by John Updike
“Oh, do. Do. Uuoooiiaaaugh. Oh, mercy. You are tops, Fox.”
“Mmmmooh. You’re right. It does relax.”
He repeated, “Oh, mercy,” and, as the wearying wonder of her naked sweated-up fucked-out body being beside his sank in, said with boneless conviction, “Ah, you’re mine.” She put her blurred cheek against his. The tip of her nose was cold. A sign of health. We are all exiles who need to bathe in the irrational.
Monday morning, sneaking downstairs, they met the other tenant of the third floor returning, a small bespectacled man in factory grays. Freezing on the narrow stair to let them pass, he said, “G-g-g-gu-ood mur-mur—”
Outdoors, in the parking lot, beside the glittering MG, Foxy giggled and said, “Your having a woman scared the poor man half to death.” Piet told her No, the man always talked like that. The world, he went on, doesn’t really care as much about lovers as we imagine. He saw her, said his farewell to her, through a headachy haze of ubiquitous, bounding sun; her pale brave face was lost, lightstruck. He saw dimly that her eyes above their blue hollows had been left soft by their nights, flowers bloomed from mud. Called upon by their circumstances to laugh joyfully, or to weep plainly, or to thank her regally for these three slavish days, or even to be amusingly stoical, he was nothing, not even polite. She gave him her hand to shake and he lifted it to his mouth and pressed his tongue into her palm, and wished her away. He leaned into the car window and blew on her ear and told her to sleep on the plane. Nothing had been concluded; nothing wanted to be said. When, after a puzzled flick of her hand and the sad word “Ciao,” learned from movies, her MG swerved out past the automatic car-wash and was gone, he felt no pang, and this gravel arena of rear entrances looked papery, like a stage set in daylight.
Loss became real and leaden only later, in the afternoon. Walking along Divinity Street with an empty skull and aching loin muscles, he met Eddie Constantine, back from the ends of the world. Eddie was rarely in town any more, and perhaps Carol had just filled him in on a month’s worth of gossip, for he gleefully cried in greeting, “Hey, Piet! I hear you got caught with your hand in the honeypot!”
One Sunday in mid-May Piet took his daughters to the beach; the crowd there, tender speckled bodies not yet tan, had herdlike trapped itself between the hot dunes and the cold water, and formed, with its sunglasses and aluminum chairs, a living ribbon parallel to the surf’s unsteady edge. Nancy splashed and crowed in the waves with the three Ong boys, who had come with a grim babysitter; Bernadette’s final vigil had begun. Ruth lay beside Piet unhappily, not quite ready to bask and beautify herself like a teen-ager, yet too old for sandcastles. Her face had thinned; the smoky suggestion across her eyes was intensifying; she would be, unlike her mother, a clouded beauty, with something dark and regretted filtering her true goodness. Piet, abashed, in love with her, could think of no comfort to offer her but time, and closed his eyes upon the corona of curving hairs his lashes could draw from the sun. Distant music enlarged and loomed over him; he saw sandy ankles, a turquoise transistor, young thighs, a bikini bottom allowing a sense of globes. How many miles must a man … Folk. Rock is out. … the answer, my friends … Love and peace are in. As the music receded he closed his eyes and on the crimson inside of his lids pictured globes parting to admit him. He was thirsty. The wind was from the west, off the land, and tasted of the parched dunes.
Then the supernatural proclaimed itself. A sullen purpling had developed unnoticed in the north. A wall of cold air swept south across the beach; the wind change was so distinct and sudden a unanimous grunt, Ooh, rose from the crowd. Single raindrops heavy as hail began to fall, still in sunshine, spears of fire. Then the sun was swallowed. The herd gathered its bright colors and hedonistic machinery and sluggishly funneled toward the boardwalk. Brutal thunderclaps, sequences culminating with a splintering as of cosmic crates, spurred the retreat. The livid sky had already surrounded them; the green horizon of low hills behind which lay downtown Tarbox appeared paler than the dense atmosphere pressing upon it. A luminous crack leaped, many-pronged, into being in the north, over East Mather; calamitous crashing followed. There was a push on the boardwalk; a woman screamed, a child laughed. Towels were tugged tight across huddling shoulders. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in five minutes. The beach behind Piet and his children was clean except for a few scoffers still lolling on their blankets. The plane of the sea ignited like the filament of a flash bulb.
