by John Updike
Days when she didn’t substitute became our days, set up with sweaty phone calls from the pay phone outside the cafeteria, which the kids had usually clogged with gum or clumsy slugs. The Owenses’ house backed up to some acres of woods that they owned. Bird-chirp and pine-scent would sift through her windows. The abundant light was almost pornographic; I was used to the uxorious dark. She kept an aquarium and a terrarium back here, to take advantage of the sun, and wildlife posters all around: we were wildlife, naked and endangered. The bestial efficiency of our encounters had to do for tenderness. She knew to the minute when I would arrive and was ready, clothes off and the phone off the hook. She knew to the minute when I must go. When one of my free periods backed onto the lunch hour, and we had more time, we wasted it in bickering. When LBJ announced he would not run, I told her this would bring in Nixon, and hoped she was happy. I taunted her with this while the happiness of our lovemaking was still in her eyes. She had light-hazel eyes that darkened when we made love. She had a way of looking me over, of examining me as reverently as she did the toad and garter snake in her terrarium, flicking back her hair to get a closer look, or to take me into her mouth. I, with my foreskin and sexual hunger and blue-collar resentments, was simply life to her, a kind of treasure.
And she to me? Heaven, of a sort. When I sneaked in the back, past the plastic trash cans smelling of Alan’s empties, Karen would be standing at the head of the back stairs like a bright, torn piece of sky. Up close, her body was a star map, her shoulders and shins crowded with freckles. Even those patches of skin shaped like the pieces of a bathing suit revealed to inspection a dark dot or two where the sun had somehow pricked.
“You really ought to go, darling,” she would soon say. More practiced than I (I hated to think this, but it must have been the case), Karen was the policeman of our affair. I began to feel disciplined, and to resent it.
At school, when she came to substitute, it drove me wild to see her in the halls, her red hair bouncing on her back, her whippy little body full of our secrets. The Movement was in the air even here now; our young Poles and Portuguese were no longer willing to be drafted unquestioningly, and the classes in government and history, even in general science, had become battlefields. At Columbia and in Paris that spring, students were rioting. Whole masses of rooted presumption were being torn up around me, but I no longer cared. I felt so foolishly proud, linking myself with Karen in those minutes between classes, in the massive shuffle smelling of perfume and chewing gum and bodily warmth.
She warned me: “I love your touch, but, Frank, you mustn’t touch me in public.”
“When did I?”
“Just now. In the hall.” We were in the teachers’ room. She had lit a cigarette. She seemed extra nervous, indignant.
“I wasn’t aware,” I told her. “I’m sure nobody noticed.”
“Don’t be stupid. The children notice everything.”
It was true. I had seen our names pencilled together, with the correct verb, on a lavatory wall. “You care?”
“Of course I care. So should you. We could both be hurt.”
“By whom? The school board? The American Legion? I thought the revolution was on and there was naked dancing in the streets. I’m all for it; watch.”
“Frank. Someone could come in that door any second.”
“We used to neck in here like mad.”
“That was before we had our days.”
“Our half-hours. I’m sick of rushing back to the table of elements in a post-coital coma.”
“You are?”
The fear in her face insulted me. “Yes,” I told her, “and I’m sick of the hypocrisy. I’m sick of insomnia. I can’t sleep anymore, I want you beside me. Only you. I thrash around, I take Sominex. Sometimes I cry, for a change of pace.”
She tucked her hair behind her ears. Her face looked narrow, its skin tight at the sides of her eyes, a glaze across the tiny wrinkles. “Has Monica noticed?”
“No, she slumbers on. Nothing wakes her up. Why? Has Alan noticed any difference in you?”
“No, and I don’t want him to.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“Need you ask?” The sarcasm made her face look quite evil. There was a set of smug assumptions behind it that I hated.
My voice got loud. “You bet your sweet ass I need to ask.” I repeated, “Why the hell not?”
“Shh. He’s my husband, that’s why.”
“That seems simplistic. And rather reactionary, if I may say so.”
Betty Kurowski, first-year algebra and business math, opened the door, looked at our faces, and said, “Oh. Well, I’ll go smoke in the girls’ lavatory.” As she was closing the door we both begged her to come back.
“We were just arguing about Vietnam,” Karen told her. “Frank wants to bomb South China now.”
For summer employment, Monica and I were counselors at a day camp in New Hampshire, about forty minutes’ drive from Mather. As if this were not separation enough, Karen and Alan spent a month in Santa Barbara visiting her family. I had been wrong about her not being rich; the parents lived in a million-dollar house near the beach. She would wear a bikini all day long. At night, while Monica slept, I masturbated like a kid. Even during the day, amid the plockety-pock of table tennis and the shouts of horseplay from our little brown lake, I could not stop thinking of Karen—her freckled flesh, the sunlight in her room, the way she fed on me with her eyes and mouth. I was weary of children, including my own, yet part of my fantasy was that I would give her a child. A child with her hazel eyes and my black hair: an elf child that would never need to have its diapers changed.
