by John Updike
“Who is this guy, that he’s become so fucking big in my life suddenly? Why doesn’t he take you for the walk, if that’s what’s on his mind?”
Did she blush? “George, really—he’s young enough to be my son.” This was an awkward assertion, made in the sweep of the moment. She could be the mother of a twenty-one-year-old, if she had been pregnant at nineteen; but in truth she had never borne a child, and when they were first married, and she was in her mid-thirties, she had hoped to have a child by him. But he had ogreishly refused; he had had enough children—a daughter by Jeaneanne, two sons by Claire. Now the possibility had slipped away. He thought of his present wife as racily younger than himself but her fortieth birthday had come and gone, and since the days when they had surreptitiously courted, in the flattering shadows of Claire’s unknowing, Vivian’s face had grown angular and incised with lines of recurrent vexation.
The young man in the office—a kind of rabbit hole around the corner from the key rack, in which the Irish staff could be heard scuffling and guffawing—was at least twenty-five, and may have been thirty, with children of his own. He was slender, black-eyed, milky-skinned, and impeccably courteous. Yet his courtesy carried a charge, a lilt, of mischief. “Yes, and walking is the thing in these parts—we’re not much for the organized sports that are the custom in the States.”
“We passed some golf courses, driving here,” Allenson said, not really wanting to argue.
“Would you call golf organized?” the assistant manager said quickly. “Not the way I play it, I fear. As we say, it’s an ungrateful way to take a walk.”
“Speaking of walks—” Vivian produced her little green map. “Which of these would you recommend for my husband and me?”
With his bright-black eyes he looked from one to the other and then settled on looking at her, with a cock to his neatly combed head. “And how hardy a man would he be?”
Wifely to a fault, Vivian took the question seriously. “Well, his driving is erratic, but other than that he manages pretty well.”
Allenson resented this discussion. “The last time I saw my doctor,” he announced, “he told me I had beautiful arteries.”
“Ah, I would have guessed as much,” said the young man, looking him benignly in the face.
“We don’t want to start him out on anything too steep,” Vivian said.
“Currabeg might be your best option, then. It’s mostly on the level road, with fine views of the Roughty Valley and the bay. Take an umbrella against the mist, along with your fine blue coat, and if he happens to begin to look poorly in the face you might hail a passing motorcar to bring in the remains.”
“Are we going to be walking in traffic?” She sounded alarmed. For all her assertiveness, Vivian had irritating pockets of timidity. Claire, Allenson remembered, drove on a motor scooter all over Bermuda with him, clinging to his midriff trustfully, twenty years ago, and would race with the children on bicycles all over Nantucket. Jeaneanne and he had owned a Ford Thunderbird convertible when they lived in Texas, and would commonly hit a hundred miles an hour in the stretch between Lubbock and Abilene, the top down and the dips in Route 84 full of watery mirages. He remembered how her hair, bleached blond in Fifties-style streaks, would whip back from her sweaty temples, and how she would hike her skirt up to her waist to give her crotch air, there under the steering wheel. Jeaneanne had been tough, but her exudations had been nectar, until her recklessness and love of speed had carried her right out of Allenson’s life. The loss had hardened him.
The assistant manager appeared to give Vivian’s anxiety his solemn consideration; there was, in his second of feigned thought, that ceremonious touch of parody with which the Irish bring music to the most factual transactions. “Oh, I judge this off-time of year there won’t be enough to interfere with your easiness. These are high country roads. You park at the crossing, as the map shows clearly, and take the two rights to bring you back.”
Still, Allenson felt, their adviser felt some politely unspoken reservation about their undertaking. In their rented car, with its mirrors where you didn’t expect them and a balky jumble of gears on the floor, while Vivian transparently tried to hold her tongue from criticism, he drove them out of Kenmare, past a cemetery containing famous holy wells, over a one-lane hump of a stone bridge, up between occluding hedgerows into the bare hills whose silhouettes, in the view from the Allensons’ hotel room, were doubled by the mirroring sheen of the lakelike estuary. They met no other cars, so Vivian had less need to tense up than on the ring roads.
