Rabbit, Run - John Updike [51]
Dislikes her own children! Rabbit is shocked, this from a minister’s wife. “Does your husband notice this?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful for Jack. He loves to have women fighting over him. It’s his little harem. I think a boy would threaten him. Do you feel threatened?”
“Not by the kid, no. He’s only two.”
“It starts earlier than two, believe me. Sexual antagonism begins practically at birth.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Good for you. I expect you’re a primitive father. I think Freud is like God; you make it true.”
Rabbit smiles, supposing that Freud has some connection with the silver wallpaper and the watercolor of a palace and a canal above her head. Class. She brings her fingertips to her temples, pushes her head back, shuts her lids, and through plump open lips sighs. He is struck; she seems at this moment a fine-grained Ruth.
Eccles’ thin voice, oddly amplified in his home, cries down the stairs. “Lucy! Joyce is getting into bed with me!”
Lucy opens her eyes and says to Rabbit proudly, “See?”
“She says you told her it’s all right,” the voice whines on, piercing bannisters, walls, and layers of wallpaper.
Mrs. Eccles gets up and goes to the archway. The seat of her orange shorts is wrinkled from sitting; the hitched-up legs expose most of the oval backs of her thighs. Whiter than the sofa; the blush of pink from the pressure of sitting fades from the skin. “I told her no such thing!” she calls upward while one fair hand tugs the shorts down and smoothes the cloth around her mussed but smug rump, a pocket stitched with black thread to the right half. “Jack,” she goes on, “you have a visitor! A very tall young man who says you invited him!”
At the mention of himself Rabbit has risen and right behind her says, “To play golf.”
“To play golf!” she echoes in a yell.
“Oh, dear,” the voice upstairs says to itself, then shouts, “Hello, Harry! I’ll be right down.”
A child up there is crying, “Mommy did too! Mommy did too!”
Rabbit shouts in answer, “Hello!”
Mrs. Eccles turns her head with an inviting twist. “Harry—?”
“Angstrom.”
“What do you do, Mr. Angstrom?”
“Well. I’m kind of out of work.”
“Angstrom. Of course. Aren’t you the one who disappeared? The Springers’ son-in-law?”
“Right,” he says smartly and, in a mindless follow-through, a kind of flower of co-ordination, she having on the drop of his answer turned with prim dismissal away from him again, slaps! her sassy fanny. Not hard; a cupping hit, rebuke and fond pat both, well-placed on the pocket.
She swiftly wheels, swinging her backside to safety behind her. Her freckles dart sharp as pinpricks from her shock-bleached face. Her leaping blood freezes her skin, and this rigid effect, of superbly severe stone, is so incongruous with the lazy condescending warmth he feels toward her, that he makes a funny face, pushing his upper lip over his lower in a burlesque of penitence.
A chaotic tumble on the stairs shakes the walls. Eccles jolts to a stop in front of them, off-balance, tucking a dirty white shirt into rumpled suntans. His shadowed eyes weep between his furry lids. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hadn’t really forgotten.”
“It’s kind of cloudy anyway,” Rabbit says, and smiles involuntarily. Her ass had felt so good, just right, dense yet springy, kind of smacked back. He supposes she’ll tell, which will finish him here. Just as well. He doesn’t know why he’s here anyway.
Maybe she would have told, but her husband starts annoying her immediately. “Oh, I’m sure we can get nine in before it rains,” he tells Rabbit.
“Jack, you aren’t really going to play golf again. You said you had all those calls to make this afternoon.”
“I made calls this morning.”
“Two. You made two. On Freddy Davis and Mrs. Landis. The same old safe ones. What about the Ferrys? You’ve been talking about the Ferrys for six months.”
“What’s so sacred about the Ferrys? They never do anything for the church. She came on Christmas Sunday and went out by the choir door so she wouldn’t have to speak to me.