S

by John Updike

  Now I fear I have set down the gold-rimmed vase with a crash. But honestly, didn't it ever feel to you as though I was nothing but a strangely weak man? Of course we must honor those who stand aside-the sexual saints, the little roundish men who would rather collect books or jade elephants, and the handsome Hepburnesque women not meant to be mothers-many of whom, so unfortunately (I think of my serenely selfish own), become mothers anyway. Actually, this ego-splitting I seem to extol doubles rather than halves our natural selfishness and selfish frenzy. Without a child, women are free to mother others-you, for instance, mothered me. And what a child I seem to be!-willful, needy, exhibitionistic, compliment-seeking, petty, jealous. Jealous, as we have discussed, of you and Durga in the time before I came here, when she was to you something of what you have been to me-an initiator, an apsaras, an avatar of Shakti. Even now as she in her drug-riddled fury brings down the paradise that the Arhat's beautiful energy crystallized, I feel in you a certain lackadaisical fondness for our Celtic destroyer, a passive willingness to "let it all go" as one more meaningless ripple of maya. Your energy exchange with Durga, in other words, still proceeds, though you find yourselves in opposite camps during all this scheming, feuding, poisoning, and mutual manipulation as the implacable outer world closes in.

  This is not a complaint, but a halting explanation, much longer than I meant it to be. I know how you hate to read, how content you were to betrance yourself in front of our feeble old Zenith with its ghost images shuddering as if the mountains between here and Phoenix were always in motion. I love you. But not only you, so I can no longer accept your roof, your A-frame. I am writing you in the rock garden, and will miss this shady spot beneath the box elder-the nirgundi, you taught me it is called in Sanskrit-and the garden's crowd of funny little scrunched-up cactus-faces, like the rumpled faces of pug dogs or of whiskery cartoon cats. The tree's seeds spin down on me, the wings of the twin samaras not outspread as in the energetic flaming maples of New England but folded down, as if still asleep and dreaming of, instead of experiencing, flight. And the rising sun like a vast high press squeezes from the air that desert spiciness, that very fine powder in the air like the substance of purusha and like something-some dim closeted seasoning-I used to smell in my grandmother's kitchen in Medford.

  Darling, it is nothing you have done-you can do nothing wrong, because in a deep and very soothing way you are beyond attempting to do anything right. You accept In the sthula sphere you were all padma and I the mani, the flawed jewel to your perfect lotus. The way you would let me brush your silky long hair on and on in the dark as the blue sparks flew about your head and my hands. And the way the top of your head would show an utterly straight parting, like a chalk-line, scalp-white, when in morning light you would shadowily kneel to give me a "tummy kiss." It is nothing you have done and nothing I am doing-it is Kali, dearest, time undoing and destroying so that the new weave can be begun. Kali who moves through all our passions, momentous as they seem, and tugs them toward the wheel's next turn. My worst fear as I write-how close I am to tearing all this up and sparing myself the pain of packing and saying goodbye to the rooms where, once frowny twitchy guilty Nitya's discordant note was gone, we made our harmony!-my fear is that you will shrug me off, you will shed me, that is what we do with one another, all of us, but it never seems right, never seems natural, though it is the most natural thing in the world.

  Be a lamp unto yourself,

  K.

