by John Updike
“Born ten years later, she’d have been a pilot herself,” her father boasted.
The guest bedroom, where his mother would go for her naps when she needed to get away from them all, and where Lee, when sick, would recline in a litter of picture books and cough-drop boxes, had been expanded outward, into a massive master bedroom, swallowing the hall window, whose sill had always held a potted geranium. At the back of the house, other walls had vanished as his little room with its stained and varnished wainscoting had been merged with the mysterious one next to it, and from his parents’ bedroom had been carved a spacious bathroom that the Jessup sons could share. The boys’ bedrooms still held traces of extensive electronic equipment. In this unfamiliar space Lee found himself remembering how the whole sleepy house would resound with the noise when his grandfather, first thing in the morning, shook down the ashes in the furnace, and shovelled in fresh coal.
“Well,” he said to his host, by way of leavetaking, and in response to a certain air of self-congratulation, “I’d say you spent your forty-seven years here very well.”
“It was a happy house for us.”
“Good. For me, too.” No longer child and young veteran, they had become two aged men who had loved the same object. One had won and one had lost, but now the winner was surrendering the prize also. Time takes all. Lee looked around once more and couldn’t find himself, even in the shape of the windows. A silent hurricane had swept through this house, leaving nothing undamaged. His parents’ bedroom had opened onto a side porch just like the one below, with jigsawed balusters holding up the wooden, green-painted rail. The present railing was ornamental ironwork, as if they were in New Orleans.
• • •
Downstairs, a glance told Lee that his mother was in trouble. She had slumped to one side on the sofa, and was resting a bony, veiny hand upon her chest, as if to quiet something within. Yet her face still bore a listening smile, as Mrs. Jessup finished saying, presumably of a son, “Now he’s in corporate finance in Wilmington, with this wonderful Bank of Delaware.”
“Mother,” Lee announced, by way of rescue, “you missed a grand tour up there. They knocked out the wall between the guest bedroom and the hall and made a master suite! Grammy and Grampy’s old room is full of pennants and teddy bears. Their daughter married a pilot in Colorado.”
“Dorothy was saying,” she responded, “that she agreed with me—this house … is hard on its women.” She spoke in little hurried skips, struggling for breath. When she stood, she staggered one sideways step, and leaned heavily on Lee in heading to the front door. She had never taken off her plaid overcoat.
“Can’t we get you anything?” Mrs. Jessup asked, her eyes and cheeks yet brighter with alarm. “Even a glass of water?”
“You’ve done … everything,” was the answer. “I get … these spells, where my chest … doesn’t seem to have any depth.” She laughed in self-deprecation. “It was lovely of you to let us … see what all you’ve done. You’ve done … wonders.”
The porch, as Lee escorted his mother across it, seemed as wide as he remembered it from childhood. The concrete walk glared under their shoes as they shuffled to the curb. She allowed herself to be folded into the passenger’s seat, and lifted a withered hand and waved it in response to the Jessups’ cheery, worried farewells. As Lee drove the car down the street, in the direction in which he would walk to elementary school eating his Tastykake, past Weisbach’s Drug Store, she struggled to breathe, in intense, sharp sips; her body shook as if some invisible predator had it by the nape of the neck.
Lee asked, “Shall we go home or straight to the Alton Hospital?”
“Home.” The syllable seemed all she could manage.
As he made the turn to circle the block, her hand in the side of his vision fed a pill into her mouth.
“That house,” she explained. “I needed … to get out.”
“Just like always.” Her retreating into ill health irritated him. His old grudge remained. “Well,” he announced, putting on the blinker to signal the next right turn, which would head them out of the city, “you won’t have to see that house ever again.”
“That room … was never black.”
“What?”
“That’s what upset me. That room was never black. Why would anybody in their right mind … paint a room black?”
“That’s what they said they were wondering.”
“They imagined it. The walls had old cream-colored paper … with blue florets … and the wainscoting was pine, stained walnut. Mother used to do her sewing in that room, before her eyesight went.”
“They couldn’t have just imagined it, they must have had some basis, Mother. She was very definite.”
“Yes, about everything. Maybe it was a joke. That’s how those Alton people are, Lee. That’s the way they were when I was a girl. Sly. Always poking fun. It made me feel bad. It made me feel crazy. That they would think … we would have had a black room.”
“How’s your chest?”
“A little better. Don’t you remember how the room was?”
“I don’t remember ever looking in, Mother. That room frightened me. When I would go to sleep in my bed, I remember, I would turn to face that wall so that if something came through the wall I could grab it before it grabbed me.”
“Oh my. And here we all thought you were such a happy child.”
As Alton fell away behind them and the country roads began to sing beneath their tires, her spirits lifted. She helped him make their dinner, directing the cooking from her chair at the kitchen table, where she sat with all her pill bottles—a miniature city—at her elbow. He fried a big slice of ham, boiled up some frozen succotash, and baked two potatoes in the crusty old oven: the kind of meal she used to devour, with a heaping of ice cream to top it off. She ate half, trying to please him, and he finished up her plate, which made him feel unpleasantly full. During the night, he heard her moving about in her room, clearing her throat and gasping, on the other side of the wall. It was still dark, before dawn. He thought of going in to her, but fell back asleep instead.
In the morning, the smell of coffee rose up the stairs. It was like his grandfather stirring the furnace: life. His mother was downstairs ahead of him, in her quilted purple bathrobe, with a tent of white hair worn loose over her shoulders. Light from the back door shone through her thinning, floating hair. “Isn’t coffee verboten?” he asked.
“Not to you, yet. I had a cup myself. I don’t know why that woman offering me tea made me so mad.”
“You were determined something would,” he told her, “no matter how nice they tried to be.”
“They were nice,” she said tonelessly.
He had to leave right after breakfast, since it was three hours back to New York City and he had promised to take his younger daughter to her riding lesson in Central Park, while his wife went to a matinee of Jelly’s Last Jam. His mother came outside with him and shuffled along as far as the sandstone walk allowed. She was dressed in wool-lined suede slippers, and the uncut lawn was lank and whitened by dew. Beyond the house, the sumac was turning red here and there, and the poplars showed a yellow tinge. Fall was on the way, with winter behind. What would she do, alone? They should have discussed it last night, after dinner, instead of watching television: Golden Girls, followed by Empty Nest. She had become an unreality addict.
“Wouldn’t you like it,” Lee asked, “if we could get somebody to stay in the house with you this winter?”
“The Jessups, maybe,” she said. “They could call this their retirement home. They could clean out all my cobwebs and put in wall-to-wall polyester.”
In the low morning sunshine, the eastward wall of the stone farmhouse glowed as if from within. Lee was conscious of the neglected lawn, the wild raspberry canes, the towering trees beyond as a tightening net of interwoven nature. The house seemed perilously small. So did his mother. From the concerned look on her face, he knew she was viewing him as her child, having one
of his nervous stomach cramps. “It’s a real problem, Mother,” he weakly insisted. “It worries me. You shouldn’t be alone.”
She had taken to wearing her glasses less and less. The absence of frames gave her face a startled, naked look, even now, when she assumed her teasing expression. She asked, “Why would you want to kill me, making me live with somebody else? I just barely survived living with your father all those years.”
He was content to be dismissed, yet couldn’t make himself move off the sandstone walk, the ten yards or so to where his car was parked. This September day was beginning with high clouds, a few ribs of cirrus arched in the stratospheric cold. Some birds made a sudden flurry of noise in the old, half-dead pear tree. There was a buzzing in the air, a constant eating. The truck traffic on the Jersey Turnpike would be at its peak. “Think about it. About, you know, more ideal arrangements.”
“Lee, this house is my ideal arrangement. Now, don’t make Jenny late for her lesson. Girls love horses. Maybe that was why I resented Dad’s moving us to town—it meant I couldn’t ride any more. Here. Let’s see if I can make it to the road.” Holding on to his arm, she kicked off her slippers and stepped off the last stone barefoot. The icy shock of the wet grass sprang a delighted laugh: life. She hobbled with him to the side of his car. Her blue-veined feet were puffy on top, like a baby’s feet. “Now, I’ll be fine,” she recited, when they had stopped walking and she could get her breath. “I’ll take my pills and try to eat more and get some strength back. I’m sorry I let those city folk get the better of me yesterday. I had wanted so not to act up.”
She lifted her weightless, onionskin hand from his arm and found a footing on the uneven lawn which held her upright while he got into his BMW and started the engine. Seen through the open car window, in the morning light, her face looked defenseless around the eyes, the delicate skin owlish. “I’m sorry,” she said solemnly, “I let myself be so frightened.”
“You mean of the bla—?”
She was startlingly quick to touch his arm again, to stop his mouth. “Don’t even say it!”
Cruise
Islands kept appearing outside their windows. Crete, Ogygia, Capri, Ponza. Calypso, who had became Neuman’s cruisemate, his wife at sea, liked to make love sitting astride him while gazing out the porthole, feeling between her legs the surging and the bucking of the boat. Her eyes, the color of a blue hydrangea, tipped toward the violet end of the spectrum in these moments. Her skin was as smooth as a new statue’s. He called her Calypso because the entire cruise, consisting of sixty-five passengers and forty crewpersons, was marketed as a duplicate of the tortuous homeward voyage of Ulysses, though everyone including their lecturers kept forgetting which port of call represented what in The Odyssey. Were the cliffs of Bonifacio, a chic and slanty tourist trap on the southern tip of Corsica, really the cliffs from which the giant, indiscriminately carnivorous Laestrygones had pelted the fleet with rocks, sinking all but the wily captain’s dark-prowed hull? Was Djerba, a sleepy hot island off of the Tunisian coast, distinguished by a functioning synagogue and a disused thirteenth-century Aragonese fort, really the land of the Lotus Eaters?
“Well, what is ‘really’?” their male lecturer asked them in turn, returning a question for a question in Socratic style. “Tí Or, as the French might put it, ‘Le soi-disant “Ding an sich,” c’existe ou non?’ ”
Their on-board lecturers were two: a small man and a large woman. The man preached a wry verbal deconstructionism and the woman a ringing cosmic feminism. Clytemnestra was her idea of a Greek hero. Medea and Hecuba she admired also. She wore gold sickles around her neck and her hair was done up in snakes of braid. Our lovers—cruel and flippant vis-à-vis the rest of humanity in their ecstasy of love newly entered upon—called her Killer. The male lecturer they called Homer. Homer sat up late in the ship’s lounge each night, smoking cigarettes and planning what he was going to say the next day. He looked wearied by all his knowledge, all his languages, and sallow from too much indoors. Even while trudging up and down the slippery, scree-ridden slopes of archaeological digs, he wore a button-down shirt and laced black shoes. The lovers felt superior to him, in the exalted state brought on by repeated orgasms in the little cabin’s swaying, clicking, cunningly outfitted space. “Aiiiieeee!” they cried. “Aiae, aiae! We are as gods!”
There were rough seas between Malta and Djerba. Neuman threw up, to his own surprise and disgust. He had thought, on the basis of several Atlantic crossings in gigantic passenger liners, that he was seaworthy. Calypso, who in her terrestrial life had been raised on a Nebraska wheat farm and not seen the ocean until she was twenty-one and unhappily married, had no mal-de-mer problem; when he bolted from their table in the seesawing dining room she stayed put, finished her poached sea-trout, helped herself to his squid stew, ate all of the delicious little Maltese biscuits in the breadbasket, and ordered caramelized pomme Charlotte for dessert, with Turkish coffee. In the tranquillity of her stomach she was indeed as a goddess—Calypso, the daughter of Thetis by Oceanus. Fleeing the dining room, Neuman held acid vomit back against his teeth for the length of his run down the second-deck corridor; when he got into his own bathroom he erupted like a fountain, disgustingly, epically. Ah, what is man but a bit of slime in the cistern of the void?
“You poor baby,” she said, descending to him at last. Her kiss smelled of caramel and brought on a minor attack of gagging. “I think I’ll spend the night back in my own cabin,” she told him. “After a spot of anisette.”
“Don’t go up to the lounge,” he begged, feeble and green-faced yet sexually jealous. “There’s a hard-drinking crowd up there every night. Hardened cruisers. Good-time Charlies. Tonight they’re having a singalong, followed by a showing of Casablanca. Whenever they show Casablanca on one of these boats, all hell breaks loose.”
“I’ll be fine,” she told him, her complicated blue eyes drifting evasively to the porthole, which was black but for the dim glow of the starboard lights and a diagonal slap of spray at the nadir of an especially sickening flop into watery nothingness. “Just because we have good sex,” she told him, firmly, “you don’t own me, buster. I paid for this cruise with my own money and I intend to have a good time.”
She was one of the new women and he, despite his name, one of the old men. Female equality struck him as a brutish idea. Just the idea of her having a good time—of trying to milk some selfish happiness out of this inchoate hyperactive muddle of a universe—doubled and redoubled his nausea. “Go, go, you bitch,” he said. His stomach, like a filmy jellyfish floating within him, was organizing itself for a new convulsion, and he was planning his dash to the toilet once she had removed the obstacle of her trim, compact body, in its chiton of starched blue linen, belted with a rope of gold. She had good sturdy legs, like a cheerleader’s without the white socks. Hips squared off like small bales of cotton. Narrow feet in gilded sandals. “Easy come,” he told her queasily, with false jauntiness, “easy go.”
They had sized each other up at the start, in the ruins of Troy. She was standing in khaki safari slacks and a lime-green tennis visor on Level VIIa, thought to be Priam’s Troy if anything on this site “really” was, and he was down in Level II, not far from where Schliemann and his racy Greek wife, Sophia, had discovered and surreptitiously hidden a hoard of golden treasures from the middle of the third millennium before Christ. Now it was all a mess of mounds and pebbles and blowing grasses and bobbing poppies and liquid-eyed guides and elderly Americans and tightly made limestone walls most probably too small to have been the walls of fabled Troy. “Can this be all there was?” Homer was murmuring to their group. “Est-ce que c’est tout? A little rubbly village by the marshes? Schliemann decided, ‘Es ist genug. This was Troy.’ ” The poppies bobbed amid the nodding grasses. The rubble underfoot had been trod by Cassandra and Aeneas, venerable Priam and ravishing Helen.
The destined lovers’ glances met, and remet; they measured each other for size and age and signs of socio-
economic compatibility, and he carefully climbed through the levels to edge into her group. Their group’s guide, a local Turk, was telling about the Judgment of Paris as if it had happened just yesterday, in the next village: “So poor Zeus, what to do? One woman his wife, another his daughter, straight from head—boom!” He hit his fist against his broad brown brow. “Each lady say she the absolute best, she deserve golden apple. So Zeus, he looking around in bad way and see far off in Mount Ida, over there, you can almost see”—he gestured, and the tourists looked, raking with their eyes the vacant plains of Troy, vast if not as windy as in the epic—“he see this poor shepherd boy, son of King Priam, minding own business, tending the sheeps. His name, Paris. Zeus tell him, ‘You choose.’ ‘Who, me?’ ‘Yes, you.’ ” The American tourists, broiling in the sun, obligingly laughed; the guide smiled, showing a gold fang. “ ‘Oh boy,’ Paris think to self. ‘Problem.’ One lady offer him much riches, Hera. Another say, ‘No, have much glory in battle and wars, thanks to me.’ That was Athena, daughter straight from Zeus’s head. Third say, Aphrodite say, ‘No, forget all that. I give you most beautiful woman in world to be your wife.’ And Paris say, ‘O.K., you win. Good deal.’ ”
By now Neuman had drawn level with his tennis-visored prey. He murmured in her ear, “The ‘O.K.’ that launched a thousand ships.” A gravelly American witticism, here in this remote archaic place. He liked her ear very much, the marble whiteness and the squarish folds of it. It was feminine yet no-nonsense, like her level gaze.