The Centaur: A Novel

by John Updike

  On the halfway landing they are out of sight. The bulb burning over the girls’ entrance below the steel-mullioned window here casts upward in distorted rhomboids enough light to see by. There must be light enough for her to see. Her naked arms seem silver, her crimson lips black. His own shirt seems black. He unbuttons one sleeve. “Now this is a very sad secret,” he says. “But because I love you you should know it.”

  “Wait.”

  “What?” He listens to learn if she has heard someone coming.

  “Do you know what you’re saying? What do you love about me?”

  Into the hush the roar of the crowd penetrates like an encircling ocean. Here on this landing he feels dry and cool. He shivers, afraid, now, of what he has begun to do. “I love you,” he tells her, “because in the dream I told you about when you turned into a tree I wanted to cry and pray.”

  “Maybe you just love me in dreams.”

  “When is that?” He touches her face. Silver. Her mouth and eyes are black and still and terrible like the holes of a mask.

  She says gently, “You think I’m stupid.”

  “I’ve thought so. But you don’t seem so now.”

  “I’m not beautiful.”

  “You are now.”

  “Don’t kiss me. The lipstick will smear.”

  “I’ll kiss your hand.” He does, and then slips her hand inside his open sleeve. “Does my arm feel funny?”

  “It feels warm.”

  “No. Rough in spots. Concentrate.”

  “Yes … a little. What is it?”

  “It’s this.” Peter pulls back the sleeve and shows her the underside of his arm; the spots look lavender in the cold diffused light. There are less of them than he had expected.

  Penny asks, “What is it? Hives?”

  “It’s a thing called psoriasis I’ve had all my life. It’s horrible, I hate it.”

  “Peter!” Her hands lift up his head from the gesture of sobbing. His eyes are dry and yet the gesture did release something real.

  “It’s on my arms and legs and it’s worst on my chest. Do you want to see it there?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You hate me now, don’t you? You’re disgusted. I’m worse than Zimmerman grabbing you.”

  “Peter, don’t just say things to hear me contradict them. Show me your chest.”

  “Must I?”

  “Yes. Come on. I’m curious.”

  He lifts his shirt and T-shirt underneath and stands in the half-light half-skinned. He feels like a slave ready for flogging, or like that statue of the Dying Captive which Michelangelo did not fully release from the stone. Penny bends to look. Her fingers brush his chilled skin. “Isn’t that strange?” she says. “They go in little groups.”

  “In the summer it pretty well goes away,” he tells her, pulling down his shirts. “When I grow up I’m going to spend the winters in Florida and then I won’t have it.”

  “Is this what your secret was?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “I expected something much worse.”

  “What could be worse? In a full light it’s really ugly, and I can’t do a thing about it except apologize.”

  She laughs, a glimpse of silver in his ears. “Aren’t you silly? I knew you had a skin thing. It shows on your face.”

  “My God, does it? Badly?”

  “No. It’s not noticeable at all.”

  He knows she is lying, yet does not attempt to make her tell the truth. Instead he asks, “Then you don’t mind it?”

  “Of course not. You can’t help it. It’s part of you.”

  “Is that really how you feel?”

  “If you knew what love was, you wouldn’t even ask.”

  “Aren’t you good?” In accepting her forgiveness he sinks to his knees, there in the corner of the halfway landing, and presses his face against her cloth belly. His knees ache in a minute; in relieving them of pressure his face slides lower. And his hands of themselves slide up silver and confirm what his face has found through the cloth of her skirt, a fact monstrous and lovely: where her legs meet there is nothing. Nothing but silk and a faint dampness and a curve. This then is the secret the world holds at its center, this innocence, this absence, this intimate curve subtly springy in its sheath of silk. Through the wool of her skirt he kisses his own fingertips. “No, please,” Penny says, her hand seeking to pull him up by his hair. He hides from her in her, fitting his face tighter against that concave calm; yet even here, his face held in the final privacy, the blunt probing thought of his father’s death visits him. Thus he betrays her. When Penny, pinned off balance, repeats “Please,” the honest fear in her voice gives him an excuse to relent. Rising, he looks away from her through the window beside them and observes, wonder following wonder, “It’s snowing.”

