by John Updike
The officer dismissed me with “O.K., buddy.” Perhaps in deference to my giddy condition, he added, “Take it easy.”
The lady and I were not young enough to let our love go, the way teen-agers do, knowing another season is around the corner. We returned to our Connecticut households unarrested, and persisted in what my grandfather would have called evildoing until we were caught, with the usual results: the wounded wife, the seething husband, the puzzled and frightened children. She got a divorce, I didn’t. We both stayed in town, after her husband went to the city to survey his new prospects. She and I entered upon an awkward afterlife of some ten years, meeting at parties, in the supermarket, at the playground. She kept looking gorgeous; woe had thinned her down a little. It was a decade of national carnival. At one Christmas party I remember, she wore red hotpants and green net stockings, with furry antlers on a headband and a red ball, alluding to Rudolph the Reindeer’s nose, stuck in the middle of her heart-shaped face.
Parties are theatre in Connecticut bedroom towns, and the wife and I did nothing to make her performances easier, the wife giving her the cold shoulder and I sitting in a corner staring steelily, still on fire. She had taken on a new persona, a kind of fallen-woman persona, laughing, brazen, flirting with every man the way she had with that cop in Passaic. I took a spiteful pleasure in watching her, from my distance, bump like a pinball from one unsuccessful romance to another. It enraged me when one would appear to be successful. I couldn’t bear imagining it—the nakedness I had known, the little whimpers of renewed surprise that I had heard. She brought these men to parties, and I had to shake their hands, which seemed damp and bloated to me, like raw squid touched in the fish market.
Our affair had hurt me professionally. An insurance salesman is like a preacher—he reminds us of death, and should be extra earnest and virtuous, as payback for the investment he asks. As an insurance agent I had been proficient and tidy in filling out the forms but less good at tipping the customers into the plunge that would bring a commission. The wife and I moved to a state, Massachusetts, where nobody knew us and I could work with my hands. We had been living there some fifteen years when word came from Connecticut that my former friend—her long looping hair, her broad bright smile, her elegant oval hands—was dying, of ovarian cancer. When she was dead, I rejoiced, to a degree. Her death removed a confusing presence from the world, an index to its unfulfilled potential. There. You see why I am not given to introspection, to digging deep. Scratch the surface, and ugliness pops up.
Before we were spoiled for each other, she saw me as an innocent, and sweetly tried to educate me. With her husband’s example in mind, she told me I must learn to drink more, as if liquor were medicine for grown-ups. She told me the way to cure a cold was to drink it under. Rather shyly, early in our love life, she informed me my orgasms told her that this—sex—was important for me. “But isn’t it for everybody?” I asked.
She made a wry mouth, shrugged her naked shoulders slightly, and said, “No. You’d be surprised.” There was a purity, a puritan clarity, to her teaching, as she sought to make me a better person. At some point in the ungainly aftermath of our brief intimacy, she let me know—for I used to seek her out at parties, to take her temperature, as it were, and to receive a begrudged bit of the infinite wisdom a love-object appears to possess—how I should have behaved to her if I “had been a gentleman.” If I had been a gentleman: it was a revelatory slur. I was not a gentleman, and had no business putting on a suit each morning and setting off to persuade people wealthier than I to invest in the possibility of their own deaths. I had begun to stammer on the mollifying jargon: “in the extremely unlikely event” and “when you’re no longer in the picture” and “giving your loved ones financial continuity” and “let’s say you live forever, this is still a quality investment.”
My clients could sense that to me death was basically unthinkable, and they shied away from this hole in my sales pitch. Not being a gentleman, I could move to a new state and acquire a truck and heavy sanders and master the modest science of penetrating slow-drying sealers, steel-wool buffer pads, and alkyd varnishes. Keep a wet edge to avoid lap marks, and don’t paint yourself into a corner. Brush with the grain, apply your mind to the surface, and leave some ventilation if you want to breathe. Young men now don’t want to go into it, though the market for such services keeps expanding with gentrification. Everybody wants to be gentry. Toward the end, I had so many clamoring clients that retiring was the only way I could escape them, whereas selling insurance had always been, for me at least, an uphill push. People are more concerned about the floors they walk on than the loved ones they leave behind.
Another curious habit of mine can be observed only in December, when, in the mid-sized sea-view Cape Ann colonial the wife and I moved to thirty years ago, I run up on the flagpole five strands of Christmas lights, forming a tent-shape that at night strongly suggests the festoons on an invisible tree. I have rigged two extension cords to connect with an outside spotlight so the illusion can be controlled from an inside switch. Before heading up to the bedroom—“climbing the wooden hill,” my grandfather used to say—I switch it off. I could do it without a glance outdoors but in fact I move to the nearby window with my arm extended, my fingers on the switch, so that I can see the lights go out.
