by John Updike
The conditions were lovely. The winter’s many snows, first falling in November, had created an eight-foot base, and snow-making had kept it replenished. The surface was scratchy with yet plenty of loose corn to turn on, and there were no lift lines. The crowds were eerily sparse. A few brats with snowboards gouged their rude arcs into the shining slopes and hurtled up and over the jumps that had been constructed for them, and a few of us fun-seeking retirees made our careful, controlled way down the trails. Actually, only Ken could be called careful; his stiff linked turns are executed with studied knee-dips and pole-plants. Red, who has never taken a lesson, sets his skis a foot apart and just heads with a whoop downhill, turning only when his gathering speed bounces his skis into the air. His scarlet ski-hat dwindles rapidly down through the granite-walled chutes and undulating mogul fields. His employees in Gloucester gave him as a joke Christmas present a silver windbreaker lettered EAT FISH ALL WEEK FOR GOD’S SAKE in big capitals and today he wore that over a turtleneck and a Shetland sweater of undyed wool.
I have a staid but furtively daredevil style. I try to think of my feet, the weight on first one and then the other, and of the inner edges, where all my weight and intricate, unseemly innards balance as if on a single ice-skate blade. But my skis, their rust sharpened away by a hunchbacked troll at the ski shop, tended to run out from under me and nearly snagged me into a fall or two, until I remembered that skiing is falling, a surrender to the unthinkable and the fearful. Then I began to fly, to feel my loosened weight gracefully check my speed as I turned, left and right and then left again, into the fall line. We rise as we age; the older we get, the longer and more treacherous the distance to the earth becomes. To a toddler, the ground is a playmate, a painless bottom-bump away.
My legs—the knees, the quadriceps—began after four or five runs to ache so much I kept braking and gasping, while Red’s hat vanished down below and Ken steadily, stiffly traversed his way out of sight. I was calling upon muscles that had been resting for a year. The years move into us; their cyclical motion is not their only motion. Pausing, gasping, I admired the sky, a bottomless gentian blue in which the two moons hung, their top hemispheres by some multi-cogged permutation of the celestial mechanism sunlit, so they looked like porous cookies being dunked in a translucent celestial brew. The valley with its twisting roads and stacked condos spread itself far below me, and at a bit more than eye level Mount Washington’s white crest gleamed above the intervening darker crests. Everything here in New Hampshire was dun and brown and blue; the clear air arrived at my senses with the sharpness of a dog’s bark, sounding somewhere unseen in the valley.
On the drive back, we were all three silent, stunned by so much unaccustomed fresh air and exercise. Our elderly proximity to death seemed a not unpleasant thing, shared in such companionable silence. The Audi’s cruise control pulled us steadily southward. Snow thinned into dirty crusts along Route 93. On the right, at Concord, the elongated gold dome of the state capitol caught the day’s declining light. Below Concord, at this hour, there used to be streams of headlights as the commuters returned to this low-tax haven from their daily raid on the coffers of “Taxachusetts.” Now that golden stream was reduced to a trickle, on a highway engineered for six times the traffic. The mountains around us shrank and lessened. The radio, tuned to a Boston station that advertised Music for Easy Listening, became less staticky and more languorous. Ken’s head, back in the pilot’s cap, snapped out of a nod; Red had grunted “Jesus!” and grabbed the wheel from him as the car drifted out of its lane. Ken was sheepish, but we too had been at fault, for falling into our private reveries and not keeping up a stimulating conversation. Ken pulled to the side to switch places with Red and, settling into the co-pilot’s seat, told us how through all the years he was flying he could never fall asleep as a passenger, no matter how jet-lagged. He knew too much, and kept listening knowledgeably to the engines for signs of trouble. Only when seated upright in the captain’s scientifically cushioned black chair, with stretches of cloud or dark ocean or settlement-spangled land miles beneath him, and the automatic pilot securely locked into the controls, would he irresistibly sink into dreamland.
