by John Updike
“Yeah, it’s really eating him up, for one thing because he knows they shouldn’t be doing it, and yet he keeps doing it anyways, and for another because he doesn’t want it to end and it is.”
“How does he know it is?”
“I guess the lady’s been giving him signals. That’s another reason he wants to go back to Ohio, to get away from her. One night he and I split a six at my place—he’s not so uptight about booze and what-all as he was—and he got into the sort of stuff they used to do, and I must say she sounds like she went all out. Up the ass and everything. Like she wanted to drive him crazy. She lives in this really big expensive house, Dale said. Somewhere in your neighborhood, I got the impression.”
“It’s a big neighborhood,” I told her. “And by the time you get to this lady’s age, there’s very little reason left not to go all out. At your age,” I advised, competing against my unseen rival counsellor, “you have to be careful how you distribute yourself.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Nineteen?”
“I have news for you, Nunc. I turned twenty last week.” From her tone, this news was a defeat for me. Instead I felt the floor tug, and a tug of relief: she seemed somewhat less on my hands, on all our hands, at that age.
“Happy Birthday, dear Verna.”
The waiter brought me my fillet of sole, her her lamb chop. He did not seem surprised when I ordered a bottle of champagne. He had a close, tidy haircut of the sort everyone wore when I was young but that now exclusively signifies homosexuals and—another marginal caste, viewed with distrust, as potential avenues of disaster—servicemen.
The view, westward, showed how the city had expanded, early in the century, when land was cheap. It had acquired its civic establishments: the public library and the fine-arts museum, both Italianate, courtyarded, and red-tile-roofed; the irregular deep-lipped green bowl that contained our major-league ballpark, rimmed with banks of lights like giant fly-swatters and lined with seats that came in two flavors, cherry and blueberry; the long reflecting pool and marzipan dome of the Christian Science cathedral (Christian Science! as if there could be such a thing!). Many of the older mansions in their iron-fenced grounds had fallen lately to new construction—parking garages whose roofs bore playful patterns of arrows, and a combination hotel and vertical shopping mall whose irregular geometrical forms, seen from above, suggested Lego. The perspectives of this brand-new structure led erratically down to entrances whose bright-blue canopies stuck out no bigger than coding tabs in a filing cabinet. There arose to us at this altitude, through the thick glass, the anesthetized city’s only voice, the urgent hiccup of a police siren.
The champagne came, and with its sparkling sourness I toasted my companion. “How’s your lamb?” I asked her.
“O.K. I mean it’s great. This is really a nice expensive lunch. Nunc?”
“Yes, Verna?”
“Are you sorry you fucked me, is that what you’re trying to say?”
“My goodness, you dear child, no. I’m ever so glad, it was lovely. As you said it would, it relieved something. It’s helped me get ready for death.” The moment had come; she had led me here. “But it needn’t be repeated, perhaps, and something I’m not grateful for—”
“Is Paula.”
“No, Paula’s no great problem, once she gets the cast off her leg and stops scratching up all the floors. What I’m not grateful for is all these attentions from the Department of Social Services: is getting my name involved with their miserable records. In my position at the Divinity School—”
“You got to keep your nose clean.”
“Clean in a certain way, or, rather, not dirty in a way that looks absurd to my colleagues. We can tolerate dirt over there, ‘fallible human nature’ we call it, but it must take certain traditional forms. This thing with Paula’s injury and so on is worse than bad, it’s gauche.”
She abruptly volunteered, “Dale wants me to go back to Cleveland with him; maybe I said that.”
“Why, no. I don’t think you did. When was this—after the sixpack?”
“You keep getting the wrong idea about him and me. He just thinks I should try to make up with Mom at least. And he says if I’d just get my certificate they have these great night courses at Case Western.”
“Don’t go back, Verna,” I said, against all my own interests. “They’re such awful people back there.”
“My counsellor says they’re the only people I really care about.”
“Well, I suppose that’s safe enough Freud.” I sighed in grateful surrender. “Would you like me to buy your ticket?”
