My Father's Tears and Other Stories

by John Updike

  “Me, neither. Could I offer you a drink?” this woman asked, nervous herself. She added with another giggle, “Since you’ve gotten out.” She gestured toward her becalmed kitchen. “I can’t offer you coffee.”

  “What have you been drinking?” Evan asked her.

  Her eyes widened, as if to compensate for the lack of light. “How did you know it was anything? Some girlfriends and I had wine and finished off lunch with anisette.”

  “In the car,” he answered her, “you smelled sweet,” and moved closer, as if to verify.

  Her kisses did not taste of licorice. There in the family room, where the great plasma-TV screen stared blankly and the morning Globe lay, still in its plastic wrapper, where it had been tossed onto the sofa unread, Lynne kissed dryly, tentatively, as if testing her lipstick. Then her lips warmed to the fit; her face pushed up at his and her fidgety hands went around his back, to its small and the nape of his neck, and Evan dizzily wondered if he wasn’t too far, too suddenly, out on a limb. But no, he reassured himself, this was human and harmless, this sheltered contact while the rain thrashed outside and the light inside the rooms dimmed by imperceptible notches. His impulse was to keep smoothing her hair, where it had been tangled and pressed flat beneath her head scarf. His hands trembled, as her lips had. Their faces grew hot; their caresses through their clothes began to feel clumsy. “We should go upstairs,” she said huskily. “Anybody going by could look inside.”

  “Who would go by in this weather?” he asked.

  “He gets a lot of FedExes,” she said. Climbing the stairs ahead of him—carpeted in pale green, where his and Camilla’s were maroon—Lynne continued the unidentified pronoun. “He calls me every day, often around now. I guess it leaves his nights free.”

  Evan, slightly winded at the head of the stairs, from having held his breath while admiring this woman’s surprisingly muscular haunches as they moved in the snug knit dress, asked, “Did you mean it, that your phone doesn’t work, either?”

  “Yeah, some penny-pinching system he got installed, so it’s all the same wires. I don’t understand it exactly. In our new car, I can’t do the radio stations. They give you too many options now.”

  “Exactly,” he agreed.

  The rooms upstairs had a different layout from those in his house, and the one she led him into was barer and smaller than the master bedroom would have been. Photographs on the bureau showed her boys, at various stages, and older people, though still young, in Fifties clothes, perhaps her parents, or Willy’s. The color in various framed vacation snapshots had bleached out, shifting register. On the wall a paper poster showed a woman, draped only in a python, stretched out on a Lamborghini. Lynne stood a moment by the window. “Look,” she said. “You can see your house, now that the leaves are down.” It took Evan some seconds to make it out—a pale shadow, the tint of smoke, through the intervening trees.

  “You have good eyes,” he told her. He did not want to feel that this neighbor was much younger than he, but an age difference was declared in how calmly and quickly she shed her clothes, as if it were no big deal. Oh, but it was a big deal, she was so lovely, all bony and downy and fat in the right places, drifting back and forth in the shadowy room to put her folded clothes on chairs, simple straight-backed boys’ chairs. When he had seen her in the center of the road he had thought for an instant she was a ghost, and there was a ghostly betranced quality in the way she moved, her lips crimped in that twist of self-criticism he had noticed in the car, when she had slid in beside him.

  She came to him to help him undress, something Camilla never did. This servile act, her small face frowning as she worked at his shirt buttons, excited him so that he ceased to feel nervous, out on a limb—ceased to listen to the rain and wind. The storm of blood inside him drowned them out. The tip of her tongue crept between her lips in her concentration. The front fringe of her hair, which the scarf had left uncovered, showed a few gleaming droplets and smelled of rain, another scent from boyhood. “God,” he said. “I love this.” He had kept himself, with an effort, from saying “you.”

  “It’s not over,” she promised, in the light voice of a woman talking to a girlfriend. “There’s more, Evan.”

  The electricity came on. All over the upstairs, wallpaper patterns and wood moldings popped into clarity. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the dishwasher surged into its next phase. By the front door, the burglar alarm resumed its beeping, at a shriller pitch. The furnace in the basement, at a pitch below that of the wind, ignited and began, with a roar steadier than the wind, to reintroduce warmth into the cooling house. Amplified, eager voices downstairs proclaimed that Lynne had been watching television an hour ago, before she panicked. Her face, so close to his that their breaths mingled, jumped back, like a cut to the commercial. “Oh dear,” she said, her rubbed-looking eyes coming back into focus.

  “To the rescue,” he said. He began to redo his buttons.

  “You don’t have to go.” But she, too, in her nakedness, was embarrassed; her cheeks blazed as if with a rash.

  “I think I do. He,” he said, “might call. Even she might, if the outage has made the news in Boston. You’ll be fine now. Listen, Lynne. The alarm has stopped beeping. It’s saying, ‘All is well. All is normal.’ It’s saying, ‘Get that man out of my house.’ ”

  “No,” she weakly protested.

