Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,79

But that time is past.

He repeats, “Is it so awful for you?”

“Well it is because you think it is.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Look, I’ve loved you.”

“Well I’ve loved you.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know. I want to still.”

Now those damn tears again. She tries to hurry the words out before her voice crumbles. “That’s good of you. That’s heroic.”

“Don’t be smart. Listen. Tonight you turned against me. I need to see you on your knees.”

“Well just that—”

“No. Not just that.”

The two tall drinks have been a poor experiment; she wants to go to sleep and her tongue tastes sour. She feels in her stomach her need to keep him and wonders, Will this frighten him? Will this kill her in him?

“If I did it what would it prove?”

“It’d prove you’re mine.”

“Shall I take my clothes off?”

“Sure.” He takes his off quickly and neatly and stands by the dull wall in his brilliant body. He leans awkwardly and brings one hand up and hangs it on his shoulder not knowing what to do with it. His whole shy pose has these. wings of tension, like he’s an angel waiting for a word. Sliding her last clothes off, her arms feel cold touching her sides. This last month she’s felt cold all the time; her temperature being divided or something. In the growing light he shifts slightly. She closes her eyes and tells herself, They’re, not ugly. Not.

Mrs. Springer called the rectory a little after eight. Mrs. Eccles told her Jack had taken the young people’s softball team to a game fifteen miles away and she didn’t know when he’d be home. Mrs. Springer’s panic carried over the wire and Lucy spent nearly two hours calling numbers in an attempt to reach him. It grew dark. She finally reached the minister of the church whose softball team they were playing and he told her the game had been over for an hour. The darkness thickened outside; the window whose sill held the phone became a waxy streaked mirror in which she could see herself, hair unpinning, slump back and forth between the address book and the phone. Joyce, hearing the constant ticking of the dial, came downstairs and leaned on her mother. Three times Lucy took her up to bed and twice the child came down again and leaned her damp weight against her mother’s legs in frightened silence. The whole house, room beyond room surrounding with darkness the little island of light around the telephone, filled with menace and when, the third time, Joyce failed to come down from her bed, Lucy felt guilty and forsaken both, as if she had sold her only ally to the shadows. She dialed the number of every problem case in the parish she could think of, tried the vestrymen, the church secretary, the three co-chairmen of the fund-raising drive, and even the organist, a piano-teaching professional who lived in Brewer.

The hour-hand has moved past ten; it’s getting embarrassing. It’s sounding as if she’s been deserted. And in fact it frightens her, that her husband seems to be nowhere in the world. She makes coffee and weeps weakly, in her own kitchen. How did she get into this? What drew her in? His gaiety, he was always so gay. To know him back in seminary you would never think he would take all this so seriously; he and his friends sitting in their drafty old rooms lined with handsome blue exegetical works made it all seem an elegant joke. She remembers playing with them in a softball game that was the Athanasians against the Arians. And now she never saw his gaiety, it was all spent on other people, on this grim gray intangible parish, her enemy. Oh, how she hates them, all those clinging quaint quavering widows and Christing young people; the one good thing if the Russians take over is they’ll make religion go extinct. It should have gone extinct a hundred years ago. Maybe it shouldn’t have, maybe our minds need it, but let somebody else carry it on. On Jack it was so dreary. Sometimes she feels sorry for him and abruptly, this is one of the times.

When he does come in, at quarter of eleven, it turns out he’s been sitting in a drugstore gossiping with some of his teenagers; the idiotic kids tell him everything, all smoking like chimneys, so he comes home titillated silly with “how far” you can “go” on dates and still love Jesus.

Eccles sees at once she is furious.