Museums and Women: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  “The poor dears.”

  And they passed on to ponder the inability, mysterious but proven a thousand times over, of Asiatics and Africans—excepting, of course, the Israelis and the Japanese—to govern themselves or, for that matter, to conduct the simplest business operation efficiently. Clem was too tired to talk and too preoccupied with the pressure chafing his armpits, but they all glanced into his face and found their opinions reflected there. In a sense, they deferred to him, for he was prosperous and young and as an American the inheritor of their colonial wisdom.

  All had made attempts at native costume. Walt wore his pajamas, and the widow, in bedsheet and sunglasses and kaffiyeh, did suggest a fat sheik, and Gwenn’s husband had blacked his face with an ingenious paste of Bain de Soleil and instant coffee. Gwenn asked Clem to dance. Blushing, he declined, but she insisted. “There’s nothing to it—you simply bash yourself about a bit,” she said, and demonstrated.

  She was dressed as a harem girl. For her top, she had torn the sleeves off one of her husband’s shirts and left it unbuttoned, so that a strip of skin from the base of her throat to her navel was bare; she was not wearing a bra. Her pantaloons were less successful: yellow St.-Tropez slacks pinned in loosely below the knees. A blue gauze scarf across her nose—setting her hectic English cheeks and heavily lashed Twiggy eyes eerily afloat—and gold chains around her ankles completed the costume. The band played “Delilah.” As Clem watched Gwenn’s bare feet, their shuffle, and the glitter of gold, and the ten silver toenails seemed to be rapidly writing something indecipherable. There was a quick half-step she seemed unaware of, in counterpoint with her swaying head and snaking arms. “Why—oh—whyyy, De-liii-lah,” the young Egyptian sang in a Liverpool whine. Clem braced his body, hoping the pumping music would possess it. His feet felt sculpturally one with the floor; it was like what stuttering must be for the tongue. The sweat of incapacity fanned outward from the pain under his arms, but Gwenn obliviously rolled on, her pantaloons coming unpinned, her shirt loosening so that, as she swung from side to side, one shadowy breast, and now the other, was entirely revealed. She had shut her eyes, and in the shelter of her blindness Clem did manage to dance a little, to shift his weight and jerk his arms, though he was able to do it only by forgetting the music. The band changed songs and rhythms without his noticing; he was conscious mostly of the skirt of his caftan swinging around him, of Gwenn’s English cheeks burning and turning below sealed slashes of mascara, and of her husband’s stained face. He had come onto the dance floor with the American widow; as the Bain de Soleil had sunk into his skin, the instant coffee had powdered his galabia. At last the band took a break. Gwenn’s husband claimed her, and Leila, the green-eyed Egyptian woman, as Clem passed her table, said remonstratingly, “You can dance.”

  “He is a dervish,” Amina stated.

  “All Americans are dervishes,” Abdul sighed. “Their energy menaces the world.”

  “I am the world’s worst dancer; I’m hopeless,” Clem said.

  “Then you should sit,” Leila said. All three Egyptians were dressed, disdainfully, in Western dress. Clem ordered a renewal of their drinks and a brandy for himself.

  “Tell me,” he begged Abdul. “Do you think the Russians have no style?”

  “It is true,” Abdul said. “They are a very ugly people. Their clothes are very baggy. They are like us, Asiatic. They are not yet convinced that this world absolutely matters.”

  “Mon mari veut créer une grande théorie politique,” Amina said to Clem.

  Clem persisted. Fatigue made him desperate and dogged. “But,” he said, “I was surprised, in Cairo, even now, with our ambassador kicked out, and all these demonstrations, how many Americans were standing around the lobby of the Hilton. And all the American movies.”

  “For a time,” Amina said, “they tried films only from the Soviet Union and China, about farming progressively. The theatre managers handed their keys in to the government and said, ‘Here, you run them.’ No one would come. So the Westerns came back.”

  “And this music,” Clem said, “and your clothes.”

  “Oh, we love you,” Abdul said, “but with our brains. You are like the stars, like the language of the Koran. We know we cannot be like that. There is a sullen place”—he moved his hand from his head to his stomach—“where the Russians make themselves at home.”