  “It’s saying, ‘I’m in charge now.’ ” Evan turned his eyes from her nakedness, his wispy blonde’s. “It’s saying,” he told her, “ ‘This is how it is. This is the real world.’ ”

  The Full Glass

  APPROACHING EIGHTY, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately. Normally I have no use for introspection. My employment for thirty years, refinishing wood floors—carried on single-handedly out of a small white truck, a Chevrolet Spartan, with the several sizes of electric sanders and the belts and discs of sandpaper in all their graded degrees of coarseness and five-gallon containers of polyurethane and thinner and brushes ranging from a stout six-inch width to a diagonally cut two-inch sash brush for tight corners and jigsaw-fitted thresholds—has conditioned me against digging too deep. Balancing in a crouch on the last dry boards like a Mohican steelwalker has taught me the value of the superficial, of that wet second coat glistening from baseboard to baseboard. All it needs and asks is twenty-four undisturbed hours to dry in. Some of these fine old New England floors, especially the hard yellow pine from the Carolinas that was common in the better homes a hundred years ago, but also the newer floors of short, tongued pieces of oak or maple, shock you with their carefree gouges and cigarette burns and the black scuff marks synthetic soles leave. Do people still give that kind of party? I entered this trade, after fifteen years in a white-collar, smooth-talking line of work, as a refugee from romantic disgrace, and abstain from passing judgment, even on clients arrogant enough to schedule a dinner party six hours after I give their hall parquet the finish coat.

  But now that I’m retired—the sawdust gets to your lungs and the fumes eat away your sinuses, even through a paper mask—I watch myself with a keener attention, as you would keep an eye on a stranger who might start to go to pieces any minute. Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eye drops and about to take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full. The rational explanation might be that, with a left hand clutching my pills, I don’t want to fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass with the right. Still, it’s more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with the gaudier pleasures levelled out of it, in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me, before I sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement (my wife’s idea, now that I get foot cramps in bed, somehow from the pressure of the top sheet), along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye. In t
he middle of the night, on the way to the bathroom, my eye feels like it has a beam in it, not a mote but literally a beam—I never took that image from the King James Version seriously before.

  The wife keeps nagging me to drink more water. Eight glasses a day is what her doctor recommended to her as one of those feminine beauty tricks. It makes me gag just to think about it—eight glasses comes to half a gallon, it would bubble right out my ears—but that healthy sweet swig near the end of the day has gotten to be something important, a tiny piece that fits in: the pills popped into my mouth, the full glass raised to my lips, the swallow that takes the pills down with it, all in less time than it takes to tell it, but bliss.

  The bliss goes back, I suppose, to moments of thirst satisfied in my childhood, some states to the south of this one, where there were public drinking fountains in all the municipal buildings and department stores, and luncheonettes would put glasses of ice water on the table without your having to ask, and drugstores served Alka-Seltzer up at the soda fountain to cure whatever ailed you, from hangover to hives. I lived with my grandparents, a child lodged with old people thanks to the disruptions of the Depression, and their house had a linoleum floor and deep slate sinks in the kitchen, and above the sinks long-nosed copper faucets tinged by the green of oxidation. A child back then had usually been running from somewhere or other and had a great innocent thirst—running, or else pumping a fat-tired bicycle, imagining it was a dive-bomber about to obliterate a Jap battleship. Filling a tumbler with water at the old faucet connected you with the wider world. Think of it: pipes running through the earth below the frost line and up unseen from the basement right through the walls to bring you this transparent flow, which you swallowed down in rhythmic gulps—down what my grandfather called, with that twinkle he had, behind his bifocals, “the little red lane.” The copper would bead with condensation while you waited for the water to run cold enough.

  The automobile garage a block away from my grandparents’ backyard had the coldest water in town, at a bubbler just inside the overhead sliding doors. It made your front teeth ache, it was so cold. Our dentist, a tall lean tennis player already going bald in his thirties, once told me, after extracting an abscessed back molar of mine when I was fifteen, that no matter what else happened to me dentally I would have my front teeth till the day I died. Now, how could he know that just by looking every six months into a mouth where a Pennsylvania diet of sugar doughnuts and licorice sticks had already wreaked havoc? But he was right. Slightly crooked though they are, I still have my front teeth, all the others having long since gone under to New England root canals and Swedish implantology. I think of him, my primal dentist, twice a day, when I do my brushing. He was the beloved town doctor’s son, and had stopped short at dentistry as a kind of rebellion. Tennis was really his game. He made it to the county semi-finals at least twice, before dropping over with a heart attack in his mere forties. In those days there was no such thing as a heart bypass, and we didn’t know much about flossing, either.

  The town tennis courts were handy to his office, right across the street—a main avenue, with trolley tracks in the middle that would take you in twenty minutes the three miles into the local metropolis of eighty thousand working men and women, five first-run movie theatres, and a surplus of obsolescing factories. The tennis courts, four of them, were on the high-school grounds, at the stop where my grandmother and I, back from my piano lesson or buying my good coat for the year, would get off the trolley car, to walk the rest of the way home because I had told her I was about to throw up. She blamed the ozone for my queasiness: according to her, the trolley ran on ozone, or generated it as a by-product. She was an old-fashioned country woman who used to cut dandelions out of the school grounds and cook the greens into a disgusting stew. There was a little trickling creek on the edge of town where she would gather watercress. Farther still into the countryside, she had a cousin, a man even older than she, who had a spring on his property he was very proud of, and would always insist that I visit. It was his idea of a good time for a citified boy.