  In the lavatory Caldwell is puzzled by the word BOOK gouged in square capitals in the wall above the urinal. Close examination reveals that this word has been laid over another; the F had been extended and closed to make a B, the U and C closed into O’s, the K left as was. Willing to learn, even by the last flash of light before annihilation, he absorbs the fact, totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a BOOK. But who would do such a thing? The psychology of the boy (it must have been a boy) who altered the original word, who desecrated the desecration, is a mystery to him. The mystery depresses him; leaving the lavatory, he tries to enter that mind, to picture that hand, and as he walks down the hall the heaviest weight yet seems laid upon his heart by that unimaginable boy’s hand. Could his son have done it?

  Zimmerman apparently has been waiting for him. The hall is all but empty; Zimmerman sidles from the stage entrance to the auditorium. “George.”

  He knows.

  “George, have you been worried about some tickets?”

  “I’m not worried, it’s been explained to me. I marked them Charity in the books.”

  “I thought I had spoken to you about it. Apparently I was wrong.”

  “I shouldn’t have gotten the wind up. Mental confusion, is what they call it.”

  “I’ve had an interesting talk with your son Peter.”

  “Huh? What did the kid tell you?”

  “He told me many things.”

  Mim Herzog, he knows I know, the goose is cooked, it’s out in the open and can never be put back. Never ever, it’s a one-way street we’re on, ignorance is bliss. The tall teacher feels whiteness fill his body from his toes to his scalp. A weariness, a hollowness and conviction of futility beyond anything he has known before seizes him. A film too thick to be sweat makes pasty his palms and brow as his skin struggles to reject this seizure. “He didn’t mean to cause me any trouble, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue,” Caldwell tells the principal. The pain, the tireless pain, itself seems weary.

  Zimmerman sees as if through a rift in clouds that Caldwell’s glimpse of Mrs. Herzog is at the bottom of his fear and his mind exults, fairly dances in the security of being on top and able to maneuver. Expertly he skims, like a butterfly teasing a field, above the surface of the dread in the knobbed drained face opposite him. “I was struck,” he says glidingly, “by Peter’s concern for you. I think he believes that teaching is too great a strain on your health.”

  Here comes the ax, praise be to God for little blessings, the suspense is over. Caldwell wonders if the dismissal slip will be yellow, as it was with the telephone company. “Is that what the kid thinks, huh?”

  “He may be right. He’s a perceptive boy.”

  “He gets that from his mother. I wish to hell he had inherited my weak head and her beautiful body.”

  “George, I’d like to speak to you frankly.”

  “Shoot. That’s your job.” A wave of dizziness simultaneous with an immense restlessness overtakes the teacher; he yearns to swing his arms, twirl around, collapse on the floor and have a nap, anything but stand here and take it, take it from this smug bastard who knows it all.

  Zimmerman has risen to h
is most masterly professional self. His sympathy, his cadences of tact, his comprehensive consideration are exquisite. His body almost aromatically exudes his right and competence to supervise. “If at any time,” he says in gentle measured syllables, “you feel unable to go on, please come to me and tell me. It would be a disservice to yourself and to your students to continue. A sabbatical could be arranged easily. You think of it as a disgrace; you shouldn’t. A year of thought and study is a very common thing for a teacher in the middle of his career. Remember, you are only fifty. The school would survive; with so many of these veterans returning, the teacher shortage is not what it was during the war.”

  Dust, lint, spittle, poverty, stuck-together stuff in gutters—all the trash and chaos behind the made world pours through the rent opened by this last subtle prick. Caldwell says, “Christ, the only place I can go if I leave this school is the junkyard. I’m no good for anything else. I never was. I never studied. I never thought. I’ve always been scared to. My father studied and thought and on his deathbed he lost his religion.”

