by John Updike
Georgene took a scalding sip of coffee and replaced the cup in its socket on the saucer and sat primly upright. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” she apologized. “I’m delighted, Foxy, to see you so happy. Frankly, I think you’re a very gutsy girl.”
“I’m not happy,” Foxy said, protesting, sensing danger.
“Well, happier. I am too. I’m so glad spring is here, it’s been a long winter up on my hill. The crocuses, Piet, are up beside the garage. When can we all start playing tennis?” She stood; there was no coat to slow her departure. On all but the coldest days of winter, Georgene wore no more than a skirt and sweater and a collegiate knit scarf. It was warming, on a January afternoon when the sun had slipped through a crack in the sky, to see her downtown dressed as if for a dazzling fall afternoon, leading snowsuited Judy over hummocks of ice, hurrying along full of resolution and inner fire.
• • •
Town meeting that spring smelled of whiskey. Piet noticed the odor as soon as he entered the new high-school auditorium, where orange plastic chairs designed to interlock covered the basketball floor solidly between the bleachers and the stage, beneath the high fluorescent emptiness hung with cables and gymnastic riggings. A few feet above the swamp of faces hovered a glimmering miasma of alcohol, of amber whiskey, of martinis hurriedly swallowed between train and dinner, with the babysitter imminent. Piet had never noticed the scent before and wondered if it were the warm night—a thawing fog had rolled in from the sea and suddenly dandelions dotted the football field—or if the town had changed. Each year there were more commuters, more young families with VW buses and Cézanne prints moving into developments miles distant from the heart of historical Tarbox. Each year, in town meeting, more self-assured young men rose to speak, and silent were the voices dominant when Piet and Angela moved to town—droning Yankee druggists, paranoid clammers, potbellied selectmen ponderously fending off antagonisms their fathers had incurred, a nearsighted hound-faced moderator who recognized only his friends and ruled all but deafening dissents into unanimity. At the first meeting Piet had attended, the town employees, a shirtsleeved bloc of ex-athletes who perched in the bleachers apart from their wives, had hooted down the elderly town attorney, Gertrude Tarbox’s brother-in-law, until the old man’s threadbare voice had torn and the microphone had amplified the whisper of a sob. Now the employees, jacketed, scattered, sat mute and sullen with their wives as year after year another raise was unprotestingly voted them. Now the town attorney was an urbane junior partner in a State Street firm who had taken the job as a hobby, and the moderator a rabbit-eared associate professor of sociology, a maestro of parliamentary procedure. Only an occasional issue evocative of the town’s rural past—the purchase of an old barn abutting the public parking lot, or the plea of a farmer, a fabulous creature with frost-burned face and slow tumbling voice, that he be allowed to reap his winter rye before an S-curve in the Mather road was straightened—provoked debate. New schools and new highways, sewer bonds and zoning by-laws all smoothly slid by, greased by federal grants. Each modernization and restriction presented itself as part of the national necessity, the overarching honor of an imperial nation. The last opponents, the phlegmatic pennypinchers and choleric naysayers who had absurdly blocked the building of this new school for a decade, had died or ceased to attend, leaving the business of the town to be carried forward in an edifice whose glass roof leaked and whose adjustable partitions had ceased to adjust. There was annual talk now of representative town meeting, and the quorum had been halved. Among Piet’s friends, Harold little-Smith was on the Finance Committee, Frank Appleby was chairman of the committee to negotiate with the Commonwealth for taxpayer-subsidized commuter service, Irene Saltz was chairlady of the Conservation Commission (and charmingly coupled her report with her resignation, since she and her husband were with sincere regret moving to Cleveland), and Matt Gallagher sat on the Board of Zoning Appeals. Indeed, there was no reason why Matt, if he believed the hint of the Polish priest, could not be elected selectman; and Georgene Thorne had narrowly missed—by the margin of a whiff of scandal—election to the school board.
