Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,41
derange his head; all the things inside his skull, the gray matter, the bones of his ears, the apparatus of his eyes, seem clutter clogging the tube of his self; his sinuses choke, with a sneeze or tears, he doesn’t know. The living-room has the feel of dust. The shades are still drawn. Janice drew them in the afternoons to keep glare off the television screen. Someone has made gestures of cleaning up; her ashtrays and her empty glass have been taken away. Rabbit puts the door key and the car keys on top of the television case, metal painted brown in imitation of wood grain. As he opens the closet door the knob bumps against the edge of the set. Some of her clothes are gone.
He means to reach for his clothes but instead turns and wanders toward the kitchen, trying to gather up the essence of what he has done. Their bed sags in the filtered sunlight. Never a good bed. Her parents had given it to them. On the bureau sit a few of her bottles and jars and a fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some brass hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous numbers and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of wood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas. Insecurely tilted against the wall is the big oval mirror they took away when her parents had a new bathroom put in; he always meant to attach it to the plaster above her bureau for her but never got around to buying molly bolts. A glass on the windowsill, half full of stale, bubbled water, throws a curved patch of diluted sun onto the bare place where the mirror should have been fixed. Three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel; what ever made them, when? Beyond the edge of the made bed a white triangle of bathroom floor shows: the time after her shower, her bottom blushing with steam, lifting her arms gladly to kiss him, soaked licks of hair in her armpits. What gladness had seized her, and then him, unasked?
In the kitchen he discovers an odd oversight. The pork chops never taken from the pan, cold as death, riding congealed grease. He dumps them out in the paper bag under the sink and with a spatula scrapes crumbs of the stiff specked fat after them. The bag, stained dark brown at the bottom, smells of something sweetly rotting. He puzzles, the can is downstairs out back, can’t take two trips. He decides to forget it. He draws scalding water into the sink and puts the pan in to soak. The breath of steam like a whisper in a tomb frightens him.
In haste he takes clean Jockey pants, T-shirts, and socks from a drawer, three shirts in cellophane and blue cardboard from another, a pair of laundered suntans from a third, draws his two suits and a sports shirt from the closet, and wraps the smaller clothing in the suits to form a bundle he can carry. The job makes him sweat. Clutching his clothes between two arms and a lifted thigh, he surveys the apartment once more, and the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face; the rooms are filled with flavor of an awkward job, and he is glad to get out. The door snaps shut behind him irrevocably. His key is inside.
Toothbrush. Razor. Cuff links. Shoes. At each step down he remembers something he forgot. He hurries, his feet patter. Jumps. His head almost hits the naked bulb burning at the end of a black cord in the vestibule. His name on the mailbox seems to call at him as he sweeps past; its letters of blue ink crowd the air like a cry. He feels ridiculous, ducking into the sunlight like one of those weird thieves you read about in the back pages of newspapers who instead of stealing money and silver carry away a porcelain washbasin, twenty rolls of wallpaper, or a bundle of old clothes.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Angstrom.”
A neighbor is passing, Miss Arndt, in a lavender church hat, carrying a palm frond in clutched hands. “Oh. Hello. How are you?” She lives three houses up; they think she has cancer.
“I am just splendid,” she says. “Just splendid.” And stands there in sunshine, bewildered by splendor, flatfooted, leaning unconsciously against the