by John Updike
There is an enlarging hollow in his life—its approaching end, perhaps. Julia cannot save him, though the sight of her, clothed and unclothed, still lifts his heart. She cannot save him with her silky willing body, her uncanny aquamarine gaze, or her matter-of-fact Christian piety, in which he has joined her in defiance of his scientific instincts and his indifferently churched upbringing. Grampy read the Bible on the caneback sofa; Grammy believed in devils and hexes. His father served the lords of local capitalism with conventional attendance, Christmas and Easter and most other Sundays. It was Owen’s mother who was the real cosmic questioner, the uncomforted Job, her face at times smeared with tears while she gave voice to her unhappiness, whose source the boy could never quite see. We do not see our parents well; they are too big, and too close.
In Haskells Crossing and the near section of Cabot City there are public tennis courts, used by those who do not have their own or access to a country club’s. The sight of them quickens in Owen a memory that surfaced after long suppression: when he was a boy of nine or ten his auburn-haired mother would put shorts on her pale, growingly plump legs and walk with him and two wood-framed rackets down through the Mifflin Avenue back yard and across the wide high-school grounds past the cinder track and little bleachers for the cinder-circumscribed football field, and open the latch of the four Willow public courts, fenced in by heavy galvanized wire. He and she would attempt to play. Neither had ever had lessons; it was frustrating, so many balls bopped into the net (also of heavy playground fencing, which sang when struck) or blooped into the air where the other could not reach them. He was embarrassed by her bare-legged figure joining him in this lonely game, her face growing redder as her clumsy efforts continued; trolley cars and traffic passed on the Alton Pike close enough for people to stare at this little boy and grown woman trying to pat an uncoöperative ball back and forth. Only now could Owen glimpse her purposes: to combat the weight problem that was overtaking her and to help him gain a skill he might need in life. In fact he went on, in the playful milieu of Middle Falls, to play a lot of tennis, though never with much of a backhand; he gave it up early, in the first years of his marriage to Julia, because of a rotator cuff that hurt when he tried to reach up into the serve. But the game had always been tainted for him by that shameful memory, the public struggle with his mother, while people in the trolley cars stared, to get the ball back and forth; there had been a pathetic impotence to the fuzzy balls—white, back then—as they hit the wire of the net or the fencing with a sad, reverberating thud. Mother and son had seemed so lost, the two of them, there at the far end of the flat school acreage, linked in a common ordeal as they had been at his painful birth.
She had died, finally, some years after his marriage to Julia, having made an impressive, white-haired, broad-bodied presence among the few wedding guests that day in Lower Falls. She didn’t have the energy to create with Julia the tensions that had existed with her first daughter-in-law; rather, she let the younger woman roll over her, even submitting to the massages that Julia skillfully applied to the aches in her osteoporotic shoulders and neck. She had never liked being touched; or so she had thought. “Julia,” she said to her second daughter-in-law, “you have a healing touch. Owen looks so much better since he took up with you. He had a sneaky, pasty look before, didn’t he?”
“To me he always looked very handsome and honorable,” Julia said, unanswerably, with a complacent closing of her lips. It was as when Elsie used to come to the house, with a lively courtesy facing his mother down, claiming her share of the son. Women are possessive. The world divides itself into their territories. A smile similar to Elsie’s would stretch Alissa’s lips when, her face perspiring inches from his, her dull blue eyes turned inky. Though we speak of a man possessing a woman it is she who takes possession.
His mother died neatly, quickly, of heart failure, in her little country house, having exerted herself with an unusual spurt of housework. Her old Hoover burned out its engine as her body lay beside it on the clean carpet. All four of the adults Owen had lived with as a boy died tidily, out of sight, as if to spare him unpleasantness and preserve his charmed, only-child sense of life.
Yet something feels amiss; there is something within him that needs to be relaxed. His fulfillment with Julia, his arrival at a harbor of safe uxoriousness and well-heeled retirement, is a strain to maintain, as his restless dissatisfaction with Phyllis had not been. Phyllis and he, in mating, had not so stressed the world that they had to be perfect; they had been the age to marry and leave their homes and make another, according to common social usage. He and Julia wrecked two existing households, and caused a death, though no court could convict them for it. Art Larson, as he calls himself now, left the ministry and enjoys well-paid employment as a p.r. interface in New York, but when he shows up, for a child’s wedding or the funeral of a dear pre–Middle Falls friend of the former couple, his neck looks vulnerable without the backwards collar. His hair no longer has the wiry health of a dog’s tousled, tight coat. His voice, however, is as resonant and gravely melodious as ever, and his manner toward Owen no less benign than at their first meeting. Even vestigial faith arms the believer in fatalism and an energy-conserving disposition to forgive.
