by John Updike
The expression on Dale’s face told me I had become impassioned, and he counted this, in the insufferable way of evangelists, as some kind of triumph. “So that’s how you see it,” he said.
“Well, it’s a way of seeing it,” I said, embarrassed. “In relation to you I have to be a Devil’s advocate.”
“ ‘Crazy creeds,’ ” he repeated, his blue eyes bisected by the light from the tall Gothic window at my back. “You’re really a very angry man.”
“That’s what Esther sometimes says. I don’t see it that way; to me, I’m as calm and good-natured as the human situation warrants—a little more so, even.”
Color, I imagined, had crept into Dale’s waxen cheeks at my mention of Esther. He tried to stay with our theological tussle. “You know,” he told me patiently, “when Christ said faith could move mountains, He didn’t say it would instantly move them, or open up refrigerator doors; your way of thinking is miracles or nothing. But surely you can see that mind, our desires and hopes, do change, can change, the material world. I mean, what we’re all coming to from about twenty different directions is a holistic—”
“Next to the indeterminacy principle,” I told him, “I have learned in recent years to loathe most the word ‘holistic,’ a meaningless signifier empowering the muddle of all the useful distinctions human thought has labored at for two thousand years.” I added, “Richie’s math—how is that coming?”
Blood, that warm traitor, visibly surged beneath his skin; it was his turn to be pudibundus, to shoulder the shame of being. By evoking Richie, fruit of her womb, I had evoked Esther. “Good. He’s a sweet boy, really; so willing. But I’m never sure how much he gets; one week we have it all together and the next session he seems to have forgotten everything. I tried to work around his mental block on bases by bringing in computers, to make it more concrete, the way they’re not only binary in principle but employ, a lot of them, hexadecimal numbers for printout, sixteen being, of course, four four-bit binaries and simplicity itself to convert. But, I don’t know, I guess he takes after his father. With that natural sweetness of his, he’d make a great minister.”
I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to hear most of what Dale told me: he had a knack, like the dental hygienist with her fine-edged scraper, for the soft and tender spots of my enamel. I wanted to keep him close to the carnal, to images recalling him to his sin. “But his mother is so number-minded,” I said. “Do you want to know something interesting about Esther? It’s rather intimate.”
“Sure,” he had to, hesitantly, say.
“She gets on the bathroom scales naked, and whenever she sees she weighs over a hundred pounds, she eats nothing but celery and carrots until she’s back to exactly one oh oh.”
“That’s pretty compulsive,” Dale admitted, in a voice that sounded reedy, like Verna’s. I knew the reference to our shared bathroom would wound him; our casual, sanctioned nudity, our damp towels and washcloths promiscuously interchanged, our mingled medications and dental floss and mouthwashes and red discarded Band-Aid threads would torment him with the realization that there were many rooms below the attic where he and she enacted their charade of hopeless love—rooms of reality, of shared possessions and wedded tasks, of memories with worn corners and chipped paint, of shelter I could give her and he could not. Well, when you venture into adultery you must expect to trip over the husband’s dental floss.
“I always find it exciting, somehow,” I confessed to him, “to think of her as being exactly one hundred pounds of flesh, of meat. Tertullian calls it caro, carnis, which seems a more satisfying word. An argument for the mind-body split you didn’t mention is the estrangement we all feel from our bodies, the disgust we have to fight in dealing with them. Feeding them, wiping them, watching them get wrinkled. Imagine how much worse for a woman—the unwanted body hair, the bleeding, the secretions staining the underpants, all those little malfunctions that result from God’s having packed too many functions into those little round bellies of theirs.…”
“Sir, I don’t want to make you late for your seminar,” Dale interrupted.
“You won’t, there isn’t one. It’s exam period. Next term, we do the post-Nicene heretics—mobs of the poor buggers. The Cathari, the Waldenses, the Apostolici, and then on into the Lollards, the Hussites, the Beghards and Beguines, not to mention you and me.”
“You and me?”
