The Music School: Short Stories

by John Updike

  “Why should I give it to an agent of the state? It’s no more his than mine.”

  “But it is,” Orson said.

  “It was a plain act of Providence that placed it in my hands,” Hub said, the corners of his lips dented securely. “I haven’t decided yet which charity should receive the money it contains.”

  Dawson asked, “But isn’t that stealing?”

  “No more stealing than the state is stealing in making people pay money for space in which to park their own, heavily taxed cars.”

  “Hub,” Orson said, getting to his feet, “you give it back or we’ll both go to jail.” He saw himself ruined, the scarcely commenced career of his life destroyed, his father the doctor disgraced.

  Hub turned serenely. “I’m not afraid. Going to jail under a totalitarian regime is a mark of honor. If you had a conscience, you’d understand.”

  Petersen and Carter and Silverstein came into the room. Some boys from the lower floors followed them. The story was hilariously retold. The meter was produced from under the pillow and passed around and shaken to demonstrate the weight of pennies it contained. Hub always carried, as a vestige of the lumberjack country he came from, an intricate allpurpose pocket knife. He began to pry open the little money door. Orson came up behind him and got him around the neck with one arm. Hub’s body stiffened. He passed the head of the meter and the open knife to Carter, and then Orson experienced sensations of being lifted, of flying, and of lying on the floor, looking up at Hub’s face, which was upside down in his vision. He scrambled to his feet and went for Hub again, rigid with anger and yet, in his heart, happily relaxed. Hub’s body was tough and quick and satisfying to grip, though, being a wrestler, he somehow deflected Orson’s hands and again lifted and dropped him to the black floor. This time, Orson felt a blow as his coccyx hit the wood; yet even through the pain he perceived, gazing into the heart of this forced marriage, that Hub was being as gentle with him as he could be. He saw that he could try in earnest to kill Hub and be in no danger of succeeding. He renewed the attack and again enjoyed the tense defensive skill that made Hub’s body a kind of warp in space through which his own body, after a blissful instant of contention, was converted to the supine position. He got to his feet and would have gone for Hub the fourth time, but his fellow-freshmen grabbed his arms and held him. He shook them off and without a word returned to his desk and concentrated down into his book, turning the page. The type looked extremely distinct, though it was trembling too hard to be deciphered.

  The head of the parking meter stayed in the room for one night. The next day, Hub allowed himself to be persuaded (by the others; Orson had stopped speaking to him) to take it to the Cambridge police headquarters in Central Square. Dawson and Kern tied a ribbon around it, and attached a note: “Please take good care of my baby.” None of them, however, had the nerve to go with Hub to the headquarters, though when he came back he said the chief was delighted to get the meter, and had thanked him, and had agreed to donate the pennies to the local orphans’ home.

  In another week, the last exams were over. The freshmen all went home. When they returned in the fall, they were different: sophomores. Petersen and Young did not come back at all. Fitch returned, made up the lost credits, and eventually graduated magna cum in history and lit. He now teaches in a Quaker prep school. Silverstein is a biochemist, Koshland a lawyer. Dawson writes conservative editorials in Cleveland, Kern is in advertising in New York. Carter, as if obliged to join Young in oblivion, disappeared between his junior and senior years. The dormitory neighbors tended to lose sight of each other, though Hub, who had had his case shifted to the Massachusetts jurisdiction, was now and then pictured in the Crimson, and once gave an evening lecture, “Why I Am an Episcopalian Pacifist.” As the litigation progressed, the Bishop of Massachusetts rather grudgingly vouched for him, and by the time of his final hearing the Korean War was over, and the judge who heard the case ruled that Hub’s convictions were sincere, as witnessed by his willingness to go to jail. Hub was rather disappointed at the verdict, since he had prepared a three-year reading list to occupy him in his cell and was intending to memorize all four Gospels in the original Greek.

