by John Updike
But I was already on another planet. Each step a comical struggle, I fought my way to the pole on its little flagstoned platform—a conceit of the previous owner, a nautical man who loved to stand and take in his view of Massachusetts Bay. I dug down to where the ends of the Christmas light cords had been pegged or tied to a handy bush. The experience was archaeological, really, and made me feel, as my numb fingers grappled at the knots, the cold connection between the buried and the present.
So much snow wraps the world in cosmic feeling. The euonymus hedge, no longer defenseless, is rounded in its thick white armor like a futuristic motor vehicle. A transcendent sparkle rides the surface; microscopic icy prisms send rainbows to my retinas. I am immersed in the white blind brute reality of nature, heartless and beautiful. I am in the rushing waterfall, the thunderhead cradle of blue new stars in a proximate galaxy. Beneath the dazzling skin of snow, a whole lost world waited to be born again, its details—blades of grass, pegs holding knotted ropes—faithfully tucked into the realm of the potential. I coiled the strings of Christmas lights, stiff and lumpy with ice, into their cardboard box and carried the box to the third floor. From the third-floor windows I looked for deer tracks, but of course there were none. She must be huddled in the tent-shaped shelter beneath a hemlock, the wet dark orb of her eye watchful. To stick a pin into that bulging eye—that would be a wicked thrill, a tunnel into another world.
Instead of deer tracks I saw curious paths between the trees, the oaks around the driveway, from one trunk to another, and then vanishing, bat-shaped dents in the snow. It took me surprisingly long to deduce that these were the body-prints of squirrels, only half hibernating, quickly floundering from one tree to another. But what makes them think one tree might be an improvement over another? A bed of grass in one, a cache of acorns in another. Like rich Manhattanites, they scuttle from Park Avenue to Wall Street and back, minimizing their moments on the ground. On this scorched planet we human beings are not yet quite alone; there is still other life. Squirrels, rats, deer, the last rhinos and cheetahs. Insects, of course, in their undismayable selfless multitudes.
And then the next day, or the next, awaking too early, unsettled by the hyperactive, menacing weather—Gloria is falling in love with the different channels’ weathermen, and can tell them all apart—I was walking in the pre-dawn semi-dark down to the mailbox, where the delivery man throws the newspaper, sparing himself the trouble of our driveway. Above me a two-thirds moon hung in a sky already blue. I looked up at this apparition and tried to see it as it is, a ball in space, illuminated by a single light-source. The direction of the source was clearly indicated by the way the light lay; it was somewhere over my shoulder. The sun was in the southeast but not yet risen. I tried to make myself realize that the moon was hoisted into the same light that had not yet touched me; there is no other light; it soaks the inner solar system, in whose interplanetary spaces there is no night and day; and this light would not soon be lifting over the horizon behind my left shoulder, beyond the cluster of quaintly named local islands, but in fact the surface I am standing on and all surface continuous with it to the horizon of the sea and beyond was plunging forward the sun, like the floor of a vast airplane crashing, a vast curved floor monumentally, imperceptibly spinning in the direction dead against that in which the sun like a knob in a slotted groove would arc across the sky to make another day in my minuscule, clinging, transitory, insectlike life. Inside my curved skull I approached this spatial visualization as if approaching the edge of a windswept cliff or steep slippery-tiled roof; then my mind darted back, dizzy, into the safety of pre-scientific stupidity. I could not at all visualize how the moon—its waxing and waning; its presenting always the same face to the Earth; its monthly revolution; its tug on the tides—fit into this gigantic toy of gravity with all its balls of matter. Everything went flat for me; the snow-packed driveway beneath my feet stopped moving.
