Rabbit, Run - John Updike [33]
Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It’s insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely. By nature in such an embrace she grows rigid. The small moist cushion of slack willingness with which her lips had greeted his dries up and turns hard, and when she can get her head back and her hand free she fits her palm against his jaw and pushes as if she wanted to throw his skull back into the hall. Her fingers curl and a long nail scrapes the tender skin below one eye. He lets her go. The nearly scratched eye squints and a tendon in his neck aches.
“Get out,” she says, her chunky mussed face ugly in the light from the hall.
He kicks the door shut with a backwards flip of his leg. “Don’t,” he says. “I had to hug you.” He sees in the dark she is frightened; her big black shape has that pocket in it, that his instinct feels like a tongue probing a pulled tooth. The air tells him he must be motionless; for no reason he wants to laugh. Her fear and his inner knowledge are so incongruous; he knows there is no harm in him.
“Hug,” she says. “Kill felt more like it.”
“I’ve been loving you so much all night,” he says. “I had to get it out of my system.”
“I know all about your systems. One squirt and done.”
“It won’t be,” he promises.
“It better be. I want you out of here.”
“No you don’t.”
“You all think you’re such lovers.”
“I am,” he assures her. “I am a lover.” And on a tide of alcohol and stirred semen he steps forward, in a kind of swoon. Though she backs away, it is not so quickly that he cannot feel her socket of fear healing. The room they are in, he sees by streetlight, is small, and two armchairs and a sofa-bed and a table furnish it. She walks into the next room, a little larger, holding a double bed. The shade is half drawn, and low light gives each nubbin of the bedspread a shadow.
“All right,” she says. “You can get into that.”
“Where are you going?” Her hand is on a doorknob.
“In here.”
“You’re going to undress in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t. Let me undress you. Please.” In his concern he has come to stand beside her, and touches her arm now.
She moves her arm from under his touch. “You’re pretty bossy.”
“Please. Please.”
Her voice grates with exasperation: “I have to go to the john.”
“But come out dressed.”
“I have to do something else, too.”
“Don’t do it. I know what it is. I hate them.”
“You don’t even feel it.”
“But I know it’s there. Like a rubber kidney or something.”
Ruth laughs. “Well aren’t you choice? Do you have the answer then?”
“No. I hate them even worse.”
“Look. I don’t know what you think your fifteen dollars entitles you to, but I got to protect myself.”
“If you’re going to put a lot of gadgets in this, give me the fifteen back.”
She tries to twist away, but now he holds the arm he touched. She says, “Say do you think we’re married or something the way you boss me around?”
The transparent wave moves over him again and he calls to her in a voice that is almost inaudible, “Yes; let’s be.” So quickly her arms don’t move from hanging at her sides, he kneels at her feet and kisses the place on her fingers where a ring would have been. Now that he is down there, he begins to undo the straps of her shoes. “Why do you women wear heels?” he asks, and yanks her one foot up, so she has to grab the hair on his head for support. “Don’t they hurt you?” He heaves the shoe, sticky web, through the doorway into the next room, and does the same to the other. Her feet being flat on the floor gives her legs firmness all the way up. He puts his hands around her ankles and pumps them up and down briskly, between the boxy ankle bones and the circular solid fat of her calves. He has a nervous habit of massage.