Rabbit, Run - John Updike [39]
Church bells ring loudly. He moves to her side of the bed to watch the crisply dressed people go into the limestone church across the street, whose lit window had lulled him to sleep. He reaches and pulls up the shade a few feet. The rose window is dark now, and above the church, above Mt. Judge, the sun glares in a façade of blue. It strikes a shadow down from the church steeple, a cool stumpy negative in which a few men with flowers in their lapels stand and gossip while the common sheep of the flock stream in, heads down. The thought of these people having the bold idea of leaving their homes to come here and pray pleases and reassures Rabbit, and moves him to close his own eyes and bow his head with a movement so tiny Ruth won’t notice. Help me, Christ. Forgive me. Take me down the way. Bless Ruth, Janice, Nelson, my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Springer, and the unborn baby. Forgive Tothero and all the others. Amen.
He opens his eyes to the day and says, “That’s a pretty big congregation.”
“Sunday morning,” she says. “I could throw up every Sunday morning.”
“Why?”
She just says, “Fuh,” as if he knows the answer. After thinking a bit, and seeing him lie there looking out the window seriously, she says, “I once had a guy in here who woke me up at eight o’clock because he had to teach Sunday school at nine-thirty.”
“You don’t believe anything?”
“No. You mean you do?”
“Well, yeah. I think so.” Her rasp, her sureness, makes him wince; he wonders if he’s lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him, makes his heart tremble. Across the street a few people in their best clothes walk on the pavement past the row of worn brick homes; are they walking on air? Their clothes, they put on their best clothes: he clings to the thought giddily; it seems a visual proof of the unseen world.
“Well, if you do what are you doing here?” she asks.
“Why not? You think you’re Satan or somebody?”
This stops her a moment, standing there with her comb, before she laughs. “Well you go right ahead if it makes you happy.”
He presses her. “Why don’t you believe anything?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Doesn’t it ever, at least for a second, seem obvious to you?”
“God, you mean? No. It seems obvious just the other way. All the time.”
“Well now if God doesn’t exist, why does anything?”
“Why? There’s no why to it. Things just are.” She stands before the mirror, and her comb pulling back on her hair pulls her puffy upper lip up so her wet teeth show grayly.
“That’s not the way I feel about you,” he says, “that you just are.”
“Hey, why don’t you get some clothes on instead of just lying there giving me the Word?”
This, and her turning, hair swirling, to say it, stir him. “Come here,” he asks. The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him.
“No,” Ruth says. She is really a little sore. His believing in God grates against her.
“You don’t like me now?”
“What does it matter to you?”
“You know it does.”
“Get out of my bed.”
“I guess I owe you fifteen more dollars.”
“All you owe me is getting the hell out.”
“What! Leave you all alone?” He says this as with comical speed, while she stands there startled rigid, he jumps from bed and gathers up some of his clothes and ducks into the bathroom and closes the door. When he comes out, in underclothes, he says, still clowning, “You don’t like me any more,” and moves sadly to where his trousers are neatly laid on the chair. While he was out of the room she made the bed.
“I like you enough,” she says in a preoccupied voice, tugging the bedspread smooth.
“Enough