The Centaurus

by John Updike

  She studied him as she passed the towel across her body; her. skin was transparently beaded everywhere. Her shoulders were lightly freckled. “You don’t like women,” she said. It seemed to be a discovery that did not excite her.

  He made no answer.

  She laughed; the brilliance of her eyes, through which a lavish Otherworld had poured, turned to an opaque animal lambency and, jauntily holding the towel about her with an arm crooked at her back, she stepped forward out of the pool and touched his chest with one finger of her free hand. Behind her, the water of the pool retreated in wide rings from her disturbing motion. It lapped low banks lined with reeds and narcissus and phallic, unflowered iris; the earth beneath her narrow, veined feet was a tapestry of moss and fine grass interwoven with violets and pale wood anemones sprung from the blood of Adonis. “Now had it been I,” she said, in a voice that curled around the whorls of his mind even as her carefully revolving fingertips intertwined with the bronze fleece of his chest, “I would have been pleased to play nurse to a creature combining the refinement and consideration of a man with”-her lids lowered; her amber lashes flared on her cheeks; the plane of her face demurely shifted, and he felt her gaze include his hindquarters-”the massive potency of a stallion.” His nether half, an imperfect servant of his will, preened of itself; his hind hooves cut two fresh crescents into the spongy pondside turf.

  “A combination, my lady, often cancels the best of its elements.”

  For the space of her smirk she seemed a rather common young flirt. “That would be true, brother, if your head and shoulders were those of a horse, and the rest human.”

  Chiron, one of the few centaurs who habitually conversed with cultivated persons, had heard this jest often before; but her powerful nearness had so expanded him that its humor pierced him afresh. His laugh emerged a shrill whinny, in degrading contrast to the controlled timbre he had assumed with the girl, as her senior, and kin. “The gods would forbid such a freak,” he stated.

  The goddess became pensive. “Your trust in us is touching. What have we done to deserve our worshippers?”

  “It is not what the gods do that makes us adore them,” he recited. “It is that they are.” And to his own surprise he discreetly expanded his chest, so that her hand rested more firmly on his skin. In abrupt vexation she pinched him.

  “Oh, Chiron,” she said, “If only you knew them as I do. Tell me about the gods. I keep forgetting. Name them to me. Their names are so grand in your mouth.”

  Obedient to her beauty, enslaved to the hope that she would drop the towel, he intoned, “Zeus, Lord of the Sky; cloud-gathering king of the weather.”

  “A lecherous muddler.”

  “His bride Hera, patron of holy marriage.”

  “The last time I saw her she was beating her servants because Zeus had not spent a night in her bed for a year. You know how Zeus first made love to her? As a cuckoo.”

  “A hoopoe,” Chiron corrected.

  “It was a silly cuckoo like in a clock. Tell me some more gods. I think they’re so funny.”

  “Poseidon, master of the many-maned sea.”

  “A senile old deckhand. His beard stinks of dead fish. He dyes his hair dark blue. He has a chest full of African pornography. His mother was a negress; you can tell by the whites of his eyes. Next.”

  Chiron knew he should stop; but he secretly relished scandal, and at heart was half a clown. “Bright Apollo,” he announced, “who guides the sun and sees all, whose Delphinian prophecies regulate our political life and through whose overarching spirit we attain to art and law.”

  “That prig. That unctuous prig always talking about himself, his conceit turns my stomach. He’s illiterate.”

  “Come now; this you do exaggerate.”

  “He is. He looks at a scroll but his eyes never move.”

  “And what of his twin Artemis, the fair huntress beloved by the very prey she dispatches?”

  “Ha! She never hits them, that’s why. Tittering around the woods with a pack of Vassar freshmen whose so-called virginity not a doctor in Arcadia-”

  “Hush, child!” The centaur brought his hand toward her lips and in his extremity of alarm almost did touch them. He had heard faint thunder behind him.

