by John Updike
At the Central Park Zoo, the yellow-white polar bears eerily float in the cold water behind the plate glass, water the blue-green color on a pack of Kool cigarettes (the last cigarettes Fanshawe had smoked, thinking the menthol possibly medicinal), and if a polar bear, dripping wet, were to surface up through his empty bathtub tomorrow morning while he shaved, the fatal swat of the big clawed paw would feel, he suspected, like a cloud of pollen.
Things used to be more substantial. In those middle years, as Fanshawe gropingly recalled them, you are hammering out your destiny on bodies still molten and glowing. One day he had taken his children ice-skating on a frozen river—its winding course miraculously become a road, hard as steel, hissing beneath their steel edges. As he stood talking to the mother of some other young children, his six-year-old son had fallen at his feet, without a cry or thump, simply melting out of the lower edge of Fanshawe’s vision, which was fastened on the reddened cheeks and shining dark eyes, the perfect teeth and fascinatingly shaped and mobile lips of Erica Andrews, his fellow-parent. A noise softly bubbled up through the cracks in their conversation; the little body on the ice was whimpering, and when Fanshawe impatiently directed his son to shut up and to get up, the muffled words “I can’t” rose as if from beneath the ice.
It developed that the boy’s leg was broken. Just standing there complaining about the cold, he had lost his balance with his skate caught in a crack, and twisted his shinbone to the point of fracture. How soft and slender our growing skeletons are! Fanshawe, once his wife and the other woman and their clustering children had made the problem clear to him, carried the boy in his arms up the steep and snowy riverbank. He felt magnificent, doing so. This was real life, he remembered feeling—the idyllic Sunday afternoon suddenly crossed by disaster’s shadow, the gentle and strenuous rescue, the ride to the hospital, the emergency-room formalities, the arrival of the jolly orthopedic surgeon in his parka and Ski-Doo boots, the laying on of the cast in warm plaster strips, the drying tears, the imminent healing. Children offer access to the tragic, to the great dark that stands outside our windows, and in the urgency of their needs bestow significance upon life; their fragile lives veer toward the dangerous margins of the narrow path we have learned to tread.
“It wouldn’t have happened, of course,” his first wife said, “if you had been paying attention to him instead of to Erica.”
“What does Erica have to do with it? She was the first one to realize that the poor kid wasn’t kidding.”
“Erica has everything to do with it, as you perfectly well know.”
“This is paranoid talk,” he said. “This is Nixon-era paranoid talk.”
“I’ve gotten used to your hurting me, but I’m not going to have you hurting our children.”
“Now we’re getting really crazy.”
“Don’t you think I know why you decided to take us all ice-skating, when poor Timmy and Rose didn’t even have skates that fit? It was so unlike you, you usually just want to laze around reading the Times and complaining about your hangover and watching The Wide World of Golf. It was because you knew the Andrewses were going. It was to see her. Her or somebody else. That whole sleazy party crowd, you don’t get enough of them Saturday nights any more. Why don’t you go live with them? Live with somebody else, anybody except me!
Go. Go!”
She didn’t mean it, but it was thrilling to see her so energized, such a fury, her eyes flashing, her hair crackling, her slicing gestures carving large doomed territories out of the air. At that age, Fanshawe saw now, we are creating selves, potent and plastic, making and unmaking homes, the world in our hands. We are playing with dynamite. All around them, as he and his first wife stood hip-deep in children, marriages blew up. Marriage counsellors, child psychiatrists, lawyers, real-estate agents prospered in the ruins. Now, in old age, it remained only to generate a little business for the mortician, and an hour’s pleasant work for the local clergyman. Just as insurance salesmen had at last stopped approaching him, and the movie-makers had written him out of audience demographics, so the armies of natural law, needed all over the globe to detonate dynamite where it counted, had left him to wander in a twilight of inconsequence.
In early August, a pair of birds decided they had to build a nest on the Fanshawes’ porch. If he could trust his eyes and his mother’s battered old bird-book, they were house finches, or else bay-breasted warblers too far north. Something must have gone wrong with their biological clocks. It was too late in the season for nesting, but, even more willful than children, they persisted, while warbling back and forth furiously, in piling up twigs and wands of hay on the small shelves created by the capitals of his porch pillars. The twiggy accumulations blew off, or Mrs. Fanshawe briskly knocked them off with a broom. She tended to be less sentimental than he. It was her clean white porch, and her porch boards that would be spattered with bird shit. But the warblers kept coming back, as children keep demanding to go to an amusement park or to buy a certain kind of heavily advertised candy until finally, adult resistance worn down, they have their way. A pillar next to the house afforded shelter enough from the wind; the twigs and grass accumulated, and from its precarious pile the stone-colored head of the female bird haughtily stared down one afternoon when the Fanshawes returned from a day in town shopping. She had her nest. The warbling ceased. The male had vanished. Then, after two weeks, the female, it dawned on the Fanshawes, had also vanished. Vanished without a warble of goodbye. Something had not worked. All the time she had been in the nest, her stony profile had radiated anger.
Getting out the stepladder, Fanshawe fetched down an empty, eggless nest, its rim tidily circled round with guano, its rough materials worked in the center to a perfect expectant cavity. A nest in vain. Whatever had those birds been thinking of? His impulse was to save the nest—his mother had always been saving birds’ nests, setting them in bookshelves, or on top of the piano—but his wife held out an open garbage bag, as though the innocent wild artifact were teeming with germs. Birds’ nests shouldn’t go in garbage bags, he thought, but dropped it in. We’re in this together, he thought, as in the shade of the porch his wife stared up at him with her shining dark eyes, trying to control her impatience as he wrestled with his sentimental scruple.
At Fanshawe’s fifth (at a guess) birthday party, a piece of cake had mysteriously vanished from the plate in front of him and reappeared in his lap. He had never touched it; it was an authentic miracle, there in the candlelight and childish babble. He could still see it lying on his corduroy lap, the cake peeping out from its inverted dish. It had been a chocolate cake with caramel icing of a type only his mother had ever made for him, its sugary stiffness most delicious where the icing between the layers met the outside layer in a thick, sweet T. A few years later, lying in bed with a fever, he had seen a black stick, at a slight angle, hop along beyond the edge of the bed, as if in one of the abstract sections of Fantasia. In those years, the knit of the physical world was stretched thin, and held a number of holes. When he was in the fourth grade, his new glasses vanished from his pocket, in their brown round-ended metal case, and a week later, cutting across a weedy vacant lot thinking of them and of how hard his father would have to work to buy him another pair, he looked down, and there the case was, like a long egg in the tangled damp grass. Inside it, the glasses had become steamy, as if worn by an overexcited, myopic ghost. Perhaps this was less a miracle than the transposed birthday cake, but the fact that he had been thinking of them at that very moment made it the strangest of all. Could it be that our mind does, secretly, control the atoms? On the strength of that possibility, Fanshawe had never quite broken his childish habit of prayer. Yet, as a child, staring at a model airplane that had unaccountably come unglued during the night, or confronting the bulging shadows at the head of the stairs, he found it hard to think of God and Jesus; the supernatural seemed no more elevated in its aims than a Walt Disney animated feature.
That curious cartoon lightness and jumpiness h
ad returned to the texture of his life. Fanshawe would find himself in a room with no knowledge of how he got there—as if the film had been broken and spliced. As he lay in bed, the house throbbed with footsteps, heard through the pillow; they fell silent when he lifted his head. Perhaps it had been his heartbeat, stealthy as a burglar.
In the sedate neighborhood where he now lived, everyone was old, more or less. For years he had watched the neighbor to his right, a widower, slowly deteriorate, his stride becoming a shuffle, his house and yard gradually growing shabbier and shaggier, inch by inch, season by season, in increments as small as those, visible only to stop-action camerawork, whereby a flower blooms. The two men would converse across the fence from time to time; Fanshawe once or twice offered to do some pruning for his neighbor. “No thanks,” would be the answer. “I’ll get to it, when I’m feeling a little more lively.” We look ahead and see random rises and falls; the linear diminishment so plain to others is invisible to us.
One Saturday morning, a fire engine appeared along his neighbor’s curb, though there was no sign of smoke. The fireman, who had moved up the front walk with some haste, stayed inside so long that Fanshawe grew tired of spying. An hour later, with the fire engine still parked there, its great throbbing motor wastefully running, a small foreign convertible appeared, and a fashionably dressed young woman—all things are relative, perhaps she was forty—uncoiled rapidly out of the low-slung interior, flashing her long, smooth shins in their glossy pantyhose, and clicked up the flagstone walk. This was his neighbor’s daughter, who explained to Fanshawe later, at the party after the funeral, that her father had been found by the cleaning lady, sitting up in his favorite chair, shaved and dressed in a coat and tie as if expecting a caller. So that was death, Fanshawe realized—a jerky comedy of unusual comings and goings on a Saturday morning, followed in a few days by a funeral and a yellow For Sale sign on the house next door.
“Thank you for being such a good neighbor to my father,” the daughter said. “He often mentioned it.”
“But I wasn’t,” Fanshawe protested. “I never did a thing for him. I just let him”—he suppressed the word “deteriorate”—“go his way.”
Why had the dead man benignly lied? Why had the cleaning lady called the fire department and not the police? And why had the fireman never shut off his engine, discharging carbon monoxide and consuming fossil fuel at taxpayer expense? Fanshawe didn’t ask; there were too many mysteries to pursue.
He often felt now, going through the motions of earthly existence—shaving, dressing, responding to questions, measuring up to small emergencies—that he was enacting a part in a play at the end of its run, while mentally rehearsing his lines in the next play to be put on. It was repertory theatre, evidently. When he remembered how death had once loomed at him, so vivid and large it had a distinct smell, like the scent of chalk dust up close to the schoolroom blackboard, he marvelled, rather patronizingly, at his timorous earlier self. When had he ceased to fear death—or, so to speak, ceased to grasp it? The moment was as clear in his mind as a black-and-white-striped gate at a border crossing: the moment when he first slept with Erica Andrews.
How inky-black her eyes seemed, amid the snowy whiteness of the sheets! There was snow outside, too, hushing the world in sunstruck brilliance. Meltwater tapped in the aluminum gutters. There had been a feeling of coolness, of freshly laundered sheets, of contacts never before achieved, by fingertips icy with nervousness. He had peeled off her black lace bra—her back arched up from the mattress to give him access to the catches—almost reluctantly, knowing there would be a white flash that would obliterate everything that had existed of his life before. She had smiled encouragingly, timorously. They were in it together. Her teeth were, after all, less than perfect, with protuberant canines that made the bicuspids next to them seem shadowy. The pupils of her shining eyes were contracted to the size of pencil-leads by the relentless light; he had never seen anything so clearly as he saw her now—the fine mechanism of her, the specialized flesh of her lips, the tripwires of her hair. He got out of the bed to lower the shade, the sight of her was such a dazzlement.
A dull-reddish bird, a female cardinal, was hopping about on the delicately tracked-up snow beneath the bird feeder a story below, pecking at scattered seed. A whole blameless town of roofs and smoking chimneys and snow-drenched trees stretched beyond, under an overturned bowl of blue light that made Fanshawe’s vision wince. He drew the curtain on it and in merciful twilight returned to where Erica lay still as a stick. He heard his blood striding in his skull, he felt so full of life. Sex or death, you pick your poison. That had been forever ago. She was still younger and spryer than he, but all things were relative. He did not envy those forever-ago people, for whom the world had such a weight of consequence. Like the Titans, they seemed beautiful but sad in their brief heyday, transition figures between chaos and an airier pantheon.
The Black Room
“I don’t want to go,” said Lee’s mother, though she had already agreed to go, in the too-bright, teal-blue silk dress that had come out of the cedar closet where it had hung for all the decades in which she had been too fat to wear it. Her weight loss was not a good sign, Lee felt, though as a boy and then as a man and then as a middle-aged man he had hoped for it. Less of a mother, he had thought, would be more—more chic, more manageable. But now that she was in her eighties and her clothes hung loose on her and her skin hung loose above her elbows, he was frightened. He wanted her bulk back.
He tried joking: “It’s the chance of a lifetime.” She didn’t smile, so he tried backing out: “You don’t have to go. I’m the one who’s interested, so I’ll go alone.”
Yet it had been her idea. She had heard that their old house in the city of Alton was being sold; the then-young couple who had bought it, Marine Lieutenant Jessup and his wife, had enlisted in a retirement community and placed the house on the market. Embarrassingly, Lee felt, his mother had phoned the Jessups and explained how much it would mean to her son if he, on one of his monthly visits from New York City, might come by. Neither she nor he had entered the house since that drizzly November day forty-seven years ago when the movers had cleared out their furniture, damaging the cane-back sofa and breaking two plates of Philadelphia blueware in the process. The family, which had numbered five then, climbed into a newly bought secondhand Chevrolet and drove twenty miles in the rain to the unimproved farmhouse that Lee’s mother had settled on as the site of her long-deferred self-fulfillment. She said now, “That Alton house nearly killed me and I swore I’d never set foot in it again.”
“You’ve made your point. Forty-seven years is as good as never. You’ve put the house in its place, Mother.”
“Your grandfather was always convinced that Jessup had slipped Jake Oberholz a fifty, to persuade us to accept the eight thousand.” Lee had heard it all before: Oberholz had been their real-estate agent, and Jessup had been fresh out of the Marines, a quiet war hero, slim and blond and tall in Lee’s memory of him, and in a white dress-uniform. He had seen him once, in the front hall, from the height of a twelve-year-old, while the sale was still being negotiated. The whole thing had gone on over Lee’s head; he could scarcely believe it was happening, this abandonment of the only house he had ever lived in.
“Well, you didn’t want the place,” he pointed out. “Jessup did. Come on. We can’t not go now, after you’ve got us invited. You shouldn’t have set this up if you didn’t want to go.”
“I was trying,” the old woman said primly, “to please my only child.”
They had maneuvered themselves out of the back door of the sandstone farmhouse, and were halfway across the yard to Lee’s BMW. His mother’s car was stored in the barn. Her cardiologist had forbidden her to drive, though she occasionally did, to the 7-Eleven at a crossroads two miles away, “to keep the engine from seizing up,” she said. They walked slowly, her hand heavy on his arm; even a little exertion left her short of breath, though she didn’t stop talking:
“I don’t know why you always spite me by loving that house so.”
“I don’t say I love it. I was born there, is all.”
“It was too much house—my father’s vanity made itself a monument the day he bought it. He bought it when I was off at college, without even telling me. I never could feel at home there. Neither could Mother. We weren’t city people. It nearly killed her, trying to keep it clean, up to city standards. It had a peculiar dust in it, that clung everywhere.”
He had heard this before, too, but its implausibility still made him laugh. “Well, you showed it,” he told her. “You escaped its clutches.”
“I don’t know why you’ve always resented our moving. Honest to goodness, Lee, I added years to all of our lives by getting us out of Alton. The only city person among us was your father.”
“I was just a child, Mother. I was in no position to resent anything. I’m still not.”
But was she right? Had he loved the house in Alton, all these years, just to spite her? It was a long, narrow-faced brick house, on a wider lot than most along the street. In his childhood the bricks had been painted pale yellow and the trim dark green. There was a front porch, a side porch, and an upstairs porch, and the yard had held cherry trees, a walnut tree, a birdbath, a bed of lilies of the valley, and a vegetable garden that his grandfather turned with a shovel every spring.
“I can take it or leave it, seeing the house,” he said. “This trip wasn’t my idea, remember.” They were skimming along a highway lined with ranch houses; it had been a winding asphalt road the first time he had travelled it, with an occasional dirt lane leading off to a barn, a silo, and a square stone farmhouse just like theirs.