by John Updike
I felt lightly covered in slime after our spiritual grapple, our “reaching out.” I hated to have my most intimate views, my hot Barthian nugget insulated within layers of worldly cynicism and situation ethics, dragged toward the light by this boy’s earnest agony, his obstinate refusal to let me go until I blessed him. I kept my distance from my students and resented this interloper from another department, from another side of the university altogether, tracking his big hush-puppy footprints where so many others had never trod. For many, even square-built Corliss Henderson with her dogged melancholy butchifying of the saints, would have liked to know me better, to “get in touch with” impeccably gray-swaddled Professor Roger Lambert, who had made his deal with the universe and was damned if he was going to welsh on it.
ii
Tentatively I knocked on the blank green door; I had never been here in this kind of daylight before. The morning sun stood at the end of the stripped, scarred hall, and there was a chaste silence to the project—children off at school, adults off at work or still in bed with their sins. Verna opened the door in a prim charcoal skirt and lilac-colored cable-knit sweater. Of course: she had been up and out, walking little Paula to the day-care center on this crisp morning in Epiphany. She had opened the door quickly, as if expecting someone else. When she saw me instead, her wide sallow face—her pieface—underwent a transformation that erased its dimple, and she pulled me into her apartment and collapsed in my arms. Through my several coats I felt the smearing pressure of her breasts, the heat and pulse captured in her young-woman’s fragile cage of ribs. She was sobbing, her breath and tears hot on the side of my neck. “Oh Nunc,” she was gasping, in her reedy immature voice. “I wondered where you’d got to.”
“I’ve been in town,” I said, stunned. “You could have telephoned if you wanted to see us. Me.” My pronouns reflected, first, a pretense that it was Esther and I together, as surrogate mother and father, whom she might have needed, and then a reflection that she and Esther must see each other at the day-care center and a glad acceptance that it was I myself alone the child wanted to turn to.
She seemed loath to let go. For the first time in fourteen years I knew what it was like to embrace a female who weighed more than a hundred pounds. But my grip was light, confused, apparently avuncular. “Oh Christ,” the girl bawled and sniffled. “It’s been horrible.”
“What’s been?”
“Everything.”
“I hear you’ve passed part of your tests,” I said. “And don’t you like having Paula off your hands every morning?” We had disentangled, though a kind of heat shadow of her body lingered on the front of mine, mussing my shirt, my trousers.
Her sniffling became a snort. “Poopsie,” she said scornfully. “She’s the least of it.” Verna looked at me with her amber eyes. They had the lashless squinting shape of a disgruntled cat’s. She was putting a bold face on the words to come. “I’m making another, Nunc.”
“Another … baby?”
Verna nodded. Her stringy bleached curls bobbed deeper over her low forehead. Her voice came out squeezed as if by apology. “I don’t know what there is about me; it’s as if these guys just have to wink.”
“Guys?”
“Well, come on, Nunc.” Brightly, as if quoting from Cosmopolitan or some breezy advice column: “Today’s young woman plays the field.”
The repeated “Nunc” felt like a jeering; but she had been relieved and grateful to see me at her door.
“Didn’t Dale tell you?” she surprisingly asked.
“Not exactly. He thought I should check on you, though.”
“So that’s why you’re here. Thanks.”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked.
She shrugged, and the abstracted way she glanced around the apartment suggested she had put the problem, along with her outburst and embrace, behind her. The radio was on in the other room; the music was repeatedly interrupted by a rapid joking voice, a female voice that proceeded in insolent fits and starts. “Hey there, all right now,” the voice said, as if disoriented. “Station W-I-L-D!” The television set was off, and sat dully on its milk crate. The room looked more like a student’s room. A little white-painted bookcase had appeared; its contents consisted of some fashion magazines and the slippery-blue anthology I had brought her. And there was a new chair, a vivid overstuffed armchair that reminded me of something, I didn’t know what.
