Rabbit, Run - John Updike [41]
When Ruth serves lunch be sees she is a better cook than Janice; she has boiled the hot dogs somehow without splitting them. With Janice, they always arrived at the table torn and twisted, cracked from end to end in wide pink mouths that seemed to cry out they’d been tortured. He and Ruth eat at a small porcelain table in the kitchen. As he touches his fork to his plate he remembers the cold feel in his dream of Janice’s face dropping into his hands, and the memory spoils his first bite, makes it itself a kind of horror. Nevertheless he says, “Terrific,” and gamely goes ahead and eats, and does regain some appetite. Ruth’s face across from him takes some of the white crudity of the table-top; the skin of her broad forehead shines and the two blemishes beside her nose are like spots something spilled has left. She seems to sense that she has become unattractive, and eats obsequiously, with quick little self-effacing bites.
“Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“You know I still have that car parked over on Cherry Street.”
“You’re O.K. The meters don’t matter on Sunday.”
“Yeah, but they will tomorrow.”
“Sell it.”
“Huh?”
“Sell the car. Get rich quick.”
“No, I mean— Oh. You mean for you. Look, I still have thirty dollars, why don’t you let me give it to you now?” He reaches toward his hip pocket.
“No, no, I did not mean that. I didn’t mean anything. It just popped into my fat head.” She is embarrassed; her neck goes splotchy and his pity is roused, to think how pretty she appeared last night.
He explains. “You see, my wife’s old man is a used-car dealer and when we got married he sold us this car at a pretty big discount. So in a way it’s really my wife’s car and anyway since she has the kid I think she ought to have it. And then as you say my shirt’s dirty and I ought to get my clothes if I can. So what I thought was, after lunch why don’t I sneak over to my place and leave the car and pick up my clothes?”
“Suppose she’s there?”
“She won’t be. She’ll be at her mother’s.”
“I think you’d like it if she was there,” Ruth says.
He wonders; imagines opening the door and finding Janice sitting there in the armchair with an empty glass watching television, and feels, like a small collapse within him, like a piece of food stuck in his throat at last going down, his relief at finding her face still firm, still its old dumb obstinate walnut of a face. “No, I wouldn’t,” he tells Ruth. “I’m scared of her.”
“Obviously,” Ruth says.
“There’s something about her,” he insists. “She’s a menace.”
“This poor wife you left? You’re the menace, I’d say.”
“No.”
“Oh that’s right. You think you’re a rabbit.” Her tone in saying this is faintly jeering and irritable, he doesn’t know why.
She asks, “What do you think you’re going to do with these clothes?” That’s it; she feels him moving in.
He admits, “Bring them here.”
She takes in the breath but comes out with nothing. “Just for tonight,” he pleads. “You’re not doing anything are you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Well then, great. Hey. I love you.”
She rises to clear away the plates and stands there, thumb on china, staring at the center of the white table. She shakes her head heavily and says, “You’re bad news.”
Across from him her broad pelvis, snug in a nubbly brown skirt, is solid and symmetrical as the base of a powerful column. His heart rises through that strong column and, enraptured to feel his love for her founded anew yet not daring to lift his eyes to the test of her face, he says, “I can’t help it. You’re such good news.”
He eats three pieces of shoo-fly pie and a crumb in the corner of his lips comes off on her sweater when he kisses her breasts good-by in the kitchen. He leaves her with the dishes. His car