Museums and Women

by John Updike

  A “girl” more by status than by age. Priscilla was, though unmarried and a year or two younger, one of us—I never knew where Fred met her, but it could have been at work or a party or a crew race, if he still went to them. She had the social grace to be tense and quiet, and I wondered how Fred had persuaded her to come. He must have told her I was a very close friend, which perhaps, in his mind, I was. I was New Haven to him, distant and safe; touchingly, his heart had never left that middling town. I would like to reward the loyalty of a ghost by remembering that evening—hour, really, for we did not invite them for dinner—as other than dull. But, in part because Jeanne and I felt constrained from asking them any direct questions, in part because Priscilla put on a shy manner, and in part because Fred seemed sheepishly bewildered by this party he had arranged, our conversation was stilted. We discussed what was current in those departed days: McCarthy’s fall, Kefauver’s candidacy, Dulles’s tactlessness. Dulles had recently called Goa a “Portuguese province,” offending India, and given his “brinkmanship” interview, offending everyone. Priscilla said she thought Dulles deserved credit for at least his honesty, for saying out loud what everybody knew anyway. It is the one remark of hers that I remember, and it made me look at her again.

  She was like Marjorie but with a difference. There was something twisted and wry about her face, some arresting trace of pain endured and wisdom reluctantly acquired. Her life, I felt, had been cracked and mended, and in this her form differed from that of Fred’s wife or, for that matter, of my own. My attention, then, for an instant snagged on the irregularity where Fred’s spirit had caught, taken root, and hastily flourished. I try to remember them sitting beside each other—he slumped in the canvas sling chair, she upright on the half of the Sheraton settee nearer him. He had reddish hair receding on a brow where the freckles advanced. His nose was thin and straight, his eyes pale blue and slightly bulged behind the silver-frame spectacles that, through some eccentricity of the nose pads, perched too far out from his face. Fred’s mouth was one of those sharply cut sets of lips, virtually pretty, that frown down from portraits on bank walls. An atavistic farmerishness made his hands heavy; when he clasped his knee, the knuckles were squeezed white. In the awkward sling chair, he clasped his knee; his neck seemed red above the fresh white collar; he was anxious for her. He quickly, gently disagreed with her praise of Dulles, knowing we were liberals. She sat demure, yet with a certain gaudy and provocative tone to her clothes, and there was—I imagine or remember—a static energy imposed on the space between her body and Fred’s, as in that visual fooler which now seems two black profiles and now a single white vase, so that the arm of the settee, the mahogany end table inlaid with satinwood, the unlit lamp with the base of beaten copper, the ceramic ashtray full of unfiltered butts shaped like commas, the very shadows and blurs of refraction were charged with a mysterious content, the “relationship” of these two nervous and unwelcome visitors.

  I want to believe that Jeanne, however half-heartedly, invited them to dine with us; of course Fred refused, saying they must go, suddenly rising, apologetic, his big hands dangling, his lady looking up at him for leadership. They left before eight, and my embarrassed deafness lifts. I can hear Jeanne complaining distinctly, “Well, that was strange!”

  “Very strange behavior, from Fred.”

  “Was he showing her that he has respectable friends, or what?”

  “Surely that’s a deduction she didn’t need to have proved.”

  “She may have a mistrustful nature.”

  “What did you make of her?”

  “I’m afraid I must say she struck me as very ordinary.”

  I said, “It’s hilarious, how much of a copy she is of his wife.”

  “Yes, and not as finished as Marjorie. A poor copy.”

  “How far,” I said, “people go out of their way to mess up their lives.” I was trying to agree with some unstated assertion of hers.

  “Yes,” said Jeanne, straightening the bent cushions on the settee, “that was very dismal. Tell me. Are we going to have to see them again? Are we some sort of furniture so they can play house, or what?”

  “No, I’m sure not. I’ll tell Fred not, if I must.”

  “I don’t care what people do, but I don’t like being used.”