There are two evidential arguments, Owen has reasoned, for the truths of the Christian religion: one, our wish to live forever, however tedious the actual experience of eternal consciousness might be, and, two, our sensation that something is amiss—that there has been a lapse or slippage in the world and things are not quite as they should be. We feel made for a better world, and the fault is ours that this is not Eden. The second may be the more solid evidence, since fear and loathing of death can be explained as, like pain, a survival device selected and refined by Darwinian evolution. Because we fear death, we try harder to live. As long as our genes get through, Nature doesn’t care how we suffer.
A third supernaturalist argument could be that belief, with a pinch of salt (that is, short of self-mutilation, a martyr’s suicide, or murder of one’s children as a surefire, low-cost relocation to Heaven), benefits the health; repeated medical studies bear this out. An anxiety-relieving faith conduces to worldly efficiency and success: this argument to Owen seems crassly pragmatic. Optimism tends to succeed, but does this refute the majestic truths of pessimism? The human animal, evolved in trees and then dropped down to run in the grasslands of Kenya, arrived at a highly conscious position awkward beyond any easements of philosophy. At three in the morning, our brains churn within the self, trying to get out of what we know to be a sinking ship. But jumping out of the self is not a Western skill. The walls of the skull stay solid, sealing us in with our fears.
They cling to each other, he and Julia, in what has become their dotage. “I hate it,” she tells him, “when you’re not in the house, even when you’re just off for golf.”
“How dear of you, baby. I hate it when you play bridge all afternoon. The house seems so large. When you’re here, it seems rather small.”
This is not entirely a compliment; Julia laughs at the jab, acknowledging that, yes, when he is in a room she finds an excuse to enter it; when he is closeted with his murmuring CPU, matching wits with the circuitry as it twirls an algorithm, at the rate of two hundred twenty billion cycles a second, through the AND and OR gates toward the conclusory IF … THEN … ELSE, she enters with a question about their health insurance or the yew and euonymus bushes waiting for him to trim them, as only he can do it, with his artistic eye—the lawn boys hack away, like bad barbers. They don’t take enough; they create holes and bald spots that never grow in. Or else she disturbs him on the terrace while he is trying for the hundredth time to render, with flake white, cobalt blue, ivory black, and a touch of Roman ochre, the look of rain clouds approaching above the sea’s horizon, their maddening near-colorlessness and their simultaneous elaborate structure and chaotic vapor, a mere brushstroke on wet paper in watercolor but in oils a labored accumulation of minutely three-dimensional tou
ches that will be dry tomorrow. Since early childhood, Owen has sheltered from reality’s pressure and misalignments by focusing closely on a paper page, a plywood cutout, a blob of clay, or, under Buddy Rourke’s laconic guidance, a copper connection within a braid of color-coded wires. Julia sets up a human clamor against her husband’s exclusionary absorption in the inanimate.
He tells her, teasingly, of the house, “Maybe it’s too large and we should sell it.”
“Don’t torture me; you know I love it here. And love you. At times,” she tells him, “I look at you when you don’t know I’m looking and I get this shiver, a physical shiver.”
“After all these years?” he dutifully asks. Their infantile give and take, word by word, forms a music that never palls, scored for a thousand repeats.
“Oh yes,” she dutifully answers. “More, even, instead of less. Something about the way you look when you don’t think anybody’s looking at you.”
“So you don’t regret … us?”
“Oh no. Not really. I’m glad. Aren’t you?”
“Oh yes,” he says.
Yet she finds, he feels, more and more about him that panics her. “Don’t eat in the middle of the kitchen floor,” she suddenly cries, as if electrically shocked. “Eat over the sink if you must eat all the time. I never saw anybody eat so constantly; no wonder your teeth are always disgusting.”
