by John Updike
The printout is disappointing. It looks faded; the color ribbons need to be replaced. The hand hardly shows—a dim mottled ghost flat on the paper where the glowing points beamed onto the screen from within presented the eye with a living intensity. Still, he now has evidence, of a sort. His own hands, pale and with sparse tufts of hair between the knuckles, hesitate above the keys, to repeat the transformative function once more. The next change might wring the matter dry, presenting him with an entire body, or an empty tomb. He feels cold to the pit of his being; his stomach is possessed by an unstoppable shudder. The very hum of the computer feels to him like a cry for pity, a craven pleading silence as the electron gun races back and forth refreshing the static screen, scanning back and forth in alternating attraction to the two magnetic fields generated by the deflection yoke while the control electrode relentlessly, repetitively modifies the beam of electrons freed by heat from the barium and strontium oxides coating the cathode. All this is performed with a precision and rapidity that seem miraculous until one has been taught (as was Dale, years ago, at Case Western) that these sub-atomic particles behave in this invariant way, wave and particle both, because they can’t help it, there is no other way. So a mechanism that would itself arouse worship in a New Guinean savage whose only glimpse of civilization is of the Godlike airplanes flying overhead is for Dale simply a means. He is like (as I picture him) a bat in this night, monstrously evolved so that webs enabling his soaring and flickering fluttering stretch between his hugely elongated fingers.
He types repeat. The screen ripples; seconds pass as the necessary crunching is performed. The stripes and concentric tunnels of the preceding display have been subdivided into geometric fish scales. The hand has been folded in, has vanished, unless its shape has been reduced and transformed into the single green scale at the lower right of the screen, in the position of an artist’s signature. Elsewhere, orange-red dominates; the fish scales have a certain optical alignment that leads the eye in, while yet remaining surface, remaining excited points in a film of phosphors backed by a super-thin mirroring film of aluminum. The machine is still locking him out of its secrets. Greedily, impatiently, his fingertips ask the VAX 8600 to repeat its gigantic loop once more.
The screen goes a cool gray, saying in unanswerable black letters Insufficient heap storage.
Dale feels wasted. He pushes himself back from the terminal. The skin of his eyes, the interface where vision meets light, hurts. The coldness of the place and hour have gone right through to his bones. He limps stiffly to the window; the moon is gone. The shreds of cloud have come to form a continuous blanket whose pewter color takes a yellow tint from the unsleeping streetlights of the city. In all the rectangular silhouettes of university and city buildings only a few windows are lit—bright slots spelling, in binary code, a word here and there. But of course, actually, a row of dead windows, of empty slots, spells words just as well. Zero is information also.
ii
“Nunc? Is that you?”
It was night, nearly ten. I had settled in my study with some lightweight old Tillich—The Socialist Decision—while Esther was finishing up a bottle of sweet vermouth and a tape of La Bohème in the living room. The phone had rung.
“What’s wrong, Verna?” Her voice sounded strange: hollow, charged.
“Oh God,” she burst forth childishly, “everything!” Yet it was not grievance or indignation that dominated her croaky voice, but fear. “Look”—she was tearily begging, sinking into her manipulating self—“could you possibly get your ass over here?”
A soft click told me that Esther had picked up the phone in the living room. To clue her in, I said to Verna, “You want me to come over there now?”
“Oh please, you got to.” She spoke in little gasps, almost hiccups; fear had knocked the air out of her lungs. “It’s not anything to do with me so much; it’s Poopsie. It’s Paula.”
“What about her?” My own voice sounded strange.
“She can’t walk; honest to God. Or else the little bitch won’t. She isn’t screaming any more but she doesn’t want me to touch her.”
That numbness that overtakes us with too much reality was slowing my mind, my tongue. “When did this start?”
“I don’t know, maybe fifteen minutes ago, the worst part. The whole thing’s been going on ever since supper. We’ve been having it out.”
“Having it out?”
“You know, hashing it over. Girl to girl.”
“With a one-year-old?”
“She’s almost two now, wake up. Listen, don’t give me a hard time. It wasn’t my first idea to call you; I tried to call Dale but he doesn’t answer his phone.”
“You say she won’t walk?” I repeated this not so much for Esther’s benefit as to help the picture form in my mind.
“It’s like”—the reedy voice hesitated, gasped, and then broke rapidly into the free air of confession, of pronouncing the terrible and thus dismissing it—“something’s wrong with her inside. So she can’t walk. I put her up on her legs a couple times and all she did was flop down and bawl at me.”
A faint light dawned. “Have you been hitting her?”
A silence, then with a childish slide: “I gave her a little push. She was bugging me. It’s the fault of that little dumb bookcase I bought when I was gonna be a hot-shit high-school grad; she sort of flew into it at kind of an angle and maybe caught one of the edges on her leg, I don’t know, I wasn’t paying exact attention.” Another silence, then: “Are the police going to have to hassle me?”