How curious it is, given the scientific view of the universe as ultimately causeless and accidental, that the moon and the sun are the exact same size in the sky, as we see in a solar eclipse, where the fit is so exact that Bailey’s beads of sunlight shoot out rays through the valleys of the moon. No wonder men for millennia took these two heavenly bodies, so disparate in astronomical fact, to be twin gods—competing brothers, or a brother and sister safeguarding different aspects of the human soul. The kinship did not have to be. In another easily imagined system there might be two moons, or five, or none. There might be two suns, a large and a small, locked in a gravitational embrace, setting and rising at opposite ends of the horizon. Somewhere beyond Jupiter our space-exploring vehicles show the sun as another star, no brighter than Venus from our planet’s vantage. One of the scientific sages I admired as a boy, a kindly prune-faced dwarf who appeared on public television, educating the masses, said that, if all our cosmological wisdom had to be passed on to a benighted future in a single sentence, the sentence should be The sun is a star.
The sun is a star. Christianity said, God is a man. Humanism said, Man is a god. Today the sages say, via such Jainist cosmogonies as string theory and the inflationary hypothesis, that everything is nothing. The cosmos is a free lunch, a quantum fluctuation.
The deer awakens, starving, in her tent of hemlock boughs and comes up to the house, placing and lifting each foot in an almost straight line. My wife is away, eating up the world with her errands, consumer and merchant both. The deer nibbles at our euonymus hedge, its edges exposed by the recent thaw, at first warily, then voraciously. She becomes as she eats a young lean-bodied whore, whom I invite into the house. We take care to brush from the front-hall Oriental, a little red, blue-bordered Qum, the pieces of melting snow that fall from her narrow naked feet. We go up to the third floor, where among the cobwebs and bat droppings there are discarded beds and down quilts, held in reserve for my stepchildren. Her thin body slowly sheds its chill, its shivering (all the little downy hairs of her body erect), and she serves me with a cold, slick expertise, her mind elsewhere to preserve her dignity. What I love most about the encounter is watching her walk back and forth to the bathroom, her flanks stately, her step silent, all but the crease between her buttocks tan. The bathroom fixtures up here have not been changed since the house was built in 1905; they are porcelain antiques, moon-white. My groin pleasantly aches from its unaccustomed friction. My semen, still coming in the sluggish way of an old man’s body, leaks onto my thigh, and thence makes a telltale stain on the sheet. The sheets are changed only once or twice a year, when a child comes to visit. I will have to call the local taxi, to get the girl away, off my property. The driver hangs out, over a scummy cup of cooling coffee, at the drugstore in the village. I am leaving clues, I realize. My body fluids are leaking out into the community. When I become frightened, for my prestige and safety and domestic peace, I tell myself she is a fantasy, a branching not existent in the palpable universe.
Walking down to the mailbox this morning, I observed in the mounds that the plow heaped on either side of the driveway, and in the ice and packed snow receding on the asphalt, the patterns of melting—the ornate undercutting, the fragile lace left behind by liquefaction and evaporation, the striations of successive snowfalls, some damper and icier than others. The snow rots at its own indolent pace, its innards crawling with bubbles of meltwater like wood lice.
In the southeast there are low thin clouds, violet rimmed with a sickly tangerine color; crumbling flakes of this metallic Day-Glo color float free and oddly mirror in the heavens the two islands, Baker’s and Misery, that float in the view from our hill. Overhead, in a sky already the powdery blue of mid-day, there are two moons—a half-moon drinking the sky’s blue through the seepage along its thin edge, and a smaller, even paler, more papery moon. If the first occupies, like the sun, approximately a half-degree of the celestial hemisphere’s 180 degrees, this second is no wider than a sixth of a degree. It has a honeycomb appearance, with a pair of scarcely visible appendages, stubby dragonfly wings.
