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

and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him; Tothero is an eddy of air, and the building he is in, the streets of the town, are mere stairways and alleyways in space. So perfect, so consistent is the freedom into which the clutter of the world has been vaporized by the simple trigger of his decision, that all ways seem equally good, all movements will put the same caressing pressure on his skin, and not an atom of his happiness would be altered if Tothero told him they were not going to meet two girls but two goats, and they were going not to Brewer but to Tibet. He adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero’s shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama. Like a cloud breaking in the corner of his vision Tothero drifts to the !window. “Is my car still there?” Rabbit asks.
    “Your car is blue. Yes. Put on your shoes.”
    “I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?” For in the vast blank of his freedom Rabbit has remembered a few imperfections, his home, his wife’s, their apartment, clots of concern. It seems impossible that the passage of time should have so soon dissolved them, but Tothero’s answer implies it.
    “No,” he says. He adds, “But then of course I didn’t go where there would have been talk of you.”
    It annoys Rabbit that Tothero shows no interest in him except as a partner on a joyride. “I should have gone to work today,” he says in a pointed voice, as if blaming the old man.
    “What do you do?”
    “I demonstrate a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeel Peeler in five-and-dime stores.”
    “A noble calling,” Tothero says, and turns from the window. “Splendid, Harry. You’re dressed at last.”
    “Is there a comb anywhere, Mr. Tothero? I ought to use the can.”
    Under their feet the men in the Sunshine Athletic Association laugh and catcall at some foolishness. Rabbit pictures passing among them and asks, “Say, should everybody see me?”
    Tothero becomes indignant, as he used to now and then at practice, when everybody was just fooling around the basket and not going into the drills. “What are you afraid of, Harry? That poor little Janice Springer? You overestimate people. Nobody cares what you do. Now we’ll just go down there and don’t be too long in the toilet. And I haven’t heard any thanks from you for all I’ve done for you, and all I am doing.” He takes the comb stuck in the brush bristles and gives it to Harry.
    A dread of marring his freedom blocks the easy gesture of expressing gratitude. Rabbit pronounces “Thanks” thin-lipped.
    They go downstairs. Contrary to what Tothero had promised, all of the men—old men, mostly, but not very old, so that their impotence has a nasty vigor—look up with interest at him. Insanely, Tothero introduces him repeatedly: “Fred, this is my finest boy, a wonderful basketball player, Harry Angstrom, you probably remember his name from the papers, he twice set a county record, in 1950 and then he broke it in 1951, a wonderful accomplishment.”
    “Is that right, Marty?”
    “Harry, an honor to meet you.”
    Their alert colorless eyes, little dark smears like their mouths, feed on the strange sight of him and send acid impressions down to be digested in their disgusting big beer-tough stomachs. Rabbit sees that Tothero is a fool to them, and is ashamed of his friend and of himself. He hides in the lavatory. The paint is worn off the toilet seat and the washbasin is stained by the hot-water faucet’s rusty tears; the walls are oily and the towel-rack empty. There is something terrible in the height of the tiny ceiling: a square yard of a dainty metal pattern covered with cobwebs in which a few white husks of insects