by John Updike
The children off to school, she moved through the emptiness of the house exploring the realization that she was in love. Like the floorboards, the doorframes, the wallpaper, the fact seemed not so much arresting as necessary, not ornamental but functional in some way she must concentrate on perceiving. The snow on the roof had all melted; the dripping from the eaves had ceased, and a dry sunlight rested silently on the warm house, the bare street, the speckled rooftops of the town beyond the sunstruck, dirty windows. Valentines the children had brought home from school littered the kitchen counter. The calendar showed the shortest month, a rectangular candy box dotted with red holidays. Rafe’s office number was newly listed in the telephone book. She dialled it, less to reach him than to test the extent of the day’s emptiness. Alarmingly, the ringing stopped; he answered. “Rafe?” Her voice surprised her by coming out cracked.
“Hi, Betty,” he said. “How was Philly?”
“How did you know I went?”
“Everybody knows. You have no secrets from us.” He stopped joking, sensing that he was frightening her. “Lydia told me.” Evan had told her; Rob had told him at work. There was a see-through world of love; her bright house felt transparent. “Was it nice?” Rafe was asking.
“Lovely.” She felt she was defending herself. “The city seemed … tamer, somehow.”
“What did you do?”
“Walked around feeling nostalgic. Went to the museum up on its hill. Rob met me there and we had tea.”
“It does sound dear.” His voice, by itself, was richer and more relaxed than his physical presence, with its helpless, humiliated clown’s air. Her silence obliged him to say more. “Have you had time to look into the book?”
“I love it,” she said. “It’s so scholarly and calm. I’m reading it very slowly; I want it to last forever.”
“Forever seems long.”
“You want to see me?” Her voice, involuntarily, had thickened.
His answer was as simple and sharp as his green glance when she had exclaimed, “Shit.” “Sure,” he said.
“Where? This house feels so conspicuous.”
“Come on down here. People go in and out of the building all day long. There’s a hairdresser next to me.”
“Don’t you have any clients?”
“Not till this afternoon.”
“Do I dare?”
“I don’t know. Do you?” More gently, he added, “You don’t have to do anything. You just want to see me, right? Unfinished business, more or less.”
“Yes.”
Downtown, an eerie silence pressed through the movement of cars and people. Betty realized she was missing a winter sound from childhood: the song of car chains. Snow tires had suppressed it. Time suppressed everything, if you waited. Rafe’s building was a grim brick business “block” built a century ago, when this suburb of Hartford had appeared to have an independent future. An ambitious blazon of granite topped the façade, which might some day be considered historical. The stairs were linoleum and smelled like a rainy-day cloakroom. A whiff of singeing and shampoo came from the door next to his. He was waiting for her in his waiting room, and locked the door. On his sofa, a chill, narrow, and sticky couch of Naugahyde, beneath a wall of leatherbound laws, Rafe proved impotent. The sight of her naked seemed to stun him. Through his daze of embarrassment, he never stopped smiling. And she at him. He was beautiful, so lean and loosely knit, but needed to be nursed into knowing it. “What do you think the matter is?” he asked her.
“You’re frightened,” she told him. “I don’t blame you. I’m a lot to take on.”
He nodded, his eyes less green here in this locked, windowless anteroom. “We’re going to be a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“I guess my body is telling us there’s still time to back out. Want to?”
On top of one set of bound statutes, their uniform spines forming horizontal streaks like train windows streaming by, lay a different sort of book, a little paperback. In the dim room, where their nakedness was the brightest thing, she made out the title: Emma. She answered, “No.”
And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days—the open fields, the dripping eaves, the paintings, the law books—as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.
