by John Updike
“Then what? What’s this about? You’ll rot here.”
“Have you seen Leinbach?”
“He told me to tell you to stay away. The school can’t keep a queer on the staff, they must think of the kids.”
This ugly word “queer” (he could see Leinbach’s mouth twist, pronouncing it) made Stanley stubborn. “Because of where I live?”
“And he hasn’t even seen the beard. When are you going to shave?”
“Not when Leinbach tells me.”
Bernard laughed; the noise broke like a shot. “Stay, then. You can start work for me early. I’ve commenced a row of foundations out toward the cemetery hill.”
“If you don’t need me yet, I’d just as soon wait a while.”
Bernard took off his coat and appeared to enter, combatively, into the spirit of the woods. “I don’t need you, Stan,” he said. “It’s the other way around.” When Stanley neither admitted this nor argued, Bernard said, louder, “Go crazy, then.”
“It’s the other way, like you say. I’m trying to clear my head.”
“Sit and stink out here. Squat on your own shit. You’ll be crawling down soon enough. Here. I’ll leave you my cigarettes.”
“Bernie, thanks, but I don’t smoke that much out here.”
Stanley was left, after the thrashing footsteps receded from his ears, with the ringing sense—heartening, on the whole—of having struggled with his brother and having achieved the usual postponement of total defeat.
With tendrils of habit the hermit rooted himself in the woods. Solitude is a two-dimensional condition whose problems can be neatly plotted. Pure water ran in a nearby rivulet. Stanley cooked, on a double kerosene burner, canned foods bought once a week at the dying corner store on the near edge of town, a store grateful for his business. Though he had his gun, he shot nothing, for fear of poaching and offending the invisible authorities who left him undisturbed. The cooking conveniently partitioned the days, and, rewarming and combining leftovers, he was able to indulge his fondness for patchwork. The problem of elimination he solved with a succession of deeply dug and gradually refilled holes that he imagined would always exist, as wells of special fertility in the woods. For exercise, he cut fallen wood, and for warmth burned it in the ancient kitchen fireplace that he had cleared in the old manner, by pulling a small pine tree down the chimney. He read very little. Kerosene, lugged through the woods in a five-gallon can, was too precious to be used for light. On one of his scavenging trips to his old home he went into the dark attic and took two books at random from the dusty stacks his mother had accumulated. She had been a tireless reader—a hermit in her way. Downstairs he found in his hands a dun-colored novel of English society dated 1913 and the moss-green memoirs of an actress who had toured the American West after the Civil War. He read a few pages from one or the other each twilight, in the magical spirit in which people used to read the Bible, expecting not continuous sense but abrupt, fragmentary illumination. And, indeed, he was rarely disappointed, for whether the scene was the ballroom of a Sussex manor house or an improvised arena in Dodge City, the events (the daughter of an impoverished nobleman declines to dance with the son of a powerful industrialist; a Mexican bandit is assassinated during the mad scene of King Lear) had the same brilliant surprisingness, quick high tints suggestive of a supernatural world.
The gallant old Duchess, her hopes so insolently dashed, indicated her desire to be carried from the room, toward a sanctum where their scintillating fragments could be considered with a loving eye, perhaps, to their reassembly.
It was a rare page that did not contain some sentence striking in its oblique pertinence, curving from the page upward into Stanley’s eyes, his mind, his life.
I felt the presence of dread Panic in the audience. I maintained my prattling song uninterruptedly but the menacing murmur swelled. Inspired by desperation, I stood, tore off my cap and bells, and allowed my long hair to cascade around my motley. Better than I had dared dream, the revelation that the Fool was a Woman shocked the crowd into silence and composure. The ovation which I received at the end of the act from these rough men left me weak and weeping.
In such passages Stanley seemed to encounter some angel within himself, a woman sexlessly garbed, demanding he continue his climb up the stairs of his days toward a plateau of final clarification.