A moment before Piet and his daughters reached the truck cab, the downpour struck, soaking them; rain slashed at the cab’s windows and deafeningly drummed on the metal sides. WASH ME. The windshield had become a waterfall the wipers could not clear. Bits of color scurried through the glass, and shouts punctured the storm’s exultant monotone. In their space of shelter his daughters’ wet hair gave off an excited doggy smell. Nancy was delighted and terrified, Ruth stoical and amused. At the first slight relenting of the weather’s fury, Piet put the truck in gear and made his way from the puddled parking lot, on roads hazardous with fallen boughs, via Blackberry Lane, flooded at one conduit, toward the crunching driveway of Angela’s house. In the peril his dominating wish had been to deliver his daughters to their mother before he was overtaken: he must remove his body from proximity with theirs. He refused Angela’s offer of tea and headed into the heart of Tarbox, unaware that the year’s great event had begun to smolder.
The cloudburst settled to a steady rain. Houses, garages, elms and asphalt submitted to the same gray whispering. Thunder, repulsed, grumbled in retreat. Piet parked behind his building and there was a sudden hooting. The Tarbox fire alarm launched its laborious flatulent bellow. The coded signal was in low numbers; the fire was in the town center. Piet imagined he scented ginger. Quickly he ran upstairs, changed out of his bathing suit, and came down to the front entrance. On Divinity Street people were running. The ladder truck roared by with spinning scarlet light and firemen struggling into slickers, clinging as the truck rounded Cogswell’s corner. The fire horn, apocalyptically close, repeated its call. The section of the town leeward from the hill was fogged with yellow smoke. Piet began running with the rest.
Up the hill the crowds and the smoke thickened. Already fire hoses, some slack and tangled, others plump and leaking in graceful upward jets, filled the streets around the green. The Congregational Church was burning. God’s own lightning had struck it. The icy rain intensified, and the crowds of people, both old and young, from every quarter, watched in chilled silence.
Smoke, an acrid yellow, was pouring neatly, sheets of rapidly crimping wool, from under the cornice of the left pediment and from the lower edge of the cupola that lifted the gilded weathercock one hundred twenty-five feet into the air. Down among the Doric columns firemen were chasing away the men of the church who had rushed in and already rescued the communion service, the heavy walnut altar and pulpit, the brass cross, the portraits of old divines, stacks of old sermons that were blowing away, and, sodden and blackening in the unrelenting rain, a few pew cushions, new from the last renovation. As a onetime member of the church Piet would have gone forward to help them but the firemen and police had formed a barricade through which only the town dogs, yapping and socializing, could pass. His builder’s eye calculated that the bolt had struck the pinnacle, been deflected from the slender lighting-rod cable into the steel rods reinforcing the cupola, and ignited the dry wood where the roofline joined the straight base of the tower. Here, in the hollownesses old builders created for insulation, between the walls, between the roof and the hung plaster ceiling of the sanctuary, in the unventilated spaces behind the dummy tympanum and frieze and architrave of the classic façade, amid the hodgepodge of dusty storage reachable by only a slat ladder behind the disused choir loft, the fire would thrive. Hoses turned upon the steaming exterior surfaces solved nothing. The only answer was immediate axwork, opening up the roof, chopping without pity through the old hand-carved triglyphs and metopes. But the columns themselves were forty feet from po
rch to capital, and no truck could be worked close enough over the rocks to touch its ladder to the roof, and the wind was blowing the poisonously thickening smoke straight out from the burning side into the throats of the rescuers.
A somewhat ironical cheer arose from the theater of townspeople. Buzz Kappiotis, his swollen silhouette unmistakable, had put on a smoke mask and, ax in hand, was climbing a ladder extended to its fullest to touch the great church’s pluming rain gutter. Climbing slower and slower, his crouch manifesting his fear, he froze in a mass of smoke, disappeared, and reappeared inching down. A few teen-agers behind Piet booed, but the crowd, out of noncomprehension or shame, was silent. Another fireman, shiny as a coal in his slicker, climbed to the ladder’s tip, swung his ax, produced a violet spurt of trapped gas, so his masked profile gleamed peacock blue, and was forced by the heat to descend.
