by John Updike
By finding ridiculous and sickening Tertullian’s blessing of everlastingness upon our poor shuffling flesh, I was one with the heretics and heathens (ethnici) whose plausible objections he had outlined a few books earlier: An aliud prius vel magis audias tam ab haeretico quam ab ethnico? et non protinus et non ubique convicium carnis, in originem, in materiam, in casum, in omnem exitum eius, immundae a primordio ex faecibus terrae, immundioris deinceps ex seminis sui limo, frivolae, infirmae, criminosae, onerosae, molestae, et post totum ignobilitatis elogium caducae in originem terram et cadaveris nomen, et de isto quoque nomine periturae in nullum inde iam nomen, in omnis iam vocabuli mortem? It is, that is, the heathens and not (as preening hedonists and mockers from Nero on would have it) the Christians who make an outcry against the flesh—its origin, its substance, its causality, its end—who accuse it of being unclean from its first formation out of Earth’s feces and then uncleaner still from the slime of its semen, of being paltry (frivolous in its root sense of “weightless”), infirm, guilty (not so much criminal as covered with accusation, with slander), burdensome, troublesome. And then (according to the ethnici), after all this litany of ignobility, falling into its original earth and the name of a cadaver, and from this name certain to dwindle into no name, into the death of all designation. How terrible and true. Tertullian, like Barth, took his stand on the only ground where he could: the flesh is man. “All of him is flesh and by nature ought to perish,” Barth roundly wrote, in his pleasant Die christliche Lehre nach dem Heidelberger Katechismus.
Weary of translating, I closed my eyes. I pictured a white shaft: tense, pure, with dim blue broad veins and darker thinner purple ones and a pink-mauve head like the head of a mushroom set by the Creator upon a swollen stem nearly as thick as itself, just the merest little lip or rounded eaves, the corona glandis, overhanging the bluish stretched semi-epiderm where pagan foreskin once was, and a drop of transparent nectar in the little wide-awake slit of an eye at its velvety suffused tip. Esther’s studious rapt face descends, huge as in a motion picture, to drink the bitter nectar and then to slide her lips as far down the shaft as they will go, again and again, down past the corpus spongiosum to the magnificent twin corpora cavernosa in their sheath of fibrous tissue and silk-smooth membrane, their areolar spaces flooded and stuffed stiff by lust; her expert action shows a calculated tenderness, guarding against her teeth grazing, care on one side and trust on another emerging per carnem, her avid cool saliva making Dale’s prick shine in the attic light. For of course they have gone to her third-floor room, her seldom-used studio, the safest, most distant place, in case our awful clattering bell breaks into their rapture, and a place removed, too, from our second-floor bedrooms, which are haunted by the ghosts of her husband, his clothes, his shoes, his shaving lotion, his pipey smell, his bedside paperback Kirchliche Dogmatik III, and of their son, flesh of their flesh, his bedroom an innocent adolescent chaos of old homework papers and model spaceships and dropped underwear and rumpled Playboys and Clubs. Esther’s paintings—big, slashing, angular, gobby, a far cry in education and sophistication from Verna’s timid, pencilly, petal-by-petal watercolors—surround the lovers like a dappled forest, like patches of camouflage hiding them from the eye of Heaven, though from the third-floor windows they themselves can see ample of the world: the neighborhood rooftops and exiguous back yards and in this leafless season the twinkling distant heart of the city, and beyond the majestic skyscrapers the airplanes slanting downward toward the airport reclaimed from tidal marsh. January this year has been monotonously cold, so cold the inaugural parade was cancelled in Washington. Esther has an electric heater up here, and an old stained mattress dragged from a dusty storage space at the back, beyond her easels and canvases and some broken floor lamps and a faded velvet easy chair not worth re-covering. This junk has been transformed into the furniture of a room cozier than any below. The heater’s bright orange bar with its parabolic reflective shield casts a sharp arid heat onto their bare skins; their reflected pale bodies swim in the polished metal along with the glowing coil. The circumambient attic chill is no match for the coursing of their aroused blood; like their danger, their sin, it invigorates. She and Dale have already fucked once this afternoon on the filthy mattress. They sit upon it facing each other, legs crossed in yoga fashion, drinking white wine from squeezable plastic glasses. Then the willing wench, as porn novels say, takes note of his revived erection and puts aside her wine to bend her lips to its inviting hard-softness, its tacit standing homage to her. Esther loves being sluttish with this boy; he is so purely grateful and astounded and would never think to use it against her, to turn a gift into a demand and then a grievance in the manner of her gloomy, scowling husband. Also, she is thirty-eight and her womanhood won’t be there forever to use. Per quod utaris, cum eo utaris necesse est. Her necessary time has come. This tall bony youth of shining skin and thrilling phallus has been somehow delivered to her. She gorges herself on his flesh until her jaws ache. In the respite, gasping and wiping her lips, she croons, “So big. Too big for my mouth.”