“Hey, sure, if you’d like to, that’d be super.” Her eyes, often rather dead in their slightly slanted envelopes of lid, were shining: perhaps it was the champagne, or the brightness up here, which made even the smallest scratches in the silver gleam. When she smiled, her teeth were as little and round as pearls. “There was another favor I was going to ask.”
“Yes, dear?” I was trying to decide why I found the crosses in her ears repulsive: because of the barbaric religion of blood atonement they symbolized, or some atavistic superstitious scruple of mine about their being worn so frivolously? Yet for centuries crosses have been bouncing in that sweaty cleft between women’s breasts. Who made a woman’s body? God, we must keep reminding ourselves.
“It’d be neat if you’d call my mom and see how she feels about my coming home. I don’t have the nerve.”
“I don’t either.”
“Why not, Nunc? She’s your sister. Your half-sister. Oh. I know what it is.” She dimpled. “You’re afraid she’d hear it somehow in your voice.”
My sole was slightly dry, and slow to leave the mouth. I swallowed with a little haste, and it hurt. “Hear what?”
“That you’ve fucked me,” she said distinctly, having cleared her throat.
Several sleek, blow-dried heads at nearby tables turned our way.
“Don’t shout,” I pleaded.
Her eyes, their amber full of gold dust in the high light, narrowed with the delight of an imagined perception. “That’s why you want to be rid of me, you old prick. I’m walking evidence. I might start getting grabby and upset your applecart, not only with your job but with that hot-shit little wife of yours. She’s the one with the money, isn’t she, for all that nice stuff in your house? You didn’t get all that on a professor’s salary. Dale told me how her father’s some kind of big shot.”
I explained to my accuser truthfully, calmly, “Esther is part of my life. I once went to a great deal of trouble to make her part of it and I’m too old to do any more rearranging.”
For dessert, Verna had baba au rhum with Irish coffee and I, feeling fat on the champagne, simply a tarry cup of espresso; a stack of heretical examination booklets waited for me back in the office.
Now our view was north. From on high the river looked much broader—grander, more primeval—than it felt as you nipped across one of the bridges in a car. The university, which loomed so large in my mind and life, almost vanished in the overview of this part of the metropolis; the domed science buildings and the Cube and the several spired campuses devoted to the humanities and student housing were less conspicuous than a number of riverside factories I had never noticed before, with their acres of flat gravel roof and their admonitory smokestacks. There was upon this face of the city, as upon a pond at dawn, a clinging haze, a haze in which I could not locate the limestone buildings of the Divinity School. But I could trace with my eye Sumner Boulevard’s straight line back from the river and found the intensified green, the leafed-out beeches and oaks, of my neighborhood; I thought I could even make out the verdant dab of Dorothea Ellicott Memorial Park, and the roof of my own house, its third-floor windows. There, in that dim patch of scum on the hazy pond, I had my life; up here I had fought for that life, successfully. Getting Verna out of town would give me space and the deeds in the dark an interval in which to erase themselves. Yet depression dragged my heart dow
n as I pictured her heading into that heartland muddle, that tangle of body smells and stale pieties, of parental curses and complacent mediocrity; her life, so vivid before me in its moment of bloom and sass, seemed a waste whether spent back in Cleveland with Edna and Paul, who would try again to tie her to the rotten wood of the old prohibitions, or here with us, in our Godless freedoms that become, with daily use, so oddly trivial. I could not stop my mood from sinking, as if it were I who had condemned this child to life. “No matter what you do,” I said, pleading again, “you must finish up your certificate.”
“That’s what she says, too. My counsellor. But why? So I can become like the rest of you boobs?”
At the farthest, looking north, the city, its pointed roofs picked out in asphalt and copper, melted into a kind of forest, green ridges speckled more and more sparsely with brick and rising into blue hills, ridge after ridge, green to blue to a gray insubstantial as fog. This city spread so wide and multiform around and beneath us: it was more than the mind could encompass, it overbrimmed the eye; but was it all? Was it enough? It did not appear to be.
Downstairs, in the great fake-onyx, neo-Art Deco lobby, we tried to estimate how much a one-way ticket would cost. “Also,” she said slyly, “there are travel expenses.”
“Why am I always having to bribe you to do what’s best for you anyway?”
“Because you think I’m nifty, remember?”
I had paid her three hundred for the abortion; this was surely worth less. She thought it was worth more, since it was longer-range in a way and involved her directly instead of some little unborn thing like a sardine. Happily, my statewide bank had installed an automatic teller in the lobby of the skyscraper, and its limit of cash payout was three hundred dollars. We settled for that. The machine, with a hum and some clicking, accepted my card, recognized my code word (AGNUS), and counted out with a rhythmic internal rumbling the necessary bills. DO YOU WISH ANY MORE TRANSACTIONS? I punched the NO button.
“Some day,” I told Verna as I handed over the cash (bills so new they felt abrasive, like very fine sandpaper), “you may have to do without a nice uncle who gives you presents.”
As she took the money I could see her wanting to laugh with the gaiety of it—of the fresh clean machine-fed bills, manna in their freedom hitherto from human touch—but then pulling herself back from a reaction so elemental, so immature. She teased me: “You seem down, Nunc. What’s the matter? Isn’t everything coming out just the way you wanted?”
“Promise me one thing,” I blurted helplessly. “You won’t sleep with Dale.”
“With Bozo?” Now she did let herself laugh. The onyx walls echoed, her broad face between the crosses shimmered with mischief. “You have too many fantasies,” she told me. “You know the kind of dude that turns me on. Dale’s a non-turnon. He’s not even evil, like you.” In spontaneous mercy Verna gave me a kiss on the cheek; it felt like a drop of rain in the desert.
iv
For nearly four weeks I have been waking in my house to the clatter of little Paula’s plaster cast scraping and bumping across our floors as she dauntlessly crawled here and there. Many times, as I sat in my study trying to force my mind through the prevarications and self-satisfying loops of theology, our little guest has sounded like a boulder being tumbled downstairs, only her accompanying prattle indicating that no catastrophe was, so to speak, afoot. Now, her cast has been removed, at the hospital—cool and proper Esther my companion instead of frantic, disreputable Verna, and none of the emergency staff the same—and the innocent child goes about whimpering, feeling she has lost part of herself.
This morning she was whimpering beside me in bed, where Esther had placed her as if ironically, in lieu of her own body. Paula, her irises inky and shiny and the whites of her eyes distinctly blue, was inspecting my bristly face with her little slobbered fingers and sharp miniature fingernails. “Da?” In the perfect convex surfaces of her corneas there were tiny squared images of the window beside my bed, with its stained-glass fanlight. “Da widey wake?”
It was Sunday; Sunday-morning light has a baleful quality, and there is an accusatory silence, with the lack of usual traffic. Coded birdsong can be heard in the trees. Church bells pathetically call. “Da up-up,” Paula commanded.
A sweetish ache traversed the frontal lobes of my brain; we had been late at a little party last night. Ed Snea, in his bachelor digs, was celebrating his wife’s willingness, at last, to give him a divorce. The hipless girl with Rapunzel hair whom he had brought to our party was present, as a kind of informal fiancée. Who would marry them? I had drunk too much and got into ugly arguments with Ed over demythologization and with a Nigerian M. Div. candidate over the efficacy of South African divestiture. All protest movements in America, I remembered shouting through the chemical tumult of alcohol being assimilated into my bloodstream, are nothing more than excuses for middle-class young white people to get together and smoke dope and feel morally superior to their parents. These rabid views of mine—where do they come from? They seem quite sincere as I spout them.
Paula gave off a delicate, powdery aroma as she warmed the bed beside me. I reached over to the leg, so touchingly flexible and small, that was now wrapped in a (pink) flesh-colored bandage, and lightly gave it a squeeze, to remind her of the missing cast. Her face underwent an anxious convulsion, her mouth pulling down and the lower lip protruding, showing its violet inner side. Satisfyingly, she began to whimper. I got out of bed; my gray pajamas were twisted into ropey creases by the night’s restless sleep. It was time to switch to summer covers. I lifted the anxious child into my arms and carried her into the spare room, once a maid’s room, that we had made into her room. I changed her diaper; her skin was delicious to touch, fine-grained and blemishless, like silk without the worminess. I had never before seen female genitals in so new a condition. They were sweet—two little lightly browned breakfast rolls fresh and puffy from the oven. I dressed her in corduroy overalls, with a bunny face sewn on the bib. Esther had found boxes of Richie’s old baby clothes up on the third floor, behind her neglected paintings.
