by John Updike
“He’s been having a very good time,” I objected. “He’s been trying out his theology project on Kriegman.”
“That was cruel of you,” Esther said, for Dale to hear, “to sick super-boring Myron on him. It’s Myron’s girls he ought to be meeting.”
“I did,” Dale said. “Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.”
We all three laughed, loving one another in our sorry way.
iii
Next day, as if in amends for not having her to our party, I phoned Verna and invited her out to lunch. I knew she was shy of getting trapped in her apartment again with me. An awkward ethics of lovemaking dictates to the woman that, once this ice has been broken, a refusal is too hurtful to the man; her maternal and protective feelings now compromise her own sexual wishes. I sensed that Verna no more wanted to be put to the trouble of accepting or rejecting me than I wanted to be put to the trouble—the work, as they used to say in high-school physics text, in reference to moving ideal cubes of weight up frictionless ramps—of posing the question. For if I failed to make a move on her, this, too, was hurtful. We had become obligations to each other.
I took her to the crassly swank restaurant called the 360 because, located on the top floor of the city’s highest skyscraper, it slowly, with only the barest rumbling of gears, turns a complete revolution every hour and a half—which tactfully tells you how long they think a meal should take.
I read in that morning’s newspaper—unsuspecting Esther’s face looking puffy and vexed across the kitchen table, which Richie had also burdened with the little Sony and its yipping, concussive babble of rerun cartoons—that an estimated three hundred thousand American children are involved in the production of child pornography. The number seemed absurdly high, like the oddly similar statistic I had read some days before in the same newspaper (a pompous liberal sheet that tries to salt its bland elitism with crocodile tears over the “decline” of the “neighborhoods”): the estimate that three hundred acres of forest are consumed in the production of a single Sunday edition of a major metropolitan newspaper. Can these huge figures be right, or is some mad copy editor in love with the number 300? Most numbers, of course, seem much higher than they would strictly need to be, including three score and ten. As far as the gene pool goes, we deliver our mail much earlier in the day than we like to think.
Verna was sitting waiting in the almost summery sun on a bench of the project playground. The trees had suddenly come into leaf and the area seemed darker and compartmentalized, each zone demarcated by the walls of foliage, a poor version of the lavishly clipped “rooms” in the gardens of Versailles. Some such indoor-outdoor sensation must have been dancing in the mind of the Ellicott daughter’s rapist as he had his way with her behind the rhododendrons and then strangled her as if crumpling a soiled napkin. When Verna stood up and walked toward my ambiguous-colored Audi, several loitering young blacks appreciatively hooted. High heels, off-white linen suit, unruly hair pinned back by tortoiseshell barrettes. Only the blond streaks growing up and out of her hair like shaggy rockets and an excess of rubber bracelets on her wrists remained of the rebel clad in overlapping rags.
My goodness, I loved her, not expecting to. Her stubborn wide face, her ample bosom under its linen lapels and severe beige blouse, her broad hips tapering to the ankles and calves shiny with nylon, and the spiky two-tone heels: a young woman. My noontime date. Paula was at the day-care center, and it had been arranged that today Esther would bring her straight to our home, where she spent more and more of her time. Verna, with her kicky high-heeled step, had slipped out of motherhood’s harness.
“Every inch a lady,” I said, as she sidled her bottom onto the velour seat beside me.
“Every inch a prick,” she said in turn.
I was truly hurt. “Why did you say that?”
“No reason, Nunc. It just kind of rhymed. Assonance, or that other thing.” She stared ahead through the windshield, postponing our inevitable quarrel. Her nose, perhaps I have already explained, looks not quite formed, a bit lumpy and coarse; but in profile straight enough. A straight nose is God’s gift to a woman; most of the rest can be faked.