“Not really, evidently,” says Dale languorously, in a voice also made husky by concupiscence. His satisfied, relaxed voice implies that all this adoration is owed him. He has put his wineglass aside and leaned back onto his straightened arms, the better to be blown. His blue eyes are dazed like a summer sky. A smell comes off his prick that has low tide in it, all mixed with her eager spit. She wants to cocksuck a bit more. She bends down into it, tucking back her straying hair, its mussed strands of gingery red. Dale grunts and says, “You better not do that.”
“Why not?” Esther’s eyes look very green as she lifts her head to ask this. Her lipstickless mouth looks bruised. One long-nailed hand supports her weight on the mattress; the other hovers near her hair, to keep tucking it back as it strays. Her little breasts hang conical and white, but for the bumpy muddy-colored tips.
“I might come.”
“Well … do.” Taking thought, she smiles; her prominent upper lip looks swollen. “Do come.”
“In your sweet mouth?”
“Would that amuse you?” The thought that it might amuses her.
“All over your pretty face?” He can hardly get the words out, the thought so excites him—the image, the words. Et sermo enim de organo carnis est.
Her own voice, usually so definite and shapely, sounds as if her throat is swollen shut. “I’d adore it. Dale. I adore your prick. I adore you.”
His words like butterflies stagger from his lips. “Have you ever been so happy,” he asks her, “your head hurts?”
Esther laughs whisperingly and flicks his one-eyed staring glans with her tongue. “Is that how you are?”
“It’s just pounding. As if my blood is too much for my veins.”
“What got you so turned on?” Her words come out playfully, among darting ticks of her tongue, yet with that throatiness, that motherly husky woman-of-substance note that she knows is one of her holds over him, one of the charms that let her do anything she wants with him, that let her mold him like white clay. His pubic hair, when her nose pushes into it, smells of cedar.
“You ask?” he asks weakly, his voice like that of a child being squeezed in wrestling and asking for mercy. He is close to coming. That kick at the root of his prick, the crura, is developing, that push from the prostate that in older men makes the hard-working old anus hurt after intercourse.
“I mean before,” she says, up through the cloud of her hair. “When we were just sitting there talking and drinking wine.”
“You,” Dale gets out. “The way, the way you were sitting there, in the lotus position, with your legs spread so casual, and your pretty fur,” he gasps, “just so there, all wet and sweet and mussed, your little pink cunt peeping through.” These words do it. The kick is taking over, from underneath. “Oh,” he says, “oh,” wanting to name her, to give her a name. “Esther” feels like another tongue’s property and “Mrs. Lambert” too formal; for him she has no
name, is simply that Other that faces us, that elastic wall that takes our punches, yin to our yang, pit to our pendulum, woman to our man.
He is coming. She stares at the little dark eye, the meatus urinarius, and with stern helpfulness gives a downward tug at the base of his engorged phallus with her encircling hand—how small and fragile and even shrivelled, she thinks, her hand with its long nails looks around the root of that helpless alabaster shaft—and when the first gob comes, as if in slow motion on a pornographic film, she has to have it herself, inside herself, all that startling pure whiteness; ravenously nimble, she straightens up on her knees and wades to him so she seems to his blurred sensus a bobbling warm giantess and, holding him firm with that hand at his kicking root, centers her cunt above his prick quickly and impales herself, settling her split self to its limit, so she feels shot through with light from underneath, up to beneath her heart, my faithless Esther’s heart. Catching his climax as it prolongedly subsides, with that desperate pumping energy of youth, she wraps her arms about his head and grinds the crest of her os pubis against his and catches up while Dale’s own heart is still beating as if to burst his veins and has her own climax, possesses it, wraps it around with her anima, moaning and then crying out in that faintly theatrical and yet well-intentioned way of hers so that, if anyone were even in the basement of the house, say a dope-crazed Haitian burglar from some other part of the city, he would hear her. Even Sue Kriegman, pecking away at her next children’s book (tentative title: Scott and Jenny Run Away to Wyoming) next door, would hear Esther’s proud and operatic cry of joy but for the double-glazed caulked storm windows that Myron has prudently had installed on all sides, to stand guard against this January’s monotonous cold.
Then our house slowly feeds its silence up to the lovers: the muffled knocking of the steam in the radiators, Esther’s great-grandfather’s eight-day Waterbury clock tolling the quarter-hour with its high-pitched chime, a creak of wood settling, an almost inaudible concussion that sounds like a footstep. Like the sea returning from a long suck and ebb, guilt floods the silence; the empty house fills with the ghostly stirring of guilt. Frivolae, infirmae, criminosae, onerosae, molestae …
Esther feels it and makes a wry impatient mouth, as if brushing a buzzing fly aside. She disengages herself; milky strands of semen link their underparts, their interfaced pudenda (the plural of pudendum, “that of which one ought to be ashamed,” a grammatically neutral form whose onus has been patriarchally shifted onto the female genitals alone), like tenuous umbilical cords. Immundioris deinceps ex seminis sui limo. Elsewhere in that same chapter, Tertullian has his scoffing heretic or heathen very sensibly ask, of our bodies in the afterlife, Rursusne omnia necessaria illi, et inprimis pabula atque potacula, et pulmonibus natandum, et intestinis aestuandum, et pudendis non pudendum, et omnibus membris laborandum?* Pudendis non pudendum—the style at its most savage, and least translatable.