Now flames, shy flickers of orange, materialized, licking their way up the cupola’s base, along the inside edges of the louvered openings constructed to release the sound of the bell. The bell itself, ponderous sorrowing shape, a caped widow, was illumined by a glow from beneath. Jets of water arched high and fell short, crisscrossing. Spirals of whiter smoke curled up the painted cerulean dome of the cupola but did not obscure the weathercock turning in the touches of wind.
The fire signal sounded a third time, and engines from neighboring communities, from Lacetown and Mather, from as far away as Quincy and Plymouth, began to arrive, and the pressure generated by their pumps lifted water to the flickering pinnacle; but by now the tall clear windows along the sides had begun to glow, and the tar shingles of the roof gave off greasy whiffs. The fire had spread under the roof and through the double walls and, even as the alien firemen smashed a hundred diamond panes of glass, ballooned golden in the sanctuary itself. For an instant the Gothic-tipped hymn boards could be seen, still bearing this morning’s numerals; the Doric fluting on the balcony rail was raked with amber light; the plush curtain that hid the choir’s knees caught and exploded upwards in the empty presbytery like a phoenix. Gone was the pulpit wherein Pedrick had been bent double by his struggle with the Word. The booing teen-agers behind Piet had been replaced by a weeping woman. The crowd, which had initially rushed defenseless and naked to the catastrophe, had sprouted umbrellas and armored itself in raincoats and tarpaulins. There was a smell of circus. Children, outfitted in yellow slickers and visored rainhats, clustered by their parents’ legs. Teen-age couples watched from cars cozy with radio music. People crammed the memorial pavilion, clung to the baseball screen. The gathered crowd now stretched far down each street radiating from the green, Divinity and Prudence and Temperance, ashen faces filling even the neon-scrawled shopping section. Rain made dusk premature. The spotlights of the fire trucks searched out a crowd whose extent seemed limitless and whose silence, as the conflagration possessed every section of the church, deepened. Flames, doused in the charred belfry, had climbed higher and now fluttered like pennants from the slim pinnacle supporting the rooster. With yearning parabolas the hoses arched higher. A section of roof collapsed in a whirlwind of sparks. The extreme left column began to smoulder like a snuffed birthday candle. Through the great crowd breathed disbelief that the rain and the fire could persist together, that nature could so war with herself: as if a conflict in God’s heart had been bared for them to witness. Piet wondered at the lightness in his own heart, gratitude for having been shown something beyond him, beyond all blaming.
He picked up a soaked pamphlet, a sermon dated 1795. It is the indispensable duty of all the nations of the earth, to know that the LORD he is God, and to offer unto him sincere and devout thanksgiving and praise. But if there is any nation under heaven, which hath more peculiar and forcible reasons than others, for joining with one heart and voice in offering up to him these grateful sacrifices, the United States of America are that nation.
Familiar faces began to protrude from the citizenry. Piet spotted the Applebys and little-Smiths and Thornes standing in the broad-leafed shelter of a catalpa tree near the library. The men were laughing; Freddy had brought a beer. Angela was also in the crowd. She had brought the girls, and when they spoke to him it was Ruth, not Nancy, who was weepy, distressed that the man Jesus would destroy His church, where she had always wiped her feet, timid of the holy, and had dutifully, among children who were not her friends, sung His praise, to please her father. Piet pressed her wide face against his chest in apology; but his windbreaker was soaked and cold and Ruth flinched from the unpleasant contact. “This is too damn depressing for them,” Angela said, “we’re going back.” When Nancy begged to stay, she said, “The fire’s nearly out, the best part is over,” and it was true; visible flames had been chased into the corners of the charred shell.
Nancy pointed upward and said, “The chicken!” The rooster, bright as if above not only the smoke but the rain, was poised motionless atop a narrow pyre. Flames in little gassy points had licked up the pinnacle to the ball of ironwork that supported the vane’s pivot; it seemed it all must topple; then a single jet, luminous in the spotlights, hurled itself higher and the flames abruptly vanished. Though the impact made the spindly pinnacle waver, it held. The flash bulbs of accumulating cameras went off like secondary lightning. By their fitful illumination and the hysterical whirling of spotlights, Piet watched his wife walk away, turn once, white, to look back, and walk on, leading their virgin girls.
