S.

by John Updike

  Days later. Prolonging the sad pleasure, the Beautifully Sorrowful. I do enjoy writing to you, old dear. "Maybe it's your silence I.enjoy—no scolding word about the state of the drapes or dust in the bookcase or about the house going to pot inside while I dug in the garden or wasted half the day at yoga. You hated my yoga, but maybe Midge will lead you along the Eightfold Path. Really, it's just stretching exercises and an attempt to still the mind, to quiet the ego and let something other than its clamoring be heard.

  Now I wonder if my reactions to you and Midge haven't been selfish and non-non-attached. After all, I did leave, and can't really imagine coming back. We've had our Krishna-Radha week in Marigot. How old were we? I would have been twenty-six, and you twenty-eight. The perfect age to play at being gods. If there is—as various patriarchal religions keep suggesting—a divinity in whoredom, I touched it that week. I wasn't just me, I was you, your sukra and my rajas indivisible. You got so brown, I remember, all but your cute pale tight fanny, and your body was like something harder than flesh, your chest leaning above me flat and hairless like a—what? A primitive lean-to, a piece of slanty attic roof that a child likes to huddle under while it rains. That must have been behind the dream of mine that I suppose Midge played for you. She really has come between us, hasn't she? In a way the Arhat never did. He belonged to my subtle body and you to my gross earthly sthula body—my real body, I suppose you'd say. I felt big enough for you both, if I can claim that without appearing immodest.

  Charles, I can't express how serene and benign I feel about you-and me. Parting is an illusion. Loss is an illusion, just as is gain. We shed our skins but something naked and white and amara slithers out and is always the same. I think I eventually will go to Holland and help Pearl bear our grandchild. These Dutch brewers have at least the charm of money—guilders, isn't it, over there? It all—sa grossesse et tout—seemed a little soon, but then everything does, I suppose, from being born to dying. I've dropped a note to Ducky asking him to try to work it out with Oilman. Did it bother you to hear on the tapes that I had a flirtation of sorts with Ducky, before he knew that he was gay? Poor Gloria, how terrible to realize that your supposed feminine charm is an unloaded gun, so to speak. There was something challenging about Ducky for a woman and I suppose that was it. Anyway, your flings with those flat-heeled nurses (how can you medical people who know so much about the body's ins and outs still get excited making love?—or does that expertise make it more so?) did bother me, however lightly you took them. They were klishta. They sullied me and you—wounded us, really. Things can't always be undone, it would seem. There is a grain to prakriti, an arrow of time. We get tired. Do remember and remind the despicable Gilman that whether or not this divorce goes through is to me a matter of utter indifference. Having known the Arhat's divine love I am not in the market (unlike needy old you) for any further attachments. I need to be still and feel now I have acquired the means to be still.

  As I wrote you last spring, I have the Price salver and teapot and the Peabody flatware and candlesticks and Daddy's Milton and Donne and Herbert and Vaughan and Marvell. You can't begrudge me those, and I've willed them to the Houghton Library in any case. The stocks that I impulsively sold on the advice of Irving's astrology I do apologize for—who would have thought the market could keep rising the nonsensical way it has? It's the terrible trade imbalance—the Japanese and Arabs and Germans have to do something with all their deterioratingdollars, and so they toss them back at us. In compensation, you can have the New Hampshire land—I don't think the Loon condos are going to come that way in this century—and I lavishly waive more than half of the assessed present value of our house and the Cape property. I would think the former would be worth a million now, with its view, so it should be easy to figure what you owe me if you and Midge have such poor taste as to want to live there, with my ghost sneaking around every corner, rose clippers in hand. I certainly can't picture even so gross a duo as you two humping away in our old fourposter, so when you sell it point out to the dealer that the carving is by William Lemon of Salem and the gilding by Daggett of Boston—these names add hundreds to the value. The Chippendale dining table and matching eight chairs with the diamond-and-scroll back splats came from the Perkinses and should go eventually to Pearl, along with the carved sea chest that accompanied Daddy's great-granddaddy back and forth to China countless times and the dear little blackened salt-and-pepper shakers handed down through. Mother's mother's mother's people the Prynnes. The Worth things are of course yours, though I confess I would love to have, here in my lonely cottage by the sea, the flame-stitch wing chair I used to sit in waiting for you to come home, stitching away at those hateful to-be-mono-, grammed place mats your tiresome Aunt Hilda inflicted on us as a wedding present—of the twelve, I think I did only three plus half of one more W over the course of twenty-two years. In most wing chairs I feel slightly repressed but that flame-stitch one had just the right gentle grip. Where I am now, the winter days are about the length of spring days in New England, and for that first half-hour of the dark as I sit reading zoology or cosmology or just staring into space I catch myself listening for the grinding sound of the garage door sliding up, in obedience to its own inner eye.

  Ever,

  S.

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