  Zimmerman lifts a benevolent palm. “If my last visitation report is bothering you, remember that it is my duty to tell the truth. But I tell the truth, to quote St. Paul, in love.”

  “I know that. You’ve been damn good to me these years; I don’t know why you’ve babied me along, but you have.” He bites back the urge to tell a lie, to blurt out that he didn’t see Mim Herzog coming out of his office mussed. But that would be nonsense. He did see her. He’d be God-damned if he’d beg. The least you can do is walk in front of the firing squad on your own two legs.

  “You’ve received no favors,” Zimmerman says. “You’re a good teacher.” On this amazing statement Zimmerman turns and walks away, with not a word about Mim or dismissal. Caldwell can’t believe his ears. Did he miss something? He wonders if the ax fell and was so sharp he didn’t feel it, if the bullets just passed right through him like a ghost. What had Zimmerman, underneath it all, said?

  The man turns back. “Oh, and George.”

  Now here it comes. Cat and mouse.

  “About the tickets.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You needn’t mention it to Phillips.” Zimmerman crookedly winks. “You know how fussy he is.”

  “O. K. I got your meaning.”

  Zimmerman’s office door closes, the frosted glass opaque. Caldwell doesn’t know if it is relief or a symptom of disease that is making his kneecaps tingle and his hands feel numb. The time has arrived for him to use his legs again and they are slow to obey. His torso swims down the hall. Rounding the corner, the teacher surprises Gloria Davis the hopped-up bitch leaning against the wall allowing young Kegerise to rub his knee between her legs. With his I. Q. he ought to know better. Caldwell ignores them and pushes into the auditorium past some Olinger High grads, Jackson is one of them and he can’t recall the other’s name, standing there with their mouths open looking down at the game. Living corpses, they didn’t even have the sense to stay out once they got out. He remembers Jackson always coming to him after class whining about special projects and his love of astronomy and making his own telescope out of mailing tubes and magnifying glass lenses and now the poor bohunk was a plumber’s apprentice at 75¢ an hour and sopping it up in beer. What in hell are you supposed to do to keep them from ending like that? He shies away from these his old students, the hunch in their shoulders reminds him of the great whole skinned carcasses hung on hooks in the freezer of a big Atlantic City hotel he once worked for. Dead meat. In veering away Caldwell comes face to face with old Kenny Klagle the auxiliary cop with his white brushed hair and baffled pale eyes and tender grandmotherly smile, solemnly tricked out in a blue uniform and paid five dollars a night to be on the premises; he stands beside a bronze fire extinguisher and they are two of a kind, in an emergency both would probably just sputter. Klagle’s wife left him years ago and he never knew what hit him. Never even knew enough to drop dead.

  Waste, rot, hollowness, noise, stench, death: in fleeing the many visages which this central thing wears Caldwell as if by God’s grace comes upon, over in the corner, leaning against the stacked folding chairs beside Vera Hummel, Reverend March in his clerical black and backwards collar.

  “I don’t know if you know me,” Caldwell says. “My name is George Caldwell and I teach general science here in the school.”

  March has to leave off laughing with Vera to take the offered hand and say, his smile pointedly patient under the curt mustache, “I don’t believe we have met, but of course I’ve heard of you and know you by sight.”

  “I’m a Lutheran so I guess I’m out of your flock,” Caldwell explains. “I hope I’m not interrupting you and Vera here; the fact is I’m badly troubled in my mind.”

  With a nervous glance at Vera, who has turned her head and might slip from his side, March asks, “Oh. What about?”

  “Everything. The works. I can’t make it add up and I’d be grateful for your viewpoint.”

  Now March’s glance travels everywhere but into the face opposite him as he looks through the crowd for some rescue from this tousled tall maniac. “Our viewpoint does not essentially differ from the Lutheran,” he says. “It’s my hope that someday all the children of the Reformation will be reunited.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Reverend,” Caldwell says, “but as I understand it the difference is the Lutherans say Jesus Christ is the only answer and the Calvinists say whatever happens to you, happens to you, is the answer.”

