by John Updike
My buffaloed boy nodded politely.
Esther came into the room, closer to naked without her apron on. A green-clad green-eyed lady elf. The elf of the house. The furniture, even the wainscoting, gathered about her in salute: the Queen Mab of Malvin Lane.
Dale hurried to his conclusion. “It’s not exactly the answer yet, there is no absolutely exact answer unless N is a square, but when the difference between two successive answers for y is less than the decimal we’ve programmed in—point oh oh oh oh oh five if we want to be accurate within five places—the loop is broken and the computer goes on to whatever it’s programmed to do next. A process that repeats like this is called an iterative algorithm, or a loop. You see, Richie, what our minds grasp by intuition and a kind of instinctive averaging out, the computer has to work through painstakingly with these loops. It doesn’t mind all the little steps because electricity travels so fast and they’ve gotten the distances in the circuitry down to almost nothing now. A computer is much quicker than we are but it has no common sense, it’s had no experience. With these loops the tricky thing is to make them converge toward the true answer; otherwise they can diverge, or, as we say, blow up, and get totally unreal.” Dale looked up at Esther. “Bright boy,” he said.
“Not in math, I fear. He takes after his father in that.”
Dale looked at me, for the first time in our antagonistic relationship, with something like frank distaste. “Weren’t you O.K. in math when you had it at school?”
“No. Not O.K. My psyche rebelled. Mathematics”—I was sounding, I realized, rather foolishly grand about it—“depresses me.” I needed more wine, and envied Esther her full glass.
“Oh it shouldn’t be depressing,” the young man said earnestly. “It’s never threatening, the way some knowledge is. Geology, say. It’s”—his big loose fingers made little circles in the air, describing unthreatening motion, a rapid kinetic music—“it’s clean,” he concluded, leaving suspended between us, above the glass table, between the crackling fire and the bookcase on which Esther had set in a slender crackled toast-colored vase his gift of zinnias, the implied mass of all that is unclean, that is dirty and sluggish and drags us down.
She, tilting a freshly lit, crimson-filtered cigarette with what I sensed to be an unusual jauntiness, bragged of herself, “I was good at math. My father told me he couldn’t imagine anything more useless for a woman to be. But I loved it, as I remember. The way if you do what the book tells you the things all fit.”
Dale gave her his freshened attention. “Or don’t quite fit. There’s a branch now of math, between math and physics, really, that you can only do on computer; they set up these cellular automata, little colored tiles each representing a number, with a certain small set of rules about what color combinations in the surrounding tiles produce what color of each new tile, and it’s amazing, however simple the rules look, how these astounding complex patterns develop. Some end very abruptly, out of their internal logic, and some give signs of going on forever, without ever repeating themselves. My own feeling is with this sort of mathematical behavior you’re coming very close to the texture of Creation, you could say; the visual analogies with DNA jump right out at you, and there’re a lot of physical events, not just biological but things like fluid turbulence, that are what we call computationally irreducible—that is, they can only be described step by step. Now, on a computer you can imitate this, if you find the right algorithms. That’s what they’re beginning to use computers for, this study of chaos, or complexity. The implications are enormous: if the physical universe can be modelled by a computational system, and its laws regarded as algorithms, then on a sufficiently powerful machine, with enough memory, you could model reality itself, and then interrogate it!”
He was talking in a void. Only I knew what he was after. I told him, “If it’s a faithful model, it’ll plead the Fifth Amendment, just like the real thing.”
“But Richie loves history, don’t you, dear?” Esther asked the child in that slightly loud voice whereby we appear to talk to one person while really talking to another. “As long as it doesn’t go back further than the age of Buddy Holly.”
This seemed to me unnecessary teasing; what was she saying but, subliminally to Dale, See what I’m stuck with here? A pair of dummies.
