by John Updike
“No,” he said again, in his deeper, more theatrical voice, touching the top of her head. The broad white parting; the soft mussed abundance dyed the orange-amber tint that had been its true color, more subtly. “If you do me,” he explained, “I’m not sure I can do you.”
“Too gynecological, huh?”
“It’s not like I’ve never been with a woman before, but—”
“I know. We feel it, too. Disgust.”
“Not disgust, please. It’s just strange, until I’m more used to it.”
“You want to get used? Are you saying you want to fuck me?”
He hesitated. A declaration was coming. “I want to be with you. Since you’ve decided you want to be with me, I don’t know exactly why.”
“Why? I’m crazy about younger men.”
“I’m not younger.”
“Than me you are.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I like your fat belly. It’s silky and wobbly, like a puppy’s. I don’t want you fucking Greta Neff.”
“Please. Don’t be grotesque. She’s such a dyke.”
“What’s grotesque? It’s all grotesque, if you look at it in a certain light. We have other things going for us; we just have to work this part of it through. You want to fuck me in the ass? So I’ll be like another boy?”
“It wouldn’t be. And actually, I was usually the catcher.”
“Oh.” She had to think that through. “I see. And I’m not equipped to pitch. Poor me. But I can buy one. One of those things. A dildo. You’ll have to help me strap it on.”
“Listen. Why don’t we just lie here in each other’s arms and talk? And cuddle. Don’t women like cuddling?”
“They like everything except being ignored.” She lifted her face to look into his, across the bulge and fuzz of his abdomen. “I’m game for whatever you want. I like the idea of me having a penis. At last. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be healthier for you, for our relationship, for you to get used to being the other thing. A pitcher.”
“You’re probably right.” His mouth felt dry, parched by the new prospects dawning, here in this underground.
“Couldn’t you imagine me as another boy? I did think to bring Vaseline.”
This dried his throat further, the cold blood of it. “You know,” he warned, “even with it, it sometimes hurts.”
“I do know. I’ve been there, with some of the guys. And I had no idea how big you were.”
“I’m sorry. It’s something you can’t help.”
“Don’t say things like that, Chris. You’re the pitcher now. Say things like ‘There it is, baby, all of it. Take it to the hilt, you cunt. I’m going to womb you, you bitch.’ But that’s with the vagina, and I won’t inflict that on you yet.”
“I’d be happy with just your mouth. You have a nice mouth. And your hand.”
She laughed, wickedly, and flicked his engorged glans with her grainy tongue, keeping her eyes rolled upward toward his face. He could see the half-moons of her eye-whites in the light coming through the rough curtain. “You would, would you?” she teased.
“Tell me,” he said, beginning to act the pitcher, “about these guys you let butt-fuck you.”
“Don’t be jealous,” she continued to tease. “One of them was my first husband. Monty. Montgomery Rougemont. He was latent, I can see now that I’ve lived more. He despised women. If they acted at all uppity, he called them butch. It turns out he was the one who was butch. He tried to sell it to me as a handy method of contraception. It didn’t do a thing for me but sting the next time I took a shit.”
“About my size. Darryl—”
“Let’s not bring Darryl into this, honey. Aren’t we having a nice time, just the two of us?”
“Yes, but he—”
“Let’s concentrate on us. Do you want to see my vagina? Have you ever looked at one?”
“Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’? Many men haven’t. Straight men. They’re scared to. It’s the Medusa’s head, that turns them to stone. Uh-oh. You’re losing your stoniness. I guess you’re not ready to think about vaginas yet.”
“No. I am. I’ll get ready. But—”
“I know, darling. I know.”
She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn’t know what name to call her. “Mrs. Rougemont” was the name he had always known her by. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea. The rhythmic relentless shushing returned to their ears. She laid her head on his pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism. Having got rid of it, there was an aftermath of sorrow in which he needed to be alone; but there was no getting rid of her. “Call me Sukie,” she said, having read his mind. “I sucked your cock.”
