by John Updike
“I did?” he said. “I thought he was perfectly pleasant, in what could have been an awkward encounter.”
“Yes, indeedy,” she agreed, imitating hearty Marvin, and for a dazzling second she allowed the man’s slightly glassy and slack expression of forced benignity to invade her own usually petite and rounded features. “Nothing awkward about us, ho-ho,” she went on, encouraged by her husband’s laughter. “And tell me, old chap, why is it your child-support check is never on time anymore?”
He laughed and laughed, entranced to see his bride arrive at what he conceived to be a proper womanliness—a plastic, alert sensitivity to the human environment, a susceptible responsiveness tugged this way and that by the currents of Nature herself. He could not know the world, was his fear, unless a woman translated it for him. Now, when they returned from a gathering, and he asked what she had made of so-and-so, Gwen would stand in her underwear and consider, as if onstage. “We-hell, my dear,” she would announce in sudden, fluting parody, “if it weren’t for Portugal there rally wouldn’t be a bearable country left in Europe!”
“Oh, come on,” he would protest, delighted at the way her pretty features distorted themselves into an uncanny, snobbish horsiness.
“How did she do it?” Gwen would ask, as if professionally intent. “Something with the chin, sort of rolling it from side to side without unclenching the teeth.”
“You’ve got it!” he applauded.
“Of course you knoaow,” she went on in the assumed voice, “there used to be Greece, but now all these dreadful Arabs …”
“Oh, yes, yes,” he said, his face smarting from laughing so hard, so proudly. She had become perfect for him.
In bed she pointed out, “It’s awfully late.”
“Want a back rub?”
“Mmmm. That would be reawy nice.” As his left hand labored on the smooth, warm, pliable surface, his wife—that small something in her that was all her own—sank out of reach; night after night, she fell asleep.
More Stately Mansions
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
—Oliver Wendell Holmes,
“The Chambered Nautilus”
ONE OF MY STUDENTS the other day brought into class a nautilus shell that had been sliced down the middle to make a souvenir from Hawaii. That’s how far some of these kids’ parents get on vacation, though from the look of the city (Mather, Massachusetts; population 47,000 and falling) you wouldn’t think there was any money in town at all.
I held the souvenir in my hand, marvelling at the mathematics of it—the perfect logarithmic spiral and the parade of increasing chambers, each sealed with a translucent, curved septum. I held the shell up to show the class. “What the poem doesn’t tell you,” I told them, “is that the nautilus is a nasty, hungry blob that uses its outgrown chambers as propulsion tanks to maneuver up and down as it chases its prey. It’s a killer.”
I sounded sore; the students stared, those that had been listening. They know your insides better than you do, often. The shell had reminded me of Karen. Karen Owens, former wife of the late Alan. She had loved Nature—its fervent little intricacies, all its pretty little survival kits and sexy signallings. There was a sheen to the white-and-pale-orange nacre, here in the staring light of the tall classroom windows, that was hers. As I diagrammed on the blackboard the spiral, and some up and down arrows, and the dainty siphuncle whereby the nautilus performs its predatory hydrostatic magic, I was remembering how she, to arouse me in the brightness of the big spare bedroom at the back of her house, would softly drag her pale-orange hair and her small white breasts across my penis.
Arousal wasn’t always instant; I would be nervous, sweaty, guilty, stealing time from the lunch hour or even—so urgent did it all seem—ducking out of the school in a free period (classes run fifty minutes in our system) to drive across town to spend twenty minutes with her and then drive the fifteen minutes back again, screeching that old Falcon Monica’s parents had given us into the high-school parking lot under the eyes of the kids loafing and sneaking cigarettes out by the bike racks. They may have wondered, but teachers come and go; kids have no idea what it takes or doesn’t take to keep the world running, and though studying us is one of their main ways of using up energy, they can’t really believe the abyss that adult life is: that what they dream, we do. They couldn’t know, no matter what their lavatory walls said, that Karen’s musk was really on my fingertips and face and that behind my fly lurked a pearly ache of satisfaction.