  Oct. 1

  Charles-

  I am living alone again and unable to sleep tonight. Your barrage of Gilmanesque legalese has left me unimpressed. If you can arrange my arrest, go to it. Pearl can add to her distinctions that of her mother being put in jail by her father. Actually, you never hear of that, do you? Halves of a couple can murder and desert'each other easily enough but legally I believe we are somehow one and therefore have oddly little legal recourse. Anyway the courts are bored with couples. The whole world for that matter is bored with couples, and if a couple doesn't take an interest in itself no one else will. All these lawyerly threats and bluff I take to be your stiff and clumsy way of expressing continued interest in me. But I would never do as your wife again, having so wildly fallen. To my derelictions I have recently added a lesbian romance-delicious and comforting but rather, for my Yankee tastes, lacking in fiber. It did helpfully clarify what men see in women. The lady, in posture and offhand affect and even in a certain disarming flatness of accent, reminded me of Marcelene Rabinowitz-remember her? Women of course are divine energy-without Shakti, as they say here, Shiva is a corpse-but, so satisfactorily endowed by the cosmos, they tend to be conservative-reconciled to the cycle, hypnotized by the days, the days in all their rasas (shades, feelings, bliss). The days go on without you. I seem myself to be involved in an ascent, or at least moving down a one-way street. Women do tempt the pilgrim to rest and that is why holy men have tended to hate them. Holy men-not the gods. Zeus, Christ, Buddha loved women. But not their philosopher-followers. No? I see you, dear Charles, as something of a holy man, really, with your white lab coat and your hands chilly from their last scrubbing.

  So truly you must consider me lost to you. When I left you last spring and wrote that long frightened letter on the plane it was like a prank I was carrying out under your auspices, under your giant parasol, and I was like the id in a dying body, that cannot admit it is dying. But now I can admit it: I was dying to you. Have you ever noticed, in all the dead people you have seen, how small they become? A dead face is no bigger than a dessert plate. I see you now clearly, reduced to your actual size. These legal pranks of yours are pathetic. Tell Oilman I will settle for half the value of the two houses as appraised for fair market value in today's skyrocketing New England real-estate market, half the New Hampshire land ditto, the stocks and bonds as I divided them, my Mercedes (I hope you rev the engine now and then), all the silver and furniture that came from my ancestors with their single insistent initial, and all my legal expenses. The more or less modern furniture we acquired together I grandly waive-your next victim can live with it, and worry about the slipcovers and the loose legs. I think I'm offering a good deal-most wronged wives get 100% of the primary residence at least. And I was wronged, of course. Don't make me interrupt my lessons in non-involvement by coming east and collecting depositions from a bevy of fucked nurses and other helpless inmates of your hospital harem. Maybe we can work up a scandal for the Herald or at least The New England Journal of Medicine. Midge suffered your affairs through with me for these last ten years-I see her, really, as my human archivist. I told her everything, back when I cared, through storms of tears. Gilman should contact Ducky Bradford when he and you are ready to talk sense.

  And do lay off little Pearl. Try to think like a father instead of a strategist in the war between the sexes. I ask your help in warding off what I think is her very demeaning involvement with this gross Dutch bunch. They are everything Americans left Europe to get away from-materialist, class-obsessed, cruel in their smugness, and smug in their dullness. The boy naturally has an unearned sophistication that would dazzle our wide-eyed daughter-flats in Paris and Venice!-but once the tourism is over, the leaden weight of age-old sacrosanct male supremacy will descend. Europeans are always bragging how their pedigrees go back to cavemen, as if this entitles them to still think like cavemen. Behind that superficial savoir-faire they are cynical slobbering brutes, and nothing delights them so much as the destruction of a beautiful innocence like our daughter's. Pearl needs nice shy American boys, awkwardly full of drive and idealism, eventually; but for now she should be allowed to study, to soak in the great poems and novels of the past if that is where her atman feels itself expand. Her not going back to Yale is tragic, and I blame you. Through this effete Jan you are acting out your own fantasies of seduction-Dr. Epstein and I often discussed your scandalous incestuous flirtatious behavior toward her, even when the poor little soul was still an infant. You are using your paternal power over her to seduce her
into "showing me up" by getting married just as I am getting Kwmarried. I feel you, out there, as a dark packet of wounded maleness spitefully taking any tack to "get at" me, even if it means ruining your daughter's fragile young life. I can only hope that this sensation of mine is paranoid.