  After graduation, he went to Union Theological Seminary, spent several years as the assistant rector of an urban parish in Baltimore, and learned to play the piano well enough to be the background music in a Charles Street cocktail lounge. He insisted on wearing his clerical collar, and as a consequence gave the bar a small celebrity. After a year of overriding people of less strong convictions, he was allowed to go to South Africa, where he worked and preached among the Bantus until the government requested that he leave the country. From there he went to Nigeria, and when last heard from—on a Christmas card, with French salutations and three black Magi, which arrived, soiled and wrinkled, in South Dakota in February—Hub was in Madagascar, as a “combination missionary, political agitator, and soccer coach.” The description struck Orson as probably facetious, and Hub’s childish and confident handwriting, with every letter formed individually, afflicted him with some of the old exasperation. Having vowed to answer the card, he mislaid it, uncharacteristically.

  Orson didn’t speak to Hub for two days after the parking-meter incident. By then, it seemed rather silly, and they finished out the year sitting side by side at their desks as amiably as two cramped passengers who have endured a long bus trip together. When they parted, they shook hands, and Hub would have walked Orson to the subway kiosk except that he had an appointment in the opposite direction. Orson received two A’s and two B’s on his final exams; for the remaining three years at Harvard, he roomed uneventfully with two other colorless pre-med students, named Wallace and Neuhauser. After graduation, he married Emily, attended the Yale School of Medicine, and interned in St. Louis. He is now the father of four children and, since the death of his own father, the only doctor in the town. His life has gone much the way he planned it, and he is much the kind of man he intended to be when he was eighteen. He delivers babies, assists the dying, attends the necessary meetings, plays golf, and does good. He is honorable and irritable. If not as much loved as his father, he is perhaps even more respected. In one particular only—a kind of scar he carries without pain and without any clear memory of the amputation—does the man he is differ from the man he assumed he would become. He never prays.

  My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails

  THE MAN stood up when the woman entered the room, or, to be exact, was standing behind his desk when she opened the door. She closed the door behind her. The room was square and furnished in a strange cool manner, midway between a home (the pale-detailed Japanese prints on the wall, the thick carpet whose blue seemed a peculiarly intense shade of silence, the black slab sofa with its single prism-shaped pillow of Airfoam) and an office, which it was, though no instruments or books were on view. It would have been difficult to imagine the people who could appropriately inhabit this room, were they not already here. The man and woman both were impeccably groomed. The woman wore a gray linen suit, with white shoes and a white pocketbook, her silvery-blond hair done up tightly in a French roll. She never wore a hat. Today she wore no gloves. The man wore a summer suit of a gray slightly lighter than the woman’s, though perhaps it was merely that he stood nearer the light of the window. In this window, like the square muzzle of a dragon pinched beneath the sash, an air conditioner purred, a little fiercely. Venetian blinds dimmed the light, which, since this side of the building faced away from the sun, was already refracted. The man had a full head of half-gray hair, rather wavy, and scrupulously brushed, a touch vainly, so that a lock overhung his forehead, as if he were a youth. The woman had guessed he was about ten years older than she. In addition to the possibility of vanity, she read into this casually overhanging forelock a suggestion of fatigue—it was afternoon; he had already listened to so much—and an itch to apologize, to excuse herself, scratched her throat and made her limbs bristle with girlish nervousness. He waited to sit down
until she had done so; and even such a small concession to her sex opened a window in the wall of impersonality between them. She peeked through and was struck by the fact that he seemed neither handsome nor ugly. She did not know what to make of it, or what she was expected to make. His face, foreshortened downward, looked heavy and petulant. It lifted, and innocent expectation seemed to fill it. The customary flutter of panic seized her. Both bare hands squeezed the pocketbook. The purring of the air conditioner threatened to drown her first words. She felt the lack in the room of the smell of a flower; in her own home the sills were crowded with potted plants.