In August the Owenses returned from their month away, and Monica telephoned them the first night, as if she had been missing them, too. She and Karen arranged to have Karen come up to the camp one day to lead a nature walk. She fixed up a bottle with a jeweller’s loupe so that the children could peer into a sample of pond water and see the frenzy of minute life there—little transparent ovals and cylinders bumping around like Dodg’em cars, trying to find something to eat without being eaten. She was honey-colored from the California sun, and her hair had been bleached to the pallor of an orange-juice stain on a tablecloth, but her teeth were still slightly crooked, and her knees bony and intense.
In the aftermath of this visit, this glimpse of her functioning with such sweet earnestness as a teacher, I wrote her on our camp stationery, which was beige, with a green letterhead spelling out the camp name in little birch logs. I came across some stolen sheets of it a few years ago, when we changed houses, and had to laugh. My letter recounted details of our lovemaking and proposed that we break out of our marriages and get married to each other. More a violent dream than a proposal: the surge of writing, in a corner of the picnic pavilion while Monica was out on the lake with a canoeing class, carried me into it, and the fact that I was out of Mather, writing a letter back into it. It was what they call now an out-of-body experience. I could see myself, very small, back in Mather, and I was easy to manipulate, into a life of love with this other doll. I held off mailing it for a day. But on rereading, the words seemed frightening but true, like the cruel facts of pond life.
Once that blue mailbox gathering dust at the side of that three-lane New Hampshire highway had closed its iron mouth, I sensed that I had overstepped. There were limits, and proprieties, like the glass walls of her terrarium, within which Karen had given me freedom. Outside those limits there was danger, and death.
Not that there was much danger of Alan’s intercepting the letter. I knew the mail arrived at the Owenses’ house around eleven, when he would be at his office or still in bed from the night before. Alcohol was worming deeper and deeper into his system and making it hard for him to sleep at night. He and I both, for different reasons, were feeling our lives turn upside down.
Days of silence went by. At first I was relieved. But when camp ended, and we were in town all day as well as evenings, I had expected some message fr
om Karen, at least a social gesture toward the two of us. Late-summer muddle—New England squeezing the last drops of fun out of its few warm months—was all around us, and school would soon begin again. In Chicago, the Democrats had nominated Humphrey while Johnson hid in the White House. The police were clobbering protesters while people like me cheered. That Thursday morning a call from Karen at last came through; she and Alan were having some of the CMC over to watch the riots and Humphrey’s acceptance on television. The convention went on and on, everything sacred unravelling before our eyes, and we kept pace with brandy and beer and white wine. Instead of junk-food snacks, Karen served little saucers of health foods—raisins, sesame and sunflower seeds, even macadamia nuts, which nobody else could afford. Alan concentrated on the bourbon, and somehow around eleven I was delegated to go downtown and get him another bottle. The package stores were closed, but he was sure I could wangle a fifth from the bartender’s at Rudy’s. Rudy’s was the main dive in the factory district; my father had been a regular. I resented the errand—I had resented my father’s long evenings at Rudy’s—but performed it, counting out Alan his change to the penny. He said I could have kept the change. When he saw, foggy as he was, how badly this went over, he tried to cover up with jokes about connections. He told me, “It must be great, Frank, to have connections. My problem in town is, I don’t have the connections.” He meant this to be a joke: the Owenses were well connected and my people were nobodies. But in fact it was true: Mather, sluggish as it was, changed a bit from year to year, and had slipped away from the Owenses.
Around midnight the other concerned citizens began to drift home. Around one-thirty the four of us were left sitting at the four sides of the antique kitchen table, a cherrywood drop-leaf, made in Mather in the 1840s by the Shaker community that had existed here. The night was hot, with a last-gasp heat; along the coast, sea breezes lighten the summer, but in our river valley it hangs heavy until the maples start to turn. Crickets were singing outside the screen door. I had had insomnia the night before, and Monica had to get up early to take our son Tommy to the orthodontist, but we didn’t make a move to go.
“So where are we?” Alan abruptly asked. He seemed to be focussed on Karen, across the table from him. Monica and I sat on his either side.
“Here and there,” Monica said, giggling. She had had plenty to drink and was more mischievous, more wakeful, than I was used to seeing her. Her liberated Catholic hair had a bushy outward thrust that was the coming look—tough, cheerful, ethnic. Karen’s look, the long ironed hair, the nervous vulnerability, belonged to a fading past.
“Let’s talk turkey,” Alan persisted through his blur, his long lashes blinking, his rather pretty mouth fixed helplessly in a sneer.
“Oh, what a good idea!” Monica said, glancing at me to see how I was taking all this.
“Alan, explain what you mean,” Karen said. Her voice with children sometimes had a wheedling tone. She was the least drunk of us all, and in a flash of alcoholic illumination I saw her as pedantic. He was being naughty and she was set to baby him, Socratically, as she had babied me about the kids going off to fight. Using her psychology. “Don’t hide behind your liquor,” she went on after Alan. “Explain what you mean.” Some old grievance between them seemed to be surfacing while the crickets droned.
It appeared to me he didn’t mean very much; he was just drunkenly making conversation. I was interested in the tremor of Karen’s stringy freckled hands as she maneuvered a cigarette to her mouth and was therefore slow to notice Monica’s plump hand on top of Alan’s. Accustomed to seeing her comfort children at the camp, I dismissed it as more Alan-babying, from his other side.
“He’s a Virgo,” Karen told Monica, smiling now that her cigarette was lit. “Virgos are so withholding.”
He looked at his wife with his fishy, starry, stunned eyes and I saw that he loathed the brightness that I loved. Much as I disliked him, my thought was that he must have reasons. He opened his mouth to speak and she prompted “Yes?” too eagerly; her sharp smile chased him back into his shell.
He hunched lower over the table, and Hubert Humphrey’s high-pitched old-womanish voice came out of his mouth. “Let’s put America back on track,” Alan said, imitating the acceptance speech we had heard, interspersed with shots of the violence outside. “Let’s not talk about the green belt.” Karen’s latest project had been to arouse community interest in creating a green belt around our tired little city. “Let’s talk about—”
“Below the belt,” Monica finished for him, and she and I laughed. Across the table from me she looked enlarged, her hair puffed out and her face broadening under its genial film of alcohol. Her mother was fat, with a distinct mustache, but I had never thought Monica would grow to resemble her. Now that she had, I didn’t mind; I felt she would take care of me, even though I had recently flung into the mailbox a letter offering to leave her. Her glances toward me were like holes in the haze that the Owenses were generating, working something out between themselves. She and I and, in his way, Alan were in tune with the crickets and the occasional swish of cars passing, but our camaraderie was weakened by something resistant in Karen and by our common fatigue; watching too much television, we, too, had become staticky and unreal. We kissed one another good night then, Karen and I primly—what a dry little mouth she gave me!—and Alan and Monica lingeringly, like a pair of sentimental drunks. Out on his porch, he did not want to let go of Monica’s hand. A warm drizzle had begun. My wife fell asleep in the car beside me as the windshield wipers swept away the speckles of rain. Downtown was deserted, the great empty factories looking majestic and benevolent, asleep. We lived across the river, in a development a mile beyond the high school.
That was our last evening with the Owenses. Next morning, Karen called the house when she knew Monica would be off with Tommy. “I told him,” she told me.
“You did?” A great numbness hit my heart and merged with my hangover. “But why?” I had answered on the upstairs phone and could see on the curving street below, under the development saplings, a few yellow leaves, the first fallen, lying in spots of damp from last night’s rain.
Karen’s voice, husky from lack of sleep, picked its way carefully, as if spelling out things to a child. “Didn’t you understand what Alan”—I hated the slightly strengthened way she pronounced the sacred name of Alan—“was saying last night? He was saying he wanted to go to bed with your wife.”
“Well, something like that. So?”
Karen didn’t answer.
I supplied, “You think he should have asked her in private, instead of making it a committee matter.”
She said, “The reason he couldn’t get it out, he didn’t think you’d accept me in exchange.” Her voice snagged, then continued, roughened by tears, “He’s only ever seen us quarrel. About Vietnam.”
“That’s touching,” I said. I didn’t find Alan touching, actually. But she was enrolling me in her decision.
“I couldn’t bear it, Frank. His being so innocent.”
“How did he take the news?”
“Oh, he was exhilarated. He kept me up all night with it. He couldn’t believe—I shouldn’t tell you this—he couldn’t believe I’d sleep with a townie.”
Downstairs my two younger children had grown bored with television and were punching each other. I said, “But with a non-townie he’d believe it? How many non-townies have you slept with?”
“Frank, don’t.” She hesitated. “You know how I am. He doesn’t give me shit, Frank. He’s sinking.”
“Well, let him.” A coldness, the cold of death, had come over me.
“I can’t.”
“O.K. I don’t think it was very nice of you to turn us in without even warning me,” I said, all weary dignity.
“You would have argued.”
“You bet. I love you. Loved you.”
“I did it for you, too. For you and Monica.”
“Thanks.” The day outside was bright, with a rinsed
brightness, and I thought, When she hangs up, I must open the window and let in some air. “Did you get my letter?” I asked her.
“Yes. That was another thing. It frightened me.”
“I meant it to be a nice letter.”
“It was nice. Only—a little possessive?”
“Oh. Maybe so. Pardon me.” I’ll never sleep with her again, never, ever, I thought, and the window whose panes I stared through seemed a translucent seal barring me from great volumes of possibility, I on one side and my life on the other, my life and the naked bright day.
Karen was crying, less in grief, I thought, than in exasperation. “I wanted to talk to you about it, but there wasn’t any way to get to you; I haven’t even had a chance to give you the present I brought from Santa Barbara.”
“What was it?”
“A shell. A beautiful shell.”
“That you found on the beach?”
“No, those are too ordinary. I bought it in a shop, a shell from the South Seas. A top shell, silvery white outside with pink freckles underneath. You know how you go on about my freckles.”