  The waiter brought the drinks and Amina said “Shh” to her husband.

  Leila said to Clem, “You have changed girlfriends tonight. You have many girlfriends.”

  He blushed. “None.”

  Leila said, “The big Swede, she danced very close with the German boy. Now they have both gone off.”

  “Into the Nile?” Amina asked. “Into the desert? How jolly romantic.”

  Abdul said slowly, as if bestowing comfort, “They are both Nordic. They are at home within each other. Like us and the Russians.”

  Leila seemed angry. Her green eyes flashed and Clem feared they would seek to scratch his face. Instead, her ankle touched Clem’s beneath the table; he flinched. “They are both,” she said, “ice—ize—? They hang down in winter.”

  “Icicles?” Clem offered.

  She curtly nodded, annoyed at needing rescue. “I have never seen one,” she said in self-defense.

  “Your friends the British,” Abdul said, indicating the noisy table where they were finger-painting on Gwenn’s husband’s face, “understood us in their fashion. They had read Shakespeare. It is very good, that play. How we turned our sails and ran. Our cleverness and courage are all female.”

  “I’m sure that’s not so,” Clem protested.

  Leila snapped, “Why should it not be so? All countries are women, except horrid Uncle Sam.” And though he sat at their table another hour, her ankle did not touch his again.

  Floating on three brandies, Clem at last left the lounge, his robe of polished cotton swinging around him. The Frenchman was tipped back precariously in a corner, watching the dancers. He lifted his mirror in salute as Clem passed. Though even the Frenchman’s wife was dancing, Ingrid had not returned, and this added to Clem’s lightness, his freedom from litter. Surely he would sleep. But when he lay down on his bed, it was trembling and jerking. His cabin adjoined that of the unsociable plump couple thought to be Russian. Clem’s bed and one of theirs were separated by a thin partition. His shuddered as theirs heaved with a playful, erratic violence; there was a bump, a giggle, a hoarse male sibilance. Then the agitation settled toward silence and a distinct rhythm, a steady, mounting beat that put a pulsing into the bed taut under Clem. Two or three minutes of this. Then: “Oh.” The woman’s exclamation was at a middle pitch, gender-neutral; a man’s guttural grunt came right on top of it. Clem’s bed, in its abrupt stillness, seemed to float and spin under him. Then, from beyond the partition, some murmurs, a sprinkling of laughter, the word “Khorosho,” and a resonant heave as one body left the bed. Soon, twin snoring. Clem had been robbed of the gift of sleep.

  After shapeless hours of pillow wrestling, he went to the window and viewed the Nile gliding by, the constellations of village lights, and the desert stars, icy in their clarity. He wanted to open the window to smell the river and the desert, but it was sealed shut, in deference to the air conditioning. Clem remembered Ingrid and a cold silver rage, dense as an ingot, upright as an obelisk, filled his body. “You bitch,” he said aloud and, by repeating those two words, over and over, leaving his mind no space to entertain any other images, he managed to wedge himself into a few hours’ sleep, despite the tempting, problematical scuttle of presences in the hall, who now and then brushed his door with their fingernails. You bitch, you bitch, you … He remembered nothing about his dreams, except that they all took place back in Buffalo, amid aunts and uncles he had thought he had forgotten.

  Temples. Dour, dirty, heavy Isna sunk in its great pit beside a city market where Clem, pestered by flies and peddlers, nearly vomited at the sight of ox palates, complete with arcs of teeth,
hung up for sale. Vast sunstruck Idfu, an endless square spiral climb up steps worn into troughs toward a dizzying view, the amateur travelogist calmly grinding away on the unparapeted edge. Cheery little Kom Ombo, right by the Nile, whiter and later than the others. In one of them, dead Osiris was resurrected by a hawk alighting on his phallus; in another, Nut the sky goddess flowed above them nude, swimming amid gilt stars. A god was having a baby, baby Horus. Poppa Omar bent over and tenderly patted the limestone relief pitted and defaced by Coptic Christians. “See now here,” he said, “the lady squat, and the other ladies hold her by the arms so, here, and the baby Horus, out he comes here. In villages all over Egypt now, the ladies there still have the babies in such manner, so we have too many the babies here.” He looked up at them and smiled with unflecked benevolence. His eyes, surprisingly, were pale blue.