We drove to the center of the city. Over the river on the old brownstone bridge. Through the older brick sections, where a perpetual traffic jam and its fumes tint with haze the once-gracious rows, four-story townhouses long ago recycled as student apartments and now being ruthlessly condominiumized. Upper windows spilled the old plaster and panelling down through wooden chutes into rusty dumpsters that added to the traffic squeeze. Perhaps the haze also arose from the curbside trees—sycamores, horse chestnuts, elms bearing green transfusion boxes on their trunks like heart-transplant patients toddling toward death—as well as the stalled cars; in May a fearful seethe of pollenization, of stringy shed catkins and floating fertilizing fluff, overtakes the arboreal world. As our transcendent President was once unjustly criticized for pointing out, Nature is its own worst polluter. Creeds replace creeds; our Godless liberals will not have Nature blasphemed and mount petitions and topple senators to save the scummiest swamp in Christendom.
Out of this ruddy, once-rich neighborhood we jerked and crawled, through carbon monoxide and the optical torture of bright sun hitting curved metal, into the downtown proper, where a plague of insolent double-parking reduces the streets to single-lane alleyways. In an attempt to cope with the constant jam, the police department has taken to riding horses—incongruous, archaic great animals tiptoeing amid the paralyzed metal while blue-uniformed riders, both male and female and often blacker than their mounts, and as nervous, gaze down with an imperious uselessness. Towering glass buildings, acres of reflection and transparency, float above shops offering oddly humble wares—doughnuts, art supplies, greeting cards, phonograph records (the double-parking here was especially insolent)—as if all this architectural and economic grandeur rests upon our willingness to buy one another droll, semi-lewd birthday cards.
Verna and I in our vehicle drove down a curved ramp (work achieved in reverse; but the ramps in physics books were never curved) and parked in the skyscraper’s underground garage, which bore a faint damp smell reminiscent of a springhouse my father and Veronica and Edna and I used to visit not far from Chagrin Falls. The farmer sold fresh brown eggs and sweet corn in season and always invited us, like a whiskery wine steward urging a rare vintage upon connoisseurs, to have a swallow of his spring water, taken from a battered tin ladle whose fragile aroma, of chilled tin, was also present here in this underground repository of cars, big hollow tinted shells shed for the moment like so many cumbersome overcoats. There were many levels to this garage, numbered and color-coded, each supported by concrete pillars conically swelling at the top. At a dank corner, adorned with urine puddles and discarded pint bottles, an unpromising door opened to reveal a vinyl-lined elevator that shot us smoothly upward. A disembodied orchestra picked its way pizzicato through an old Beatles tune. The elevator swooped to a stop to collect other passengers on the ground floor—tourists clutching guidebooks and cameras and wearing running shoes, heading for the viewing platform; businessmen already clothed in summer suits of gray and putty, heading for an expense-account lunch—and then ascended with such vehemence that our fingertips filled with blood and our knees threatened to buckle. The floor numbers flickered overhead in those electronic digits composed of tiny bulbs like rod-shaped bacilli, faster and faster, and then slow again, and then out we stepped, the tourists one way to the Sky View and its souvenir shops and constantly replayed tape of the city’s history as intoned by some funeral director, and we onto the hushing steel-blue carpeting of Restaurant 360, its velvet ropes, its jungle ferns, its muffled tinkle of cutlery, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the blocks and parks sixty stories below. Our old city from above is predominantly red, and the view is shocking, a vast surgery or flaying.
As we were led to our table by the lantern-jawed maître d’, we walked on cloudy carpet through dizzying bright volumes of upper atmosp
here, and I felt myself exposed with Verna as sharply as in a photograph. Eyes flickered across us; some lingered. Years ago we could have been assumed to be a man and his daughter or, as was the case, his niece; now the glances would register a young thing and her grizzled, aging lover, which was also, in a sense, the case. By contrast with Verna’s smooth, shimmery, piscine youth I must have loomed in the raking light as a craggy old fisherman indeed, with every pinch that lust and spite had delivered in a half-century of egoism somewhere remembered in the slack and creviced texture of my cunning, cautious face; yet I was oddly unembarrassed to be seen with Verna. No one I knew, from the Divinity School or its neighborhood, was apt to have found his or her way into this celestial tourist trap; modest but precious restaurants—seven tables and a sooty patio tucked between a laundromat and a health-food store, the chef a former student and the menu a simple blackboard—were our academic style. Verna moved easily among the glancing tables with a nice fuck-you poise (her young life, so impoverished in many respects, has been rich in public dining), and, except for the rubber bracelets and rather clunky earrings, she was dressed not inappropriately. She was not, it occurred to me for the first time, a disgrace to her/our family, but one more member of it, with that same rounded, almost hunched, patient back that Edna had had, and Veronica before her, once the vixen had put on weight. Each generation is a stick poked into the water of time and only apparently crooked.
