Marry Me by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

trips, she saw, have that possibility, of no return.
    ‘I’m thirsty’ she said.
    Jerry asked, ‘What sort of thirsty? For a real drink or just for anything?’
    ‘Just anything. A drink might make me dizzier still.’ A part of her still dreamed back on the beach with Meursault and the Arab.
    The hot-dog counter was too crowded to approach, but a hundred steps down the corridor towards the main terminal they found a bar, wide open on one side like a stage, with an empty table in a far corner. Jerry sat her here and fetched two containers of milk, in the shape of little wax-paper tents, from a dingy oasis marked by bubbling urns of coloured water. Coming to her at the table, Jerry set one carton on his head and balanced it. He waved a white-wrapped drinking straw at her like a magic wand. She was Cinderella.
    She said, ‘Don’t be an exhibitionist.’
    ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m a terrible person, I’ve decided. I can’t imagine what you see in me.’
    She pried up the dotted corner and inserted the straw and sipped; she knew by the edge in his face that he was going to talk.
    ‘Let’s analyse this,’ he said. ‘What do you see in me? It must be that you can have me only for moments, moments you have to fight for, and this makes them seem precious. Now, if we got married, if I destroyed my wife and waded through my children’s blood for you –’
    ‘That’s a horrible thing to say, Jerry.’
    ‘It’s the way I see it. If I did this, I’d no longer be the man you think you love. I’d be the kind of man who abandons his wife and three children. I’d despise myself, and quite quickly you’d concur.’
    ‘I’m not so sure that’s how it works,’ she said, trying to fit her impression of life into some sort of generalization. He really didn’t know. Jerry believed in choices, in mistakes, in damnation, in the avoidance of suffering. She and Richard believed simply that things happened. After everything was said about how unhappy her childhood had been – her father’s casual death, her mother’s craziness, her sullen older brother, the succession of boarding schools – there remained her sense that she would, now, be less of a person if it had happened any other way. She would be somebody else, somebody she had no desire to be.
    ‘On the other hand,’ he said, cocking his wrist elegantly – he took more pleasure in his hands than anyone she had ever known – ‘why do I love you? Well, you’re gorgeous, brave, kind – really so kind – alive, female, and all the rest of it that anybody can see. To this extent, anyone who sees you come into a room loves you. The first time I saw you, I loved you, and you were eight months pregnant with Peter.’
    ‘You’re wrong, though. Very few people like me.’
    He reflected a moment, as if reviewing the hearts of their common acquaintances, and then said, with his abrasive dispassion, ‘You may be right.’
    ‘You’re really the only man who sees me as very special.’ Her chin trembled; saying it, she felt it clinched her claim on him.
    He said, ‘Other men are stupid. Anyway, in addition to your evident charms, you are unhappy. You need me and I can’t give myself to you. I want you and I can’t have you. You’re like a set of golden stairs I can never finish climbing. I look down, and the earth is a littleblue mist. I look up, and there’s this radiance I can never reach. It gives you your incredible beauty and if I marry you I’ll destroy it.’
    ‘You know, Jerry, a marriage makes something, too. It isn’t all destroying illusions.’
    ‘I know that. I do know that. It kills me. I want, part of all this is, I want to shape you, to make you all over again. I feel I could. I don’t feel this with Ruth. Somehow, she’s formed, and the best kind of life I can live with her will be lived in’ – his fingers illustrated the word in the air – ‘parallel.’
    ‘Let’s face it, Jerry. You still love her quite a bit.’
    ‘I don’t