Deaths of Distant Friends
THOUGH I WAS BETWEEN MARRIAGES for several years, in a disarray that preoccupied me completely, other people continued to live and to die. Len, an old golf partner, overnight in the hospital for what they said was a routine examination, dropped dead in the lavatory, having just placed a telephone call to his hardware store saying he would be back behind the counter in the morning. He owned the store and could leave a clerk in charge on sunny afternoons. His swing was too quick, and he kept his weight back on his right foot, and the ball often squirted off to the left without getting into the air at all; but he sank some gorgeous putts in his day, and he always dressed with a nattiness that seemed to betoken high hopes for his game. In buttercup-yellow slacks, sky-blue turtleneck, and tangerine cashmere cardigan he would wave from the practice green as, having driven out from Boston through clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion, I would drag my cart across the asphalt parking lot, my cleats scraping, like a monster’s claws, at every step.
Though Len had known and liked Julia, the wife I had left, he never spoke of my personal condition or of the fact that I drove an hour out from Boston to meet him instead of, as formerly, ten minutes down the road. Golf in that interim was a haven; as soon as I stepped off the first tee in pursuit of my drive, I felt enclosed in a luminous wide sanctuary, safe from women, stricken children, solemn lawyers, disapproving old acquaintances—the entire offended social order. Golf had its own order, and its own love, as the three or four of us staggered and shouted our way toward each hole, laughing at misfortune and applauding the rare strokes of relative brilliance. Sometimes the summer sky would darken and a storm arise, and we would cluster in an abandoned equipment shed or beneath a tree that seemed less tall and vulnerable to lightning than its brothers. Our natural nervousness and our impatience at having the excitements of golf interrupted would in this space of shelter focus into an almost amorous heat—the breaths and sweats of middle-aged men packed together in the pattering rain like cattle in a boxcar. Len’s face bore a number of spots of actinic keratosis; he was going to have them surgically removed before they turned into skin cancer. Who would have thought that the lightning bolt of a coronary would fall across his plans and clean remove him from my tangled life? Never again (no two snowflakes or fingerprints, no two heartbeats traced on the oscilloscope, and no two golf swings are exactly alike) would I see his so hopefully addressed drive (“Hello dere, ball,” he would joke, going into his waggle and squat) squirt off low to the left in that unique way of his, and hear him exclaim in angry frustration (he was a born-again Baptist, and had developed a personal language of avoided curses), “Ya dirty ricka-fric!”
I drove out to Len’s funeral and tried to tell his son, “Your father was a great guy,” but the words fell flat in that cold, bare Baptist church. Len’s gaudy colors, his Christian effervescence, his hopeful and futile swing, our crowing back and forth, our fellowship within the artificial universe composed of variously resistant lengths and types of grass were all tints of life too delicate to capture, and had flown.
A time later, I read in the paper that Miss Amy Merrymount, ninety-one, had at last passed away, as a dry leaf passes into leaf mold. She had always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James as if he had just left the room. She possessed letters, folded and unfolded almost into pieces, from James to her parents, in which she was mentioned, not only as a little girl but as a young lady “coming into her ‘own,’ into a liveliness fully rounded.” She lived in a few rooms, crowded with antiques, of
a great inherited country house of which she was constrained to rent out the larger portion. Why she had never married was a mystery that sat upon her lightly in old age; the slender smooth beauty that sepia photographs remembered, the breeding and intelligence and (in a spiritual sense) ardor she still possessed must have intimidated as many suitors as these virtues attracted and must have given her, in her own eyes, in an age when the word “inviolate” still had force and renunciation a certain prestige, a value whose winged moment of squandering never quite arose. Also, she had a sardonic dryness to her voice and something restless and dismissive in her manner. She was a keen self-educator; she kept up with new developments in art and science, took up organic foods and political outrage when they became fashionable, and liked to have young people about her. When Julia and I moved to town with our babies and fresh faces, we became part of her tea circle, and in an atmosphere of tepid but mutual enchantment maintained acquaintance for twenty years.
