by John Updike
And who is to say what is an “essential direction”?
Barylambda was an amblypod, meaning “blunt foot,” an order (or suborder) of ungulates that had, Webster’s Dictionary told Sapers, “very small smooth brains.” The “small” was to be expected, the “smooth” was surprising. It was nice. The man who loved extinct mammals resented the way Markman kept chaffing the amblypods; nothing about them, especially their feet and their teeth, was specialized enough to suit him. One could hear Markman sigh, like the sardonic instructor of a class of dullards, as he wrote, “At least one more family of amblypods must be mentioned: the uintatheres. By late Eocene time some of these grotesque creatures had attained the size of circus elephants. Arranged along the face and forehead they had three pairs of bony protuberances resembling horns.…” In the accompanying photograph of a Uintacolotherium skull, the bony protuberances looked artful, Arp-like. Sapers didn’t think them necessarily grotesque, if you tried to view them from the standpoint of the Life Force instead of from ours, the standpoint of Man, with his huge, rough brain. Sapers shut his eyes and tried to imagine the selective process whereby a little bud of a bony protuberance achieved a tiny advantage, an edge, in battle, food-gathering, or mating, which would favor an exaggeration from generation to generation. He almost had it in focus—some kind of Platonic ideal pressing upon the uintathere fetuses, tincturing uintathere milk—when the telephone shrilled near his ear.
It was Mrs. Sapers. Her voice—alive, vulnerable, plaintive, his—arose from some deep past. She told him, not uninterestingly, of her day, her depressions, her difficulties. Their daughter had flunked a math exam. The furnace was acting funny. Men were asking her to go out on dates. One man had held her hand in a movie and her stomach had flipped over. What should she do?
“Be yourself,” he advised. “Do what feels natural. Call the furnace man. Tell Dorothy I’ll help her with her math when I visit Saturday.”
“If I had a gun, some nights I’d shoot myself.”
“That’s why they have firearms-control laws,” he told her reassuringly, wondering then why she wasn’t reassured.
For she began to cry into the telephone. He tried to follow her reasoning but gathered only the shadowy impression that she loved him, which he felt to be a false impression, from previous fieldwork as her husband. Anyway, what could he do about it now? “Nothing,” Mrs. Sapers snapped, adding, “You’re grotesque.” Then, with that stoic elegance she still possessed, and he still admired, she hung up.
Mammae, he read, are specialized sweat glands. A hair is a specialized scale. When a mammal’s body gets too hot, each hair lifts up so the air can reach the skin. The bizarre Arsinoitherium, superficially like a rhinoceros but anatomically in a class by itself, may be distantly related to the tiny, furry hyrax found in nooks of Asia and Africa. The saber-toothed tiger was probably less intelligent than a house cat. Its “knife tooth” was developed to prey on other oversized mammals, and couldn’t have pinned a rabbit. Rabbits have been around a long time—though nothing as long, of course, as the crocodile and the horseshoe crab. Sapers thought of those saber teeth, and of the mastodon’s low-crowned molars, with the enamel in a single layer on top, which were superseded by the mammoth’s high-crowned molars, which never wore out, the enamel distributed in vertical plates, and he tried to picture the halfway tooth, or the evolutionary steps to baleen; his thoughts wandered pleasantly to the truth that the whale and the bear and Man are late, late models, arrivistes in the fossil record. What is there about a bear, that we love him? His flat, archaic feet. The amblypods are coming back! There was a delicate message Sapers could almost make out, a graffito scratched on the crumbling wall of time. His mistress called, shattering the wall.
She loved him. She told him so. He told her vice versa, picturing her young anatomy, her elongate thighs, her small smooth head, its mane, her spine, her swaying walk, and wondering, mightn’t his middle-aged body break, attempting to cater to such a miracle? She told him of her day, her boredom, her boring job, her fear that he would go back to his wife.
“Why would I do that?” he asked.
“You think I’m too crass. I get so frightened.”
“You’re not especially crass,” he reassured her. “But you are young. I’m old, relatively. In fact, I’m ancient. Wouldn’t you like to get a nice youngish lover, with a single gristly horn, like a modern-day rhinoceros, one of the few surviving perissodactyls?”