I got back before seven and though the house was silent something had changed. An infinitesimal measurement had been made, and Deirdre and I were in another universe. There was an alteration in the air of the rooms. There was the scent of another man. She came downstairs languidly, already in a bathrobe. “I felt grubby after housework all day and took a shower,” she explained. “How was skiing?”
“Beautiful,” I said. “But Ken fell asleep at the wheel on the way back and nearly got us killed. Also, I can hardly move my knees, they’re not used to it. Anything happen while I was away?”
“No, nothing.”
“Nothing? Nobody call?”
“Some old lady. She was worried about the forty-point drop in the market today. I told her you were out having fun with some guys. She sounded sore about it. I said to her, ‘Lady, he’s retired. You can’t expect him to sit home all day watching your pot for you.’”
“Mrs. Fessenden, it must have been. I should call her and make reassuring noises. I’ll remind her she’s a long-term investor and shouldn’t worry about the ups and down day to day. These old people don’t have enough to do, so they worry.” I realized that from Deirdre’s point of view I was also old. I had forgotten my age, in the afterglow of the ski trip. “What’s for dinner, darling?”
“Oh,” Deirdre said, with a shifty lowering of her long-lashed eyes, “I’m not hungry. I’ve been kind of nibbling. There’s some cold ravioli in the fridge from last night you could zap in the microwave.”
“Thanks. Zapped ravioli, my favorite gourmet meal. Let me get out of these ski clothes.”
There was a bareness to the house, somehow. On the way upstairs I glanced into the living room and the dining room to see if anything conspicuous was missing. In Gloria’s time these rooms had been resplendent, showcases for the family antiques, but since her departure—disappearance? death?— the rooms had invisibly begun to slip into shabbiness. Even the rug, the great blue Tabriz, looked faded, up at the end with the French doors and the little oval-backed sofa whose ecru silk the sun was rotting as it traced its daily arc above the sea’s horizon. There seemed fewer trifles—candlesticks and silver picture-frames and Limoges figurines. In our bedroom, I thought I had left a few of my bureau drawers out a few inches; they were all snugly closed, and the bed seemed too tightly made. Such tidiness was unlike Deirdre, even on a day that she said she spent doing housework. I sniffed. Was the ashy trace in the air a cigarette, or a ghost in the fireplace? The previous owners used to build fires upstairs—one could tell by the charred bricks. They had used the house fully, confidently, as something theirs by right. The information on my olfactory cells decoded, suddenly, as a man in a baggy brown suit. His naked, plump, hairy reflection was embedded in the mercury backing of the oval mirror, if I had the technology to recover it. The technology of the future will be able to reconstruct the exact location of every atom in the past from its position in the present, just as technicians at the factory can recover every key-tap fed into the computer’s hard memory, even those obliterated by the command DELETE. One strange scientist, I read years ago in Scientific American, maintained that at the end of time, which he called the Omega Point, the kind souls of a fantastically advanced civilization spread across the entropie or imploding terminal universe would painstakingly reconstruct and resurrect us all, every human being who had ever lived, me and a medieval stableboy and a Neandert(h)al aurochs-hunter along with all of Gloria’s ancestors and the millions of Chinese civilians killed in the recent lamentable Sino-American Conflict. It seemed an unlikely thesis, though one partially anticipated by St. Paul, and no doubt rigorous in its physics.
The intruder would have left traces, also, on Deirdre’s nervous system, while I was clumsily courting ecstasy on the ski slopes. Going downstairs, I saw the carpeted steps as neatly ali
gned moguls, and imagined myself dancing, knees pressed together, from one side to the other, swerving around the newel posts on the landing. As I dutifully consumed my zapped ravioli, along with some tired broccoli whose browner florets I had cut away before tucking the stalks into the microwave dish, she hovered over me uncharacteristically. She was making an effort to be agreeable, though her conversational responses were sluggish, like those of a computer whose memory is loaded to capacity. No doubt about it, she was getting more input than mine. “God,” I said, rummaging in the chaotic fridge for something else half rotten to warm up, “it feels good to have had some exercise for a change! We should do more physical stuff, now that spring’s in the air. How’s your sex life?”