  I disliked these country visits, so full, I thought, of unnecessary ceremony. My great-cousin was a dapper chicken-farmer who by the time of our last visits had become noticeably shorter than I. He had a clean smell to him, starchy with a touch of liniment, and a closeted mustiness I notice now on my own clothes. With a sort of birdy, cooing animation he would faithfully lead me to the spring, down a path of boards slippery with moss from being in the perpetual shade of the droopy limbs of a great hemlock. In my memory, beyond the shadows of the hemlock the spring was always in a ray of sunlight. Spidery water striders walked on its surface, and the dimples around their feet threw inter-locking golden-brown rings onto the sandy bottom. A tin dipper rested on one of the large sandstones encircling the spring, and my elderly host would hand it to me, full, with a grin that was all pink gums. He hadn’t kept his front teeth.

  I was afraid of bringing a water strider up to my lips. What I did bring up held my nostrils in the dipper’s wobbly circle of reflection. The water was cold, tasting brightly of tin, but not as cold as that which bubbled up in a corner of that small-town garage, the cement floor black with grease and the ceiling obscured by the sliding-door tracks and suspended wood frames holding rubber tires fresh from Akron. The rubber overhead had a smell that cleared your head the way a bite of licorice did, and the virgin treads had the sharp cut of metal type or newly ironed clothes. That icy water held an ingredient that made me, a boy of nine or ten, eager for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another.

  Thinking back, trying to locate in my life other moments of that full-glass feeling, I recall one in Passaic, New Jersey, when I still wore a suit for work, which was selling life insurance to reluctant prospects. Passaic was out of my territory, and I was there on a stolen day off, with a woman who was not my wife. She was somebody else’s wife, and I had a wife of my own, and that particular fullness of our situation was in danger of breaking over the rim. But I was young enough to live in the present, thinking the world owed me happiness. I rejoiced, to the extent of being downright dazed, in this female presence beside me in the rented automobile, a red Dodge coupe. The car had just a few miles on it and, as unfamiliar automobiles do, seemed to glide effortlessly at the merest touch of my hand or foot. I felt like that, too. Being with this woman made my blood feel carbonated. She wore a broad-shouldered tweedy fall outfit I had never seen on her before; its warm brown color, flecked with pimento red, set off her thick auburn hair, done up loosely in a twist behind—in my memory, when she turned her head to look through the windshield with me, whole loops of it had escaped the tortoiseshell hair clip. We must have gone to bed together at some point in that day, but what I remember is being with her in the interior of the car, proudly conscious of the wealth of her hair and the width of her smile and the breadth of her hips, and then in my happiness jauntily swerving across an uncrowded, sunny street in Passaic to seize a metered parking space along the left-hand curb.

  A policeman saw the maneuver and before I could open the driver’s door was standing there. “Driver’s license,” he said. “And car registration.”

  My heart was thumping and my hands were jumping as I rummaged in the glove compartment for the registration, yet I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. The cop saw it there and it must have further annoyed him, but he studied the documents I handed him as if patiently mastering a difficult lesson. “You crossed over onto the left side of the street,” he explained at last. “You could have caused a head-on collision.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I spotted the parking space and saw no traffic was coming. I wasn’t thinking.” I had forgotten one of the prime axioms of driving: a red car attracts the police. You can get away with almost nothing in a red car.

  “Now you’re parked illegally, headed the wrong way.”

  “Is that illegal? We’re not from Passaic,” my passenger intervened, bending down low, across my lap, so he could s
ee her face. She looked so terrific, in her thick shoulder pads and pimento-flecked wool, that I thought another man must understand and forgive my intoxication. Her long oval hands, darting up out of her lap; her painted lips, avidly tensed in the excitement of argument; her voice, which slid past me almost palpably, like a very fine grade of finish sandpaper, caressing away my smallest imperfection—the policeman must share my own amazed gratitude at what she did for me with this array of erotic instruments. And she was genteel, too. Her husband had money.

  The cop handed the documents back to me without a word, and bent down to say past my body, “Lady, you don’t cut across traffic lanes in Passaic or anywhere else in the United States to grab a parking space heading the wrong way.”

  “I’ll move the car,” I told him, and unnecessarily repeated, “I’m sorry.” I wanted to get going; my sense of fullness was leaking away.

  My companion took a breath to tell the cop something, perhaps of some idyllic town back in Connecticut, where we came from, where cutting across traffic lanes was perfectly legal. But my body language may have communicated to her a fervent wish that she say nothing more, for she stopped herself, her lips parted as if holding a bubble between them.

  The policeman, having sensed her intention and braced to make a rejoinder, silently straightened up into his full frowning dignity. He was young, but it wasn’t his youth that impressed me; it was his uniform, his badge, his authority. We were all young, relatively, as I look back at us. It has taken old age to make me realize that the world exists for young people. Their tastes in food and music and clothing are what the world is catering to, even while they are imagining themselves victims of the old, the enforcers of the laws.