by John Updike
From these same windows—“front” I call them, though Gloria says the seaside faces front—I heard in mid-morning, as I lay there, shaved and fully dressed but recuperating from my insomnia with a copy of Scientific American, a truck roar up and Gloria’s pure, bell-like voice, more familiar to me than my own, mingle with a voice also, though less resonantly, familiar. I peeked down and over the edge of the porch roof glimpsed my wife’s bright head nodding in eager conversation with a chunky man in the police-blue FedEx uniform, with its tricolor stripe down the sleeves. Not a package changed hands but a sheaf of scrip, from her hand to his and thence into a worn leather satchel. The squirrels are in a frenzy of gathering and hiding; one of them scampered along the roof above my head and when the FedEx man looked up at the noise I saw his face; it was Phil. He had not been rubbed out, then, when Spin was; like me, he lived on. When the truck had roared down the driveway, I called for Gloria to come upstairs. The tyranny of the sick is luxurious. She came. “Who was that?” I asked.
“The FedEx man, darling. Haven’t you seen him before?”
“Why were you handing him money?”
“I told you, dear. They collect, in exchange for peace and order. It was they who took care of those horrible children who had built a hut in our woods and who were terrorizing the neighbors; the rumor is it was they who burned down Pearl Lubbetts’s expensive beach house! It’s quite wonderful, what they’re doing. FedEx, I mean. The guards they use to protect their shipments are being assigned to cities and towns now. They want to bring back green money, that people could use in any state. There’s even talk, the Times says of their moving the federal government, what there is left of it, to Memphis, where FedEx has its headquarters and all its airplanes. It’s about time somebody took charge, before the Mexicans invade.”
The Mexican repossession of Texas, New Mexico, Ari zona, and lower California had been an item lately in the Globe, along with much else terrible—shootings in Dorchester, rapes in Mattapan—that had merely a literary relationship to me, sequestered in my own microcosmic geography and my seared, chastened body.
“It’s a network, so it can do any thing,” Gloria was going on, with a flash of her beautiful teeth and a toss of her ash-blond hair much like those (the flash, the toss) with which, twenty years ago, she could cap one of her—our, might I say?—triumphant sexual performances. She would coax up an erection through a trouser pocket of my gray suit in the middle of Symphony or, unzipping my fly, while we were driving home from Boston at midnight through the neon carnival of pre-war Route 1. “People say President Smith has already resigned, but there’s no way to tell.”
At times I dream I have an erection, with a mauve head like a rabbit’s heart, so hard and blood-stuffed a one it makes the veins in my throat sympathetically stiffen and swell; but when I awake and peek inside my soaked Depends, my poor prick is as red and flaccid as a rooster’s comb. How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the hub of my universe? The foolishness of life hits me, stunningly, as the last plausible shreds of my dream dissolve and the suburban houris conjured by my desire—Grace Wren, sucking; Muriel Kelly, splayed—withdraw their wisps of white flesh, but there is nothing to laugh about.
Still, I burn to see Phil by myself, to ask what happened to Deirdre.
I live on a planet where the vegetation is golden, gold in all its shades from red-brown to platinum-white, but all refulgent, towering, superabundant. Red veins of contrast course through its infinite foliations; sheets of orange twirl and tuck themselves into quilted caverns of rustling shadow; a rain of cast-off leaves twirls and twitters down on the same diagonal as the westering light from our proximate star. Gold on this planet rusts; the atoms of its element are eager to combine with the blue of oxygen, the green of vaporized sulfur. Out of gold’s volatile, ubiquitous substance are hewn and thrashed the beams of our homes, the thatch of our roofs, the bedding for our livestock. “Common as gold” is a phrase, and “gold poor.” Yet we do not despise the element, but bask in its superabundance, which crowds every surface to the verge of the sea, itself golden, imbued as it is with aureate salts. Stalked heaps of gold froth compete with the clouds in their cumulus, and make a ragged join with the sulfurous sky, which the daily floods of local starlight dye a deep, heavenly chartreuse. Theologians make of this an argument for the existence of God: if the vast sky were any color less soothing than green, our lovingly fabricated eyes would be burned blind.
Today Phil was waiting for me at the mailbox, his white FedEx truck parked at the entry to our dirt lane through the woods. The pond was having a jolly time reflecting the blazing wall of maples and birches along its edge. A duo of ducks jostled the reflection with their widening rings every time they took off and relanded, or with comic deftness tipped up their tails to grab a bite underwater.
“How’re ya doin’, Mr. Turnbull?” Phil asked me. The somber blue-gray uniform fitted him better than his brown suits had. “That’s some operation you’ve had, your wife’s been tellin’ me.”
I shagged. “They’ve got it down to a science now. A stream of pure protons, no bigger than a pencil lead, passes through the good cells and slices out the bad.”
“Still, there are lousy aftereffects, she was saying. Your missus and I did a lot of chitchat when you were in the hospital. She’s some swell lady, by the way. She knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to express it: that’s what I like in a dame.”
I had never heard Phil talk so much; in the old days Spin had done most of the talking. “She likes you, too,” I said. “She likes the way FedEx is going to take over and kill off all the anti-social elements and bring back the United States of America.”