Perhaps not so tepid: now I think Miss Merrymount loved us, or at least loved Julia, who always took on a courteous brightness, a soft daughterly shine, in those underheated and window-lit rooms crowded with spindly, feathery heirlooms once spread through the four floors of a Back Bay town house. In memory the glow of my former wife’s firm chin and exposed throat and shoulders merges with the ghostly smoothness of those old framed studio photos of the Merrymount sisters—there were three, of whom two died sadly young, as if bequeathing their allotment of years to the third, the survivor sitting with us in her gold-brocaded wing chair. Her face had become unforeseeably brown with age, and totally wrinkled, like an Indian’s, with something in her dark eyes of glittering Indian cruelty. “I found her rather disappointing,” she might dryly say of an absent mutual acquaintance, or, of one who had been quite dropped from her circle, “She wasn’t absolutely first-rate.”
The search for the first-rate had been a pastime of her generation. I cannot think, now, of whom she utterly approved, except Father Daniel Berrigan and Sir Kenneth Clark. She saw them both on television. Her eyes with their opaque glitter were failing, and for her cherished afternoons of reading (while the light died outside her windows and a little fire of birch logs danced in the brass-skirted fireplace) were substituted scheduled hours tuned in to educational radio and television. In those last years, Julia would go and read to her—Austen, Middlemarch, Joan Didion, some Proust and Mauriac in French, when Miss Merrymount decided that Julia’s accent passed muster. Julia would practice a little on me, and, watching her lips push forward and go small and tense around the French sounds like the lips of an African mask of ivory, I almost fell in love with her again. Affection between women is a touching, painful, exciting thing for a man, and in my vision of it—tea yielding to sherry in those cluttered rooms where twilight thickened until the white pages being slowly turned and the patient melody of Julia’s voice were the sole signs of life—love was what was happening between this gradually dying old lady and my wife, who had gradually become middle-aged, our children grown into absent adults, her voice nowhere else hearkened to as it was here. No doubt there were confidences, too, between the pages. Julia always returned from Miss Merrymount’s, to make my late dinner, looking younger and even blithe, somehow emboldened.
In that awkward postmarital phase when old friends still feel obliged to extend invitations one doesn’t yet have the presence of mind to decline, I found myself at a large gathering at which Miss Merrymount was present. She was now quite blind and invariably accompanied by a young person, a round-faced girl hired as companion and guide. The fragile old lady, displayed like peacock feathers under a glass bell, had been established in a wing chair in a corner of the room beyond the punch bowl. At my approach, she sensed a body coming near and held out her withered hand, but when she heard my voice her hand dropped. “You have done a dreadful thing,” she said, all on one long intake of breath. Her face turned away, showing her hawk-nosed profile, as though I had offended her sight. The face of her young companion, round as a radar dish, registered slight shock; but I smiled, in truth not displeased. There is a relief at judgment, even adverse. It is good to think that somewhere a seismograph records our quakes and slippages. I imagine Miss Merrymount’s death, not too many months after this, as a final, serenely flat line on the hospital monitor attached to her. Something sardonic in that flat line, too—of unviolated rectitude, of magnificent patience with a world that for over ninety years failed to prove itself other than disappointing. By this time, Julia and I were at last divorced.
Everything of the abandoned home is lost, of course—the paintings on the walls, the way shadows and light contend in this or that corner, the gracious burst of evening warmth from the radiators. The pets. Canute was a male golden retriever we had acquired as a puppy when the children were still a tumbling, pre-teen pack. Endlessly amiable, as his breed tends to be, he suffered all, including castration, as if life were a steady hail of blessings. Curiously, not long before he died, my youngest child, who sings in a female punk group that has just started up, brought Canute to the house where now I live with Lisa as my wife. He sniffed around politely and expressed with only a worried angle of his ears the wonder of his old master reconstituted in this strange-smelling home; then he collapsed with a heavy sigh onto the kitchen floor. He looked fat and seemed lethargic. My daughter, whose hair is cut short and dyed mauve in patches, said that the dog roamed at night and got into the neighbors’ garbage, and even into one neighbor’s horse feed. This sounded like mismanagement to me. Julia’s new boy friend is a middle-aged former Dartmouth quarterback, a golf and tennis and backpack freak, and she is hardly ever home, so busy is she keeping up with him and trying to learn new games. The house and lawn are neglected; the children drift in and out with their friends and once in a while clean out the rotten food in the refrigerator. Lisa, sensing my suppressed emotions, said something tactful and bent down to scratch Canute behind one ear. Since the ear was infected and sensitive, he feebly snapped at her, then thumped the kitchen floor with his tail, in apology.