She and Alan lived in the Elm Hill section, where the mill-owners and their managers had built big Victorian clapboard houses. The high school, new in 1950, had been laid out on an old farm on the other side of the river. With less than the whole dying downtown between us, we might have had time to share a cigarette afterwards or talk, so that I might have come to understand better what our affair meant from her side, what she was getting out of it and where she saw it going. My father had worked in those empty mills. He had me late in life and had coughed and drunk himself to death by the time I was twenty, and a kind of rage at the mills and him and all of Mather would come over me when, in a panic to be back to my next class, I would get stuck in the overshadowed streets down in the factory district. The city fathers had made them all one-way in some hopeless redevelopment scheme.
My grandfather came over from Italy to help build those mills, brick by brick. My oldest brother is a former auto mechanic who now owns a one-third share in a parts-and-supplies store and never touches a tool except to sell it. Our middle brother sells real estate. They had me set to become a Boston doctor, but with the lint’s getting my father’s lungs so early I was lucky to get through college. I picked up the education credits and an easy master’s and now teach general science to ninth- and tenth-graders. A while ago I was made assistant principal, which means two classes a day less and afternoons in the office. I had hoped originally to get out of Mather, but here is where our connections were—my father’s old foreman was on the school board when they hired me—so here I still am. Fall is our best season, and in recent years some high-tech has overflowed Route 128 and come into the local economy, giving it a shot in the arm. It needs it. But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
Alan’s father, old Jake Owens, had owned Pilgrim, one of the smaller mills and about the last along the river to close down. That was the late Forties, long after the bigger outfits had all sold their machinery south. Some in town said Jake showed a touching loyalty to Mather and its workers; others said the Owenses never had had much head for business. They were drinking and shooting men, with a notion of themselves as squires, at home in their little piece of industrial valley with its country club, its Owens Avenue, its hunting and skiing an hour or two north in New Hampshire. When his father died in the mid-Sixties, Alan came home from the West Coast with his Stanford law degree and his red-haired wife.
Karen was from Santa Barbara, thirtyish, pretty, but parched somehow. All that Pacific sun was beginning to produce crow’s-feet and little creases fanning out from her quick, maybe too quick, smile. She was small, with a tight cute figure that had been on a lot of beaches. She had majored in psychology and had a California teacher’s certificate and put her name in at the high-school office as a substitute. That was where I first saw her, striding along our noisy halls, her hair bouncing between her shoulder blades. She was no taller than many of the girls but different from them, a different animal, with the whippy body and seasoned voice of a woman.
When we did talk, Karen and I, it was out in the open, on opposite sides of the fence, about the war. The
re was a condescending certainty about her pacifism that infuriated me, and a casual, bright edge of militance that possibly frightened me. I can’t imagine now why I imagined then that the U.S.A. couldn’t take care of itself. I felt so damn motherly toward, of all people, LBJ. He looked so hangdog, even if he was a bully.
“Why do you talk of people being for the war?” I would ask Karen in the teachers’ room, amid the cigarette smoke and between-the-acts euphoria of teachers offstage for fifty minutes. “It puts you people in such a smug no-lose position, being not for the war. Nobody’s for any war, in the abstract; it’s just sometimes judged to be the least of available evils.”
“When is it the least?” she asked. “Tell me, Frank.” She had a tense way of intertwining her crossed legs with the legs of the straight wooden school chair so that her kneecaps jutted out, rimmed in white. This was the heyday of the mini-skirt; female underpants, sure to be seen, had sprouted patterns of flowers. When she crossed her legs like that, her skirt slid up to reveal an oval vaccination scar her childhood doctor had never thought would show. There were a number of awkward, likable things about Karen in spite of the smug politics: she smoked a lot, and her teeth were stained and slightly crooked, in an era of universal orthodontia. Her hands had the rising blue veins of middle age, and a tremor. I loved the expensive clothes that what with the Owens money she couldn’t help but wear. Though her sweaters were cashmere, they always looked tugged slightly awry, so that a background of haste and distress seemed to lie invitingly behind her smooth public pose.
