by John Updike
“It seems so brutal,” I said.
“It’s disgusting,” he agreed. “But there it is. Back and forth, back and forth; nothing else, Peter—kissing, hugging, pretty words—it doesn’t touch them. You have to do it.” He took a pencil into his mouth and showed me how, bending his face into the conjunction of his palms with the pencil sticking, eraser first, from his tartarish teeth. For this moment of tender attention a whole hushed world seemed conjured in the area of his breathing. Then he straightened up, and broke his palms apart, and stroked the two fatnesses of his left palm. “If there’s too much fat here,” he said, “along the inside of the thighs, you’re blocked—you understand?”
“I think so,” I said, furious to scratch my itching arms, where the red shirt was shredding.
“So don’t laugh off the lean pieces,” Deifendorf admonished me, and the dense seriousness of his face repelled me, for I knew it won my father. “You take a skinny kid like Gloria Davis, or one of these big rangy types like Mrs. Hummel—I mean, when a piece like that takes you, you don’t feel so lost. Hey, Peter?”
“What? What?”
“Wanna know how to tell if they’re passionate?”
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
He stroked the ball of his thumb lovingly. “Right in here. The mound of Venus. The more there is, the more they are.”
“The more they are what?”
“Don’t be dumb.” He punched me in the ribs so that I gasped. “And another thing. Why doncha get some pants without a yellow stain on the fly?”
He laughed and behind me I could hear all the Caucasus laughing and snapping their towels and flipping their silvery genitals.
Now the town came to visit me, daubed with Indian paint and vague-faced from idle weeping. “You remember us,” I said. “How we used to walk up the pike beside the trolley cars, me always hurrying a little to keep up?”
“Remember?” He touched his cheek in confusion, so that dabs of wet clay rubbed off on his fingertips. “There are so many …”
“Caldwell,” I said. “George and Peter. He taught at the high school and when the war was over he was Uncle Sam and led the parade down from the fire hall down the pike, where the trolley tracks used to be.”
“There was somebody,” he said, his eyelids trembling in a sleep-walker’s concentration, “a stout man …”
“No, a tall man.”
“You all imagine,” he said with sudden vexation, “if you’re here for a year or two, that I … that I … there are thousands. There have been thousands, there will be thousands … First, the People. Then the Welsh, the Quakers, the Germans from the Tulpehocken Valley … and all think that I should remember them. In fact,” he said, “my memory is poor.” And with this confession his face was brightened by a quick smile that, creasing so counter to the earth-colored markings of paint on his face, made me love him for a second even in his weakness. “And the older I get,” he went on, “the more they stretch me, the streets up Shale Hill, the new development toward Alton, the more … I don’t know. The less things seem to matter.”
“He was in the Lions,” I prompted. “But they never made him president. He was on the committee to get a borough park. He was always doing good deeds. He loved to walk up and down the alleys and used to spend a lot of time hanging around Hummel’s Garage, on the corner there.”
His eyes were closed and, following the pattern of his lids, his whole face seemed membranous and distended, flickering with fine veins but rapt as a death-mask is rapt. The daubs of paint glistened where they had not dried. “When did they straighten Hummel’s Alley?” he murmured to himself. “There had been a woodworking shop there, and that man blinded by gas in the trenches in that little shack, and now I see a man coming into the alley … His coat pocket is full of old pens that don’t write …”
“That’s my father!” I cried.
He shook his head crossly and let his lids slowly lift. “No,” he told me, “it’s nobody. It’s the shadow of a tree.” He grinned and took from his pocket a winged maple seed, which he expertly split with his thumbnail and glued to his nose, as we used to when children, so it made a little green rhinoceros horn there. The effect, in combination with the ochre paint, was suddenly malevolent, and he stared at me for the first time directly, his eyes as black as oil or loam. “You see,” he pronounced distinctly, “you moved away. You shouldn’t have moved away.”
“It wasn’t my fault, my mother—”
The bell rang. It was time for lunch, but no food was brought me. I sat opposite Johnny Dedman and there were two others with us. Johnny dealt us cards. Since I could not pick mine up, he flashed each one in my face, and I saw that they were not ordinary cards. Each of them had instead of central pips a murky photograph.
