by John Updike
There is no way from us to God—not even a via negativa—not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way—even of this way—would not be God.
Yes. I closed the book and put it back. The god who stood at the end of some human way would not be God. I have a secret shame: I always feel better—cleaner, revitalized—after reading theology, even poor theology, as it caresses and probes every crevice of the unknowable. Lest you take me for a goody-goody, I find kindred comfort and inspiration in pornography, the much-deplored detailed depiction of impossibly long and deep, rigid and stretchable human parts interlocking, pumping, oozing. Even the late Henry’s Opus Pistorum, so vile it was posthumous, proved not too much for me, for me had its redeeming qualities, exalting as it did and as such works do our underside, the damp underside of our ordained insomnia, crawling with many-legged demons. Lo! the rock is lifted. And what eventuates from these sighing cesspools of our being, our unconscionable sincere wishes? Cathedrals and children.
Richie was crouching blurry-eyed over his homework while trying to keep a rerun of “Gilligan’s Island” in focus. I ruffled the back of the boy’s hair, dark brown like my own before gray infiltrated everything but my eyebrows, which remain solid, dark, long, and stern. “How’d school go?”
“O.K.”
“How’s your cold?”
“O.K.”
“Your mother says it’s getting worse.”
“Dad. I’m doing homework. What’s twenty-seven to base six?”
“I have no idea. They didn’t have bases when I was in school.”
Actually, I had tried to understand them with him, and by following his textbook closely had seemed to succeed; but the slidingness of exponentiality repelled me, and the revelation that base ten was in no way sacred opened an unnecessary hole in my universe. Thinking of mathematics, I see curves moving in space according to certain aloof and inevitable laws, generating the beauty of trajectories, expanding, carrying truth upon the backs of their arches, like cherubs on dolphinback, farther and farther out, plunging and rising. The Gnostics’ hierarchies of angels and of human degrees of susceptibility to the pleroma, and the “measuring of the body of God” set forth with so much laborious alphabetic arithmetic in Merkabah mysticism, surely anticipated and intended to represent these sweeping immaterial formulae that mediate between us and the absolutes of matter and energy. I continued to Esther, “And he had the nerve, this science type I was telling you about in the library, to more or less ask me to get him a grant so he can prove God’s existence on the computer.”
“Why are you so dead against it? You believe in God, or at least you used to.”
Sensing her mood, I wasn’t sure Richie should hear what would be coming out of her mouth; but we were all in the kitchen, where she, above all, had the right to be. Partake of her food, partake of her mood. “I’m sure I still do,” I stiffly said. “But not because a computer tells me to. It trivializes the whole idea.”
“Maybe this boy thinks God is more than just an idea.”
“You sound remarkably like him.”
“How tall was he?”
A curious question, but I answered. “Six feet, at least. Too tall.”
“You gonna get him the grant?” Little Esther was being slangy, drawling and jauntily lighting a cigarette from the orange-hot coil of a burner on the electric stove. She lowered her face to within an inch of a ghastly maiming: a stumble, a mere nudge, and she would be forever branded.
“I do wish you’d stop your smoking,” I told her.
“Who’s it hurting?”
“You, dear.”
“Everybody in the house, Mom,” Richie pointed out. “They were saying at school how people who live with smokers have lungs almost as bad as smokers themselves.” On “Gilligan’s Island” a small man with a yelping voice was wearing a sarong and trying to avoid a heavyset blond man who, clad in a splashy-patterned bathing suit, was bombarding him with water balloons from a helicopter.
“I can’t possibly get him a grant,” I said. “That’s not my department at all.”
“He sounds like a rather touching young man,” Esther told me, on no evidence.
Richie interrupted again. “Mom, what’s twenty-seven to the base six? Dad won’t tell me.”
“Forty-three,” she said. “Obviously. Six goes into twenty-seven four times with three left over for the units column. Read your book, Richie, for Heaven’s sake. I’m sure it’s all in there, that’s why they give you the book in the first place.”