  I felt she expected me, though innocent, to apologize. I said, “I can’t imagine what got into Fred. He’s usually nothing if not correct.”

  For a moment, Jeanne may have considered letting me have the last word. Then she said firmly, “I found the whole thing extremely dreary.”

  The next day, or the day after, Fred called me at the office, and thanked me. He said, with an off-putting trace of the stammering earnestness his clients must have found endearing, that it had meant more to him than I could know, and some day he would tell me why. I may have been incurious and cool. He did not call again. Then I heard he was divorced, and had left Madison Avenue for a public relations outfit starting up in Chicago. His new wife, I was told, came originally from Indianapolis. I tried to remember if Priscilla Evans had had a Midwestern accent and could not.

  Years later, but some time ago, when Kennedy Airport was still called Idlewild, Fred and I accidentally met in the main terminal—those acres of white floor where the islands of white waiting chairs cast no shadows. He was on his way back to Los Angeles. He was doing publicity work for one of the studios that can television series. Although he did not tell me, he was on the verge of his second divorce. He seemed heavier, and his hands were puffy. His hair was thinning now on the back of his skull; there were a few freckles in the bald spot. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, which did not make him look youthful. He kept taking them off, as if bothered by their fit, exposing, on the bridge of his nose, the red moccasin-shaped dents left by the pads of his old silver frames. He had somehow gone pasty, sheltered from the California sun, and I wondered if I looked equally tired and corrupt to him. Little in my life had changed. We had had one child, a daughter. We had moved uptown, to a bigger, higher, bleaker apartment. Kennedy’s bear market had given me a dull spring.

  Fred and I sought shelter in the curtained bar a world removed from the sun-stricken airfield and the glinting planes whose rows of rivets and portholes seemed to be spelling a message in punched code. He told me about his life without complaint and let me guess that it was not going well. He had switched to filtered cigarettes but there was a new recklessness in his drinking. I watched his hands and suddenly remembered how those same hands looked squeezed around the handle of a lacrosse stick. He apologized for the night he had brought the girl to our apartment.

  I said that I had almost forgotten, but that at the time it had seemed out of character.

  “How did we look?” he asked.

  I didn’t understand. “Worried,” I said. “She seemed to us much like Marjorie.”

  He smiled and said, “That’s how it turned out. Just like Marjorie.” He had had three drinks and took off his glasses. His eyes were still a schoolboy’s, but his mouth no longer would have looked well on a bank wall; the prim cut of it had been boozed and blurred away, and a dragging cynicism had done something ineradicable to the corners. His lips groped for precision. “I wanted you to see us,” he said. “I wanted somebody to see us in love. I loved her so much,” he said, “I loved her so much it makes me sick to remember it. Whenever I come back to the city, whenever I pass any place we went together when it was beginning, I fall, I kind of drop an inch or so inside my skin. Herbie, do you know what I’m talking about, have you ever had the feeling?”

  I did not think that I was expected to answer such questions. Perhaps my silence was construed as a rebuke.

  Fred rubbed his forehead and closed his watery blue eyes and said, “I knew it was wrong. I knew it was going to end in a mess, it had nowhere else to go.” He opened his scared eyes and told me, “That’s why I brought her over that time. She hated it, she didn’t want to come. But I wanted it. I wanted somebody I knew to see u
s when it was good. No: I wanted somebody who knew me to see me happy. Did you see?”

  I nodded, lying, but he was hurrying on: “I had never known I could be that happy. God. I wanted you and Jeanne to see us together before it went bad. So it wouldn’t be totally lost.”