He was offering to divert her, but she kept insisting on her love, his bones crunching at every declaration. Rhinoceroses, he learned when at last she had feasted enough and hung up, had been backed with unguarded enthusiasm by the investment councils of the Life Force. Some species had attained the bulk of several elephants. There had been running rhinoceroses—“long-legged, rather slender-bodied”—and amphibious rhinoceroses, neither of them the ancestor of the “true” rhinoceros; that honor belonged to hornless Trigonia, with his moderate size, “stocky body,” fourteen toes, and “very conservative” (Sapers could hear Markman impatiently sighing) dentition.
What is this prejudice in favor of progress? The trouble with his mistress, Saper decided, was that she had too successfully specialized, was too purely a mistress, perfect but fragile, like a horse’s leg, which is really half foot, extended and whittled and tipped with one amazing toenail. The little Eohippus, in its forest of juicy soft leaves, scuttled like a raccoon; and even Mesohippus, though as big as a collie, kept three toes of each foot on the ground. Eohippus, it seemed to Sapers, was like a furtive little desire that evolves from the shadows of the heart into a great, clattering, unmanageable actuality.
• • •
His wife called back. Over the aeons of their living together she had evolved psychic protuberances that penetrated and embraced his mind. “I’m sorry to keep spoiling your wonderful privacy,” she said, in such a way that he believed in her solicitude for his privacy even as she sarcastically invaded it, “but I’m at my wits’ end.” And he believed this, too, though also knowing that she could induce desperation in herself as a weapon, a hooked claw, a tusk. Perhaps she shouldn’t have added, “I tried to call twice before but the line was busy”; yet this hectoring, too, he took into himself as pathos, her jealousy legitimate and part of her helplessness, all organs evolving in synchrony. She explained that their old pet dog was dying; it couldn’t eat and kept tottering off into the woods, and she and their daughter spent hours calling and searching and luring the poor creature back to the house. Should they put the dog into the car and take her to the vet’s, to be “put to sleep”?
Sapers asked his wife what their daughter thought.
“I don’t know. I’ll put her on.”
The child was fourteen.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, sweet. Is Josie in much pain?”
“No, she’s just like drunk. She stands in the puddle in the driveway and looks at the sky.”
“She sounds happy, in a way. Whose idea is it to take her to the vet’s?”
“Mommy’s.”
“And what’s your idea?”
“To let Josie do what she wants to do.”
“That sounds like my idea, too. Why don’t you let her just stay in the woods?”
“It’s beginning to rain here and she’ll get all wet.” And the child’s voice, so sensible and direct up to this point, generated a catch, tears, premonitions of eternal loss; the gaudy parade of eternal loss was about to turn the corner, cymbals clanging, trombones triumphant, and enter her mind. Keep calm, Sapers told himself. One thing at a time.
He said, “Then put her in the back room with some newspapers and a bowl of water. Talk to her so she doesn’t feel lonely. Don’t take her to the vet’s unless she seems to be in pain. She always gets scared at the vet’s.”
“O.K. You want to talk any more to Mom?”
“No. Sweetie? I’m sorry I’m not there to help you all.”
“That’s O.K.” Her voice grew indifferent, sm
all and smooth. She was about to hang up.
“Oh, and, baby?” Sapers called across the distance.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t flub up any more math exams. It drives Mommy wild.”
Giant and bizarre mammalian forms persisted well after the advent of Man. The splendid skeleton of an imperial mammoth, Archidiskodon imperator, exhibited in the Denver Museum of Natural History, was found associated with a spear point. Neanderthal men neatly stacked, with an obscure religious purpose, skulls of Ursus spelaeus, the great cave bear. Even the incredible Glyptodon, a hard-shelled mammal the size and shape of a Volkswagen, chugged about the South American pampas a mere ten thousand years ago, plenty late enough to be seen by the wary, brown-faced forebears of the effete Inca kings. Who knows who witnessed the fleeting life of Stockoceros, the four-pronged antelope? Of Syndyoceras, the deerlike ruminant with two pairs of horns, one pair arising from the middle of its face? Of Oxydactylus, the giraffe-camel? Of Daphoenodon, the bear-dog? Of Diceratherium, the small rhinoceros, or Dinohyus, the enormous pig? Again and again, in the annals of these creatures, Sapers found mysterious disappearances, unexplained departures. “By the end of the Pliocene period all American rhinos had become extinct or wandered away to other parts of the world.” “After the horse family had been so successful in North America … its disappearance from this hemisphere has no ready explanation.”