Though the days submitted to a design, the nights proved slippery; an uncontrollable intruder appeared—insomnia—to ravage and mock the order of his existence. Several nights, sleep evaded him entirely; often he awoke under a cold moon and, trying to hurry with closed eyes back through the dark door that had blown ajar, found it locked until dawn, with a breath of light, blew it open again. It was as if in lightening himself of so much of the world he had made himself too buoyant to sink—as if in purging himself of so much dross he had violated an animal necessity that took its revenge on his stripped nerves, like teeth that hurt after a cleaning. To relax himself, he would remember women, but his emissions into these ghosts merely amplified his hollowness. Lying awake, he dreamed he was a stone drained of weight, a body without personality, and wondered if his personal existence had ever been actual or was merely an illusion that these women had given him.
First there had been his mother, gloating over him as one of her four growing boys even though in some respects he looked to be the slow one, and then the straggling succession of kind encouragers ending with Loretta, who in intimacy had praised this and that about his body, so that the memory of her, or even the vision of her two-toned trailer sitting with its hitch ensnarled in vines, physically broadened his chest, tightened his skin. Why, indeed, did he keep a mirror but as a kind of woman, in whom he sought—cocking his head to catch the best light, smoothing his beard, smiling secretively—the angles previously made vivid by admiration? Even when under his mother’s care he had sensed that the very quality which made him laggard in some respects gave his outward form the leisure to fill itself out with a fullness skimped in his less passive brothers. He was glad when Loretta came to see him. It happened late in April. Her incongruous body, in a blue dress and gray sweater, approached through the trees and waded across the treeless farmyard. The farmyard was now filled with ferns that swallowed her ankles. Her ankles were fine for so fat a woman.
“Well, Jesus,” she said, halting. “Look at you.”
“Look at you,” he said. “I didn’t know you could walk so far.”
Unlike the others, she had come toward evening. She asked, “Aren’t you going to have me in?”
“Sure,” he said. Her advance was smooth, unstoppable. “It’s not as tidy as your trailer.” He felt fussed and pleased, invaded to his bones, as she stepped across the grooved and pitted threshold and examined the efficient interior he had formed, and found nothing to laugh at.
“You’ve done all right,” she said seriously, awed. Then she laughed.
“What are you laughing at?”
“It reminded me of something, and now I know what. I once knew a Chinese bachelor who lived like this, in the middle of Philly. It smelled like this. Maybe it’s the kerosene. Let me smell you.” She unbuttoned the two top buttons of his shirt, tugged down the neck of his undershirt, put her snub nose against his skin, and sniffed. “You don’t smell Chinese yet, you still smell like Stanley. Your heart’s thumping.”
“It’s been a time.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to come.”
“I don’t think I did want you to come.”
“But I’m here now, huh?”
“You’re here.”
“How cold does it get at night?”
“Not so bad now. We’ll be O.K. Are you hungry?”
“Thirsty.”
He looked down into her face to see in what sense she meant thirst, but the sun was low and his own body blocked her from the window light, so all he felt of her face was its shadowy warmth and a gingery perfume that perhaps dwelled in her hair. He gave her the cot and put a blanket on the
floor beside it, so that each time he awoke that night he saw her above him, her bare bent arm luminous, her heavy body floating cloudlike on the spindly crossed legs of the cot and bellying the underside of the canvas. As if it had become possible to tamper with the sky and move the moon, he reached and touched, and then became confused, for, as her body encircled his and slipped across his fingertips, she seemed now vast and now terribly thin, thin with a child’s expectant thinness as her frame yearned toward some sought position in relation to the fixed stars of his own system.
He slept late, awaking to the sound of her working on his stove. The metallic rummaging annoyed him; she seemed to be tinkering inside his head. From the back, in faded blue, she looked swollen, having feasted on him. She cursed his kerosene burners, which were reluctant to light. He turned her from his stove and, naked, used his body as a wedge to separate her from the instruments, the stove and pans, of his private life. She yielded complacently at first, but by the time he was through her eyes were strained by anger. Dabs of sunlight shuffled on the coarse floor like coins perpetually being counted. He lay upon an adversary who in a single space of breathing might swell enough to overthrow him. They rose, and her storm came—the tears, the scorn, the stony-voiced repetitions, the pitiable reversals toward tenderness. Looking past her head, his chin burning in the halo of her uncombed hair, he saw the window giving on the morning woods as an aquarium from whose magic jagged world of green leaves stricken with sunshine this weeping would keep him forever sealed. He gave her breakfast and walked her to the edge of the land, where the steel company’s No Trespassing signs were posted.
