Rabbit, Run - John Updike [78]
“That’s not true.” Harrison’s practiced palms flicker more hastily. “He volunteered it to me. Not that it was anything I didn’t know; the whole school knew it.”
Did it? Nobody ever told him.
Ruth says, “God, let’s not talk basketball. Every time I go out with this bastard we talk nothing but.”
He wonders, Did doubt show on his face, and she say that to reassure him? Does she in any part of her pity him?
Harrison perhaps thinks he’s been uglier than befits his sales-conference suavity. He takes out a cigarette and a lizard-skin Ronson.
Rabbit turns to Margaret—something in the way this arranges the nerves in his neck rings a bell, makes him think he turned to her exactly like this a million years ago—and says, “You never answered me.”
“Nuts, I don’t know where he is. I guess he went home. He was sick.”
“Just sick, or—” Harrison’s mouth does a funny thing, smiling and pursing both, as if he is introducing, with deference, this bit of Manhattan cleverness to his rural friends for the first time, and taps his head to make sure they will “get it”—sick, sick, sick?”
“All ways,” Margaret says. A serious shadow crosses her face that seems to remove her and Harry, who sees it, from the others, and takes them into that strange area of a million years ago from which they have wandered; a strange guilt pierces Harry at being here, instead of there, where he never was. Ruth and Harrison across from them, touched by staccato red light, seem specters glimpsed from the heart of damnation.
“Dear Ruth,” Harrison says, “how have you been? I often worry about you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she says, yet seems pleased. The Negress brings their drinks and Harrison sets his lizard-skin Ronson beside his glass, as if suggesting it’s for sale. “Did you know,” he asks Harry, with a sweet smile, as if he’s chatting with a child, “that Ruth and I once went to Atlantic City together?”
“There was another couple,” she tells Harry.
“A disgusting pair,” Harrison says, “who preferred the shabby privacy of their own bungalow to the golden sunshine outdoors. The male of this twosome later confided to me, with ill-concealed pride, that he had enjoyed the orgasmatic climax eleven times in the all-too-short period of thirty-six hours.”
Margaret laughs. “Honestly, Ronnie, to hear you talk sometimes you’d think you went to Harvard.”
“Princeton,” he corrects. “Princeton is the effect I want to give. Harvard is suspect around here.”
Rabbit looks toward Ruth to see if she is still on his side. With dismay he sees that the second Daiquiri is on its way and the first has been delivered. She titters. “The awful thing about them,” she says, “was that they did it in the car. Here was poor Ronnie, trying to drive through all this Sundaynight traffic, and I looked back at a stoplight and Betsy’s dress was up around her neck.”
“I didn’t drive all the way,” Harrison tells her. “Remember we finally got him to drive.” His head tips toward her for confirmation and his pink scalp glints.
“Yeah.” Ruth looks into her glass and titters again, maybe at the thought of Betsy naked.
Harrison watches narrowly the effect of this on Rabbit. “This guy,” he says, in the pushy-quiet voice of offering a deal, “had an interesting theory. He thought”—Harrison’s hands grip air—“that right at the crucial, how shall I say?—development, you should slap your partner, as hard as you can, right in the face. If you’re in a position to. Otherwise slap what you can.”
Rabbit blinks; he really doesn’t know what to do about this awful guy.