Higher Gossip

by John Updike

  The woman who made trouble for him was an over-the-hill director’s young second wife, named Patrice. Seeking rejuvenation and reëducation at a blow, the director had found her in a college. She was one of those weirdly both bright and beautiful girls who astound their seminars and intimidate their tutors and even, taking degree after degree, defy time; yet who, once torn from the hothouse of libraries and the company of immortals, darken and go mad. Her lips were painted a red so dark it was black, and in her gestures and stances there was always one limb or angle out of rhythm, awry. Her remarks to Francis were intelligent and merciless:

  “On the stage, you don’t move. Other people, somehow, are their bodies; you still live in yours, like a drawbridge operator.

  “Your looks hurt you, Francis. Your face has no marks on it. Even lousy actors have some moment when the part coincides with themselves and they fit it, it works. Maybe if you played a Martian, an adolescent Martian…

  “I’ve figured out your trouble, Francis. You’ve never had to face hate. That’s why you have no empathy. Empathy equals sympathetic magic equals killing an enemy. Until you’ve looked at an enemy you’ve never seen anybody. That’s why Lex is great. Everybody hates him.”

  Lex was her husband, the famous director. When Francis, intimidated, asked her if she too hated Lex, she snapped back, “Of course. Any real man, you hate sometimes. I could never hate you. Never.” So even her confessions came as taunts. He held his head tilted, and she grew frantic. They were in his hotel room; he had asked her there as a courtesy, in the hope that by sleeping with her he would be rid of her. “I wouldn’t be here if you were anything at all. If you had even the presence of a fool, I wouldn’t be here. You’re a ghost, Francis. A spook. Don’t touch me. Wait. Please.”

  He suddenly knew that but for her husband this harsh centrifugal woman was a virgin. She had rushed from the window past him to the bathroom; she returned in her slip. Cravenly kissing those black, black lips, he touched her below, to see if she had left on her underpants. She had not. There was a resilient softness beneath the silken slip, at the center of her, softer than silk; her pussy was so soft he broke the kiss to exclaim “Oh” and wanted to cry. Her softness spun him out fine and taut as shining wire. Afterward, she looked up at him and laughed. “It is different,” Patrice said.

  “Different from what?”

  “From with your husband.”

  Again, later:

  “I want to give you a baby.”

  “How beautiful of you,” he murmured. Then there was a small stunned contraction within his chest as he realized, from the complacent quality of her silence, that she meant it literally and, indeed, at the moment, had the means within her. “You mean right now?”

  She laughed. Her caressing hand was describing over and over a circle on the small of his back. Her face seemed to glow in the dark, so pale was her skin in contrast with her black hair, her eyebrows, her eyes, her painted lips. She limply wrapped herself around him. “Don’t be frightened. I wouldn’t trick you into it. I’ll do it with your consent.”

  “Maybe you can’t have my consent.”

  “I’ll have it.” He was indeed her first lover, and she was touchingly sure of the omnipotence of her surrender.

  “I’m married.”

  “Badly. To a sterile stick. I don’t even despise her; isn’t that conceited of me?”

  “Well, yes.”

  She laughed again, and it was uncanny to him how her skin, as if electrified by the contrast with her hair, emitted a waxy light. “I love,” she said, “the way you pretend to resist me.”

  “I do resist you.”

  “If you did, I’d feel it in your body.”

  “The body and the soul are two different things,” he told her. “Didn’t you ever go to Sunday school? The body belongs to death, and the soul belongs to God.”

  “You belong to me. All of you, Francis. All, all. Don’t move. If you take yourself out of me, I’ll die.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “I don’t exaggerate. How dare you say that! How dare you mock me! Don’t you know what you are to me? Don’t you know?”

  “I’m beginning to think I’m too much to you. Hey. Let me up.”

  Her voice came surely from the darkest depth of her throat. “I’m going to have you, Franky.”

  Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d.

