by John Updike
S
John Updike
S. is Sarah Worth – doctor's wife, North Shore matron, loving mother, and now (suddenly!) ardent follower of a Hindu religious leader known as the Arhat. As this brilliant and very funny novel opens, Sarah is fleeing the confinement of her suburban life to become a sannyasin (pilgrim) at her guru's Arizona ashram.
In the letters and audiocassettes that Sarah sends to her husband, daughter, mother, brother, best friend – to her psychiatrist and her hairdresser and her dentist – master novelist John Updike gives us a witty comedy of manners, a biting satire of life on a religious commune, and the story – deep and true – of an American woman in search of herself.
John Updike
S
April 21
Dearest Charles-
The distance between us grows, even as my pen hesitates. The engines drone in the spaces between words, eating up the miles, the acres of the flat farms in big brown and green squares below the wing as it inches along. I close my eyes and see our white house, its two screened porches and long glassy conservatory, its peek at the sea and the rocks of the cove-those gray rocks you and Pearl and I have picnicked on so many times and that when the sun beats on their veins feel warm even in February-and its undulating lap of lawn and the bulb bed so happy and thrusty with leaves, now that spring has come. Do leave a note for the lawn boys when they come tomorrow to set their big wide reel mower a notch higher, since last Tuesday they scalped that area over by the roses, where the ground bulges up. How often I've spoken to them about it, and with what results! Of course it's not always the same boys, year after year.
I bought two extra boxes each of your apple granola and unprocessed bran-so you have breakfasts at least for a month. You may wish to speak to Mrs. Kimball about coming now more than once a week. As you know Thursday is her day and I always try to tidy up for her, especially the kitchen and our bedroom. She arrives around noon. If you can't bring yourself to make the bed at least pull the covers up and smooth the puff. The most gracious thing, the day she comes, is to air the bed for the morning with the puff and covers down and windows open to get our body smells out but possibly such refinements were wasted on her anyway. Also: she knows where the front-door key is hidden down up in under the garbage-can bin lid, the door on the right, and puts it back there when she goes home, but don’t leave the burglar alarm on when you go off in the morning-I did once, as you may remember, absent-mindedly when Irving switched yoga lessons at Midge's to Thursday morning because the boy who helps him in the framing shop had to go to his grandmother's funeral or something and the police came as they're supposed to (though not very promptly, she later confided) and poor Mrs. K. with that crooked heavy-lidded eye of hers that makes her look dishonest in any case had a terrible time explaining, since though I trust her with the key I could never bring myself to trust her with the code to the burglar-alarm system-it seemed too intimate. She does, incredible though it may seem to us, have a sex life and who knows with what kind of men who might casually get it out of her? Whereas it would take a real conscious betrayal for her to cold-bloodedly take a key to the hardware store and have duplicates made on that nasty-sounding little machine. You might ask her if she can give you Mondays as well. The thing about dust and dirt that men don't realize is it doesn't just sit there, it sinks in.
I withdrew half of our joint accounts, all the ones I could find records of-the 5½% checking, the savings account at 6½ %, and the capital account in Boston at 7¾% (I think). Indeed, I took a teeny bit more than half since the CDs are tied up for six months at a time and you have all the Keogh and medical-partnership retirement-plan money stashed away that you've always been rather cagey and secretive about, not to mention those tax-shelter real-estate partnerships Ducky Bradford got you into years ago and that you said would be too much trouble and might alert the IRS to put into our joint name-one of the things I suppose I've always resented without admitting it to myself is how you tended to call money "yours" that we really earned together since not only was I keeping up our lovely home to. enhance your image with your patients and fellow-doctors and raising our daughter virtually unassisted since you were always at the office for reasons that didn't dawn on poor innocent me for years, not to mention how while you so heroically (everybody kept telling me) slogged through medical school and internship I was the one who gave up two years of college and any chance of going on to graduate school-I was majoring, you have no doubt forgotten, in French philosophy, Descartes to Sartre-it's amazing to me what I once knew and have forgotten, all that being and nothingness and cogito ergo sum, all I remember now is essence precedes existence, or is it the other way around?-anyway I loved it then, and fantasized myself as Simonede Beauvoir or Simone Weil and instead substitute-taught French and sewing at that terrifying parochial school in Somerville, those clammy-faced nuns and priests who I swear did act a bit lecherous even though nobody in those days believed they could, and stood on my feet all day in the boutique in Porter Square where it turned out their real business was selling pot in little Marimekko sachets. And you have also no doubt forgotten that your tuition fees were partly paid out of that trust fund Daddy had set up for me.
