by John Updike
He nods again, but the two nods feel different, as if a continent had hurtled by between them, at this terrific unfelt speed.
She names a man he knows only slightly, an assistant director in the museum, who wears a collar pin and has his gray hair cut long and tucked back in the foppish English style. “It was fun,” Joan says, kicking at a shoe. “He thinks I’m beautiful. He cares for me in a way you just don’t.” She kicks away the other shoe. “You look pale to me too, buster.”
Stunned, he needs to laugh. “But we all think you’re beautiful.”
“Well, you don’t make me feel it.”
“I feel it,” he says.
“You make me feel like an ugly drudge.” As they grope to understand their new positions, they realize that she, like a chess player who has impulsively swept forward her queen, has nowhere to go but on the defensive. In a desperate attempt to keep the initiative, she says, “Divorce me. Beat me.”
He is calm, factual, admirable. “How often have you been with him?”
“I don’t know. Since April, off and on.” Her hands appear to embarrass her; she places them at her sides, against her cheeks, together on the bedpost, off. “I’ve been trying to get out of it, I’ve felt horribly guilty, but he’s never been at all pushy, so I could never really arrange a fight. He gets this hurt look.”
“Do you want to keep him?”
“With you knowing? Don’t be grotesque.”
“But he cares for you in a way I just don’t.”
“Any lover does that.”
“God help us. You’re an expert.”
“Hardly.”
“What about you and Mack?”
She is frightened. “Years ago. Not for very long.”
“And Freddy Vetter?”
“No, we agreed not. He knew about me and Mack.”
Love, a cloudy heavy ink, inundates him from within, suffuses his palms with tingling pressure as he steps close to her, her murky face held tense against the expectation of a blow. “You whore,” he breathes, enraptured. “My virgin bride.” He kisses her hands; they are corrupt and cold. “Who else?” he begs, as if each name is a burden of treasure she will lay upon his bowed shoulders. “Tell me all your men.”
“I’ve told you. It’s a pretty austere list. You know why I told you? So you wouldn’t feel guilty about this Vogel person.”
“But nothing happened. When you do it, it happens.”
“Sweetie, I’m a woman,” she explains, and they do seem, in this darkening room above the muted hubbub of television, to have reverted to the bases of their marriage, to the elemental constituents. Woman. Man. House.
“What does your psychiatrist say about all this?”
“Not much.” The triumphant swell of her confession has passed; her ebbed manner prepares for days, weeks of his questions. She retrieves the shoes she kicked away. “That’s one of the reasons I went to him, I kept having these affairs—”
“Kept having? You’re killing me.”
“Please don’t interrupt. It was somehow very innocent. I’d go into his office, and lie down, and say, ‘I’ve just been with Mack, or Otto—’ ”
“Otto. What’s that joke? ‘Otto’ spelled backwards is ‘Otto.’ ‘Otto’ spelled inside out is ‘toot.’ ”
“—and I’d say it was wonderful, or awful, or so-so, and then we’d talk about my childhood masturbation. It’s not his business to scold me, it’s his job to get me to stop scolding myself.”
“The poor bastard, all the time I’ve been jealous of him, and he’s been suffering with this for years; he had to listen every day. You’d go in there and plunk yourself still warm down on his couch—”
“It wasn’t every day at all. Weeks would go by. I’m not Otto’s only woman.”
The artificial tumult of television below merges with a real commotion, a screaming and bumping that mounts the stairs and threatens the aquarium where the Maples are swimming, dark fish in ink, their outlines barely visible, known to each other only as eddies of warmth, as mysterious animate chasms in the surface of space. Fearing that for years he will not again be so close to Joan, or she be so open, he hurriedly asks, “And what about the yoga instructor?”
“Don’t be silly,” Joan says, clasping her pearls at the nape of her neck. “He’s an elderly vegetarian.”
The door crashes open; their bedroom explodes in shards of electric light. Richard Jr is frantic, sobbing.
“Mommy, Judy keeps teasing me and getting in front of the television!”
“I did not. I did not.” Judith speaks very distinctly. “Mother and Father, he is a retarded liar.”