  As once he had felt his will replace the will of another, so now cell by cell he submitted to a tyranny of possession, a helpless and phantasmal tyranny whose perpetrator grew ghostlike, so cold the pallor of her face, so dark the burning of her eyes and lips. He pitied her and, unable to release her from the spell it was his fate to cast, he cried for help by growing careless, leaving clues in his pockets and carrying her scent in his clothes and on his fingertips. His wife seemed deliberately slow to hear this cry. At last one night Ellen brought him a discovered message, an avowal scrawled on a paper napkin to be understood above the noise of a nightclub orchestra; she walked into the room holding it by one corner, like a dead bird by its wingtip.

  “Who is this?”

  “Nobody. A girl.”

  “How long have you had this one?”

  “Not long. Since I began the new show.”

  “That’s much longer than usual for you, isn’t it?”

  “Ellen, I’m sorry.”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m scared, then. She … loves me too much.”

  His wife smiled; she had grown, he noticed, stiff in their marriage, as if her body were her soul’s armor against him. “All by herself! You didn’t invite it!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why it happens.”

  “You want me to get you out of it?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. Please.”

  “Tell her I know. Tell her it must be ended or I’ll get a divorce.”

  “I can’t lie to her. She knows me too well.”

  “You won’t be lying. It’s the truth.” She turned and spoke with a choral stiffness to the windowless wall of their living room. “It’s the simple truth. I’m exhausted. Get rid of this child or I’m through.” Inaudibly she gave herself over to weeping.

  He found himself frightened of losing his wife, though she had long ceased to love him, or at least to express that love. They had no children, at first by intention, and then through some chemical mystery. But in her presence his feverish sense of being consumed subsided. He was unable to explain it to his mistress; he who could hurl a whisper to the back rows of balconies was unable to convince this intelligent woman that other love existed in the world.

  A group of philanthropic citizens, whose generosities were matched by municipal and federal funds, had endowed what was intended to resemble the great repertory theatres of Europe. He was invited to join the company and at Ellen’s urging had accepted, though wary of leaving the gambler’s strip of Broadway, that cozy jungle where success is oversold and even failure carries a certain panache. The theatre was newly built and, if not acoustically perfect (an elusive old art, acoustics, like violin-making), was visually opulent; he had come to love this theatre, the physical case at last for his jewel, the jewel that he carried inside his tilted head and that only he could not see.

  Even here, unforgivably, Patrice waylaid him, bluffing her way, a director’s wife, into an unlit side room. Her long hot arms, with their spiralling black hairs, pulled him into her; her black mouth seized his lips; her hand, whose fingertips had a chilly touch, reached into his fly. She led him up, into silver length, to erupt; he sobbed against her open mouth while his mind cried No. He tried to explain that her love insulted him, that it was a kind of outpouring of herself which his empty presence made possible. She spoke of him as of a wilderness she was destined to inhabit. Tears shone on her white face in the sharp-edged half-light. The sight of them intensified his appetite for dryness. “Forgive me, forgive me,” he said, ceasing to listen to her words, as she had not listened to his. As they parted s
he touched his chest, dazed. Like a gold thread through their grief ran his pride that he had instructed her, had given her biological conceit a necessary blow, had established, over against nature, another, superior realm.

  His chest smarted as if strips of adhesive tape had been torn from it. His mouth was parched. A vapor was affecting his eyes. He walked down a passageway, past the greenroom already alive with the gossip of the extras, Capulets and Montagues, past the closed dressing room of his leading lady. She was the girl with the long dull blond hair and the flat cat’s nose. She had survived his desertion to become an actress; she had used him. She had needed to know degradation, to give her voice the necessary shadows. Each night Francis declaimed love into the steady gray gaze of her contempt. Against her resentful body his own grew mockingly light, freed and confirmed as when his father had struck him. The theatre was full. The crowd, dressed formally, male and female alternating, seemed, seen from the height of the stage, an abstract pattern, a pen of peacocks seen from above. The first act, so artificial, passed in a haze of light and verbal glitter; the follow-spot, he felt, never left his eyes and acted as a shield, a mirror interposed between himself and the audience it was so necessary to touch. The moon, perhaps, had come too close; the whiteness of his mistress’s skin had dazed his eyes. Her physical extraction from him had left an ache which he feared might be visible through his tights. He left the stage aware that he was fumbling, failing.

