Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,116
department stores with music piping from the walls and eating a hot dog at the five and ten and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. He kept expecting to see her shoulders that he kissed jostle out of a crowd and the ginger hair he used to beg to unpin shining on the other side of a rack of birthday cards. But it was a city of over a hundred thousand and the odds were totally against him and anyway there was tons of time he could find her another day. No, what kept him in the city despite the increasing twisting inside that told him something was wrong back home, what kept him walking through the cold air breathed from the doors of movie houses and up and down between counters of perfumed lingerie thinking of all the delicate ass these veils would flavor the little tits to be tucked into these cups and jewelry and salted nuts poor old Jan and up into the park along paths he walked once with Ruth to watch from under a horse-chestnut tree five mangy kids play cat with a tennis ball and a broomstick and then finally back down Weiser to the drugstore he called from, what kept him walking was the idea that somewhere he’d find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice wasn’t so much that she was in the right for once and he was wrong and stupid but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And the feeling that he wouldn’t always be able to produce this flame. What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it’s this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus, he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it. The kink in his stomach starts to take the form of nausea and he clings to the icy bar bitterly as the bus swings around the mountain. He gets off, in a sweat, blocks too soon. Here in Mt. Judge the shadows have begun to grow deep, the sun baking Brewer rides the crest of the mountain, and his sweat congeals, shortening his breath. He runs to keep his body occupied, to joggle his mind blank. Past a dry-cleaning plant with a little pipe hissing steam at the side. Through the oil and rubber smells riding above the asphalt pond around the red pumps of an Esso station. Past the Mt. Judge town-hall lawn and the World War II honor roll with the name plaques crumbled and blistered behind glass.
When he gets to the Springers’ house Mrs. comes to the door and shuts it in his face. But he knows from the olive Buick parked outside that Eccles is in there and in a little while Jack comes to the door and lets him in. He says softly in the dim hall, “Your wife has been given a sedative and is asleep.”
“The baby …”
“The undertaker has her.”
Rabbit wants to cry out, it seems indecent, for the undertaker to be taking such a tiny body, that they ought to bury it in its own simplicity, like the body of a bird, in a small hole dug in the grass. But he nods. He feels he will never resist anything again.
Eccles goes upstairs and Harry sits in a chair and watches the light from the window play across an iron table of ferns and African violets and cacti. Where it hits the leaves they are bright yellow-green; the leaves in shadow in front of them look like black-green holes cut in this golden color. Somebody comes down the stairs with an erratic step. He doesn’t turn his head to see who it is; he doesn’t want to risk looking anybody in the face. A furry touch on his forearm and he meets Nelson’s eyes. The child’s face is stretched shiny with curiosity. “Mommy sleep,” he says in a deep voice imitating the tragedy-struck voices he has been hearing.
Rabbit pulls him up into his lap.