My question, somewhat like the theological questions with which Dale and I irritated the space between us, had been a voicing of what should be left unsaid: Verna kept forgetting that actions have consequences. Her unstable face threatened to dissolve again into panic, as when she had greeted me. “I don’t know. I don’t want to do anything.”
I decided to become directive. “You can’t just have it,” I told her. “That would put you deeper behind the eight ball.”
It came to me what her new chair reminded me of: that peach-colored corduroy bed rest I had seen the willowy young black carrying on his head the time I had walked to this place, down Sumner Boulevard, before Election Day. Not that the colors or shapes were exactly the same, but they shared an aura, of doomed hopefulness. I touched the chair’s tangerine corduroy. “I see you’ve spent the money I gave you.”
“That’s my uncle’s chair,” she said, imitating a little girl. “For him to sit in when he comes to visit. If he ever does.” I sat in it. Its cushions had the stiff resistance of new airfoam. “How many periods have you missed?” I asked.
“I think two,” she said sullenly.
I realized I had compromised my dignity by sitting down. My face was at the level of Verna’s hips. My nerves still glowed with the sensation of holding her: her body, the weight, denseness, and responsibility of it. There is an odd erotic illumination that comes over us when for a moment we see women as simply the females of our animal species, another set of forked creatures condemned to a daily round of ingestion and defecation, of sleep and exertion. We are in this together. In carnem. “You think,” I said sternly. “Can’t you count?”
“The third would be about now” was her grudging response. Her hips in their charcoal skirt swayed; she was idly beginning to flirt.
“Well then,” I told her. “No problem. Have the abortion. You’re lucky to live in a time when you can have one for the asking. When I was your age you had to creep and crawl and beg to have it done. It was illegal, and dangerous, and women died of it. And now these idiots want to bring the dark ages back.”
“Did you ever have to creep and crawl, Nunc?”
“No. My first wife,” I said, reluctantly, “couldn’t have children. It was the tragedy of her life.”
“If she had been able, would you have made her risk her life and kill the fetus?”
“We were married, Verna. There is no comparison between our situation and yours.”
“You know, Nunc, I agree with those idiots. The fetus is alive. It shouldn’t be killed.”
“Don’t be grotesque. The fetus, as you call it, at this point is about as big as a peanut, as a minnow. If you’ve ever eaten sardines you should be willing to have this abortion.”
“Don’t you be grotesque. It’s inside me, not you. I can feel it wanting to live. There’s a movie they show, of how they crush the baby’s head.”
“Stop thinking baby. Think Verna. What do you want with another little tarbaby when the one you already have drives you crazy and is dragging your life down?”
There is a point in an argument, however heated, when the center slides away from the topic being ostensibly discussed, and the participants’ actual interest has slid to the heat itself, the back-and-forth of passion being generated. Verna’s flirtatiousness had increased; it clung to her hips like a sarong. Her voice had lowered, gone sultry. “Who says the baby’s a tarbaby?”
I was still shrill. “Whatever the color: that baby can be as white as snow and there’s no room for it in this world. Why let it in just to torture it?” I wished I had br
ought my pipe.
“You wanna know something, Nunc? I love having babies. Feeling it grow, and then that incredible thing of being split and there suddenly being two of you.”
I rested my forehead on my fingertips and thought no answer at all would be most impressive.
She sashayed closer to the chair. “You want to know something else?”
“I’m not sure.” My throat was drying.
“My mother wanted to have me aborted, but my daddy, ’cause he was pretty religious even before his cancer scare, wouldn’t let her. That’s why I can’t get too mad at him for being such a prick about Poopsie and all. Without him I wouldn’t be here. I’d be nowhere, Nunc.”
Someone knocked on the door. The acoustics of her underfurnished room were such that the knock seemed enormous, and as hard as a gun held against our heads. Yet the knock actually had been gentle, insinuating.
“Verna?” The voice was a mellow baritone, with a sediment of gravel. “Verna you there honey?”
She and I had frozen, me in the chair and she standing, her thighs a few inches from its square padded arm. I was looking up at her and she down at me, her chin creased into chins; she smiled a sly motherly, dimple-making smile, to seal our conspiracy of silence.