  “I saw him only once this week,” she said at last. Out of polite habit she waited for a reply, then remembered that there was no politeness here, and forced herself to go on alone. “At a party. We spoke a little; I began the conversation. It seemed so unnatural to me that we shouldn’t even speak. When I did go up to him, he seemed very pleased, and talked to me about things like cars and children. He asked me what I was doing these days, and I told him, ‘Nothing.’ He would have talked to me longer, but I walked away. I couldn’t take it. It wasn’t his voice so much, it was his smile; when we were … seeing each other, I used to think that there was a smile only I could bring out in him, a big grin whenever he saw me that lit up his whole face and showed all his crooked teeth. There it was, when I walked up to him, that same happy smile, as if in all these months … nothing had changed.”

  She looked at the catch on her purse and decided she had begun badly. The man’s disapproval was as real to her as the sound of the air conditioner. It flowed toward her, enveloped her in gray coolness, and she wondered if it was wrong of her to feel it, wrong of her to desire his approval. She tried to lift her face as if she were not flirting. In another room she would have known herself to be considered a good-looking woman. Here beauty ceased to exist, and she was disarmed, realizing how much she depended on it for protection and concealment. She wondered if she should try to express this. “He sees through me,” she said. “It’s what made him so wonderful then, and what makes him so terrible now. He knows me. I can’t hide behind my face when he smiles, and he seems to be forgiving me, forgiving me for not coming to him even though … I can’t.”

  The man readjusted himself in the chair with a quickness that she took for a sign of impatience. She believed she had an honest gift for saying what he did not want to hear. She tried to say something that, in its frankness and confusion, would please him. “I’m suppressing,” she said. “He did say one thing that if he hadn’t been my lover he wouldn’t have said. He looked down at my dress and asked me, ‘Did you put that on just to hurt me?’ It was so unfair, it made me a little angry. I only have so many dresses, and I can’t throw out all the ones that … that I wore when I was seeing him.”

  “Describe the dress.”

  When he did speak, the level of his interest often seemed to her disappointingly low. “Oh,” she said, “an orangey-brown one, with stripes and a round neckline. A summer dress. He used to say I looked like a farm girl in it.”

  “Yes.” He cut her short with a flipping gesture of his hand; his occasional rudeness startled her, since she could not imagine he had learned it from any book. She found herself, lately, afraid for him; he seemed too naïve and blunt. She felt him in constant danger of doing something incorrect. Once she had a piano teacher who, in performing scales with her side by side on the bench, made a mistake. She had never forgotten it, and never learned the piano. But as always she inspected his responses conscientiously, for a clue. She had reverted, in their conversations, again and again to this rural fantasy, as if, being so plainly a fantasy, it necessarily contained an explanation of her misery. Perhaps he was, with this appearance of merely male impatience, trying to lead her into acknowledging that she was too eager to dive to the depths. His own effort, insofar as she understood it, was, rather, to direct her attention to what was not obvious about the obvious. He asked, “Have you ever worn the dress here?”

  How strange of him! “To see you?” She tried to remember, saw herself parking the car, Thursday after Thursday, locking the door, feeding the meter, walking down the sunny city street of bakeries and tailor shops and dentists’ signs, entering the dour vestibule of his building, with its metal wall-sheathing painted over and over, seeing the shadow of her gloved hand reach to darken his bell.… “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Do you have any thoughts as to why not?”

  “There’s nothing profound about it. It’s a casual dress. It’s young. It’s not the identity a woman comes to Boston in. I don’t come in just to see you; I buy things, I visit people, sometimes I meet Harold afterward for a drink and we have dinner and go to a movie. Do you want me to talk about how I feel in the city?” She was suddenly full of feelings about herself in the city, graceful, urgent feelings of sunlight and release that she was sure explained a great deal about her.

  He insisted. “Yet you wore this quite informal dress to a dinner party last weekend?”

  “It was a party of our friends. It’s summer in the suburbs. The dress is simple. It’s not shabby.”

  “When you picked it to wear to this party where you knew he would see you, did you remember his special fondness for it?”

  She wondered if he wasn’t overdirecting her. She was sure he shouldn’t. “I don’t remember,” she said, realizing, with a flash of impatience, that he would make too much of this. “You think I did.”

  He smiled his guarded, gentle smile and shrugged. “Tell me about clothes.”

