Rabbit, Run by John Updike Page B

Either one.”
    “Well then undress me and stop screwing around.”
    He sighs through his nose. “You have a sweet tongue,” he says.
    “I’m sorry if I shock you.” Yet in her voice is a small metallic withdrawal, as if she really is.
    “You don’t,” he says and, business-like, stoops and takes the hem of her dress in his hands. His eyes are enough accustomed to the dark now to see the cloth as green. He peels it up her body, and she lifts her arms, and her head gets caught for a moment in the neck-hole. She shakes her head crossly, like a dog with a scrap, and the dress comes free, skims off her arms into his hands floppy and faintly warm. He sails it into a chair hulking in a corner. “God,” he says, “you’re pretty.” She is a ghost in her silver slip. Dragging the dress over her head has loosened her hair. Her solemn face tilts as she quickly lifts out the pins. Her hair falls out of heavy loops.
    “Yeah,” she says. “Pretty plump.”
    “No,” he says, “you are,” and in the space of a breath goes to her and picks her up, great glistening sugar in her sifty-grained slip, and carries her to the bed, and lays her on it. “So pretty.”
    “You lifted me,” she says. “That’ll put you out of action.”
    Harsh direct light falls on her face; the creases on her neck show black. He asks, “Shall I pull the shade?”
    “Please. It’s a dismal view.”
    He goes to the window and bends to see what she means. There is only the church across the way, gray, somber, confident. Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath. He feels gratitude to the builders of this ornament, and lowers the shade on it guiltily. He turns quickly, and Ruth’s eyes watch him out of shadows that also seem gaps in a surface. The curve of her hip supports a crescent of silver; his sense of her weight seems to make an aroma.
    “What’s next?” He takes off his coat and throws it; he loves this throwing things, the way the flying cloth puts him in the center of a gathering nakedness. “Stockings?”
    “They’re tricky,” she says. “I don’t want a run.”
    “You do it then.” In a sitting position, with the soft-pawed irritable deftness of a cat, she extricates herself from a web of elastic and silk and cotton; he helps clumsily. His uncertain touches gather in his own body, bending him into a forest smelling of spice. He is out of all dimension, and in a dark land, and a tender entire woman seems an inch away around a kind of corner. When he straightens up on his knees, kneeling as he is by the bed, Ruth under his eyes is an incredible continent, the pushed-up slip a north of snow.
    “So much,” he says.
    “Too much.”
    “No, listen. You’re good.” He kisses her lips; her lips expect more than they get. Into their wet flower he drops a brief bee’s probe. Cupping a hand behind her hot sheltered neck, he pulls her up, and slides her slip over her head. In just the liquid ease it comes off with he feels delight; how clothes just fall from a woman who wants to be stripped. The cool hollow his hand finds in the small of her back mixes in his mind with the shallow shadows of the stretch of skin that slopes from the bones of her shoulders. He kisses this expanse. Where her skin is whiter it is cooler. She shrugs off her bra. He moves away and sits on the corner of the bed and drinks in the pure sight of her. She keeps her arm tight against the one breast and brings up her hand to cover the other; a ring glints. Her modesty praises him; it shows she is feeling. The straight arm props her weight. Light lies along her right side where it can catch her body as it turns in stillness; this pose, embarrassed and graceful, she holds; rigidity is her one defense against his eyes and her figure does come to seem to him inviolable; absolute; her nakedness swings in tides of