The map in her lap, she announced at last, “This must be the crossroads.” A modest intersection, with barely enough parking space for one car on the dirt shoulder. They parked in the space and locked the car. It was the middle of a morning of watery wan sunshine. A bite in the breeze told them they were higher than in Kenmare.
On foot they followed a long straight road, not as long and shimmering as the straightaways in Texas, yet with something of the same potential for mirage. They crossed a stream hidden but for its gurgle in the greenery. A house being built, or rebuilt, stood back and up from the road, with no sign of life. Land and houses must be cheap. Ireland had been emptying out for ages. Cromwell had reduced the Irish to half a million, but they had stubbornly bred back, only to be decimated by the potato famine two centuries later.
At first, Vivian athletically strode ahead, hungry for hovels and unspoiled views. She had brought new running shoes on the trip—snow-white, red-chevroned, bulky with the newest wrinkles of pedal technology. They were not flattering, but, then, compared with Jeaneanne’s, this wife’s ankles were rather thick. Her feet looked silly, under the hem of her bright-blue raincoat, flickering along the road surface, striped like birds. Where were the real birds? Ireland didn’t seem to have many. Perhaps they had migrated with the people. Famines are hard on birds, but that had been long ago.
The hedgerows thinned, and after the invisible stream the road had a steady upward trend. He found himself overtaking his young wife, and then slowing his pace to match hers. “You know,” she told him, “I really did twist my back in the car yesterday, and these new sneakers aren’t all they were advertised. They have so much structure inside, my feet feel bullied. It’s as if they keep pushing my hips out of alignment.”
“Well,” he said, “you could go barefoot.” Jeaneanne would have. Claire might have. “Or we could go back to the car. We’ve gone less than a mile.”
“That’s all? I wouldn’t dream of telling them at the hotel that we couldn’t do their walk. This must be the first right turn already, coming up.”
The T-crossing was unmarked. He looked at the green map and wished it weren’t quite so schematic. “This must be it,” he agreed, uncertainly, and up the road they went.
A smaller road, it continued the upward trend, through emptier terrain. Irish emptiness had a quality different from that of Texas emptiness, or that of the Scots Highlands, where he and Claire had once toured. The desolation here was intimate. Domes of stone-littered grass formed a high horizon, under roiling clouds with blackish centers. There was little color in anything; he had expected greener grass, bluer sky. The landscape wore the dull, chastened colors of the people in the towns. It was a shy, unassuming sort of desolation. “I suppose,” Allenson said, to break the silence of their laborious walking, “all this was once full of farms.”
“I haven’t seen a single hovel,” Vivian said, with a querulousness he blamed on her back.
“Some of these heaps of stones—it’s hard to tell if man or God, so to speak, put them there.” Jeaneanne had been a liberated Baptist, Claire a practicing Episcopalian. Vivian was from a determinedly unchurched family of ex-Catholic scientists whose treeless Christmases and thankless Thanksgivings Allenson found chilling. Strange, he thought as he walked along, he had never had a Jewish wife, though Jewish women had been his best lovers—the warmest, the cleverest.
“It said in the guidebook that even up in the hills you could se
e the green places left by the old potato patches but I haven’t seen a single one,” Vivian complained.
Time passed wordlessly, since he declined to answer. He hadn’t written the guidebook. The soles of their feet slithered and scratched.
Allenson cleared his throat and said, “You can see why Beckett wrote the way he did.” He had lost track of how long their forward-plodding silence had stretched; his voice felt rusty. “There’s an amazing amount of nothingness in the Irish landscape.” On cue, a gap in the clouds sent a silvery light scudding across the tops of the dull hills slowly drawing closer.
“I know this isn’t the road,” Vivian said. “We haven’t seen a sign, a house, a car, anything.” She sounded near tears.
“But we’ve seen sheep,” he said, with an enthusiasm that was becoming cruel. “Hundreds of them.”
