by John Updike
“How so?”
“Now he’ll feel he has to come up with something, and it’s impossible, what he’s trying to do.”
“O ye of little faith.”
“He’s losing his faith. This will do it in entirely.”
“How do you know he’s losing his faith?” I asked.
She turned on her clacky heels and swished down the hall, giving me that back view from which even the smallest woman looks somehow grand, a piece of the Earth. She was wearing snug khaki slacks; she had been out in the garden, doing some fidgety winter pruning, wondering when the mulch should come off, finding the first snowdrops hanging their heads over in that sun-warmed corner of our fence toward the Ellicotts’ tool shed. “Aren’t we all?” she called back to me, before vanishing into the kitchen. I had never thought of Esther as having any faith; that had been part of her charm, the succulent freedom she had held out.
I had asked her to take Verna to the abortion clinic and she refused, saying that she was my niece and anyway Verna had conceived a dislike to her; she was quite rude coming into the day-care center. Where, incidentally, she brought Paula less and less faithfully, and when she did bring her the poor child was filthy. Things were deteriorating on that front, she said. As if there were any number of fronts, and she and I were campaign headquarters.
Over the telephone Verna had been quite clear that she didn’t want to go alone. She said it was my idea anyway. I said I would take her, then. Better that than let her wriggle out. I was determined to see this through. On the appointed afternoon a babysitter from within the project crumped out at the last minute, typically. So little Paula had to come with us. It was a time of day, late afternoon, that until recently had been pitch-dark and that now surprised us with its light, the daylight lingering on the three-decker rows, the corner stores with their grated windows, the leafless sycamores and locusts, the bent and spray-painted No Parking signs. The light embarrassed me as I chauffered this nineteen-year-old woman and the one-and-a-half-year-old girl in my solid, unmarred, slightly racy Audi along these streets lined with the rusted bloat of Detroit, cars frozen here like wads of lava. I had no business here. But I did. I was killing an unborn child, to try to save a born one. Two born ones. The clinic was a low building of white brick, the building not exactly new and the brick only white enough to make the mortar look dark; it was a number of blocks beyond the project, deeper into that section of the city where I never used to go.
It embarrassed me, too, to go into the clinic office attached to this mulatto toddler and this slack-mouthed, sallow-faced, slightly overweight teen-ager. For this event Verna had contrived to put on her most thrift-shoppy outfit, a collage of wide pea-green wool skirt and canary-yellow turtleneck and orange leather vest under some kind of plaid serape; she looked like an ingénue bag lady. And her hair was done up in oily curls—that wet, snaky look, as if fresh from the shower, which you see more and more, even on the secretaries at the Divinity School.
The fluorescent lights inside the clinic, faintly buzzing and humming, made little headway against the sullen air. There were two desks in the anteroom, staffed by a nurse and a secretary. The nurse looked up and gave me a look that seemed accusatory. To fill out the forms, Verna had to pass Paula into my arms, and the child felt heavier than when I had last lifted her—not only the outdoor winter clothes but growth, new muscle demanding satisfaction from the world. How tiny she was, yet how fully alive, with personhood’s full unitary value. She was getting leggy. Her face now wore a more complex, thoughtful expression. In my grasp she felt restless, her little muscles softly rolling, yet undecided as to whether or not to make a strenuous effort to break free. From inches away she looked me straight in the eyes, unsmiling, appraising. “Not faw down,” she said, singsong. Her eyes, which had once looked navy-blue to me, had become brown, shades deeper than Verna’s.
“Paula not fall,” I agreed. “Man hold tight.” I wondered what the little smell was, coming off of her as she warmed in my grasp; I remembered Esther’s “filthy” but this was not excrement, it was a musty comfortable odor from deep in my life, savoring of the enchanted spaces behind bureaus or of closets whose shelves were lined with oilcloth. I remembered this child’s grandmother in the slant-roofed attic that day, the dust motes, the sad gray-white of her dickey as Edna reached inside her sweater to undo it. I remembered the longing that our poor minds press against the bodies of others, like water against the bodies of swimmers.