“You sure did. Thanks. Wow.” His voice came out boyish. He kissed her shiny face; already the stuff was drying. Her hair where it had strayed onto her face was sticky and stiffening.
“Was I as good as a man?”
“Better.” But there had been a strength, of tongue and ruthless iron finger-grip, that he had missed.
She snuggled deeper into the pillow, not bothering to wash her face, looking at him with one eye. “Tell me about New York. I’ve never lived there, you’ll have to teach me. Lennie loved suburbia, and we went into the city less and less. You must know lots of special private places. Art galleries, off-Broadway shows. Clubs on the far West Side. I still love to dance.”
“Places change. What’s in one year is out the next.”
She read his mind and asked, “Am I too old to dance with? I’m not even seventy yet. Are you afraid I’ll embarrass you in front of your gay friends? Why? They can understand. Nobody is young forever, and every artist needs a patron. I think we’ll look fine together. I don’t look my age, everybody says. And tonight: I won’t ask if you love me, but didn’t you love it?”
“I did. You give great head.”
“And won’t you love living in New York in the nice big apartment you’ll help me choose? Not one of those roachy basements you’re used to, sharing with a bunch of creeps.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “Great.”
“Next time,” she said, with drowsy confidence, “it’ll be my turn to have the orgasm.”
In all those years of his being her lover, Alexandra had never been in Joe’s house. It stood in a section of Eastwick seldom included in her rounds back then, the so-called Polish section, though there were more Portuguese and Italian offspring of immigrants than Poles—tightly packed narrow houses well away from the water, five or six blocks beyond Kazmierczak Square, which the Yankees and summer people still called Landing Square, though the town meeting thirty years ago had passed by a fair majority the official vote renaming it for a fallen Vietnam soldier from this neighborhood. A big red-brick Catholic church, blank-faced but for a double door and some shallow tall pilasters worked into the expanse of brick, lifted its green copper cross above the rows of asphalt-shingled rooftops. Joe’s was one of the better houses, narrow but stretching back into an acre where he had, in the Italian style, laid out a pair of vegetable gardens and built between them a fieldstone arch leading to a half-dozen fruit trees—apple, pear, peach, plum—that he called his orchard. Alexandra remembered driving by, a lovelorn divorcée, and stealthily glancing in and coveting the devotion Joe’s big backyard showed, especially in April, when his trees broke into blossom. She saw his touch everywhere. A grape arbor flourished along the side of the house, the eastern side; it got the morning sun, and the vine leaves gave a cooling shelter to his outdoor table and chairs in the afternoons and early evenings. He had brought a Mediterranean temper to harsh Ame
rican conditions. As soon as Alexandra had begun to let Joe fuck her, the plants in her own garden, especially the tomatoes and rhubarb, perked up; he had a green thumb, or something similar.
Parking the car at a curb crowded with old Detroit models, venturing up the concrete steps Joe’s hands had poured and his feet so often climbed, she felt her heart thump and flutter in her chest like a moth flinging itself against a hot light. She had lost so much weight Marcy was alarmed, but Doc Pat, quite shinily bald and nearly blind in one eye, assured her that there was nothing wrong with her but the ineluctable course of Nature. That was the advantage of a senile doctor; he discovered nothing that would demand action from him. The electric shocks had seemed to be letting up lately, mysteriously, but her memory lapses were worse—she felt she was sleepwalking from morning to evening, and was often surprised by where she found herself. At night, settling to really sleep, she had pains in her fingers and cramps in her feet and, throughout her body, a sour backwash of dread, as if everything she ate was asking, Why bother? She woke up anxious around four, and dragged through the day. Constipation alternated with diarrhea, and there were pains above the back of her neck as if her skull were softening. Her feet felt like lumps, even without shoes on, so that her contact with the earth lacked precision, and she now and then dizzily lurched. Floaters nagged her vision as tinnitus nagged her hearing. Lying in bed or sitting inert in a chair, she resented the repetitive business of life—rising, pissing, eating, answering the telephone—after seven decades and more wherein these duties had been lightened by a vague expectation of some wonderful eventuality. Now expectations had become a nuisance, and indifference gave her an inverted courage; otherwise she would never have dared ring Gina Marino’s front doorbell.