  His wife was waiting for him in the wings, dressed in an ordinary suit, her brown hair touched with gray. She handed him an envelope on whose face his name emerged from a scrawl of loops. “This is yours,” she said.

  He knew the handwriting, ill-controlled, the slant inconsistent. His chest contracted. “Where did you get it?”

  “The police found it by her bed.”

  “The poor crazy thing.”

  Ellen said, “She called me on the phone. She said she was dying and wanted to talk about you. I got her address out of her and called the police. The hospital thinks they reached her in time.”

  How you exaggerate! The police had already opened the envelope. Her letter was illegible, loops and underlinings spelling love, love in its churning chaotic egotism. He felt disgusted and dizzy; his wife, seeing his reaction in his face, took the letter from him as if redeeming something precious, and turned her back. Turned it forever, he felt.

  “Romeo? Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” It was the wing prompter, an envious and sardonic old spinster.

  Francis stepped into the light and said, “Can I go forward when my heart is here? Turn back, dull earth, and find thy center out.” He hid in the shadows, waited like an animal while two painted young men went through the speeches of Benvolio and Mercutio, and then, coming out of hiding, proclaimed, “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

  An invisible bombardment arose around him—from the motley shadowy wings; from the glaring light troughs framing the black void of the audience; from the space above him, the towering stage house, rigged like a ship, where past and future scenery hung suspended like gigantic gills; from the cardboard façade suspended behind him, where a little cat-nosed face appeared. A ripple of applause expressed surprise from the watching void. His throat like some curved silver weapon released flights of words, sun, moon, maid, sick, and the bombardment intensified; he cried out, stars, spheres, birds, cheek, and another voice cried out against his: “Ay me!” The light plot, subtle and silent, swirled around them like an eddying of winds; the floor at his feet was chalked with arrows. He tilted his head, as if to receive an obliquely directed blow, in that gesture becoming, helplessly, more himself. My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself. He lifted his hand, and it burned before his eyes, bathed in white fire. From all corners, from beyond the footlights, from above the topmost shadows, Francis was bombarded by the certainty that he was—monstrous imposition!—beloved.

  THE LENS FACTORY

  DAVID KERN, at sixteen, had taken a summer job at the lens factory. Everything seemed huge: the brick factory wall, springing right off the sidewalk, as he entered in the morning; its several football-field-wide floors, flickeringly lit, crammed with the noise and tremor of the machines. Even the space of dirt and weeds behind the factory, where the other workers ate and played quoits for the half-hour allowed, felt enormous to him, as he crossed the diagonal line of shadow into the sunshine where Eddie, a workmate, already sat on a bench made of a plank and cement blocks. David loved these minutes of intermittence from tending his machine, but not completely: there was a pocket of dread within him that he must carry back to the job and even into sleep and out the other side. It made him feel lopsided, this sense of being plucked at by unhappiness.

  “How goes it?” Eddie asked him, as David sat beside him. Eddie had been here several years, since dropping out of high school, and David supposed the older boy must have many friends at the factory. But the bench was empty, and Eddie’s friendly interest in him seemed unfeigned. When David reported to work three days ago—a Monday, and this was only Wednesday—Eddie had been assigned by the foreman of that part of the floor to show him how to mount the semi-spherical caps of sunglass lenses on the round pivots, how to stack them on the shelved cart when their twenty minutes in the “mud”—the liquid abrasive in its long trough, which stuck under your fingernails and ruined your clothes—was over, and how to keep track of their numbers on the wire overhead. The work seemed simple, yet it was a terrible race to keep the machine from getting ahead, as it scrubbed and chugged away with its row of metal elbows. An inspector in a white shirt came around once every morning and afternoon with his chalk, slashing X’s on the dozens of shelved lenses that were ruined, through some error of David’s. The timing had to be exact—too little, they weren’t polished, and too much, they were “cooked.”

