by John Updike
“Your gorgeous freckles,” I said.
Karen didn’t substitute-teach that fall; she went into Boston and worked long days for the peace movement. Friends of ours who had remained in the Owenses’ inner circle told us that some nights she didn’t come home. If you look at the memoirs of the celebrity-radicals of that time, a lot of it was sex. Liberals drink and smoke, radicals use dope and have sex. Karen and Alan split up finally, sometime between when Nixon and Kissinger finagled our troop withdrawal and when South Vietnam collapsed. His drinking became worse; he ceased to function as a lawyer at all, though the name stayed up in the lobby of the office block downtown where he had rented space. She went back to the West Coast; he stayed with us, like the gutted factories. Though I didn’t see him from one year to the next, I thought of him often, always with joy at his fall. Monica and I had moved, actually, into his neighborhood; we allowed ourselves a fourth child before she got her tubes tied, and, with heating oil going higher and higher, we were able to pick up very reasonably—my brother was the realtor—a big turn-of-the-century house on Elm Hill, with a finished third floor and a porch on two sides. We’ve closed off some of the rooms and put in a wood-burning stove in the living room.
Betty Kurowski’s mother cleaned, twice a week, the Owens house two blocks farther up the hill. It was Betty who told me how bad Alan was getting. “A skeleton,” she said. “You should go see him, Frank. I went in there last week and talked with him and he asked about you. He saw in the paper how you’ve become assistant principal.”
“Why would I want to go see that snide bastard?”
Betty looked at me knowingly, under those straight black eyebrows that didn’t go with her bleached hair. “For old times’ sake,” she said, straight-faced.
I asked Monica to go with me and she said, “It’s not me he wants to see.”
“It was you he liked.”
“That was pathetic, that was his attempt to fight back. He’s not fighting back anymore. Poor Alan Owens. That whole family was just too good for this world.” She sounded like her mother. But Monica hasn’t gotten fat. She counts those calories and is taking a night course in computer science. She’s been working mornings as receptionist and biller for a photo-developing lab that has taken half a floor of the old Pilgrim mill, and they want her to learn to use the computer. I’m proud of her, seeing her go off nights in her trim skirt and blouse. She’s tough. Old cheerleaders keep that toughness. Win or lose, is the way they figure. The truth about Karen and me, when it came out, simply made her determined to win.
Karen sends us mimeographed Christmas letters. She’s remarried, has a son and a daughter, and got a degree in landscape architecture. Alan had been holding her back, but a dozen years ago she was too uncertain of herself to know that. It hadn’t occurred to me, then, that being sexy could be a woman’s way of repressing her other problems.
Nobody answered my knock. The Owens house has a front door as wide as a billiard table, with gray glass sidelights into which a lacy pattern of frosting has been etched, so people can peek in only in spots. The clapboards in the shelter of the porch were pumpkin-colored, but those out in the weather were faded pale as wheat, and peeling. There were dry leaves all over the porch; it was that season again. Advertising handouts had been allowed to collect on the welcome mat. The door was unlocked and swung open easily. The downstairs showed Mrs. Kurowski’s work; indeed, it was uncannily clean and tidy in the big rooms, as if no one ever walked through. The long kitchen, with its little Shaker table, looked innocent of meals. Two tangerines in a pewter bowl had turned half green with mold.
“Alan?” I was sorry I had come; being in their house after so many years awakened in my stomach the sour tension of those noontime visits that would never come again. Sun slanted in at the kitchen windows the way it always had, making the scratched lip of the aluminum sink sparkle, drying out the bar of soap in its cracked rubber dish. She had liked those stained-glass flowers and butterflies people use as shade-pulls, and a few of these were still hanging here, picking up the light. I stood at the foot of the dark back stairs at whose head naked Karen used to flicker like a piece of sky, and called again, “Alan?”
Frighteningly, his voice came. “Come on up, Francis.” He had always had a deeper, more melodious voice than one would have expected out of his skinny, slumped frame, and there was still timbre in his voice, though it sounded frayed and quavery, like an old woman’s. I remembered his imitation of Hubert Humphrey. I climbed the stairs, my belly remembering how my eyes would possess her, her ankles, her knees, her amber triangle, each step carrying me higher toward the level of her fluttering, excessively pleased embrace, her heart through her arched ribs thumping against my classroom clothes, my tie and the coarse cotton of my button-down shirt crushed against the cool-warm silk of her.
“In here,” his voice came, already weaker. I had feared he would be in the bright back room that she and I had used, but he was in the bedroom that had been theirs, at the front of the house, darkened by the mass of the two big beeches outside. And the shades were drawn. The dim room was soaked in a smell that at first I took to be medicinal but that then came clear as whiskey, the flat and shameful smell it has in the empty bottle. Alan was sitting in the center of his tousled bed in striped pajamas and an untied blue bathrobe, in the lotus position, smoking a cigarette. He looked dreadful—emaciated, with a patchy beard inches long. He had lost the hair on the top of his head in a clean swath, but the rest hung down nearly to his shoulders. His skin was as dull and thin as tracing paper; there was something radiant about the blue-white tops of his naked feet. The room was hot, the thermostat turned way up—in this day and age, a bit of swank in that.
“Alan,” I managed to get out. “How do you feel?”
“Not bad, Francis. How do I look?”
“Well, thin. Aren’t you eating?”
He put the cigarette to his lips the way children learning to smoke do, trying to follow the tip with his eyes. Yet the gesture with which he took it away and exhaled was debonair. “I’ve been having a little war with my stomach,” he said. “I can’t keep anything down.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Aaah.” A little flip of his hand, all bones now. His gestures had become effete, unduly flexible. “They always say the same thing. I know what I’ve got—a stomach bug that’s been going around. A touch of the flu.”
“What is it that they always say?” I asked. “The doctors.”
His hands were so emaciated, the hairs on their backs seemed to be growing with a separate life. He turned his head away, toward the dusty frame of sunlight around the drawn shade nearest his bed; dim as it was, the light made him squint, and a cutting edge of bone was declared by a shadow scooped at his temple. He turned back toward me and tipped his head flirtatiously. “You know, you son of a bitch,” he drawled, trying to be pleasant. “To taper off on the sauce. But the sauce has never hurt me. It’s when I taper off that the horrors begin.” His eyes widened, remembering. His voice for a moment was flattened into honesty.
There must be fear of death in there somewhere, I thought; but as a gentleman he wanted to shield me from it. The result was a kind of grisly puppetry: so gaunt, with his face spread wide by alcoholic bloat, he looked like a lollipop with a Rasputin beard. Fear was my emotion, mixed in with that thrill of importance witnesses to disaster have.
I found the courage to tell him, “Alan, you can’t keep on like this. You’ll get dehydrated. You really must do something.”
It was what he had wanted me to say, so he could spurn it. He sneered and made a soft hawking noise that put me in my place. “I’m not that much of a doer. Let’s talk about you. I see where you got a promotion.”
“It happens, if you’re there long enough.”
“Always modest,” he said. “And you’ve moved in down the street.”
“You mind?”
It wasn’t clear that he heard me. His next speech came out as if it had been
recorded on tape; his head wobbled as he drawled it out. “I always knew you’d make it big in a half-ass way. One of those sleek slobs in three-piece suits eating steak every Friday night over at the River House, hopping up from your table to go across and pal it up with some school-board member, everybody jolly, saying sure you’ll head up the door-to-door drive for the new hospital wing, go peddle tickets for the K of C clambake and all that public-spirited crap. That’s what I used to tell Karen, he’ll wind up one of those sleek wop slobs in a three-piece suit. Where’s the third piece?” He whined, “You look so fucking preppy, Frank.”
I laughed. I was wearing a jacket and gray flannels. His twitching head, his eyes oddly theatrical with their big lashes, seemed actually to be searching the corners near the ceiling for the third piece. He wanted me to laugh, really. The atmosphere of this room was rich, with the gloom and bad smells, and there was a certain grandeur in his ruin, none of his scorn for all of us concealed anymore. “Yeah,” I said. “Karen told me at the time you couldn’t believe she’d sleep with a townie.”
