by John Updike
About widowhood, what can I tell you? You’ve been through it. I still keep expecting Lennie to come home at night and when he doesn’t it’s like he’s willfully refusing or up to some mischief and it makes me mad. I’m free of course of a lot of annoying male habits and laziness—the kitchen floor over by the toaster doesn’t have English-muffin crumbs all over it, for instance—but what good is freedom if nobody’s watching you have it? Lennie was a salesman and a wife can get tired of being sold things she doesn’t want much. For instance, he had to have this ski place in southern Vermont though once the children began to rebel at being herded into the station wagon every weekend we hardly ever used it, and as the mountain lost cachet—they do, you know, just like restaurants—real-estate values went way down. For another instance, he bought me one of these fashionable new stoves with smooth black tops and the burners under it just barely visible, so I kept burning myself and setting vegetables in the wrong place where they stayed raw. As his computer business picked up again what with so many companies coming out from NYC to Stamford, he bought me a heavyweight navy-blue BMW because when he met me I was still driving that gray Corvair with the top you pulled down and locked by hand. I loved that car, remember? Like sitting in a bathtub going all over town with my hair streaming behind me and Hank (my beautiful Weimaraner, remember?) sitting up in the front seat beside me with his ears flattened pink inside out. Lennie thought the Corvair was tinny and unsafe for me to be driving. The BMW, which I still have, always feels to me like a man’s fantasy car—it has this phallic stick shift on the floor I’m always jamming into the wrong gear, and it rides so you feel every bump on the road. That was manly right there. At first in Stamford—not exactly Stamford but a village on the northern edge called Rocky Ridge—I had a comfy old red Taurus that I just loved, its trunk took a week’s worth of groceries plus a golf bag. But Lennie had to buy me that expensive BMW, just to let people know we had money again. And he would make me buy flashy clothes—a “fun fur” that made me look like a stupid puffball, and backless party dresses that would give me a cold for weeks. The reason, it turned out, was that his girlfriend at the office, who kept getting younger of course, one after another, wore clothes like that. Once, we turned up at the same business party on his boss’s lawn in Old Greenwich in the same exact clingy silk print, with a sash instead of a belt. We hugged each other at the end, it was so humiliating. He would sell me his affairs, too, after I discovered them, convincing me they were my fault. But that push of his, that salesman’s constant aggravating engaging push—it’s gone, dear Lexa. The way the dead vanish is almost enough to make you believe they go somewhere else. Going from room to room in our useless oversize house here I feel like that girl in the palace where the Beast never shows himself. That silence in the hour he used to pull into the driveway—do you ever get used to it? I’m so glad you met him that time in Manhattan at the Roosevelt Grill, in case I ever forget that he really existed or come to believe he was a perfect saint.
Now that I have a little distance on him I can see he was a lot like Monty—a spiffy dresser and a male chauvinist. Sexual attraction keeps making the same mistakes. But less sardonic—he never made me feel stupid the way Monty sometimes tried to do. But, then, I was so young, just twenty, when I married him (Monty). The children have taken his death (Lennie’s) rather too much in stride, it seems to me. But why not, they’re all middle-aged, even little Bob, our one joint product (Lennie and me), on top of the three I brought with me from Monty. To the children his death is just part of Nature’s natural cycle, but to me it’s the end of my life of being important to anybody.
Give me a call if you can’t be bothered to write. I know it’s more work for most people than it is for me. The trouble with these word processors is it’s too easy to go and on, and once they’ve perfected voice recognition and transcription, won’t that be a horror of sheer unhampered babble?— just the way the world used to be when it was all tribes and shamans and oral literature. I’d love to come visit you in sunny Taos but where I used to freckle charmingly I now get a hideous blotchy sun rash. O the joys of these sunset years! Does the sun ever shine in China? I hope not. You never see shadows in the scenes on their teapots and room-divider screens, I know that.
Mucho love, long overdue,
Sukie
So, the next September, Alexandra joined the two others in the San Francisco airport, and together they flew for eleven and a half hours to Narita Airport in Japan, suspended within the engines’ giant hum. Flying in the same direction as the planet’s rotation, they arrived three and a half hours later the next day. Their inner clocks thoroughly deranged, they rose from a few hours’ attempted sleep in a transit hotel and were ushered onto an Air China flight to Beijing. After the hyper-modernity of the Narita facility, the Chinese airport seemed barny and crude, floored in uneven linoleum and echoing with the coarse, hooting laughter of the baggage handlers in their baggy clothes. China, the three exhausted women apprehended, was a jolly place, where the past was in the present tense and visitors who obeyed all the rules would come to no harm.
Sukie’s being along greatly helped Alexandra’s sense of well-being. She hadn’t seen her, the youngest and most cheerful of their little coven, since before the millennium, back when Bill Clinton was President and wriggling pitifully in the grip of the Lewinsky scandal. Jim Farlander had grudgingly consented to their last winter trip to the Caribbean, and the bargain flight came back through Kennedy, so Alexandra had suggested they take two extra nights and visit some museums, not just the Met and the Modern and the Guggenheim but the Cooper-Hewitt with its fantastic collection of American ceramics. To cement her inspiration she had called a number in Connecticut—it still rang!—and invited her old friend from Eastwick to come into Manhattan for dinner. She and Jim couldn’t get a reservation at “21,” where the famous ate, so they met the Mitchells at the grill in the Roosevelt.
Lennie had seemed a bit preoccupied and jumpy at first but on the second round of drinks began to reveal himself as a blowhard, loud like the double-breasted Harris tweed suit he had on. By the second bottle of wine with the meal, while Jim waxed more and more silent, Lennie got confiding, as though he had successfully sold them whatever it was he was selling, fuller and fuller of little twinkles and winks as he told a few stories illustrating what a lovable featherhead Sukie was, churning out these little romance novels for frustrated lamebrain women. He was that type of sandy-haired man, with even teeth, small ears, and blue eyes, who early in life got the idea, probably from his infatuated mother, that he was irresistible. He kept putting his hand on Alexandra’s forearm when the punch line of a story was approaching, and by the time they were into dessert and Irish coffee his hand, dropping casually out of sight behind the table edge, had migrated to her thigh, resting there like a heavier napkin. What she especially didn’t like about Lennie Mitchell was how mousy Sukie seemed in his presence, cowed even, with a trace of a stammer and a defensive bluestocking drabness. Her carrot-colored hair, that she used to grow as long as a flower child’s, was cut shorter and showing gray; her plump lips nibbled at each other as if she were trying to remember something, or perhaps this was just her nearsighted squint when she wasn’t wearing contacts. Her attempts to reinforce her husband and revive a conspiratorial gaiety with Alexandra seemed forced efforts, from a stressed and washed-out version of the blithe oversexed Sukie of old.
Afterwards, in their room at the Roosevelt, after the other couple had rushed off to catch the ten-seventeen, in such a flurry that they put up the feeblest token resistance to Jim’s gallant insistence on signing for the check, her husband said to Alexandra, “That’s some slick con man there. But Suzanne’s a little honey.”
His words were still cut into his memorial chamber in her mind: Suzanne’s a little honey. She had replied, “I’m glad you saw that. She was our beauty, back then. But she seemed a ghost tonight.”
Now, by a trick of lesser expectations or of fresh context, Sukie seemed
her old self, giddy and crisp and even shiny, to match Chinese décor. Her hair was tinted its former color, her lipstick was glossily applied. Her body, to Alexandra’s eye, was a few pounds leaner in her late sixties than the glimmering soft shape, lithe and freckled and firm-breasted, that she presented in her thirties, filmed with droplets of condensed steam, in Darryl Van Horne’s dark-panelled hot-tub room. Alexandra had caressed this apparition with not only fingertips but a thirsty mouth. Sukie’s own lips, though now less plump with natural collagen, still had a habit of remaining parted, in a wondering way, on her face, in a lingering afterglow of astonishment.
