Rabbit, Run - John Updike [37]
She answers, “Hey.”
“You’re pretty.”
“Come on. Work.”
Galled, he shoves up through her and in addition sets his hand under her jaw and shoves her face so his fingers slip into her mouth and her slippery throat strains. As if unstrung by this anger, she tumbles and carries him over and he lies on top of her again, the skin of their chests sticking together; her breathing snags. Her thighs throw open wide and clamp his sides and throw open again so wide it frightens him, she wants, impossible, to turn inside out; the muscles and lips and bones of her expanded underside press against him as a new anatomy, of another animal. She feels transparent; he sees her heart. She suspends him, subsides, and in the folds of her withering, his love and pride revive. So she is first, and waits for him while at a trembling extremity of tenderness he traces again and again the arc of her eyebrow with his thumb. His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel. At each shudder her mouth smiles in his and her legs, locked at his back, bear down.
She asks in time, “O.K.?”
“You’re pretty.”
Ruth takes her legs from around him and spills him off her body like a pile of sand. He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows a sad expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair. Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little price leaves you with nothing. The sweat on his skin is cold in the air; he brings the blankets up from her feet.
“You were a beautiful piece,” he says from the pillow listlessly, and touches her soft side. Her flesh still soaks in the act; it ebbs slower in her.
“I had forgotten,” she says.
“Forgot what?”
“That I could have it too.”
“What’s it like?”
“Oh. It’s like falling through.”
“Where do you fall to?”
“Nowhere. I can’t talk about it.”
He kisses her lips; she’s not to blame. She lazily accepts, then in an afterflurry of affection flutters her tongue against his chin.
He loops his arm around her waist and composes himself against her body for sleep.
“Hey. I got to get up.”
“Stay.”
“I got to go into the bathroom.”
“No.” He tightens his hold.
“Boy, you better let me up.”
He murmurs, “Don’t scare me,” and snuggles more securely against her side. His thigh slides over hers, weight on warmth. Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat; he wants the heat his groin gave given back in gentle ebb. Best bedfriend, done woman. Bit of bowl about their bellies always. Oh, how! when she got up on him like the bell of a big blue lily slipped down on his slow head. He could have hurt her shoving her jaw. He reawakens enough to feel his dry breath drag through sagged lips as she rolls from under his leg and arm. “Hey get me a glass of water,” he says suddenly.
She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There’s that in women repels him; handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men’s dirt, insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows under the window shade. Its childish brightness seems the one kind of comfort left to him.
Light from behind the closed bathroom door tints the air in the bedroom. The splashing sounds are like the sounds his parents would make when as a child Rabbit would waken to realize they had come upstairs, that the whole house would soon be dark, and the sight of morning would be his next sensation. He is asleep when like a faun in moonlight Ruth, washed, creeps back to his side, holding a glass of water.
During this sleep he has an intense dream. He and his mother and father and some others are sitting around their kitchen table. It’s the old kitchen. A girl at the table reaches