Sapers looked about his apartment. He observed with satisfaction that there was no other living thing in it. No pets, no plants. Such cockroaches as he saw he killed. But for himself, the place had a Proterozoic purity. He breathed easy.
The telephone rang. It was his mother. He asked, “How are you?” and received a detailed answer—chest pains, neuralgia, shortness of breath, numbness in the extremities. “What can I do about it?” he asked.
“You can stop being a mental burden to me,” she answered swiftly, with a spryness unseemly, he thought, in one so dilapidated. “You can go back to your loved ones. You can be a good boy.”
“I am a good boy,” he argued. “All I do is sit in my room and read.” Such behavior had pleased her once; it failed to do so now. She sighed, like Markman over a uintathere, and slightly changed the subject.
“If I go suddenly,” she said, “you must get right down here and guard the antiques. Terrible things happen in the neighborhood now. When Ginny Peterson went, they backed a truck right up to the door, so the daughter flew in from Omaha to find an empty house. All that Spode, and the corner cupboard with it.”
“You won’t go suddenly,” he heard himself telling her; it sounded like a rebuke, though he had meant it reassuringly.
After a pause, she asked, “Do you ever go to church?”
“Not as often as I should.” … no ready explanation.
“Everybody down here is praying for you,” she said.
“Everybody?” The herds had just wandered away.
“I slept scarcely an hour last night,” his mother said, “thinking about you.”
“Please stop,” Sapers begged. When the conversation ended, he sat still, thinking, We are all, all of us living, contemporary with the vanishing whale, the Florida manatee, the Bengal tiger, the whooping crane.
He felt asthmatic. The pages about extinct mammals suffocated him with their myriad irrelevant, deplorable facts. Amebelodon, a “shovel-tusker” found in Nebraska, had a lower jaw six feet long, with two flat teeth sticking straight out. Whereas Stenomylus was a dainty little camel. Why is a horse’s face long? Because its eyes are making room for the roots of its high-crowned upper grinders. But even Eohippus, interestingly, had a diastema. Creodonts, the most primitive of mammalian carnivores, moved on flat, wide-spreading feet; indeed, the whole animal, Sapers had to admit, looked indifferently engineered, compared with cats and dogs. “The insectivores, however, have made very little progress in any direction.” With a sudden light surge of cathexis that shifted his weight in the chair, Sapers loved insectivores; he hugged their shapeless, conservative archetype to his heart. “Feet and teeth provide us with most of our information about an extinct mammal’s mode of existence.…” Of course, Sapers thought. They are what hurt.
Love Song, for a Moog
Synthesizer
She was good in bed. She went to church. Her IQ was 150. She repeated herself. Nothing fit; it frightened him. Yet Tod wanted to hang on, to hang on to the bits and pieces, which perhaps were not truly pieces but islands, which a little lowering of sea level would reveal to be rises on a sunken continent, peaks of a subaqueous range, secretly one, a world.
He called her Pumpkin, or Princess. She had been a parody of a respectable housewife—active in all causes, tireless in all aspects of housekeeping from fumigation to floor-waxing, an ardent practitioner of the minor arts of the Halloween costumer and the Cub Scout den mother, a beaming, posing, conveniently shaped ornament to her husband at cocktail parties, beach parties, dinner parties, fund-raising parties. Always prim, groomed, proper, perfect.
But there was a clue, which he picked up: she never listened. Her eyebrows arched politely, her upper lip lifted alertly; nevertheless she brushed her gaze past the faces of her conversational partners in a terrible icy hurry, and repeated herself so much that he wondered if she were sane.
Her heart wasn’t in this.
She took to jabbing him at parties, jabbing so hard it hurt. This piece of herself, transferred to his ribs, his kidneys, as pain, lingered there, asked to be recognized as love.
His brain—that impatient organ, which deals, with the speed of light, in essences and abstractions—opted to love her perhaps too early, before his heart—that plodder, that problem-learner—had had time to collect quirks and spiritual snapshots, to survey those faults and ledges of the not-quite-expected where affection can silt and accumulate. He needed a body. Instead there was something skeletal, spacy.
