Marry Me by John Updike Page B

bulldozer rested tilting, as if abandoned in the middle of a lurch on the stroke ending the working day. An air of peace hung above these scraped acres. Beyond, a filament of highway bridge silently glittered with the passage of cars. There were trees, and some reddish rows of government housing, and a distant plantation manse on a low blue ridge, and an immense soft sky going green above the hushed horizon. It was a landscape of unexpected benevolence. Her toes felt cool out of her shoes, and her man regained his reality in the presence of air and grass.
    ‘I see us,’ he said stretching his arm towards the distance, ‘in Wyoming, with your children, and a horse, and a cold little lake we can swim in, and a garden we can make near the house.’
    She laughed. She had once said, in passing, that she had always wanted to return to the West, but not to the Coast, and he had built their whole future on it. ‘Wyoming’ – the very word, when she wrote it to herself, seemed open and free. ‘Don’t tease me,’ she said.
    ‘Do I tease you? I don’t mean to. I say these things because I feel them, I want them. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not very strong with you; I guess I should pretend I don’t think it would be wonderful. But it would be wonderful, if I could swallow the guilt. We’d spend the first month making love and looking at things. We’d bevery tired when we got there, and we’d have to start looking at the world all over again, and rebuild it from the bottom up, beginning with the pebbles.’
    She laughed. ‘Is that what we’d do?’
    He seemed hurt. ‘No? Doesn’t that make sense? I always want land after making love to you. This morning, stepping into the street with you on my arm, I saw a little plant in the window of a shop, and it was terribly vivid to me. Every leaf, every vein. It’s the way I saw things in art school. In Wyoming, I’d take up painting again, and draw toasters for an ad agency in Casper.’
    ‘Tell me about art school, Jerry.’
    ‘There’s nothing to tell. I went there, and met Ruth, and she painted quite well in a feminine way, and her father was a minister, and I married her. I’m not sorry. We had good years.’
    ‘You know, you’d miss her.’
    ‘In ways, perhaps. You’d miss Richard, oddly enough.’
    ‘Don’t say “oddly enough”, Jerry. Sometimes you make me feel it’s all my doing. You and Ruth were happy –’
    ‘No.’
    ‘– and along came this miserable woman pretending she wanted a lover when what she really wanted was you for a husband.’
    ‘No. Listen. I loved you for years. You know that. It didn’t take our sleeping together to tell me that I loved you; it was the way you looked. As to marriage, you weren’t the one who brought that up. You assumed it was impossible. It was I who thought it might be possible. It was bad of me to mention it before I wassure, but even that, I did out of love for you; I wanted you to know – Oh, I talk too much. The word “love” is beginning to sound nonsensical.’
    ‘You’ve done one thing wrong, Jerry.’
    ‘What’s that? I’ve done everything wrong.’
    ‘In making me feel so loved you’ve convinced me being somebody’s mistress is too shabby for me.’
    ‘It is. You’re too nice, you’re too straight, really. You give too completely. I hate myself for accepting.’
    ‘Accept, Jerry. If you can’t take me as a wife, don’t spoil me as a mistress.’
    ‘But I don’t want you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game. You can’t take this indefinitely; you think you can, but I know you can’t.’
    ‘I guess I know it too. It’s just that I’m so scared of trying for everything and losing what we have.’
    ‘What we have is love. But love must become fruitful, or it loses itself. I don’t mean having babies – God, we’ve all had too many