  She backed off, startled at his presumption. Then she looked skywards over his shoulder and laughed in recognition; it was a mirthless laugh, a high heated syllable defiantly prolonged; it tightened her face across her skull and sharpened her perfect features cruelly, out of all femininity. Cheeks, brow, and throat flushed, she shouted toward Heaven. “Yes, Brother: blasphemy! Your gods, listen to them-a prating bluestocking, a filthy crone smelling of corn, a thieving tramp, a drunken queer, a despicable, sad, grimy, grizzled, crippled, cuckolded tinker-”

  “Your husband!” Chiron protested, striving to keep himself in the graces of the firmament above him. His position was difficult; he knew that the indulgent Zeus would never harm his young aunt. But he might in annoyance toss his bolt at her innocent auditor, whose Olympian position was precarious and ambiguous. Chiron knew that his own intimacy with men was envied by the god, who never visited the created race except, in feathers and fur, to accomplish a rape. Indeed it was rumored that Zeus thought centaurs a dangerous middle-ground through which the gods might be transmuted into pure irrelevance. But the sky, though it had darkened, remained silent. Gratefully Chiron pursued his tactic, telling Venus, “You fail to appreciate your husband. Hephaestus is dexterous and kind. Though every anvil and potter’s wheel serves as an altar to him, he remains humble. The calamity of his fall upon Lemnos purged all dross of arrogance from his heart; though his body is bent, there is not a mean bone in it.”

  She sighed. “I know. How can I love such a ditherer? Give me that mean bone. Do you think,” she asked, with the expectant and subtly condescending face of a not usually curious student, “I’m drawn to cruel men because I have a guilt complex about my father’s mutilation? I mean, I blame myself and want to be punished?”

  Chiron smiled; he was not of the new school. The sky above had paled. Feeling safe, he dared a touch of impudence. He pointed out, “There is one deity you have ex empted from your catalogue.” He meant Ares, the most vicious of all.

  The girl tossed her head; her orange hair flared into a momentary mane. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m no better than the rest. How would you list me, noble Chiron? ‘A compulsive nymphomaniac’? Or, less circumspectly, ‘A born whore’?”

  “No, no, you misunderstand me. I did not mean yourself.”

  She paid him no heed, crying, “But it’s unfair!” She clutched the towel about her emphatically. “Why should we deny ourselves the one pleasure the Fates forgot to take from us? The mortals have the joy of struggle, the satisfaction of compassion, the triumph of courage; but the gods are perfect.”

  Chiron nodded; the old courtier was familiar with the way these aristocrats blithely extolled the class that in the previous breath they had calumniated. Did the girl imagine that her petty set of jibes went near to the heart of the real case against the gods? He felt a weight of weariness; he would always be less than they.

  She corrected herself. “Perfect only in our permanence. I was cruelly robbed of a father. Zeus treats me like a pet cat. His blood love is reserved for Artemis and Athene, his daughters. They have his blessing; they are not driven again and again to clasp into their loins that giant leap that for a moment counterfeits it. What is Priapus but His strength without a father’s love? Priapus-my ugliest child; worthy of his conceiving. Dionysos made me perform as if I were another boy.” She touched the centaur’s chest again, as if to reassure herself that he had not turned to stone. “You knew your father. I envy you. Had I seen Uranus’ face, heard his voice-were I not the afterthought of his desecrated corpse-I would be as chaste as Hestia, my aunt, the one god who truly loves me. And now she is demoted from Olympus, reduced to a household trinket.” The girl’s darting thought took another turn. She said to Chiron, “
You know men. Why do they revile me? Why is my name a matter of jokes, why is my caricature gouged into lavatory walls? Who else serves them so well? What other god gives them with the same hand such power and such peace? Why am I blamed?”

  “Your accusations, my lady, are all from yourself.”

  Her flood of confession drained, she dryly mocked him, “So prudent. So wise. Good Chiron. Our scholar, our propagandist. So docile. Have you ever wondered, nephew, if your heart belongs to the man or the horse?”

  He stiffened and said, “From the waist up, I am told I am fully human.”

  “Forgive me. You are kind, and I repay you in divine coin.” She stooped and plucked an anemone. “Poor Adonis,” she said, idly fingering the starlike sepals. “His blood was so pale. Like our ichor.”

  A gust of remembrance ruffled her hair, in whose feathery crown the moisture had evaporated. She turned her back and in half-secrecy brought the flower to her lips, and her still-damp mane dripped in sympathetic curves down flesh as white and smoothly molded as that fabled powder, the earth of Olympus, snow. Her buttocks were pink and faintly roughened; there was a golden tinge of pollen on the backs of her thighs. She kissed the flower, dropped it, and turned with a new expression-tremulous, flushed, diffuse, shy. “Chiron,” she commanded. “Make love to me.”