Like me when snubbed by Miss Merrymount, my wife seemed more pleased than not, encountering a touch of resistance, her position in the world as it were confirmed. She discussed dog antibiotics with my daughter, and at a glance one could not have been sure who was the older, though it was clear who had the odder hair. It is true, as the cliché runs, that Lisa is young enough to be my daughter. But now that I am fifty every female under thirty-five is young enough to be my daughter. Most of the people in the world are young enough to be my daughter.
A few days after his visit, Canute disappeared, and a few days later he was found far out on the marshes near my old house, his body bloated. The dog officer’s diagnosis was a heart attack. Can that happen, I wondered, to four-footed creatures? The thunderbolt had hit my former pet by moonlight, his heart full of marshy joy and his stomach fat with garbage, and he had lain for days with ruffling fur while the tides went in and out. The image makes me happy, like the sight of a sail popping full of wind and tugging its boat swiftly out from shore. In truth—how terrible to acknowledge—all three of these deaths make me happy, in a way. Witnesses to my disgrace are being removed. The world is growing lighter. Eventually there will be none to remember me as I was in those embarrassing, disarrayed years when I scuttled without a shell, between houses and wives, a snake between skins, a monster of selfishness, my grotesque needs naked and pink, my social presence beggarly and vulnerable. The deaths of others carry us off bit by bit, until there will be nothing left; and this, too, will be, in a way, a mercy.
Pygmalion
WHAT HE LIKED about his first wife was her gift of mimicry; after a party, theirs or another couple’s, she would vivify for him what they had seen, the faces, the voices, twisting her pretty mouth into small contortions that brought back, for a dazzling instant, the presence of an absent acquaintance. “Well, if I reawy—how does Gwen talk?—if I re-awwy cared about conserwation—” And he, the husband, would laugh and laug
h, even though Gwen was secretly his mistress and would become his second wife. What he liked about her was her liveliness in bed, and what he disliked about his first wife was the way she would ask to have her back rubbed and then, under his laboring hands, night after night, fall asleep.
For the first years of the new marriage, after he and Gwen had returned from a party, he would wait, unconsciously, for the imitations, the recapitulation, to begin. He would even prompt: “What did you make of our hostess’s brother?”
“Oh,” Gwen would simply say, “he seemed very pleasant.” Sensing with feminine intuition that he expected more, she might add, “Harmless. Maybe a little stuffy.” Her eyes flashed as she heard in his expectant silence an unvoiced demand, and with that touching, childlike impediment of hers she blurted out, “What are you reawy after?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing. It’s just—Marguerite met him once a few years ago and she was struck by what a pompous nitwit he was. That way he has of sucking his pipestem and ending every statement with ‘Do you follow me?’ ”
“I thought he was perfectly pleasant,” Gwen said frostily, and turned her back to remove her silvery, snug party dress. As she wriggled it down over her hips she turned her head and defiantly added, “He had a lot to say about tax shelters.”
“I bet he did,” Pygmalion scoffed feebly, numbed by the sight of his wife frontally advancing, nude, toward him as he lay on their marital bed. “It’s awfully late,” he warned her.
“Oh, come on,” she said, the lights out.
The first imitation Gwen did was of Marguerite’s second husband, Marvin; they had all unexpectedly met at a Save the Whales benefit ball, to which invitations had been sent out indiscriminately. “Oh-ho-ho,” she boomed in the privacy of their bedroom afterwards, “so you’re my noble predecessor!” In an aside she added, “Noble, my ass. He hates you so much you turned him on.”