Our table was on the moving circumference, with the view. As we sat, I could feel the floor tug us softly along, from one steel rib of the tall viewing windows to the next, as angled rooftops and receding vistas melted one into the other, our city displayed to the hazed, indecipherable horizon.
She must have sensed what I had brought her up here to negotiate, for she went quickly on the attack. “What have you done to Dale, Nunc?” she asked, leaning forward above her empty plate, the brimming water glass, the folded napkin, and the knives and forks with their minute glittering scratches. “He’s in terrible shape.” I noticed in this high light a few freckles that had appeared on her brow and nose; Edna, I remembered, would grow a crop of freckles, playing tennis and swimming and lounging at the club all those monotonous, priceless summers.
“How so?”
“He says he’s lost his faith. Some guy he met at that party you didn’t invite me to made him see how silly it all was. Also, I don’t think his computer stuff is working out too well. It’s like he expected some miracle that didn’t happen.”
“You wouldn’t have had a good time at the party. It’s just something we have every year to clean up our social debts. The computer stuff, as you call it, was to have been a proof of God’s existence. If he had brought it off the world would have had no choice but to end. The bastard was trying to end the world for us. He better have something to submit by June first or his grant won’t be renewed.”
“I don’t think he wants it renewed. The way he talks, he wants to get out of this area and go back home. He says some people can’t hack the East and he thinks he’s one of them. He thinks I’m another.”
Our view at the moment was east, toward the harbor: the ins and outs of the old wharves, the long granite warehouses with their dormered roofs of heavy slate outlined in pale-green copper flashing, some tall harborside apartment buildings with rounded corners like playing cards, and at their feet decaying old commercial buildings of brick and tar and a battered expressway in the throes of being widened. The new lanes were a margin, churning with tiny men and machines, of scraped orange earth. Who can believe, about any city, how thinly it overlies earth and rock? Beyond the wharves there was water, striped blue and gray, with a few toy ships and some shabby harbor islands, sandbars shaped like brush daubs, one of which held a reformatory and the other a fertilizer plant. The long blue low cloud of a peninsula, paler and paler into the distance, was tipped by a lighthouse. The southern edge of our view held a flat piece of airport, with a foreshortened runway and on two white stilts the control tower, its green windows like tiny emeralds. Above all, higher than we usually see it, the serene kiss-off of the horizon, flat as the oscillograph of brain death. The waiter in his tuxedo came, and I ordered a martini and Verna a Black Russian.
“How else does it affect him,” I asked, “this alleged loss of faith?”
“Don’t say ‘alleged.’ He’s really having some kind of breakdown.”
This was womanly, as distinct from girlish, exaggeration. “Men are great sympathy seekers,” I pointed out to her.
“He says he can’t sleep now, because he always used to pray and that would put him to sleep. He says he goes to work on these fancy cartoons he does and it makes him sick, it’s all so stupid. He says”—her voice took on that reediness, that timbre of a small rigid instrument ill-adapted for speech—“at times at work in front of the screen this actual wave of nausea comes over him and he thinks he has to throw up.”
“And does he?”
“Well, not that he told me.”
“Well, then. There you have it. He’ll live. There’s faith and there’s faith, and what we think we believe is really a very minor part of what we do believe.”
“You seem so pleased. What did Dale ever do to you?”
