Roger's Version: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Esther?”

  “She’s another woman.”

  “That snippy little snob, she doesn’t give me shit when I see her over at day-care.”

  “She probably thinks you don’t want to talk to her. She’s shy, with most people.”

  “Boy then I guess I know the wrong people.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That’s for you to ask and me to know, