The Music School: Short Stories

by John Updike

  It was not many minutes that they lay there at right angles together, but the time passed as something beyond the walls, as something mixed with the faraway clatter of pans and the approach and retreat of footsteps and the opening and closing of unseen doors. Here, conscious of a pointed painless pulse in the inner hinge of his arm but incurious as to what it looked like, he floated and imagined how his soul would float free when all his blood was underneath the bed. His blood and Joan’s merged on the floor, and together their spirits glided from crack to crack, from star to star on the ceiling. Once she cleared her throat, and the sound was like the rasp of a pebble loosened by a cliff-climber’s boot.

  The door opened. Richard turned his head and saw an old man, bald and sallow, enter and settle in a chair. He was one of those old men who hold within an institution an ill-defined but secure place. The young doctor seemed to know him, and the two talked, quietly, as if not to disturb the mystical union of the couple sacrificially bedded together. They talked of persons and events that meant nothing—of Iris, of Dr. Greenstein, of Ward D, again of Iris, who had given the old man an undeserved scolding, of the shameful lack of a hot plate to make coffee on, of the rumored black bodyguards who kept watch with scimitars by the bed of the glaucomatous king. Through Richard’s tranced ignorance these topics passed as clouds of impression, iridescent, massy—Dr. Greenstein with a pointed nose and almond eyes the color of ivy, Iris eighty feet tall and hurling sterilized thunderbolts of wrath. As in some theologies the proliferating deities are said to exist as ripples upon the featureless ground of Godhead, so these inconstant images lightly overlay his continuous awareness of Joan’s blood, like his own, ebbing. Linked to a common loss, they were chastely conjoined; the thesis developed upon him that the hoses attached to them met somewhere out of sight. Testing this belief, he glanced down and saw that indeed the plastic vine taped to the flattened crook of his arm was the same dark red as hers. He stared at the ceiling to disperse a sensation of faintness.

  Abruptly the young intern left off his desultory conversation and moved to Joan’s side. There was a chirp of clips. When he moved away, she was revealed holding her naked arm upright, pressing a piece of cotton against it with the other hand. Without pausing, the intern came to Richard’s side, and the birdsong of clips repeated, nearer. “Look at that,” he said to his elderly friend. “I started him two minutes later than her and he’s finished at the same time.”

  “Was it a race?” Richard asked.

  Clumsily firm, the boy fitted Richard’s fingers to a pad and lifted his arm for him. “Hold it there for five minutes,” he said.

  “What’ll happen if I don’t?”

  “You’ll mess up your shirt.” To the old man he said, “I had a woman in here the other day, she was all set to leave when, all of a sudden—pow!—all over the front of this beautiful linen dress. She was going to Symphony.”

  “Then they try to sue the hospital for the cleaning bill,” the old man muttered.

  “Why was I slower than him?” Joan asked. Her upright arm wavered, as if vexed or weakened.

  “The woman generally is,” the boy told her. “Nine times out of ten, the man is faster. Their hearts are so much stronger.”

  “Is that really so?”

  “Sure it’s so,” Richard told her. “Don’t argue with medical science.”

  “Woman up in Ward C,” the old man said, “they saved her life for her out of an auto accident and now I hear she’s suing because they didn’t find her dental plate.”

  Under such patter, the five minutes eroded. Richard’s upheld arm began to ache. It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a classroom where they would never be recognized, or in a charade that would never be guessed, the correct answer being Two Silver Birches in a Meadow.

  “You can sit up now if you want,” the intern told them. “But don’t let go of the venipuncture.”

  They sat up on their beds, legs dangling heavily. Joan asked him, “Do you feel dizzy?”

  “With my powerful heart? Don’t be presumptuous.”

  “Do you think he’ll need coffee?” the intern asked her. “I’ll have to send up for it now.”

  The old man shifted forward in his chair, preparing to heave to his feet.