But, then, the shivering. That was lovable. As they left a fine restaurant in an elegant, shadowy district of the city, Princess complained (her talk was unexpectedly direct) that her underpants kept riding up. Drunk, his drunkenness glazing the bricks of the recently restored pavement beneath them, the marquee of the cunningly renovated restaurant behind them, the other pedestrians scattered around them as sketchily as figures in an architectural drawing, and the artificially antique streetlamp above them, its wan light laced by the twigs of a newly planted tree that had also something of an architect’s stylization about it, Tod knelt down and reached up into her skirt with both hands and pulled down her underpants, so adroitly she shivered. She shivered, involuntarily, expressing—what? Something that came upon her like a breeze. Then, recovering poise, with an adroitness the equal of his, she stepped out of her underpants. Her black high heels, shiny as Shirley Temple dancing pumps, stepped from the two silken circles on the bricks—one, two, primly, quickly, as she glanced over her shoulder, to see if they had been seen. She was wearing a black dress, severe, with long sleeves, that he had last seen her wear to a mutual friend’s funeral. Tod stood and crumpled his handful of warm gossamer into his coat pocket. They walked on, her arm in his. He seemed taller, she softer. The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind on her cunt.
He had loved that shiver, that spasm she could not control; for love must attach to what we cannot help—the involuntary, the telltale, the fatal. Otherwise, the reasonableness and the mercy that would make our lives decent and orderly would overpower love, crush it, root it out, tumble it away like a striped tent pegged in sand.
Time passed. By sunlight, by a window, he suddenly saw a web, a radiating system, of wrinkles spread out from the corners of her eyes when she smiled. From her lips another set of creases, so delicate only the sun could trace them, spread upward; the two systems commingled on her cheeks. Time was interconnecting her features, which had been isolated in the spaces of her face by a certain glossy, infantile perfection. She was growing old within their love, within their suffering. He examine
d a snapshot he had taken a year ago. A smooth, staring, unlistening face. Baby fat.
Tod liked her aging, felt warmed by it, for it too was involuntary. It had happened to her with him, yet was not his fault. He wanted nothing to be his fault. This made her load double.
• • •
As mistress, she adapted well to the harrowing hours, the phone conversations that never end, the posing for indecent photographs, the heavy restaurant meals. She mainly missed of her former, decent, orderly life the minor blessings, such as shopping in the A & P without fear of being snubbed by a fellow-parishioner, or of encountering Tod’s outraged wife across a pyramid of dog food.
Their spouses’ fixed fury seemed rooted in a kind of professional incredulity; it was as if they had each been specialists (a repairer of Cyrillic typewriters, or a gerbil currier) whose specialty was so narrow there had been no need to do it very well.
But how he loved dancing with Pumpkin! She was so solid on her feet, her weight never on him, however close he held her. She tried to teach him to waltz—her husband having been a dashing, long-legged waltzer. But Tod could not learn: the wrong foot, the foot that had just received his weight, would dart out again, as if permanently appointed Chief Foot, at the start of the new trio of steps; he was a binary computer trying to learn left-handedness from a mirror.
So Tod too had his gaps, his spaces. He could not learn to repeat himself. He could do everything only once.
On a hotel bed, for variety, he sat astride her chest and masturbated her, idly at first, then urgingly, the four fingers of his right hand vying in massage of her electric fur, until her hips began to rock and she came, shivering. He understood that shivering better now. He was the conduit, the open window, by which, on rare occasions, she felt the ventus Dei. In the center of her sensuality, she was God’s plaything.
And then, in another sort of wind, she would rage, lifted above reason; she would rage in spirals of indignation and frenzy fed from within, her voice high, a hurled stone frozen at the zenith of its arc, a mask of petulance clamped so hard upon her face that the skin around the lips went quite white. Strange little obstructions set her off, details in her arrangements with her husband; it was a fault, a failure, Tod felt, in himself, that he did not afford her an excuse for such passion. She would stare beyond him, exhausted in the end as if biologically, by the satisfaction of a cycle. It fairly frightened him, such a whirlwind; it blew, and blew itself out, in a region of her where he had never lived. An island, but in a desert. Her lips and eye-whites would look parched afterwards.