  In his anxiety and anger and embarrassment March reaches sideways and almost seizes Vera bodily to keep her with him during this preposterous interruption. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Orthodox Calvinism—and I count myself more orthodox than not—is fully as Christocentric as the Lutheran doctrines. Perhaps more so, since we exclude the saints and any substantive Eucharistic transformation.”

  “I’m a minister’s son,” Caldwell explains. “My old man was a Presbyterian, and as I understand it from him there are the elect and the non-elect, the ones that have it and the ones that don’t, and the ones that don’t have it are never going to get it. What I could never ram through my thick skull was why the ones that don’t have it were created in the first place. The only reason I could figure out was that God had to have somebody to fry down in Hell.”

  The Olinger High basketball team forges into the lead and March has to raise his voice furiously to make himself heard. “The doctrine of predestination,” he shouts, “must be understood as counterbalanced by the doctrine of God’s infinite mercy.” The crowd noise subsides.

  “That’s my problem, I guess,” Caldwell says. “I can’t see how it’s infinite if it never changes anything at all. Maybe it’s infinite but at an infinite distance—that’s the only way I can picture it.”

  March’s gray eyes are exploding with pain and irritation as the danger of Vera’s leaving him grows. “This is burlesque!” he shouts. “A basketball game is no place to discuss such matters. Why don’t you come and visit me in my study sometime, Mr.—?”

  “Caldwell. George Caldwell. Vera here knows me.”

  Vera turns back with a wide smile. “Somebody invoke my name? I don’t understand a thing about theology.”

  “Our discussion of it has just been concluded,” Reverend March tells her. “Your friend Mr. Caldwell has some very singular adverse notions about poor abused John Calvin.”

  “I don’t know a thing about him,” Caldwell protests, his voice becoming plaintive and high and unpleasant. “I’m trying to learn.”

  “Come to my study any morning but Wednesdays,” March tells him. “I’ll lend you some excellent books.” He firmly restores his attention to Vera, presenting to Caldwell a profile as handsome and final as if stamped onto an imperial coin.

  Make Nero look tame, small town aristocrats, Caldwell thinks, retreating. Heavy and giddy with his own death, sluggish and diaphanous like some transparent predator who trails his poisoned tentacles through the adamantine p
ressures of the oceanic depths, he moves along behind the backs of spectators and searches the crowd for the sight of his son. At last he spots Peter’s narrow head in a row on the right near the front. Poor kid, needs a haircut. Caldwell’s work tonight is done and he wants to go down and get Peter and go home. Humanity, which has so long entranced him, disgusts him packed and tangled like germs in this overheated auditorium. Even Cassie’s empty land by contrast would look good. And the snow is piling up outside. And the kid could use the sleep.

  But beside Peter’s head there is a small round blondness. Caldwell recognizes the ninth-grade Fogleman girl. He had had her brother two years ago, the Foglemans were the kind who would eat your heart and then wash the rest down the sink. Brutal Germans, brrr. It dawns upon him that she and Peter are not sitting next to each other by accident. With that kid’s brains, can it be? Now Caldwell remembers seeing Peter and Penny paired here and there in the halls. By the drinking fountain giggling. Against the annex lockers leaning broodily. Framed, blotted together into one silhouette, against the milky light of a far doorway. He had seen these things but they hadn’t sunk in before. Now they do. The sadness of the abandoned wells up. A great shout arises as Olinger’s lead expands, and the powerful panic of it licks with four hundred tongues the lining of the teacher’s strained innards.

  Olinger wins.

  Peter rarely takes his eyes from the game but hardly sees it, so possessed is his inner eye by the remembrance of pressing his face into the poignant absence between Penny’s thighs. Who would have thought even an instant’s access would be granted him, so young? Who would have thought thunder would not peal and punishing spirits flap awake? Who of all those pressed into this bright auditorium would dream what brimming darkness he had, kiss-lipped, sipped? The memory of it is a warm mask upon his face, and he does not dare turn his face to his love for fear she will see herself there, a ghostly beard, and cry out in horror and shame, every pore on her nose vivid.