  “I do not want any coffee”—Richard said it so loud he saw himself transposed, a lesser Iris, into the firmament of the old man’s aggrieved gossip. Some dizzy bastard down in the blood room, I get up to get him some coffee and he damn near bit my head off. To demonstrate simultaneously his essential good humor and his total presence of mind, Richard gestured toward the blood they had given—two square plastic sacks filled solidly fat—and declared, “Back where I come from in West Virginia sometimes you pick a tick off a dog that looks like that.” The men looked at him amazed. Had he not quite said what he meant to say? Or had they never seen anybody from West Virginia before?

  Joan pointed at the blood, too. “Is that us? Those little doll pillows?”

  “Maybe we should take one home to Bean,” Richard suggested.

  The intern did not seem convinced that this was a joke. “Your blood will be credited to Mrs. Henryson’s account,” he stated stiffly.

  Joan asked him, “Do you know anything about her? When is she—when is her operation scheduled?”

  “I think for tomorrow. The only thing on the tab this after is an open heart at two; that’ll take about sixteen pints.”

  “Oh …” Joan was shaken. “Sixteen … that’s a full person, isn’t it?”

  “More,” the intern answered, with the regal handwave that bestows largesse and dismisses compliments.

  “Could we visit her?” Richard asked, for Joan’s benefit. (“Really ashamed,” she had said; it had cut.) He was confident of the refusal.

  “Well, you can ask at the desk, but usually before a major one like this it’s just the nearest of kin. I guess you’re safe now.” He meant their punctures. Richard’s arm bore a small raised bruise; the intern covered it with one of those ample salmon, unhesitatingly adhesive bandages that only hospitals have. That was their specialty, Richard thought—packaging. They wrap the human mess for final delivery. Sixteen doll’s pillows, uniformly dark and snug, marching into an open heart: the vision momentarily satisfied his hunger for order.

  He rolled down his sleeve and slid off the bed. It startled him to realize, in the instant before his feet touched the floor, that three pairs of eyes were fixed upon him, fascinated and apprehensive and eager for scandal. He stood and towered above them. He hopped on one foot to slip into one loafer, and then on this foot to slip into the other loafer. Then he did the little shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap step that was all that remained to him of dancing lessons he had taken at the age of seven, driving twelve miles each Saturday into Clarksburg. He made a small bow toward his wife, smiled at the old man, and said to the intern, “All my life people have been expecting me to faint. I have no idea why. I haven’t fainted yet.”

  His coat and overcoat felt a shade queer, a bit slithery and light, but as he walked down the length of the corridor, space seemed to adjust snugly around him. At his side, Joan kept an inquisitive and chastened silence. They pushed through the great glass doors. A famished sun was nibbling through the overcast. Above and behind them, the King of Arabia lay in a drugged dream of dunes and Mrs. Henryson upon her sickbed received, like the comatose mother of twins, their identical packets of blood. Richard hugged his wife’s shoulders and as they walked along leaning on each other whispered, “Hey, I love you. Love love love you.”

  Romance is, simply, the strange, the untried. It was unusual for the Maples to be driving together at eleven in the morning. Almost always it was dark when they shared a car. The oval of her face clung in the corner of his eye. She was watching him, alert to take the wheel if he suddenly lost consciousness. He felt tender toward her in the eggshell light, and curious toward himself, wondering how far beneath his brain the black pit did lie. He felt no different; but, then, the quality of
consciousness perhaps did not bear introspection. Something surely had been taken from him; he was less himself by a pint. Yet the earth, with its signals and buildings and cars and bricks, continued like a pedalled note.

  Boston behind them, he asked, “Where should we eat?”

  “Should we eat?”

  “Please, yes. Let me take you to lunch. Just like a secretary.”

  “I do feel sort of illicit. As if I’ve stolen something.”

  “You, too? But what did we steal?”

  “I don’t know. The morning? Do you think Eve knows enough to feed them?” Eve was their sitter, a little bony girl from down the street who would, in exactly a year, Richard calculated, be painfully lovely. They lasted three years on the average, sitters; you got them in the tenth grade and escorted them into their bloom and then, with graduation, like commuters who had reached their stop, they dropped out of sight, into college or marriage. And the train went on, and took on other passengers, and itself became older and longer.

  “She’ll manage,” he told her. “What would you like? All that talk about coffee has made me frantic for some.”

  “At the Pancake House beyond 128 they give you coffee before you even ask.”

  “Pancakes? Now? Aren’t you jolly? Do you think we’ll throw up?”

  “Do you feel like throwing up?”

  “No, not really. I feel sort of insubstantial and gentle, but it’s probably psychosomatic. I don’t really understand this business of giving something away and still somehow having it. What is it—the spleen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Are the splenetic man and the sanguine man the same?”

  “God. I’ve totally forgotten the humors. What are the others—phlegm and choler?”

  “Bile and black bile are in there somewhere.”

  “One thing about you, Joan. You’re educated. New England women are educated.”

  “Sexless as we are.”

  “That’s right; drain me dry and then put me on the rack.” But there was no wrath in his words; indeed, he had reminded her of their earlier conversation so that, in much this way, his words might be revived, diluted, and erased. It seemed to work. The restaurant where they served only pancakes was empty and quiet this early. A bashfulness possessed them both, and a silence while they ate. Touched by the stain her blueberry pancakes left on her teeth, he held a match to her cigarette and said, “Gee, I loved you back in the blood room.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “You were so brave.”

  “So were you.”

  “But I’m supposed to be. I’m paid to be. It’s the price of having a penis.”

  “Shh.”

  “Hey. I didn’t mean that about your being sexless.”

  The waitress refilled their coffee cups and gave them the check.

  “And I promise never never to do the Twist, the cha-cha, or the schottische with Marlene Brossman.”

  “Don’t be silly. I don’t care.”

  This amounted to permission, but perversely irritated him. That above-it-all quality; why didn’t she fight? Trying to regain their peace, scrambling uphill, he picked up their check and with an effort of acting, the pretense being that they were out on a date and he was a raw dumb suitor, said handsomely, “I’ll pay.”

  But on looking into his wallet he saw only a single worn dollar there. He didn’t know why this should make him so angry, except the fact somehow that it was only one. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Look at that.” He waved it in her face. “I work like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats and at the end of it what do I have? One goddamn crummy wrinkled dollar.”

  Her hands dropped to the pocketbook beside her on the seat, but her gaze stayed with him, her face having retreated, or advanced, into that porcelain shell of uncanny composure. “We’ll both pay,” Joan said.

  A Madman

  ENGLAND ITSELF seemed slightly insane to us. The meadows skimming past the windows of the Southampton–London train seemed green deliriously; they were so obsessively steeped in the color that my eyes, still attuned to the exhausted verdure and September rust of American fields, doubted the ability of this landscape to perform useful work. England appeared to exist purely as a context of literature. I had studied this literature for four years, and had been sent here to continue this study. Yet my brain, excited and numbed by travel, could produce only one allusion; “a’ babbled of green fields,” that inconsequential Shakespearean snippet rendered memorable by a classic typographical emendation, kept running through my mind, “a’ babbled, a’ babbled,” as the dactylic scansion of the train wheels drew us and our six mute, swaying compartment-mates northward into London.

  The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea where we spent the night in the flat of a vague friend, the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices that surrounded us when we awoke—all this seemed too authentic to be real, too corroborative of literature to be solid. The taxi we took to Paddington Station had a high roof and an open side, which gave it to our eyes the shocked, cockeyed expression of a character actor in an Agatha Christie melodrama. We wheeled past mansions by Galsworthy and parks by A. A. Milne; we glimpsed a cobbled eighteenth-century alley, complete with hanging tavern boards, where Dr. Johnson might have reeled and gasped the night he laughed so hard—the incident in Boswell so beautifully amplified in the essay by Beerbohm. And underneath all, underneath Heaven knew how many medieval plagues, pageants, and conflagrations, old Londinium itself like a buried Titan lay smoldering in an abyss and tangle of time appalling to eyes accustomed to view the land as a surface innocent of history. We were relieved to board the train and feel it tug us westward.