This startled her. “You should know,” she said at last. “The same as yours.”
“Is it? When did we last make love?” I asked.
She had the answer, dopey as she seemed. “Eight days ago. Last Tuesday, after you got turned on by the new talking head on Channel Seven.”
A crisp blonde woman with a glassy square cleft chin she tips up toward the camera as she reads the TelePrompTer through the lens. She has thin, darkly painted long lips that she rarely smiles with, except at the end, when she releases a wide satisfied smile that says it all. She is so cool and refined that she never banters with the weatherman or the oaf who does sports. “What a terrific talking cunt she is,” I agreed. “What’s on your schedule tonight?”
“Nothing.” But she dragged the word out, teasing.
“Want to go to bed early? I mean, right after the news, before the skiing catches up to me and I start snoring.”
“Su-ure,” Deirdre said, “if you want to. I was going to wash my hair.”
“Wash it afterwards. Let me mess it up first.”
“Mess it up how?” Thinking perhaps of some perverse trick she had once turned. She was taut, like the bed she had made for a second time today.
“Oh,” I said, reluctant to give her any satisfaction, “I don’t know how. I don’t want to feel inhibited, though, like your hair is offbounds. Wasn’t there some frozen yogurt? Peach was the flavor—I can see the carton, right here, next to the frozen lemon cake. Where is it? Who ate it?”
“Who ate what?”
“The peach yogurt, you dope.” She was reminding me annoyingly of herself the night she peed in the bed and refused to become aware of it. “It’s gone. Let’s unfreeze the lemon cake for tomorrow night. Let’s get into bed first and think of a way we can mess up your hair.”
“I don’t like your tone,” Deirdre said.
“I don’t like yours, either.”
“You seem hyper.”
“You seem like you’ve snorted or swallowed or mainlined something and have something to hide.”
“I’ll be fucked if FU fuck you in this nasty mood you’re in, just because you say to.”
“Some mysterious body has eaten all my peach frozen yogurt. Who the hell are you not to fuck me when I’m begging like this, when I pay all the damn bills?”
“I’m your wife, I guess you could say.”
“I liked you better when you were a whore, frankly.”
“Of course you did. Men do. Like whores better than wives.”
“You were purer then.”
“A man would think so.”
“You used to auction yourself off, piece by piece.”
“O.K., you bastard. A million welders, to come all over my hair.”
“I don’t have a million welders.”
“Yes you do. I’ve seen the statements.”
“Only a fraction of those assets are liquid, Miss Nosy. Let’s say two million, if you tell me what you were really doing all day.”
“I was doing housework and feeling fond of you, if you must know. I was thinking how much I wanted to go to bed with you when you got back from skiing with those jerks. I swept and cleaned the whole upstairs, and picked up winter sticks and stuff outside on the lawn.” Tears, confounding me, had appeared like rheum on her lower lids, shellacking brighter the brown of her eyes. We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids. Our olfactory cells are open nerve ends embedded in a thin mucus that dissolves the volatile molecules we scent. “There were these little puddles,” she went on, her voice trembling, “of little turds everywhere.”
“Deer scat,” I said, abandoning my hopes of peach frozen yogurt and giving Deirdre a timid, paternal hug. “Let’s not go to bed,” I said. “We’re both in lousy moods. Let’s see what’s on TV.”
“Yeah, that blonde bitch you have the hots for.” She added, perversely aroused now, “Ben, I’ll be a whore if that’s what you want. Let’s think of some fun way to get you off.”
“Maybe while we’re watching,” I deferentially suggested, “that bitch on TV.”