“We-ell,” he said judiciously, with what I took to be official FedEx gravity; the corporations among their other roles have become the only teachers of deportment. “FedEx has got its competition.” His eyes were small and close together, but on the other hand they were a light contemplative gray, the color of a machine’s burnished underside, and were framed by unexpectedly long eyelashes. “But we’re getting a handle at least on everything east of the Mississippi. The strategy is to absorb the little carriers first, and let UPS come to us when it’s ready.” He moved closer; a sour male essence wafted from his jowls and armpits. “Between us, they’re working on a way to remote-control the trinkets, with radio signals; the little things’ brains are just a few transistors, after all. Once the kinks are out it’ll be the biggest thing in warfare since the taming of the horse.”
“And the invention of horseshoes and the stirrup,” I said. “Otherwise, warrior herdsmen couldn’t have ridden their horses for invasive distances.”
“You’re losin’ me.” He frowned. “Hey”—his little eyes crinkled in anticipation of the jab to come—“how’d the old dingle-dangle like being knocked out of commish? You were some hot ass-man, to hear Deirdre tell it.”
“Deirdre,” I said. “Exactly. Tell me about Deirdre. What’s happened to her? When Spin got killed, I was afraid—”
“Yeah, Spin,” Phil said. “That was real ugly. The kids did it with rocks. Rocks were all the little suckers had—real crude. But you know,” Phil went on, waxing philosophical, “Spin, great a guy as he was, led with his chin sometimes. Remember how he had to dress like some dandy all the time? That showed insecurity, knowing he was out there operating pretty much on his own. He didn’t have what this outfit”—he touched the insignia on his breast pocket—“has. Esprit de corps. The world like it is, you can’t go it alone. Impossible. They’ll eat you up. That’s what I told Deirdre. But the cunt, she don’t listen.”
The present tense was hopeful. “Where is she?” I asked.
He looked at me still humorously. “What you want with her now? Your dick’s just a memory, the way your missus tells it.”
“Gloria talks about it?”
“You know—in a very refined way. Like I say, she’s a class act. What I really appreciate, she’s got a head on her shoulders. She may n
ot call a spade a spade, but she can dig a hole with the best of ’em, you know what I mean?”
People who have come up in the world become boring very quickly; everything they say is disguised bragging. He wanted to talk about his connection with Gloria, I wanted to talk about Deirdre. “You’re not telling me about Deirdre,” I said. “Did you and she, after she left me, live together?”
I tried to picture this oaf laying his sweaty sack of a body down beside hers with its slender bony back, its silken coating of fine flowing hair, and my anger was all at Deirdre, for allowing it, for giving away so cheaply what I had chosen to regard as precious. “For a while,” he casually admitted. Not only were Phil’s eyes small, but so were his ears—no bigger than teacup handles, and pressed tight into the spongy sides of the skull between the bulge of his shaven blue jowls and the bulge of his curly, springy hair. Between his hairline and his eyebrows there was little space for a forehead. “We palled around, she moved into my digs. But she’s restless, Ben.” When would everybody stop calling me Ben? I was not the world’s friend. “She wants to be”—his gesture took in the flaming pond, the walls of woods, the vast presiding illusion of a blue sky—“out there. She’s a whore, you know? She’ll lay for you, great, but then she’ll lay for the next guy. She doesn’t give a fuck, literally. She’s hooked on dope and this notion she has of freedom. I tried to beat the crap out of her a few times, but it didn’t take. She didn’t learn a thing. She’s like some wild animal, you know?”
I didn’t want to hear this, particularly, but I did like being able to talk about Deirdre openly—to drag with my tongue the sweet secret of her name out from the granular dark of my memory cells. The way she would pantingly negotiate the price for every new twist of lovemaking. Her tight butternut ass, with its white thong shadow, up in the air, the little flesh-knot between the glassy-smooth buttocks visible in moonlight that entered the third-story window at just the right celestial angle. The flat planes of her face harking back to the Egyptian Sphinx or some heavy Aztec head of solid sandstone, only transposed to a smaller, female scale, with modern nihilist nerves. The way her stiffish purple dress with its little white collar rustled beside me in church last Easter as the boyish clergywoman preached of how the risen Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, “Touch me not.” Her searing wish—I felt it now, at last—to be sheltered.
I drew closer to Phil, as if to a squat radiator on a bleak winter day. There is a warmth in the proximity of a man who has fucked the same woman you have. It is as if she took off her clothes as a piece of electric news she wished him to bring to you. He has heard the same soft cries, smelled the same stirred-up scent, felt the same compliant slickness, seen the same moonlit swellings and crevices and tufts—it was all in Phil’s circuitry, if I could but unload it. He was a healthy FedEx man, wearing the attractive uniform of power; he could afford to be casual about his conquests, but I no longer could. My sexual memories had become epics of a lost heroic age, when I was not impotent and could shoot semen into a woman’s wincing face like bullets of milk. Deirdre’s flanks in memory had acquired the golden immensity of temple walls rising to a cloudless sky and warmed by an Egyptian sun. Whore though he thought her, a nimbus of her holy heat clung to Phil—his oily black pubic curls had tangled with hers—and I moved another inch closer to him, as the two ducks on the pond suddenly tussled, with a quacking and thrashing that sent concentric ripples crashing into the reflected red image of the maples.