  It is not too early to think about having some fall fertilizer spread on the lawn-they say the acid rain makes it more important than ever. Lawn Craft makes a 10-6-4 mixture called Turf Food that should go on with the spreader set at notch 5-tell the boys to move briskly doing it, last year they left burned patches wherever they turned the spreader around. Also tell them not just to blow the oak leaves-they love pushing that big blower around, of course-into the bushes in the circle and the ivy over on the rocks-but to carry them down in those dirty old sheets we keep in the tool shed to the compost pile, and to dig them out from under the bushes with rakes-the little hedge rakes that look like children's toys are actually best for this purpose. You must get Mr. Kimball when he does the storm windows also to clean the gutters-otherwise all winter there are those dreadful orange stains down behind the drain pipes. Remind him to turn off the outside water at the underground valve behind the lilacs. I usually do it, and you need an adjustable wrench for the big nut that turns the lid of the standpipe, and a flashlight to see in, otherwise you grope forever with that long rod with the two-pronged grip on the end. Make sure he takes the windows out of the frames and Windexes-or uses a squeegee and ammonia water, which is actually better-both sides instead of just the outside, which is easy to reach from a ladder-he bates doing it and who can blame him but it must be done. Remember, those first years after we bought the house from old Mrs. Pynch-eon, so young and frightened that $56,000 might have been impossibly too much to pay, how we used to wash the windows together on a weekend, the warm early fall wind blowing the sailboats along on the dark-blue ocean with its whitecaps and the whole world so new to us and clean, clean, clean!?

  Love,

  S.

  [tape]

  Are you there? I guess it's working. Midge, you wouldn't believe the goings-on we've been having here! Maybe some of it has been getting into the Boston papers, but no doubt hideously distorted. Well, I'm not sure anybody can give an account that isn't somewhat distorted-even Durga, who is at the center of it, probably couldn't tell you everything, because she's been so crazy on all the drugs that Ma Prapti's been giving her and everybody, it turns out. I told you-or did I write it to somebody else?-how funny people have been feeling after some of the meals, and how Ma Prapti has been complaining about running out-of tranquillizers, out of Percodan and Valium and Demerol, over at the clinic-well, the reason she kept running out is it's all been being sprinkled into our vegetarian curry, like they used to put saltpeter into prisoners' food, to keep them from being too sexy-in our case the idea seemed to be to keep us all calm and passive, since Durga had this idea everybody was conspiring to take her power from her. It's true there's been a lot of complaining about things running downhill,' but her notion of a coup was quite fantastic and insecure, since the only real power-source around here is the Arhat's spiritual beauty and condition of moksha, which can't be stolen or changed. But the numbers of reporters and county officials and state cops and FBI men and men from the Immigration Service that kept filtering through made her feel she was losing control, I guess-it turns out that Durga, who as I must have said before is Irish, from one of these charming little villages in the western islands with muddy paths and stone walls where things haven't changed for a thousand years and people go about singing to their cows and sloshing down usquebaugh neat in pubs, was terrified of having her green card taken away and being sent back there, and also Vikshipta, who couldn't find a job in Seattle and is back here now, is from West Germany, and Ma Prapti from Rumania by way of England, and the Arhat himself of course from India, though funnily enough he's the only real Indian, the others stayed behind when they had to move the ashram out of this hilly remote place full of carved caves called Ellora-so this threat of deportation really hung over the inner circle in a way that those of us who happened to be American citizens and never thought much about it couldn't really appreciate. And so Durga was becoming more and more insecure, so that every official terrified her, even the nice little old electrical man who came around to inspect the wiring and stage lighting in Joy-Six-Oh, and when they'd offer these poor men-these really touchingly straight young guys from the IRS or the INS, usually Mormons with that intense religious background-who came around to ask some more official questions herbal tea or whatever, they'd put in something, heaven knows what-I don't know half the chemical names, and Ma Prapti was willing to try anything as an experiment, even ground-up mesquite leaves and creosote-bush twigs, to make them confused and forgetful, but it mostly just gave them terrible diarrhea two hours later. She's confessed all this to the authorities, she talks to them day after day now. I don't think she felt around here anybody ever listened to her. So now all these men, including the lawyers for the ranches and the land-use clique from Phoenix, which is entirely retired Northerners with nothing else to do, and a lot of petty bureaucrats hoping to get their faces on television-this state is so square, Midge, the governor is called Babbitt!-have been milling around and commandeering desks in the Uma Room and putting their feet up and trying to be friendly, saying we don't seem to be such crazies as they had thought and dribbling cigarette ash all over everything, and half the sannyasins that hadn't already left are leaving, and Durga and the hard core around her, Satya and Nitya and Vikshipta and Agni and the security-force boys, have headed up the Sachchidananda to where it becomes a kind of canyon and have holed up in the trailers that were there as a last-ditch security compound, with evidently a ton of weapons like Uzis and Galil assault rifles and even some bazookas to use for anti-aircraft. There're these government helicopters that have been flapping back and forth overhead for days but they never seem to land, just come down and hover, stirring up the dust and blowing all the leaves off the few trees we have. Funnily enough, though, now that the roof's fallen in in a way, there's a sort of up mood among those of us still around, a kind of, you know, prakhya feeling that a really immense amount of garbage has been finally disposed of. And I must say that Durga, the last time I saw her, looked terrific, in lavender jeans and denim ranch-hand jacket dyed to match and with a lilac silk scarf at her throat like a British paratrooper and, believe it or not, paratrooper boots as well, and this swanky big black revolver holster strapped to her hip. She's taken to smoking tinted cigarettes in a long ivory holder and the only thing she needs is a black eye patch. She has, I guess I don't have to remind you, this spectacular flaming red hair and pale-green eyes and one of those milky slightly freckled complexions that when I was little I used to envy so-my mother has one and always thought I was disgustingly dark.