  His great heart jarred against his ribs; he waved her back with a trembling hand. “But my lady: below the waist, I am fully animal.”

  Gay, she stepped forward on violets. The towel fell. Her breasts were already tipped with desire. “Do you think you will rupture me? Do you think us women so negligible? We are weak in the arms; but strong in the thighs. Our thighs must be strong; the world is rooted between them.”

  “But a goddess, and a centaur-”

  “Men are reeds; they no longer fill me. Come, Chiron, don’t insult your lady. Disrobe of wisdom; you will be wiser when we rise.” She cupped her palms below her breasts and stood on tiptoe against him, so that her nipples thrust against his own, the male’s vestigial ornaments. But their chests were of unequal spans; she giggled with the game of making the double opposition, and Chiron even in his distraction saw that the problem might be expressed geometrically.

  “Are you afraid?” she whispered. “How do you do it with Chariclo? Do you mount her?” His voice rose small and parched in his constricted throat. “It would be incest.”

  “It always is; we all flow from Chaos.”

  “It is day.”

  “Good; then the gods are asleep. Is love so hideous it must hide in the dark? Do you disdain me because I’m a trollop? But as a scholar you know how after every bath I am restored to virginity. Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead; it hampers my walking.”

  More in weakness than in strength, as one would embrace in despair a fevered child, he put his arms around the wiggling girl; her body was slippery and limp with complaisant dissolution. The hollow of her back felt downy. The crest of an erection grazed his belly; a neigh seethed through his nostrils. Her arms were clenched around his withers, and her thighs, lifting weightlessly, murmured among his fore legs. “Horse,” she breathed, “ride me. I’m a mare. Plough me.” From her body issued a swift harsh scent of flowers, flowers of all colors crushed and tumbled in the earth of his own equine odor. He closed his eyes and was swimming through a shapeless warm landscape studded with red trees.

  But his joints held rigid. He remembered the thunder. Zimmerman might still be in the building; he never went home. The centaur listened for a rumble upstairs, and in that moment of listening everything altered. The girl dropped from around his neck. Without a backwards look, Venus vanished into the underwood. A thousand green petals closed upon her passage. Love has its own ethics, which the deliberating will irrevocably offends. Then as now, Caldwell stood on that spot of cement alone and puzzled, and now, as then, climbed the stairs with a painful, confused sense of having displeased, through ways he could not follow, the God who never rested from watching him.

  He climbed the flights of stairs to his room on the second floor. The steps seemed built for the legs of a more supple species; his clumsiness was agonizing. Each wave of pain forced his gaze tight against a section of wall where a ball point pen had looped, a varnished newel post whose bevelled cap had been torn from the glue-glazed dowel stump, a corner of the stairs in which a little black drift of dust and grit had hardened, a windowpane filmed in grease and framed in rusty mullions, a dead stretch of yellow wall. The door to his room was shut. He expected to hear turbulence through it; but there was instead an ominous quiet. His skin twitched. Had Zimmerman, detecting noise, come and taken over the class?

  This fear proved justified. He pushed open.the door, and there, not two yards away, Zimmerman’s lopsided face hung like a gigantic emblem of authority, stretching from rim to rim of Caldwell’s appalled vision. With a malevolent pulse, it seemed to widen still further. An implacable bolt, springing from the center of the forehead above the two disparately magnifying lenses of the principal’s spectacles, leaped space and transfixed the paralyzed victim. The silence as the two men stared at one another was louder than thunder.

  Zimmerman turned to the class; it had been tamed into alphabetical rows of combed, frightened children. “Mr. Caldwell has graciously returned to us.”

  The class obediently snickered. “I think such devotion to duty should be rewarded with a mild round of applause.” He led the clapping; his cupped palms patted each other daintily. Zimmerman’s extremities were queerly small for such a massive head and torso. He wore a sports coat whose padded shoulders and broad checkered pattern emphasized the disproportion. Above the ironical applause a few boys’ smirks glinted toward Caldwell. The humiliated teacher licked his lips. They tasted charred.