Pedrick, his wiry old hair disarrayed into a translucent crest, recognized Piet in the crowd, though it had been months since he had been in the congregation. His voice clawed. “You’re a man of the world. How much in dollars and cents do you estimate it will take to replace this tragic structure?”
Piet said, “Oh, if the exterior shell can be salvaged, between two and three hundred thousand. From the ground up, maybe half a million. At least. Construction costs increase about eight per cent a year.” These figures bent the gaunt clergyman like a weight on his back; Piet added in sympathy, “It is tragic. The carpentry in there can never be duplicated.”
Pedrick straightened; his eye flashed. He reprimanded Piet: “Christianity isn’t dollars and cents. This church isn’t that old stump of a building. The church is people, my friend, people. Human beings.” And he waggled a horny finger, and Piet saw that Pedrick too knew of his ouster from his home, his need to be brought into line.
Piet told him in return, “But even if they do save the shell, the walls are going to be so weakened you’ll have to tear it down anyway.” And as if to bear him out, fresh flames erupted along the wall on the other side and leaped so high, as the hoses were shifted, that a maple sapling, having ventured too close to the church, itself caught fire, and dropping burning twigs on the shoulders of spectators.
The crowd churned to watch this final resurgence of the powers of destruction, and Piet was fetched up against Carol Constantine. She carried an umbrella and invited him under it with her, and two of her children, Laura and Patrice. Her show of sorrow touched him. “Oh Piet,” she said, “it’s too terrible, isn’t it? I loved that church.”
“I never saw you in it.”
“Of course not, I’m a Presbyterian. But I’d look at it twenty times a day, whenever I was in our yard. I’d really be very religious, if Eddie weren’t so anti-everything.”
“Where is Eddie? On the road?”
“In the sky. He comes back and tells me how beautifully these Puerto Rican girls lay. It’s a joy to see him leave. Why am I telling you all this?”
“Because you’re sad to see the church burn.”
The gutted walls stood saved. The pillars supported the pediment, and the roof beam held the cupola, but the place of worship was a rubble of timbers and collapsed plaster and charred pews, and the out-of-town firemen were coiling their hose, and Buzz Kappiotis was mentally framing his report, and the crowd gradually dispersing. Carol invited Piet in for a cup of tea. Tea became supper, spaghetti shared with her children. He changed from his wet clothes to a sweater and pants, to
o tight, of Eddie’s. When the children were in bed it developed he would spend the night. He had never before slept with a woman so bony and supple. It was good, after his strenuous experience of Foxy, to have a woman who came quickly, with grateful cries and nimble accommodations, who put a pillow beneath her hips, who let her head hang over the side of the bed, hair trailing, throat arched, and who wrapped her legs around him as if his trunk were a stout trapeze by which she was swinging far out over the abyss of the world. The bedroom, like many rooms in Tarbox that night, smelled of wet char and acidulous smoke. Between swings she talked, told him of her life with Eddie, his perversity and her misery, of her hopes for God and immortality, of the good times she and Eddie had had long ago, before they moved to Tarbox. Piet asked her about their affair with the Saltzes and whether she missed them. Carol seemed to need reminding and finally said, “That was mostly talk by other people. Frankly, she was kind of fun, but he was a bore.”
Larry & Linda’s Guest House
Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V.I.
May 15
Dearest Piet—
Just to write your name makes me feel soft and collapsing inside. What am I doing here, so far from my husband, or my lover, or my father? I have only Toby, and he, poor small soul, has been sunburned by his idiot mother who, accustomed to the day-by-day onset of the Tarbox summer, has baked both him and herself in the tropical sun, a little white spot directly overhead no bigger than a pea. He cried all night, whenever he tried to roll over. Also, this place, advertised as “an inn in the sleepy tradition of the islands of rum and sun” (I have their leaflet on the desk, the very same one given to me by a Washington travel agent), is in fact two doors up from a steel band nightclub and the slanty little street where blue sewer water runs is alive most of the night with the roar of mufflerless VW’s and the catcalls of black adolescents. So I have fits all night and droop all day.