The man at the door knocked again, more sharply, and then could be heard to shuffle his feet and softly whistle through his teeth to dramatize his patience. “Verna, you playing possum?”
Verna’s smile and her maternal gaze down at me did not alter; but her chubby short-nailed hands at the sides of her gray skirt bunched and lifted the cloth, lifted it, rustling so faintly only my ear could hear it, higher, up above her thighs. She was wearing no underpants. My mouth went utterly dry, as if raked by the dentist’s saliva vacuum.
“O.K. you Verna,” the voice said, to itself, and the back of its knuckles tapped an absent-minded little rhythm on the door. Her thighs were sallow shining curved columns; her pubic bush was broad, like her face, and darker than the hair of her head, and even curlier, so that arcs of reflected light glinted in it and random congruences of the circlets made little round windows through to the skin. The man at the door heaved a stagy sigh, and, though his footsteps were stealthy, by the vibration of the walls we knew he was going away. She lowered her skirt and backed off, still smiling but her eyes solemn and hostile.
“What was that for?” I whispered.
“Oh,” she said in her normal, reedy voice. “Just something to do while we were killing the time. I thought it might interest you. You don’t have to whisper. He must have heard us talking and just did that to bug me.”
“Who was he?”
“A friend, I guess you’d have to say.”
“Is he the father?”
“I doubt it, actually.”
“Could Dale be the father?”
“Would that make it better? Could I keep it then?”
“I wouldn’t think so. But if he were, then you and he could decide together.”
“No way, Nunc. Like I told you in the first place, he and I don’t fuck. He’s not like you. He doesn’t think I’m nifty.”
“I do think you’re nifty, yes.” What she had displayed to me remained in my mind as a distinct creature, a sea urchin on the white ocean floor. When she lifted her skirt an aroma had wafted out, cousin to that musky crushed-peanut-shell scent from my deepest childhood, but with an origin beyond even that, back to the birth of life. Moisture was slowly returning to my oral cavity.
She moved about switchily, pleased with herself. “If I do get an abortion, Nunc, it’s not exactly free.”
“I thought they were, at a clinic. Isn’t the whole idea of a clinic to save teen-aged girls like you the embarrassment of telling your parents?”
“Yeah, but they like to charge something now, it’s part of Reaganomics. Anyway maybe I don’t want to go to a clinic and stagger out an hour later. Maybe I’m terrified of operations and ought to go to a regular hospital. Also if I go through with it don’t you think I should get something for mental suffering?”
I sensibly asked, “Why should I bribe you to do something for your own good?”
“Because you want to fuck me. You want to lick my cunt.”
“Verna. Your language.”
She grinned girlishly. “It’s great, isn’t it? Mom could never have got herself to talk like that.”
I asked, to test the depth of her corruption, or to discover the price of a fetus, “How would three hundred suit you?”
Her lips came forward as if her tongue were fiddling with something caught between her teeth; a Fifties mannerism that made her look remarkably like her mother. After considering thus, she said, “I have to think about it. I’m not just kidding, Nunc, I feel it’s a sin to do it.”
“We all feel it’s a sin. But the world is mired in sin. In this mire we try to determine the lesser of available evils. We try to choose, and take the consequences. That’s what being a grown-up is.”
“Come on—you believe even little babies are bad?”
“Augustine did. John Calvin did. All the best Christian thinkers did. You have to; otherwise the world isn’t truly fallen, and there’s no need for Redemption, there’s no Christian story. Anyway, Verna, it’s your life, as you said. Your sweet body.”
The project was quiet around us, as if only we existed. Snow on the windowsill blew upward, sparkling. Though not much snow had fallen, January had been so cold that what had fallen remained, had failed to melt away, squeaking and shifting underfoot and blowing back and forth in a thousand little glittering pseudo-storms.
Verna seemed restless, captive. But where did she have to go, on this bright morning, without a car, without a job? “My sweet body, huh?” she said.