The widow opened the front door and peered through the screen door warily, an unmistakably hostile dark, squat shadow. “What you want?”
“Actually, Gina, I’ve come to see Veronica. Is she home?”
“Always home. I tell her, get out of the house, but she stay inside. Thirty-nine, and like a child hiding. Mike is giving up—he stay forever at the Barrel.”
“I thought the Bronze Barrel had become something else—what they call a sports bar.”
“Whatever they call it, idea the same—drink to forget.” The shadow of her head tilted behind the aluminum mesh, as her hand lifted toward the handle of the screen door. “You have business with Veronica?”
“I have something to ask her. It will take less than a minute, but I didn’t want to ask it over the phone, it was too personal. If you don’t want me in your home, Gina, perhaps Veronica could come visit me, over at the Lenox Mansion Apartments, at the end of the beach road. I’ll be there another week.”
“How she get way down there? All day Mike has the car. Come in, then. We’re none of us getting younger.” She had to fumble at a hook-and-eye as well as the handle, and the screen door creaked, for want of a man’s lubricating attention. “Ronnie!” Gina called, hardly raising her voice, as if the house had so long held her and her daughter that signals between them flew through the wood.
And Veronica did answer, in a sullen timid voice, from upstairs. “What, Mama?”
“Somebody to see you.” Gina eyed Alexandra and nodded. “Go up,” she said.
Alexandra pushed herself, her unfeeling feet, up the steep carpeted stairs. Penetrating the house and its secrets was startlingly easy, like an unplanned seduction. The house had a smell she couldn’t quite place, stale yet warm—the odor under sofa cushions, along with hairpins and stray coins, the secluded staleness sweetened by whiffs of life, of cleaning fluid and of garlic bread baking in the oven. Joe had brought the odor with him into her house, a trustworthy smell, most vivid on a winter day—the children all at school, black-capped chickadees flickering at the feeder, Orchard Road bright with the previous day’s snow, icicles beginning to drip from the eaves, her own skin tingling and rosy from the bath she had taken in anticipation of his visit. He would park his truck behind the house and come in through the sun porch and shrug off his bulky parka, worn grimy in spots, and let it fall on her braided rag rug, and drop after it his jaunty little bog hat with the narrow brim; the sour-sweet male scent of him would gush from his grubby green wool work sweater and the neck of his shirt collar and the old-fashioned sleeveless undershirt that exposed his frothy armpits as in nothing but her blue bathrobe she hurled herself into his embrace.
The stairs attained a landing and a papered hallway that went in one direction toward the front of the house, where she guessed Joe had slept with Gina, and the other way to the back, where Veronica lived childless with Mike O’Brien. She came into the hall to greet her visitor: “Mrs. Spofford!”
“Farlander,” Alexandra told her, smiling to think how true the name was here in Eastwick. “I was Spofford when you were a little girl, but that was a long time ago. Where shall we talk?”
“In here, I guess,” the younger woman said, standing aside, unsmiling but not unfriendly. She was taller and thinner than Gina, with Joe’s Roman nose and his liverish shadows under the eyes, features unfortunately homely on her female face. Like Marcy, she seemed to have been brought up in the world without sufficient instruction in fundamental graces, so that every motion had to be thought through. Awkwardly she admitted Alexandra into what did the O’Briens for a living room. The room’s closed doors presumably opened into a bedroom and a bathroom. An ironing board had been set up, a basket of laundry fresh from the dryer beside it. The singeing scent of the patient process seemed to arise from the depths of Alexandra’s childhood; her heart cozy and damp with love, she would watch her own mother iron—testing the iron’s hot bottom with a licked finger, poking its hissing nose into the corners around a man’s shirt collar, demonstrating to her girl child a precious fraction of the domestic expertise that made a home.