  The travelogist from Wisconsin was grinding away, Walt from New Jersey was switching his whisk, the widow was fainting in the shade, beside a sphinx. Clem helped the Frenchman inch his feet across some age-worn steps; he was like one of those toys that walk down an inclined ramp but easily topple. The English and Egyptians were bored: too many temples, too much Ramses. Ingrid detached herself from the German boys and came to Clem. “How did you sleep?”

  “Horribly. And you?”

  “Well. Very well. I thought,” she added, “you would be soothed by my no longer trying to rape you.”

  At noon, in the sun, as the Osiris glided toward Aswan, she took her accustomed chair beside Clem. When Egon left the chair on the other side of him and clamorously swam in the pool, Clem asked her, “How is he?”

  “He is very nice,” she said, holding her bronze face immobile in the sun. “Very earnest, very naïve. He is a revolutionary.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, “you’ve found someone congenial.”

  “Have I? He is very young. Perhaps I went with him to make another jealous.” She added, expressionless, “Did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am pleased to hear it.”

  In the evening, she was at the bar when he went up from an unsuccessful attempt at a nap. They had docked for the last time; the boat had ceased trembling. She had reverted to the silver dress that looked put on backwards. He asked, “Where are the Germans?”

  “They are with the Egyptians in the lounge. Shall we join them?”

  “No,” Clem said. Instead, they talked with the lanky man from Green Bay, who had ten months of advance tickets and reservations to Cape Town and back, including a homeward cabin on the Queen Elizabeth II. He spoke mostly to women’s groups and high schools, and he detested the Packers. He said to Clem, “I take pride in being an eccentric, don’t you?” and Clem was frightened to think that he appeared eccentric, he who had always been praised, even teased, by his mother as typically American, as even too normal and dependable. She sometimes implied that he had disappointed her by not defying her, by always dutifully returning from his trips alone.

  After dinner, he and Ingrid walked in Aswan: a receding quay of benches, open shops burning a single lightbulb, a swish of vehicles, mostly military. A true city, where the appetites are served. He had bought some postcards and let a boy shine his dusty shoes. He paid the boy ten piasters, shielding his potent wallet with his body. They returned to the Osiris and sat in the lounge watching the others dance. A chaste circle around them forbade intrusion; or perhaps the others, having tried to enter Clem and failed, had turned away. Clem imagined them in the eyes of the others, both so composed and now so tan, two stately cool children of harsh winters. Apologizing, smiling, after three iced arracks, he bit his tongue and rose. “Forgive me, I’m dead. I must hit the hay. You stay and dance.”

  She shook her head, with a preoccupied stern gesture, gathered her dress tight about her hips, and went with him. In the hall before his door, she stood and asked, “Don’t you want me?”

  A sudden numbness lifted from his stomach and made him feel giddily tall. “Yes,” he said.

  “Then why not take me?”

  Clem looked within himself for the answer, saw only glints refracted and distorted by a deep fatigue. “I’m frightened to,” he told her. “I have no faith in my right to take things.”

  Ingrid listened intently, as if his words were continuing, clarifying themselves; she looked at his face and nodded. Now that they had come so far together and were here, her gaze seemed soft, as soft and weary as the tailor’s. “Go to your room,” she said. “If you like, then, I will come to you.”

  “Please do.” It was as simple, then, as dancing—you simply bash yourself about a bit.

  “Would you like me to?” She was stern now, could afford to be guarded.

  “Yes. Please do.”

  He left the latch off, undressed, washed, brushed his teeth, shaved the second time that day, left the bathroom light on. The bed seemed immensely clean and taut, like a sail. Strange stripes, nonsense patterns, crossed his mind. The sail held taut, permitting a gliding, but with a tipping. The light in the cabin changed. The door had been opened and shut. She was still wearing the silver dress; Clem had imagined she would change. She sat on his bed; her weight was the counterweight he had been missing. He curled tighter, as if around a pillow, and an irresistible peace descended, distinctly, from the four corners of space, along forty-five-degree angles marked in charcoal. He opened his eyes, discovering thereby that they had been shut, and the sight of her back—the belling solidity of her bottom, the buckle of the backwards belt, the scoop of cloth exposing the nape of blond neck and the strong crescent of shoulder waiting to be touched—covered his eyes with silver scales. On one of the temple walls, one of the earlier ones, Poppa Omar had read off the hieroglyphs that spelled Woman is Paradise. The moored ship and its fittings were still. Confident she would not move, he postponed the beginning for one more second.