“Nunc, mind if I put you down as next of kin?” Verna asked in her scratchy and conspicuous voice. Several faces turned toward me. There was a row of chairs to wait in, in this room with its flickering fluorescent ceiling, its Venetian blinds hiding the view of the street, its wall panels of institutional pastel. An odd thick interior silence diluted the swish of traffic outside; the plastic bucket chairs, in different primary colors as in an elementary school, were a third occupied, by young women, mostly black, and a few desultory escorts. One prospective mother chewed bubble gum, with virtuoso deadpan placing perfect pink spheres in front of her lips, repeatedly, expanding and popping and growing again. Another wore a Walkman and her eyes were shut upon the din filling her head. A black boy who looked little older than the child who had guarded my car was urgently murmuring into the ear of a girl and offering her drags of his cigarette. She had wet cheeks but was otherwise impassive, an African mask, her lips and jaw majestically protruding.
“But I’m not,” I said, stepping closer and whispering.
“Bad man,” Paula said close to my face, testing, flirting. Her rubbery wet fingers probed my mouth and tugged at my lower lip. Her tiny fingernails scratched.
“I don’t want to put down Mom and Dad,” Verna said, carelessly loud. “They say fuck me, I say fuck them.”
Another bubble popped. A car with a broken muffler snarled tigerishly out on the street. The nurse, with a blue cardigan worn like a cape over her starchy white uniform, led Verna into another, brighter room. Paula and I could see her inside the ajar door sitting in a chair, having her blood pressure taken from a bare arm. A thermometer tilted upwards jauntily in Verna’s mouth. The child became agitated, fearful that her mother was being hurt, and I carried her outside.
Outside on the sidewalk, night had come. From the distant heart of the city, where a dome of light stained the sky and the airplane-warning lights at the tops of the skyscrapers pulsed, there arose a muffled roaring, an oceanic sound as if the stalled surge of traffic had taken on an everlasting meaning. This neighborhood seemed almost suburban; a grocery store glowed on one corner, and faceless pedestrians moved back and forth across the street, snapping off words of greeting. Paula bucked in my arms; she was apprehensive, hungry, and increasingly heavy. She kept kicking me softly through my sheepskin coat and scratching curiously at my lower lip. Rather than venture back into that flickering waiting room, I took her into the shelter of the Audi, and on the car radio tried to find a song that would please her. I tried to find that song with all the bops in it, but in the jungle growth of new songs and new stars, Cyndi Lauper was nowhere to be found, from one end of the softly glowing dial to the other.
“Music,” Paula observed.
“Wonderful stuff,” I agreed.
“Awesome,” she said, in her mother’s exact tone, slightly trancelike.
“You could say that.”
I ransacked the dial, trying to find music instead of the news or the talk shows that proliferated as the evening deepened. Half of the callers were drunk, and all were stirred into garrulousness by the miracle of their being on radio. I marvelled at the practiced rudeness with which the hosts shut them off. “O.K., Joe. We’re all entitled to our opinion.… I’m sorry, Kathleen, you got to make more sense than that.… Take care, Dave, and thanks a ton for calling.” Paula fell asleep; I moved her to the passenger seat and realized she had made my lap damp. I switched off the radio, its Tower of Babel.
A spiritual fatigue descended upon me, a recognition that my life f
rom the age of fifty-three on was a matter of caretaking, of supervising my body like some feeble-minded invalid kept alive by tubes and injections in a greedy nursing home, and that indeed it always had been such, that the flares of ambition and desire that had lit my way when I was younger and had given my life the drama of fiction or of a symbol-laden dream had been chemical devices, illusions with which the flesh and its percolating brain had lured me along. There is, as the saints knew, a satisfaction in this fatigue, as if in sinking beneath despair and acedia we approach the abysmal condition that drove God in His vacuum so diffidently to say, Let the waters swarm, let the earth bring forth.