“She can’t help she’s growing,” Richard tells his son, picturing poor Judith trying to fit herself among the intent childish silhouettes in the little television room, pitying her for her size, much as he pities Johnson for his Presidency. Bean bursts into the bedroom, frightened by violence not on TV, and Hecuba leaps upon the bed with rolling golden eyes, and Judith gives Dickie an impudent and unrepentant sideways glance, and he, gagging on a surfeit of emotion, bolts from the room. Soon there arises from the other end of the upstairs an anguished squawk as Dickie invades John’s room and punctures his communion with his dinosaurs. Downstairs, a woman, neglected and alone, locked in a box, sings about amore. Bean hugs Joan’s legs so she cannot move.
Judith asks with parental sharpness, “What were you two talking about?”
“Nothing,” Richard says. “We were getting dressed.”
“Why were all the lights out?”
“We were saving electricity,” her father tells her.
“Why is Mommy crying?” He looks, disbelieving, and discovers that, indeed, her cheeks coated with silver, she is.
At the party, amid clouds of friends and smoke, Richard resists being parted from his wife’s side. She has dried her tears, and faintly swaggers, as when, on the beach, she dares wear a bikini. But her nakedness is only in his eyes. Her head beside his shoulder, her grave polite pleasantries, the plump unrepentant cleft between her breasts, all seem newly treasurable and intrinsic to his own identity. As a cuckold, he has grown taller, attenuated, more elegant and humane in his opinions, airier and more mobile. When the usual argument about Vietnam commences, he hears himself sounding like a dove. He concedes that Johnson is unlovable. He allows that Asia is infinitely complex, devious, ungrateful, feminine: but must we abandon her therefore? When Mack Dennis, grown burly in bachelorhood, comes and asks Joan to dance, Richard feels unmanned and sits on the sofa with such an air of weariness that Marlene Brossman sits down beside him and, for the first time in years, flirts. He tries to tell her with his voice, beneath the meaningless words he is speaking, that he loved her, and could love her again, but that at the moment he is terribly distracted and must be excused. He goes and asks Joan if it isn’t time to go. She resists: “It’s too rude.” She is safe here among social proprieties and foresees that his exploitation of the territory she has surrendered will be thorough. Love is pitiless. They drive home at midnight under a slim moon nothing like its photographs—shadow-caped canyons, gimlet mountain ranges, gritty circular depressions around the metal feet of the mechanical intruder sent from the blue ball in the sky.
They do not rest until he has elicited from her a world of details: dates, sites, motel interiors, precisely mixed emotions. They make love, self-critically. He exacts the new wantonness she owes him, and in compensation tries to be, like a battered old roué, skillful. He satisfies himself that in some elemental way he has never been displaced; that for months she has been struggling in her lover’s grasp, in the gauze net of love, her wings pinioned by tact. She assures him that she seized on the first opportunity for confession; she confides to him that Otto spray-sets his hair and uses a scent. She, weeping, vows that nowhere, never, has she encountered his, Richard’s, passion, his pleasant bodily proportions and backwards-reeling grace, his invigorating sadism, his male richness. Then why …? She is asleep. Her breathing has become o
blivious. He clasps her limp body to his, wasting forgiveness upon her ghostly form. A receding truck pulls the night’s silence taut. She has left him a hair short of satiety; her confession feels still a fraction unplumbed. The lunar face of the electric clock says three. He turns, flips his pillow, restlessly adjusts his arms, turns again, and seems to go downstairs for a glass of milk.
To his surprise, the kitchen is brightly lit, and Joan is on the linoleum floor, in her leotard. He stands amazed while she serenely twists her legs into the lotus position. He asks her again about the yoga instructor.
“Well, I didn’t think it counted if it was part of the exercise. The whole point, darley, is to make mind and body one. This is pranayama—breath control.” Stately, she pinches shut one nostril and slowly inhales, then pinches shut the other and exhales. Her hands return, palm up, to her knees. And she smiles. “This one is fun. It’s called the Twist.” She assumes a new position, her muscles elastic under the black cloth tormented into runs. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’ve slept with Harry Saxon.”
“Joan, no. How often?”