As a child on Mifflin Avenue he had been afraid the food would give out, and would march through the house nibbling a celery stick or a dirty carrot fresh-pulled from the backyard garden. Phyllis had never appeared to notice his nervous habit of grabbing pretzels, nuts, cookies from the bread drawer, to fill a suddenly felt gap within him. He fights back: “I hate eating over the sink, it makes me feel like a dog at his bowl.”
“Well, the floor everywhere is full of crumbs and the cleaning ladies were just here.” Those bustling Brazilians with their broad bottoms: when they talk together the language is as full of shushing sounds as Russian. Owen suspects that big countries are unhappier than little countries: more responsibilities.
“And don’t slurp,” Julia will say, of hot soup. She rarely serves soup, as if to teach him a lesson. “You had such a terrible upbringing. What was your mother thinking of?”
“She was improvising. She hadn’t been a mother before. She was going for the big picture, not table manners.”
“Good manners are where it all begins,” Julia states, and he accepts the wisdom from her, who looks to be the last of a string of instructresses. “My father used to say, manners are a form of courtesy, and courtesy a form of goodness.” She goes on, “And that’s what I tell my grandchildren. You observe their manners, Owen, and they’ll help you. They don’t slurp.”
He searches the dump of odd information in his head for a self-defense. “It tastes better,” he explains. “In some societies, slurping is considered a compliment to the host and hostess.”
“Well, aren’t we glad we don’t live in such a society? And another thing you do that’s truly terrible—I noticed it the other night, at dinner with the Achesons. You don’t break your bread into little enough pieces and you dabble at it with your butter knife, pat pat pat. It drove me so crazy I wanted to grab the bread out of your hand.”
“Well,” he says, “that would have been a lesson in manners to edify everybody.”
“I’m sorry, but I love you so much, I can’t stand it when you eat like an animal.”
“Grrr.”
“Don’t try to be funny, dear. It’s not funny. It’s your one flaw. And please look at me when I’m talking to you.” If he glanced away—say, at the newspaper on the kitchen table with its horrifying headlines of international and domestic tragedy—it was in the constructive spirit of multi-tasking, as mainframe computers used to do in the heyday of timesharing. It does seem to him, as Julia explains details of their health insurance or their next trip to Europe, that the English language in her mouth has too elaborate a syntax, expanding a simple thought graspable by the mind in a few billionths of a second into a paragraph a number of minutes long. One of the boys older than he back in Willow, probably Marty Naftzinger, who made a study of such matters, confided to him this piece of village wisdom: “The more a girl talks, the more she’ll fuck. Their mouths and their cunts,” Marty theorized, “are connected by this long nerve down their spines.”
Experience bore it out. Phyllis had talked reluctantly, as if the language of numbers had her tongue, or as if the basic imprecision of speech bothered her, whereas Julia in their very first meeting at the hospital fund-drive celebration dazzled him with the excellence of her pronunciation and the glittering completeness of her sentences. Talking for her, as for her husband, was a kind of delight, a public self-pleasuring, and one of Owen’s puzzlements concerned why a pair so well-matched had allowed itself to be split up. But ideality becomes by itself, in a couple, a reason for dissatisfaction and rebellion. Americans need to experience room for improvement, for progress.
Looking back, he is touched by how completely his two wives delivered what he asked. Phyllis had hoisted him up into Cambridge and the snob life of the mind, and Julia into Haskells Crossing and the life of bourgeois repose. If both lives were less than complete—less than his mother, who exaggerated his capacities, would have wished for him—then life itself is incomplete, a hasty approximation. It is a rough rehearsal, not a finished production.
The world tends to give us what we want, but what we receive will partake of the world’s imperfection.
He remembers his life in Middle Falls nostalgically, as a magical exploration of his male nature, but he forgets the seedy underside—the fear of discovery, the squeezed brevity of the trysts, the guilt that gnawed his innards into gastritis, the messy aftermaths. With Faye there had been legal threats and with Alissa a pregnancy. Once he and Alissa had tried meeting at the Whitefield’s Rock preserve, in the woods where he and Faye had gone that wondrous first time, and midsummer mosquitoes feasted on her exposed skin. She stood above him in forest concealment as he tugged down her underpants; her lovely plump legs became quickly hairy with the frantic bloodsucking little creatures. Out of mercy, he said after a minute, “Let’s get out of here.” He forgets more and more but still remembers trying to brush away the mosquitoes from her thighs as his mistress gazed down at him uncertainly, looking to him for leadership and sexual stimulation, for a sheltered site where they could be themselves.