A: woman, white, not young, sitting on a chair smiling, naked, legs spread.
J: female white and male Negro performing that act of mutual adoration vulgarly known as a 69.
10: four persons, in rectangular arrangement, femalemale alternately, one Negro, three white, performing cunnilingus and fellatio alternately, blurred by the necessarily considerable reduction under cheap engraving process, so some details were not as clear as I avidly wished. To cover my confusion I coolly asked, “Where did you get these?”
“Cigar store in Alton,” Johnny said. “You have to know the man.”
“Are there really fifty-two different ones? It seems fantastic.”
“All except this one,” he said, and showed me the Ace of Spades. It was simply the Ace of Spades.
“How disappointing.”
“But if you look at it upside down,” he said; and it was an apple with a thick black stem. I didn’t understand.
I begged, “Let me see the other cards.”
Johnny looked at me with his wise look, his fuzzy cheeks lightly aflame. “Not so fast, my little teacher’s son,” he said. “You have to pay. I paid.”
“I have no money. Last night we had to stay at a hotel and my father had to give the man a check.”
“You have a dollar. You held out on the old bastard. You have a dollar in your wallet in your hip pocket.”
“But I can’t reach it; my arms are fastened.”
“All right then,” he said. “Buy your own cards, you little flute.” And he put his in the pocket of his shirt, which was forest-green, of a beautifully coarse weave, with the collar turned up so its edge rubbed the nape of his wet-combed hair.
I tried to get at my wallet; my shoulder muscles ached in their frozen sockets; my back seemed welded to the rock. Penny—it was she beside me, giving off a columbine hint of perfume—nuzzled my neck as she tried to reach my wallet for me. “Let it go, Penny,” I told her. “It’s not important. I need the money because we have to eat in town tonight because of the basketball game.”
“Why did you ever move into the country?” she asked. “It sets up all these inconveniences.”
“True,” I said. “But it also gives me a chance at you.”
“You never take advantage of it,” she said.
“I did once,” I said, blushing in defence.
“Oh, shit, Peter, here,” Johnny sighed. “Now don’t say I never did you a favor.” He ruffled through the deck and showed me the Jack of Hearts again. It seemed very beautiful, a circle completed, a symmetry found, a somber whirlpool of flesh, the faces hidden by the woman’s white thighs and the woman’s long loose hair. But the beauty of it, like a black pencil rubbed over paper to bring out the buried initials and inscriptions long ago carved on a desk-top, brought up again my sorrow and fear over my father. “What do you think the X-rays will show?” I asked, I hoped casually.
He shrugged and after a little hum of calculation said, “Fifty-fifty. It could go either way.”
“Oh my Lord,” Penny cried, her fingertips darting to her lips. “I forgot to pray for him!”
“That’s O. K.,” I said. “Forget it. Forget I ever asked you. Just gimme a bite of your hamburger. Just a little
bite.” All the cigarette smoke was bothering my face; I felt as I opened my mouth I was taking sulphur into myself.
“Easy, easy,” Penny said. “This is all I have for lunch.”
“You’re kind to me,” I said. “Why?” It was not really a question, I was just trying to draw her out.
“What do you have next period?” Kegerise asked in his ugly flat voice. He was the fourth.
“Latin. And I haven’t done any of the shit-eating work. How could I, I spent the whole screwed-up night gallivanting with my father up and down the streets of Alton.”
“Miss Appleton will love to hear that,” Kegerise said. He envied my brains.
“Oh, I think she’ll forgive anything a Caldwell does,” Penny said. She had a mood of slyness which I detested; she was not very clever and it did not become her.
“That’s an odd thing to say,” I said. “Does it mean anything?”
“Haven’t you noticed?” Her green eyes went quite round. “The way your father and Hester stand around in the hall talking? She thinks he’s wonderful.”
“You’re mad,” I said. “You’re really sex-mad.”
Meant to be cute, to my surprise it miffed her. “You don’t notice anything, do you, Peter? You’re just so wrapped up in your own skin you have no idea what other people feel.”
