Roger's Version: A Novel

by John Updike

Indeed, it has occurred to me that in my sensation of peace post coitum, of sweet theistic certainty beneath the remote vague ceiling, of living proof at Verna’s side, I was guilty of heresy, the heresy of which the Cathars and Fraticelli were long ago accused amid the thunders of anathema—that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God’s forgiveness can magnificently play. Más, más. But thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God.

  ii

  To the party came Closson with his shrivelled little pretty wife, Prudence, her clear blue eyes as hard and intense as enamelled beads baked in her lifetime regimen of health foods, spring water, militant pacifism, and illusionless goodness, and the Vanderluytens, to give our gathering the factitious jolly racial mix of a Coca-Cola commercial on television, and Ed Snea, who was “working things out” these days with Mrs. Snea and brought in her stead a flaxen-haired, starry-eyed, and utterly hipless graduate student in problematics to whom his relationship had evidently ceased to be purely advisory. Rebecca Abrams brought a female lover, a rosy-cheeked square-built Englishwoman who knew all about Mochica and Nazca pottery shards, and Mrs. Ellicott a middle-aged son by one of her many fatal marriages, a tall bald person with a rapid eye-blink and a tic that caused his mouth, every minute or so, to shoot sideways toward one of his ears. Though quite nicely spoken, he had an odd, ineradicable air of not having dressed himself, of other hands having done up his buttons. Rebecca’s escort, on the other hand, plainly put herself every day into the same impenetrable plaid suit, equally sound for a dig or a party, its wool so thick and tangled as to awaken envy in a tweedy type like me.

  Some of my graduate students came, but no one could imagine my having an affair with Corliss Henderson; she instantly gravitated toward the bushy Englishwoman to quiz her on the issue of whether, in pre-Columbian cultures, pottery had been the product of (as patriarchal doctrine had it) male or (as she firmly believed) female hands. The Englishwoman, in her boxy skirt and mud-colored flat shoes, stated with loud relish that the Inca woman was a beast of burden, pure and simple. The wife of a tall economist famous for his readiness to appear on talk shows begged to differ, on the strength of last winter’s trip to Machu Picchu. The husband of a Bolivian poetess persona non grata with the present regime had his own slant on that, the Latin-American feminist question. Has North America, for all its vaunted suffrages, ever had a figure like Eva Perón? Or Gabriela Mistral? And so it went. The party brimmed with guests to remain nameless in this narrative yet all with some claim, via beauty or brains or birth, to be considered exceptional, to be among what in an earlier New England would have been called the elect.

  On all sides, while I greeted guests and ushered them, clucking absurdly and trying to remember for the sake of small talk the names of their children and pets, and Esther hustled on her clacking heels back and forth to the kitchen, where skulked the two pathologically shy Irish girls hired to pass the hors d’oeuvres, there arose a shrill unanimous deploring of the President’s latest blunder, more than a blunder, the downright atrocity of his laying a wreath at some German cemetery. The party munched, munched, munched upon Reagan’s absent body; each President in turn is offered up to the vigorous though untested conviction of the university personnel that they could run the country better than the elected authorities that do. And yet it seemed to me that we all existed inside Reagan’s placid, uncluttered head as inside a giant bubble, and that the day might come when the bubble burst, and those of us who survived would look back upon this present America as a paradise.

  I wanted Dale to meet the Kriegmans, and luckily they all arrived together—Dale looking, in his gray suit and violent necktie, pasty and gaunt, while the Kriegmans, all five of them, radiated health and heartiness. Myron and Sue always bring that extra touch to a party: forsythia and magnolia had given way in our adjacent back yards to dogwood and azalea, and the amusing Kriegmans had snipped their hot-pink azaleas en fleur and woven matching garlands for their heads. The three daughters had restricted themselves to single blossoms tucked into their semi-punk coiffures. These jeunes filles were nicely spaced at nineteen, seventeen, and fifteen years old, and their names—Florence, Miriam, and Cora—could be remembered by their happy consonance with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail. I introduced them all to Dale, and told the boy, “You must talk to Myron here about your theories. Unlike me, he’s a real scientist and can give you some intelligent feedback.”

