Rabbit, Run - John Updike [32]
He recognizes his problem; she dislikes him now, like that whore in Texas. “Hey,” he says. “Have you ever been up to the top there?”
“Sure. In a car.”
“When I was a kid,” he says, “we used to walk up from the other side. There’s a sort of gloomy forest, and I remember once I came across an old house, just a hole in the ground with some stones, where I guess a pioneer had had a farm.”
“The only time I ever got up there was in a car with some eager beaver.”
“Well, congratulations,” he says, annoyed by the self-pity hiding in her toughness.
She bites at being uncovered. “What do you think I care about your pioneer?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t you? You’re an American.”
“How? I could just as easy be a Mexican.”
“You never could be, you’re not little enough.”
“You know, you’re a pig really.”
“Oh now baby,” he says, and puts his arm around the substance of her waist, “I think I’m sort of neat.”
“Don’t tell me.”
She turns left, off Weiser, out of his arm. This street is Summer. Brick rows, not so much run down as well worn. The house numbers are set in fanlights of stained glass above the doors. The apple-and-orange-colored light of a small grocery store shows the silhouettes of some kids hanging around the corner. The supermarkets are driving these little stores out of business, make them stay open all night.
He puts his arm around her and begs, “Come on now, be a pleasant piece.” He wants to show her that her talking tough won’t keep him off. She wants him to be content with just her heavy body, but he wants whole women, light as feathers. To his surprise her arm mirrors his, comes around his waist. Thus locked, they find it awkward to walk, and part at the traffic light.
“Didn’t you kind of like me in the restaurant?” he asks. “The way I tried to make old Tothero feel good? Telling him how great he was?”
“All I heard was you telling how great you were.”
“I was great. It’s the fact. I mean, I’m not much good for anything now, but I really was good at that.”
“You know what I was good at?”
“What?”
“Cooking.”
“That’s more than my wife is. Poor kid.”
“Remember how in Sunday school they’d tell you everybody God made was good at something? Well, that was my thing, cooking. I thought, Jesus, now I’ll really be a great cook.”
“Well aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. All I do is eat out.”
“Well, stop it.”
“It’s in the trade,” she says, and this really stops him. He doesn’t think of her this bluntly. It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.
“Here I am,” she says. Her building is brick like all the others on the west side of the street. Across the way a big limestone church hangs like a gray curtain under the streetlamp. They go in, passing beneath stained glass. The vestibule has a row of doorbells under brass mailboxes and a varnished umbrella rack and a rubber mat on the marble floor and two doors, one to the right with frosted glass and another in front of them of wire-reinforced glass through which he sees rubber-treaded stairs. While Ruth fits a key in this door he reads the gold lettering on the other: F. X. PELLIGRINI, M.D. “Old Fox,” Ruth says, and leads him up the stairs.
She lives one flight up. Her door is the one at the far end of a linoleum hall, nearest the street. He stands behind her as she scratches her key at the lock. Abruptly, in the cold light of the streetlamp which comes through the four flawed panes of the window by his side, blue panes so thinseeming the touch of one finger might crack them, he begins to tremble, first