“I won’t come again,” she said.
“It’s too hard for you,” he told her.
“You know what you’re doing?” she asked, and then answered, “You’re pouring yourself down the drain.”
“I’m just like you in the trailer,” he said, smiling and watching her face for the reflection of his smile. “Independent.”
“No,” she said, in the tone of dry calm that followed her storms, “it’s been forced on me. But you’re choosing.”
How grateful he was, after all, to his visitors!—for each of them left him something to clarify his situation. He was choosing, yes, and, treading back through the woods, welcomed by the calls of unseen birds and the gestures of unnamed plants, he sought for some further choice, some additional dismissal with which he could atone for the night’s parasitic pleasure. He smashed the mirror. He held it squarely above the hearthstone, so the last thing it reflected was a slice of blue zenith, and let it drop. The fragments he swept up and buried in a place far from the house, covering the earth with leaves so he could not find the spot again. But from that sector of woods, for a while, he felt watched, by buried eyes. The sensation passed in daylight but persisted at night, when it gave his sleep depth, as had knowing when he was a child that his mother, moving around downstairs, would on her way to bed come into his room and touch his forehead and tuck the kicked covers around him. Insomnia ceased to visit him. After Loretta’s visit, he grew drowsy at twilight, was often unable to read a word, and rose with the sun.
He never saw so well, saw so much. Chill April yielded to frilly May. Buds of a hundred designs had broken unbidden. He became aware, intensely, of tiny distinctions—shades of brown and gray in the twigs, differences in the shapes of leaves, the styles of growing, a cadence expressed in the angle at which a hooved branchlet thrust from the parent branch. That he could not articulate these distinctions or could hardly name a dozen trees and flowers bathed the populations of growth in a glistening transparency like that left by mist; as his mind slowly sorted the sea of green into types, he greeted each recognized specimen not with its name but with its very image, as one remembers a sister whose name, through marriage, has ceased to apply. His mind became a beautiful foreign book whose illustrations were enhanced, in precision and wonder, by the unintelligibility of the text. First venturing onto the spaced beams of the floorless house, he had thought of a church organ’s pedals, and now the finely tuned strata of distinctions, fixed yet pliant, seemed a greater instrument, either waiting to be struck or else played so continually that an instant of silence would have boomed in his ears. The patient intricacy of moss and grass fascinated him. There was no realm so small that it repelled distinctions. Stanley felt the green and reticulate mass around him as so infinitely divisible that the thickness of a veil was coarse in comparison. Nature, that sturdy net of interlocking rapacity, dissolved for him in its own unsayable exactness, and ceased to exist, or existed merely as the description of something else.
Some boys came to see him: his two nephews and a friend. The friend was thin, new in the town, with a close-cropped skull and brown eyes so dark they seemed round. Stanley felt, awkwardly entertaining his guests, that he was addressing mostly this stranger, for the familiar leeringness and the competitive jostling of his brother’s boys were things which he had determinedly ignored even when he shared a house with their noise. His visitors seemed chastened by his strangeness. He could not think what to show them; these boys had expected, perhaps, some piece of work, some monument to testify to the accumulation of his days. But there was nothing, nothing except the shelter on which he had ceased to make improvements—that, and Stanley’s delicately altered sense of actuality. He walked them through the woods, showed them the overgrown rectangle of rubble where a barn must have stood, pointed out the tidy deposits of pellets with which the smaller mammals of the woods declared their presence, bid the boys bend with him to examine a bank where a combination of exposed roots, rocks, moss, and erosion had created a castle, or chain of castles, inhabited by ants. The boys began to crush the ants; Stanley shouted, and they backed from him, and he glimpsed his gauntness, his bristling red beard, in their eyes. They explored, taking him farther in the woods than he had ever thought to go alone, to a point from which the smoking chimney of a house and a glinting strip of highway could be seen. On the way they made themselves clubs and smashed them against dead branches and pitched their entire weight against dead young trees whose skeletons had hung vertical, undisturbed, for years, upheld by the arms of the trees that had stifled them. Wherever they circled, the boys flushed death, finding the cough balls of owls wadded with mouse bones, the bloated elongated corpse of a groundhog mangled by dogs, the mysteriously severed forefoot of a deer. The matrix of abundant life held for them only these few nodes of slaughter. Stanley gave each boy an apple to provision their trek home, and sent them off with no invitation to return. In parting he sensed a susceptibility in the third child, a curiosity in those round eyes not quite satisfied, a willingness to be taught that offered itself to Stanley, in the midst of his slow learning, as a new temptation—to be a teacher. But the boy disappeared with the two others.