I felt her mind working against some resistant stuff, some chemical that piled up in waves and then thinned enough for reality to frighten her before the waves piled up again. “Verna, hold on a second,” I said. Carefully, so she wouldn’t know I had left her, I rested the receiver on the arm of the chair, next to The Socialist Decision splayed face down with Tillich’s handsome, uneasy face glowering from the back of the jacket, and raced stealthily out into the hall and into the living room. “What do you think?” I asked Esther in a whisper.
She put her hand over the receiver through which she had been listening; the gesture seemed slow and oddly graceful, like a diver’s adjustment underwater. When she looked up at me, the whites of her eyes seemed enormous, and bloodshot. Her lips framed a tiny black o, as if she might whistle. “Go,” she said softly, wide-eyed. “You must go.”
To Verna in the middle of the night? But I had her blessing. In needless excuse I said, “Probably all much ado about nothing, but—”
Gracefully holding the smothered phone, Esther sat with an air, perhaps drunken, of great composure. She was wearing her fawn cashmere cardigan (bought on the same day, in Trimingham’s, as my camel V-neck) over a yellow turtleneck, and she perched on the edge of the red silk settee with her bare knees pressed against the edge of the glass table. Through the glass I could see the white ribbon of pressure on her kneecaps, refracted. Her face looked glazed, perhaps from the heat of the dying fire, and I had an impression of her being less surprised by this development than I was. She had turned the volume of the cassette player down, but the little red light and the rotating hubs in the plastic windows told me the opera was still moving toward its climax. Poor Mimi. Poor Rudolfo.
I rushed back to the library phone to tell Verna I was coming. The receiver buzzed. She had hung up. In the hall I put on my plaid-lined Burberry, my gray wool scarf, my Irish bog hat. Though there had been a day or two of melting sunshine, April is still in our part of the world a cold, damp month.
Esther came to me in the hall. She seemed to be having trouble walking, though she wore no clacking heels; her feet were bare. For her gardening she wears rubber Wellingtons or else a tattered and muddy old pair of tennis sneakers, without socks. Her feet have broadened and grown homely in these fourteen years of marriage, but since they have acquired their warped nails and yellow calluses in my service, in the performance of tasks for our common household, there is for me a certain affecting beauty
about them. Our bones spread, the knit of our flesh loosens, no matter how we diet. She was sweating, as if the affair with Dale, all those attic afternoons of shameless and vengeful adultery, her turning herself inside out like a porn queen, her wallowing in a young man’s semen and innocent heat, had pickled her in something faintly acrid that now was being exuded from her pores. Like all sinners she was stewing in her own juice. She had brushed back her damp hair and her prominent curved brow shone. “How long are you going to be?” she asked. Could she have it in her tipsy heart to arrange a swift tryst, an electronically quick coupling with our computer whiz?
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said. “It could be a while, if the child needs medical attention.”
“The child—?”
“Paula. Or Verna, for that matter. You go to bed. You were right about the girl; we should have left her alone.”
“You were just trying to be a good brother to Edna,” Esther said, I couldn’t tell how ironically. My heart was beating so hard as to dull my senses. I yielded to a rare impulse and bent down and kissed her. Startled, she softened her mouth in response just as I was pulling away. How nice, nevertheless, it was and is, to bend down to a woman! With Lillian, my sensation, kissing, had been of ceremonially greeting another man, a fellow politician. Tillich was right: as creatures we are not only incorrigibly religious but incorrigibly social. As I left to rescue another woman, I felt lust for my wife, steeped though she was in another man’s brine.
And she? The look on Esther’s face reminded me of how, fourteen—fifteen, in fact, it was getting to be—years ago she used to look when, after a session of illicit lovemaking at her apartment, she would send me back to confront Lillian and the turbulence and guilt of my breaking home. If I never see you again, her bulging green eyes seemed to say, as I shut the door in her face, we’ve had this much. She thought like an accountant.
The Audi was parked at the curb out front. I got in and drove it. Our city is divided into zones that, blurred during the day, at night take on a certain sharpness; the denizens of one zone do not pass unnoticed in another, even if it is only to stand a moment at the take-out counter of a Chinese restaurant. Subtle matters of dress, or make-up and voice and even of personal bearing, shout out in the city lights and betray a trespasser. So it was with a slight sense of danger, sustaining my heartbeat at its high muffled pace, that I drove down Malvin Lane out of our neighborhood of barny faculty homes and headed into the realm of three-decker rows, of shuttered shops and blue-lit self-serve gas stations, of little clusters of the young and the tough gathered with the nervous watchfulness of grazing animals on the pavement outside of bars, beneath neon names. These bars leaked music; I could hear it dimly through my rushing windows. The Audi’s tires bounced on the rotted, potholed, overused asphalt of the Boulevard. At the edge of my headlights’ travelling cones, elongated shapes flitted along or hung on the curb—spectral, faceless shapes, od ombra od omo certo. The top lights of the tall center city showed far to my right, beyond the river, lights red and white like the lights of the airplanes slantingly descending into the airport still farther beyond. What were the planes descending and ascending toward, for what purpose were these shadowy clusters gathered on this raw spring night? The same force, no doubt, that had propelled me out into this potholed city, fragrant through all its asphalt of fertile spring.