“Wop. I think I said wop.”
“No doubt you did.”
“You owe me one for that. You owe me one, brother.”
“It was a long time ago. What happened between you two then?”
He looked toward the window shade again, as if he could see through it. “Karen was … greedy.” The words came out of him as if dictated from behind, by a prompter’s voice he had to hear and then echo. “You owe me one, brother,” he repeated, fuddled.
“Alan, what can I do for you?” My own voice seemed to boom. “I’m not a doctor, but I’d say you need one.” That third piece he mentioned, the vest, seemed to be on my chest, making me thicker, armored, ruthless in my health.
He fended me off with effeminate, flustered gestures. “You can do a little shopping for me,” he said. “This damn flu, I can hardly make it to the john. My legs don’t want to work right.”
“Can’t Betty’s mother shop for you?”
“She drags in loathsome stuff. Breakfast cereal. Orange juice. She doesn’t know …”
“Doesn’t know what, Alan?”
“What’s good for flu.”
“What is? Bourbon?”
He gave me a straight dark helpless look. “Just to tide me over until I get my legs back.”
“On one condition, Alan. You call your doctor.”
“Oh, sure. Absolutely. I know he’ll just say it’s the flu. My wallet’s on the bureau over there—”
“My treat.” As he said, I owed him one. No embarrassing deal with the bartender at Rudy’s this time; I paid $18.98 over the counter for a glass-handled half-gallon of Wild Turkey’s best, 101 proof, at the liquor supermarket at the new shopping mall on the other side of Elm Hill. Back up the hill, back up the stairs: my siphuncle was working overtime. Alan wasn’t in his bed, he was in the bathroom; I listened a moment and heard the noise of dry heaves. I left the bottle in the center of his bed.
Who can say that that was the bottle that killed him? A parade of bottles killed him, going back to his spoiled teens. It was not the next morning but the next week that they found him curled over, stiffened in the lotus position beside the toilet bowl. When they opened the door (Betty’s mother had called the police, guessing what was behind it), his body fell over in one piece, like a husk. Dehydration, internal bleeding, heart failure. Betty told us there were empty bottles everywhere—under the bed, in the closet. I pictured mine in my mind’s eye, drained, lying on its side on the floor, gleaming when they raised the shades at last. Maybe it was that bottle I thought of when the student brought in the nautilus shell. Or the shell Karen never got to give me. Or that big house with all its rooms and this naked freckled woman waiting in one of its chambers.
Thinking I should strike a more positive note, I held up the souvenir again and told the class, “There’s a clear lesson here in this shape. Who knows what it is?”
Nobody did.
“Growth,” I said. “We all have to grow.”
Learn a Trade
“MOBILES?” Fegley echoed over the telephone, with a sinking feeling. He was an internationally known junk sculptor whose annual income ran well into six figures, but in his mind he was still an unpopular and ill-coördinated adolescent walking out to a rural mailbox in Missouri to place in it a brown envelope containing cartoons and addressed to Collier’s, or else to discover there a brown envelope returned from the same magazine with a rejection slip. Partch, Hoff, Rea—he imitated them all, and yet everything came back. Once, he tried to sell the nearest city’s only newspaper a comic strip and then took the same cartoons to the local department store, as the possible basis for an advertising scheme. His mother went with him into the city that day, since he was too young to drive, and a street photographer snapped a picture of them walking together, she clutching her purse, he holding his portfolio under a skinny arm, both of them looking distracted and tired. His mother had sponsored his “creativity,” indulged it. Almost his first memory of her was of a young woman sitting on the threadbare carpet with him, crayoning solid a space at the top of a page of the coloring book on the floor before him; it seemed marvellous to the child that she, sitting opposite him, could color upside down, as well as with such even, gentle strokes, which never strayed outside the printed outlines. Fegley’s father, who supplemented the income from the farm by working as a non-union carpenter, wrung his hands to think of his son’s wasting his life on hopeless ambitions. “Learn a trade,” he begged the boy. “Get a solid trade, and then you can fool around with this artsy-craftsy stuff.” One night in bed, Fegley, shortly before going off to a New York art school, overheard his father confide to his mother downstairs, “They’ll just break his heart.”
Overhearing this, the boy had inwardly scoffed. And eventually, moving from cartooning, by way of imitating the playful sculpture of Picasso and Ipoustéguy, into a world of galleries and spacious duplexes and expectant museum spaces that his father had never dreamed existed, he proved the old man wrong. Yet the older that Fegley himself grew, the more it seemed his father had been essentially right.
In the pattern of his generation he had married young, had four children, and eventually got a divorce. His first wife, met at the art school, had been herself artistic: Sarah painted delicate impressionistic still-lifes and landscapes that were often abandoned before the corners were filled. There was usually something wrong with the perspective, though the colors were remarkably true. He sometimes blamed himself, in their years together, for not encouraging her more; but in truth all “this artsy-craftsy stuff” depressed him, and he hoped that his children would become scientists. He plied the two boys, especially, with telescopes and microscopes, chemistry sets and books of mathematical puzzles; they squinted at Saturn’s rings for an evening and at magnified salt granules for an afternoon, and then the expensive tubes of brass and chrome drifted toward the closets already full of deflated footballs and gadgets whose batteries had given out. Fegley’s two daughters, as they grew into women, with the distances and silences of women, took watercolor brushes and pads on their sunbathing expeditions, and at home solemnly inscribed haiku on pebble board with crow-quill pens. Their mother encouraged all this, having set the example by her own dabbling, which fitfully continued into her middle age; the house was strewn with Sarah’s half-completed canvases. Fegley did his powerful, successful sculpture—most famously, the series of giant burnished insects fabricated from discarded engine blocks and transmission systems—in an old machine shop he rented two miles from the house, down low along the Hudson. He did not encourage his children to visit him there, and even had his subscription to Artnews directed to that address. He was like a man who, having miraculously survived a shipwreck, wants to warn all others back at the edge of the sea. As the two boys grew older, he congratulated himself that they seemed more concerned with putting their feet to leather balls and car accelerators than with setting implements to paper. Unlike his youthful self, t
hey were popular and well-coördinated, and expert at sports. The older went off to college determined to make the football varsity, having been a spectacularly shifty tight end for his boarding school, but somewhere under the cloud of his parents’ divorce proceedings he dropped out of athletics and into film studies; he took courses (college courses! for credit!) that analyzed the cutting rhythm in old Laurel and Hardy comedies and the advance of camera mobility in musical comedies of the Forties. Now he was living in a squalid Manhattan loft with several other aspirants to the world of film, lost young souls stoned on media, pounding the sidewalks and virtually (who knows?—maybe actually) selling their bodies for the whisper of a promise of becoming an assistant grip’s assistant in a public-television documentary on the African killer bee. Fegley’s daughters had also faded into the limbo of artistic endeavor; one was in northern California making “pinch pots” out of her lover’s back-yard clay, and the other was editing a journal of genealogy in Cincinnati while working on a highly ambitious feminist novel called Ever Since Eve. This left uncontaminated by creativity only the younger son, Warren. Warren was a broad-shouldered brown-eyed nineteen-year-old who had once collected butterflies and rock specimens and who was clever with his hands; he had even given signs of becoming a carpenter, working alongside his grandfather for a few summers, before the old man died. Here at last, Fegley had thought, was my practical, down-to-earth child.
So it was with a sinking feeling that Fegley heard that the boy was making mobiles this summer. “But what about his job?” he asked.
“I don’t think he ever called that number Clara gave him,” Sarah said.
Clara, Fegley’s present wife, was a civil engineer with a firm in White Plains and had given her stepson a lead on a summer job with a road-repair crew.
“What do you mean exactly, mobiles?” Fegley asked.