  Solitaire

  THE CHILDREN were asleep, and his wife had gone out to a meeting; she was like his father in caring about the community. He found the deck of cards in the back of a desk drawer and sat down at the low round table. He had reached a juncture in his life where there was nothing to do but play solitaire. It was the perfect, final retreat—beyond solitaire, he imagined, there was madness. Only solitaire utterly eased the mind; only solitaire created that blankness into which a saving decision might flow. Conviviality demanded other people, with their fretful emanations of desire; reading imposed the author’s company; and one emerged from the anesthetic of drunkenness to find that the operation had not been performed. But in the rise and collapse of the alternately colored ranks of cards, in the grateful transpositions and orderly revelations and unexpected redemptions, the circuits of the mind found an occupation exactly congruent with their own secret structure. The mind was filled without being strained. The week after he graduated from college—already married, his brain worn to the point where a page of newspaper seemed a cruelly ramifying puzzle—he played solitaire night after night by the glow of a kerosene lamp on an old kitchen table in Vermont; and at the end of the week he had seen the way that his life must go in the appallingly wide world that had opened before him. He had drawn a straight line from that night to the night of his death, and began walking on it.

  During that week he had remembered how in his childhood his mother would play solitaire by the light of the stained-glass chandelier in the dining room. His father would be out somewhere, doing good for the community, and he and his mother would be alone. He was an only child, and as such obscurely felt himself to be the center of the sadness that oppressed them. Frightened of her silence and of the slithering of the cards, he would beg her to stop. Tell me a story, come into the kitchen and make some toast, go to bed, anything; but stop playing solitaire.

  “One more game,” his mother would say, her faced pitted and dragged by the shadows cast by the overhead chandelier. And then she would slip into one of the impersonations whereby she filled their empty house with phantoms, as if to make up to him for the brothers and sisters she had not, somehow, been permitted to give him. “The weary gambler stakes his all,” she said in a soft but heavy monotone. “The night is late. The crowds have left the gaming tables. One lonely figure remains, his house, his car, his yacht, his jewels, his very life hinging on the last turn of the cards.”

  “Don’t, Mother; don’t!” He burst into tears, and she looked up and smiled, as if greeting a fond forgotten sight upon her return from a long journey. He felt her wonder, Who is this child? It was as if the roof of the house were torn off, displaying the depth of night sky.

  He knew now that her mind had been burdened in that period. Everything was being weighed in it. He remembered very faintly—for he had tried to erase it immediately—her asking him if he would like to go alone with her far away, to the sunny Southwest, and live a new life. No, must have been his answer, Mother, don’t! For he had loved his father, loved him out of the silence and blindness that wait at the bottom of our brains as the final possibility, the second baptism; the removal of his father plunged him toward that black pool prematurely. And she, too, must have felt a lack of ripeness, for in the end she merely moved them all a little distance, to a farm where he grew up in solitude and which at the first opportunity he left, a farm where now his father and mother still performed, with an intimate expertness that almost justified them, the half-comic routines of their incompatibility. In the shrill strength of his childish fear he had forced this on them; he was, in this sense, their guardian, their father.

  And now the father of others. Odd, he thought, setting a black nine below a red ten, how thoroughly our lives are devoted to doing the contrary of what our parents did. He had married early, to escape the farm, and had rapidly given his wife children, to make his escape irrevocable. Also, he had wished to spare his children the responsibility and terror of solitude. He wondered if they loved him as he had loved his father, wondered what depth of night sky would be displayed to them by his removal. To some extent he was already removed. They formed a club from which he was excluded. Their corporate commotion denied him access. The traces of his own face in their faces troubled him with the suspicion that he had squandered his identity. Slowly he had come to see that children are not our creations but our guests, people who enter the world by our invitation but with their smiles and dispositions already prepared in some mysterious other room. Their predictable woe and fright and the crippled shapes they might take had imperceptibly joined the finances and the legalities as considerations that were finite, manageable. Problems to which there is any solution at all, no matter how difficult and complex, are not really problems. (Red four on black five.) Night by night, lying awake, he had digested the embarrassments, the displacements, the disappointments, the reprimands and lectures and appeals that were certain; one by one he had made impossibilities possible. At last he had stripped the problem to its two white poles, the two women.

