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

are suspended. His depression deepens, becomes a kind of paralysis; he walks out and rejoins Tothero limping and stiffly grimacing, and they leave the place in a dream. He feels affronted, vaguely invaded, when Tothero gets into his car. But, just as in a dream he never stops to question, Rabbit slides in behind the wheel and, in the renewed relation of his arms and legs to the switches and pedals, puts on again the mantle of power. His wet-combed hair feels stiff on his head.
    He says sharply, “So you think I should’ve drunk with Janice.”
    “Do what the heart commands,” Tothero says. “The heart is our only guide.” He sounds weary and far away.
    “Into Brewer?”
    There is no answer.
    Rabbit drives up the alley, coming to Potter Avenue, where the water from the ice plant used to run down. He goes right, away from Wilbur Street, where his apartment is, and two more turns bring him into Central Street heading around the mountain to Brewer. On the left, land drops away into a chasm floored by the slick still width of the Running Horse River; on the right, gasoline stations glow, twirlers flicker on strings, spotlights protest.
    As the town thins, Tothero’s tongue loosens. “The ladies we’re going to meet, now Harry, I have no conception of what the other one will be like, but I know you’ll be a gentleman. And I guarantee you’ll like my friend. She is a remarkable girl, Harry, with seven strikes against her from birth, but she’s done a remarkable thing.”
    “What?”
    “She’s come to grips. Isn’t that the whole secret, Harry; to come to grips? It makes me happy, happy and humble, to have, as I do, this very tenuous association with her. Harry?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Do you realize, Harry, that a young woman has hair on every part of her body?”
    “I hadn’t thought about it.” Distaste, like an involuntary glandular secretion, has stained his throat.
    “Do,” Tothero says. “Do think about it. They are monkeys, Harry. Women are monkeys.”
    He says it so solemn, Rabbit has to laugh.
    Tothero laughs too, and comes closer on the seat. “Yet we love them, Harry, don’t we? Harry, why do we love them? Answer that, and you’ll answer the riddle of life.” He is squirming around, crossing and uncrossing his legs, leaning over and tapping Rabbit’s shoulder and jerking back and glancing out the side window and turning and tapping again. “I am a hideous person, Harry. A person to be abhorred. Harry, let me tell you something.” As a coach he was always telling you something. “My wife calls me a person to be abhorred. But do you know when it began? It began with her skin. One day in the spring, in nineteen forty-three or four, it was during the war, without warning it was hideous. It was like the hides of a thousand lizards stitched together. Stitched together clumsily . Can you picture that? That sense of it being in pieces horrified me, Harry. Are you listening? You’re not listening. You’re wondering why you came to me.”
    “What you said about Janice this morning kind of worries me.”
    “Janice! Let’s not talk about little mutts like Janice Springer, Harry boy. This is the night. This is no time for pity. The real women are dropping down out of the trees.” With his hands he imitates things falling out of trees. “Plippity, plippity.”
    Even discounting the man as a maniac, Rabbit becomes expectant. They park the car off Weiser Avenue and meet the girls in front of a Chinese restaurant.
    The girls waiting under crimson neon have a floral delicacy; like a touch of wilt the red light rims their fluffy hair. Rabbit’s heart thumps ahead of him down the pavement. They all come together and Tothero introduces Margaret, “Margaret Kosko, Harry Angstrom, my finest athlete, it’s a pleasure for me to be able to introduce two such wonderful young people to one another.” The old man’s manner is queerly shy; his voice has a cough waiting in it.
    After Tothero’s build-up, Rabbit is