This moon was man-made—a space station set in orbit three thousand miles above the Earth, one-hundredth of the first moon’s distance, by men before the Sino-American Conflict dissolved the governments able to maintain the shuttle ships. Earth abandoned its satellite, and the colonists marooned there survived for a time amid their tons of provisions and their solar-powered greenhouses. Then, as the world watched in horror the television broadcasts that were maintained with the generator’s last volts of energy, the space-dwellers one by one died. This episode, become mythic, has inspired any number of bathetic retellings in the popular media, even if all of us who dwell on Earth are in a position exactly the same, if on a larger scale. Indeed, it is not impossible that the colony, in its giant honeycomb of hollow struts and exquisitely stretched sheets of insulating foil, still holds a few live crewpersons, surviving on protein tablets and hydroponic lettuce. The scattered surviving populations of the Earth lack the technical resources to send a rescue mission aloft, even if there were a will. This second moon, with its own phases and periods of eclipse, hangs in the sky as an embarrassment, a bad conscience. Once my species had been strong enough to put it up there, and now it is out of our reach. Like its larger natural brother, it was a half-moon today, struck at the same angle of solar radiation, half dissolved in the blue, translucent like a mirage. The moon’s two power-gathering wings seemed, as I squinted up, an optical aberration, like the feathers of iridescence that spin off from the sim when you squint at it, or when you emerge from the sea with drenched lashes and corneas stinging from the salt.
The mailbox stands beneath several hemlocks. Their shadows make the snow slow to melt on this slope of driveway, an icy tunnel in wintertime. But, as I turned, Boston Globe in hand, to climb the hill, the hairy red sun, just lifted above the gray treetops of the woods, struck the bare asphalt at a low angle that brought into relief the parallel scratches left by the lawn service’s plow. I had never noticed them before. They seemed ominously ancient, Egyptian, these man-induced grooves, as if slaves had dragged one huge stone across another in the construction of a pyramid so gigantic that death itself would be defeated.
Our late-January thaw continues. Looking down upon my lawn from a third-floor window, I marvel at how the bushes and hedges are completely freed and how much green grass has been exposed. Where I struggled heroically, braving a heart attack, out to the flagpole to remove the Christmas lights, a ragged green path exists, on which, if I wished, I could stroll out to run up the American flag. But I spare the flag the winter winds; already it is so frayed the stripes are coming apart at their ends, each becoming a thin pennant.
On Cape Cod, the snow has receded to the point where some golf courses are open. Yesterday a friend, Red Ruggles, invited me to drive down, with another friend of his, a retired airline pilot named Ken Dixon, and to play a round at a course of which a friend of Red’s is a member. The member, who is our age, was suddenly too sick with something—gout, arthritis, the flu—to join us, but he phoned us in as guests. Red is not exactly retired, although his two sons have taken over the daily routines of the fish business he founded in Gloucester. While driving his Dodge Caravan down Route 1 and through Boston to Route 3 to the Sagamore Bridge and Route 6, Red kept picking up his cellular phone and talking to the distant places—Vladivostok, Punta Arenas, Dar es Salaam—where “product” (fish) can still be found and bought. He gives the greeting in the local language—“Dobrii dyen!” “Buenos días!” “Jambo!”—and then speaks in a loud English. He calls everybody “friend.” He makes all these calls, I think, in part to impress his helpless passengers and in part to maintain sentimental contact with the shreds of what had been his fish empire. The fact seems to be that the world contains fewer and fewer fish. The oceans are as exhausted and mined-out as the land. Much of Red’s cellular-phone time is spent reminiscing, with the person on the other end, about great hauls of yesteryear—multi-vessel shipments of frozen product that steamed across the Pacific like convoys in wartime and around Cape Horn to the bustling, venerable wharves of Gloucester, catch after catch. The planks of the wharves, in his telling, were slick and rank with cod liver oil.
It took a tedious two-hour drive to transpose rocky, oaky Cape Ann into Cape Cod’s sand dunes and pitch pines and salt-bleached shingles. But there was golf, on a course that was all rounded hills, grassed-over links—an opulent succession of freshly exposed breasts and thighs, little hill upon hill, with comforting swales and clefts and bulges between them. There were no flat lies, but no bare ones either. The grass under all that early snow had not had time to brown and harden. The greens held frost beneath a thawed quarter-inch that ripped open when a ball hit. I felt masterly and tender, repairing these wounds with a two-pronged plastic U and tamping the scar smooth with my shoe. It was lovely to be out and swinging. Among all these green bulges the flight of the ball felt especially penetrating. A good drive tended to catch a downslope that added yards. Ken hit one that, on a 420-yard par-four, wound up at the 150-marker. Two hundred seventy yards! And this from a silver-haired former pilot who is very deliberate and a bit cautious in all his preliminary moves, as if just before takeoff.
A few surviving white drifts in the sand traps and along the shaded edges of the fairway heightened our sense of adventure. The air was cold but not still—I put on my winter gloves only toward the end of the round. We had the course to ourselves: Ken, Red, and Ben, which made a euphonious scorecard. I was low medalist, by a stroke or two, but lost money at the game of skins we played. On one hole with four skins riding on it, I had a stroke advantage but then three-putted, with hateful senile nerves. Short on my lag, I pulled my four-footer. God, how I hated myself, while Ken and Red crowed.
Driving back through the rush hour was worse than after a ski trip down from North Conway. A hamstring in Red’s left leg began to seize up, but there was nowhere to stop on the Southeast Expressway, full of cars pouring, with red taillights and white headlights, into and out of the ghost of Boston. This approach from the south used to be thrilling, the glass skyscrapers looming closer and closer and then burning rectangular and golden all around you as the expressway climbed upward out of the Chinatown tunnel. But with the completion of the so-called Big Dig in 2002, it became one long tunnel up to Causeway Street and the giant looping connectors to Charlestown and the Mystic River Bridge. Neglect has taken the futuristic shine off of the long subterranean stretch; the dead lights and the fallen tiles go unreplaced. Flickering in and out of shadow, the blue-tinted buried highway is spooky, the spookier for our knowing that above its dim roof rests a blasted swathe—formerly the old elevated highway with its constant traffic jams—of weed-ridden parks, stilled carousels, pot-holed jogging paths, straggling shops and restaurants doing a bankrupt imitation of the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and other such rotting wisps of a vision of civic renewal. Few of the Chinese missiles made it this far, but there were pro-Chinese riots, and the collapse of the national economy has taken a cumulative physical toll. Looking back at the city’s profile from the dizzying cloverleaf above the Charles, we saw the blue-glass, post-modern downtown buildings darkened in their post-war desolation, and rusty stumps of projected construction that had been abruptly abandoned, as too expensive for our dwindled, senile world.
One advantage of the collapse of civilization is that the quality of young women who are becoming whores has gone way up. No more raddled psychotics or puffy, dazed coke addicts for the discriminating consumer: twenty-year-olds who would once have become beauticians or editorial assistants, nurses or paralegals, have brought efficiency and comeliness to the trade. The prostitution rings advertise under such names as Velvet Sensations, Unadorned Fantasies, and the like, not just in the Herald and Phoenix but in the Globe and Christian Science Monitor Anything for a welder in our new world. The commonwealth scrip is sepia, the tint of the former governor’s red hair; it was hastily issued when the dollar hyperinflated, so the frozen wheels of commerce could begin again to turn; the engraver w
as a Republican.
Deirdre—Deirdre Lee, she confided to me on her last visit, her third, a last name being a treasure evidently as worth withholding as a whore’s kiss on the lips—now moves about on our third-floor love nest with the briskness of a wife, remaking the bed, bundling our used towels for the washer and dryer. I can’t rid myself, as I entertain her, of the uneasy feeling that Gloria will come back, slamming all the doors downstairs, clattering up the steps, exploding with icy-eyed fury at the homemaking prerogatives that Deirdre has usurped. It is not clear to me that Gloria is dead; I have a memory of wheeling and shooting her with Charlie Pienta’s shotgun through the living-room window, but when I went back inside there was no body. It was a moment of measurement. I felt the universe crackle and branch.
Deirdre also steals material things—two silver-plated candlesticks, and an exquisite little French clock with a gilded face and a case veneered in mother-of-pearl—that Gloria had brought to the marriage. I brought nothing from the Berkshires but my maternal grandfather’s china mustache cup and some bone-handled dull cutlery that I can still see my father’s workmanly hands, callused and ingrained with machine grease, plying upon a tough Thanksgiving turkey. My mother’s anxious face is framed between his cocked elbows as she waits to augment each set of slices with mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, and cranberry sauce, on one of those terrible holidays of childhood, those dry-mouthed group penances we owed the calendar’s faded gods.