  “What theories?” Myron asked hungrily. His intellectual appetite is as keen as his thirst for good wines and good times; over the years his constant intake has shortened the distance between his head and chest so that his large, swarthy face seems rooted below his shoulders, his several chins engulfing the knot of his necktie. His three daughters, each a distinct shade of loveliness in stencilled pastel tank top and baggy painter pants, picked Dale over with their eyes and decided they’d better move deeper into the party. Indeed, he did look terrible, terrible from within: the inner worm was gnawing lustily.

  “I’ll be getting back to you, young fella,” Myron promised him. “I can’t absorb theories without a glass in my hand.”

  The Kriegmans moved down the hall into Esther’s theatrical embrace and, although Dale’s blue eyes (their cool serenity somewhat qualified since he and I first met) travelled over my shoulder to seize the sight of his mistress in the frilly costume of a wife, I held him a moment, as if solicitously, there beside the bench loaded with the rack of theological books the tide of troubled faith deposits at my door.

  “How’s it going?” I asked him, in the urging, conspiratorial whisper we use with the sick.

  “How do you mean?” His eyes dulled, and without turning my head I could see, as in a rearview mirror, Esther passing from his field of vision.

  “The project,” I urged.

  “Oh, O.K. There’s some interesting things turning up. I still haven’t got the methodology a hundred percent straightened away, but maybe in a week or two, when the pressure eases on the daytime stuff, the animation graphics.”

  “You’re expected to come up with something substantive before June,” I reminded him. “To get the grant renewed.”

  Dale removed his gaze from the distances where Esther might reappear and tried to focus on me, his friend and enemy. I felt him, with a soft snap of will, vow to be honest. “Maybe it shouldn’t be renewed, Professor Lambert. Maybe the whole thing is too big for me.”

  “Nonsense,” I told him. “You persuaded me, and I’ve been a hard-core fideist since the age of fifteen. How did you fancy those young Kriegman ladies, by the way? A little young—but my intuition about you is that you like ’em young.” This was vulgar, but a party forces us to become many people, none of them entirely pleasant.

  “I didn’t notice them all that closely. They looked pretty typical,” Dale said. Again, that soft snap, deciding to be frank with me: “I don’t much want to discuss my theories with their father, for that matter. They feel a little strange to me right now, my theories.” Astonishingly, in his unkempt and somewhat curly brown hair, allowed to fall over his forehead perhaps to hide the thinning at the temples, a few white hairs had appeared, all the more shocking for being, as yet, very few.

  “Nonsense,” I said again, playing the bluff professor-host, unafraid of repetition. “Kriegman has an open mind. You’ll bowl him over.”

  Poor Dale. He feels sick. He sits down, on the red silk settee. The inner worm is gnawing high in his stomach, where the esophageal tube joins and ulcers begin. The sight of Esther, clacking and flurrying back and forth through the loud and gaudy garden of her party, stuns him with some wrong so deep at the base of things as never to be reconciled with his own inner Gesetz. For this occasion my wife is wearing not the suave and iridescent green velvet of Thanksgiving but a lighthearted frock of pollen yellow, trimmed with floppy frills at the sleeves and hem and striped black across the hips so that she seems a giant bumblebee. That this crisp, overanimated, quasi-official female presence could ever hav
e lain naked on his narrow cot in the room smelling of sneakers and soy sauce, that those same hips bound in black stripes could have parted for him in the contortions of love to reveal the rose-brown dent of her anus, and that that prattling painted mouth could have stretched to engulf his inflamed and veiny manhood now seems a dream, a Boschian vision frozen on a cracked canvas, an old Hell priceless on its burglar-alarmed museum walls. He feels, my poor Dale, a futile raging possessiveness, a helpless desire to reclaim, to wrench Esther loose from the solid and lively social matrix in which I have embedded her, and to extend into a lifetime those few ecstatic hours she has wantonly granted him, for reasons of her own which, like all else in this sublunar world, are not immutable. In the two weeks since Paula has become a part-time tenant, the lovers’ attic trysts have fallen off; they parted last time with no appointment for the next. An Esther-less void confronts him, and now her glances convey only an irritation that he keeps gazing toward her so soulfully, where the flower of our local academia can observe and take note.

  Richie senses another orphan and sits down beside him, here by the glass table. The fireplace ashes have been swept away with the winter and a big fluffy vase of peonies set in the black cavity. A few petals have fallen onto the hearth bricks and are turning brown at the edges.

  Dale gamely asks, “How’s it going, Rich? How’re the bases coming?” Their tutorial sessions have not been resumed since the Easter vacation, another sign from his mistress’s direction of diminished passion.

  “I flunked the last two tests,” the boy admits, already too inured to failure to sound an apologetic note. “I thought I had the theory of it down but I guess I didn’t. You multiply something by something else but I didn’t remember what, it all goes sort of inside out in my head. My mother thinks I’m dyslexic.”

  “Does she though?”

  “Where’s your girl friend?”

  “Girl friend?”

  “You know, Verna, who parks her baby with us now sometimes. I like her. She’s funny.”

  “What does she do funny?”

  “Teases Dad. A lot of the times you can see he doesn’t know he’s being teased.”

  “She was never my girl friend, just a friend. Maybe she wasn’t invited because she teases your dad too much.”

  “No, it’s because Mom doesn’t like her.”

  “She doesn’t?” The mere introduction of Esther into the conversation gives Dale’s heart rise. Love tumescent in every cell fans through his skin, as when a punched-up spread sheet arrays itself on the screen, left to right, up to down. “Why not, do you suppose?”

  “She thinks she’s slutty. She doesn’t want me to talk to her, but I do anyway, when she comes for Paula or drops her off. Once I showed her my Clubs and she laughed. She said those girls weren’t really horny, they were just pretending. It’s all exploitation.”

  Dale wonders about pretending, women pretending. Had Esther been pretending? Impossible, he thinks. But the thought makes his body burn with shame beneath his clothes. He wants to ask this boy a thousand questions about his mother—how she looks in the morning, what she eats for breakfast—but decides this would be exploitative, and changes the subject. “How do you like having Paula around?”

  “She’s a pain,” my son says, “but I guess she can’t help it. She’s this funny color, too, but I guess she can’t help that either. I teach her stuff, like how to use the remote control on the VCR. She’s smart, she can do it.”

  Dale wonders if Richie, who will never be a mathematician, might become a teacher or a clergyman instead. The boy has his defects but seems kind. There are people people and thing people, Dale thinks, and reflects of himself that he was a thing person, from that Lionel train set on. Personifying things is perhaps as big a mistake as reifying people. Some mistake has certainly been made.

  Esther comes over to where the two of them are sharing the settee. Her stripes are sudden bright bars on Dale’s eyes. He doesn’t dare lift his eyes to her face, that aggressive cushion of an upper lip and her slender jaw with its middle-aged slack. Her voice descends, speaking motherly to Richie. “Darling, would you please like to go help the girls pass the hors d’oeuvres? All they want to do is hide in the kitchen and giggle, and if the chicken livers wrapped in bacon aren’t served hot they become greasy and mealy.”

  These last remarks seem to be addressed to an adult, and Dale hopefully lifts his eyes. Her face, so far above him, gazing down, has a neutral, questioning look, as if he were a bit of tissue on a slide, whose pathology has not been quite determined. “You aren’t having a very good time,” she observes.

  “No. I am. This is a great party. It’s nice to see the house all full of people.” Evoking the times they have had it to themselves, as Adam and Eve had the wilderness.

  Her mouth compresses into a circle, a bumpy bud, of flesh. “I prefer it with more select company,” she says, still conversationally but her voice so lowered that only he can hear.

  She still loves him, wants him. His inner leap of renewed belief drives him to stand, but this is a mistake; his raw height alarms her, his bony unusable size, and makes them as a pair conspicuous. “Richie tells me he’s flunking again,” Dale says. “Maybe he could use a little tutoring. I sure could use … the money.”