Politics bored Piet. The Dutch in his home region had been excluded from, and had disdained, local power. His family had been Republican under the impression that it was the party of anarchy; they had felt government to be an illusion the governed should not encourage. The world of politics had no more substance for Piet than the film world, and the meeting of which he was a member made him as uncomfortable as the talent auditions at a country fair, where faces strained by stolen mannerisms lift in hope toward wholly imagined stars. Piet went to town meetings to see his friends, but tonight, though the Hanemas had arrived early, it happened that no one sat with them. The Applesmiths and Saltzes sat up front with the politically active. On the stage, as observers, not yet citizens, sat the young Reinhardts, whom Piet detested. The Guerins and Thornes had entered and found seats by the far doors and Piet never managed to catch either woman’s eye. Bernadette Ong and Carol Constantine came late, together, without husbands. Most strangely, the Whitmans did not attend at all, though they had now lived in Tarbox long enough to be voting citizens. At Piet’s side Angela, who had to rush into Cambridge after nursery school every day and then fight the commuter traffic home, was exhausted, and kept nodding and twitching, yet as a loyal liberal insisted on staying to add her drowsy “Ayes” to the others. The train service proposal, at the annual estimated budget cost of twelve thousand dollars, on the argument that the type of people attracted to Tarbox by creditable commuter service would enrich the community inestimably, unanimously passed. The self-righteous efficiency of the meeting, hazed by booze, so irritated Piet, so threatened his instinct for freedom, that he several times left the unanimous crowd to get a drink of water at the bubbler in the hall, where he imagined that the town building inspector evaded his gaze and refused to return his hello. When the meeting, after eleven, was adjourned, he saw the other couples huddling by an exit, planning a drink at one of their homes. Harold’s eager profile jabbered; Bea slowly, dreamily nodded. Angela mocked Piet’s premonition of exclusion and said she wanted to go home and sleep. Before psychiatry, she would have equivocated. Piet could only yield. In the car he asked her, “Are you dead?”
“A little. All those right-of-ways and one-foot strips of land gave me a headache. Why can’t they just do it in Town Hall and not torment us?”
“How did psychiatry go?”
“Not very excitingly. I felt tired and stupid and didn’t know why I was there.”
“Don’t ask me why you’re there.”
“I wasn’t.”
“What do the two of you talk about?”
“Just I’m supposed to talk. He listens.”
“And never says anything?”
“Ideally.”
“Do you talk about me? How I made you sleep with Freddy Thorne?”
“We did at first. But now we’re on my parents. Daddy mostly. Last Thursday it came out, just popped out of my mouth, that he always undressed in the closet. I hadn’t thought about it for years. If I was in their bedroom about something, he’d come out of the closet with his pajamas on. The only way I could see him really was by spying on him in the bathroom.”
“You spied. Angel.”
“I know, it made me blush to remember it. But it made me mad, too. Whenever he’d be in there he’d turn on both faucets so we couldn’t hear him do anything.”
We: Louise, her seldom-seen sister, a smudged carbon copy, two years younger, lived in Vermont, husband teaching at a prep school. Louise married early, not the rare beauty Angela was, smudged mouth and unclear skin, probably better in bed, dirtier. He thought of Joop. His pale blond brother, flaxen hair, watery eyes, younger, purer, had carried on the greenhouse, should have married Angela, the two of them living together in receding light. Leaving him dirty Louise. Piet asked, “Did Louise ever see his penis? Did you and she ever talk about it?”
“Not really.
We were terribly inhibited, I suppose, though Mother was always talking about how glorious Nature was, with that funny emphasis, and the house was full of art books. Michelangelo’s, the ones on Adam, are terribly darling and limp, with long foreskins, so when I saw you, I thought—”
“What did you think?”
“I’ll try to work it out with him what I thought.”
The Nun’s Bay Road was, since it had been widened, unlike the beach road, straight and rather bare, more like a Midwestern road, sparsely populated by a shuttered-up vegetable stand and, high on a knoll, a peeling gingerbread mansion with a single upstairs light burning, where a widower lived. Joop had had more Mama’s eyes and mouth. Washed-out, unquestioning, shattered. He felt Angela beginning to doze and said, “I wonder if I ever saw my mother naked. Neither of them ever seemed to take a bath, at least while I was awake. I didn’t think they knew a thing about sex and was shocked once when my mother in passing complained about the spots on my sheets. She wasn’t really scolding, it was almost kidding. That must have been what shocked me.”