“When we felt like it. We used to go out behind the Little League field. That heavenly smell of clover.”
“But, sweetie, why?”
Smiling, she inwardly counts the seconds of this position. “You know why. He asked. It’s hard, when men ask. You mustn’t insult their male natures. There’s a harmony in everything.”
“And Freddy Vetter? You lied about Freddy, didn’t you?”
“Now, this pose is wonderful for the throat muscles. It’s called the Lion. You mustn’t laugh.” She kneels, her buttocks on her heels, and tilts back her head, and from gaping jaws thrusts out her tongue as if to touch the ceiling. Yet she continues speaking. “The whole theory is, we hold our heads too high, and blood can’t get to the brain.”
His chest hurts; he forces from it the cry, “Tell me everybody!”
She rolls toward him and stands upright on her shoulders, her face flushed with the effort of equilibrium and the down-flow of blood. Her legs slowly scissor open and shut. “Some men you don’t know,” she goes on. “They come to the door to sell you septic tanks.” Her voice is coming from her belly. Worse, there is a humming. Terrified, he awakes, and sits up. His chest is soaked.
He locates the humming as a noise from the transformer on the telephone pole near their windows. All night, while its residents sleep, the town murmurs to itself electrically. Richard’s terror persists, generating mass as the reality of his dream sensations is confirmed. Joan’s body asleep beside him seems small, scarcely bigger than Judith’s, and narrower with age, yet infinitely deep, an abyss of secrecy, perfidy, and acceptingness; acrophobia launches sweat from his palms. He leaves the bed as if scrambling backwards from the lip of a vortex. He again goes downstairs; his wife’s revelations have steepened the treads and left the walls slippery.
The kitchen is dark; he turns on the light. The floor is bare. The familiar objects of the kitchen seem discovered in a preservative state of staleness, wearing a look of tension, as if they are about to burst with the strain of being so faithfully themselves. Esther and Esau pad in from the living room, where they have been sleeping on the sofa, and beg to be fed, sitting like bookends, expectant and expert. The clock says four. Watchman of the night. But in searching for signs of criminal entry, for traces of his dream, Richard finds nothing but—clues mocking in their very abundance—the tacked-up drawings done by children’s fingers ardently bunched around a crayon, of houses, cars, cats, and flowers.
Sublimating
THE MAPLES AGREED that, since sex was the only sore point in their marriage, they should give it up: sex, not the marriage, which was eighteen years old and stretched back to a horizon where even their birth pangs, with a pang, seemed to merge. A week went by. On Saturday, Richard brought home in a little paper bag a large raw round cabbage. Joan asked, “What is that?”
“It’s just a cabbage.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Her irritability gratified him.
“You don’t have to do anything with it. I saw Mack Dennis go into the A& P and went in to talk to him about the new environment commission, whether they weren’t muscling in on the conservation committee, and then I had to buy something to get out through the checkout counter, so I bought this cabbage. It was an impulse. You know what an impulse is.” Rubbing it in. “When I was a kid,” he went on, “we always used to have a head of cabbage around; you could cut a piece off to nibble instead of a candy. The hearts were best. They really burned your mouth.”
“O.K., O.K.” Joan turned her back and resumed washing dishes. “Well, I don’t know where you’re going to put it; since Judith turned vegetarian the refrigerator’s already so full of vegetables I could cry.”
Her turning her back aroused him; it usually did. He went closer and thrust the cabbage between her face and the sink. “Look at it, darley. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s so perfect.” He was only partly teasing; he had found himself, in the A & P, ravished by the glory of the pyramided cabbages, the mute and glossy beauty that had waited ages for him to rediscover it. Not since preadolescence had his senses opened so innocently wide: the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter, where the girl, with a flicker of surprise, dressed it in a paper bag and charged him thirty-three cents. As he drove the mile home, the secret sphere beside him in the seat seemed a hole he had drilled back into reality. And now, cutting a slice from one pale cheek, he marvelled across the years at the miracle of the wound, at the tender compaction of the leaves, each tuned to its curve as tightly as a guitar string. The taste was blander than his childhood memory of it, but the texture was delicious in his mouth.