It is not easy for me to know or picture Esther’s attitude toward other males. At first, of course, in recoil at having taken me away from the ministry and my wife and our groaning boards and never-to-be-born children, she clenched shut upon us, Esther and Roger, and for four or five years was all ardor bred of shame, and loyalty bred of guilt. Then Richie began to go to nursery school, and my re-education secured my position at the Divinity School, and our private life, the hard-won and once-illicit intimacy in which we were like two gladiators whose heated grappling fascinates an entire arena, slowly, imperceptibly, became an enactment, a transportation hither and yon of lifesize representations of ourselves, while our real selves shrank to the size of dwarf puppeteers, unseen manipulators who when alone with each other at the end of the show had no voices left. I was old enough to accept our dwindling sex life as part of a general dying, a biological pullback; but Esther? Her nerviness and boredom seemed more intense at some times of the month than at others. This appeared to be one of the times; her movements of hand and mouth had an electric swiftness, and her hair pushed out from her head with unusual and unruly “body”; one felt she would be shocking to the touch, like a gleaming kitchen appliance that harbors a short circuit. Her hair was so vivacious she undid a clip and, holding its prongs between her teeth, re-gathered, coiled, and tucked tighter a piece at the back of her skull.
“The guy who I really like from that primitive era is Fats Domino,” Dale said, after a pause, his eyes sliding toward my wife. It was as if he were speaking a foreign language by phrase book and were not a hundred percent certain that his output was also his listeners’ input. I was beginning to get a headache. Holidays do that to me. A full glass of white wine had appeared in my hand, with no memory of how I had obtained it.
“Yeah, you see him on old film clips,” dear Richie gamely, lamely responded. Except when rooted in front of his television set he seems generally at sea. “Along with Little Richard and Diana Ross before she was Diana Ross.”
The doorbell rang—our vile doorbell, strangled in layers of rust and scrawking as if to set galloping all the families of rats domiciled in the lath and plaster behind our panelled walls.
“That must be your darling niece,” Esther told me. “She took her own sweet time.”
“I called her up,” Dale volunteered, “to come over with me, but she wouldn’t answer her phone. She didn’t answer it last night either.”
They both sounded aggrieved. They were both good at math. They were welcome to each other. I marched to the door. The house is such that there is no quick way to the front door from the living room; you must pass under the archway, with its elaborate spindlework header, and then down the length of the hall. At the hall’s far end, a door closes off the foyer; through its one big dirty pane, and then through the narrow leaded strip of glass beside the front door, I glimpsed Verna peeking dubiously in, her sallow broad face with its slant eyes. She looked cold, and scared. As I pulled open the various doors to admit her, the wood, dried by the reviving furnace and the arid air of late fall, crackled and popped alarmingly. Alarming not just Verna: she was carrying Paula, bundled up, and with a wool hood askew on her face so only one soft brown cheek and tearful dark-blue eye showed.
“Sorry, Nunc,” Verna said in her reedy little voice. “I’ve had a fuck of a time. First the babysitter crumped out. Then the brother of the girl the babysitter said I might try came down to the apartment and tried to hassle me, so I had to throw a screaming fit to get rid of him. Then Poops here made a mess in her pants and had to have a bunch of cookies to keep still enough to let me dress her. So then I had to clean her face off of all these Oreo crumbs. Then the bus didn’t come alo
ng the boulevard. And didn’t come. And I began to cry, so these old bums and bag ladies waiting for the bus with me began to cluck and joggle the kid so much back and forth between them I got scared they’d kidnap her or something crazy. They’re all crazy, you know, these people that sleep in doorways under cardboard and everything. I don’t know where they were all going on a holiday, I guess to a handout somewheres. Then when the bus did come finally I got off a stop late and wound up in front of some chemical-research place that’s being built onto and where nobody knew anything, just these nerds inside when I knocked. Oh boy. I feel I been hiking for hours. Just at the end of this street I was so tired I put Paula down on the sidewalk to walk a little, she can walk perfectly well when it’s a question of getting into one of my drawers at the apartment and messing everything up, and the crummy little bitch just sat down on the cold bricks and wouldn’t budge and screamed back at me until this old lady weirdo with a tiny white dog with hair hiding its face and its feet too came along and went right up sniffing her and gave her a scare so she decided I was the lesser of available evils. Now that I’ve picked her up again I think her snowsuit smells of dog pee. Every time I go outdoors something like this happens, I should give up trying. Sorry if I’ve made everything late. It’s a real fuck-up.”