It was true. Paler than boulders but no less opaque, scattered sheep populated the wide fields that unrolled on both sides of the road. With their rectangular purple pupils the animals stared in profile at the couple. Sometimes an especially buoyant ram, his chest powdered a startling turquoise or magenta color, dashed back among the ewes at the approach of these human intruders. Single strands of barbed wire reinforced the stone walls and rotting fences of an older pastoralism. Only these wires, and the pine poles bearing wires overhead, testified that twentieth-century people had been here before them. The land dipped and crested; each new rise revealed more sheep, more stones, more road. A cloud with an especially large leaden center darkened this lunar landscape and rained a few drops; by the time Vivian had put up their umbrella, the sprinkle had passed. Allenson looked around for a rainbow, but it eluded his vision, like the leprechauns promised yesterday at Moll’s Gap, in the droll roadside sign LEPRECHAUN CROSSING.
“Where is that second right turn?” Vivian asked. “Give me back the map.”
“The map tells us nothing,” he said. “The way it’s drawn it looks like we’re walking around a city block.”
“I knew this was the wrong road, I don’t know why I let you talk me into it. We’ve gone miles. My back is killing me, damn you. I hate these bossy, clunky running shoes.”
“You picked them out,” he reminded her. “And they were far from cheap.” Trying to recover a little kindness, Allenson went on, “The total walk is four and a half miles. Americans have lost all sense of how long a mile is. They think it’s a minute of sitting in a car.” Or less, if Jeaneanne were driving, her skirt tucked up to air her crotch.
“Don’t be so pedantic,” Vivian told him. “I hate men. They grab the map out of your hands and never ask directions and then refuse to admit they’re lost.”
“Whom, my dear, would we have asked directions of? We haven’t seen a soul. The last soul we saw was your cow-eyed pal at the hotel. I can hear him now, talking to the police. ‘Ah, the American couple,’ he’ll be saying. ‘She a mere raven-haired colleen, and he a grizzly old fella. They were headin’ for the McGillycuddy Reeks, wi’ scarcely a cup of poteen or a pig’s plump knuckle in their knapsacks.’ ”
“Not funny,” she said, in a new, on-the-edge voice. Without his noticing it, she had become frantic. There was a silvery light in her dark eyes, tears. “I can’t walk another step,” she announced. “I can’t and I won’t.”
“Here,” he said, pointing out a convenient large stone in the wall at the side of the road. “Rest a bit.”
She sat and repeated, as if proudly, “I will not go another step. I can’t, George. I’m in agony.” She flipped back her bandanna with a decisive gesture, but the effect was not the same as Jeaneanne’s gold-streaked hair whipping back in the convertible. Vivian looked old, worn. Lamed.
“What do you want me to do? Walk back and bring the car?” He meant the offer to be absurd, but she didn’t reject it, merely thinned her lips and stared at him angrily, defiantly.
“You’ve got us lost and won’t admit it. I’m not walking another step.”
He pictured it, her never moving. Her body would weaken and die within a week; her skin and bones would be washed by the weather and blend into the earth like the corpse of a stillborn lamb. Only the sheep would witness it. Only the sheep were watching them now, with the sides of their heads. Allenson turned his own head away, gazing up the road, so Vivian wouldn’t see the calm mercilessness in his face.
“Darling, look,” he said, after a moment. “Way up the road, see the way the line of telephone poles turns? I bet that’s the second right turn. We’re on the map!”
“I don’t see anything turning,” Vivian said, but in a voice that wanted to be persuaded.
“Just under the silhouette of the second little hill. Follow the road with your eyes, darling.” Allenson was feeling abnormally tall, as if his vision of Vivian stuck in the Irish landscape forever had a centrifugal force, spilling him outward, into a fresh future, toward yet another wife. What would she be like, this fourth Mrs. Allenson? Jewish, with a rapid, humorous tongue and heavy hips and clattering bracelets on her sweetly hairy forearms? Black, a stately fashion model whom he would rescue from her cocaine habit? A little Japanese, silken and fiery within her kimono? Or perhaps one of his old mistresses, whom he couldn’t marry at the time, but whose love had never lessened and who was miraculously unaged? Still, in a kind of social inertia, he kept pleading with Vivian. “If there’s no right turn up there, then you can sit down on a rock and I’ll walk back for the car.”
“How can you walk back?” she despairingly asked. “It’ll take forever.”
“I won’t walk, I’ll run,” he promised. “I’ll trot.”