“Protestants. We did away with the middleman. Faith alone. Phooey to works. Phooey to the Pope and his indulgences. It all gets very political and economic and rather dreary—the Templars, for example, weren’t heretics at all, just victims of the greed of the King of France and Pope Clement the Fifth. A lot of it had to do with the rise of cities. City religion spells relief from the city, and as such tends to be mystical. Anti-organizational. The Church couldn’t have that. Everybody, from Saint Francis to Joan of Arc, wanted their own direct pipeline, and the Church couldn’t stand that either. I much prefer the ante-Nicene part of the course, before the bishop of Rome became quite such a brute. In those first centuries there was something intellectually creative going on; they were trying to work out what had happened—what was the exact nature of Christ. What is it, do you think?”
“What’s what?”
“The nature of Christ. You’re a Christian, yes? You keep wanting to prove the existence of God via natural theology; where does Jesus figure in your diagrams?”
“Why”—his embarrassment had shifted ground but kept its color—“wherever the Creed says He figures, as God made Man, come down to redeem our sins—”
“Oh, please. We don’t need to have our sins redeemed, do we? What sins? A little greed, a little concupiscence? You call those sins, compared with an earthquake, compared with a tidal wave, a plague? Compared with Hitler?”
“Hitler—” he began to argue, hitting on my weak link.
“And don’t talk to me about the Creed: which Creed? The Athanasian has a totally different emphasis from the Nicene. The Apostles’ is a cover-up, a company hand-out. How do you see the two natures of the God-Man combining? Like the Arians and Adoptionists, with the God part tuned way down, or like the Monophysites and Apollinarianists, with the Man part just a phantom, a pretense? Or like the Nestorians, with the two parts so independent poor Jesus couldn’t have known Who or what or where He was? How do you feel about His sex life? Any? Some? None? He had a way with the ladies, you must admit, sweet-talking those sisters of Lazarus or just sitting around in the house of Simon the Leper getting expensive oil poured into His hair, and telling everybody not to throw the first stone. Think of being Jesus Christ at age fifteen, back home in Nazareth after Your impish behavior in the Temple has been forgotten and everybody thinks You’re going to be just another carpenter, just like Your dad. Do You masturbate? Do You go out behind the stack of wood scraps with the little Canaanite girl next door? Do You have wet dreams that not even old Yahweh at His most forbidding could hold against a boy? Don’t be embarrassed. This is the kind of thing the ante-Nicenes thought about day and night, this was their bread and butter, and now it’s become my bread and butter. When Esther gets up over a hundred pounds, it’s this bread and butter she’s had too much of. She’s ravenous, have you ever noticed? The woman loves to eat.”
His blanched irises shuttled with fright at my manicky mood. “You talk about me and blasphemy,” he weakly accused.
“Yes,” I said simply. “All this Heaven-storming you want to do. If God wanted His tracks discovered, wouldn’t He have made them plainer? Why tuck them into odd bits of astronomy and nuclear physics? Why be so coy, if You’re the Deity? Tell me: are you ever afraid of looking too deep and having your eyes torn out?”
Dale blinked and said simply in turn, “Yes.”
The defenseless answer touched me. I felt myself abruptly, vomitously brimming with that detestable stuff .
He confided to me, “Ever since I began to go into this seriously, my prayers at night—they feel unheard. I’ve broken
some connection. There’s an anger.”
“Of course there is,” I said, spreading my hands on my gray, stained desk blotter and noticing that once again I had cut the one thumbnail too short, with a notch in it. It must be my way of holding the clippers. “You’re trying to make God stand at the end of some human path,” I told Dale. “You’re building a Tower of Babel.”
“And in my personal life,” he huskily, tearily began to confess, seeing that he had awakened the old minister in me.
But I didn’t want to hear about Esther, however he disguised her. If he were allowed to confess and weep, the wound would start to drain and stop festering. I held up my hand. “Ah well, that,” I said. “We all have something. In these circumstances down here everybody has to be a bit kinky. Don’t be afraid of the Earth. The flesh. You know what Tertullian said? He said, ‘There’s nothing to blush for in Nature; Nature should be revered.’ Natura veneranda est, non erubescenda. He goes on in rather interesting detail, about men and women. He says when they come together the soul and the flesh discharge a duty together; the soul supplies the desire and the flesh the gratification. That the man’s semen derives its fluidity from the body and its warmth from the soul. He calls it, in fact, a drip of the soul. Rather charmingly, saying that he must risk offending modesty in his desire to speak the truth,” I said to Dale, leaning forward as if to activate in the space behind his eyes the licentious images that he and Esther had stored there, “Tertullian says that when a man comes he feels his soul has flown, he feels faintness and his sight goes dim. He goes on to point out that Adam was made from clay and breath, and that clay is naturally moist, and so is the semen that springs from it.* Nothing to be ashamed of, in short. Non erubescenda.”
“It’s funny,” Dale confessed. “But at night I sometimes want to talk to you. I think of arguments. You disturb me, I guess. You tell me not to be afraid of the Earth. I could say the same to you. You’re always bringing up earthquakes, the horrible hugeness and heartlessness of it all, war, disease.…”
“Yes.” I urged him on; I wanted to hear his solution.
He was still blushing, rubescent; his eyes slid away when I sought them. “That sort of thing can be said, of course, and maybe should be said; I mean, it’s God speaking within us, this indignation. This rebellion. It’s what makes atheists so religious, in a way, so self-righteous and proselytizing. But”—he forced himself to look at me, my many shades of gray—“what I framed one night to say to you is this: you should realize that our loyalty to God will not go away, because it is basically loyalty to ourselves, if you can follow that.”
“I can,” I said, “and it sounds dangerously close to humanism to me. There has to be an Other. As you know. And once you get the Other, He turns out to be a monster, full of terrible heat and cold and breeding maggots out of the dung and so forth. Anyway, you were good to say it. I know it’s hard to express these things we store up. You were good to want to comfort me.”
We were both, indeed, in a crisis state of discomfort; our eyes, our souls, were sliding back and forth like ghostly eels. The cold blank sky of this January cast a stony light into the cathedral space of this office. My feet felt cold on the floor; I felt in my bones the weight of all the books lining my walls. My pipe had died. “How’s Verna?” I asked, for something to say, as relief from God and these terrible, perilous attempts to pin Him down, to caress the divine substance.
“I don’t know,” Dale told me. “Something’s eating her. She was all up for a while, really exhilarated, it was great to see it, about getting the diploma, and getting going in the world, but something’s pulled her back down. Have you been over there since Christmas?”
“My last visit didn’t feel like a success,” I said, though this hadn’t been quite my feeling at the time. In truth I had been afraid to pursue my advantage, for fear I had imagined it. “We tried to read ‘Thanatopsis’ together.”
“She passed the English part of her exam.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You do? How? She just told me herself over the phone the other day.”
“Esther told me.” Esther again. Verna had told Dale, Dale Esther, Esther me.
He didn’t flinch. “You ought to go make a visit, honest. Verna respects you.”
I had to smile. I remembered her angry face, her exposed breasts. “That’s not the conclusion I’ve drawn.”
“You’re her only relative in the area.”
“It may be she came to our fair city to get away from her relatives.”
Dale now seemed much as when I had first met him—the shy yet cocksure do-gooder, the Jesus freak in jeans and camouflage jacket; for the moment he had forgotten (how could he!) that he was in love with my wife, her hundred-pound sack of membrane and guts. Poor Esther had flown from his mind as he worried about hapless Verna. “You wouldn’t be checking on just her, Professor Lambert, you’d be checking on Paula. She’s the one I worry about, really.”
“Why?”
He paused. “Verna does get pretty frantic.”
“But the child is going to the day-care center five mornings a week. Free.” Esther had seen to the financial arrangements.
“That doesn’t help the afternoons and nights, somehow. I don’t know. It’s like if you take the pressure off a little bit, it’s worse when it comes back. I mean, she realizes now what she’s been missing. I really wish you’d at least give her a call; I just don’t have the energy to focus on her any more.”