Stanley, who when he had lived among men had infrequently bathed, because the drawing and pollution of water seemed a waste, now bathed often, because in the nearby rivulet the water ran pure night and day and not to have used it would have been a waste. The stream was only inches deep and a man’s width wide; to wet himself Stanley had to lie on the bed of red sand and smoothed sandstones and make of himself a larger stone that the little stream, fumbling at first, consented to lave. To wet his back he would roll over and lie staring up at the explosive blue rents in the canopy of leaves and feel the icy stream divide at his scalp. Then he would rise, dripping, a silver man, and walk naked back, slightly uphill, through the warm ragged mulch of last autumn’s leaves. He had thought of building a dam, but the thought offended him. Still water would attract mosquitoes. More obscurely, the gap of water while the stream pooled would carry through the woods toward the sea as a kind of outcry betraying his existence here. Yet, though there was no natural pool where he could so much as squat, it was important in this bathing that every inch of him, even his eyelids, know the water. Otherwise he could not walk through the woods married to the surrounding purity.
One day, thus returning, he was conscious of b
eing watched, but blamed the buried mirror until he saw, standing startled in the lake of ferns in front of the house, the third boy, alone. The boy was the first to speak. “I’m sorry,” he said, and turned to run, and Stanley, seized by an abrupt fear of loss, of being misunderstood, ran after him—a terrifying figure, probably, gaunt and wet and wordlessly openmouthed among the serene verticals of the trees, his penis bobbling. The boy ran faster, and Stanley soon stopped. His pounding heart seemed to run a few paces farther and then return to the protection of his shaking rib cage. He was amazed at himself, ashamed. His spurt of pursuit had reversed months of patient waiting, waiting—he saw now—for himself to be overtaken. He saw how narrowly he had escaped a ruinous distraction, a disciple who would have diluted his vulnerable solitude and siphoned goodness from him faster than it could be secreted.
Now, each morning, he awoke with a sense of having been called. At first, it was the slightest of sensations, imparting a shadowy, guilty restlessness to his waking motions. Gradually, as the sensation was repeated on the following three mornings, the unheard voice gathered to itself clear impressions of masculinity, of infinite gentleness and urgency. It was distinct from any dream; he knew what dreams were, and this call cut through them. The call took place, as near as he could judge, in the instant between his dreams’ stopping and his eyelids’ opening. But also it seemed to underlie the dreams, like a telephone ringing in another room; the dream phantoms derived from his memories of humanity were mocked and made doubly phantasmal, performing in patterns constantly twisted and interrupted by an underlying pressure. In his desire to hear the voice, so to speak, face to face, to grasp its masculinity and taste its urgency direct, Stanley fell asleep as if diving toward a rendezvous. For two nights, in reprimand, the voice was silent. A humble learner, he concluded that the voice had been unreal, that he was drawing close, as Bernard had predicted, to going crazy. The next morning, the seventh since the sensation had first touched him, it touched him strongly, just as the dark was softening. He sat up in answer to a command spoken in the room and perceived that the call was a condensation, like the dawn dew, of a reality that existed continually, that persisted through daylight. The minute truth of bark textures, the many-layered translucence of leaves, the stately gliding intervals between tree trunks all bespoke something that wanted to be answered, a silence unsure of itself. But it was so shy, so tactful, that to hear it distinctly would be like—as Stanley had once read of counterfeiters doing—dividing a dollar bill edgewise with a razor blade.