“Maybe you don’t realize the kind of town you’ve moved to,” I told her. “The VFW is where we have our Saturday dances. Our kids aren’t pouring pig blood into draft-board files. Their grandparents were damn glad to get here, and when their country asks them to go fight, they go. They’re scared, but they go.”
“Why does that make it right?” Karen asked gently. “Explain it to me.” The old psychology major. She was giving up the debate and babying me, as a kind of crazy man.
Her hair in its long brushed flower-child fall was not exactly either orange or red, it was the deep flesh color of a whelk shell’s lip; and the more you looked, the more freckles she had. She was giving me an out, of sorts—a chance to shift out of this angry gear that discussion of the war always shoved me into. LBJ had been a schoolteacher, as I was now, and it seemed to me that the entire class, from coast to coast, just wasn’t listening. And he was trying to be so good, so suffering-on-our-behalf—our crooked Christ from Texas.
“It just does,” I told Karen, in my very lameness accepting her offer, surrendering. “I love these kids.” This was a lie. “I grew up just like them.” This was half a lie; I had been much the youngest child, pampered by my brothers, prepared for something better, out of Mather. “They give us great football teams.” This was the truth.
The peace movement in Mather amounted to a few candle-bearing parades led by the local clergy, the same clergymen who would invoke the blessings on Memorial Day before the twenty-one-gun salute shattered the peace of the cemetery. When the first local boy died in Vietnam, he got a new elementary school named after him. When the second died, they took a street intersection in his part of town, called it a square, and named it after him. For the third and the fourth, there wasn’t even an intersection.
The Owenses’ house on the hill had a big living room overlooking the city through tall, proprietorial windows. It had walnut wainscoting and a maze of ball-and-stick woodwork above the entranceways; the room could easily hold meetings of fifty or sixty, and did. At Karen’s invitation, black men imported from Roxbury spoke here, and white women imported from Cambridge. Civil rights and feminism and the perfidy of the Pentagon and the scheming, polluting corporations had become one big all-purpose issue, and the Owenses had become the local chieftains of discontent, at least in the little circle Monica and I were drawn into. CMC, we called ourselves: Concerned Mather Citizens.
Monica and I had both been raised Catholic. I let it go in about my sophomore year of college, when my father died, but Monica kept it up until she went on the Pill. Our three children had been born in the first four years of our marriage. At first she attended Mass, though she couldn’t take Communion; then she stopped even that. I was sorry to see it—it had been a part of her I had understood—and to hear her talk about the Church with such bitterness. That’s how women can be, mulling something over and getting madder and madder about it, all in secret, and then making a sudden quantum jump: revolutionaries. My impression was that Karen had courted Monica at the teachers’ Christmas party, asking her to come over during the holidays and help address circulars. Monica jumped right in. She stopped getting perms and painting her fingernails. She pulled her springy black hair back into a ponytail and wore sneakers and jeans not only around the house but out to shop. She stopped struggling against her weight. Monica bloomed, I suppose; she had been a jock at Mather High (field hockey, girls’ basketball) and a cheerleader, and now, fifteen years later and fifteen pounds heavier, that old girlish push, that egging-on fierceness, had come back. I didn’t much like it but wasn’t consulted. Somehow in all this I had become the oppressor, part of “the system,” and the three children we had “given” each other, as they used to say, had been some kind of dirty trick. She said the Pill was carcinogenic and I should get a vasectomy. I told her to go get her tubes tied if she was into mutilation and she said that was what Karen Owens had advised. I asked angrily, hungrily, if Karen Owens’s tubes were tied and Monica replied with a certain complacence that, no, that wasn’t the reason Karen and Alan didn’t have children; she knew that much, and knew I’d be interested. I ignored the innuendo, excited to think of Karen in this way and alarmed by Monica’s tone. It was one thing to stop going to Mass—after all, the Church had betrayed us, taking away Latin and Saint Christopher and fish on Friday—but this was beginning to feel evil.
Still, I went to the meetings with her, across town through the factory district and up Elm Hill. Support the Blacks, Stop the War, Save Ecology—Karen often sat up beside the speaker, entwining her legs with the chair legs so her kneecaps made white squares and, in a kind of V for Victory, resting the tips of her middle and index fingers at the corners of her lips, as if enjoining herself not to say too much. When she did talk, she would keep tucking her hair behind her ears, a gesture I came later to associate with our lovemaking. Sometimes she laughed, showing her engagingly imperfect teeth. She hadn’t been born rich, I deduced.