“Skin” was a shock; but I was sure she knew nothing about my skin. My face and hands were clear and she had never seen anything else. This troubled me and made her love frightening; for if she loved me we would be driven to make love and there would come this very painful time when I must expose to her my flesh … Forgive me, my brain suddenly began murmuring, forgive me, forgive me.
Johnny Dedman, irritated at being left out of the conversation—after all, he was a senior and we were sophomores so his being with us was a considerable condescension—riffled through his dirty pack and ostentatiously chuckled. “The one that really kills me,” he said, “is the whore of farts. I mean the four of hearts. It’s a woman and a bull.”
Minor charged over to our booth. Anger flashed from his bald dome and steamed through his flared nostrils. “Here, hyaar,” he snorted. “Put those away. Don’t come in here again with anything like that.”
Dedman looked up at him with a benign flicker of the long curling eyelashes that gave his gaze a starry expectancy. He spoke with his lips hardly moving. “Go chop some horsemeat,” he said.
Miss Appleton seemed rather flustered and out of breath, probably from the long climb. “Peter, translate,” she said, and then she read aloud with her impeccable quantities,
“Dixit, et avertens rosea cervice refulsit,
ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem
spiravere, pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,
et vera incessu patuit dea.”
As she made these words ring, she wore her Latin face: corners of the lips sternly downdrawn, eyebrows lifted rigidly, her cheeks gray with gravity. In French class, her face was quite different: cheeks like apples, eyebrows dancing, mouth puckered dryly, corners tense naughtily.
“She said,” I said.
“She spoke. Thus she spoke,” Miss Appleton said.
“She spoke, and … and … glowed.”
“What glowed? Not she glowed. Cervice glowed.”
“She spoke, and, turning, her, uh, rosy crevice—” Laughter from the others. I blushed.
“No! Cervice, cervice. Neck. You’ve heard of the cervix. Surely you’ve heard of the cervical vertebrae.”
“She spoke, and, turning—”
“As she turned.”
“As she turned, her rosy neck blushed.”
“Very well.”
“And, and coma, coma—sleep?”
“Hair, Peter, hair. Surely you’ve heard of the derivative word comose? Think of comb, as a rooster’s comb.”
“And, uh, turning again—”
“Oh, no. Dear child, no. Vertice here is the noun, vertex, verticis. Vortex. A vortex, a whirl, a crown of hair, of what kind of hair? What agrees?”
“Ambrosial.”
“Yes, ambrosial meaning, properly, immortal. Applied most often to the food of the gods, and in that sense descending to us with the meaning of sweet, delicious, honey-like. But the gods also used ambrosia for anointment and perfume.” She spoke of the gods with a certain authority, Miss Appleton did.
“And her whirl, her tangle—”
“Crown, Peter. The hair of the gods is never tangled.”
“And her crown of ambrosial hair breathed out a divine odor.”
“Yes. Good. Fragrance, let’s say. Odor rather suggests plumbing.”
“… a divine fragrance, her vestment, her robe …”
“Yes, a flowing robe. All the goddesses save Diana wore a loose flowing robe. Diana, the heavenly huntress, wore of course a sensible tunic, perhaps with leggings, probably of a heavy green or brown cloth such as what I am wearing. Her robe flowed down—”
“I don’t understand ad imos.”
“Imus, a rather archaic word. The superlative of inferus, below, down below. Ad imos, to the lowest extremity. Here, literally, to the lowest extremity of her feet, which makes little sense in English. It is used as emphasis; the poet is astounded. Some rendering such as ‘her robe flowed down, ah, down to her very feet’ might be equivalent. The sense is of ‘all the way.’ She was totally naked. Please proceed, Peter. This is taking much too long.”
“Down, down to her feet, and in truth opened—”
“Was opened, was exposed, made manifest as vera. Vera dea.”
“As a true goddess.”
