Marry Me by John Updike Page B

supreme Unitarian commandment, it was Face things. ‘Having things out’ had been her father’s phrase, returning post-midnight from some ecumenical, interracial scrimmage in Poughkeepsie. One empty winter afternoon, two children at school and Geoffrey asleep, the whole house ticking like a clock, the furnace heaving, the floorboards drying, the outdoors brilliant with snow, Richard appeared at the door. Seeing his old tan Mercedes from the living-room windows as she went to answer the ring, she knew who it would be. The door was stuck and the wrench it took to pull it open startled them both. Framed in the doorway, wearing a raincoat and a plaid lumber-jack shirt open at the neck, he seemed a huge, woeful apparition. He had brought her a book they had discussed, the new Murdoch, as an excuse. As an excuse, it was cursorily offered; his instinct had told him he would not need much of one.
    She grew used to him, as winter yielded to spring.
    Under his corpulent weight, his shoulders filling her vision with soft black hairs, Ruth felt herself responding matter-of-factly to the thick, careful pounding of Richard’s carnal attack. It was all matter-of-fact, controlled, satisfactory; under this alien man there was time, time in which to make the trip to the edge and fall, fall and arrive where she had begun, pressed to the earth as if safe. The earth was her bed, hers and Jerry’s. The light of early afternoon opened around her. Geoffrey was having his nap at the other end of the upstairs. Curiously Ruth touched the little arc ofpurplish marks in the fat of Richard’s shoulder, teeth-marks left there, it seemed, by a third person. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
    ‘Sweet pain, as they say.’
    He had a phrase for everything. Unwilling to test herself against his eyes, she studied his lips. There was a disturbing elderly jut to the lower one, and lovemaking had left them liquid with saliva. ‘It’s so unlike me,’ she said.
    His lips hardly moved when he talked. ‘It’s part of the act. Mistresses bite. Wives don’t.’
    ‘Don’t.’ She wriggled to shift his weight, which was beginning to crush. ‘Don’t poke fun.’
    His breath, sourly crested with whiskey, though he had come in the back door at noon and they had gone straight to bed, was still scattered, panting. ‘Poke fun, my ass,’ he said. ‘I’m drunk. I’m fucked out.’
    She turned her eyes down, to where the skin of their chests melted together, her breasts half-clothed in the fur that made him feel in her embrace like unevenly woolly bear. Jerry by comparison felt smooth as a snake.
    Richard asked, clairvoyant, ‘Do I seem freaky to you?’
    ‘I seem that way to myself.’
    ‘Why have you let me in, Ruthie babes?’
    ‘Because you asked.’
    ‘Nobody ever asked before?’
    ‘Not that I noticed.’
    Richard’s heavy breath gathered for an effort; he pushed himself up from her chest; sadly she felt him receding into the perspective of their lives. ‘I don’t know why’ he said, ‘you and Jerry don’t work in bed. You throw a great piece.’
    She lifted her knees and cradled him in her thighs and rocked him back and forth, a touch impatiently, as if he were a baby refusing its nap. He had been naughty to mention Jerry; it threatened to spoil it. The house shuddered, and a moment later a jet breaking the sound barrier boomed above them, in the blue that stood unbroken at the windows. On the other side of the house Geoffrey began to fret in his crib. Richard must go; she must use him while he was with her. She must learn. ‘Is that really a phrase?’ she asked. ‘Throw a piece?’ The words sounded so strange in her voice that she blushed, though naked.
    Richard looked down; his rather boneless hand stroked her hair and his good eye tried to feed on her face, which was afraid. She brought her eyes to his; she owed him that much. ‘No one’s ever told you,’ he said, stroking, ‘how cunty you are.’
    He had this conception of himself as a