Everything in China was more or less astonishing, beginning with their being here at all, on the other side of the world, in a country the size of the United States, with four times as many people. China within their memory-span had taken various forms: a fabled land of starving children, Pearl Buck peasants, dragon ladies, rickshaws, and comic-strip pirates; a friendly democracy ably led by Chiang Kai-shek and his glamorous Soong-sister wife; a suffering victim of the vicious Japanese and a staunch ally of President Roosevelt; a post-war, Cold War field of civil conflict wherein President Truman cannily declined to intervene and wherein the staunch Nationalists lost to the Communists; a tightly closed bastion of inimical political creed; a source of hordes of enemy “volunteers” pouring southward in Korea; a ponderous mass of robotized humanity that might swallow us if prodded at Quemoy or Matsu or Formosa; a mob of Mao-chanting Red Guards in a Cultural Revolution brutally parodying the West’s Sixties counterculture; then, after Nixon’s trip and gawky dinner toasts, an ally again, against the Soviet Union; after Mao’s death and the Gang of Four’s overthrow, a tender seedbed of budding free enterprise; after Deng Xiaoping’s triumph of pragmatism, a voracious consumer of American jobs and receiver of American dollars; and now the twenty-first century’s impending superpower, a billion three hundred million factory workers and consumers, a creditor of sagging American capitalism and competitor for the dwindling global supply of oil. There in the airport Sukie cried in her high, faintly breathless voice, “We’re going to have such fun!”
Their baggage was still to emerge on the creaky belts. Other Americans, like frogs whose eyes and nostrils emerge from the muck rimming a shallow pond, began to be visible to them. Deeper into the turmoil of arrival, their tour escort, a sallow small New Zealander whose parents had been medical missionaries in Taiwan and who had taken in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese with his daily rice, appeared beyond a certain gate, and, hurling scraps of language right and left to clear a path, led the group he had collected to a waiting bus. The three women inhaled the exciting, dim-lit air, the air of China, peppered with indecipherable aromas and unintelligible announcements, a vast underworld surfacing into tourism. The bus was almost too cozy, full of contented babble all too easily understood—those languid on-rolling American voices, the drawled flirtatious “kidding,” the self-pleasing accent of the last century’s superpower, its retirees complacently settling into their seats as if at the dark start of a long movie.
The road from the airport felt lightly trafficked; young trees lined it, miles of it, and flickering low lights, like stage footlights. The city gradually enclosed the bus with illumined alleyways and low buildings roofed in red tile. “Hutongs,” Sukie pronounced, from the seat ahead.
Under a streetlight a man sat in a straight chair having a haircut, a sheet tucked around his chin just as if he were in a barbershop indoors. To Alexandra the sight, so calm and stark, seemed magical: the simplicity of using an alley as a room. The rent-free economy of it, your professional equipment pared down to a sheet and a pair of scissors.
It must have been after midnight. Jane, seated beside her, had fallen asleep, her breath rasping in a pale echo of her snores in Egypt, like a small caged animal that has given up any real hope of escape. Of the three of them, Jane, being the richest widow, had arranged for a single room, leaving the other two to share a second room. Jane’s wish to be alone made Alexandra wonder if she also had snored; it was a disconcerting thought. Jim had never complained, but, then, he was often deaf to her, sitting at his singing wheel, thinking his monotonous masculine thoughts. What a curious test Nature sets us, surrendering consciousness every day, baring ourselves to who knows what oneiric assaults and embarrassments.
The hotel loomed above its neighborhood of dark low houses like a great ship showing rows of burning lights above sullen waves. In the towering atrium a pianist, late as the hour must be, was playing Broadway show tunes for a scattering of Asian bar customers: a meditative “Blue Moon,” a bouncy “Mountain Greenery.” “Oh, I do love this crazy place!” Sukie exclaimed. “Lexa, let’s be happy here!” She had replaced Jane at Alexandra’s side. Jane had drifted off and slumped into a bloated lobby chair, thus detaching herself at a moment that should have been shared three ways.
