Trust Me by John Updike Page B

himself and his defective bindings. For a moment that somehow made her shiver inside—perhaps no more than the flush of exertion meeting the chill blue shade of the woods, here at the edge—the two men stood together, intent upon the mechanism, her presence forgotten. Rob found the mis-adjustment, and Rafe’s skis came off no more.
    In the woods, Rob and Jennifer fell behind, and Rafe slithered ahead, hurrying to catch up to his children and, beyondthem, to his wife and Evan. Betty tried to stay with her husband and child, but they were too maddening—one whining, the other frowning, and neither grateful for her company. She let herself ski ahead, and became alone in the woods, aware of distant voices, the whisper of her skis, the soft companionable heave of her own breathing. Pine trunks shifted about, one behind another and then another, aligned and not aligned, shadowy harmonies. Here and there the trees grew down into the path; a twig touched her eye, so lightly she was surprised to find pain lingering, and herself crying. She came to an open place where paths diverged. Here Rafe was waiting for her; thin, leaning on his poles, he seemed a shadow among others. “Which way do you think they went?” He sounded breathless and acted lost. His wife and her lover had escaped him.
    “Left is the way to get back to the car,” she said.
    “I can’t tell which are their tracks,” he said.
    “I’m so sorry,” Betty said.
    “Don’t be.” He relaxed on his poles, and made no sign of moving. “Where is Rob?” he asked.
    “Coming. He took over dear Jennifer for me. I’ll wait, you go on.”
    “I’ll wait with you. It’s too scary in here. Do you want that book?” The sentences followed one another evenly, as if consequentially.
    The book was about Jane Austen, by an English professor Betty had studied under years ago, before Radcliffe called itself Harvard. She had noticed it lying on the front seat of the Smiths’ car while they were all fussing with their skis, and had exclaimed with recognition, of a sort. In a strange suspended summer of her life, the summer when Billy was born, she had read through all six of the Austen novels, sitting on a sun-porch waiting and waiting and then suddenly nursing. “If you’re done with it.”
    “I am. It’s tame, but dear, as you would say. Could I bring it by tomorrow morning?”
    He had recently left a law firm in Hartford and opened an office here in town. He had few clients but seemed amused, being idle. There was something fragile and incapable about him. “Yes,” she said, adding, “Jennifer comes back from school at noon.”
    And then Jennifer and Rob caught up to them, both needing to be placated, and she forgot this shadowy man’s promise, as if her mind had been possessed by the emptiness where the snowy paths diverged.
    Monday was bright, and the peal at the door accented the musical dripping of the icicles ringing the house around with falling pearls. Rafe was hunched comically under the dripping from the front eaves, the book held dry against his parka. He offered just to hand it to her, but she invited him in for coffee, he seemed so sad, still lost. They sat with the coffee on the sofa, and soon his arms were around her and his lips, tasting of coffee, warm on her mouth and his hands cold on her skin beneath her sweater, and she could not move her mind from hovering, from floating in a golden consciousness of the sun on the floorboards, great slanting splashes of it, rhomboids broken by the feathery silhouettes of her houseplants on the windowsills. From her angle as he stretched her out on the sofa, the shadows of the drips leaped upward in the patches of sun, appearing to defy gravity as her head whirled. She sat up, pushed him off without rebuke, unpinned and repinned her hair. “What are we doing?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” Rafe said, and indeed he didn’t seem to. His assault on her had felt clumsy, scared, insincere; he seemed