  Oob. What was that? Nothing, I guess. Distant shots. I've made myself this cozy nest in Vikshipta's old A-frame-he left his blankets, and a lot of Lowenbrau.in the fridge, and all this Freud in German that I can't read. And, Midge, I found a little whip, and some funny black leather outfits I can't even figure out how to put on, all straps and rings. Maybe he's supposed to put them on. I feel rather hurt, that he never shared this with me. I wonder if that's what he and Durga had between them-when he came back from Seattle he went straight to her and didn't give me the time of day. At any rate-

  Uh-oh. There it was again. It sounded closer than way up the canyon, but then that's how sounds are out here-the spaces are so huge and the air so dry, it's hard sometimes to know if a sound is up in the hills or right around the corner. Anyway, this harness or whatever it is is held together by big brass buckles and rings with these designs that if you look-

  Oh no. No. That was definitely footsteps outside, on the gravel. Now something's fiddling at the door! My God, Midge, what shall I do? Somebody's coming in!

  [Amplified clatter and scraping as of drawer being opened and shut. Subsequent conversation faint and transcribed with, difficulty. Male v
oice in italics below as before.]

  Master. It's you.

  Who is with you?

  Nobody. I'm alone. All alone. You scared me. My heart's pounding.

  I heard your voice talking.

  I often talk aloud, before I go to sleep. It empties the mind. It's like saying a mantra.

  To whom do you speak, Kundalini, in this spiritual exercise, since God in the Occidental sense does not exist?

  My daughter. My old friends back home.

  They are still real to you?

  No, Master, only you are truly real. It's just I have to relax my chittavrittis away from all this disturbance lately.

  Let me feel your heart pounding, my dear. It is true, you are afraid. Whenever we talk, it is of fear. Yours or mine. We should attempt to talk of joy. When you speak in solitude, is it also to your husband, this Charles?

  Rather rarely, Master. For years I didn't much interest him and now he doesn't interest me.

  Perhaps you both self-deceive a little in this. You said be admired your breasts. He was correct. They are admirable.

  I usually wear a nightie, but it's been so hot lately-

  Kundalini blushes. Also she smiles. It is good, to be admired. I think despite your shyness you like being admired. I admire your smooth darkness, your old-fashioned upright way.

  I find your kindness to me rather stunning, actually. I mean, I'm forty-two and just a former housewife-