This was all said, with accompanying sounds of avuncular sympathy from me, as she divested herself and Paula of their outer clothes. Esther had come out into the hall and heard the end of the recital and gave her in greeting a slim hand. Esther has intimidatingly slender hands, freckled on the backs and the fingernails grown so long lately I fear being inadvertently slashed when she rolls over in bed. “You poor dear. It sounds like a nightmare.”
“It’s more or less the way my life is,” Verna told her, sighing and suddenly remembering: “Then on the bus some old sleazeball with this great mixture of rotgut-whisky and rotten-teeth smell coming out of his mouth tried to put a move on me, cuddling up to my friend here. She was giving him her cute smile. She’s a real little hooker, aren’t you, Poops?” She shook the child a little harder than she needed to to cinch the joke.
Paula’s great brimming navy-blue eyes had fastened on me, and her honey-colored plump hand, with its curling small conical fingers, reached toward me in recognition. Her father’s blood was visible in the hard hall light: a flare to her little nostrils, and a gleam to the fine black wires of her still-wispy hair. Her hair had been pulled back into two pigtails, as if her mother had chosen to state, This is my pickaninny.
“Rog should have offered to pick you up in the car,” Esther said, though she had never suggested it.
I defended myself: “I thought somehow Dale …” The fact of the matter was that the neighborhood has resident parking for cars with stickers; but many strange cars—Divinity School students, and an overflow of shoppers from Sumner Boulevard—crowd our area, and if you find a space in front of your own house you are loathe to unpark and give it up. I changed the subject, turning to Verna. “I’m surprised there was anybody at the Chem Annex on Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, there were guys there, but I don’t know what they were sniffing. They’d never heard of Malvin Lane, I can tell you that. And here I finally found it right around the corner.”
“The two cultures,” I lamented, insincerely.
“Do come in and meet our son,” Esther said, leading us partway down the hall but then heading back into the kitchen, from which the aroma of our meal emanated like the stupefying incense that in pre-Christian times accompanied prophecy.
I led Verna in.
“Hiya, Bozo,” she said lazily to Dale as he stood, or, rather, froze in a crouch. They did not touch. Once more I tried to decide whether or not they had slept together, and decided not, yet failed to be satisfied with the conclusion.
She did reach out and touch Richie, shaking the hand he extended with that exasperating limpness of adolescents. “So you’re the guy knows all about Cyndi Lauper,” she said.
“Isn’t she great?” he responded, startled, pleased. He needs friends. Esther and I must seem to him impossibly old and remote. The Kriegman girls and he used to play together, but Cora, the one nearest him in age, at fifteen has joined the other two in womanhood—become a slut, as Richie put it.
“She’s O.K.,” Verna told him, assuming the thoughtful tone of an adult. “Like all those rock types, it’s not them actually so much, it’s what you put into them.”
She was charming, I saw; she had carried Edna’s oozy old carelessness into an era where it could be a style instead of an undercurrent. She wore a brick-red wool dress with a wide scalloped neckline; for a nineteen-year-old, she carried her bosom low, and was equally heavy and down-slipping in the hips. Yet a coltish springiness and unpredictability hung implicit in her body. Her complexion was sallow and her bleach-streaked twisty hair fell in damp-looking careless coils to her shoulders, so there was something Pre-Raphaelite, tubercular and ethereal, about the glow she gave off. She carried her small head forward on a substantial neck, wide and flat at the nape. Her ears had been pierced several times and held two pairs of gold rings. She wore some rings on her fingers but unexpectedly so: a wide copper band on one index finger, a chunk of turquoise on a pinkie. Her fingernails were cut short, like a child’s, and this did stir me. Her caresses would not scratch.
“Da?” Paula was saying. Her grimy snowsuit had been removed in the hall; the toddler’s little bare feet gripped the nap of our Bokhara as if fearful of falling through. It was not clear whom she had addressed, me or Richie or Dale: a real little hooker, Verna had said. Elbows daintily, apprehensively uplifted and pointed outward, the child tottered on those precarious, narrow, uncallused feet to the glass table, whose surface she smearily slapped, upon arrival, in triumph. “Da!”