  “Thank you, boys and girls,” Zimmerman said. “That is quite enough.” The gentle applause abruptly stopped. The principal turned to Caldwell again; the unbalance of his face seemed that of a proud pregnant cloud tugged by a wind high in heaven. Caldwell uttered a nonsensical-syllable that was meant to be a shout of praise and adoration.

  “We can discuss this later, George. The children are anxious for their lesson.”

  But Caldwell, frantic to explain, to be absolved, bent and lifted his trouser leg, an unhoped-for indecency that burst the class into loud hilarity. And indeed Caldwell had in his heart asked for some such response.

  Zimmerman understood this. He understood everything. Though Caldwell instantly dropped the trouser leg and straightened to attention, Zimmerman continued to gaze down at his ankle, as if it were at an infinite distance from him but his eyes were infinitely percipient. “Your socks don’t quite match,” he said. “Is this your explanation?”

  The class burst again. Immaculately timing himself, Zimmerman waited until he would be audible above the last trickling chuckles. “But George-George-you should not allow your commendable concern with grooming to interfere with another pedagogic need, punctuality.”

  Caldwell was so notoriously a poor dresser, his clothes were so nakedly shabby, that there was rich humor even in this; though doubtless many of the laughers had been lost among Zimmerman’s elegant sarcastic turns.

  The principal made a fastidious indicative gesture. “Are you carrying a lightning rod? Remarkably prudent, on a cloudless winter day.”

  Caldwell groped and felt behind him the cold sleek arrow-shaft jutting from his pocket. He took it out and offered it to Zimmerman while he struggled to find the first words of his story, a story that, once known, would make Zimmer man embrace him for his heroic suffering; tears of compassion would fall from that imperious distended face. “This is it,” Caldwell said. “I don’t know which kid did it-”

  Zimmerman disdained touching the shaft; palms lifted in protest, as if the bright stick were charged with danger, he took a few quick backward steps, his small feet twinkling with the athletic prowess that still lingered in them. Zimmerman’s first fame had been as a schoolboy track star. Strong-shouldered, lithe-limbed, he had excel
led in all tests of speed and strength-the discus, dashes, endurance runs. “George, I said later,” he said. “Please teach your class. Since the program of my morning has already been interrupted, I’ll sit in the rear of the class and make this my month’s visit. Please behave, boys and girls, as if I were not present.”

  Caldwell lived in dread of the supervising principal’s monthly classroom visitations. The brief little typewritten reports that followed them, containing a blurred blend of acid detail and educational jargon, had the effect, if they were good, of exalting Caldwell for days and, if they were bad (as they nearly always seemed to be; even an ambiguous adjective poisoned the cup), of depressing him for weeks. Now a visit had come, when he was addled, in the wrong, in pain, and unprepared.

  Slyly pussyfooting, Zimmerman sidled down along the blackboard. His broad checkered back was hunched in a droll pretense of being inconspicuous. He took a seat in the last row, behind the cup ears and blazing acne of Mark Youngerman. No sooner was Zimmerman settled at the end desk than he noticed that level with him, two rows away, in the last seat of the third row, Iris Osgood sat immersed in dull bovine beauty. Zimmerman slid out of his seat into the one next to her and in a little pantomime of whispers asked her for a sheet of tablet paper. The plump girl fussed, tore off a sheet, and as he leaned over to take it the principal with a bold slide of his eyes looked down the top of her loose silk blouse.

  Caldwell watched this in an awed daze. He felt the colors of the class stir under him; Zimmerman’s, presence made them electric. Begin. He forgot who he was, what he taught, why he was here. He went over to his desk, put down the arrowshaft, and picked up a magazine clipping that reminded him. Cleveland scientist charts creation-clock. Zimmerman’s face seemed huge at the rear of the room. “Behind me on the blackboard,” Caldwell began, “is the figure five followed by nine zeros. This is five-what?”

  A timid girl’s voice broke from the silence, saying, “Trillion.” Judith Lengel, that would be. She tried, but didn’t have it. Her father was one of those biff-bang real estate salesmen who expected their kids to be May Queen, valedictorian, and Most Popular just because he, old Five Percent Lengel, had made a mint. Poor Judy, the kid just didn’t have it upstairs.