“Should we be doing anything,” I carefully asked, my throat gone parched again, “about my finding you so nifty?”
She didn’t at first know what I meant; her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said at last. “You feel funny about fucking when you’re in a family way, like eating on a full stomach or something.” Her refusal, like most tentative positions, was lavishly overdetermined. “Anyways, I was going to do a watercolor. Dale said he wanted one to show somebody, and also he gave me this book to brush up on math with, for the equivalency tests. Also I promised my worker I’d swing by and get some AFDC forms, they keep changing the rules. You know,” she told me, her eyes widening again, “I could make an extra seventy-four dollars a month from AFDC, having another baby.”
“Verna,” I scolded. “What a way to make money. Making babies.”
“No worse than making it by having abortions.”
“I wouldn’t be paying you, I’d be compensating you.”
“That’s a pretty cute distinction.” She looked down at me again, in that way that creased her chin. “About you and me. Wouldn’t it feel funny, you being my nice uncle and all?” She touched the top of my head, that thick silvery hair of which I am vain. “You could kiss me, though. That would be friendly.”
I moved to push up out of her new armchair but she moved closer and said, “Don’t get up. Here,” and lifted her skirt again. Some boyfriend must have once told her she had a beautiful pussy. There was a tender pale valley, with the faintest blue buried veins, where her abdomen met each thigh, and I chose the one on the right; a few pubic hairs stood like sentinels on the edge of the woolly homeland, at the side of the mons Veneris Far above me Verna giggled. “That’s a tickly place.”
I kissed with more pressure, to reduce the tickliness. As I thought of moving my lips leftward she backed herself away and flipped down her charcoal skirt. I was pleased to notice below my own waist the beginning of an erection. Not every female can reach into your reptile brain; it’s a matter of pheromones, an obscure fit of neural notches. Nor does this reach have any relation to the lady’s societally admirable qualities; if anything, these dull the interlock. We mate not to please ourselves but the great genetic pool lapping all around us.
Verna was back in her girls-wanna-have-fun mood: “It’d be fun maybe at least to take off our clothes,” she said. “If you don’t reject me again.”
“I never reject you, do I?”
“All the time, Nunc. It’s devastating. You tease me.”
“Odd. I could have sworn you were teasing me.”
“I bet you wonder why I don’t have any underpants on.”
“I made my speculations, yes.”
“I like the feeling. When I walk out in the air it’s like I have this secret.”
“Among your many others.”
Her slant eyes narrowed and took up the challenge. “Not as many as you think. You think I’m really a slutty person.”
As she spoke and stared, a wall of glass materialized between us; the little links forged when my face nestled beside her belly were all broken, and I saw this common-minded delinquent girl as meaning less to me than a department-store mannequin. The sensation was a relief; as soon as her invitation to be naked together was delivered, I had been besieged by darting thoughts of AIDS, of herpes, of the man at the door returning with a strengthened fist, of the mountain of performance I should have to climb, of my rickety and undependable fifty-three-year-old* flesh, of the mockery I would risk from this unstable teen-ager, of drunken and hilarious descriptions to dark strangers down at the Domino. “I think,” I solemnly corrected her, “you’re a person not doing the most she can with her life.”
“Well, fuck you, Nunc, that’s the last sniff of my pussy you’ll ever have. And I don’t need your money either. Like we were saying I have an asset.”
“Christ, don’t start doing that, you’ll really hit the skids. How are you and dope, anyway?”
“I never have a joint until after five o’clock. I only snort coke when somebody else has paid for it. It depends on the date I’m with.”
“Dear me, what a bad girl.”
“I’m a good girl, Nunc.”
We were drifting into patter. I was already looking into my wallet and planning the stop at the automatic teller on the way back to the Divinity School: THANK YOU FOR USING OUR SERVICES AND HAVE A NICE DAY. “Here’s eighty-five, it’s all the cash I have. Just as a little cushion for right now. Do go to the clinic, Verna. I’ll go with you if you insist. Would it help you to talk it over with Esther?”
