Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  When I dared reproach Deirdre with her thefts today, she looked me up and down with her expressionless brown eyes—tarry coffee into which some pale flecks of nutmeg had fallen—and said mulishly, “I do plenty for you.”

  “But, darling, I pay you. Even more than you asked, the last time.”

  Our lovemaking had some of the excitement of an auction, as she volunteered, in a breathless whisper, to perform or submit to a variety of acts beyond the basic missionary in-and-out. She even, as I tried to move my tongue from one lovely smallish uptilted breast to the other—tan but for the little triangles of a thong-bikini bra—specified, “Twenty-five welders extra if you suck both.”

  “You bitch,” I panted, liking this and knowing she liked it too, this damp tangle of commerce and hostility amid the friction of our naked epiderms. “Fifteen. Not a penny more. Your tits should be part of the package. I mean, I’m paying you for your time, not for each itty-bitty bit of you.”

  “Thirty-five if you suck so hard it hurts me,” she countered.

  It had not occurred to me until this moment to hurt her. Now it seemed an inviting idea. The universe had branched.

  “Ow,” she said, within a second, looking down maternally from within the massive Sphinx-mane of her bushy black hair, the side nearest the window glinting on the crests of its dishevelled curls. Her broad young face, simply but impressively carved but for its blunt and visibly pored nose, loomed a muddy brown, a sandstone tint, insofar as my eyes could pull color from the murk of the ambient dim windowlight. She was somehow Egyptian in this light, pharaonically opaque.

  “You’re lying,” I protested. “That didn’t hurt.”

  “I’m very sensitive there. Especially when I’m ovulating.”

  “If you’re so fucking sensitive you shouldn’t be a whore,” I told her, slobbering on, so the small glossy slope of her profiled breast shone by virtue of what must have been, beyond our sheltered grapple on this lonely planet, the moon, the barren uninhabitable moon hanging above the yard’s retreating snow.

  She was maddening me into an inflamed condition such as I had not experienced since the sweaty backseat tussles of my teens, with their excruciatingly grudging advances, piece by piece, into the forbidden, sacred terrain of a female body. “Let’s do it with you on your knees this time,” I suggested hoarsely.

  “That’s fifty more welders.” Her hard little voice, with its Massachusetts accent, which erased the “r” in “welders,” sounded a touch hoarse also. “Doggie is normally seventy-five more.”

  “How about up—”

  “I don’t do that,” she quickly said, then added, “for less than three hundred.”

  She had put herself in doggie position, presenting me with the glazed semi-rounds of her tight young buttocks, and, visible in the moonlight between them, the lovable little flesh-knot of her anus, suggestive of a healed scar. Here, too, the sun had failed to penetrate, deep between the tan buttocks, making a slim white crescent. I wondered if it was Revere Beach where she sunbathed so diligently, her swart skin fearless of the keratoses that cancerously dotted my horny old hide. The Columbus-haters are right: we Northern Europeans should never have veered south across the roiling Atlantic into this dazzling New World. It was a pit-failed Eden; it was forbidden fruit; we drank too much and lost our faith. We began to speckle and rot.

  I slapped her solid glazed butternut ass, with its infantile puckered aperture, so decisively that she tumbled onto her back, her eyes stung into life by the blow. I noticed those wounded, tear-moistened eyes nevertheless flick with professional satisfaction toward my triumphantly swollen member, its undischarged juices swirling their intoxicants through my veins. My prostate ached with the forthcoming discharge. I told her calmly, “You can take that hypothetical three hundred and—”

  On her back, where I had tumbled her, she laughed at my nicety. “Stuff it,” she finished for me. “Go ahead,” she teased. “Do it, you old fart.” Pronounced “faaht.” She spread her legs a bit; her thighs were paler inside than out. “But not up my ass for less than three hundred. Those membranes are delicate. That’s how people used to get AIDS.”

  “Shut up about your ass all the time. Your cunt will do fine. I’m not one of your sicko pervert customers.”