  Esther looks distracted, checking on either side to see who is standing close. She is smoking a cigarette. “It’s so near the end of school,” she tells Dale, “I wonder if it’s worth it. Roger and I really don’t know what to do about Richie; maybe Pilgrim is just too academic for him. So many clever Jewish children, and now these appallingly motivated Orientals.” She exhales irritably, stubs out the cigarette in our silver ashtray, distractedly looks into the silver case, finds it empty but for a few crumbs, and lets the lid slam shut.

  Dale says, “You’re the boss.” His sense of incapability seems to him in the midst of my party a costume of degradation, a beggar’s rags smeared with dung. If only they were naked! She couldn’t fail to fall to worshipping his beautiful erect prick. He would tease her with it, torture her; when she opened herself on the stained attic mattress to be entered between her spread legs, instead he would kneel to her little face and rub it across her lips, have her kiss it balls to tip, her tense, distracted features subdued and grateful in the dreamlike loosening of concupiscence. “You have my number,” he tells her. He receives a glimmer, through his mental picture of their love play, of the possibility that women are stirred to such feats of love by the sensation of their own power, by the joy of power, and that having proved their power lessens their interest; and, further, that enacting the role of hostess at a party like this, in such a substantial and correct house, proves power of another sort, and provides another agreeable sensation.

  “I do,” Esther curtly agrees, and in turning bumps into Myron Kriegman, who is bearing down, wineglass in hand, garland on head.

  “Whoops. Sorry, Es.”

  “Myron, you all look divine.”

  “Sue’s idea. I feel like a damn fool.”

  “I must check on the kitchen; ghastly things are happening.”

  “You go, sweetheart. O.K., young fella, hit me with those theories of yours.”

  To Dale at the moment these theories are as hatefully irrelevant and obscure as the exact words being exchanged in the cheerful cacophony of these many rooms of mine, where the word “Bitburg” keeps sounding like a bird chirp. Esther’s closeness, and the ambiguity of their conversation, have tantalized him; his renewed glimpse and scent of the woman-lover, that radiant animal who waits crouching at the head of the stairs, at the end of all these crooked, noisy, obstructed social corridors, have left him dazed. His mind aches like an overexercised body. Yet he politely offers, as on the other side of the world priests peddle candles in the clamor of the weary holy places, the cosmic arguments: the hugely long odds against the Big Bang’s having worked out so well, the horizon, smoothness, and flatness problems, the incredible necessary precision of the weak- and strong-force con
stants, not to mention that of the gravitational-coupling constant and the neutron mass, were any of which different by even a few ten-thousandths the universe would have been too explosive or diffuse, too shortlived or too utterly homogenous to contain galaxies, stars, planets, life, and Man.

  Kriegman hears all this out with bursts of rapid nodding that bounce his chins on the knot of his necktie and wag the blossoms of the azalea garland he still wears. As if better to understand, he has put on large squarish horn-rims, trifocals; behind their lenses, between sips from his flexible plastic glass of white wine (Almaden Mountain Rhine, $8.87 per three-liter jug at Boulevard Bottle), his small eyes jump and change size as they jiggle among the three levels of focal length. “Well,” he says at last, smiling like a man who even as he talks is listening to a background music with sentimental associations, “nobody denies the Big Bang has a few wrinkles we don’t comprehend yet, we may never comprehend for that matter; for example, I was reading the other day that even the oldest star clusters show traces of the heavy elements, which is strange because there’s no older generation of stars to have cooked them up and as you know the particle mechanics of the Big Bang could only have supplied helium and hydrogen, right?”

  Dale wonders if he’s supposed to say, “Right.” He foresees that he will not have to say very much.

  “Listen, there’s always going to be wrinkles,” Kriegman is telling him with a fatherly gruffness. “This primal fireball et cetera, and all this field theory in those first fractions of a second, we’re talking about virtually incomprehensible events, ridiculously long ago. These astrophysicists are just whistling ‘Dixie’ three-quarters of the time.”

  “Right,” Dale says. “That’s what I say.”

  “Yeah, but no need to go all obscurantist either. Let me give you a homework assignment. Want a homework assignment?”

  Dale nods, feeling weak, with a child’s grateful weakness when he is told he is sick and must be put to bed.