Higher Gossip

by John Updike

  In adolescence, Francis showed a preference, which he was to carry with him into fame, for the company of people who did not especially like him—athletes and conventional classroom beauties. He was tolerated, barely, on the fringes of their gatherings. Undersized, uncertain in health, and grotesquely large-featured—his eyes and nose and lips had had the unwholesome flourish of hothouse growth—he added nothing to their court but a jester’s loyalty, a happiness in being with them so keen that the dullest felt it and were flattered. Years later, in out-of-the-way bars, in restaurants where no one would recognize him, he would seek again the bliss of those smoky luncheonettes and pine-panelled basement rumpus rooms where, head tilted, he sat alone yet surrounded, accepted yet ignored, free to admire—in the crushing of a beer can, or the tug of plaid cloth across a girl’s hips—how life is lived. That life, in the form of a girl, would turn and enwrap him was a possibility that, though intensely imagined, seemed securely remote. The orchard walls are high and hard to climb.

  The brassy girls he adored barely noticed him. But plainer girls, less insensitized by the clangor of their own beauty, had long observed the inviting tilt of his head, his strange air of both absence and infinite possibility; one of them stepped forward and disclosed to him the treasure he had been accumulating. He never forgot the quality of light in which she first exposed her breasts to his eyes. They had parked during the rain, and while they unfolded for each other through their clothes the moon eluded the clouds and anointed her bare front with the shadows of raindrops still clinging to the windshield. On the windshield a raindrop, too heavy, trembled and broke downward; on the girl’s skin an echoing shadow ran down, swerving where her skin swelled. Her glowing body seemed disclosed not only to him; there was a sharing in which he too was somehow generous. He offered himself as a receptacle; she fed him with an impalpable outflowing of herself that became, once accepted, an essential nutrition.

  Having this girl, he was no longer allowed idly to watch the others live life. She needed to be tended: kissed, squeezed, rubbed against until she became as pliant as his grandfather’s Bible. They would sit on the cellar stairs above the rumpus-room party, their heads in darkness, their feet in the electric glow. Once, abruptly, she pushed him back from feeding on her face; even in darkness she looked pale, listening to motions within herself. She excused herself and stood; light, as she pushed open the door at the head of the cellar stairs, wounded his eyes. Not many minutes later she returned and offered herself to be rubbed. But her hands were cold, her face moist. Her breath had been artificially sweetened by a mouth rinse that tasted pink.

  He asked her if she felt sick.

  She nodded.

  If she had been sick.

  She touched her mouth self-consciously. Did it show?

  No, but didn’t she feel queasy still? Wouldn’t she rather just sit?

  No. She insisted he kiss her lips. On the unobliging stairs she sought to flatten herself against him. Her tainted breath became a mica window through which he looked, frightened, into a furnace. Her body was wet fire. His insides lifted, hoping to hop over disgust. Love is a glutton; it vomits and feasts again. He tried to forgive her; but there was an edge of pleasure, at the end of high school, in his saying goodbye.

  “Must you go?”

  “To the big city.”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face.

  “You know I never mock.”

  “You always do. What kind of actor do you want to become?”

  “Every kind. Tragical, comical; Caliban, Ariel. Please forget me. I’ll fail. I’m nothing. You’re well rid of me.”

  “I love you. I’ll die.”

  “You exaggerate. You’ll be fine. You’re a fine normal animal.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “I mean it nicely. I envy you your health.”

  “My stupidity.”

  “You see, you saw it all along as a deal, in which you might be cheated.”

  “If you don’t make it, will you come back?”

  “Please don’t wait.”

  “Well. I guess that leaves nothing else to say.”

  Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay.”

  For a time he attended a strange school, where groups of young adults, the women in leotards and the men in tight jeans and black jerseys, stood in circles and watched one another eat imaginary meals, pluck roses and butterflies from the air, climb invisible stairs, and weep at will. Francis admired another student, a small-boned girl with lustreless long blond hair and a flat cat’s nose, as if a thumb had depressed it, producing dimples in either cheek. She was magical. She could walk on the bare floor and make you feel pebbles, stairs, deep snow. She could kneel on the floor, cup her hands, drink from a nonexistent spring, and come up with a wet chin. Francis saw why in Christian days actors were superstitiously abhorred. Her private life, the sum of her gestures within actuality, was relatively dim and wan and careless. Rather accidentally, it seemed to Francis, he was at a party with her, then beside her at a bar, then in bed with her. Believing her able to conjure sensations of pleasure as easily as she created illusions for others, he timidly warned her, “I may not please you.”

  “How could you not?”

  In their darkness she was as remote as an audience. He asked, anxious, “How do I feel to you?”

  She said, surprised, “You feel beautiful to me,” as if his beauty had long ago been generally agreed upon.