She feels the guilt in the air, in the ghostly disturbances of the great house that stretches beneath their semen-stained mattress, as a manifestation of me; her long-accumulating anger with me, her boredom, leads her to brush the sensation aside and to rejoice, more deliberately now, in the well-knit pale body of her awkward young lover. She kisses him on the lips (wetwarm, pushsoft) and then gazes into his eyes, making him return the gaze, knowing her eyes have been flushed a richer, kinder green by her orgasm. “I wish I did have a pretty face,” she says, reminding him of his remark in passion. “I did once but it’s got all dry and bitter, with tiny little wrinkles.”
“I don’t see them.”
“And what if you did?”
“I’d love you anyway.”
“That’s the answer. What else can you say?” she asks, a bit dryly. “And I’m sorry I didn’t let you come in my mouth. I just had to have you”—the manner of a faculty wife, courteous and superior, is slipping back upon her as her blood cools; she lowers her lids—“down there. Next time, I promise.”
Though this is a delicious promise, sworn with the strength and generosity of a woman’s giving heart, her mention of the “next time” reminds them of the time (did the Waterbury clock strike four-fifteen or four-forty-five? Richie returns a little after five, to be tutored in the tortuous bases) and reminds him of his running commitment, somehow evolved in these weeks since Christmas, to make love to her, to betray me in my own house with my lawful wife’s body, not impulsively in an ungainsayable burst of mutual longing but mechanically, by schedule, from three o’clock on, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on and on into a future whose only horizon is their unthinkable, unbearable parting.
“Maybe we should meet out of this house,” he says.
Esther’s eyes widen. “Why? It’s perfectly safe. Rog never leaves his precious office before five-thirty, and even if he did you could just stay up here until he was out of the house again. I’d get him out.”
“But it feels, I don’t know, wrong,” Dale ventures. “Like trespassing. All your nice things, room after room. I feel him watching us, somehow.”
To him, yes, our things would seem nice, luxurious, even—our few stately antiques from Esther’s mother’s Connecticut ancestors, the rugs and red settee and glass table, the mahogany dining table and chairs in the Danish-modern style still fashionable when we were newly wed, Richie’s room with its wealth of rapidly defunct electronic games and gadgets. As he mounts the stairs behind Esther’s tight ass he must feel that he is boring upward through a wad of money. In truth, our house, compared with that of the Kriegmans or the Ellicotts, is shabby and underfurnished.
“I have a room,” he tells her. “I mean, my roommate’s hardly ever there. He studies over at the tech library and has a job evenings parking cars at a movie-theatre lot.”
“But, darling—what’s the building like?”
“Oh you know,” he says, as if she has been there other than in his masturbatory fantasies, or as if all faculty wives know how perpetual students must live. “In one of these old three-deckers all broken up into studio apartments.”
“Full of messy kids,” she says, wishing for a cigarette but knowing that if she goes downstairs to her bedroom to get one it will signal the breakup of the day’s tryst, it will begin the dressing and the tidying up and the putting on of suitably joyless faces to greet Richie when he returns from school, and wanting instead to linger in this easy nudity, to keep gazing at the image of herself cast back by the mirror of this young man’s flesh, and tasting the briny taste of herself he puts in her mouth. “I can imagine it. You all hear each other’s rock music through the walls and have to thread your way through a crowd of beat-up bicycles in the downstairs hall.”
He nods, on his side also thinking sadly that they are winding down, when what he’d like to do, after another glass of wine, is go at her another way, burying his face between her legs where she’s wet and at the other end of their conjunction making her make good on her kind offer, even though the poor cunt wriggle and gag like a hooked fish. Inprimis pabula atque potacula. This older woman is for him a sensual field in which his incarnation has room at last to run and roam to the limit. She even holds out, in her fantastic willingness (engendered of the desperation dutiful years work upon a woman), the possibility of his being cruel; this possibility is in his hands like pulling, burning reins when they are making love; when the love is over, the possibility has flown.
“I’ll feel ridiculous,” she says, in that superior drawling voice she uses socially, sitting there casually cross-legged leaking his jism onto the blue-striped mattress ticking, “going into a building like that. What could I be doing there, in my little wool suit and Gucci shoes, but coming to be fucked? When a woman gets the first gray hair, Dale dear, there are suddenly certain places where she simply doesn’t go. To be a woman is to be very unfree.”
“I just thought,” he says, embarrassed by his refused offer, “the day-care center where you work isn’t so far from my neighborhood.”
“The days I don’t take a bus, I p
ark on one certain street, always in front of the same house if I can, and walk up the sidewalk looking neither to the right nor the left. This much, I’m permitted. If I were to park in the next block up, I’d be in trouble.” She stands, and in standing rises above him in her flesh so that Dale recalls how when she had waded to him on her knees she appeared in that moment of predation a giantess, her small breasts huge and her compact hips enormous and split by desire like worlds dividing.