As to the stocks-I had intended to sell only half but then couldn't decide which ones and since everybody agrees the market can't keep rising like it has been I told the broker at Shearson Lehman to go and unload them all. He sent me these forms requiring both our signatures and I rummaged through your desk for one of those big black felt-tips you always use-that same imperious C-scrawl you use on prescriptions and checks and even on the love-note to that brainless LPN you were fucking that time I discovered the Christmas present you were going to give her in your golf-club closet (a Wedgwood shepherdess!-no doubt some private erotic joke in that, to your little Bo-Peep)-I know it so well, that signature, it's been branded into me, I wouldn't be surprised to see it burned into my flank if I looked down, char for Charles, it felt wonderful writing it-being you for a second, with all your dark unheeding illegible male authority. I had meant to divide the amount but Shearson Lehman sent it all in one big check though I had asked the young man I talked to not to-Midge was saying they get them all out of Tufts and Northeastern, these baby brokers now, the smart boys from Harvard and Brandeis go to Hong Kong or straight to Wall Street where the huge money is-but it came in one check anyway and I figured that if the market goes down as it's certain to-even Irving was saying the other day it will, according to the astrological signs-then I'm saving us both money and maybe should award myself a commission. So I have. Anyway, darling, you have all the house and furniture plus the Cape house and the acres in New Hampshire we bought as an investment in case the Loon Mountain condos ever spread that way. Besides taking my jewelry-you can't object to that, some of it was Great-grandmother Perkins's and you gave me the other things, the moonstone brooch for our fifth anniversary and the pear-cut diamond pendant for our tenth and for our fifteenth those rather ugly though I know expensive rectangular emerald earrings I always thought with my dark hair and rich complexion made me look too much like a squaw, a Navajo in turquoise chunks-I rented a big safe-deposit box and put in it the silver teapot with the side-hinged lid and the oblong salver with the big monogrammed P and embossed rim in rope motif that came from the Prices, and the chest of Adam flatware and those lovely fluted double-serpentine candleholders from the Peabodys, and Daddy's coin collection and those old editions of Milton and the Metaphysicals he scandalized his family by spending so much money on the year he went to London to learn the luxury-leather business and didn't, plus some other few odd old family things, I forget what. It's a huge box, much bigger than a breadbox, and the girl at the bank and I both struggled sliding it back into its empty space, like a pair of weakling undertakers grunting and straining in the crypt
. I have both keys, don't bother looking.
(Wet spot here because stewardess came with second drink. Little and giggly, just your type, a Filipino I think. The prefab daiquiri mix is not so absolutely sugary as most. Daiquiris it just occurs to me have always been my drink for "letting go"-remember that time we flew down to Saint Martin for your vacation?)
My old Charles-how much I loved you and love you still! Your cheek so excitingly rough in bed at night, that of a beast in whom time had been ticking all day, and then so excitingly smooth in the morning when I kissed you goodbye so you could go heal the world. The wonderful worthy way you smelled-after-shave lotion and the starch m your shirt collar and your hands all soapy and antiseptic and pink. And your sweat, your distinctly own, after we played tennis or made love. Sometimes (may I confess?), even when we were along in years and a distance had grown between us, even then I would miss you so much, the afternoons in the house alone stretching so silently long for me, and the sea that bright metallic four-o'clock blue but the rocks already in shadow, that to cure my hollowness, my dread, I would go to your pajamas on their hook in the closet and smell them-bury my face in their soft flannel in search of your faint, far stale sweat. It was most intense around where your neck rubbed: I found that touching. Somehow we American girls are raised for the smell of a man in the house. Even the scent of your urine and of that unmentionable other lingering in the bathroom into the middle of the morning was comforting-doorways into another being, another body like your own, helplessly a body.