“Quite so. What does incessu have to do with the sentence?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really, Peter, this is disappointing. College material like yourself. Incessu, in stride, in gait. She was in gait a true goddess. Gait in the sense of carriage, of physical style; there is a style to divinity. These lines brim with a sense of that radiance, breaking in upon the unknowing Aeneas. Ille ubi matrem agnovit; he recognized his mother. Venus, Venus with her ambrosial fragrance, her swirling hair, her flowing robe, her rosy skin. Yet he sees only as she is avertens, as she is turning away. The sense of the passage being that only as she turns to leave him, does he perceive her true glory, her actual worth and her relationship to him. So it is often in life. We love too late. In the next lines he cries out to her, most movingly, as she fades away, ‘Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or hear and give back speech truly?’ ”
Iris Osgood replaced her; the girl was crying. Tears streamed down her cheeks, soft and bland like the sides of a Guernsey, and she did not have the wit to wipe them away. She was one of those dull plain girls who was totally unfashionable in the class and yet with whom I felt a certain inner dance. That half-shaped fatness of her figure secretly roused the hard seeds in me; I showed it by being quick and bantering of tongue. But today I was tired and wanted only to pillow my head upon her low I. Q. “Why the tears, Iris?”
Through a sob in her throat she brought out, “My blouse: he tore it. It’s ruined and what can I tell my mother?”
And now I noticed that indeed the downslipping silver of one breast was exposed to the very verge of its ruddy puckered coin; I could not quite tear my eyes away, it looked so vulnerable.
“That’s all right,” I told her, debonair. “Look at me. My shirt is totally disintegrated.”
And this was true; except for flecks and glutinous threads of red, my chest was bare. My psoriasis was made manifest. A line had formed and, one by one, they walked by, Betty Jean Shilling, Fats Frymoyer, Gloria Davis suppressing a smile, Billy Schupp the diabetic—all my classmates. They had obviously come together in a bus. Each for a moment studied my scabs, and then moved on in silence. A few shook their heads sadly; one girl pressed her lips together and shut her eyes; a few eyes were thick and pink with tears. The wind, the mountaintops, had fallen still behind me. My rock felt padded and there was a tangy chemical smell all but smothered in the artif
icial perfume of flowers.
Last came Arnie Werner, the president of the senior class and the student council, captain of the football and baseball teams. He was a hollow-eyed boy with the throat of a god and heavy sloping shoulders all shining from the shower. He bent way over and stared at the scabs of my chest and touched one fastidiously with his index finger. “Jesus, kid,” he said, “what’ve you got? Syphilis?”
I tried to explain. “No, it’s an allergic condition, not contagious, don’t be frightened—”
“Have you had a doctor look at this?”
“You won’t believe this, but the doctor himself—”
“Does it bleed?” he asked.
“Only when I scratch too hard,” I told him, desperate to ingratiate myself, to earn his forgiveness. “It’s kind of relaxing, actually, when you’re reading or in a movie—”
“Boy,” he said. “This is the ugliest stuff I ever saw.” He frowningly sucked his index finger. “Now I’ve touched it and I’ll get it. Where’s the Mercurochrome?”
“Honest, cross my heart, it’s not contagious—”
“Frankly,” he said, and from the solemn-dumb way he said that one word I could see that he was probably a good president of the student council, “I’m surprised they let you bring a thing like that into the school. If it’s syphilis, you know, the toilet seats—”
I shouted, “I want my father!”
He came before me and wrote on the blackboard,
C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O+ E.
It was the last, the seventh period of the day. We were tired. He encircled the E and said, “Energy. That’s life. That little extra E is life. We take in sugars and oxygen and burn it, like you burn old newspapers in the trash barrel, and give off carbon dioxide and water and energy. When this process stops”—he Xed through the equation—“this stops”—he double-Xed out the E—“and you become what they call dead. You become a worthless log of old chemicals.”
“But can’t the process ever be reversed?” I asked.
“Thanks for asking that, Peter. Yes. Read the equation backwards and you have photosynthesis, the life of green plants. They take in moisture and the carbon dioxide we breathe out and the energy of the sunlight, and they produce sugar and oxygen, and then we eat the plants and get the sugar back and that’s the way the world goes round.” He made a vortex with his fingers in the air. “Round and round, and where it stops, nobody knows.”