The Early Stories: 1953-1975

by John Updike

  She had been, the mother of Adeodatus, strangely calm in receiving the news, anxious foremost to understand, to avoid misunderstanding; her quest for clarity, which had made her appear rigid, frontal, iconic, brusque at the pre-circus party more than a decade ago, had tunnelled through all their intervening ecstasies. She was in his arms, her face tear-blurred but held back from his, contemplating his naked shoulder as if the truth might rest upon it like a butterfly. “Monica has found you a wife?”

  “My mother deems it crucial to my salvation that I marry.”

  “And the betrothed—?”

  “Is two years under the fit age.”

  “Not fit, but beautiful?” she asked. De pulchro et apto had been the title of his first dissertation, composed in Carthage and read aloud to her there. She was illiterate. Since, he had ceased to share his compositions—De vita beata, De immortalitate animae. He had felt these subjects as betrayals of her, prefatory to this great betrayal.

  “Not beautiful, but sufficiently pleasing,” he factually answered, unprepared for the sirocco of her grief. “But not you, not like you,” were all the words he could call into her weeping, repeating, “Not like you at all,” recognizing, at last, her firmness and smallness so close yet remote in his arms as that of an unformed person. The recognition hardened his heart. His cruelty as he held her heightened him. He saw over her head, where gray hairs had come, scarcely distinguishable, to mingle with the fair, back to the fact that she had had a husband and had accepted that husband and her lover as if they were kindred manifestations of the same force, as if he himself were not incomparable, unique, with truth’s sole Lord within him. For this she was rightly punished. Punished, nay, obliterated, as a heresy is obliterated, while love for the heretic burns in the heart of the condemner. Aurelius grew immortally tall against her grieving; he felt in her, who had so often sobbed in love’s convulsion against his body, the benign enemy he was later to find in Pelagius, who held that Adam’s sin touched only Adam, that men were born incorrupt, that unbaptized infants did not go to Hell. Such liberal plausibilities poisoned the water of eternal life as it sprang from the stricken rock. So with her softness, her stolid waist and child’s small eager hands, the austerity of her dress, the brazen circlets she wore as earrings, the halo of fine white hairs her skin bore everywhere: the sum was ease, and ease was deception, and deception evil. So with her love for him. There was more. There must be more. Verus philosophus est amator Dei.

  Nor was that my wound cured, which had been made by the cutting away of the former, but after inflammation and most acute pain, it mortified, and my pains became less acute, but more desperate.

  To Thee be praise, glory to Thee, Fountain of Mercies. I was becoming more miserable, and Thou nearer.

  In Africa, the sky almost never shows a cloud. The heat the desert bestows upon its green shore is severe but not oppressive, unlike that heavy Milanese heat wherein she had pulled back her hair from damp temples. She, too, could taste the dry joy of lightness, of renunciation. She cut off her hair. She forgot her son. Nor would she ever make love again; there was no moderation in what mattered.

  Among the women of the cenobium she entered, she moved not as one with a great grief behind her but as one who, like a child, had yet to live. Blue was the color of the order, her color, between Hellenic white and medieval black. The Beautiful and the Fitting: this, the first of Augustine’s dissertations, and the only one of which she was the substance, stayed in her memory and conspired, among these whispering gowned women and these sun-dazed walls of clay, to refine that aesthetic of rite and symbol with which half-formed Christianity, amid its renunciations, was to enrich the vocabulary of beauty. Though illiterate, she drew to herself, from these her sisters—the maimed and fanatic and avoidant—authority. Her complacence, which had never doubted the body’s prerogatives, seemed here, in these corridors cloistered from the sun, to manifest purity. Her shamelessness became a higher form of self-surrender. Her placid carriage suggested triumph. It was as if her dynamic and egocentric lover, whom she had never failed to satisfy, in his rejection of her had himself failed, and been himself rejected, even as his verbal storms swept the Mediterranean and transformed orthodoxy.