  The train brought us into Oxford at dusk. We had no place to go. We had made no reservations. We got into a cab and explained this to the driver. Middle-aged, his huge ears frothing with hair, he seemed unable to believe us, as if in all his years he had never before carried passengers who had not already visited their destination. He seemed further puzzled by the discovery that, though we claimed to be Americans, we had never been in Stillwater, or even in Tulsa. Fifteen years ago he had spent some months in the depths of Oklahoma learning to fly Lend-Lease planes. Now he repaid his debt by piloting us down a narrow street of brick homes whose windows—queerly, for this was suppertime—were all dark. “We’ll give you a try at the Potts’,” he explained briefly, braking. He went with us up to the door and twisted a heavy wrought-iron knob in its center. A remote, rattling ring sounded on the other side of the opaquely stained panes. At length a tall saturnine man answered. Our driver explained to him, “Potty, we’ve two homeless Yanks here. They don’t know the score as yet.”

  Early in the evening as it was, Mr. Pott wore a muttering, fuddled air of having been roused. The BED AND BREAKFAST sign in his window seemed to commit him to no hospitality. Only after impressing us with the dark difficulty of it, with the unprecedented strain we were imposing upon the arrangements he had made with a disobliging and obtusely technical world, did he lead us upstairs and into a room. The room was large, chill, and amply stocked with whatever demigods it is that supervise sleep. I remember that the deliciously cool sheets and coarse blankets were topped by a purple puff smelling faintly of lavender, and that in the morning, dressing, my wife and I skipped in and out of the radiant influence of the electric heater like a nymph and satyr competing at a shrine. The heater’s plug was a ponderous and dangerous-looking affair of three prongs; plugging it in was my first real work of acclimatization. We appeared for breakfast a bit late. Of all the other boarders, only Mr. Robinson (I have forgotten his actual name) had yet to come down. Our places were laid at the dining table, and at my place—I couldn’t believe my eyes—was set an insanity, a half of a cooked tomato on a slice of fried bread.

  Mr. Robinson came down as Mr. Pott was finishing explaining to us why we must quickly find perman
ent lodgings. Our room would soon be needed by its regular tenant, an Indian undergraduate. Any day now he would take it into his head to show up. It was a thankless job, keeping students’ rooms; they were in and out and up and talking and making music at all hours, and the landlord was supposed to enforce the midnight curfew. “The short of it is,” Mr. Pott snarled, “the university wants me to be a nanny and a copper’s nark.” His voice changed tone. “Ah, Mr. Robinson! Good morning, Professor. We have with us two lovebirds from across the Atlantic.”

  Mr. Robinson ceremoniously shook our hands. Was he a professor? He was of middle size, with a scholar’s delicate hunch and long thinning yellowish-white hair brushed straight back. In speech, he was all courtesy, lucid patter, and flattering attention. We turned to him with relief; after our host’s dark hints and dour discontents, we seemed to be emerging into the England of light. “Welcome to Oxford,” he said, and from a bright little tension in his cheeks we could see he was about to quote. “ ‘That home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.’ That’s Matthew Arnold; if you want to understand Oxford, read Arnold. Student of Balliol, fellow of Oriel, professor of poetry, the highest bird as ever flew with a pedant’s clipped wings. Read Arnold, and read Newman. ‘Whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age’—which he did not mean, you know, entirely sympathetically; no, not at all. Arnold was not at all church-minded. ‘The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full … But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.’ Hah! Mr. Pott, what is this I see before me? My customary egg. You are a veritable factotum, a Johannes Factotum, of kindness. Mr. Pott of St. John’s Street,” he confided to us in his quick, twinkling way, “an institution no less revered by the student body than the church of St. Michael’s-at-the-North-Gate, which contains, you should know, and will see, the oldest standing structure in”—he cleared his throat, as if to signal something special coming—“Oxnaford: the old Saxon tower, dating from the ninth century at the least. At the least, I insist, though in doing so I incur the certain wrath of the more piddling of local archaeologists, if we can dignify them with the title upon which Schliemann and Sir Leonard Woolley have heaped so much indelible honor.” He set to his egg eagerly, smashing it open with a spoon.