Dale, seated again, reached out and took her onto his knees.
Verna’s head slowly rotated on its strong neck and she said, “Great place, Nunc. You professors do all right for yourselves.”
“It’s all a question of seniority,” I explained. Actually, Esther’s father had been generous.
The fire crackled, and abruptly tumbled upon itself in a spurt of sparks. Richie got up and rearranged the logs with the tongs. Paula leaned forward from Dale’s lap toward a silver cigarette case that Esther’s father, whose name is Arnold Prince, had given us on our fifth anniversary. He, an Albany widower, had “done well,” as they say, and after five years of docile marriage we had earned this sign of blessing; also from then on he, in princely fashion, had begun to release to Esther fractions of her inheritance, giving her a certain nimbus of independence and added value. We had married at a civil affair in Troy, New York, the city nearest the town that had housed our scandal. What a decided pleasure, really, it had been, affronting public opinion: as sweet as returning soldiers sometimes admit the act of killing to be, as sweet as we know the discomfort and failure of others to taste. Yet fourteen years later I had slipped into conformity of a slightly reshuffled sort, my father-in-law’s blessing, as represented by his polished gift, clutched in the slippery grip of my mulatto grand-niece.
I asked Verna, “Could I get you anything to drink?”
She said, “Oh, Lordy, yes, Uncle Roger. I thought you’d never ask. I’d love a Black Russian.”
“Uh—what goes into it? Vodka and—”
“Kahlúa.”
“As I feared. We don’t have any Kahlúa.”
“How about a Grasshopper, then?”
“And its ingredients are—?”
“Oh, come on. Guess.” Was she playing with me?
“Crème de menthe?”
“To be sure; but then I don’t know what-all they put in on top of it. Real cream, I know, and some other crème de something. Then they shake it all up with cracked ice and pour it into a cocktail glass and put it on the bar. It’s delicious, Nunc; haven’t you ever had one?”
“When do you go to all these fancy bars?” Dale asked her, from the settee. His big hands were cupped to keep
the cigarette case from being dropped on the glass table. Paula was sucking one silver corner of the lid, which she had pried open. A wad of tinted, dried-up English Ovals had fallen out; they had been in there since our faculty party last May.
Verna smirked and preened at him, for having asked, and glanced sideways at me, sensing that I was interested. “They don’t have to be all that fancy; the one down at the end of Prospect, with the burnt-out upstairs, makes a great Grasshopper.”
“Who takes you there?” Dale asked, which is what I had wanted to ask.
“Oh … guys. What’s it to you? A girl’s gotta have some fun, you know.”
“Like the song says,” Richie said, amused at himself for thinking of it, and cocky from handling the fire competently.
“Right,” Verna said, to Dale. “Like the man says, like the song says.”
There was in her manner something of learned vulgarity, imitated, I supposed, from punk girl singers, and from Cher and Bette Midler—from a certain vein of American brass going back at least to the Andrews Sisters.
“I could make you a Bloody Mary,” I suggested.
“That’d be great,” she drawled to me, as if to a bartender she was flirting with, to annoy the guy who had brought her.
A great concussion filled the room—possessed it, from Bokhara rug up to dentil ceiling molding. Paula had dropped the cigarette case upon the glass table. Dale and Richie looked startled and guilty; Verna, who had been lighting a cigarette, sighed so the match went out, and then struck another. “See, Nunc?” she said. “She’s a bitch.”
I went over and said, “No harm done,” though my keen eyes detected an insect-shaped scratch on the glass, and a bent corner of fine sterling. I polished the case as best I could on my tweed coat sleeve, and dumped back in the tinted cigarettes, so desiccated that several of them broke in my fingers.
In the kitchen, Esther was wrestling with the food; her hair was flying apart, shedding its pins. She grimaced at me like Medusa and said, “Never again!” She says that every year, at Thanksgiving.