Rabbit, Run - John Updike [2]
He pauses in the sunless vestibule, panting. Overhead, a daytime bulb burns dustily. Three tin mailboxes hang empty above a brown radiator. His downstairs neighbor’s door across the hall is shut like an angry face. There is that smell which is always the same but that he can never identify; sometimes it seems cabbage cooking, sometimes the furnace’s rusty breath, sometimes something soft decaying in the walls. He climbs the stairs to his home, the top floor.
The door is locked. In fitting the little key into the lock his hand trembles, pulsing with unusual exertion, and the metal scratches. But when he opens the door he sees his wife sitting in an armchair with an Old-fashioned, watching television turned down low.
“You’re here,” he says. “What’s the door locked for?”
She looks to one side of him with vague dark eyes reddened by the friction of watching. “It just locked itself.”
“Just locked itself,” he repeats, but bends down to kiss her glossy forehead nevertheless. She is a small woman with a tight dark skin, as if something swelling inside is straining against her littleness. Just yesterday, it seems to him, she stopped being pretty. With the tiny addition of two short wrinkles at the corners, her mouth had become greedy; and her hair has thinned, so he keeps thinking of her skull under it. But he keeps hoping that tomorrow she’ll be his girl again. “Watcha fraid of? Who do you think’s gonna come in that door?”
Expecting no answer, he carefully unfolds his coat and goes to the closet with it and takes out a wire hanger. The closet is in the living-room and the door only opens halfway, since the television set is in front of it. He is careful not to kick the wire, which is plugged into a socket on the side of the door. One time Janice, who is especially clumsy when pregnant or drunk, got the wire wrapped around her foot and nearly pulled the set, a hundred and forty-nine dollars, down smash on the floor. Luckily he got to it while it was still rocking in the metal cradle and before Janice began kicking out in one of her panics. What made her get that way? What was she afraid of? With loving deftness, a deftness as complimentary to the articulation of his own body as to the objects he touches, he inserts the corners of the hanger into the armholes of the coat and with his long reach hangs it on the printed pipe with his other clothes. He presses the door shut and it clicks but then swings open again an inch or two. Locked doors. It rankles: his hand trembling in the lock like some old man and her sitting in here listening to the scratching.
He turns and asks her, “If you’re home where’s the car? It’s not out front.”
“It’s in front of my mother’s. You’re in my way.”
“In front of your mother’s? That’s terrific. That’s just the God-damn place for it.”
“What’s brought this on?”
“Brought what on?” He moves out of her line of vision and stands to one side.
She is watching a group of children called Mouseketeers perform a musical number in which