“The one good thing Daddy did,” Angela answered, “was to tell us to stand up straight when we began to get breasts. It made him furious to see us hunch over.”
“You were ashamed of them?”
“Not ashamed so much, it just feels at first as if you can’t manage them. They stick out and wobble.”
Piet pictured Angela’s breasts and told her, “I’m very hurt, that you talk about your father when I thought I was your problem. To be sure, he is the one paying for it.”
“Why does that make you so angry? He has money and we don’t.”
The wheels of their car, her cream-colored Peugeot, crunched on gravel. They were home. Squares of windowlight transfixed shrubbery in misted crosshatch. The lawn felt muddy underfoot, a loose skin of thaw on winter’s body. A maple sapling that had taken root near the porch, in the bulb bed, extended last summer’s growth in glistening straight shoots red as thermometer mercury. Beside the black chimney the blurred moon looked warm. Gratefully Piet inhaled the moist night. His year of trouble felt vaporized, dismissed.
Their babysitter was Merissa Mills, the teen-age daughter of the ringleader of the old boatyard crowd, who years ago had divorced his wife and moved to Florida, where he managed a marina and had remarried. Merissa, as often with children of broken homes, was determinedly tranquil and polite and conventional. She said, “There was one call, from a Mr. Whitman. I wrote down the number.” On a yellow pad of Gallagher & Hanema receipt forms her round bland hand had penciled Foxy’s number.
Piet asked, “Mr. Whitman?”
Merissa, gathering her books, gazed at him without curiosity. Her life had witnessed a turmoil of guilt she was determined not to relive. “He said you should call him no matter how late you got back.”
“He can’t have meant this late,” Angela told Piet. “You take Merissa home and I’ll call Foxy in the morning.”
“No!” In sudden focus Piet saw the two women before him as identical—both schooled prematurely in virtue, both secluded behind a willed composure. He knew they were screening him from something out there in the dark that was his, his fate, the fruit of his deeds. His tongue streaked tranced down the narrow path still open. “We may still need Merissa. Let me call Ken before we let her go.”
Angela protested, “Merissa has school tomorrow and I’m exhausted.” But her voice lacked fiber; he walked through it to the phone, his palms tingling. His movements, as he picked up the receiver and dialed, were as careful as those of a leper whose flesh falls off in silver shards.
Ken answered on the second ring. “Piet,” he said. It was not said as a greeting; Ken was giving something a name.
“Ken.”
“Foxy and I have had a long talk.”
“What about?”
“The two of you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Do you deny that you and she have been lovers since last summer?”
Ken’s silence lengthened. An impatient doctor faced with a procrastinating hope. Piet saw that there was no glimmer, that the truth had escaped and was all about them, like oxygen, like darkness. As a dying man after months of ingenious forestallment turns with relief to the hope of an afterlife, Piet sighed, “No, I don’t deny it.”
“Good. That’s a step forward.”
Angela’s face, forsaken, pressed wordless against the side of Piet’s vision as he listened.
“She also told me that she became pregnant by you this winter and you arranged to have the pregnancy aborted while I was in Chicago.”
“Did she though? While you were in the Windy City?” Piet felt before him an adamant flatness upon which his urge was to dance.
“Is that true or false?” Ken persisted.
Piet said, “Tell me the rules of this quiz. Can I win, or only lose?”
Ken paused. Angela’s face, as something of what was happening dawned on it, grew pale, and anxiously mouthed the silent syllable, Who?
Less disciplinary, a shade concessive, Ken said, “Piet, I think the best thing would be for you and Angela to come over here tonight.”
“She’s awfully tired.”
“Could you put her on the phone, please?”