Bean, their baby, ten, came into the kitchen. “What is Daddy eating?” she asked, looking into the empty bag for cookies. She knew Daddy as a snack-sneaker.
“Daddy bought himself a cabbage,” Joan told her.
The child looked at her father with eyes in which amusement had been prepared. There was a serious warmth that Mommy and animals, especially horses, gave off, and everything else had the coolness of comedy. “That was silly,” she said.
“Nothing silly about it,” Richard said. “Have a bite.” He offered her the cabbage as if it were an apple. He envisioned inside her round head leaves and leaves of female psychology, packed so snugly the wrinkles dovetailed.
Bean made a spitting face and harshly laughed. “That’s nasty,” she said. Bolder, brighter-eyed, flirting: “You’re nasty.” Trying it out.
Hurt, Richard said to her, “I don’t like you either. I just like my cabbage.” And he kissed the cool pale dense vegetable once, twice, on the cheek; Bean gurgled in astonishment.
Her back still turned, Joan continued from the sink, “If you had to buy something, I wish you’d remembered Calgonite. I’ve been doing the dishes by hand for days.”
“Remember it yourself,” he said airily. “Where’s the Saran Wrap for my cabbage?” But as the week wore on, the cabbage withered; the crisp planar wound of each slice by the next day had browned and loosened. Stubbornly loyal, Richard cut and nibbled his slow way to the heart, which burned on his tongue so sharply that his taste buds even in their adult dullness were not disappointed; he remembered how it had been, the oilcloth-covered table where his grandmother used to “snitz” cabbage into strings for sauerkraut and give him the leftover raw hearts for a snack. How they used to burn his tender mouth! His eyes would water with the delicious pain.
He did not buy another cabbage, once the first was eaten; analogously, he never returned to a mistress, once Joan had discovered and mocked her. Their eyes, that is, had married and merged to three, and in the middle, shared one, her dry female-to-female clarity would always oust his romantic mists.
• • •
Her lovers, on the other hand, he never discovered while she had them. Mon
ths or even years later she would present an affair to him complete, self-packaged as nicely as a cabbage, the man remarried or moved to Seattle, her own wounds licked in secrecy and long healed. So he knew, coming home one evening and detecting a roseate afterglow in her face, that he would discover only some new layer of innocence. Nevertheless he asked, “What have you been up to today?”
“Same old grind. After school I drove Judith to her dance lesson, Bean to the riding stable, Dickie to the driving range.”
“Where was John?”
“He stayed home with me and said it was boring. I told him to go build something, so he’s building a guillotine in the cellar; he says the sixth grade is studying revolution this term.”
“What’s he using for a blade?”
“He flattened an old snow shovel he says he can get sharp enough.”
Richard could hear the child banging and whistling below him. “Jesus, he better not lose a finger.” His thoughts flicked from the finger to himself to his wife’s even white teeth to the fact that two weeks had passed since they gave up sex.
Casually she unfolded her secret. “One fun thing, though.”
“You’re taking up yoga again.”
“Don’t be silly; I was never anything to him. No. There’s an automatic car wash opened up downtown, behind the pizza place. You put three quarters in and stay in the car and it just happens. It’s hilarious.”
“What happens?”
“Oh, you know. Soap, huge brushes that come whirling around. It really does quite a good job. Afterwards, there’s a little hose you can put a dime in to vacuum the inside.”
“I think this is very sinister. The people who are always washing their cars are the same people who are against abortion. Furthermore, it’s bad for it. The dirt protects the paint.”
“It needed it. We’re living in the mud now.”
Last fall, they had moved to an old farmhouse surrounded by vegetation that had been allowed to grow wild. This spring, they attacked the tangle of Nature around them with ominously different styles. Joan raked away dead twigs beneath bushes and pruned timidly, as if she were giving her boys a haircut. Richard scorned such pampering and attacked the problem at the root, or near the root. He wrestled vines from the barn roof, shingles popping and flying; he clipped the barberries down to yellow stubble; he began to prune some overweening yews by the front door and was unable to stop until each branch became a stump. The yews, a rare Japanese variety, had pink soft wood maddeningly like flesh. For days thereafter, the stumps bled amber.