I answered promptly, from the heart. “He annoyed me. He came into my office clamoring about nailing God down and he wasted my time. When you get to my age, Verna, time is what you can least afford to waste. Not only did he bully me, he was trying, I thought, to bully God. Most ‘good’ people, in my limited experience, are bullies.”
The martini was working on me; everything looked slightly polished. The circular floor tugged us and our table along. Verna’s smooth cheek showed her dimple. “That must be why you like me. I’m bad.”
“Bad only in the black sense.” I clarified: “Baad. That is, good.” I dared tell her, “I love you in that nice conservative linen; you blend right in up here.”
“I try to do what other people want me to do, Nunc,” she said. “But—”
“But girls they want to have fun,” I supplied.
A young assistant waiter in a white dinner jacket brought us our first course: beef consommé for me, a shrimp cocktail for Verna, in cracked ice. The shrimp were hooked over the edge of a sherbet glass like faceless living creatures that had climbed up there hoping to drink at the pool of scarlet cocktail sauce. My consommé was too hot for the moment; as my companion bent her broad face to her food, I turned to the view again. It had become southerly. A neighboring skyscraper, a glass grid filled like a crossword puzzle with office workers in an alphabet of sitting, standing, and stooping positions, hung close; past its shoulder a low brick neighborhood, prettily laid out long ago with oval parks and crescent streets and a white-spired church or two, was struggling back into fashionability again, after a century in exile. Beyond it, neighborhoods too far out from the central city to be yet thus gentrified diminished in smoky tones of rose and gray and green toward a white smear of gas tanks, beside the rust of a high-arching iron railroad bridge. Like outsize tree stumps, the cluster of a large housing complex stuck up from the denuded hills that marked, on maps, the limits of the city; but in fact the city went on and on, following the expressway and the shoreline south, sucking village and farmland into its orbit until you could say it ended only where the far suburban edge of the next coastal city began.
“She’s passé, Nunc,” Verna responded, the last lick of cocktail sauce wiped with a childish, stub-nailed fingertip from one corner of her mouth. “Cyndi Lauper.”
“So soon?”
“All the girls now are dressing like Madonna. Look.” She reached out and rattled her bracelets at me. “That’s Madonna. And these.” She leaned her face forward and with an index finger beneath each lobe pushed into better view the mock-gold crosses dangling from her ears. “A lot of these girls are furious they got the sides of their heads shaved when Cyndi was in,” she explained to me. “And purple streaks and all that weird stuff that’s really self-mutilation. I was tal
king to my counsellor about it. Cyndi, you see, is a victim type. Did you see her not get all those awards she should have had at the Grammys, smiling right through it when it had really been her year? Whereas Madonna’s tough. She knows what she wants and goes for it.”
“And you? Do you know what you want now?” There was a direction I wanted this conversation to take, but it was perhaps too early for a nudge.
“My counsellor says I just want to be normal,” Verna said. “That’s why I had it in so for Poopsie: just to look at her kept reminding me I wasn’t. I mean, all this stuff with blacks, just to annoy my father probably …”
“What’s normal?” I remembered her saying, and echoed, “Wiggling your ass at Shaker Heights cocktail parties?”
“That might be part of it. But only part. I want structure, Nunc.”
The Barthian in me protested: what right have we fallen creatures, given of our own free wills into chaos, to demand structure? Who is the guarantor of all this merely human order? I said, “Tell me about your counsellor.”
“She’s neat. I love her.”
I felt a jealous flash. “A young woman?”
“Old. Older than you even. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk too much about it.” She cast her eyes down into her empty shrimp-cocktail glass, in its socket of cracked ice melting in a silver bowl. The waiter came and cleared her place; but I felt she would have fallen silent anyway. Out of her own associations she began a new topic, or one that would appear new. “Another thing bugging Dale,” she told me, “speaking of wiggling your ass, is he’s been having an affair with some older woman, somebody married who I guess is a pretty hot ticket.”
“Oh?” I said, feeling the floor tug us clockwise.