I was nettled, sensing that she was siding with this unknown youth only in order to annoy me. I debated the wisdom of pouring myself a pre-dinner bourbon. Esther had poured another slug of red wine from the green Gallo jug, and just the way her hair had loosened up, its wings coming untucked, proclaimed her readiness for a fight. Were I to get drunk, it would help me in the fight but incapacitate me for the reading I had hoped to do tonight—the book, for instance, on Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers had been written by a former student, who was looking to me anxiously for a blessing and a bit of a boost up the Jacob’s ladder of academic preferment. I compromised on the drink, denying myself the bourbon but pouring some of the Gallo into a glass of my own. It tasted thick, fusty. I prefer white. I really prefer champagne. “Since when,” I asked my wife amicably, “have you become such a theologian?”
“I’m not,” she said. “You know what I think. I don’t think anything; I mean, I don’t think it’s anything. I think it’s nonsense. But I’m amused to see you so vigorously defending your own style of nonsense against somebody else’s style. All these emperors without clothes, you all have your turfs to defend. This boy comes in and offers to prove God’s existence and you curl that upper lip of yours and lower those eyebrows and obviously wish him dead, gone, out of the church. To you he’s a heretic.”
“I would not so dignify him,” I said, all dignity. “He’s very young, and I dare say a month from now he’ll have another brainstorm. He’s using God as a gimmick for a grant. This whole generation has grown up that thinks of nothing but grants. An academic welfare class.” The wine was sour; it hadn’t been just Esther’s breath. Of course, fermentation is a kind of rot, much as life, from the standpoint of energy, is a form of decay. There was, though, a beauty, a certain soap-bubble shimmer of benignity, in feeling the first sips mingle with my blood and speed up its motion through my veins while my gaze was fixed on Esther’s pursed, aggrieved little lips, tensed to unleash the next argumentative utterance. She spoke of my upper lip but it was hers that was complex; across her mouth there passed that wistful cloud, that sad sweet blur, a scarcely perceptible “hurt” look, a hint of some sudden tender sad song about to form a round O. She used to blow me a certain amount; indeed, when we were new to each other and the passion of courtship was upon her, the female passion of beating out another woman and securing a protector, I could hardly keep her lips away from my fly. In cars, while I was driving: her fluffy head would bump the wheel and make steering tricky. In my church office, as I sat back in the fake-leather easy chair my counsellees usually occupied in their spiritual confusion: my eyeballs would roll upward in the manner of Saint Teresa (who used, incidentally, to yearn at communion for a bigger host—más, más, Dios!). In bed, when we were spent: Esther would rest her lovely little sugar sack of a skull on my belly and hold me softly in her mouth as if for safekeeping, and in my sleep I would harden again. Now it was a rare thing, and she never failed to let me feel her disgust. I could not in good faith blame her: our emotions change, and the chemistry of our impulses with them.
“Why don’t you bring him around?” she asked, as if innocently, her eyes also, it occurred to me, like my recent visitor’s, awash with window light, though their blue favored the green end of the spectrum and my young visitor’s the gray. My own eyes, to complete the chart, are a somewhat melting chocolate, a dark wet bearish brown that makes me look, according to the susceptibilities of the wit
ness, angry or about to cry. Esther sarcastically added, “I haven’t been around a brainstorm for years.”
Underneath our sour exchange, Richie vented his exasperation. “All this dumb book does,” he said, “is talk about sets and keep showing these like puddles of x’s that don’t have anything to do with numbers!”
With a sudden graceful acquiescence Esther bent low, as minutes before she had bent her face to the hot stove coil, and read the textbook over his shoulder. “When we write twenty-seven,” she told him, “it’s a shorthand way of expressing two sets of ten plus seven ones. To do it into base six, you must ask yourself how many sixes go into twenty-seven. Think. Begins with F.”
