Rabbit, Run - John Updike [47]
Eccles presses. “I’m afraid you’ll go back to demonstrating peelers if I don’t catch you soon. Tuesday? Tuesday at two? Shall I pick you up?”
“No; I’ll come to your house.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah. But don’t trust a promise from me.”
“I have to.” Eccles names an address in Mt. Judge and they call good-by at the curb. An old cop walks with a wise squint along the pavement beside the shut, stunned Sunday storefronts. To him it must look like a priest parting from the president of his Youth Group. Harry grins at this cop, and walks along the pavement with his stomach singing. Funny, the world just can’t touch you.
Ruth lets him in, a pocket mystery in one hand. Her eyes look sleepy from reading. She has changed into another sweater. Her hair seems darker. He dumps the clothes on her bed. “Do you have hangers?”
“Say. You really think you have it made.”
“I made you,” he says. “I made you and the sun and the stars.” Squeezing her in his arms it seems that he did. She is tepid and solid in his embrace, not friendly, not not. The filmy smell of soap lifts into his nostrils while dampness touches his jaw. She has washed her hair. It pulls back from her forehead in darker straighter strands evenly harrowed by the comb. Clean, she is clean; he puts his nose against her skull to drink in the demure sharp scent. He thinks of her naked in the shower, her hair hanging oozy with lather, her neck bowed to the whipping water. “I made you bloom,” he says.
“Oh you’re a wonder,” she answers, and pushes away from his chest. As he hangs up his suits tidily, Ruth asks, “You give your wife the car?”
“There was nobody there. I snuck in and out. I left the key inside.”
“And nobody caught you?”
“As a matter of fact somebody did. The Episcopal minister gave me a ride back into Brewer.”
“Say; you are religious aren’t you?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing much.”
“What was he like?”
“Kind of creepy. Giggled a lot.”
“Maybe just you make him giggle.”
“I’m supposed to play golf with him on Tuesday.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really. I told him I don’t know how.”
She laughs, on and on, in that prolonged way women use when they’re excited by you and ashamed of it. “Oh, my Rabbit,” she exclaims in a fond final breath. “You just wander, don’t you?”
“He got hold of me,” he insists, knowing his attempts to explain will amuse her, for shapeless reasons. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You poor soul,” she says. “You’re just irresistible.”
With keen secret relief, he at last takes off his dirty clothes and changes into clean underwear, fresh socks, the sports shirt, and suntans. He has to put his suede shoes back on. He forgot to steal his sneakers. “Let’s go for that walk,” he announces, dressed.
“I’m reading,” she says from a chair. The book is open to near the end. She reads books nicely, without cracking their backs, though they cost only 35¢.
“Come on. Get out in the weather.” He goes over and tries to tug the mystery from her hand. The title is The Deaths at Oxford. Now what should she care about deaths at Oxford? When she has him here.
“Wait,” she pleads, and turns a page, and reads some sentences as the book is pulled slowly up, her eyes shuttling, and then suddenly lets him take it. “God, you’re a bully.”
He marks her place with a burnt match and looks at her bare feet. “Do you have sneakers or anything?”
“No. Hey I’m sleepy.”
“We’ll go to bed early.”
Her eyeballs turn on him at this, her lips pursed a little. There is this vulgarity in her, that just couldn’t let that go by. Ever so faintly unctuous vulgarity.
“Come on,” he says. “Put on flat shoes and well dry your hair.”
“I’ll have to wear heels.” As she bows her head to pinch them on, the white line of her parting makes him smile, it’s so straight. Like a little birthday girl’s parting.
They approach the mountain through the city park. The trash baskets and movable metal benches have not been set out yet. On the concrete-and-plank benches fluffy old men sun like greater pigeons, dressed in patches of gray multiple