Where was Esther? Her absence felt like a presence, an electrical charge of silence in the house.
The shower was running behind the bathroom door. I went downstairs and used the toilet beneath the stairs. I sat Paula in a corner, where she deftly unrolled all the toilet paper. Richie was watching cartoons in the kitchen, his rapt face moronic in the flickering glow. I sat Paula in his lap and put half a sugar doughnut in her hand; instantly the lower half of her face was bleached and powdered sugar had drenched the corduroy.
Richie accepted her on his lap without complaint. Since her arrival he has grown more manly, protective, and tutorial; he is no longer the baby of the house. Their two faces turned to the television screen like flowers to the sun. Three faces, counting the one on her bib.
Through the kitchen window I could see the Kriegmans doing aerobics on their redwood deck. Myron was leading the rite, in what seemed his underwear; Sue and their daughters wore clownish outfits of luridly colored leg-warmers and leotards. They were performing disco steps, and pelvic rotations, in the dappled spring shade, to one of Bach’s more upbeat fugues. So this was civilization and health. Nevertheless, Kriegman’s belly and pseudo-mammae jiggled conspicuously. He did not look well. I think he has curvature of the spine, from bending over the microscope. He saw me spying and gave a hasty wave, out of rhythm.
What did Esther feel, pulling baby clothes from the third floor? When did she and Dale make love for the last time, and what did they say upon parting? She would take it upon herself to lighten the occasion, she being older and more familiar with finitude, trying to tease him up from his terrible heaviness of defeat into erectitude. Her naked body gleams at those points where bone presses flesh from within; her tongue and hands seek the light touch within the awful claustral ardor of his despairing embrace. He does not want to let go. She catches sight of her feet bare on the dirty mattress, their veins mor
e conspicuous, more yellow and blue, than one of the Kriegman girls’ (or Amy Eubank’s) would have been; she then cannot stop being aware of her own body, a complex fragile costume to be some day painfully cast aside, while she caters to his, its raw boniness, its waxy skin, the fur of his buttocks and thighs and lower back defenseless as a puppy’s belly, the touching tendony interlock where his arms and shoulders hinge and stretch, the acne along his jaw like a half-healed wound, his head on its long neck bowed in submission to this decree. She caresses with her right hand the long straight line of his neck and with her left the beautiful perishable hardness and length below, while her face behind its scrim of tears smiles, some impossible promise implied in her smile.… I could not picture it, quite.
It depressed me, trying to picture it.
One of these days, Edna must call, to discuss things. Her child, her grandchild. I have sent Verna to her as a message she must answer. Her voice will be roughened by all these years, but not in essence changed: vulgar, self-satisfied, platitudinous, sexy. Pleasantly pungent, like the smell of one’s own body. Flat-tasting but oddly delicious, like the meals served up to me in our solitude by my mother, love-miserly Alma. The certainty of this contact, between now and death’s certainty, felt to me like money in the bank, earning interest. Edna must call, and Paula would be taken away. Things had indeed worked out very well. Somebody had said that to me, recently. Who?
I poured a second orange juice and tried to decide, looking ahead, between Total and an egg. The Kriegmans were retiring from their deck, in single file, the females in their patchy garb gaudy as parrots. In Esther’s garden the azaleas were mostly by, their shed hot-pink petals dissolving in the lawn, and the irises were coming on. She has been irritable and abstracted these recent days, and eats late at night, and sleeps more than usual. Most strangely, she has stopped watching her weight; I am sure she weighs more now than a hundred pounds. She came into the kitchen dressed in a crisp dark suit, with lace at her throat. Her hair was done up in a somehow triumphant sweep.