And unlike, say, Midge and Ann Turner and even Liz Bellingham, I was never really satirical about our material advantages, the socio-economic side of it all. Our comfort did not embarrass me. I knew how hard we had worked together to make you a grand grave man, with just enough silvery hair flaring out above the ears, and how important to you the alchemy was that turned your horrible patients' complaints and diseases into our prosperity. Unlike some (Liz, who should talk, whose father never lifted a finger except to sign a bar bill) I saw nothing funny or vulgar in our matching Mercedeses, or the heated lap pool we installed in the old conservatory for your back and my figure. This was economic health, it seemed to me, as attractive as any other kind. The Truro house perhaps was an enhancement that didn't quite work-I could never get used to that mildewy mousy little damp stink that hangs under the pines-so unlike the North Shore with its stern chaste oaks and hemlocks and granite-or keep the squirrels out of the crawl spaces in the winter, or get the aura of the previous people's fried clams and onion rings out of the kitchen. And then of course Pearl and her friends rather ruined my happy early associations (when you could still go skinny-dipping in the ponds in the dunes and the roads really were just ruts in.the sand) after they got old enough for rock and beer and cigarettes and the dreadful rest of it those last summers. For me it became like running a bus route, slithering up and down the driveway heading back into Wellfleet for one more ton of hot dogs and some pimply guest's highly specific favorite munchie called Fritos or Doritos or Cheez Doodles.
Why do Americans always think they should feel guilty about their things? I loved our things. Things are what we strive for, what all the waves in the air tell us to strive for-things are the stuff of our dreams and then like Eve and Adam digesting the apple we must feel so guilty. I didn't, I don't think. Through my thirties I was shamelessly happy about being'me, being part of us. I loved our renovations, the amalgamated maids' rooms and the garage excavated under the porch and the marble-topped island in the kitchen and the lap pool echoing and splashing under all that whitewashed-dap-pled conservatory glass. I grimly enjoyed doing battle with the aphids on the roses and the chinch bugs under the sod and the garden boys with their headphones and lazy stoned smiles, their pulling up groundcover and leaving weeds and poisoning the lawn with fertilizers every summer in big brown stripes. I loved even those famously dreaded suburban cocktail parties, going in the car with you and in the door on your arm and then us separating and coming together at the end and out the door again like that Charles Addams cartoon of the two ski tracks around the tree. I loved you, my eternal' date, the silent absent center of my storm of homemaking, the self-important sagely nodding doctor off in his high-rise palace of pain. I didn't mind fatally the comical snobbish brusque callousness that comes when you've processed enough misery, or the rabid reactionary politics that came with not wanting any national health plan to cut into your fat fees, or even the nurse-fucking when it became apparent-I could smell them on your hands no matter how many times you scrubbed, and there was a new rough way you handled me-because though in some sense you were just another Boston-bred preppy brat not much older than I in another you were my creator, you had put me here, in this rocky grassy sparkling seaside landscape, amid the afternoon silence and the furniture (except of course the things Daddy wanted me to have and Mother had to ditch, grudgingly, when she sold the Dedham house and bought her hideous Florida condo).
Charles darling, it was not your fault.
(Long interruption. They brought me food on a tray-funny chickeny sort of rolled-up thing. Fork and knife and napkin all rolled up too. Hard to unroll and not bother with my elbows the sleeping man next to me. He already hates my writing, my scratching and scratching and pausing now and then to blot my tears. He's terrified I'm going to start confiding the reason for my hysteria and so feigns sleep. Typical male avoidance maneuver. Then I got sleepy, having consumed the little demi-bouteille du vin rosf californien. Plane bounced up and down over some white-nosed mountain range as soon as the girl filled my coffee cup. No girl, actually-a woman about my age, both of us too old to be bouncing around in the sky with these mountains poking upwards at us. Then I dozed. I don't know where your Filipino went to-she seemed busy in the first-class section and then got absorbed into the cockpit. They say with these automatic pilots all sorts of things go on-nobody, really, is flying the plane. Just like the universe.)
