her her breasts, and Ruth had envied their smallness, unembarrassed and firm. Since the age of thirteen Ruth had felt her breasts were too big. It was as if, Ruth felt, there had not been enough of her grown inside to carry them off; and this sensation had persisted; her life pushed on ahead of her, betraying an inner woman not quite ready to be unveiled. Across the fire, Jerry looked unfamiliar, happy in his skin, beside the bigger, softer man, who was benignly drunk, as were they all. Yet the idyll was not repeated. The rest of that summer, the Mathiases took other couples musselling, and that winter they separated – another piece of excess, it seemed to the Conants, another showy extravagance – over an affair Richard had evidently been conducting in Cannonport. By the time they reconciled in the spring, and Richard returned to Greenwood, the boat had been, in one of his mysterious financial manoeuvres, sold.
He took satisfaction in being mysterious. He travelled to no apparent purpose, often overnight, and his money-making schemes – a local coffeehouse, a publishing firm specializing in Oriental erotica, a firm that would re-upholster automobiles in the same kind of tapestry-cloth being used in the newly fashionable ‘carpetbag’ suitcases – never came to much. In conversation with women, he would pretend not to understand the simplest statements, and his good eye would water, in sympathy with his bad, in sympathy with the sadness of what was being confessed to him.
It made Ruth blush, as if a secret were being pried from her, and then blush with anger, anger at herself for blushing, and at Richard, for being an intrusive fool. Yet not merely that. Possibly she was betraying a secret, the secret of herself that she had kept from Jerry these eight years of being his wife. It was a wordless secret, that is, one that Ruth did not seek words for. She liked Richard’s smell, tobacco and liquor and a leathery staleness reminding her of her father’s study after one of his weary Saturdays writing a sermon; she liked the protective baffled way he hunched and lurched at parties, and always, sooner or later, came to talk to her. Jerry noticed this; he hated Richard. Richard was one of the few people they had ever met, in their thirty years in materialist America, who professed being an atheist. When she had mentioned to him Jerry’s insistence that the children go to Sunday school, Richard’s wiry eyebrows arched and the live eye widened and he laughed disbelievingly ‘For God’s sake, why?’
‘Because it matters to him,’ Ruth said, loyally – though perhaps such clearly reflexive loyalty was disloyalty.
After this, Richard didn’t always pass up a chance to ‘bug’ Jerry, as he put it. Once, on the Mathiases’ side lawn in the pride of a summer afternoon, Richard produced a plastic dashboard Christ that had arrived unsolicited in the mails, and proceeded to clean his fingernails with the tip of the hand upraised in blessing. ‘Look, Sally-O,’ he had said, ‘doesn’t Christ make a good fingernail-picker?’ Sally, who had been raised, Ruth had gathered, as a Catholic, snatched the little doll from Richard’s hand and said something to the effect that she didn’t know what she believed, but … really, Richard. Jerry had turned pale under the sun. He always used the incident afterwards to illustrate how sadistic that bastard Mathias was to his wife.
Whereas in truth Richard was too good to Sally. As her voice rose shrill from a corner of a rumpus room or the patio of a lawn party, he would wince, but clamp his lips shut on the conclusion of a bargain, the price he was paying for her high visibility. He had a family sense that Jerry quite lacked. No matter how late the night’s drinking, he rose early, often cooking breakfast for his wife and children, while Jerry didn’t get up until the children were fed and out of the house and there were minutes to make the 8.17. Though Jerry mocked
He took satisfaction in being mysterious. He travelled to no apparent purpose, often overnight, and his money-making schemes – a local coffeehouse, a publishing firm specializing in Oriental erotica, a firm that would re-upholster automobiles in the same kind of tapestry-cloth being used in the newly fashionable ‘carpetbag’ suitcases – never came to much. In conversation with women, he would pretend not to understand the simplest statements, and his good eye would water, in sympathy with his bad, in sympathy with the sadness of what was being confessed to him.
It made Ruth blush, as if a secret were being pried from her, and then blush with anger, anger at herself for blushing, and at Richard, for being an intrusive fool. Yet not merely that. Possibly she was betraying a secret, the secret of herself that she had kept from Jerry these eight years of being his wife. It was a wordless secret, that is, one that Ruth did not seek words for. She liked Richard’s smell, tobacco and liquor and a leathery staleness reminding her of her father’s study after one of his weary Saturdays writing a sermon; she liked the protective baffled way he hunched and lurched at parties, and always, sooner or later, came to talk to her. Jerry noticed this; he hated Richard. Richard was one of the few people they had ever met, in their thirty years in materialist America, who professed being an atheist. When she had mentioned to him Jerry’s insistence that the children go to Sunday school, Richard’s wiry eyebrows arched and the live eye widened and he laughed disbelievingly ‘For God’s sake, why?’
‘Because it matters to him,’ Ruth said, loyally – though perhaps such clearly reflexive loyalty was disloyalty.
After this, Richard didn’t always pass up a chance to ‘bug’ Jerry, as he put it. Once, on the Mathiases’ side lawn in the pride of a summer afternoon, Richard produced a plastic dashboard Christ that had arrived unsolicited in the mails, and proceeded to clean his fingernails with the tip of the hand upraised in blessing. ‘Look, Sally-O,’ he had said, ‘doesn’t Christ make a good fingernail-picker?’ Sally, who had been raised, Ruth had gathered, as a Catholic, snatched the little doll from Richard’s hand and said something to the effect that she didn’t know what she believed, but … really, Richard. Jerry had turned pale under the sun. He always used the incident afterwards to illustrate how sadistic that bastard Mathias was to his wife.
Whereas in truth Richard was too good to Sally. As her voice rose shrill from a corner of a rumpus room or the patio of a lawn party, he would wince, but clamp his lips shut on the conclusion of a bargain, the price he was paying for her high visibility. He had a family sense that Jerry quite lacked. No matter how late the night’s drinking, he rose early, often cooking breakfast for his wife and children, while Jerry didn’t get up until the children were fed and out of the house and there were minutes to make the 8.17. Though Jerry mocked
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