“No. We’ll come over.” Hanging up, he faced the rectangle of slightly darker wallpaper where until recently a mirror had hung. Angela had transferred it to Nancy’s room because the child expressed jealousy of her father’s birthday gift of a mirror to Ruth. He told Angela, “We must go,” and asked Merissa, “Can you stay?” Both acquiesced; he had gained, in those few seconds over the phone, the forbidding dignity of those who have no lower to go. His face was a mask while his blood underwent an airy tumult, a boiling alternation of shame and fear momentarily condensing into those small actions—a sticky latch lifted, a pocket-slapping search for car keys, a smile of farewell at Merissa and a promise not to be long—needed to get them out of the house, into the mist, on their way.
By way of Blackberry Lane, a winding link road tenderly corrupted from Nigger Lane, where a solitary escaped slave had lived in the days of Daniel Webster, dying at last of loneliness and pneumonia, the distance from the Hanemas’ house to the Whitmans’ was not great. Often in summer Piet after his afternoon’s work would drive his daughters to the beach for a swim and be back by supper. So Piet and Angela had little time to talk; Angela spoke quickly, lightly, skimming the spaces between what she had overheard or guessed. “How long has it been going on?”
“Oh, since the summer. I think her hiring me for the job was a way of seeing if it would happen.”
“It occurred to me, but I thought you wouldn’t use your work like that, I thought it was beneath your ethics to. Deceive me, yes, but your men, and Gallagher …”
“I did a respectable job for her. We didn’t sleep together until toward the end. It was after the job was done, when I had no reason to have my truck parked there, that it began to seem not right.”
“Oh, it did seem not right?”
“Sure. It became very heavy. Religious, somehow, and sad. She was so pregnant.” It pleased Piet to be able to talk about it, as if under this other form he had been secretly loving Angela, and now could reveal to her the height and depth of his love.
She said, “Yes, that is the surprise. Her being pregnant. It must be very hard for Ken to accept.”
Piet shrugged. “It was part of her. I didn’t mind it if she didn’t. Actually, it made it seem more innocent, as if that much of her was being faithful to Ken no matter what we did with the rest.”
“How many times did you sleep with her in all?”
“Oh. Thirty. Forty.”
“Forty!”
“You asked.” She was crying. He told her, “Don’t cry.”
“I’m crying because you seemed happier lately and I thought it was me and it’s been her.”
“No, it hasn’t been her.” He felt under him a soft place, a hidden pit, the fact of Bea.
“No? W
hen was the last time?”
The abortion. She mustn’t know. But it was too big to hide, like a tree. In its shade the ground was suspiciously bare. He said, “Months ago. We agreed it would be the last time.”
“But after the baby had been born?”
“Yes. Six or so weeks after. I was surprised she still wanted me.”
“You’re so modest.” Her tone was empty of irony, dead. A mailbox knocked cockeyed, toppling backwards forever, wheeled through their headlights. Ghosts of mist thronged from the marshes where the road dipped. Angela asked, “Why did you stop?”
Having withheld truth elsewhere, Piet lavished frankness here. “It began to hurt more than it helped. I was becoming cruel to you, and I couldn’t see the girls; they seemed to be growing up without me. Then, with her baby, it’s being a boy, it seemed somehow clear that our time was past.” He further explained: “A time to love, and a time to die.”
Her crying had dried up but showed in her voice as a worn place, eroded. “You did love her?”
He tried to tread precisely here; their talk had moved from a thick deceptive forest to a desert where every step left a print. He told her, “I’m not sure I understand the term. I enjoyed being with her, yes.”
“And you also enjoyed Georgene?”
“Yes. Less complexly. She was less demanding. Foxy was always trying to educate me.”
“And any others?”
“No.” The lie lasted as they dipped into the last hollow before the Whitmans’ little rise.
“And me? Have you ever enjoyed being with me?” The desert had changed; the even sand of her voice had become seared rock, once molten, sharp to the touch.
“Oh,” Piet said, “Jesus, yes. Being with you is Heaven.” He hurried on, having decided. “One thing you should know, since Ken knows it. At the end, after I figured our affair was over, Foxy got pregnant by me, don’t ask me how, it was ridiculous, and we got Freddy Thorne to arrange our abortion for us. His price was that night with you. It sounds awful, but it was the only thing, it was great of you, and it absolutely ended Foxy and me. It’s done. It’s over. We’re just here tonight so I can get reprimanded.”