Canada geese honking overhead are so common I don’t even look up. Two visited the pond down by the mailbox, now that the ice is off some of its surface. It melts from the edges in. The geese, with their haughty black faces and pearly gray bodies, are intruding upon a pair of mallards who have been in the pond since black water opened at the reedy edges and where the flow in and out is swiftest. I stood by the mailbox watching the ducks one day; my watching alarmed them, and the little brown female tried to paddle away and ran into slush. The drake with his sumptuous green head followed, and so she found herself performing as an ice-breaker, paddling her way through the slush, beating her wings to give herself extra thrust as the ice thickened. Her struggles carved a sinuous trail—the handsome drake serenely floating in her wake—before cutting back to some open water farther from the threat that my silent presence posed.
Odd, how perfectly both duck and drake seemed to agree that the task was hers. The female of the species takes on the serious business, while the male wears the plumage.
I visited little Keith and Jennifer yesterday, in the mint-green Lynnfield ranch house occupied by my youngest child, Roberta, and her contractor husband, Tony O’Brien. Jenny is six months old, her big silky cubical head adorned now by a coating of fine fuzz that stands up with a comical erectitude, as if suffused with static electricity. As I spooned in pureed carrots, her splay-fingered, transparently nailed hands, agitated by the strangeness of this craggy old man feeding her, would wander into her mouth with the food and thus make along with the silver feeding spoon a confusion of substances and purposes. Her tiny blue fist captured and squeezed an orange blob, and then sleepily rubbed it across a gossamer eyebrow. “Stop that,” I said sharply, and my daughter—whose own infancy is still coiled somewhere in the gray neuronic tangle of my atrophying memory—explained patiently to me that babies learn first how to grip things and only much later how to coordinate the niceties of letting go.
From my own infancy on, I have ascribed to things—toys, tools—a hostile intent, bent on opposing and frustrating me. An only child, I selfishly think of the universe as a big antagonistic sibling. Despite my gaffe of speaking to Jennifer as if she were a typically obstructive adult, I was allowed to give her the bottle, warmed in the microwave exactly one minute; Perdita and I had had to heat bottles in water simmering on the stove and then test them on the inside of our wrists, with a little kiss of blood-warm milk my veins have not forgotten. A cosmic calm descended, of food and appetite colliding. This was as close as I would ever come to having breasts. When I experimentally tugged at the bottle, I was astonished by the force with which Jennifer’s little mouth held it fast—again, serious business.
A defect in me, I fear, if not all male animals, is an inability to take serious business quite seriously. Feeding, fornicating, sleeping, dying—surely all a touch undignified and absurd. I used to marvel at the intensity with which Gloria would protest when I, at the wheel of one of our cars, would seem to her to be too close to another car, to be in the wrong lane, to be risking a slip on a patch of ice, or—and here I may have been guilty of teasing—to be insensitive to the dangers of the railroad tracks at the bottom of our hill. I liked to bounce over th
em without stopping and looking and, when the red lights were furiously dinging, to nose forward and see if the train was far enough down the line to take a chance and scoot across. What a squawking fuss Gloria would make, over her little life! Females carry the burden of the world, I think, but men the magic—the universal magic, the glittering super-dense sperm that spurted out of nothing to make the Big Bang. Male homosexuals, in my construction of it, disdain all the rosy, spongy allurements that nature has created to lead them fruitfully astray and go straight for this magic at which females also hurl themselves, defying destruction. Girls fall in love with serial murderers and with rock stars who like reptiles flicker their tongues between choruses. It hurt my feelings, it diminished me, when Gloria so furiously resisted the opportunity to die with me beneath the wheels of a commuter train. Once, as I slyly glided forward, she pulled out the car keys; another time, she opened the door on her side and would have jumped out had I not braked. Flirtation with death had no erotic charm for her. I was insulted. If not magical, men are not much.
A curious symptom, possibly fatal: when I stand holding an infant in my arms, my knees go weak, so watery-weak I fear I will fall down with my precious burden. An effort of will holds me upright until the fit passes, or else I ease my weight onto a chair. I first noticed this with my seventh grandson, Duncan. I nearly crumpled, there in the cream-colored maternity ward of the hospital. The boneless bundle in my arms, with a round face still blue from its passage through the vaginal channel, added seven nearly unbearable pounds to my own weight.