“Five?” the poor child said, his brain frazzled.
“Four.” Her voice barely disguised her disgust. She pointed into his book with a disagreeable scrape of her fingernail. “Four times six is twenty-four. With three left over makes forty-three. See?”
See. “Gilligan’s Island” had momentarily yielded to a commercial. For catfood. A handsome, caramel-colored cat, an actor-cat wearing a bow tie, was shown snubbing raw steak and fresh fish and then greedily burying its face up to its throat muff in a dish of gray-brown pellets. Pavarotti in the distance was reaching toward one of the higher shelves of canned emotion. The ceiling above our heads, in our old-fashioned, servant-oriented kitchen, showed cracks and a worrisome yellowness, as if pipes under the second floor were slowly leaking ectoplasm. Through our big kitchen “picture” window—an improvement inflicted in the Fifties—I could see across our yard and fence into the dining room of our neighbors, the Kriegmans. Myron teaches bacteriology at the medical school and Sue writes children’s books, and their three teen-age daughters are lovely in triplicate. Their five heads were arrayed in the light of the Tiffany lamp over their dining table and I could even see Myron’s mouth moving—his low-slung face, his thick hunched shoulders, the choppy gestures of the hand not holding the fork—and the haloed coiffures of his women rhythmically nodding as if in a subdued rapture of agreement and adoration. Myron and I often meet at parties; he is an avid small-talker, “up” on everything and bored by nothing, except possibly his own specialty. Though we have exchanged thousands of words and spent hours pressed together with watery whiskies in one hand and slippery hors d’oeuvres in the other, he has never told me anything about the one subject, bacteria, where he might be truly informative; nor has he ever elicited from me any information on Christian heresies.
In contrast with the sour, quarrelsome atmosphere and deteriorating ceiling of our own kitchen, how happy the Kriegmans appeared in their dining alcove, their multicolored lamp just barely illumining the shadowy walls, which they, like most academic families, have strewn with clumps of eclectic objects—African masks and drums, Carpathian shepherds’ horns, Ethiopian crosses, Soviet balalaikas—displayed as evidence of foreign travel, like the mounted heads of kudus or leopards for another social class, in another time and empire. I envied the Kriegmans their visible bliss, their absolutely snug occupancy of their ecological niche, which came equipped with a tenant couple on the third floor, as a tax break and hedge against burglary, with a summer home on a suitably underdeveloped small Maine island, and with uproariously unsuitable suitors for the daughters—such wastrel, drop-out boy friends (some of whom became husbands) being, I suppose, at our level of conspicuous consumption what yachts and summer “cottages” were to Veblen’s rich. Esther and I, with our second marriage and single child and my relatively shabby job in the backwater of the Divinity School, didn’t fill our niche as snugly as the Kriegmans did theirs, and we didn’t even, unfashionably, put ourselves to the trouble of creating a third-floor apartment, preferring to use these old servant rooms as a storage attic and as Esther’s studio, when one of her ever less frequent painting fits was upon her. In our decade here she had done rather lurid, abstractified views of the rooftops from all of the third-floor windows, in all of the directions of the compass, and thus used up her world. Her painting style had become over the years increasingly violent—great gumboish sweeps of the brush and palette knife, with dribbles of turpentine and unlucky houseflies accepted into the texture. Sue Kriegman’s children’s books, oddly, portrayed families in disarray: sundered by divorce, beset by financial emergency, or comically swept up in a frenetic untidiness, of too many cats and furniture spilling its stuffing, quite unfamiliar to those of us who visited her impeccably kept home—one street over, though its windows looked into ours.
“So why don’t you?” Esther was asking, still looking to release her tension, to cap the outrage of her boring day, with a fight. For the past few years, beginning as a volunteer and graduating to underpaid assistant, she has been working at a day-care center in another part of the city, four days a week; but this activity only seems to exacerbate her sense of useless vitality, of her life’s being wasted.