Having learned my lesson that Prospect Street was one-way, I turned a block before the burnt-out bar, up a similar, half-abandoned street, whose windows were either dark or dimly signalling with television’s fluorescent flicker. Parking near the project was more difficult than in the day: the birds came home to roost. I circled the blocks and finally squeezed into a space illegally near a hydrant on Prospect, across from the gap that revealed the ginkgo tree, now coming again into bud. The struggling curbside saplings, spindly maples and taped-up locusts, were not yet leafed out. I locked the car and strode, not so swiftly as to appear to be running, beneath some smashed streetlamps toward the sulphurously illuminated project.
Though darkness had overtaken some of my winter-afternoon visits to Verna, I had never been here at night before. The black children who used the playground of truck tires and concrete pipes had been replaced by older youths who, chilly as it was, with the damp breath of the harbor in the air and a luminous mist thickening between the buildings, had congregated on the benches and the steps leading up to the iron doors of 606. The swift-moving white man in his fancy raincoat was so quickly upon them that they had time only to lean away from my footsteps as I scuffed briskly through a startled mass of denim, quilted dacron, and rounded hair glistening with drops of the night mist. There were girls—fat, with fat Afros and fat rubber-dark rounded arms and fat false pink pearls—among them, and this mitigated my sense of danger. Foolishly or not, we do associate females with safety, all history’s murderous mothers, frenzied Bacchantes, and self-mutilated Amazons to the contrary. All it takes to kill, after all, is to perceive another as an enemy, whose destruction will do us good; and such perceptions are surely not exclusively male. Sadism, however, is—sadism as a philosophical protest. The capacity for indignation at the nature of things, this cankerworm that has helped inspire men to such prodigious feasts of torture, lies stillborn in the hearts of the daughters of agreeable Eve. Women rage in frustration and plot out of spite but do not, it seems, exult in demonstrating to the universe its scandalous toleration of pain.
These thoughts—or the sketchiest inner return of them, for I had been over this ground in my mind before and even in my classroom, as in my discontinued seminar in blasphemy (readings in Villon, Rabelais, Sade, Verlaine, Bataille, and others [French not a requisite but desirable])—carried me through the entryway and up the cement-and-metal stairs. On the landings, the love-boasts of Tex and Marjorie had been effaced by rollers of paint itself now overlaid by some graffiti art so artful I could not read it; the message or signature seemed dashingly scrawled in something like Thai or Japanese. I listened for footsteps rattling in pursuit of my wallet and heard none. But as I attained the third-floor landing, the origin and purpose of my mission overtook me, and dread rubbed the floor of my stomach, and that numbness of too much reality returned. Those musty, doughy women of home: they had been too much for me, I had successfully fled them, why was I courting this disaster?
I walked down the bare hall to the door with 311 in ghostly numbers. I rapped lightly, hoping no one would answer. Verna, in her terrycloth bathrobe, her curly hair a partially bleached mess, the chestnut roots grown out several inches, opened the door instantly, pulling it so eagerly hard that she bumped herself, and the chain lock jangled. Her sallow broad face looked puffy and had been stained pink by the passage of tears. Mascara had run in dark lines downward from the outer corners of her eyes; I thought of a Japanese mask. To let me enter she stood aside with a demure ceremonial stiffness that went incongruously with her dishevelled appearance and the air of dislocation that had invaded the room, of its all having been tipped and hastily righted. Nothing, even the window, seemed to be quite where I remembered it.
Yet out of her pitiable condition her first words were an attack: “Jeez, Nunc. You took long enough.”
“I had trouble parking,” I said. “Where’s the child?” My voice surprised me with its deadly calm; long intimidated by Verna, her luminous and boneless flesh, I had been given the upper hand.
She bowed her head and said dully, “In here.”
I shoved through the maroon curtain ahead of her into the dismal small room that contained the child’s cot and an unmade futon. A faint sweet smell, of female animals. The cassette player was sitting on the floor outside the door to the bathroom but was silent; into the silence dripped sounds from the other apartments—reggae, a toilet being flushed, a distant quarrel that might have been something on television. Paula lay in her cot, motionless, in a paper diaper whose white swarmed in the dark. Her liquid live eyes were awake and stared up at me. She had been attending to some in
ner issue and her eyes only slowly focused on my giant white face as it loomed above her. “Da bad,” she said solemnly, and then smiled. Her curly long upper lip, her two small spaced front teeth. There was a red welt below one eye. “How did that—?”