Free Marry Me by John Updike Page B

for his face. ‘And Bink Hubbard – I know Richard has met him – has disappeared in Florida; the rumour has it he’s shipped out on a Liberian freighter again.’
    ‘I don’t think I know him.’
    ‘No, you wouldn’t. He’s one of those men other men rather envy.’
    ‘Yes, there is that kind of man.’ Sally sounded mechanical to herself. Push, pull, push, pull: a real whore.
    Wigglesworth gazed over her head and asked, ‘Isn’t that Jerry Conant?’
    ‘Where? Do you know Jerry?’
    ‘Of course. Doesn’t he live rather near you out there?’
    He glanced down, his immaculate eyebrows (did he pluck between them?) lifted at the intensity of her concern. ‘Through Ruth,’ he explained. ‘My parents went to her father’s church. She was considered quite a beauty.’
    ‘She still is.’
    ‘Nobody ever understood quite why she married Jerry.’
    And there he was. She felt him in the side of her vision when he was still far away coming back from the counters. She felt him hesitate, then decide to approach. His voice, close to her ear, harshly announced, ‘Anno Domini Wigglesworth, the Rock of Ages himself.’
    ‘Jerry Are you stranded here too?’
    ‘Apparently I’ve been looking for a mythical man called Cardomon who’s supposed to unstrand us.’
    ‘You and Mrs Mathias?’
    ‘Yes, Mrs Mathias and I seem to be caught in the same pickle.’ He looked down at his hand, which held two tickets. He held them up. ‘I’ve taken over negotiations for her. Do you have a reservation?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How would you feel about giving it to Sally?’
    ‘Splendid – but I’m going to St Louis.’
    Jerry turned to Sally and said, ‘Maybe we should go to St Louis. We could get on a raft and float down the Mississippi.’
    She laughed, shocked. How dare he tease her, right in the teeth of disaster!
    Wigglesworth’s smile had become fixed, and from the heightened composure of both men’s faces she knew she had become an object, a body, between them. ‘I was just telling Sally,’ Wigglesworth said, ‘that Jamie Babson has married an Indonesian.’
    ‘Excellent,’ Jerry said. ‘Miscegenation is the only permanent solvent for world tensions. Kennedy knows it, too.’
    ‘Come, Jerry,’ the other man said. ‘When did you get religion? I thought you were stooging for the State Department.’
    They were fighting over her. Sally’s sick dread returned, a desire to sleep; she thought of Richard’s sitting alone, puzzled, worried for her, sipping his second Martini, and she yearned to faint, to sink down into the trafficked, dirty floor, into the spaces between the cigarette filters, and awake at his feet. The men talked on, bantering angrily through her daze, until Wigglesworth, routed by Jerry’s superior rudeness, said, ‘I believe it’s time for me to board. Good luck to both of you.’ And in his farewell, in the way he bowed from his rigid height, there was something genuinely gracious, almost a blessing. Only a stuffed shirt could have brought it off.
    Jerry was sulky and opaque. Had it come, his hating her? She asked him, ‘You didn’t find Cardomon?’
    ‘No. He doesn’t exist. Do you think it’s a code? Cardomon spelled backwards is Nom-o-drac.’ The eight o’clock flight to St Louis was announced and Wigglesworth, staring straight ahead, chin high, was carried out of the waiting room on a river of briefcases. Jerry took Sally’s hands. ‘You’re trembling.’
    ‘A little. That upset me.’
    ‘Does he see Richard often?’
    ‘Almost never. He snubs Richard.’
    ‘He won’t say anything. There’d be no percentage in it for him. He’ll save this on the chance he can use it with you.’
    ‘He’s right, isn’t he? I mean, what he saw me as, I am.’
    ‘What did he see you as?’
    ‘Don’t make me say it, Jerry.’
    Jerry mulled this refusal. ‘Actually’ he said, ‘you’d be much better off with him than with me. He’d get you on a Goddamn plane, I know