Phil mistook the reason for my intimacy. He thought working for the expanding FedEx conglomerate was the most important thing about him. He lowered his voice confidentially to tell me, “In a coupla months, we’ll have the circuitry in place so we don’t even have to collect in person; the monthly charge will be automatically deducted from your bank account. Neat, huh?”
“How do I know you won’t deduct too much?”
“It’s a matter of trust, like you always said. Trust us. You won’t feel a thing.”
“With you, did she come?”
“Huh?”
“Deirdre.” I was shameless now, in my decrepitude. In a world of dwindling days, why wait to seek the truth? “Were you able to give her climaxes?”
“Hey, Ben, come on. What does this have to do with the price of cheese?” He glimpsed my need and smilingly despised me for it.
“I want to know,” I pleaded. “I miss her. Deirdre.” Saying her name—did my penis stir? I felt something. “I wish her well.”
“Like I said, she was a whore. Her coming wasn’t the issue.”
“I tried to make it an issue,” I confessed. “I worked at it. But I could never be sure, she was so good at faking it. Her mind was always a little elsewhere, didn’t you think?”
He saw that he mattered to me only as an emanation of our shared cunt, and he felt indignant. He cut me off. “On her next fix is where it was,” he said. “They’re all like that. They hate the tricks they turn, don’t kid yourself, Ben. Hey, you don’t look so good suddenly. Think you can make it back up that hill?”
“My doctors want me to exercise,” I told him. “They want me to drop dead.” As I shuffled my way up the curved asphalt, past the fruit trees with their rotting dropped fruit, the lilacs turning purple leaf by leaf, the sassafras shaped like an upside-down bowl, and the cedar with its frost of tiny berries, I decided that the stir of my penis at the mention of Deirdre’s name had likely been just a leak of warm urine I had happened to notice. I resolved to work harder on my Kegel exercises.
Rain for three days, one of those fall nor’easters that knock the leaves from the trees and paste them to the wet earth, Still, the hickory outside my upstairs window has scarcely turned, but for patches of yellow. Agitated squirrels tousle it, clambering out on its downward-drooping twigs, and then scamper thunderously across the roof above my head.
The gutter at one end was plugged, and the overflow built up a puddle behind the pachysandra that was draining into a basement window. In a burst of vitality that alarmed Gloria, I put on my old foul-weather sailing gear and in the driving rain set up the extension ladder and climbed its slick rungs and, not daring to look down into the steep triangular space beneath my feet, cleared away a plug of twigs and leaves with my hands. There was primitive satisfaction in seeing a vortex appear and the level of water standing in the old wooden gutter go slowly down, obedient to the patient, omnipresent laws of physics. Childhood games: getting the elements back on track. Man as hydraulic traffic cop. Down on the ground I tried with the point of a pick to gouge a runnel through the pachysandra to drain the puddle into the driveway, but gravity was against me. If gravity be against us, what can be for us? I liked being out in the rain, because it made my soaked paper diaper feel natural, a piece of saturated nature.
Inside the house, arranging everything in the laundry room to dry, I was aware of the heat from the radiators, as touched and grateful as if a faithful servant had thought to set out for me a tray of tea and warm scones. The house and its appurtenances of wiring and piping pursue an independent life, like a motherly, stationary megatrinket.
Gloria professed alarm at my exertions but in fact I felt invigorated, my face tingling. It was only in the evening, as I tried to read in bed a popular book about cosmology, that a terrific fatigue hit me—that degree of unforswearable weariness that brushes even the certainty of death aside in its haste to close our eyes.
Alive, I’m alive, I sometimes think now, listening to the rain in the gutters, feeling the extension of my limbs beneath the soft sheets. What bliss life is, imagined from the standpoint of a stone or of a cubic yard of black water in the icy ocean depths. Even there, apparently, conglomerated molecules manage to light a tiny candle of consciousness. The universe hates death, can it be? If God be for us, who can be against us? Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the … Alive. A pitiable but delicious reprieve from timelessness. I think of all the sons of bitches like Gary Gray and Firman Frothingham who would just as s
oon see me dead and the pleasure of spiting my enemies warms my cooling heart.
The sky this dawn was a pink blotting paper, set above a sea whose blue presented the same misty, fibrous texture. In the foreground the golden trees looked sullen and darker now, curdled and rust-ridden, after the storm. As the leaves thin, the sky lowers again upon our awareness. Making my slow way down the damp asphalt, where flowing water has left drifts and eskers of pine needles, acorns, hickory nuts, dead twigs, and gravel from the edges, I seem to see, in broken arcs beyond the scudding, thinning rain clouds, the heavenly circle, the torus. Has it, in spite of the public indifference that attended its departure, returned, or is it a trick merely of refracted sunlight in a high mist of crystals—a white rainbow?