I pushed down on the door handle and listened to hear if the noise woke Paula. Her breathing snagged for a second, but then resumed its trustful oblivious rhythm, and I went back out into the air, the street. A gentle cold drizzle had materialized, darkening the asphalt, tingling at my face. We do love being touched from above—by rain, by snow. I thought of Esther moving about our kitchen, her motions slowed by wine and inner reflection, and of Richie mechanically putting food into his mouth while his eyes gorged on the shuddering little screen, and I was happy not to be there for once, to be out in the tingling air in this strange part of the city, as strange to me and as pregnant with the promise of the unknown as Tientsin or Ouagadougou. I wondered if I had left one of the Audi windows cracked to let in a little air, as you would for a dog, and went back and checked. Paula asleep looked not worth stealing, a bundle of rags. As seen by the sodium glow of the streetlight she had no more color to her face and her little limp limbs than a newspaper photograph.
The nurse was gone from her desk and the secretary said my niece would be a while yet; there was only one doctor on, so he was running late. Of the three young black women I had originally seen, only the African mask was left. Her escort was gone, and her tears had dried, and she was impassively regal, princess of a race that travels from cradle to grave at the expense of the state, like the aristocrats of old. I found myself wondering how many hours it had taken to do up her hair in so many fine braids, interbraided with colored beads and tiny ringlets of imitation gold.
When Verna did at last emerge from the unseen chambers of the clinic, ten minutes before eight o’clock, she, too, was impassive; she moved carefully, as if walking on feet she could not feel touching the floor. She was carrying into the milky, flickering light pieces of paper, both big—official forms—and little: prescriptions to be filled. Also a small parcel, something yielding wrapped in tissue paper. I offered her my arm, when her brief transactions with the secretary were over, but she ignored my helpfully bent elbow. Perhaps she didn’t see it. Below her eyes there were delicate mauve cushions, as if her face had been inflated and was not quite collapsed back onto its bone. “What’s in your little bundle?” I asked.
“Pads,” she said. In a loud ironic voice she imitated an enthusiastic child: “They gave me the cutest little pink belt to wear, free!”
Outside, the rain had subsided to a mere mist, yet I still wanted to shelter her, to be a canopy as she walked to the car one floating step at a time. Like butterflies about a statue my concern fluttered uselessly about her stoic upright figure. I found her dignity alarming, asserted now against a personal history of indignity and clenched around a determination to be revenged. She stood at the passenger door while I gropingly, clumsily poked at the little curvate handle slot with the ragged key. While patiently waiting she looked in and saw Paula’s tumbled body through the dark glass.
“Well Nunc,” she said, in that deadened voice of hers which seemed exhaled through a tube too narrow, “one down, and one to go.”
*“Will it have all its needs there again, especially food and drink, and the floating of the lungs, and the surging of the bowels, and the not being ashamed of the shameful organs, and the laboring with all the limbs?”
* Quid enim indignius deo, quid magis erubescendum, nasci an mori? carnem gestare an crucem? circumcidi an suffigi? educare an sepeliri? in praesepe deponi an in monimento recondi?… Quodcunque deo indignum est, mihi expedit. Salvus sum, si non confundar de domino meo. Qui mei, inquit, confusus fuerit, confundar et ego eius. Alias non invenio materias confusionis quae me per contemptum ruboris probent bene impudentem et feliciter stultum. Crucifixus est dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est dei filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est.
* In hoc itaque sollemni sexuum officio quod marem ac feminam miscet, in concubito dico communi, scimus et animam et carnem simul fungi, animam concupiscentia, carnem opera, animam instinctu, carnem actu. Unico igitur impetu utriusque toto homine concusso despumatur semen totius hominis, habens ex corporali substantia humorem, ex animali calorem. Et si frigidum nomen est anima Graecorum, quare corpus exempta ea friget? Denique, ut adhuc verecundia magis pericliter quam probatione, in illo ipso voluptatis ultimae aestu, quo genitale virus expellitur, nonne aliquid de anima quoque sentimus exire? atque adeo marcescimus et devigescimus cum lucis detrimento? Hoc erit semen animale protinus ex animae destillatione, sicut et virus illud corporale semen ex carnis defaecatione. Fidelissima primordii exempla. De limo caro in Adam. Quid aliud limus quam liquor opimus? inde erit genitale virus.
—De Anima, XXVII
* Since the outset of this account I have suffered, in the margins, a birthday. I was born on one of the shortest days of the year, and my mother with her narrow pelvis writhed from dark to dark. Fifty-three! How old had Tertullian been when he composed his carnal paragraphs? At a certain age and beyond, the best sex is head sex—sex kept safe in the head.