“Why don’t I what? I was spying on the Kriegmans, envying them their happiness.”
“That’s the way we look to them, too. Don’t worry about it. All families look great through windows.”
“Cora Kriegman’s a slut,” Richie volunteered.
“What’s a slut?” I asked him.
“Come on, Dad. You know.” He took refuge back in “Gilligan’s Island,” where some kind of reconciliation seemed to be in progress, a mass embracing beneath the stage-set palms. The Pacific sunshine, made of studio lights, cast no shadows.
“Have him to tea,” Esther clarified, “with your niece.”
“Why should I have this creepy computer whiz to my own blessed home? I’ll cope with him in my office, along with the other dirty work.”
“It doesn’t seem to me you did cope, though. You’re acting very annoyed and upset.”
“I am not.”
“His ideas sound more amusing than you seem willing to admit, for some reason.”
“I resent your poking at me about him. I also resent the way he poked me about Verna. He seemed to think I should be doing more for her than I am.”
“Maybe you should. Don’t you think it’s unnatural, here she’s been over a year in town and you haven’t once called her up?”
“Edna told me not to. Over the phone. She said the girl had disgraced herself and her family, including me. Including you and Richie, for that matter. Including the Kriegmans and Mrs. Ellicott, you could almost say.”
“Don’t rave, Rog. You don’t care what Edna told you. You’ve never been crazy about Edna.”
“I can’t stand her, to be precise. She was messy and shallow and bossy. And I’m sure her daughter would be the same.”
“What a mean spirit I’m married to,” Esther said. Her green, hyperthyroid eyes had been tipped into glassiness by her last sip of wine. One whole side of her hairdo had collapsed and was falling loopily to her shoulders. “What a cold, play-it-safe bastard.”
I told her quickly, as one cuts short a student who is garrulously bluffing, “My dear, you’ve been looking ever since I came home for an excuse to attack me and I don’t think you’ve quite found it yet. I am not my niece’s keeper. When on earth is dinner?”
Richie, indignant at our quarrel—children take our friendly adult give-and-take all too seriously—punched off the television and said upward, “Yeah, Mom. When’s dinner? I’m starving.”
Simultaneously, Pavarotti, in the far-off living room, had exhausted his string of sob stories and automatically clicked off.
For fourteen years we’ve had the same cheap white timer, a wedding present given to us by an old lady in my former parish who didn’t seem to realize that I had disgraced myself into an outer darkness beyond all such homey things. The device had a docile little long-nosed clockface you twisted to the required minutes; when the minutes were up, it gave out its flat, furious peal. Looking like one of Shakespeare’s slim transvestites, a bosomless boy in an unravelling gingery-red wig, Esther bowed toward the timer as toward a fellow actor. Dramatically extending one hand, palm up, she announced to her audience
of two, “Voilà. Le meatloof.”
“O mia cara,” I said, thinking, Más, más. I love meatloaf; it’s easy to chew.
Her wrist, thrust from her loose sweater, looked thin as a dog’s foreleg. The faintly desperate impudence of this her burlesque of the housewife’s role triggered in me that old enchantment, that fourteen-year-old sense of the space in her vicinity being sacred, charged with electrons agitating to one’s own. Cathexis is, as Freud repeatedly says (where?), never lost, just mislaid, like a one-armed doll lodged among worn, rolled-up carpets and empty picture frames in the attic.
iii
Then a few days later I found myself walking in the steps of Dale Kohler as I imagined them, the afternoon he left my office. The trees held a few leaves less but the weather was otherwise similar, in-and-out, the blue-bottomed clouds twisting and fragmenting as they sailed their sea of air, the American flags shining in the sunny intervals. My route passed fire stations, schools, and other buildings where the public services of the commonwealth and the nation were distributed. I had looked up Verna Ekelof in the phone book, and was somehow astonished to find her there, to see that a girl with so few resources and little reason to be in our city had been allowed to procure a telephone.