  It displeased him to discover how totally she was his. A woman’s love had first come to him mixed with lunar remoteness; now he was led to understand what a whore means when she confesses to her pimp, “You’re under my skin.” He could do anything with her, and this abyss, this abnegation, confused his respect for her talent until he perceived that there was no contradiction; self-abnegation was her talent. She was totally open to manipulation; her limp body begged for abuse. He poured nagging scorn into her; he prostituted her to friends. He hit her. She became sallow and heavy-breasted, living with him, and at school he slowly became the magician. He was relieved when they parted. In some way, physically, she had always repelled him. There had always been in the texture of her buttocks a faint and disturbing grittiness, like sand on a damp day at the beach, and a panicky sweatiness in the yellow soles of her little high-arched feet.

  His excuse for parting was a small role he had secured in a touring production of The Importance of Being Earnest. He had secured it through the young man who played Algernon; Francis played Lane, Algernon’s manservant. The curtain went up. The darkness of the audience was dazzling. While a piano was played by a lame old lady in the wings, Francis set tea things on a table, concentrating so hard on not trembling and having them rattle that the rims of china burned crescents into his eyes. Algernon, a muscular, balding young man a shade too phlegmatic for the part, entered, asking, “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?”

  Lane straightened, waiting for the inaudible breeze of the audience’s attention to take hold, and said coolly, “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.” Laughter. During the laughter, frozen in the thrilling imitation of death that laughter imposes, Francis was aware of two things the audience could not know: that he, the droll Lane, was shortly to vanish from the play, and that Algernon was his lover.

  Francis’s homosexual episode was undercut by its element of farce. He could not quite suppress his sense of something inadvertent, like his grandfather’s passing attachment to his toe, in the grapplings of another male body for a hold upon his. The experience, at first, of a man’s flat-chested muscularity, of the direct and wholly knowledgeable exchange of penile pleasure, was somehow clarifying; there was a purity in being loved against the grain of nature, and an odd slanting height that deepened post-coital sadness into an almost majestic disillusion. But the spoken endearments, the masquerades with makeup and underwear, the fluid and malevolent spread of momentary feminine positions into continuous fillips of gesture and in
tonation composed a farce that the unremitting self-seriousness of homosexuals rendered outrageous. They dominated the company, and aspired to the dignity of a culture. Francis was especially offended by the tradition, presumably Greek in origin, of philosophic disquisition. Algernon, whose sturdy build and slow calm had reminded Francis of the high-school athletes whose presence had once given him peace, would (in chorus with whatever initiates, in and out of exotic costume, were present in the hotel room) deplore the world, the universal stupidity, the thorough rot, the drastic and titillating stink. There was a sourness here Francis could not help relating to the sourness of the male rectum. Having hollowed the world, these young men floated loose, contempt their only connection with reality.

  Yet it was not easy to leave this weightless world. Long after he had gone “straight,” Francis was inwardly bent by the memory of certain poignancies: Algernon’s grateful sated sleeping, each breath feathered by a boyish snore; a hermetic outlawry that preserved the troupe of them from conventional contamination and anxiety; a tender black glaze that would come into the other man’s eyes when Francis, an increasingly willful mistress, would give a consent; and, above all, the fleshy freedoms, amid a rub of planes satisfyingly solid and flat and rank, that, carried to the porch of pain, could never be reëstablished on the body of a woman, however corrupt. Yet amid these dark planes the actor felt himself going under to what was, essentially, despair.

  As he tried to fight free, his lover took it as a personal rejection and turned on him with a woman’s spite. Toward the end of the tour, when the director was too faithfully drunk to enforce discipline, Algernon consistently truncated Lane’s funniest speech on marriage, which begins, “I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present.”

  Here Algernon would say (languidly), “I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane,” before Lane could enunciate the cap-joke:

  “I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.”

  And indeed there proved to be an element of misunderstanding in Francis’s marriage. His wife was a tall straight girl with the vaguely blank beauty that dwells unaltered in the Greek statues of Venuses, Apollos, and hermaphrodites. She was the antistrophe of the chorus of the off-Broadway modern-dress Hippolytus in which Francis achieved first notice. He was the hero, chosen, over a half-dozen more experienced actors, for a quality about him, a sinister austerity, which the director, a superstitious Hungarian, felt as ominous and appropriate. The reviewers were chilled by the pale and thunderous prig, with a powdery touch of the harlequin, that Francis made of Hippolytus. The audiences, aware of an uncanny tampering at the backs of their minds, applauded with a slightly frightened warmth the slim tuxedoed figure so recently dragged to death by his panicked horses. The formal dress was Francis’s suggestion. The director’s original inspiration called for business suits (Theseus looked like a gentleman of the audience looking for his seat onstage) and for sack dresses that made Phaedra with the white-clad chorus seem the heavily coiffed manageress of a team of beauticians. Always in his stage career, Francis, given a choice, would favor the formal and stylized, the cool.

  Antistrophe, she who stepped forward and cried, “Love is like a flitting bee in the world’s garden and for its flowers, destruction is in his breath,” was from the Midwest, well-to-do, and twenty-one. Francis, at this turning in his life, was twenty-three and considered gay. Antistrophe, new to New York and its shadowy paths, simply placed herself beside him in the dark passageway one night (the theatre was the basement of a combined Presbyterian church and synagogue, and was entered via a narrow sidewalk striped by a shadow of a fire escape), led him to a brightly lit sandwich shop on Sixth Avenue, drank a milkshake, let him walk her to her apartment on Perry Street, and kissed him good-night in the foyer. Her kiss was like one of those stiff little cupcakes that at birthday parties long ago confidently appeared beside the ice cream. She was tall like a man, but fit him. Her name was Ellen. Moving, night by night, deeper into her, Francis revisited the past, lost landscapes of plain decency where people drove cars, watered gardens, conversed with the mailman, and knew the milkman’s son.