  She was heavily furred, her forearms swirling with dark down. Her pubic hair was so oily it would have been iridescent in a stronger light. So she could wear a thong bathing suit, she had shaved all but a central strip, which stood straight up like an old-fashioned typewriter brush. I imagined I saw a gleam of responsive moisture between the elephant-gray lips of her vulva. Her cool fingers seemed to be guiding me in but in fact held me off, even as I crouched to thrust home. Deirdre murmured into my ear, “Hey wouldn’t you like me to sit on your face? I could do that and blow you at the same time. For only a hundred extra—I’l give you a deal.”

  “You bitch, will you shut up about money?” But I hesitated. Her offer was tempting. She knew her man.

  “But not so much that I come,” I bargained. “I want my seed inside you. You money-grubbing cunt, I want to prong you up to your eyeballs.”

  She shuddered under me involuntarily. Her face like the face of a girl being mussed in the backseat of a family Chevrolet was built all of shadows, a ruin of little slabs. “Jesus, I hate men,” she said, conversationally, as if I had become a disinterested anthropologist. “You’re all so fucking proud of nothing—just nothing.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, pronging her. “That nothing?”

  “Nothing,” she said, stiffening like a scared child beneath me.

  “How about that?” She was young and slender and unex-cited, with a virgin womb and a never-distended cervix. I knew I could hurt her, and gave a pelvic thrust that pinched my old prostate gland; it, too, wanted to retire, after pushing toxic effluents through its knotty core for fifty-plus years.

  Her dark eyes widened and went watery in the shadow my head was casting. Her face sank a bit deeper into the black nest of her widespread hair. “Ow,” she did admit, sweetly.

  After Deirdre left, bounding down through the woods with her lifted tail showing more white than anyone could expect, I noticed that Gloria’s silver quail were gone from the dining-room table. One bent down pecking; the other lifted its beak. I had given them to her on a bygone Christmas, on a lower limb of the thick gray tree of the branching past. Heavy silver—one had to be careful setting them on the table, lest their feet scratch the finish—they would melt down to a lump worth a few lousy welders, a bargain quickly struck with some cheating fence. The nether world preys on its own. I felt deeply ashamed, as though cancer had invaded my body. I would beat the thieving slut black and blue next time, tying her wrists and ankles together with pieces of the waxed cord that I had once bought to replace the rotting sash cords of the old house, and which I thought was still in the cellar. I would screw her until she squealed for mercy, and toss her out naked into the snow, and not pay her a red cent. If she beat sobbing on the door, I would pelt her with golf balls.

  With Gloria gone from my side, the bed seems huge and cold at night, and the house reveals vast creaking depths as the unsated February winds whistle and roar outside. I have been taking Sominex to get me through the empty hours of the night, but then, fearful of becoming an addict, I abstained last evening. Sleep came with a satisfyingly dull and solid book on former President Gore—I never read fiction; after all its little hurly-burly what does it amount to but more proof that we are of all animals the most miserable?— but then I awoke in the whining, spitting dark. Furtive footsteps were detectable below and beyond me, faint as thumbprints on black glass.

  In the breakdown of order, the criminal element has proved to be the only one with the resources and ruthless-ness to rule. I pay protection to a pair of spivs, Spin and Phil who come out of the local underbrush, and am allowed to reside on my little hill for somewhat less than I formerly paid in combined state and federal taxes. Of course, Spit and Phil aren’t trying to m
ake the world safe for democracy or to administer a sensible but humane welfare program. I is not likely that I will be allowed my domain, defenseless a I am, forever, but for now, in the improvisatory confusion c the new world taking rough shape, I am allowed a space; I am overlooked. The new powers do not provide all the services the old did, but water continues to move through the town pipes into my own, and electricity flows. It amused me that in order to make their last collection the ambassadors from the underworld had to plow my driveway for me; thanks to them I could shop, and the local taxi could bring Deirdre to me. The footsteps that I seemed to hear I reasoned to be imaginary, because the world is so empty now; there are hundreds of empty houses where the starving and the disease-ridden can take shelter. The population pressure, for at least a time, is off.

  I rose to urinate. Not wishing to agitate my neurons by turning on the bedside light, I groped toward the narrow pale slit behind which the bathroom night light feebly gleams. It was the two-slit experiment, it occurred to me, that embodied the paradox of quantum reality—a single photon, passing through both slits simultaneously, was able to project a striped pattern of interference with itself. I perhaps would have fallen back to sleep but for a snag, a nagging realization that I had not taken Sominex. After an indeterminate motionless time, I gave up trying to trick my body into thinking it was asleep; I rose again and turned on the light, not my own bedside lamp but Gloria’s, reaching across the stretch of bed as cool and as smooth as a marble tombstone, to switch on the lamp. By some law that had evolved early in our marriage, the alarm clock, a Braun quartz travelling clock, lived on her side of the bed.

  But she, like me a light and anxious sleeper, always kept its face turned so that its luminescent hands would not greet her eyes in a wakeful moment. I had to stretch, cursing, to press the switch and turn the little black box that contained time in its two endless spools. Two-fifteen! Not three hours of sleep! It seemed incredible to me that at that hour I would not fall asleep again, but in the long featureless blur of shifting positions and churning brain (like a cement mixer full of dry rocks, the same rocks over and over, never consolidating into pourable wet concrete) this did seem to be the case. I was tense, waiting for the first signs of dawn, a change of tune, a distant car—some event to trigger a relaxing realization that there existed a world other than my howling brain. As the wind outside died, my brain got noisier, senselessly tumbling alphabet games and previews of tomorrow (in which nothing in particular was scheduled to happen, just a dental checkup and a teatime visit to one of my grandchildren, and in the evening a television show on the cosmological implications of the new deep-space evidences gathered by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, a show I would be too exhausted to enjoy unless I could now fall asleep) and comparisons between Gloria and Deirdre (whose body was not as comforting as Gloria’s, which although softer was also warmer, infiltrating calories into the bed covers, whereas Deirdre’s hard lithe form was cool even in the heat of coitus; after she would leave, by that disreputable taxi whose glowing rooflight I watched from the upstairs window circle my driveway and then pull away like a momentarily captured planet, shivers would overtake me and I would rush to put on a sweater) and all sorts of clattering useless mental debris including a rock-hard fury at my stupid self, my foolishly, helplessly rotating brain.

  I could not shake free of myself. Whenever my thoughts loosened enough to permit a glowing, nonsensical mirage to peep through, my hungry consciousness leaped upon the glimmer with the triumphant thought I’m falling asleep and thereby snuffed it, closing the peephole into blissful rest. In the disorderly blizzard of waking thoughts I now and then prayed to the vibrating shadows, silently running the mutinously non-stop inner speaker through the paces of the Lord’s Prayer or a simple beseechment, Dear Lord, for Christ’s sake, let me fall asleep. But no remission in my torment was granted. God was a vibrating patch indistinguishable from the featureless others in the fuzzy Rothko that insomnia painted on the ceiling. The sheet beneath me was a bed of bent nails, of dead coals.

  Then, before dawn, the surface of silence was lightly ruffled by the purr of a car coming up the driveway, the soft squeal of its brakes, and the thump of Gloria’s New York Times arriving on the porch. Then the car’s purr, shaped like a vortex in the sink, retreated down the driveway. The Times came to the door; the Globe just to the mailbox. I reminded myself I must cancel the subscription. This daily bulletin from another exhausted, blasted city, doubling the burden of paper to be set out fortnightly in the orange recycling bin, had always struck me as a snobbish excess. But I did not yet quite believe that she was gone. She existed in my brain and in my dreams. Sometimes in my dreams I find her bloodied and even headless corpse on the living-room carpet—an ethereal rose-and-sky-blue Tabriz that set us back twenty-four thousand dollars when dollars still counted. So the Timeses keep coming, with their news of crack crackdowns and motor-mouthed mayors and uncollected garbage and public schools run like prisons and subways that are warrens of mayhem and disease.

  Finally, the radiator close to my ear began to tick, at a signal from the thermostat, and my tense frame slackened. Soon the old pipes would companionably chug, chitter, and bang. I was not utterly alone in the universe. The house, well built at the other end of the last century, in slightly slumping over the years has reversed the pitch of some of the pipes, which therefore collect moisture that explodes when the rising steam encounters it. I pictured the little plastic wheel in the thermostat, marked with the numbers of the hour, and the little tripping protrusion I had myself poked into a small hole at the numeral 6, and the leverage this minuscule plastic protrusion (they came in two colors, red for day and blue for nighttime) would exert on the adjoining small wheel that would tip a bead of mercury in its inch-long vial, completing an electric circuit that would activate the furnace. That little bead of mercury, balanced on a temperature-sensitive spring of two annealed metals with a different expansion rate— brass and steel, at a guess—was more of a friend to me in the endless night than almighty eternal God.

  But, believers will respond, God gave Mankind the wit to construct thermostats, and this manifests His benevolent existence. I was suddenly too relaxed to argue. The radiators had been resurrected and were shouldering the task of watching over the house. My vigil could cease. But by now, near seven, sunlight, arriving earlier each day, shone in a heartless white stripe below the window shade, and it was time to get up, groggy, disconsolate, and doomed to oblivion though I was. The day was a hostile dare I must take, with a commensurate hostility.

  The chores of living: the brushing of the teeth, the shaving of the cheeks and chin, taking extra care around the lips, which invariably wear a pursed, haughty expression, the expression of a stranger. My mouth over the years has sunk into a downturned, faintly sneering expression, like the mouth of a death mask, slightly lower on one side than the other. Luckily, I was always rugged-looking rather that handsome, so the wreck of the flesh—the eyelids so sagging their folds snag one on another and need to be rubbed back into place upon awaking, the double cords of throat wattle, taut only when I lift my chin to shave beneath it—dismays me relatively little. The meaningless geography of an old face: the odd dark spot on the edge of one upper lip, the inexplicably sensitive patch along the left jaw, the actinic bumps that have returned after their enraging treatment with Efudex. It resembles the moon’s geography, which once afforded room for hypothetical canals and seaports and which has proved, now that we have walked upon it and photographed its pores, obdurately meaningless, a study in enlarged non-significance. A pimple of a hillock here, a blue-gray mare there, a rumpled dark side. But not an anatomy: bleak evidence, rather, of heavenly happenstance.

  Though I gave it up over thirty years ago, when pitiable tobacco-addicts were being banished from restaurants and offices and being made to stand outside on the sidewalk in all weathers, I still miss smoking, if only because it deadened my sense of smell. A clammy pungence arises to my nostrils from pocke
ts of my body when I, lifting first one leg and then the other, remove my pajamas. No amount of soaping in the shower long suppresses scents which I do not, myself, find disagreeable but remember Gloria complaining about. Yet she herself, in the sodden relaxation of sleep, emitted odors I would never chastise her with. Alone in the house with my unnarcotized nose, I scent what I fear may be a fire in some plastered wall or combustible corner of the cellar but what I deduce is only the Kellys burning wood in their fireplace a wedge shot away. A few carbon atoms in the air; how do our nasal receptors find them, out of so much mere bland oxygen and nitrogen, and digitize them into signals that activate the brain? The brain protrudes the eyes, but molecules seek out the smell centers within it, at the back of the cave. There, matter meets mind.

  I undress my body, shower it, dress it again, in slightly different clothes. No need any more for the crisp business suit and shirt; the same beige corduroys and pilled blue sweater will do, with clean underwear and a maroon turtleneck of fresh-smelling cotton. My papery bare feet with their purple etching of veins beg for their socks and ever more shapeless moccasins. We are the herders of our bodies, which are beasts as dumb and bald and repugnant as cattle. Death will release us from this responsibility, which grows, morning by morning, ever heavier. This morning, having completed the last tightened lace of my dressing and preparing to make my constitutional down the driveway for the Globe, I looked from the window and saw on the seaside lawn one of the deer that, now that Gloria is gone, browse untroubled on our shrubbery. This one, munching a crescent into the euonymus hedge, seemed less than full size, and gazed up at my face calmly. His (I felt it was a half-grown buck) muzzle was surprisingly coarse, seen head-on, as lumpy and stupid, around the dark-grained and convolute nostrils, as a cow’s. I was beginning to see deer as stupid ruminants rather than heraldic apparitions. Gloria had not been wildly wrong to hate them. The animal slowly scented danger in my watching—my white face as much a signal as his white tail—and stalked off, with an affronted dignity, across the flagpole platform and then down toward the driveway.