  His wife was fair, with pale eyelashes and hair containing, when freshly shampooed, reddish lights. His mistress was as black-and-white as a drawing in ink: her breasts always shocked him with their electric silken pallor, and the contrast with the dark nipples and aureoles. In the summer, she tanned; his wife freckled. His wife had the more delicate mind, but his mistress, having suffered more, knew more that he didn’t know. Their opposition was not simple. His wife’s handwriting, developed out of the printing she had been taught at a progressive school, looked regular but was often illegible; the other’s, with its hurried stenographic slant, was always clear, even when phrasing panic. His wife, carnally entered, opened under him as an intimidating moist void; his mistress in contrast felt dry and tight, so tight the first thrusts quite hurt. His wife, now that she saw herself on the edge of an abyss, clung to him with an ardor that his mistress would have found immodest. He had come to feel a furtive relief when a day passed without lovemaking being thrust upon him; pinned between whirlpools, he was sated with the sound and sight of women crying. His mistress cried big: with thrilling swiftness her face dissolved and, her mouth smeared out of all shape, she lurched against him with an awkward bump and soaked his throat in abusive sobs. Whereas his wife wept like a miraculous icon, her face immobile while the tears ran, and so silently that as they lay together in bed at night he would have to ask her, “Are you crying?” Back and forth, back and forth, like a sore fist his heart oscillated between them, and the oscillations grew in intensity as the two poles drew together and demanded that he choose one. He had allowed them to draw together, had allowed his wife to know, and allowed his mistress to know that she knew, in the hope that they would merge—would turn out to be, in fact, one woman, with no choice needed, or the decision settled between them. He had miscalculated. Though he had drawn them so close that one settling into his embrace could smell the other’s perfume, each woman became more furiously herself.

  (A king uncovered, but nowhere to put him.) How could he balance their claims and rights? The list was entirely one-sided. Prudence, decency, pity—not light things—all belonged to the guardian of his children and home; and these he would lose. He would lose the homely old neighborhood that he loved, the summer evenings spent scratching in his little garden of lettuce and tomatoes, the gritty adhesion of his elder daughter’s hand to his as they walked to the Popsicle store, the decade of books and prints and records and furniture that had accumulated, the cellar full of carpentry tools, the attic full of old magazines. And he would as well lose his own conception of himself, for to abandon his children and a woman who with scarcely a complaint or a quarrel had given him her youth was simply not what he would
do. He was the son of parents who had stayed together for his sake. That straight line, once snapped, could not be set straight again.

  While on the other side there was nothing, or next to nothing—merely a cry, a cry for him that he had never heard before. No doubt it was momentary; but so was life. She had little to give him but bereavement and a doubtless perishable sense of his existing purely as a man. Her presence made him happy and her near presence made him very happy. Yet, even when they were so closely together their very skins felt wished away, strange glass obstacles came between them, transparent elbows and icy hard surfaces that constituted, he supposed, the structure of what is called morality.

  The weary gambler stakes his all. This game was clearly headed nowhere. An ominous unanimity of red had pretty well blocked the seven ranks. The kings had been buried for lack of space, one of the aces was not yet up, and the cards left in his hand were few. He fanned them and found that in fact there were three. He turned the top one up. The eight of spades. He put it below a red nine, but this unblocked nothing. Two cards left. He decided upon a gamble. A card for his wife, a card for her. His heart began to tremble at this boldness. In the months past, he had learned to listen to his heart; he had never noticed before what a positive will this supposedly oblivious organ possessed. On his way to a tryst it would press in his throat like a large bird trying to escape a trap, and at night, when he lay down in the hope of sleeping, it would churn and rattle on his ribs like the blade of a Waring Blender chopping ice.

  He turned the first card and looked down at it from what felt like a great height. The ten of diamonds, for his wife. It was a strong card. He felt frightened, and looked down at the spiderweb back of the last card with a sensation of his vision’s being impaired by the roaring in his chest.