  But she was conventional only, like an Ibsen stage, in her furniture; her core was a rare sense of truth. In her he found his touchstone, an artistic index he could always consult. Of his Hippolytus, she told him, “You tease us. You dart in and out of him and just when we think we have either him or you you become the other. It makes the death scene very confusing. You seem to be enjoying it too much. There’s something mocking in it, something cruel.”

  The accusation was familiar. “I mock?”

  “Up to a point it’s nice. You’re flirting with us. But after you’ve flirted you must”—she hesitated, rejecting the coarse obvious words—“go on.”

  “And can you teach me, to ‘go on’?”

  She answered his mockery seriously. “Yes.”

  “I believe you.”

  She explained, “I can never get very far myself. I’m too big, too inhibited, really. But you, it’s just a question of what you want to be.” She spoke deliberately, and went directly to the matter of first importance. “How much do you do with other men?”

  “Hardly anything any more. I’m attracted physically but repelled intellectually.”

  She nodded, understanding that what others might have dismissed as Wildean paradox was his honest understanding of the matter. Encouraged, he dared ask her a question equally direct. “What do you feel toward me, me apart from my talent?”

  “It’s part of you. I can’t separate them.”

  He saw sadly that the question had been unreal, as he had become unreal; the human object his parents and grandparents had loved was gone, had been transmuted into reputation and performance.

  She asked, “And me. What do you feel about me?”

  He shrugged and said, “I want you and once I have you will probably need you forever.” After a moment of consideration she accepted his avoidance of the verb “love,” though by this discourtesy he betrayed not so much a passion for precision as a certain plebeian rudeness, like the rough carpentry on the back of an elegant set. He had never taken the time to learn manners, and here too he felt she could help him. She was a lady.

  There was a light beneath her skin, a cool light leading him, in the act of love, down toward a total clarity which, when the act was completed, stayed with him as insomnia. In the lucid mental air her love left behind, he felt a visionary excitement. A sense of his own infinite possibilities possessed him; an evil shuffle of masks tormented him. He would wake her and beg for sleep. She would stroke his narrow skull and, as he had taught her, massage his chest, dipping her tongue into the hollow at the base of his throat. In turn he would arrange her long silken hair, bleached in the moonlight, on the pillow to be smoothed and gloated over like a treasure laid out for inventory. Calm and straight as a corpse she would lie under his hands, receding from him. For he was never sure of her love. Her body too often seemed a fine gift carelessly left behind. Their marriage perhaps was too much a contract, too intelligently shaped for their mutual profit. Yet she satisfied the artist in him, through her he could “go on”; and at the ceremony, though it took place in City Hall, he had a full sense, as she confidently stood erect at his side, of the occasion’s being sufficiently formal. His successes multiplied. He was invited to Broadway, and stayed. In the next six years, detesting the tedium of long runs and secretly grateful for the plays that folded, Francis became in succession a dope-pusher, in white suit and black sunglasses; a prince in the court of Alfonso the Wise, King of León and Castile; a cuckolded millionaire collecting exotic marine life from the deck of a Mediterranean yacht; a symbolic root-digger speaking in ragged rhyme; the educated miner’s son in an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence; Touchstone; Pierre Abélard; an alcoholic pianist; an idealistic Jewish schoolteacher sent to the gas chambers; an effet
e art-dealer whom the dénouement revealed to be also a homocidal maniac; another cuckolded millionaire; Stephen Foster (encore the bottle and piano); Bluntschli in a revival, with inserted Cold War overtones, of Shaw’s Arms and the Man; and a tainted senator in a timorously fearless play about Washington corruption. Francis regarded most of his vehicles as preposterously feeble. The playwrights he met were bloated with private hysteria and public clichés. The directors were paunchy cads whose artistic consciences and wits had been stupefied by decades of dining in restaurants, at tables of sycophants. The producers, graceful gray men, were bankers and brokers essentially motivated, after years of patient financial accumulation, by the hope of buying an actress or—even better because less conspicuous—an understudy. All the real theatre had moved to the streets, and was brought back indoors by kids just off the streets. Francis felt out of it, a relic; his energy after thirty turned to seduction.

  Loving each woman, he discovered, gave him a new shape; some elicited wit from him, others sadness. With some, in bed, he became rampaging, a rhinoceros; with others, insinuant, boneless, an amoeba, ubiquitous and transparent. With all of them, he wearied of the shape they conjured up. For they could not essentially change him any more than we change a mirror by posing before it; when they were gone, nothing remained. Except a handkerchief, a cigarette filter, a wet bathroom floor because one woman had carelessly let the shower curtain hang outside the tub.