Perhaps it was your fault. Leaving me alone so much amid our piled-up treasures, you gave me time to sense that my life was illusion, maya. Midge's yoga group, that I joined just for the exercises and something to do, gave me a vocabulary. My spirit, a little motionless fleck of eternal unchanging fttrusba, was invited to grow impatient with prakriti-all that brightness, all that flow. I would look at the rim of the saucer of my fourth decaf for the day and feel myself sinking-drawn around and around and down like a bug caught on the surface of bathwater when the plug is pulled. Pearl 's going away to England was part of it. Your emotional desertion and the fading of our sex life was part of it. But there was-something beyond and behind these phenomenal manifestations that was rendering even my unhappiness insubstantial. I seemed, like some dainty Japanese on the other side of the world with her rice-powdered face and pigeon-toed stockinged feet, to be living in a paper house, among miniature trees and gardens raked to represent nothingness. And into this papery world broke love.
That much you should know. I have left you out of love for another. Your own "genteel atrocities of coldness and blindness toward me were not by themselves enough. I was too stoical, too Puritan, too much a creature of my society for solitary rebellion; I needed another. Who he is, and where we are together, I will trust you not to seek out. Your dignified useful life, of which I was an ever smaller and less significant adornment, surely will forbid any ugly vulgar furor of detectives and lawyers and warrants. Let me become truly nothing to you, at last. I will change my name. I will change my being. The woman you "knew" and "possessed" is no more. I am destroying her. I am sinking into the great and beautiful blankness which it is our European/Christian/Western avoidance maneuver to clutter and mask with material things and personal "achievements." Ego is the enemy. Love is the goal. I shed you as I would shed a skin, with some awkwardness perhaps and at first a sensitivity to the touch of the new, but without pain and certainly without regret. How can I-we-regret a phase of life that is already dead? Are not all oiir attachments, in truth, to things that are already dead?
; If you decide to sell the house or any part of our joint holdings, I of course expect-my legal half. If in time you wish to remarry (and I expect you will, not out of any great talent for uxoriousness but because the ferocious sea of seeking women will at some point overpower your basic indifference; the only bulwark against women is a woman, and a wife is convenient, especially for spoiled and preoccupied men of middling years) I will ask an appropriate settlement in exchange for your freedom. The affront, to your pride and convenience, of my desertion should weigh little, in any wise court, against the nearly twenty-two years of mental and emotional cruelty you with your antiseptic chill have inflicted on me. More than twenty-two-since I date my bondage not from that rather grotesquely gauzy and bubbly and overphotographed August wedding at King's Chapel the year our fathers were all for Goldwater but from the moment when you, with the connivance of my parents, "rescued" me from what was so generally deemed to be an "unsuitable" attachment to dear little Myron Stern.
But enough, my once and only husband. No grudges. Between us the scale is fairly balanced. Darkness, though the plane has moved west with the sun and given us a sunset in slow motion, has at last come, and little unknown cities twinkle below. We are descending. The human pilot has resumed the controls and the pretty little Filipino has reappeared, checking our seat belts with mock concern for our well-being. The fat man has stopped pretending to be asleep and is leaning his bulk into me, straining to see out my window. He fears for his life. In his gross voice he has the temerity to tell me I should put up my tray. I hope he reads this sentence. That is not my hand trembling, but the sudden uncongenial mixture of air and metal-the shaking of the plane. No-I am suddenly terrified to be without you (interruption: we have landed and are taxiing)-to be without you now that dinner hour has properly come, and our windows will be black against the yews outside, with the lights of a lone boat moving across the cove, and the automatic garage door will be grinding upward to receive your Mercedes, and rumbling down again, and the stairs up from the basement will resound with your aggressive footsteps, and there you will be, so solid and competent and trusting and expecting your quick martini before dinner. But then I realize that this happened-darkness came to you, you found the house empty, you read my horrible hasty note-hours ago, in quite another time zone.