  She was a saint, whose name we do not know. For a thousand years, men would endeavor to hate the flesh, because of her.

  During the Jurassic

  Waiting for the first guests, the iguanodon gazed along the path and beyond, toward the monotonous cycad forests and the low volcanic hills. The landscape was everywhere interpenetrated by the sea, a kind of metallic-blue rottenness that daily breathed in and out. Behind him, his wife was assembling the hors d’oeuvres. As he watched her, something unintended, something grossly solemn, in his expression made her laugh, displaying the leaf-shaped teeth lining her cheeks. Like him, she was an ornithischian, but much smaller—a compsognathus. He wondered, watching her race bipedally back and forth among the scraps of food (dragonflies wrapped in ferns, cephalopods on toast), how he had ever found her beautiful. His eyes hungered for size; he experienced a rage for sheer blind size.

  The stegosauri, of course, were the first to appear. Among their many stupid friends these were the most stupid, and the most punctual. Their front legs bent outward and their tiny, beak-tipped, filmy-eyed faces virtually skimmed the ground; the upward sweep of their backs was mountainous, and the double rows of giant bone plates along the spine clicked together in the sway of their cumbersome gait. With hardly a greeting, they dragged their tails, quadruply spiked, across the threshold and maneuvered themselves toward the bar, which was tended by a minute and shapeless mammal hired for the evening.

  Next came the allosaurus, a carnivorous bachelor whose dangerous aura and needled grin excited the female herbivores; then the rhampho-rhynchus, a pterosaur whose much-admired “flight” was in reality a clumsy brittle glide ending in an embarrassed bump and trot. The iguanodon despised these gangly pterosaurs’ pretensions; he thought grotesque the precarious elongation of the single finger from which their levitating membranes were stretched, and privately believed that the less handsomely underwritten archaeopteryx, though sneered at as unstable and feathered, had more of a future. The hypsilophodon, with her graceful hands and branch-gripping feet, arrived escorted by the timeless crocodile—an incongruous pair, but both were recently divorced. Still the iguanodon gazed down the path.

  Behind him, the conversation gnashed on a thousand things—houses, mortgages, lawns, fertilizers, erosion, boats, winds, annuities, capital gains, recipes, education, the day’s tennis, last night’s party. Each party was consumed by discussion of the previous one. Their lives were subject to constant cross-check. When did you leave? When did you leave? We’d been out every night this week. We had an amphibious baby-sitter who had to be back in the water by one. Gregor had to meet a client in town, and now they’ve reduced the Saturday schedule, it means the 7:43 or nothing. Trains? I thought they were totally extinct. Not at all. They’re coming back, it’s just a matter of time until the government … In the long range of evolution, they are still the most efficient … Taking into account the heat-loss/weight ratio and assuming there’s no more glaciation … Did you know—I think this is fascinating—did you know that in the financing of those great ornate stations of the eighteen-eighties and nineties, those real monsters, there was no provision for amortization? They weren’t amortized at all, they were financed on the basis of eternity! The railroad was conceived of as the end of Progress! I think—though not an expert—that the key word in this overall industrio-socio-what-have-you-oh nexus or syndrome or bag or whatever is “overextended.” Any competitorless object bloats. Personally, I miss the trolley cars. Now, don’t tell me I’m the only creature in the room old enough to remember the trolley cars!

  The iguanodon’s high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split; the brontosaurus was coming up the path.

  Her husband, the diplodocus, was with her. They moved together, rhythmic twins, buoyed by the hollow ass
urance of the huge. She paused to tear with her lips a clump of feathery leaves from an overhanging paleocycas. From her deliberate grace the iguanodon received the impression that she knew he was watching her. Indeed, she had long guessed his love, as had her husband; the two saurischians entered his party with the languid confidence of the specially cherished. Even as the iguanodon gritted his teeth in assumption of an ironical stance, her bulk, her gorgeous size, enraptured him, swelling to fill the massive ache he carried when she was not there. She rolled outward across his senses—the dawn-pale underparts, the reticulate skin, the vast bluish muscles whose management required a second brain at the base of her spine.

  Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned a conventional career in finance to enter an Episcopalian seminary. This regression—as the iguanodon felt it—seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.

  How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was exquisite. Her facial essence appeared to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realized, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, to be impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs—strange adaptation!—were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.

  “Comment va le bon Dieu?”

  “Ah?” The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humored. Seconds elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.

  The iguanodon insisted. “How are things in the supernatural?”

  “The supernatural? I don’t think that category exists in the new theology.”

  “N’est-ce pas? What does exist in the new theology?”

  “Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith.”

  “Work? I had thought you had quit work.”

  “That’s an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I’ve changed employers.”

  The iguanodon felt in the other’s politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said gnashingly, “The Void pays wages?”

  “Ah?”

  “You mean there’s a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense.”

  “Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I’m not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my life, I feel on the verge of finding myself.”

  “Yourself? That little thing? Cette petite chose? That’s all you’re looking for? Have you tried pain? Myself, I have found pain to be a great illuminator. Permettez-moi.” The iguanodon essayed to bite the veined base of the serpentine throat lazily upheld before him; but his teeth were too specialized and could not tear flesh. He abraded his lips and tasted his own salt blood. Disoriented, crazed, he thrust one thumb deep into a yielding gray flank that hove through the smoke and chatter of the party like a dull wave. But the nerves of his victim lagged in reporting the pain, and by the time the distant head of the diplodocus was notified, the wound was already healing.

  The drinks were flowing freely. The mammal crept up to the iguanodon and murmured that the dry vermouth was running out. He was told to use the sweet, or else substitute white wine. Behind the sofa the stegosauri were Indian-wrestling; each time one went over, his spinal plates raked the recently papered wall. The hypsilophodon, tipsy, perched on a banister; the allosaurus darted forward suddenly and ceremoniously nibbled her tail. On the far side of the room, by the great slack-stringed harp, the compsognathus and the brontosaurus were talking. The iguanodon was drawn to the pair, surprised that his wife would presume to engage the much larger creature—would presume to insert herself, with her scrabbling nervous motions and chattering leaf-shaped teeth, into the crevices of that queenly presence. As he drew closer to them, music began. His wife confided to him, “The salad is running out.”

  “Amid all this greenery?” he responded, incredulous, and turned to the brontosaurus. “Chère madame, voulez-vous danser avec moi?”

  Her dancing was awkward, but even in this awkwardness, this ponderous stiffness, he felt the charm of her abundance. “I’ve been talking to your husband about religion,” he told her, as they settled into the steps they could do.

  “I’ve given up,” she said. “It’s such a deprivation for me and the children.”

  “He says he’s looking for himself.”

  “It’s so selfish,” she blurted. “The children are teased at school.”

  “Come live with me.”

  “Can you support me?”

  “No, but I would gladly sink under you.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “Je t’aime.”

  “Don’t. Not here.”

  “Somewhere, then?”

  “No. Nowhere. Never.” With what delightful precision did her miniature mouth encompass these infinitesimal concepts!

  “But I,” he said, “but I lo—”

  “Stop it. You embarrass me. Deliberately.”

  “You know what I wish? I wish all these beasts would disappear. What do we see in each other? Why do we keep getting together?”

  She shrugged. “If they disappear, we will too.”

  “I’m not so sure. There’s something about us that would survive. It’s not in you and not in me but between us, where we almost meet. Some vibration, some enduring cosmic factor. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Let’s stop. It’s too painful.”

  “Stop dancing?”

  “Stop being.”

  “That is a beautiful idea. Une belle idée. I will if you will.”

  “In time,” she said, and her fine little face precisely fitted this laconic promise; and as the summer night yielded warmth to the multiplying stars—fresher, closer, bigger then—he felt his blood sympathetically cool, and grow thunderously, fruitfully slow.

