Rabbit, Run by John Updike Page B

woman who came to the door could have been on television selling cake mix. But she said, “Come on in boys, don’t be shaaeh, come on in and heyiv a good taam,” said it so motherly, and there they were, not as many as he had pictured, in the parlor on old-fashioned-looking furniture with scrolls and knobs. That they were pretty homely made him less timid, just ordinary factory-looking women, you wouldn’t even call them girls, with a glaze on their faces like under fluorescent lights. They pelted the soldiers with remarks like balls of dust and the men sneezed into laughter and huddled together surprised and numb. The one he took, but she took him, came up and touched him, hadn’t buttoned her blouse more than one button from the last one and upstairs asked him in her gritty sugar voice if he wanted the light on or off and when out of choked throat he answered “Off” laughed, and then now and then smiled under him, working around to get him right, and even speaking kindly: “You’re all right, honey. You’re gone along all right.” So that when it was over he was hurt to learn, from the creases of completion at the sides of her lips and the hard way she wouldn’t keep lying beside him but got up and sat on the edge of the metal-frame bed looking out the dark window at the green night sky, that she hadn’t meant her half. Her mute back showing in yellow-white the bar of a swimming-suit bra angered him; he took the ball of her shoulder in his hand and turned her roughly. It was kid stuff; the weighted shadows of her front hung so careless and undefended he looked away. She said down into his ear, “Honey, you didn’t pay to be no two-timer.” Sweet woman, she was money. The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. Its noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love.

    His dreams are shallow, furtive things. His legs switch. His lips move a little against the pillow. The skin of his eyelids shudders as his eyeballs turn, surveying the inner wall of vision. Otherwise be is as dead, beyond harm. The slash of sun on the wall above him slowly knifes down, cuts across his chest, becomes a coin on the floor, and vanishes. In shadow he suddenly awakes, his ghostly blue irises searching the unfamiliar planes for the source of men’s voices. These voices are downstairs, and a rumble suggests that they are moving the furniture, tramping in circles, hunting him. But a familiar bulbous basso rings out, it is Tothero, and around this firm center the noises downstairs crystallize as the sounds of card-playing, drinking, horseplay, companionship. Rabbit rolls in his hot hollow and turns his face to his cool companion, the wall, and through a red cone of consciousness falls asleep again.
    “Harry! Harry!” The voice is plucking at his shoulder, rumpling his hair. He rolls away from the wall, squinting upward into vanished sunshine. Tothero sits in the shadows, a hulk of darkness dense with some anxiousness. His dirty-milk face leans forward, scarred by a lopsided smile. There is a smell of whisky. “Harry, I’ve got a girl for you!”
    “Great. Bring her in.”
    The old man laughs, uneasily? What does he mean?
    “You mean Janice?”
    “It’s after six o’clock. Get up, get up, Harry; you’ve slept like a beautiful baby. We’re going out.”
    “Why?” Rabbit meant to ask “Where?”
    “To eat, Harry, to dine. D-I-N-E . Rise my boy. Aren’t you hungry? Hunger. Hunger.” He’s a madman. He jumps off the bed, pivots a few times on his quick man’s little feet, and goes through the motions of bringing things to his mouth. “Oh Harry, you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t understand that.” He walks to the window and looks down into the alley, his lumpy profile leaden in the dull light.
    Rabbit slides