The children are gone now but Julia and Owen live with another presence in the house, their approaching deaths. And before that, if they are unlucky, Alzheimer’s with its idiotic life-in-death. They are both forgetful, she of errands she means to run and he of names, especially of their friends in Haskells Crossing and Haven-by-the-Sea. Names planted early in the brain seem to last; a curling, brittle photo of the Willow second grade awakens names row by row, without a gap, whereas yesterday’s golf companion, met on the street, draws a blank, although Owen can picture his swing—a vulturous hunch, a spectacular hook—perfectly. Former President Reagan hangs heavily over the infant millennium: this foggy-voiced actor, this handsome snake-oil salesman who persuaded the poor to vote with the rich, as if indeed they were rich, has become a haze of pure existence, unencumbered by any memory of his venturesome life or even by his faithful wife’s name, while his own name, thanks to his grateful party, is attached to the capital’s airport and a huge downtown building of appropriately vague purpose. He haunts the national village; he warns us of what, even with salubrious amounts of brush-cutting and horseback-riding and plenty of sleep, can happen. In Pennsylvania they used to speak of old people “going back”—reverting, that is, to infancy. Owen and Julia are already turned in that direction, talking in baby syllables, touching each other as if for orientation in the dark, squabbling like mated toucans in a tropical jungle and then flying away in perfect forgetful unison.
Owen’s old question—why that anonymous, paradigmatic woman had allowed herself to pose for the obscene depiction
on the back of the playground-equipment shed—is still imperfectly answered. The question perhaps belongs to the unscientific order that deserves no answer, such as Why does anything exist? and What is gravity? Julia takes a jarringly hard-eyed view: women are the world’s slaves and in the end must do whatever men demand. As Alissa pointed out, the question Why do men fuck? is never asked. The question Why do women? perhaps arose in Owen’s mind from a childish over-estimation of the distance between women and men. He had no sisters; his mother’s heat frightened him; the macadam playground surrounding the Willow Elementary School had been gender-segregated by a broad central sidewalk. Decades later, Owen read that, in an experiment on white mice gender-segregated by an electric fence, the males back off at the first severe shock whereas the females continue to charge the fence until all are electrocuted.
Women’s natures are very large, he early sensed, to seek sex amid the world’s perils, in the face of so many wise societal discouragements. The force that parts their legs overrules modesty and prudence and common sense. Women fuck, his provisional conclusion was, because, like men, they are trapped in a biological universe where the species that do not propagate disappear; the traits the survivors harbor—lustiness, speed, canniness, camouflage—are soaked in these disappearances, these multitudinous deaths. Sex is a programmed delirium that rolls back death with death’s own substance; it is the black space between the stars given sweet substance in our veins and crevices. The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted. We are told that we shine, that we are splendid, and the naked bodies we were given in the bloody moment of birth hold all the answers that another, the other, desires, now and forever.
At three in the morning, writhing on the wrinkled sheets, unable to find the door to healing self-forgetfulness, as close to his death as Grampy was on Mifflin Avenue but a more skeptical and less frequent reader of the Bible, Owen sees as if looking down into a suddenly illumined well that his charmed life has been a long torment of fear, desire, ambition, and guilt. Picturing himself in Middle Falls, he cannot imagine what drove him into so many hazardous passes and contorted positions: he was a puppet whose strings old age has snipped. Even his attempts at masturbation now fizzle; in his mind’s eye he runs the images of those moist, knowing engulfments, those grotesque postures of submission, but, just when he almost has it, has it in hand, the temperature or edge or whatever it is unexpectedly slithers away. The triggering mix of brute mechanics and sentimental illusion dissipates. The secret flees. The system crashes. The workable parameters, once so broad there was ample room for fatigue and ambivalence, draw in. At the far extreme of his pilgrimage, the self-induced orgasms of early adolescence recede. None since have been so intense, so absolute an escape. Similarly, he looks at the contents, the well-made furniture and lustrous crockery, of his present excellent white seaside house and cannot conjure upon them the Christmas gleam, the excited metaphysical urgency, that the shabby homely things in his grandfather’s house—the brass candlesticks and embroidered table runners, the paltry few books and toys and vases—had possessed in the pale December window-light.