  He awoke feeling rich, full of sleep. At breakfast, he met Ingrid by the glass dining-room doors and apologetically smiled, blushing and biting his tongue. “God, I’m sorry,” he said. He added in self-defense, “I told you I was dead.”

  “It was charming,” she said. “You gave yourself to me that way.”

  “How long did you sit there?”

  “Perhaps an hour. I tried to insert myself into your dreams. Did you dream of me?” She was a shade shy, asking.

  He remembered no dreams but did not say so. Her eyes were permanently soft now toward him; they had become windows through which he could admire himself. It did not occur to him that he might admire her in the same fashion: in the morning light, he saw clearly the traces of age on her face and throat, the little scars left by time and a presumed promiscuity, for which he, though not heavily, did blame her. His defect was that, though accustomed to reflect love, he could not originate light within himself; he was as blind as the silvered side of a mirror to the possibility that he, too, might impose a disproportionate glory upon the form of another. The world was his but slid through him.

  In the morning, they went by felucca to Lord Kitchener’s gardens, and the Aga Khan’s tomb, where a single rose was fresh in a vase. The afternoon expedition, and their last, was to the Aswan High Dam. Cameras were forbidden. They saw the anti-aircraft batteries and the worried brown soldiers in their little wooden cartoon guardhouses. The desert became very ugly: no longer the rose shimmer that had surrounded him at the airport in Luxor, it was a merciless gray that had never entertained a hope of life, not even fine in texture but littered to the horizon with black flint. And the makeshift pitted roads were ugly, and the graceless Russian machinery clanking and sitting stalled, and the styleless, already squalid propaganda pavilion containing a model of the dam. The dam itself, after the straight, elegantly arched dam the British had built downriver, seemed a mere mountain of heaped rubble, hardly distinguishable from the inchoate desert itself. Yet at its heart, where the turbines had been set, a plume like a cloud of horses leaped upward in an inverted Niagara that dissolved, horse after horse, into mist before becoming th
e Nile again and flowing on. Startled greenery flourished on the gray cliffs that contained the giant plume. The stocky couple who had been impassive and furtive for six days beamed and crowed aloud; the man roughly nudged Clem to wake him to the wonder of what they were seeing. Clem agreed: “Khorosho.” He waited but was not nudged again. Gazing into the abyss of the trip that was over, he saw that he had been happy.

  The Carol Sing

  SURELY one of the natural wonders of Tarbox was Mr. Burley at the Town Hall carol sing. How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became Good King Wenceslas:

  Mark my footsteps, good my page;

  Tread thou in them boldly:

  Thou shalt find the winter’s rage

  Freeze thy blood less co-oh-ldly.

  When he hit a good “oh,” standing beside him was like being inside a great transparent Christmas ball. He had what you’d have to call a God-given bass. This year, we other male voices just peck at the tunes: Wendell Huddlestone, whose hardware store has become the pizza place where the dropouts collect after dark; Squire Wentworth, who is still getting up petitions to protect the marsh birds from the atomic-power plant; Lionel Merson, lighter this year by about three pounds of gallstones; and that selectman whose freckled bald head looks like the belly of a trout; and that fireman whose face is bright brown all the year round from clamming; and the widow Covode’s bearded son, who went into divinity school to avoid the draft; and the Bisbee boy, who no sooner was back from Vietnam than he grew a beard and painted his car every color of the rainbow; and the husband of the new couple that moved this September into the Whitman place on the beach road. He wears thick glasses above a little mumble of a mouth, but his wife appears perky enough.

  The-ey lo-okèd up and sa-haw a star,

  Shining in the east, beyond them far;

  And to the earth it ga-ave great light,