In one nanosecond, the drooping strands are burning bright, casting their image of a Christmas tree out into the world, and in the next, so quick that there seems no time at all while the signal travels along the wires from the switch, the colored, candle-flame-shaped bulbs—red, orange, green, blue, white—are doused. I keep imagining, since a pair of one-hundred-foot extension cords carry the electrons across the yard, through the bushes and frozen flower beds, that I will perceive a time lag, as with a lightning flash and subsequent thunder. But no; the connection between the lights and my hand on the switch appears instantaneous. The lights are there, imprinting the dark with holiday cheer, and then are not. I need to see this instant transformation occur. I recognize something unhealthy in my need, and often vow beforehand just to touch the switch and forgo peeking. But always I break my vow. It’s like trying to catch by its tail the elusive moment in which you fall asleep. I think that, subconsciously, I fear that if I don’t look the current will jam and reverse and it is I who will die, and not the lights.
The wife and I are proud of our homemade Christmas tree. We see it loom vividly from the beach below and, stupid as children, imagined we could even see it from Marblehead, eight miles away. But, though we took along our younger son’s telescope—abandoned now in his room, with all his toys and posters and science fiction and old Playboys—we couldn’t make out our festooned flagpole at all, amid so many other shore lights. Our faces hurt in the December wind; our eyes watered. What we, after much searching, thought might be our illusion of a tree was a blurred speck in which the five colors and the five strands had merged to a trembling gray as slippery in the telescope as a droplet of mercury.
My hoping to see the current snake through the extension cords possibly harks back to my fascination, as a boy, with pathways. I loved the idea of something irresistibly travelling along a set path—marbles rolling down wooden or plastic troughs, subway trains hurtling beneath city streets, water propelled by gravity through underground pipes, rivers implacably tumbling and oozing their way to the sea. Such phenomena gave me considerable joy to contemplate, and, with the lessening intensity that applies in my old age to all sensations, they still do. They appeal, perhaps, to a bone-deep laziness of mine, a death-wish. My favorite moment in the floor-finishing business used to be getting out the door and closing it, knowing that all that remained was for the polyurethane to dry, which would happen without me, in my absence.
Another full moment: Beginning in kindergarten, all through grade school and high school, I was in love with a classmate I almost never spoke to. Like marbles in parallel troughs we rolled down the years toward graduation. She was popular—a cheerleader, a st
ar hockey player, a singer of solos in school assemblies—with many boyfriends. She had big breasts on a lean body. My small-town grandparents had kept many country connections, and through them I was invited to an October barn dance five miles out of town. Somehow I got up my nerve and invited this local beauty to go with me, and she absorbed her surprise and surprisingly accepted. Perhaps, reigning so securely in the tightly built-up streets of our small town, she was amused by the idea of a barn dance. The barn was bigger than a church, and the fall’s fresh hay bales were stacked to the roof in the side mows. I had been to barn dances before, with my country cousins, and knew the calls. Bow to your partner. Bow to your corner. All hands left. Women like all that, it occurs to me this late in life—connections and combinations, contact. As my partner got the hang of it, her trim waist swung into my hand with the smart impact of a drum beat, a football catch, a lay-up off the reverberating backboard. I felt her moist sides and the soft insides beneath her rib cage, all taut in the spirit of the dance. Sexual intercourse for a female has always been hard for me to picture, but it must feel to be all about you. You, at the center of everything. She might have gone on a date with me before, if I had asked. But that would have spilled her, for me, into too much reality.
From a geographical standpoint, my life has been a slow crawl up the Eastern seaboard. The wife and I joke that our next move is to Canada, where we’ll get the benefits of universal health care. A third curious habit I’ve fallen into is, when I get into bed at night, having been fending off sleep with a magazine and waiting in vain for the wife to join me (she is deep into e-mail with our grandchildren and English costume dramas on public television), I bury my face in the side of the pillow, stretch out down to my toes in the hope of forestalling the foot cramps, and groan loudly three times—“Ooh! Ooh! Ooh-uh!”—as if the bliss of letting go at the end of the day were agony. At first it may have been an audible signal to the wife to switch off whatever electronic device was keeping her up (I’m deaf enough to be totally flummoxed by the British accents in those costume dramas) and to come join me in bed, but now it has become a ritual that I perform for an immaterial, invisible audience—my Maker, my grandfather would have said, with that little thin-lipped smile of his, peeping out from under his gray mustache.