“Where is your energy going instead?” I mischievously asked. His skin seemed slightly to cloud, and the knit of his long face, its cartilage and cheek fat and underlying bone, to loosen, creating bluish pockets such as a baby’s flesh has. Our exchange of notwithstanding, I did intend to crush him, and this determination felt delicious and solid and gristly, like an especially circumstantial paragraph in Tertullian.
“My project, I guess. I keep groping around in my mind for the way to frame it, to model reality on the computer, and really it’s too vast. Just to store the data of how a city block, say, looks, let alone the atomic and chemical structures underneath, would take more megabytes of storage than I think exist between here and Berkeley, even if you posit an omniscient and lightning-fast programmer who had the time to feed it all in. Just the commercial project I’m working on—the problem is to bounce a ball, with the lettering and logo of a certain kind of pet-food can mapped onto it, across a little pebbly patch of landscape that’s already been generated, piece by piece. Sounds simple, but every time the ball bounces you have to show it slightly flattening, otherwise it looks like a glass ball and like it should shatter, and then in mid-air the elasticity makes the shape rebound, so what you have is not a circle but some linked spline curves, not exactly symmetrical, because the ball flattens on one side—all this can be calculated, of course, even in three dimensions, but when you get the functions piggybacking and the mapping going on on these constantly distorting surfaces thirty times a second, not to mention the highlighting and reflection and texture diffusion and all that, well, the crunching, the number crunching, becomes significant. If the system you’re time-sharing is loaded you can sit there for minutes waiting for the processor to grind it out. And this bouncing ball is a relatively trivial animation problem. Cartoon figures made up of cylinders and truncated cones and bicubic surface patches are more complex by another order of magnitude or two. But really, with graphics and robotics both, it’s the elasticity of organic substances that puts the mathematics of it out of sight.”
I had understood little of what he had said. It depressed me to try. I nodded, saying, “It’s appalling to think about.”
“Well, the machine does most of the thinking for you,” Dale reassured me, “the gritty stuff.” His hands had begun to dart and slide in mid-air, as he empathized his way into the computer, into the problem. “I’ve been thinking, for the proposal, that trying to model the world from the outside bit by bit is ridiculous; that what I have to imitate is not Creation bu
t the Creator—that is, if I set up a system of, whatever, not molecules and neutrinos and galaxies and microbes, but just a few thousand color blocks, say, and program absolute randomness into the proliferation of one set and tilt another a bit toward teleology by injecting some cellular-automata rules, maybe a planning and reasoning subsystem of some kind, I don’t know, just something mathematically to represent an element of intention, of divine purpose more or less, and then crank up this planner and crank it up again to see if some parallels emerge with the observed world, that is, if the absolutely random set resembles reality less than the teleologically tilted set, we might have a bit of a package to present to your Grants Committee. When did you say they want to meet with me?”
“Soon after spring term resumes. Early February, I would think.”
He stared over my head, into space. “Oh boy. That’s almost immediately. It’s all still so vague in my mind, it’s like this beckoning cloud. I’m not sure I’m the one should be attempting this; I feel too stupid sometimes.”
“Well,” I told him briskly, “perhaps stupidity is one of the qualifications. It has been for a number of noble enterprises.” I heard in my voice a valedictory note, and Dale heard it too, and stood and departed. The angles of his neck and shoulders signalled discouragement; I pictured him making his way down the long second-floor hall with its chocolate-brown linoleum and closed classroom doors, the limestone staircase, its broad oak railing, its slit-windowed landing like a little side chapel, and then the first-floor hall, past the bulletin board with its overlaid announcements of banjo-accompanied Eucharists in downtown ghetto churches, of moonlit rap sessions concerning “The Development of a Jewish Feminist Spirituality” and “Liberation Theology at Work in North America’s Third World,” or of an address by a visiting M.D. on the sticky matter of “Intimacy and Trust in the Era of AIDS.”