Marry Me by John Updike Read Free Book Online

in.
    ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Help me choose.’
    ‘No. I can’t.’
    ‘Sally.’
    ‘Do it yourself. They’re your children – yours and Ruth’s.’
    His face went pale; he had never seen her like this.
    She tried to make it better. ‘I’ll walk to the hotel and pack your suitcase. Don’t worry. Please don’t make me buy the toys with you.’
    ‘Listen. I love –’ He tried to take her arm.
    ‘Don’t embarrass me, Jerry. People are trying to get by.’
    In walking down Fourteenth Street alone, the pavement pricking her eyes with mica, she began to cry, and realized it didn’t matter, for no one was looking at her, no one at all in these multitudes.
    Together they left the hotel and caught a taxi. They crossed the Potomac and passed an inexplicable wreck on the Washington Memorial Parkway. An old blue Dodge with red Ohio plates had turned turtle in the middle lane, it was impossible to guess why. No other automobile seemed involved. Laughing policemen were redirecting traffic in the sunshine. Two fat women with dishevelled hair were embracing each other on the median strip, and the road surface glittered with glass powder. Jerry’s hand tightened over hers. Then the wreck was behind them, the traffic expanded and speeded, the taxi driver ceased muttering, and they wound their way through a series of loops to the north terminal.
    The waiting room was unexpectedly crowded, for a weekday afternoon. In the faces that turned towards them Sally felt them register as a handsome couple, vaguely ordinary and vaguely striking, he in grey andshe in black, he with a suitcase, she with a paperback Camus. She pictured them entering a lifetime of airports, depots, piers, and hotel lobbies, and knew that they would always look like this, tallish, young, bumping together a bit too much. She wished Jerry would stop touching her; it damaged the illusion that they were married. The maintenance of this illusion did not seem to concern him here. He put down his bag and walked to a waiting line, leaving her, flustered, blushing, to take a place in the adjacent line. The line was long and sluggish; it slowly dawned on Sally that the air of jocular agitation in the room did not centre around her embarrassment. She was startled – as a sleeper is startled to find, upon awakening, a room whose furniture has steadfastly kept its shape throughout her long immersion in dreams – to realize that other people and other problems existed. A plump flushed man in rumpled Dacron joined the line behind her and in sheer force of worry several times nudged her legs with his briefcase. ‘I’m supposed to be in Newark by seven,’ he explained. His anxious face had forgotten the attempted suavity of its blurry little moustache. Once, Richard had affected such a moustache, and she wondered if that was why his upper lip seemed now, in profile, so bald and vulnerable.
    When the two lines wobbled close enough to touch, Jerry held her arm and said, ‘Apparently the strike at Eastern has created a jam-up here. We should have thought to make reservations. What time must you be back?’
    ‘I had thought between five and six. Don’t look so worried , Jerry.’
    ‘I’m not worried for myself. She won’t meet me until nine. Let me think. It’s five after three now. Assuming we miss the three-fifteen, that puts you on the four-fifteen, your car’s at LaGuardia –’
    ‘It may not start.’
    She said it to tease him. But he was not amused. His long face tensed and lost the laughter wrinkles that gave it some look of maturity, of having endured. Richard had more than once remarked of Jerry that he never suffered. She took the remark to mean that Jerry skimmed where Richard burrowed, or that Ruth was easier to live with than she. But it haunted her, and she wondered if that was why Jerry had taken her into his life, to be taught about suffering. He said, ‘Let’s assume it does start. You’ll be home a little after six, allowing for the rush. Is