Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Literary, Men, General, Psychological, Harry (Fictitious character), Modern fiction, Angstrom, Fiction
ISBN: 9780141187839
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2006-07-15T03:15:06.177000+00:00

Club Castanet was named during the war when the South American craze was on and occupies a triangular building where Warren Avenue crosses Running Horse Street at an acute angle. It’s in the south side of Brewer, the Italian-Negro-Polish side, and Rabbit doesn’t like it. With its glass-brick windows grinning back from the ridge of its face it looks like a fortress of death; the interior is furnished in the glossy low-lit style of an up-to-date funeral parlor, potted green plants here and there, music piping soothingly, and the same smell of strip rugs and fluorescent tubes and Venetian-blind slats and, the most inner secretive smell, of alcohol. We drink it and then we’re embalmed in it. Ever since a man down from them on Jackson Road lost his job as an undertaker’s assistant and became a bartender, Rabbit thinks of the two professions as related; men in both talk softly, look very clean, and are always seen standing up. He and Ruth sit at a booth near the front, where they get through the window a faint fluctuation of red light as the neon castanet on the sign outside flickers back and forth between its two positions, that imitate clicking.

This pink tremor takes the weight off Ruth’s face. She sits across from him. He tries to picture the kind of life she was leading; a creepy place like this probably seems as friendly to her as a locker room would to him. But just the thought of it that way makes him nervous; her sloppy life, like his having a family, is something he’s tried to keep behind them. He was happy just hanging around her place at night, her reading mysteries and him running down to the delicatessen for ginger ale and some nights going to a movie but nothing like this. That first night he really used that Daiquiri but since then he didn’t care if he ever had another and hoped she was the same way. For a while she was but lately something’s been eating her; she’s heavy in bed and once in a while looks at him as if he’s some sort of pig. He doesn’t know what he’s doing different but knows that somehow the ease has gone out of it. So tonight her so-called friend Margaret calls up. It scares him out of his skin when the phone rings. He has the idea lately it’s going to be the cops or his mother or somebody; he has the feeling of something growing on the other side of the mountain. A couple times after he first moved in, the phone rang and it was some thick-voiced man saying “Ruth?” or just hanging up in surprise at Rabbit’s voice answering. When they hung on, Ruth just said a lot of “No’s” into the receiver and they never had any trouble luckily. She knew how to handle them and anyway there were only about five that ever called. Like the past was a vine hanging on by just these five shallow roots and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank.

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