“You’ll have a heart attack.”
“What do you care? One male killer less in the world. One less splash of testosterone.” Death, the thought of either of their deaths, felt exalting, in this green-gray landscape emptied by famine and English savagery. British soldiers, he had read, would break the roofbeams of the starving natives’ cottages and ignite the thatch.
“I care,” Vivian said. She sounded subdued. Seated on her stone, she looked prim and hopeful, a wallflower waiting to be asked to dance.
He asked, “How’s your back?”
“I’ll stand and see,” she said.
Her figure, he noticed when she stood, had broadened since he first knew her—thicker in the waist and ankles, chunky like her aggravating shoes. And developing a bad back besides. As if she were hurrying to catch up to him in the aging process. She took a few experimental steps, on the narrow macadam road built, it seemed, solely for the Allensons’ pilgrimage.
“Let’s go,” she said combatively. She added, “I’m doing this just to prove you’re wrong.”
But he was right. The road branched; the thinner piece of it continued straight, over the little hill, and the thicker turned right, with the wooden power poles. Parallel to the rocky crests on the left, with a view of valley on the right, the road went up and down in an animated, diverting way, and took them past houses now and then, and small plowed areas to vary the stony pastures. “You think those are potato patches?” he asked. He felt sheepish, wondered how many of his murderous thoughts she had read. His vision of her sitting there, as good as a corpse, kept widening its rings in his mind, like a stone dropped in black water. The momentary ecstasy of a stone smartly applied to her skull, or a piece of flint sharp as a knife whipped across her throat—had these visions been his, back in that Biblical wilderness?
Now, on the higher, winding road, a car passed them, and then another. It was Sunday morning, and unsmiling country families were driving to mass. Their faces were less friendly than those of the shopkeepers in Kenmare; no waves were offered, or invitations to ride. Once, on a blind curve, the couple had to jump to the grassy shoulder to avoid being hit. Vivian seemed quite agile, in the pinch.
“How’s your poor back holding up?” he asked. “Your sneakers still pushing your hips around?”
“I’m better,” she said, “when I don’t think about it.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He should have let her have a baby. Now it was too late. Still, he wasn’t sorry. Life was complicated enough.
The road turned the third right on their map gradually, unmistakably, while several gravelled driveways led off into the hills. Though Kenmare Bay gleamed ahead of them, a tongue of silver in the smoky distance, they were still being carried upward, dipping and turning, ever closer to the rocky crests, which were becoming dramatic. The sheep, now, seemed to be unfenced; a ram with a crimson chest skittered down a rock face and across the road, spilling scree with its hooves. In what could have been another nation, so far away it now appeared, a line of minuscule telephone poles marked the straight road where Vivian had announced she would not move another step. Overhead, faint whistling signalled a hawk—a pair of hawks, drifting motionless near the highest face of rock, hanging in a wind the Allensons could not feel. Their thin hesitant cry felt forgiving to Allenson, as did Vivian’s voice announcing, “Now I have this killing need to pee.”
“Go ahead.”
“Suppose a car comes?”
“It won’t. They’re all in church now.”
“There’s no place to go behind anything,” she complained.
“Just squat down beside the road. My goodness, what a little fussbudget.”
“I’ll lose my balance.” He had noticed on other occasions, on ice or on heights, how precarious her sense of balance was.
“No you won’t. Here. Give me your hand and prop yourself against my leg. Just don’t pee on my shoe.”
“Or on my own,” she said, letting herself be lowered into a squatting position.
“It might soften them up,” he said.
“Don’t make me laugh. I’ll get urinary impotence.” It was a concept of Nabokov’s, out of Pale Fire, that they both had admired, in the days when their courtship had tentatively proceeded through the socially acceptable sharing of books. She managed. In Ireland’s great silence of abandonment the tender splashing sound seemed loud. Pssshshshblipip. Allenson looked up to see if the hawks were watching. Hawks could read a newspaper, he had once read, from the height of a mile. But what would they make of it? The headlines, the halftones? Who could know what a hawk saw? Or a sheep? They saw only what they needed to see. A tuft of edible grass, or the twitch of a vole scurrying for cover.