“Those stairs,” Alexandra said. “I feel weak.” Even had Veronica waved her toward a chair, which she didn’t, Alexandra would have remained standing. She felt herself for the first time a violator of Joe’s domestic arrangements. He had always come to her; she had received him into her home and her body; the rest of his life was his business. “ I’m leaving Eastwick soon, and I have a simple question to ask,” she said. “Simple and personal.”
Veronica stared with something of her mother’s foreign opacity, though her eyes were lighter. “Ask it,” she said.
“Have you missed your period this month?”
The words sank in. The woman’s tired eyes widened. “My God,” she said. “You are a witch. I thought it was just something people said.”
Alexandra blushed in satisfaction, the first time in days she had felt her blood move. “I tried it, for a while,” she admitted. “Before my second marriage. Do I gather that your answer is yes?”
“Yes. I haven’t told anybody, not even Mike. Not even Mama. I’m so frightened I’m imagining it, or that I just skipped the curse this one time. I’m afraid I’ll lose it. I’m too old to have a baby.”
“You’re a year short of forty,” Alexandra told her. “That’s not old for a woman any more. Why would you lose it? Think of all the women in the history of the world who couldn’t lose it, though they desperately prayed to. Nature doesn’t want us to lose babies. It wants us to hang in there. Do you smoke or drink?”
“No. A glass of wine now and then, to keep Mike company.”
“No more wine. Let Mike keep you company. I assume he keeps you enough company to be the father.”
Veronica only slowly understood. Then she blushed “Oh, yes. He still wants me, when he’s had a few. How could it be anybody else?”
“Well, there are ways, but never mind. I see they don’t apply to you. Would you and he want a boy or a girl?”
“I suppose a boy, but we’d be incredibly grateful for either.”
“I had two of each,” Alexandra said, speaking out of a depth of experience she seldom drew upon. “Girls are easier for the first fifteen years, but after that boys are.
Girls get secretive. Boys get less bumptious. My guess is you’ll have a boy. Here’s a way to tell the sex, once you’re out of the first trimester: Tie your wedding ring to a length of thread and have your husband hold it suspended over your belly. If it swings in a circle, it’ll be a girl. If it swings back and forth, it’ll be a boy.”
Veronica laughed, an unaccustomed violent sound that embarrassed her. She covered her mouth with her hand and then took the hand, reddened by housework, away. “Why are you doing this for me?” she asked.
“Nature’s doing it; there’s no proof I did anything. There never is. Maybe I made a wish. Offered up a little prayer.” Alexandra hesitated before making the next confession: “Your mother asked me to.”
“My mother? But what did she say? When?”
“She didn’t say. She implied. In front of the Stop and Shop early last month.”
“But why?”
“Why did she ask, or why did I oblige?”
“Both.”
Again, Alexandra hesitated. “I owed her one, as people say. She knew it. I knew she knew it. I’m so happy for you, that it worked out. But don’t give me the credit. Give Mike the credit. Give the Virgin Mary the credit, if she’s still your goddess.”
Veronica’s lips parted, her eyelids flared, but she did not admit the witch to this part of her.
“I should go,” Alexandra said. “Your mother must be wondering.”
Veronica was flustered by the need to be polite, to be grateful, yet not absurd. “You said you’re leaving town?”
The coastal light lasted a few minutes less each afternoon. Pumpkins were ripening in the fields at the end of their writhing vines. The moon was throwing shadows. “Before Labor Day. I began with two roommates; one died, and the other is looking for an apartment in New York.”
“Is that sad for you? You said you felt weak.”
“It’s sad, but that’s life, or Nature, or growth, or death, or something. The weakness may be all in my imagination. Unlike your baby.”