Sharing: that was what China let them do that was harder to do in their own country, with all its private property and enlightened self-interest. They ate lunch and dinner at round tables with plates of food on great lazy Susans laden with platters that bustling waitresses replaced by the armful. Twelve or fourteen Americans at each table had to attack mounds of noodles, vegetables, pieces of meat, dumplings (especially delicious and slippery, the dumplings), and even grains of rice with nothing more acquisitive than chopsticks. The morning’s sightseeing, and then the afternoon’s, with no snacking possible, left them hungry, and there was a spiritual gain in seizing, with acquired patience and deftness, a portion as the swiftly dwindling dishes rotated by. Alexandra shared with Sukie the hour or two of recapitulation, reading, and underwear-washing in the hotel room before sleep seized them as if they were innocent children who had played hard all day. Sukie’s breathing, on her fifty percent of lung function, was not noisy; rather, it was so quiet that on the first nights Alexandra would climb out of bed and bend over and listen to make sure her friend was inhaling oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. She resisted the temptation to caress the other woman’s hair, or touch a gleaming piece of exposed shoulder, though she did sometimes adjust the covers where Sukie, cuddling herself, had tangled them. Any more contact than that, and Jane in the next room would sense it, and wax jealous, and their precious trinity would be broken. The flaw in a threesome is that two can gang up on one.
The Great Wall, which they had come all this way to see, was their first sight, the first day, when they were all still jetlagged. The bus containing the three widows lurched and swayed on the small, twisting roads that led through the hills that climbed for an hour toward the Great Wall, nearer the capital than they had imagined. The tour was provided with not only the Taiwan-educated guide and two smiling though generally silent young Party escorts but with an American lecturer, who stood up front and fought for balance as he talked into his hand-held microphone. “Whenever there’s a problem in China,” he said, staggering sideways as the bus swung around a hairpin curve, “the government says, ‘Let’s throw a party!’ ” He went on to say, as best as Alexandra could hear him, “The first emperor of a unified China, spelled Q-I-N but pronounced ‘Ch’in,’ a man we’re going to hear a lot about on this trip, conscripted an estimated one million people, about one-fifth of China’s total workforce, to erect a continuous wall along the entire northern frontier of his newly assembled empire. Some walls already existed, built as long ago as the seventh century B.C. In the [she didn’t catch the name] desert you can find sections dating back to the second century B.C. made of twigs, straw, rice, and sand. In most other sections, rammed earth was the preferred material. The substantial section you’re going to see, of bricks and mortar, broad enough on the top for five horsemen to ride abreast, with garrisoned beacon towers equipped to set off smoke signals or fireworks in case of enemy attack, was built that way in the Ming Dynasty, fourteenth to seventeenth century, and restored to its excellent present condition twenty-five years ago by a team of German masons, engineers, archaeologists, and existentialists.”
There was laughter in the bus, a few damp firecrackers of nervous, anxious-to-please laughter, and Alexandra wondered if the word had truly been “existentialists.” Her hearing was not improving with age. But the lecturer, learning to flex his knees to cushion the swerves of the bus, frowned and persisted in what she thought might be an existential, despairing style. He frowned and brought the little microphone closer to his lips. “The fact is, it never worked. Not for Ch’in, not for the Mings. The Manchus came right in over the wall, or right through the gaps, and formed the next dynasty. Ch’in threw an entire generation into the Wall—think of it as stuck together with blood, and broken backs, and long nights trying to sleep in the cold on a dirt floor. Nevertheless, his empire crumbled anyway. His son succeeded him but couldn’t hold it together for more than four years. Ch’in was like Cromwell, a one-man dynasty. He took the title ‘First Emperor’ when he was thirty-eight and died eleven years later. But he gave China its enduring shape. He standardized its script, its weights and measures, its coinage—that little square in the center of a coin was his—and the width of chariot axles. He organized the empire into administrative units and brought under his thumb the powerful families in the capital. He wasn’t a Confucian or a Taoist but a legalist—he believed people were basically evil or at least stupid and had to be restrained by written laws, ruthlessly enforced. He was a totalitarian, not as a matter of contingency but of dogma, of doctrine. No individual counted, except himself. It was a beautiful absolutism, broken up, after his death, into warring states. We’ll see the clay army he was buried with later in this tour. He was a murderous megalomaniac, but it wasn’t enough to secure China’s borders. As history makes clear, there is no keeping barbarians out. They always eventually win. Energy comes from below, from the excluded and oppressed, from those with nothing to lose. It’s like water in a pot on a stove: the hottest, on the bottom, rises to the top.”