  Under the Microscope

  It was not his kind of pond; the water tasted slightly acid. He was a cyclops, the commonest of copepods, and this crowd seemed exotically cladoceran—stylish water-fleas with transparent carapaces, all shimmer and bubbles and twitch. His hostess, a magnificent daphnia fully an eighth of an inch tall, her heart and cephalic ganglion visibly pulsing, welcomed him with a lavish gesture of her ciliate, branching antennae; for a moment he feared she would eat him. Instead she offered him a platter of living desmids. They were bright green in color and shaped like crescents, hourglasses, omens. “Who do you know here?” Her voice was a distinct constant above the din. “Everybody knows you, of course. They’ve read your books.” His books, taken all together, with generous margins, would easily have fitted on the period that ends this sentence.

  The cyclops modestly grimaced, answered “No one,” and turned to a young specimen of water mite, probably Hydrachna geographica, still bearing ruddy traces of the larval stage. “Have you been here long?” he asked, meaning less the party than the pond.

  “Long enough.” Her answer came as swiftly as a reflex. “I go back to the surface now and then; we breathe air, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. I envy you.” He noticed she had only six legs. She was newly hatched, then. Between her eyes, arranged in two pairs, he counted a fifth, in the middle, and wondered if in her he might find his own central single optic amplified and confirmed. His antennules yearned to touch her red spots; he wanted to ask her, What do you see? Young as she was, partially formed, she appe
ared, alerted by his abrupt confession of envy, ready to respond to any question, however presuming.

  But at that moment a monstrous fairy shrimp, nearly an inch in length and extravagantly tinted blue, green, and bronze, swam by on its back, and the water shuddered. Furious, the cyclops asked the water mite, “Who invites them? They’re not even in our scale.”

  She shrugged permissively, showing that indeed she had been here, in this tainted pond, long enough. “They’re entomostracans,” she said, “just like Daphnia. They amuse her.”

  “They’re going to eat her up,” the cyclops predicted.

  Though she laughed, her fifth eye gazed steadily into his wide lone one. “But isn’t that what we all want? Subconsciously, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  An elegant, melancholy flatworm was passing hors d’oeuvres. The cyclops took some diatoms, cracked their delicate shells of silica, and ate them. They tasted golden brown. Growing hungrier, he pushed through to the serving table and had a volvox in algae dip. A shrill little rotifer, his head cilia whirling, his three-toothed mastax chattering, leaped up before him, saying, with the mixture of put-on and pleading characteristic of this environment, “I wead all your wunnaful books, and I have a wittle bag of pomes I wote myself, and I would wove it, wove it if you would wead them and wecommend them to a big bad pubwisher!” At a loss for a civil answer, the cyclops considered the rotifer silently, then ate him. He tasted slightly acid.

  The party was thickening. A host of protozoans drifted in on a raft of sphagnum moss: a trumpet-shaped stentor, apparently famous and interlocked with a lanky, bleached spirostomum; a claque of paramecia, swishing back and forth, tickling the crustacea on the backs of their knees; an old vorticella, a plantlike animalcule as dreary, the cyclops thought, as the batch of puffs rooted to the flap of last year’s succès d’estime. The kitchen was crammed with ostracods and flagellates engaged in mutually consuming conversation, and over in a corner, beneath an African mask, a great brown hydra, the real thing, attached by its sticky foot to the hissing steam radiator, rhythmically swung its tentacles here and there until one of them touched, in the circle of admirers, something appetizing; then the poison sacs exploded, the other tentacles contracted, and the prey was stuffed into the hydra’s swollen coelenteron, which gluttony had stretched to a transparency that veiled the preceding meals like polyethylene film protecting a rack of dry-cleaned suits. Hairy with bacteria, a simocephalus was munching a rapt nematode. The fairy shrimps, having multiplied, their crimson tails glowing with hemoglobin, came cruising in from the empty bedrooms. The party was thinning.