Rabbit, Run - John Updike [134]
He, who always took pride in dressing neatly, who had always been led to think he was all right to look at, blushes to feel this sincerity. The sensation he had counted on, of being by nature her master, of getting on top of her, hasn’t come. He looks at his fingernails, with their big cuticle moons. His hands and legs are suffused with a paralyzing sense of reality; his child is really dead, his day is really done, this woman is really sickened by him. Realizing this much makes him anxious to have all of it, to be pressed tight against the wall. He asks her flat, “Did you get an abortion?”
She smirks and says hoarsely, “What do you think?”
He closes his eyes and while the gritty grained fur of the chair arms rushes up against his fingertips prays, God, dear God, no, not another, you have one, let this one go. A dirty knife turns in his intricate inner darkness. When he opens his eyes he sees, from the tentative hovering way she is standing there, trying to bring off a hard swagger in her stance, that she means to torment him. His voice goes sharp with hope: “Have you?”
A crumbling film comes over her face. “No,” she says, “no. I should but I keep not doing it. I don’t want to do it.”
Up he gets and his arms go around her, without squeezing, like a magic ring, and though she stiffens at his touch and twists her head sideways on her muscled white throat, he has regained that feeling, of being on top. “Oh,” he says, “good. That’s so good.”
“It was too ugly,” she says. “Margaret had it all rigged up but I kept—thinking about—”
“Yes,” he says, “Yes. You’re so good. I’m so glad,” and tries to nuzzle the side of her face. His nose touches wet. “You have it,” he coaxes. “Have it.” She is still a moment, staring at her thoughts, and then jerks out of his arms and says, “Don’t touch me!” Her face flares; her body is bent forward like a threatened animal’s. As if his touch is death.
“I love you,” he says.
“That means nothing from you. Have it, have it, you say: how? Will you marry me?”
“I’d love to.”
“You’d love to, you’d love to do anything. What about your wife? What about the boy you already have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you divorce her? No. You love being married to her too. You love being married to everybody. Why can’t you make up your mind what you want to do?”
“Can’t I? I don’t know.”
“How would you support me? How many wives can you support? Your jobs are a joke. You aren’t worth hiring. Maybe once you could play basketball but you can’t do anything now. What the hell do you think the world is?”
“Please have the baby,” he says. “You got to have it.”
“Why? Why do you care?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know any of these answers. All I know is what feels right. You feel right to me. Sometimes Janice used to. Sometimes nothing does.”
“Who cares? That’s the thing. Who cares what you feel?”
“I don’t know,” he says again.
She groans—from her face he feared she would spit—and turns and looks at the wall that is all in bumps from being painted over peeling previous coats so often.
He says, “I’m hungry. Why don’t I go out to the delicatessen and get us something. Then we can think.”
She turns, steadier. “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “You know where I was when you came here the other day? I was with my parents. You know I have parents. They’re pretty poor parents but that’s what they are. They live in West Brewer. They know. I mean they know some things. They know I’m pregnant. Pregnant’s a nice word, it happens to everybody, you don’t have to think too much what you must do to get that way. Now I’d like to marry you. I would. I mean whatever I said but if we’re married it’ll be all right. Now you work it out. You divorce that wife you feel so sorry for about once a month, you divorce her or forget me. If you can’t work it out, I’m dead to you; I’m dead to you and