by John Updike
The harp joined in, and the melody became “White Christmas.” Just like the ones we used to know … A man of his acquaintance, a fellow writer, the liberal thinker Maurie Leonard, came up to him. Maurie, though tall, and thick through the shoulders and chest, had such terrible, deskbound posture that all effect of force was limited to his voice, which emerged as an urgent rasp. Metal on metal. Mind on matter. “Some digs, huh?” he said. “You know how Hyde made his money, don’tcha?” More than a liberal, a radical whose twice-weekly columns were deplored by elected officials and whose bound essays were removed from the shelves of public-school libraries, Maurie yet took an innocent prideful glee in the awful workings of capitalism.
“No. How?” Bech asked.
“Game shows!” Maurie ground the words out through a mirth that pressed his cheeks up tight against his eyes, whose sockets were as wrinkled as walnuts. “Hyde-Jinks, Hyde-’n’-seek. Haven’t you heard of ’em? Christ, you just wrote a whole book about the TV industry!”
“That was fiction,” Bech said.
Maurie, too, exerted pressure on the flesh above Bech’s elbow, muttering confidentially, “You wouldn’t know it to look at the uptight little prick, but Hyde’s a genius. He’s like Hitler—the worst thing you can think of, he’s there ahead of you already. Know what his latest gimmick is?”
“No,” Bech said, beginning to wish that this passage were not in dialogue but in simple expository form.
“Mud wrestling!” Maurie rasped, and a dozen wrinkles fanned upward from each outer corner of his Tartarish, streetwise eyes. “In bikinis, right there on the boob tube. Not your usual hookers, either, but the girl next door; they come on the show with their husbands and mothers and goddamn gym teachers and talk about how they want to win for the hometown and Jesus and the American Legion and the next thing you see there they are, slugging another bimbo with a fistful of mud and taking a bite out of her ass. Christ, it’s wonderful. One or two falls and they could be fucking stark naked. Wednesdays at five-thirty, just before the news, and then reruns Saturday midnight, for couples in bed. Bech, I defy you to watch without getting a hard-on.”
This man loves America, Bech thought to himself, and he writes as if he hates it. “Easy money,” he said aloud.
“You can’t imagine how much. If you think this place is O.K., you should see Hyde’s Amagansett cottage. And the horse farm in Connecticut.”
“So what I wrote was true,” Bech said to himself.
“If anything, you understated,” Leonard assured him, his very ears now involved in the spreading folds of happiness, so that his large furry lobes dimpled.
“How sad,” said Bech. “What’s the point of fiction?”
“It hastens the Revolution,” Leonard proclaimed, and in farewell, with hoisted palm: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
Bech needed another drink. The piano and harp were doing “Frosty the Snowman,” and then the harp alone took on “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The room was filling up with whiteness like a steam bath. At the edge of the mob around the bar, a six-foot girl in a frilly Dior nightie gave Bech her empty glass and asked him to bring her back a Chablis spritzer. He did as he was told and when he returned to stand beside her saw that she had on a chocolate-brown leotard beneath the nightie. Her hair was an unreal red, and heavy, falling to her shoulders in a waxen Ginger Rogers roll; her bangs came down to her straight black eyebrows. She was heavy all over, Bech noticed, but comely, with a greasy-lidded humorless gaze. “Whose wife are you?” Bech asked her.
“That’s a chauvinistic approach.”
“Just trying to be polite.”
“Nobody’s. Whose husband are you?”
“Nobody’s. In a way.”
“Yeah? Tell me the way.”
“I’m still married, but we’re split up.”
“What split you up?”
“I don’t know. I think I was bad for her ego. Women now I guess need to do something on their own. As you implied before.”
“Yeah.” Her pronunciation was dead level, hovering between agreement and a grunt.
“What do you do, then?”
“Aah. I been in a couple a Hendy’s shows.”
Ah. She was a mud wrestler. Maurie Leonard in his enthusiasm for the Revolution sometimes got a few specifics wrong. The mud wrestlers were hookers. The give-away-nothing eyes, the calm heft held erect as a soldier’s body beneath the frills. “You win or lose?” Bech asked her. He had the idea that wrestlers always proceeded by script.
“We don’t look at it that way, win or lose. It’s more like a dance. We have a big laugh at the end, and usually dunk the referee.”
“I’ve always wondered, what happens if you get mud in your eyes?”
“You blink. You the writer?”
“One of the many.”
“I saw you on Cavett. Nice. Smooth, but, you know, not too. You gonna stick around here long?”
“I was wondering,” he said.
