Three Score & Ten

‘Anyway, it’s nice about you and Ollie, if it works out. A little sad, too.’

‘Why sad?’

‘Sad for me. I mean, I guess I blew my chance, to – ’

‘To what?’

‘To cash you in.’

Bad phrase, too harsh, though it had been an apology. He has lived with Skeeter too long. But her blankness, the blankness of her silhouette as Peggy stands in her habitual pose against the windows, suggested it. A blank check. A woman is blank until you fuck her. Everything is blank until you fuck it. Us and Vietnam, fucking and being fucked, blood is wisdom. Must be some better way but it’s not in nature. His silence is leaden with regret. She remains blank some seconds, says nothing. Then she moves into the space around him, turns on lamps, lifts a pillow into place, plumps it, stoops and straightens, turns, takes light upon her sides, is rounded into shape. A lumpy big woman but not a fat one, clumsy but not gross, sad with evening, with Ollie or not Ollie, with being thirty-six and knowing nothing. He and Peggy Gring sat in the same classroom since first grade; she had seen him when he was good, had sat in those hot bleachers screaming, when he was a hero, naked and swift and lean. She has seen him come to nothing. She plumps down in the chair beside his, brushes at the ghost of the hairdo she no longer has, and says, ‘I’ve been cashed in a lot lately.’

John Updike, Rabbit Redux

 …he’s quite unprepared when the nurse in the baby room, where little bundles with heads like oranges lie in rows of supermarket baskets, some tilted, brings his girl to the viewing window, and it’s like a damper being slid back in his chest. A sudden stiff draft draught freezes his breath. People are always saying how ugly new babies are, maybe this is the reason for the amazement. The baby is held by the nurse so her profile is sharp red against the buttoned white bosom of the uniform. The folds around the nostril, worked out on such a small scale, seem miraculously precise; the tiny stitchless seam of the closed eyelid runs diagonally a great length, as if the eye, when it is opened, will be huge and see everything and know everything. In the suggestion of pressure behind the tranquil lid and in the tilt of the protruding upper lip he reads a delightful hint of disdain. She knows she’s good. What he never expected, he can feel she’s feminine, feels something both delicate and enduring in the arc of the long pink cranium, furred in bands with black licked swatches. Nelson’s head had been full of lumps and frightening blue veins and bald except at the base of the neck. Rabbit looks down through the glass with a timidity in the very act of seeing, as if rough looking will smash the machinery of this sudden life.

 John Updike, Rabbit, Run