  “I guess better,” David said, unfolding his paper bag and taking out the sandwich of Lebanon baloney his mother had made. She had tucked an apple into his new lunch pail, which made him want to cry, somehow—its Christmassy redness, its country smell. His grandparents’ place had an apple tree in the back yard. The apple seemed something he could never get back to, from this abyss he felt he was in, here behind the towering brick factory, sitting on a plank under a scrawny weed tree.

  Eddie was smoking a Pall Mall and eating a ten-cent cake, with caramel icing and lemon-yellow insides. He was faintly yellow himself, as if the flickering factory lights had given him their own kind of tan. Smoke and crumbs were mixed in his mouth as he talked. “The thing is to get the rhythm,” he said. “The machine has a rhythm and after two weeks here it’ll be second nature to you, you won’t even have to think what you’re doing.”

  The Lebanon baloney had flecks of spice in it, and these flecks burned in David’s stomach, touching the sensitive soreness that was always there now. “What do you think about instead?” he asked the other boy.

  Eddie laughed, disclosing more yellow crumbs. “Dirty stuff,” he said cheerfully.

  David felt invited to ask what dirty stuff, but instead rolled his face away, staring upward into the weed tree (trees of heaven, his mother called them), which had grown surprisingly tall in the shadow of the factory. Its leaves were parallel, like rapid crayon strokes, dark down closer but golden up high, where the sunshine struck. He saw that the tree of heaven was in feeble bloom, with small yellowish-green dirty-looking flowers. David’s mind squeezed itself up there as if out of a deep well, high into the tree, where he would never have climbed when he was a child, being shy of heights and this kind of tree being too brittle, too jungle-quick in its growth, to climb anyway. The tree’s presence here—a touch of nature, like the apple—seemed a blessing, though. While he was staring off into space, feeling his childhood hovering just above him, like something from which he had just this minute fallen, Eddie’s hand had come to rest on his thigh. It was a light, sallow hand, the nails rimmed with dried orange mud, a bit undernourished, like everything else about Eddie. Even Eddie’s mind, David imagined,
was curled in there like a shrivelled walnut, blackened.

  “You’re a good kid, Davey,” Eddie told him. “You’ll get the hang of things.”

  Nobody called David “Davey.” Irritable in his sensitive sad state, he twitched his thigh away from Eddie’s consoling hand. He longed to express the horror of life that this job had opened to him, but didn’t know quite how to without insulting Eddie, whose life it was. “Yeah, but then so what?” he did say.

  “What do you mean, so what?”

  “I mean, how do you stand it, day after day, all summer and all? I mean, you don’t have any summer.”

  The other boy blinked, little pink lids and colorless short lashes. “You get as much summer as most people,” he argued. “There’s weekends, and lots of light hours after four.”

  Something in the concentrated set of Eddie’s thin lips, and the watery way his dull blue eyes stayed on David’s face, suggested that the boy was determined not to be insulted. David despaired of expressing how completely the factory seemed to eclipse everything else. He took in breath but there was nothing to say, it was all too big. His comforter saw this and continued for him, “This ain’t going to be your life, Davey. You’ll do it for the summer and be going back to school. It ain’t going to be my life, neither. I’m thinking of joining one of the services, the Navy probably. All kinds of action in the Navy. This city is dead. There’s nothing in this city for anybody who wants to be a little different.”

  It was strange, the way the older boy’s voice so softly and insistently went on, embroidering this and saying that, as if searching for a passageway.

  “I don’t want to be different, exactly,” David told him. “I just want room to breathe. When I’m up there with the trough sloshing mud and everything timed to the split-second, it’s like I can’t breathe.”

  Eddie lit another cigarette without taking his eyes off of David’s face. “You’ll breathe,” the other boy strangely said. “You’ll take lots of breaths before you’re done, Davey boy.” Puffs of smoke tumbled from his mouth, and he shook his red pack of Pall Malls so one cigarette jumped up for David to take. Eddie had this nimbleness, this sly slippery trickiness, clinging to him like a yellowish film. “You know what ‘blow’ means?” he asked.