As a child I would look at him and wonder how he could stay sane, being so close to his death. But actually, it turns out, Nature drips a little anesthetic into your veins each day that makes you think another day is as good as a year, and another year as long as a lifetime. The routines of living—the tooth-brushing and pill-taking, the flossing and the water glass, the matching of socks and the sorting of the laundry into the proper bureau drawers—wear you down. And the shaving.
I shave every morning. Athletes and movie actors leave a little bristle now, to intimidate rivals or attract cavewomen, but a man of my generation would sooner go onto the street in his underpants than unshaven. The very hot washcloth, held against the lids for dry eye. The lather, the brush, the razor. The right cheek, then the left, feeling for missed spots along the jaw line, and next the upper lip, with that middle dent called the (did you know this?) philtrum, and finally the fussy section, where most cuts occur, between the lower lip and the knob of the chin. My hand is still steady, and the triple blades they make these days last forever.
The first time I slept with the woman who got me nearly arrested in Passaic, I purred. That detail had fled my memory for years, but the other day, as I held somebody else’s cat on my lap, it came back to me. The lady and I were on a scratchy sofa, covered in that off-white Haitian cotton that was once fashionable in suburban décor, and when I had pumped her full of myself—my genetic surrogate, wrapped in protein—I lay on top of her, cooling off. “Listen to this,” I said, and laid my cheek against hers, which was still hot with the love-flush, and let her listen to the lightly rattling sound of animal contentment that my throat was producing. I hadn’t known I could do it, but I had felt the sound inside me, waiting for my happiness to overflow enough to produce it. She heard it. Her eyes, a few inches from mine, flared in astonishment, and she laughed. I had been a dutiful, religious child, but there and then I realized that the haven where life was rounded beyond the need for any further explanation had been opened up, and I experienced a peace that has never quite left me, clinging to me even now, in shreds.
Years before, before our affair, a group of us young marrieds had been sitting and smoking on a summer porch, and when she, wearing a tennis dress, crossed her legs, the flash of the underside of her thigh made my mouth parch—go as sharply dry as if a desert wind had howled in my skull. She was to me a marked woman from that moment on. And I to her, it may be, a marked man.
Until the wife leaves off her electronic entertainments and comes to bed, I have trouble going to sleep. Then, at three o’clock, when there’s not a car stirring in town, not even a drunken kid or a sated philanderer hurrying home on rubber tires, I wake and marvel at how motionlessly she sleeps. She has taken to wearing a knotted bandana to keep her hair from going wild, and the two ends of the knot stick up against the faint window light like little ears on top of her head. Her stillness is touching, as is the girlishly tidy order in which she keeps her dressing room and kitchen and would keep the entire house if I would let her. I can’t fall back into unconsciousness, like a water strider held aloft on the surface tension of her beautiful stillness.
I listen for the first car downtown to make a move toward dawn; I wait for the wife to wake and get out of bed and set the world in motion again. The hours flow forward in sluggish jerks. She says I sleep more than I am aware. But I am certainly aware of when, at last, she stirs: she irritably moves her arms, fighting her way out of some dream, and then in the strengthening window light pushes back the covers and exposes for a moment her rucked-up nightie. I see in silhouette her torso lift through a diagonal to a sitting position. Her bare feet pad around the bed, and, many mornings, now that I’m retired and nearly eighty, I fall back asleep for another hour. The world is being tended to, I can let go of it, it doesn’t need me.
The shaving mirror hangs in front of a window overlooking the sea. The sea is always full, flat as a floor. Or almost: there is a delicate planetary bulge in it, supporting a few shadowy freighters and cruise ships making their motionless way out of Boston Harbor. At night, the horizon springs a rim of lights—more, it seems, every year. Winking airplanes from the corners of the earth descend on a slant, a curved groove in the air, toward the unseen airport in East Boston. My life-prolonging pills cupped in my left hand, I lift the glass, its water sweetened by its brief wait on the marble sink-top. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.
Table of Contents
Cover
Books by John Updike
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
Morocco
Personal Archaeology
Free
The Walk with Elizanne
The Guardians
The Laughter of the Gods
Varieties of Religious Experience
Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage
Delicate Wives
The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe
German Lessons
The Road Home
My Father’s Tears
Kinderszenen
The Apparition
Blue Light
Outage
The Full Glass
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