* See—and then absolutely no more footnotes!—Barth’s letter of September 5, 1967, to Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt: “… in personal encounters with living Jews (even Jewish Christians) I have always, so long as I can remember, had to suppress a totally irrational aversion, naturally suppressing it at once on the basis of all my presuppositions, and concealing it totally in my statements, yet still having to suppress and conceal it.”
IV
i
Toward evening of this first Friday in April, Dale proceeds, with a cooling hot-pastrami sandwich in a grease-soaked paper bag, plus a small carton of high-fat milk and a pair of broken oatmeal cookies in a plastic envelope, to the building, erected in 1978, that houses the university’s violently expanded facilities for computer research and development. A concrete cube with nine times nine windows on a side, it looms above the tattered and doomed rows of tenements that stand in this section of the city, real estate that is all owned by the university and awaiting its developmental fate. Mere daily life seems meagre in the shadow of this great housing, its many windows identically deep-set in sandy-gray sockets bevelled like the slits of a bulletproof bunker. The sky this evening is turquoise, and the smaller, more nervous clouds of spring have replaced winter’s stolid mantle. Everything, suddenly, is tugging, from greening tree-tips to mud underfoot, to be something other than it is. Dale’s stomach feels high in his body, its lining chafed from within by guilty apprehension. He has accepted money for his project; he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Though the normal world’s working hours are over, and the great rose-marble foyer of the Cube is deserted but for one lackadaisical guard who checks Dale’s laminated pass, on certain upper floors truly creative activity is just beginning, having yielded the daytime hours to more assuredly profitable projects than its own. Dale enters one of the powder-blue elevators. He punches the number 7.
The first floor of the Cube is given over to reception space, the offices of the public-relations staff, and a technical library of computer science and the great programming languages (LISP, FORTRAN, PL/1, Pascal, Algol with its ancestor Plankalkül and its descendant JOVIAL), plus a small and amusing museum displaying abaci, Inca quipus, a seventeenth-century slide rule, diagrams of Pascal’s toothed and ratcheted calculation wheels and the stepped wheels of Leibniz, a wall-sized enlargement of some engineering specs for Charle
s Babbage’s epochal Analytical Engine with its Jacquard cards and thousand wheels of digit storage, reproductions of selected pages of the Countess Lovelace’s mathematical notebooks and also one of her actual embroidered linen handkerchiefs, samples of the Hollerith punched cards used in the U.S. census of 1890, significant pieces of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator put into operation at Harvard in 1944, and a disassembled accumulator, consisting of ten ring counters comprising in turn ten vacuum tubes, from ENIAC, the first true electronic computer, designed in Philadelphia to calculate the trajectories of quaint, old-fashioned bombs and shells.
On the second and third floors the administrators of the Cube have their offices, and there are conference rooms and a small all-stainless-steel kitchen in which luncheons and heavy hors d’oeuvres can be concocted for significant visitors. For the benefit of the Cube’s workers there are a gymnasium (with Nautilus equipment and a balcony running track), a meditation room (equipped only with mats and zafus), a three-bed infirmary, and storage space for bicycles and mopeds, which must be brought into the building lest they be stolen outside.
The button to the fourth floor, in most of the elevators, is taped over, and even in those elevators where the button is exposed it achieves no response unless a numbered code, changed every week, is punched into a small panel. The work done on the fourth floor is secret, and yet from this unmentionable work stem the funds upon which the entire Cube rests. The men who work on the fourth floor never acknowledge it but can be identified by their relatively formal attire—suits and neckties, whereas even the head of all research and development, a jubilant Italo-American named Benedetto Ferrari, goes about in a turtleneck or a silk shirt open at his throat to disclose a thick gold chain or some old love beads of no-longer-fragrant cedar. Once a brilliant mathematician, with his fine Italian flair for elegant shortcuts, Ferrari dazzles trustees and even charms, over the telephone, those weary men in Washington who like coal heavers of old must shovel out their daily quotas of the incessant national treasure.