep stubbornly. Sleep is a safe cave. Today is the last day of his abnormal life, today is the funeral; tomorrow he is scheduled to go back to work.
He has a vivid dream. He is alone on a large sporting field, or vacant lot, littered with small pebbles. In the sky two perfect disks, identical in size but the one a dense white and the other slightly transparent, move toward each other slowly; the pale one is directly above the dense one. At the moment they touch he feels frightened and a voice like over a loudspeaker at a track meet announces, “The cowslip swallows up the elder.” The downward gliding of the top one continues steadily until the other, though the stronger, is totally eclipsed, and just one circle is before his eyes, pale and pure. He understands: “the cowslip” is the moon, and “the elder” the sun, and that what he had witnessed is the explanation of death: lovely life eclipsed by lovely death. With great excitement he realizes he must go forth from this field and found a new religion. There is a feeling of the disks, and the echo of the voice, bending over him importunately, and he opens his eyes. Janice stands by the bed in a brown skirt and a pink sleeveless blouse. There is a drab thickness of fat under her chin he has never noticed before. He is surprised to be on his back; he almost always sleeps on his stomach. He realizes it was a dream, that he has nothing to tell the world, and the knot regathers in his chest. In getting out of bed he kisses the back of her hand, which is hanging by her side helpless and raw.
She makes him breakfast, the cereal drowned in milk, the coffee scalded in her style. With Nelson they walk over to the apartment to get clothes for the funeral. Rabbit resents her being able to walk; resents her not dying of remorse and shame. What kind of grief is it that permits them to walk? The sense of their thick bodies just going on, wrapping their hearts in numbness and small needs, angers him. They walk with their child through streets they walked as children. The gutter along Potter Avenue where the slime-rimmed ice-plant water used to run is dry. The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the