Read Online Rabbit, Run by John Updike - Free Book Online

back the covers, angles his naked legs over the edge, and holds himself in a sitting position. The sight of his thighs, parallel, pure, aligns his groggy brain. The hair on his legs, once a thin blond fur, is getting dark and whiskery. The odor of his sleep-soaked body rises to him. “Whatsis girl business?” he asks.
    “What is it, yes, what is it?” he asks and utters three obscenities in a stream touching a woman in her three parts, and in the gray light by the window his face falls; he seems amazed to hear himself. Yet he’s also watching, as if this was some sort of test. The result determined, he corrects himself, “No. I have an acquaintance, an acquaintance in Brewer, a ladylove perhaps; whom I stand to a meal once in a blue moon. But it’s nothing more than that, little more than that. Harry, you’re so innocent.”
    Rabbit begins to be afraid of Tothero, these phrases are so inconsequential, and stands up in his underclothes. “I think I just better run along.” The flour-fluff sticks to the soles of his bare feet.
    “Oh Harry, Harry,” Tothero cries in a rich voice mixed of pain and affection, and comes forward and hugs him with one arm. “You and I are two of a kind.” The big lopsided face looks up into his with confidence, but Rabbit sees no resemblance. Yet his memory of the man as his coach still disposes him to listen. “You and I know what the score is, we know—” And right here, arriving at the kernel of his lesson, Tothero is balked, and becomes befuddled. He repeats, “We know,” and removes his arm.
    Rabbit says, “I thought we were going to talk about Janice when I woke up.” He picks up his trousers from the floor and puts them on. Their being rumpled disturbs him; reminds him that he has taken a giant step, and makes nervous wrinkles in his stomach and throat.
    “We will, we will,” Tothero says, “the moment our social obligations are satisfied.” A pause. “Do you want to go back now? You must tell me if you do.”
    Rabbit remembers the dumb slot of her mouth, the way the closet door bumps against the television set. “No. God.”
    Tothero is overjoyed; it is happiness making him talk so much. “Well then, well then; get dressed. We can’t go to Brewer undressed. Do you need a fresh shirt?”
    “Yours wouldn’t fit me, would it?”
    “No, Harry, no? What’s your size?”
    “Fifteen three.”
    “Mine! Mine exactly. You have short arms for your height. Oh, this is wonderful, Harry. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you came to me when you needed help. All those years,” he says, taking a shirt from the bureau made of beer cases and stripping off the cellophane, “all those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands, and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back.”
    Rabbit is startled to feel and to see in Tothero’s mirror that the shirt fits. Their difference must be all in their legs. With the rattling tongue of a proud mother Tothero watches him dress. His talk makes more sense, now that the embarrassment of explaining what they’re going to do is past. “It does my heart good,” he says. “Youth before the mirror. How long has it been, Harry, now tell me truly, since you had a good time? A long time?”
    “I had a good time last night,” Rabbit says. “I drove to West Virginia and back.”
    “You’ll like my lady, I know you will, a city flower,” Tothero goes on. “The girl she’s bringing I’ve never met. She says she’s fat. All the world looks fat to my lady—how she eats, Harry: the appetite of the young. That’s a fascinating knot, you young people have so many tricks I never learned.”
    “It’s just a Windsor.” Dressed, Rabbit feels a return of calm. Waking up had in a way returned him to the world he deserted. He had missed Janice’s crowding presence, the kid and his shrill needs, his own walls. He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent,