by John Updike
The Oglethorpes had bought the Dunhams’ rambling Victorian, with its spindlework and scalloped shingles, behind its palisade fence and lilac bushes, for themselves and their three children and what seemed, when they came bounding together over the slanting lawn in loose-jointed, crotch-sniffing welcome, a herd of golden retrievers. The Oglethorpes were both rather comically thin, he with an amiable discombobulation that appeared to seek to disown his embarrassing height (he was six four) with a distracting whirl of hand-flaps and misplaced guffaws, and she with a Twiggyesque knock-kneed winsomeness that chose to set itself off in filmy short shifts and school-uniformish, big-buttoned outfits, as if going shopping with Mommy. Her hair was a shiny, cedar-colored cap sometimes adorned with a big ribbon and bow. The Oglethorpes entertained almost as much as the departed Dunhams had. Perhaps the old house demanded it. Its rooms were scaled for life with servants and its steam heat clanged like a madman trapped in the walls with a hammer. Moving through its familiar rooms, now renovated and refurnished in a less reckless, eclectic style than Faye had favored, Owen frequently found himself pierced by a memory of her. He seemed to see her, flickering gaily through a doorway in one of her bright, improvised costumes, or treading toward him naked, silently barefoot, with a less smiling expression, tentative and imperilled, out of the second-floor back bathroom. He had come to know the brown tearstains on this little room’s turn-of-the-century porcelain and its high, industrial-strength showerhead, the size of a sunflower. That particular sentimental plumbing, he noticed, sneaking around upstairs while an Oglethorpe party raged downstairs, had been ruthlessly replaced.
The Oglethorpes fought off alcoholic calories with exercise, from dog-walking to tennis. The sight of them playing tennis was comical, especially when they teamed up together: so many angles of elbow and knee and of feet that in white sneakers projected like those of kangaroos as they hopped here and there with an occasional clash of rackets. Trish was the first woman Owen knew who had made jogging a part of her life, and it was somehow exciting to see her in unexpected parts of town, even along Partridgeberry Road, a good two miles from her house. In rainy weather she wore a short yellow slicker from which her naked legs seemed to dangle over the asphalt like a puppet’s, and an extensive rain hat down her back like the little girl’s on the Morton’s salt box. When Owen suggested her to Vanessa, in playful continuation of a fantasy that turned them both on, as their possible third, his lover said, “Not much meat on those bones, as Spencer Tracy said.”
Having seen the movie back at the Scheherazade, he finished the quotation: “But what there is, is choice.”
“I don’t know, Owen. You’re welcome to try, but I never get anything much back from her when we talk. The bounce is too quick. There isn’t any depth behind what you see.”
“How much depth do you need, Greedy? I like the way the bounce is always a little off, as if she hasn’t quite heard you and is desperately trying to imagine what you want her to say. They’re both pathetically anxious to ‘get with it.’ I think she has round heels. There’s a sense you get. She’s been good all her life and doesn’t think what it’s gotten her is enough.” He spoke a bit rapidly, breathlessly even, like a junior officer reporting to a superior. He wondered if the expression “round heels” was offensive to a woman, as savoring too much of gossip among men—of the brotherhood argot. Vanessa said nothing, nodding curtly and letting him rattle on. “Why have they attached themselves to us,” he asked, “when there are plenty of stodgy O.K. couples just their age new in town? What do they call them now? Yuppies. White-flight types who work in Hartford or Norwich. No, the Oglethorpes are looking for action. At least she is. Couldn’t you sort of love her?”
“ ‘Cherce,’ ” Vanessa said. “That was part of the joke. Tracy said, ‘Cherce.’ ”
There was no lack of meat on Vanessa’s bones; she was wide-shouldered and thick-waisted like a man. He had, now and then, an unindulged impulse to twist her wrists, to beat her, knowing she could take it. Like him she had been of the poor and as in an unforgiving mirror showed him the abjectness of his needs. He was learning to resent the hold she had over him. It was possible, he discovered, to accept all the gifts one body can give another and yet dislike the inhabitant of that body. He felt inadequately tender toward Vanessa. For a year, and then another, he was her lover; no doubt not the only one. Her days were long, though she filled them with activities.
He was sorry he had said Trish had round heels. Whenever he came up to her at a party, he was afraid of knocking her over. His discourteous characterization coated the inside of his mouth with a phlegm that made it hard for him to talk to her as he must to win her trust—candidly, amusedly, with no more implication than she was ready for. “So,” he said to her at a fall party at Roscoe and Imogene Bisbee’s, “how do you like your new President?”
“He seems fine, though I’m not sure he should have pardoned Nixon.”
“Oh, we all need to be pardoned, don’t we?”
“Do we?” Patricia asked, looking away, as if something were happening beyond the Bisbees’ porch rail, down in the darkness where footsteps crunched on the spalled driveway, going back and forth to the cars.
“Maybe not you,” Owen said. “But seriously, if he hadn’t pardoned him the fuss and trial would have consumed all our energy.”
“You’re right,” she said; her agreement felt too quick, a way to get rid of him. He studied her from the side. Her profile showed a chafed pinkness to the nostrils and an underslung jaw that left her plump upper lip protruding as if pensively. He felt in her the crack of some old sorrow, like a teacup’s chipped rim on his tongue. Did he imagine, also, a certain impatience, an excess of wanting, expressed, as with Faye, by her clothes?
“I keep seeing you everywhere, jogging,” he said. “You look darling.”
“Oh, don’t,” Trish quickly cried, twisting there by the porch rail as if in the grip of an unshakable irritation.
She saw him, her reaction told him, as a dangerous man. “In your big sneakers and sweat pants,” he hastily explained. “I keep wondering if you’re ever afraid of getting hit.”
“I try to always wear something white. And the running shoes now have strips that light up in headlights.”
And her eyes, with lashes so spaced and starry they might be artificial, flared like headlights. He had alarmed her, been too pushy, too forward. “O.K., good,” he said quickly, backtracking. He had found in his experience that a woman’s basic desire to please will hold her to you even after an affront: the way Alissa had jumped back as if scalded, saying Oh no you don’t, and then come around wonderfully. He said, “Let’s talk about something else. How do you feel about that guy in California who had a sex-change operation wanting to compete in women’s tennis?”
“Well,” Trish cautiously admitted, “it’s unusual.”
She was not very bright, nor very beautiful. Why was he bothering her, making conversation, risking embarrassment, in the service of some strange dream of bringing this naïve woman to Vanessa like a live doe slung over his shoulders? They could each nibble at opposite ends and meet in the middle. The two women would adore him, vying for him, competing in feats of slavishness. “Speaking of unusual,” he pursued, “I was reading where they have a woman prison guard at a maximum security facility in Iowa.”
“And why not?” Trish asked, with a spark of pugnacity that brightened the dark of the Bisbees’ porch.
He backed off again. “I don’t know, and all these sex-change operations. It makes you wonder, what is a woman?”
“Yes,” she said. It was as if they were both under a table looking for a lost something—an earring, or a contact lens—and had found it. “Even when you are one,” she told him, “you wonder.”
The crack in the teacup must have to do with sex, sex and gangly foolish Dwight with his flapping kangaroo feet and ghastly effeminate guffaw. “Sometimes,” Owen ventured, “it must make you angry. Women are getting angrier. Look at Patty Hear
st, going from Daddy’s girl to gun moll.”
“She was brainwashed,” Trish snapped, with one of her erratic quick bounces. “She was kidnapped and brainwashed and now she’s being hunted. And they say women have equal rights.” She was just enough younger than Owen to have feminism implanted in her; women Owen’s age had had to invent it for themselves, in a range of personal styles.
His appetite for this conquest was waning. He didn’t like politically prickly women; he liked them ironical and detached and devoted to the realm of the purely personal, the privilege of the free world. He asked her, “You know what I’ve really loved so far about this year?” He had in mind the Viking spacecraft landing on Mars, which after a century of talk about canals looked drier than Arizona.
“Evil Knievel not making his jump,” Trish replied with surprising promptness, as though she had given his mental processes some thought. Her hostile edge was hopeful; he was beginning to work within her. He saw from a foot away how her face would look in bed, on a pillow; the realization made him a little tired, with the effort of living on several levels. Her face would be petulant, eager to extract from him payment for her daring, for the risk she had taken.
“Why would I like that?”
“You like flub-ups. Misery loves company,” Trish pronounced, tapping him unexpectedly on the chest and drifting off the porch, with its November chill, into the bright, warm, chatter-filled living room.
His private monk’s cell at E-O, with its dirty high window and its carefully scheduled visitors from beyond, had been lately invaded from within the factory. A low-level programmer, Karen Jazinski, hired a year or so ago, had delivered a number of papers from Ed’s end of the operation—printouts of machine code with problems, contracts Owen had to initial, yellow-highlighted items from Computing Tomorrow. Karen had to traverse an unutilized section of upper factory floor (its vacancy a reminder of the company’s recent stagnation, of DigitEyes 2.2’s relative failure on the increasingly graphics-crowded market) and knock on the gray-painted metal door Owen kept locked from within. Admitted for the first time, Karen was startled by the near-domestic coziness he had created within the small space: the Oriental rug, the corkboard where memos and snapshots of his family had been thumbtacked, bracket-supported shelves of catalogues and computer manuals, the fluorescent overheads seconded by bridge lamps and bulbs enclosed in ribbed rice-paper balls, the molded-plastic, much-adjustable office furniture augmented by a corduroy-covered easy chair and the Naugahyde sofa softened by a striped blanket and several fat pillows, the CRT monitors on separate desks but coupled by a colorful festoon of multi-strand insulated wire. The young woman’s eyes took on a glisten; she saw the room for what it was, a chamber for fucking, for binary fantasy. Indeed, she must have sensed it, even without the clues of those instances when he refused to answer her knock, and breaths were held on both sides of the quilted steel door.
She stood there like a spectre; she had been admitted to his dream life. She handed him Ed’s sheaf and fled, back across the empty factory floor. But there came a day, as both sensed it might, when, once the thick door had closed with a punky click behind her, she handed him along with the business papers an additional message: a wadded warm handful of nylon underpants. Karen stood there with swarming eyes and lifted up her skirt, showing that her pants were in his hand and not on her. “We don’t have much time,” she said in a voice doubly fearful—that her absence from her workstation would be noticed and that he would spurn her.
She was small and sharp-featured, with abundant wiry hair and a worried, malnourished look. She was one of the thousands of young people feeding day after day on the sickly light of a cathode-ray tube. She plucked at Owen’s heart. “Then let’s not waste it,” he said gamely.
She took off her gray flannel skirt and little penny loafers but kept on the white peds and pearl-pink silk blouse. If he kissed her, it was afterwards. When she carefully removed her glasses, she squinted, and above her pointed chin her lips thinned with habitual concentration. She said, “Hey, look at you,” when she saw how ready he had become for her, his jeans quickly off, but then she was surprisingly slick, without foreplay. She must have carried a rising sexual excitement with her as she hurried across the blackened old floor, with its pattern of bolt scars and gleaming worn nailheads, her underpants in her hand. Or had she slipped them off right at his door, on an impulse? What a brave generation hers was, that in a mere decade or so had freed itself from centuries of hangups.
“Why do you want this?” he asked her in a breathy moment stolen from one of their times together.
Pressed beneath him on the sofa, her thighs spread to embrace his hips, she was not afraid of seeming tactless. “With guys of your own generation,” she explained, “there’s all this negotiation. There’s all this baby stuff and heavy crap about commitment. You feel trapped by your future and what you do with it. With you, there’s no future. There’s just this. Bim, bam, not even a thank-you-ma’am.”
“How wonderful you are,” he began.
“None of that, Mr. Mackenzie. I’m not wonderful. I’m functional, and I’m not downright ugly, but that’s all. Face it: to you I’m a piece of ass.”
“And me, what am I to you?”
Karen was silent. Owen felt time ticking. Phyllis might call. Or Ed. He had promised Ed to plot a revise of an insurance program that needed to combine actuarial probabilities with the sliding interest rate of their annuities, plugged into the Fed’s interest rates, with algorithms that included double log functions.
“You, you’re a beautiful old guy. I can see you as a kid. I love DigitEyes, what you did back then with those few kilobytes available. I love playing with it, when I start missing you and wishing we had more.”
“Then you do miss me. You do want more.”
“Of course; that’s just biology. Biology is stupid. It wants babies. I don’t want babies. Not yet. I just want your cock inside me now and then.”
They could talk this way to each other only in the small sealed space, as sealed in by thick old walls as his brain was by his skull; they occupied it like the murmur of thoughts incessant in our heads.
“How often?” he asked. “When are you going to come again? I ought to know, so I’m sure to be here.” Vanessa and he might have scheduled something; his four children had their appointments—their sports, their teeth.
“See, that’s negotiations,” Karen said. “I’ll come when I want to, when I can. I’m getting paid to work here, don’t forget. Other people watch you. People sense things.”
“They do?”
“I did, didn’t I? You knew, too. You weren’t so surprised that time when I first hoisted my skirt.”
She was right: even this bit of recapitulation, of purposefully hoarded memory, revealing that she had put some twos and twos together and evolved a plan of action, tainted the relationship. It was weeks before she appeared in his room again, and then shamefaced, as a suppliant; she had caved in to desire, and he didn’t entirely like it that he had gained this power over her. He made her, though she said she had only a minute, take off her blouse and played with her little pert breasts, as she had played with DigitEyes. Their impulsive fling was beginning to deviate into sexual politics and a clutter of scrupulously kept old scores.
He had learned to have sex without kindness, without a grandiloquent gratitude. He could dislike Vanessa even as he milked her for revelations and wisdom. He guided her toward discussing the other women of their set, especially those he had known, to revisit them from another angle, in a cooler light. “Faye,” she said. “I loved Faye, her giddy spirit, but she hadn’t a clue how to dress. Like a ragbag on speed, and those ridiculous long skirts to hide her bow legs.” “I never noticed she had bow legs.”
Vanessa laughed her laugh, a growl deep in her throat. “How could you, dearest, you were too focused on what was between them.”
“I still feel guilty about her, making that mess of her life.”
“Faye
was a butterfly—how long do butterflies live? A day or two. She was born to be a victim. Anybody who stays married to an alcoholic likes being a victim. Then you victimized her, and you weren’t the only one, I’m sure she told you. You’re quite naïve to blame yourself.”
“Alissa. What do you make of her?”
“What did you make of her? Or out of her, you could say.”
She meant the baby. He said, “I can’t say anything.”
“Of course you can’t. Nobody can. Hush-hush.”
“Except that she’s delicious, isn’t she?”
“It depends on how much fat you have the stomach for.”
He took a handful of the soft flesh at the side of Vanessa’s stately waist, above the hip bone, and gave a sharp, cruel squeeze. Her grimace showed her eye teeth. They were in her home—a rare, risky occasion, with his red Stingray in her and Henry’s two-car garage like a piece of gleaming meat, if the electronic door were triggered and slid up. The Slades’ house, a ’fifties neo-colonial with garage and sunporch, on one of the newer post-war streets in Middle Falls, irritated him with its sanctimonious order, its many evidences of Henry’s careful carpentry and groundskeeping and of Vanessa’s efficient, traditional homemaking and of Victor’s exemplary progress at Choate. The Slades’ perversely solid marriage, built on some immovable mute foundation, rubbed him the wrong way. Didn’t Henry know what a slut his wife was? Didn’t his plodding, complacent obtuseness madden her? No, they seemed to have a perfect arrangement—every silver-framed photo of Victor and Garden Club prize ribbon and matching armchair and footstool in place, like the homes in Willow he had envied, with completely finished cellars.
“Ow,” Vanessa said, but without ire, accepting his rebuke as deserved.