The girl turned her face slightly toward him—a thrilling sight, like the soft sweep of a lighthouse beam or the gentle nudging motion of a backhoe, so much smooth youth and health bunched at the base of her throat, where her nightie’s lace hem clouded the issue. He felt her heavy gaze rest on the top of his head. “Maybe we could go out get a snack together afterward,” she suggested. “After we circulate. I’m here to circulate.”
“I am too, I guess,” Bech said. Men and women: what a grapple. New terminology, same old pact. “Name’s Lorna,” his mud wrestler told him, and moved off, her leotard suspended like a muscular vase within the chiffon of her costume. He remembered Bea’s soft nighties, and the bottom dropped out of his excitement, leaving an acid taste. Better make the next drink weak, it looked like a long night.
“Shine On, Harvest Moon” had become the tune, and then one he hadn’t heard since the days of Frankie Carle, “The Glow Worm.” Glimmer, glimmer. The music enwrapped as with furling coils of tinsel ribbon the increasingly crowded room, or rooms; the party was expanding in the vast duplex to a boundary whereat one could glimpse those rooms stacked with the polychrome furniture that had been temporarily removed, rooms hung with paintings of rainbows and flayed nudes, bursts of color like those furious quasars hung at the outer limits of our telescopes. In the mass of churning whiteness the mud wrestlers stood firm, big sturdy girls wearing silver wigs and rabbit-fur vests and shimmery running shorts over those white tights nurses wear, or else white gowns like so many sleepwalking Lady Macbeths, or the sterilized pajamas and boxy caps of laboratory workers dealing with bacteria or miniaturized transistors; in the pallid seethe they stood out like caryatids, supporting the party on their heads.
Bech had to fight to get his bourbon. The piano and the harp were jostled in the middle of “Stardust” and went indignantly silent. Like a fuzzy sock being ejected by the tumble-dryer there was flung toward Bech the shapeless face of Vernon Klegg, the American Kafka, whose austere minimalist renderings of kitchen spats and dishevelled mobile homes were the rage of writers’ conferences and federal and state arts councils. There was at the heart of Klegg’s work a haunting enigma. Why were these heroines shrieking? Why were these heroes going bankrupt, their businesses sliding from neglect so resistlessly into ruin? Why were these children so rude, so angry and estranged? The enigma gave Klegg’s portrayal of the human situation a hollowness hailed as quintessentially American; he was published with great faithfulness in the Soviet Union, as yet another illustrator of the West’s sure doom, and was a pet of the Left intelligentsia everywhere. Yet one did not have to be a very close friend of Klegg’s to know that the riddling texture of his work sprang from a humble personal cause: except for that dawn hour of each day when, pained by hangover and recommencing thirst, Klegg composed with sharpened pencil and yellow-paper pad his few hundred beautifully minimal words—nouns, verbs, nouns—he was drunk. He was a helpless alcoholic from whom wives, households, faculty positions, and entire neighborhoods of baffled order slid with mysterious ease
. Typically in a Klegg conte the hero would blandly discover himself to have in his hands a butcher knife, or the broken top fronds of a rubber plant, or the buttocks of a pubescent babysitter. Alcohol was rarely described in Klegg’s world, and he may himself not have recognized it as the element that kept that world in perpetual centrifugal motion. He had a bloated face enlarged by a white bristle that in a circle on his chin was still dark, like a panda marking. In this environment he seemed not unsober. “Hear you turned down Dakota Sioux Tech,” he told Bech.
“My wife advised me to.”
“Didn’t know you still had a wife.”
“My God, Vern, I don’t. I plumb forgot.”
“It happens. My fourth decamped the other day, God knows why. She just went kind of crazy.”
“Same with me,” Bech said. “This modern age, it puts a lot of stress on women. Too many decisions.”
“Lord love ’em,” Klegg said. “Who are all these cunts standing around like cops?”
“Mud wrestlers. The newest thing. Wonderful women. They keep discipline.”
“About time somebody did,” Klegg said. “I’ve lost the bar.”
“Follow the crowds,” Bech told him, and himself rotated away from the other writer, to a realm where the bodies thinned, and he could breathe the intergalactic dust. A stately creature swaddled in terrycloth attracted him; her face was not merely white, it was painted white, so that her eyes with their lashes stared from within a kind of mask. She smiled in welcome, and her red inner lips and gums seemed to declare an inner face of blood.
“Hey man.”
“Hey,” he answered.
“What juice you groovin’ on?”
“Noble dispassion,” he answered.