Alan would sit in one of the back rows of the chairs they had assembled, looking surly and superior, already by that time of evening stupid with booze but backing her up in his supercilious deep voice when she needed it. As a lawyer in town he had already taken on enough fair-housing and draft-resistance cases to hurt his practice with the people who could pay. It was hard to know how unhappy this made him; it was hard to decipher what he saw, slumped down in the back, watching with sleepy eyes. He had great long lashes, and hardly any eyebrows, and a high, balding forehead sunburned in summer.
I disliked him. He took up my oxygen when he was in the room. He was tall, tall as the rich get, plants with no weeds around them. When he looked down at me, it wasn’t as if he didn’t see me, he saw me too well; his eyes—with their lashes like an ostrich’s and a yellowish cast to the whites—flicked through and away, having taken it all in and been instantly bored. Whatever had happened to him out there on the West Coast, it had left him wise in a way that made the world no longer very useful to him. Yet he also had Karen, and this Victorian mansion, and golf clubs and shotguns and tennis presses in the closets, and his father’s deer heads in the library, and a name in the town that would still be worth something when this war and its protest had blown over.
In fairness, Alan could be entertaining, if he hadn’t drunk too much. After the meetings a favored few of us would stay to tidy up, and Alan might get out his banjo and play. As a teenager, off at private schools since he was eleven, he had been a bluegrass fr
eak and had taught himself this lonely music, fashionable then. When he got going, cracking his voice and yowling, I would see green hills, and a lone hawk soaring, and the mouths of coal mines, and feel so patriotic that tears would sting my corneas; all the lovely country that had been in America would come rushing back, as it was before we filled the land too full. Tipping back his head to keen the hillbilly chorus, Alan exposed his skinny throat as if to be cut.
While Monica and I would sit enthralled, joining in on the choruses, Karen would keep moving about, picking up the glasses and ashtrays, her determined manner and small set smile implying that this was an act Alan saved for company. First it had been her turn to howl; now it was his. When his repertoire ran out, she took over again, organizing word games, or exercises to enhance our perceptions. She had brought these games and exercises from California. One Saturday night, I remember, all the women there hid behind a partition of blankets and extended one hand for the men to identify, and to my embarrassment I recognized Karen’s, its blue veins, and couldn’t find Monica’s—it was thicker and darker than it should have been, with a hairier wrist.
In many ways I did not recognize my wife. Her raised consciousness licensed her to drink too much, to stay up too late. She never wanted to go home. The Owenses, the times, had corrupted her. However my own heart was wandering, I wanted to have her at home, raising the children, keeping order against the day when all this disturbance, this reaching beyond ourselves, blew over. I had been attracted to what was placid in Monica, the touch of heaviness already there when she was seventeen, her young legs glossy and chunky in the white cheerleader socks. She had an athlete’s slow heartbeat and fell asleep early. When I came to sleep with Karen, in the bright back bedroom of her big ornate house, I had trouble accepting the twittery fervor she brought to acts that with Monica possessed a certain solemn weight, as of something yielded. Monica had once confessed to me that she held back out of dread of losing her identity in the sex act; Karen seemed to be pushing toward just such a loss. Her quick, dry lips, kissing mine for the first time in the hazardous privacy of the teachers’ room, took their style (it crossed my mind) from the adolescents thundering all around us. I couldn’t be worth, surely, quite such an agitation of lips and tongue, quite so hard a hug from this slender, overheated person, whose heart I could feel tripping against my own through my coat and shirt and tie, and the wool of her sweater, and the twin cages of our ribs. Even in this moment of first surrender I observed that the wool was cashmere. It crossed my mind that she had mistaken me for a stud, an obediently erect conscript from the working class. I was a little repelled by the something schooled in her embrace—something pre-readied and too good to be true. But in time I accepted this as simply her metabolism, her natural way. She was love-starved. So was I.