  “Just anything? You want me to free-associate about clothes in general?”

  “Whatever comes to your mind.”

  The air conditioner flooded her silence with its constant zealous syllable. Time was pouring through her and she was wasting her session. “Well, he”—it was queer, how her mind, set free, flew like a magnet to this pronoun—“was quite funny about my clothes. He thought I overdressed, and used to kid me about what an expensive wife I’d make. It wasn’t true, really; I sew quite well, and make a lot of my things, while Nancy wears these quiet clothes from R. H. Stearns that are really quite expensive. I suppose you could say my clothes were a fetish with him; he’d bury his face in them after I’d taken them off, and in making love sometimes he’d bring my underclothes back, so they’d get all tangled up between us.” She stared at him defiantly, rather than blush. He was immobile, smiling the lightest of listening smiles, his brushed hair silvered by the window light. “Once, I remember, when we were both in the city together, I took him shopping with me, thinking he’d like it, but he didn’t. The salesgirls didn’t know quite who he was, a brother or a husband or what, and he acted just like a man—you know, restless and embarrassed. In a way, I liked his reacting that way, because one of my fears about him, when I was thinking of him as somebody I had a stake in, was that he might be effeminate. Not on the surface so much as down deep. I mean, he had this passive streak. He had a way of making me come to him without actually asking.” She felt she was journeying in the listening mind opposite her and had come to a narrow place; she tried to retreat. What had she begun with? Clothes. “He was rather lazy about his own clothes. Do you want to hear about his clothes, or just my clothes? Next thing, I’ll be talking about the children’s clothes.” She permitted herself to giggle.

  He didn’t respond, and to punish him she went ahead with the topic that she knew annoyed him. “He’s sloppy. Even dressed up, the collars of his shirts look unbuttoned, and he wears things until they fall apart. I remember, toward the end, after we had tried to break it off and I hadn’t seen him for several weeks, he came to the house to see how I was for a minute, and I ran my hand under his shirt and my fingers went through a hole in his T-shirt. It just killed me, I had to have him, and we went upstairs. I can’t describe it very well, but something about the idea of this man, who had just as much money as the rest of us, with this big hole in his undershirt, it make me weak. I suppose there was something mothering about it, bu
t it felt the opposite, as if his dressing so carelessly made him strong, strong in a way that I wasn’t. I’ve always felt I had to pay great attention to my appearance. I suppose it’s insecurity. And then in lovemaking, I’d sometimes notice—is this too terrible, shall I stop?—I’d notice that his fingernails were dirty.”

  “Did you like that?”

  “I don’t know. It was just something I’d notice.”

  “Did you like the idea of being caressed by dirty hands?”

  “They were his hands.”

  She had sat bolt upright, and his silence, having the quality of a man’s pain, hurt her. She tried to make it up to him. “You mean, did I like being—what’s the word, I’ve suppressed it—debased? But isn’t that a sort of womanly thing that everybody has, a little? Do you think I have it too much?”

  The man reshifted his weight in the chair and his strikingly clean hands moved in the air diagrammatically; a restrained agitation possessed his presence, like a soft gust passing over a silver pond. “I think there are several things working here,” he said. “On the one hand you have this aggressiveness toward the man—you go up to him at parties, you drag him on shopping expeditions that make him uncomfortable, you go to bed with him, you’ve just suggested, on your initiative rather than his.”

  She sat shocked. It hadn’t been like that. Had it?

  The man went on, running one hand through his hair so that the youthful lock, recoiling, fell farther over his forehead. “Even now, when the affair is supposedly buried, you continue to court him by wearing a dress that had a special meaning for him.”

  “I’ve explained about the dress.”

  “Then there is this dimension, which we keep touching on, of his crooked teeth, of his being effeminate, feeble, in tatters; of your being in comparison healthy and masterful. In the midst of an embrace you discover a hole in his undershirt. It confirms your suspicion that he is disintegrating, that you are destroying him. So that, by way of repair in a sense, you take him to bed.”