Her hands, Bech saw, were black, with lilac nails and palms. She was black, he realized. She was truth. The charm of liquor is not that it distorts perceptions. It does not. It merely lifts them free from their customary matrix of anxiety. America at heart is black, he saw. Snuggling into the jazz that sings to our bones, we feel that the Negro lives deprived and naked among us as the embodiment of truth, and that when the castle of credit cards collapses a black god will redeem us. The writer would have spoken more to this smiling apparition with the throat of black silk beneath her mask of rice, but Lorna, his first mud wrestler, sidled up to him and said, “You’re not circulating.” Her wig was as evenly, incandescently red as the glowing coil of the hot plate he cooked his lonely breakfasts on.
“Is it time to go?” he asked, like a child.
“Give it another half-hour. This is just fun for you, but Hendy makes us girls toe the line. If I skip off early it could affect my match-ups.”
“We don’t want that.”
“No we don’t, ol’ buddy.” Before she went off again her body purposely and with only peripheral menace brushed Bech’s; in the lightness of the contact her breast felt as hard as her hip. A dangerous word from Bech’s linguistic past, spoken rarely even by his uninhibited uncles, occurred to him. Kurveh. The stranger who comes close.
The piano and harp were interrupted again, this time in the middle of “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Henderson Hyde was up on the piano bench, making a speech about Angus Desmouches’s extraordinary book. “… horizons.… not since Atget and Steichen … rolling back the limits of the photographic universe …” The albino fish in the vertical tank flurried and goggled, alarmed by the new vibrations. They were always in profile. On edge they looked like knives, like Bea’s clothes in the closet. Why is a fish like a writer? Bech asked himself. Because both exist in a different medium. Since seeing through the black woman’s white paint and obtaining for himself a fourth bourbon (neat: the party was running out of water), Bech felt the gift of clairvoyance growing within him. Surfaces parted; he had achieved X-ray vision. The white of this party was a hospital johnny beneath which lungs harbored dark patches and mud-packed arteries sluggishly pulsed. Now Angus Desmouches was up on the piano bench, saying he owed everything to his mother’s sacrifices and to the nimbleness and sensitivity of his studio assistants too numerous to name. Not to mention the truly wonderful crew at Colortron Photographics. A limited number of signed copies of White on White could be purchased in the foyer, at the pre-Christmas price. Thank you. You’re great people. Really great. The albino crowd flared and fluttered, looking for its next crumb. In the mass of white, heads and shoulders floated like photos on the back flaps of dust jackets. Bech recognized two authors, both younger than he, more prolix and better publicized, and saw right through them. Elegantly slim, pearl-laden Lucy Ebright, she of dazzling intellectual constructs and uncanny six-hundred-page forays into the remoter realms of history: in her work a momentous fluency passed veils of illusion before the reader’s eyes everywhere but when, more and more rarely, her own threadbare Altoona girlhood was evoked. Then as it were a real cinder appeared at the heart of a great unburning fire of invention. For the one thing this beautiful conjurer of the world’s riches truly understood was poverty; the humiliation of having to wear second-hand clothes, the inglorious pain of neglected teeth, the shame of watching one’s grotesque parents grovel before the distributors of jobs and money—wherever such images arose, even in a psychoallegorical thriller set in the court of Kublai Khan, a jarring authenticity gave fluency pause, and the reader uncomfortably gazed upon raw truth: I was poor. Lucy was chatting, the sway of her long neck ever more aristocratic as her dreams succeeded in print, with the brilliant and engaging Seth Zimmerman, whose urbane comedies of sexual entanglement and moral confusion revealed to Bech’s paternal clairvoyance a bitter, narrow, insistent message. I hate you all, Seth’s comedies said, for forsaking Jesus. A Puritan nostalgia, an unreasonable longing for the barbaric promise of eternal light beyond the slate-marked grave, a fury at all unfaith including his own gave Zimmerman’s well-carpentered plots their un-centered intensity and his playful candor its hostile cool. Both rising writers came up to Bech and in all sincerity said how much they had adored Think Big.
“I just wished it was even longer,” Lucy said in her lazy, nasal voice.
“I wished it was even dirtier,” Seth said, snorting in self-appreciation.
“Bless you both,” said Bech. Loving his colleagues for having, like him, climbed by sheer desperate wits and acquired typing skill up out of the dreary quotidian into this alabaster apartment on high, he nevertheless kept dodging glances between their shoulders to see if his new friend in her nightie and fiery wig were approaching to carry him off. The piano and harp, running out of white, had turned to “Red Sails in the Sunset” and then “Blue Skies.” Radiant America; where else but here? Still, Bech, sifting the gathering with his liquored gaze, was not quite satisfied. Another ancestral word occurred to him. Trayf, he thought. Unclean.
Books by John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Ear
ly Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011)
PLAY MEMOIRS
Buchanan Dying (1974) Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)
JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.