Rabbit, Run - John Updike [31]
“O.K. You start.”
She plops a cake in and looks at him with a funny full-mouth smile, the corners turned down tight, and a frantic look of agreeableness strains her features while she chews. She swallows, her blue eyes widened round, and gives a little gasp before launching into what he thinks will be a remark but turns out to be a laugh, right in his face. “Wait,” she begs. “I’m trying.” And returns to looking into the shell of her glass, thinking, and the best she can do, after all that, is to say, “Don’t live in a hotel.”
“I got to. Tell me a good one.” He instinctively thinks she knows about hotels. At the side of her neck where it shades into her shoulder there is a shallow white hollow where his attention curls and rests.
“They’re all expensive,” she says. “Everything is. Just my little apartment is expensive.”
“Where do you have an apartment?”
“Oh a few blocks from here. On Summer Street. It’s one flight up, above a doctor.”
“It’s yours alone?”
“Yeah. My girl friend got married.”
“So you’re stuck with all the rent and you don’t do anything.”
“Which means what?”
“Nothing. You just said you did nothing. How expensive is it?”
She looks at him curiously, with that alertness he had noticed right off, out by the parking meters.
“The apartment,” he says.
“A hundred-ten a month. Then they make you pay for light and gas.”
“And you don’t do anything.”
She gazes into her glass, making reflected light run around the rim with a rocking motion of her hands.
“Whaddeya thinking?” he asks.
“Just wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“How wise you are.”
Right here, without moving his head, he feels the wind blow. So this is the drift; he hadn’t been sure. He says, “Well I’ll tell ya. Why don’t you let me give you something toward your rent?”
“Why should you do that?”
“Big heart,” he says. “Ten?”
“I need fifteen.”
“For the light and gas. O.K. O.K.” He is uncertain what to do now. They sit looking at the empty plate that had held a pyramid of sesame cakes; they have eaten them all. The waiter, when he comes, is surprised to see this; his eyes go from the plate to Rabbit to Ruth, all in a second. The check amounts to $9.60. Rabbit puts a ten and a one on top of it, and besides these bills he puts a ten and a five. He counts what’s left in his wallet; three tens and four ones. When he looks up, Ruth’s money has vanished from the slick table. He stands up and takes her little soft coat and holds it for her, and like a great green fish, his prize, she heaves across and up out of the booth and coldly lets herself be fitted into it. He calculates, a dime a pound.
And that’s not counting the restaurant bill. He takes the bill to the counter and gives the girl a ten. She makes change with a frown; the frightening vacancy of her eyes is methodically ringed with mascara. The purple simplicity of her kimono does not go with her frizzly permed hair and rouged, concave, deprived face. When she puts his coins on the pink cleats of the change pad, he flicks his band in the air above the silver, adds the dollar to it, and nods at the young Chinese waiter, who is perched attentively beside her. “Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much,” the boy says to him. But his gratitude does not even last until they are out of sight. As they move toward the glass door he turns to the cashier and in a reedy, perfectly inflected voice completes his story: “—and then this other cat says, ‘But man, mine was helium!’ ”
With this Ruth, Rabbit enters the street. On his right, away from the mountain, the heart of the city shines: a shuffle of lights, a neon outline of a boot, of a peanut, of a top hat, of an enormous sunflower erected, the stem of green neon six stories high, along one building to symbolize Sunflower Beer, the yellow center a second moon, the shuffling headlights glowworms in the grass. One block down, a monotone bell tolls hurriedly, and as long as knives the red-tipped railroad-crossing gates descend, slicing through the soft mass of neon, and the traffic slows, halts.
Ruth turns left, toward the shadow of Mt. Judge,