by John Updike
Spin is natty, with a red-and-gray bushy mustache, a toothpick he rolls around in his mouth, and a nice tidy way of expressing himself, like an old-style movie actor. “Mr. Turnbull, what you get is active consideration, not just passive. With the deluxe, anybody gives you trouble, anybody, we come after them. With the straight, you get no hassle from us, but if anybody else gets on your case, you’re on your own. Can you follow that?”
“Just barely,” I say. “Suppose I paid you nothing, how would that differ from the straight?”
Phil is heavier-set, and still wears brown suits, which don’t ever look pressed. “It’d be ugly, Ben,” he told me, with a quick hitch in his shoulders that made his suit jacket hang worse than ever. “I don’t want to have to think about it. I don’t want you to have to think about it. Hey, this is a beautiful place you got here. Wood, though. Hundred-year-old wood, at least. Get to burning up on this hill, there’d be no stopping it. They don’t make fire hoses long enough.”
I intended to pay, but, as with insurance salesmen in the old days, or company representatives touting a public stock offering, I liked to tease them a little, to make them work for what we both knew was a societally condoned rip-off. “I don’t need so much house,” I told them. “With all the expense, I’m thinking of moving. It’s not as if I’m not still paying taxes on top of everything else.”
“Some taxes,” Spin coolly sneered. “Local and commonwealth. I can remember, so can you, when there were federal taxes, and the structure in place to enforce the collection. It was called the 1RS.”
I said, “There’s a lot of talk on the radio about starting it up again. A lot of people miss the federal government.”
“Fat chance,” Phil said, “after that dumbhead dust-up with the Chinks. They blew it.”
Deirdre heard the male voices on the lawn, in the front circle, and came out with her hair in curlers and green cream on her face. “You creeps ever think of getting lost?” she asked.
“Watch your mouth, Dee,” Phil said.
“You know Deirdre?” I asked.
Phil didn’t answer.
“We went to high school together,” she admitted. “He was a loser then, and he’s a loser now. What are they asking money for?”
“Protection,” I told her. “They see that no harm comes to me, despite the breakdown of law and order.”
“Ha!” she said. “These two jerks saying they’re the new law and order? Go inside and call the police, Ben. This is intimidation and threatened assault and arson and I don’t know what all else.”
“Are there still police?” I wondered aloud.
“Sure,” Deirdre said.
“You don’t see them standing guard at road repairs any more,” I pointed out, adding helpfully, “Maybe because there are no road repairs.”
“They’re too busy,” Deirdre said, “locking up crooked morons like this and throwing away the key.”
Spin contemplated her with a smile, shifting the toothpick from one corner of it to the other. “The police,” he said, “are our colleagues. We all have a stake in returning order to the community.”
Phil tried to reinforce the other man’s smile by also leering. “Back in high school, Dee,” he said, “they used to say you were a pretty easy lay.”
The universe branched; I would come home and find her raped and her throat slit and a leering note pinned to the blood-soaked body.
“I don’t give a fuck what they said,” she said. “They used to say you were a simple-minded asshole, too. Get the fuck off this property and stop intimidating my—my husband.”
I had to protest. “They’re not intimidating me, darling. We have an arrangement, from long before you showed up, if you don’t mind my pointing that out.”
Boys versus girls: how often that’s what it comes down to. Still, in this day and age.
Deirdre is like Gloria in that she gets excited—panics, really—when she feels her territory is being invaded. Her eyes, weirdly comic in their rings of green face cream, swivelled from one to another of us and then clamped shut; her mouth stretched sideways into a slit and the veins in her throat swelled as a terrible noise came out of her mouth, high like a siren but breathy, panting in little bursts. We all laughed, I the least heartily. “Darling,” I told her, “this is the way things are now, since the war. We’re all having to make new arrangements.”
Deirdre in her blind fury lowered her head and tried to butt at Spin’s and Phil’s bellies; Phil grabbed a fistful of curlers and black hair and held her like that, her arms swinging, while Spin looked at me, the toothpick dangling from the middle of his lip, and said, “This isn’t reasonable, Mr. Turnbull. We’re just doing the collecting. We don’t make the rules.”
“I know you don’t. I’ll get the money. Gloria, you calm down. I mean Deirdre.”
“You’re with these creeps!” she cried, her voice muffled as Phil bent her head to her chest. “Against me!”
I raced upstairs, to where the bundles of Massachusetts tender were tucked beneath my folded undershirts. The old governor, with sepia hair and sleepy eyes, gazed out from the crude engraving. When the dollar exploded into worthlessness, not just states but corporations and hotel chains had to issue scrip. Ours has been holding its value pretty well lately, thanks to the revival of clamming and lobstering. With the plains a radioactive dust bowl, decimated Midwestern cities have been living on truckloads of New England mussels and apples from New York State.
The three interlopers had spaced themselves out on the driveway circle. Deirdre, putting her curlers back in place, was standing over by the euonymus bush, its brown chewed patches waist-high. Phil was sizing her up, wondering when to attempt a rapprochement. Spin was all business, standing just off the granite porch step; I handed him the money. The sepia bills looked worthless, with their rather supercilious engraved visage. Spin glanced at the welders but did not count them; he tucked the lot into his side coat pocket, taking care to smooth the pocket flap. He was jumping the season with a light checked sports jacket and dove-gray pegged slacks. He debonairly sniffed the air. “Next time we see you,” he promised, “the grass will be green.”
Phil pleaded with the back of Deirdre’s head, “You get good value, honest. Without us you’re totally vulnerable up here.”
She refused to turn or say a word. I glanced at the two strong-arm men and shrugged apologetically.
“Want a receipt, Mr. Turnbull?” Spin asked me.
“I trust you,” I said. “Take care.”
“Explain to your little lady,” Phil told me, “that the world’s changed. It ain’t what it used to be.”
“She knows it,” I said, feeling hostile now myself. It’s one thing to be held up, another to be forced to give your approval. It’s true, if they were not “protecting” me, somebody else would be. I actually have a pretty good life, compared with most of the people on this planet, in these sunset years of mine.
The sea earlier this March morning wore a look you never see in winter—a lakelike calm, a powdery blue so pale it was scarcely blue, with stripes of a darker, stirred-up color that might have marked the passage of a lobster boat an hour before. The daylilies, in a rock-rimmed bed on the right side of the driveway as I walk down it, are up an inch or two, and the bulb plants on the sunny side of the white garage show thrusting shoots as close together as comb teeth. An occasional boat—motor, not sail—appears on the water, and in the woods there is a stir of trespassers—teenagers on dirt bikes, sub-teens sneaking smokes.
Last night, stepping out into the misty chill darkness in a failed attempt to see a comet that has lately been much in the Globe, I was hit by a true scent of spring—the caustic and repellent yet not totally unpleasant stink of a skunk. One never sees them, except as a mangled mess of black and white fur on the road. But the odor of their existences suddenly reaches us, even through the steel walls of a speeding car, alerting us to the hidden strata of animal existence, whose creatures move through coded masses of scent
, through invisible clouds of information.
A curious dream last night, whose details fall from me even as I write. Gloria and I were leaving Boston after some event, some little concert or worthy talk, probably at the Tavern Club or her club, called, in honor of Caesar’s wife, the Calpurnia. The city, torn up by the Big Dig, could be exited only at “the top”—a narrow place of high traffic like the Mystic River Bridge. We were on foot, she leading. The mouth of a downward tunnel—an oneiric echo of the one under the old Charlestown circle, or the one named after a legendary baseball player—loomed confusingly, like the ambiguous exits off of Memorial Drive that suddenly shoot a car over the river or into Kendall Square. She led me to the right, along a concrete walk that stayed level—one of those ill-marked gritty passageways that skirt great new constructions. Except that it seemed to proceed along the edge of buildings that fell away beside me, on the right, dizzyingly. Gloria moved along, with that brisk impatience and obliviousness of the comfortably born, and I timorously followed along the obscure path, which bent now and then as if tracing the ramparts of ancient city buildings: the analog perhaps is with those medieval pedestrian ways around Court Square, in the shadow of the ancient gray City Hall, now a Chinese-war memorial.
Gloria did not acknowledge the screaming depths of vertical façade and jutting cornice beneath us, nor did I speak of them: I wrestled with my terror in silence. Then we came, among the building-tops, to a place where there was a gap— a dream image, perhaps, of the Mystic River—and I froze, too panicked to step across. But then somehow she doubled back and deftly traversed the perilous gulf with me and we were together on the opposite side. It was like a flickering at the climax of a silent movie, this transposition to the safe, the northern, side of Boston.
I awoke and it was not Gloria beside me but Deirdre, her lithe and lightly sweating body emitting a faintly harsh, metallic scent, her face tucked into the crooks of her slender brown arms, which were folded around her head with a silken relaxation as she slept the heedless, unshatterable sleep of the young. Perdita, the first woman I slept with on a contractual basis, used to awake, no matter how late we had come to bed, around dawn. To the sounds of her stirring about in the bedroom and then in the kitchen below, I would fall asleep again, as if to the sounds of my mother’s morning housework back in Hammond Falls. Like the sun and moon, I as a young husband realized, men and women set and rise on independent schedules.
In the many years of my commuting, from 1977 on, there were two memorable tragedies on the Mystic River Bridge. Just before dawn one morning an overloaded truck swerved out of control and hit a bridge support with such force that the upper deck collapsed, crushing the driver and stymieing the early commuter traffic, which had to halt at a precipice not unlike that in my dream; the bridge was closed for at least a year. Then, years later, a husband who had almost persuaded the public and the police that an unknown black man had shot to death his pregnant wife when their automobile strayed into Roxbury parked in the middle of the bridge and leaped to his death as the truth began to emerge: he had done the deed, long premeditated in a brain overheated by an infatuation with a younger, non-pregnant woman. To deflect attention from himself he had fired a bullet into his own abdomen, perhaps more painfully than he had intended. His suicide note admitted nothing and was full of self-pity. The incident made us New Englanders all wonder, Inside every husband is there a wife-killer?
Deirdre keeps a very messy house. The laundry accumulates in the hamper, the dishes in the sink. She even leaves banana peels and eggshells and crusts of toast rotting within the Disposall, when it is but a few seconds’ satisfying occupation to switch it on, under running water, and listen to it grind such garbage away. Before she moved in with me, I had her enlist in NarcAnon, and she was initially enthusiastic and resolute, but I sense backsliding lately. Unaccountable fits of euphoria, with manically sexy and animated behavior, are followed by spells of withdrawn hostility. She is like a kite whose string is still held in my hands but whose distant paper shape I can see fluttering and dipping out of control.
The other night she wet the bed. I was astonished: I awoke at the sting of the warm liquid seeping through my pajamas, and when I wakened her—she was sleeping naked— and roused her to what she had done, she didn’t seem to comprehend. She fumbled with me at tearing off the wet bedding, laying a dry towel over the damp place on the mattress, and remaking the bed with a fresh sheet, but seemed still asleep, locked into some drugged continuing dream of her own. In the morning I couldn’t get her to talk about it, and indeed I didn’t press her too hard: it was embarrassing to me, too.
Some kids—I presume they were kids—smashed a window and broke into the barn. I’m not sure of everything they stole: Two bicycles, at least, that had belonged to Henry and Roger. An inflatable raft, not much of a success, for use in the pond, when Henry was still a little boy, and lonely on our hill, his brother and sister already away at prep school; I remember how he tried to make pets of the pair of ducks that nested near the pond every spring. They produced a chain of fuzzy ducklings that, one per day, would be pulled under by the snapping turtle that lived in the bottom ooze. Also missing were a number of the Mickey Mouse blocks— they have some collectible value now—from my old toy basket, that weathered brittle bushel basket from the apple country of the Berkshires. And a porcelain-base lamp and a folded linen tablecloth that I seemed to remember from my previous, depressing visit to this storage area, which had claustrophobically reminded me of the cellar of the house I once shared with Perdita, several worlds ago. Perhaps I had not fled her but that basement, where I couldn’t bear to hammer together a dollhouse for a girl who would soon outgrow it and add it to the world’s wasteland of discarded toys.
I think the thieves were the kids I hear whooping and crashing in the woods, now that the weather is warming. Deirdre is certain it was Spin and Phil, “as a warning.”
“What would they warn us about? I’m a model member of their club, paid up until the end of March.”
“Ben, you’re such an innocent. People always want more, more. They keep going until there’s nothing left, until they’ve sucked you dry.”
The image recalled to me too vividly her past as a cock-sucking prostitute. She seemed to know Spin and Phil too well. I wanted to slap her, to knock that stubborn out-of-reach druggy daze out of her. Her lips looked swollen and moved stiffly, like those of a person in the cold, though the day was sunny, if cool—one of the first basking days, when an atavistic streak in the blood begs you to crawl up on a rock, old turtle, and let the sun soak through your shell.
Ken and Red asked me to go skiing with them. I said yes, though a little loath to leave Deirdre alone in the house all day—she has been acting so dangerous lately, with that reckless female self-disregard that presumably serves Nature’s need to throw DNA around but frays the hell out of male nerves. I dragged my skis and boots up from the cellar, where they rest in the little damp laundry room next to the chamber where the jagged ledge sits like an uninvited guest, a chthonic ghost. The cellar of this house is a century-and-a-half newer and several orders of magnitude more cheerful than that of the pre-Revolutionary house that I once occupied with Perdita and my five dependent children. My present basement savors of upper-class self-regard in the early 1900s. The same ample scale of construction that obtained in the householders’ summer living quarters was transposed, in a minor key, to a netherworld, for servants. There are foundations of pointed rust-tinged granite, partitions of white-painted brick, steam and waste pipes of cast-iron solidity, cobwebbed rooms devoted to the hobbies (woodworking, photography) of the sons of the previous owners. In the darkest and dampest of these—the old darkroom, its windows sealed with taped wallboard—I keep my skis. Since February a year ago, the last time I skied, the edges had rusted, I discovered. The windowless, subterranean damp had penetrated the weave of their canvas carrier, and atoms of oxygen had bonded with atoms of iron. Natural processes continue without our witnessing t
hem: what stronger proof of our inconsequence? Bertrand Russell (I believe) spoke of human consciousness as an “epiphenomenon”—superficially there, a bubble thrown up by confluences in the blind tumble of mindless matter, like the vacuous brown curds whipped up by a fast-running brook.
We drove two hours north in Ken’s gray Audi. Red had to forgo the global conversations with which he regales his passengers in his hyperequipped Caravan. Ken wore his old pilot’s cap as we sailed up Route 93, through stretches of second- and third-growth woods and blank-sided industrial buildings—Reading, Wilmington, Andover—into New Hampshire. Above Concord, a lot of the condo developments wedged into the hillsides were charred shells. Abandoned when the flow of back-to-nature second-home buyers out of metropolitan Boston had been dried up by the disasters of the last decade, these standardized wooden villages had been sacked and set ablaze by the starving locals in their own back-to-nature movement. But Nature was slow to digest these mock-bucolic intrusions; the blue-brown hills with their precipitous rock outcroppings bore wide black scars festooned with tangled pipes and wiring. Electronic equipment had been one of the objects of the looting, but its value depended upon an electronic infrastructure that had been one of the first casualties of urban catastrophe and global underpopulation.
Loon Mountain was one of the few ski resorts still open for customers. The gondola had been closed for lack of Swiss replacement parts and the lift operators on duty had a bearded, furtive look. They seemed evil trolls, in their polychrome parkas and lumberjack shirts, mining the mountain with clanking, creaking ore-carts that went up full and came down empty. The overweight, pockmarked woman behind the ticket window asked to see my driver’s license in verification of my claim to the senior rate. “Sixty-six,” she said, having done the arithmetic with a frown. “O.K., sonny. What’s your secret? Cheeks like a baby’s. A mop of hair.” Her coarse attempt at flirtation made me wonder if she had scented Deirdre’s youthful body oils clinging to me, giving me an ungeriatric aura of sexual success. Ken and Red crowed at my blushes, and got their own senior tickets without challenge.
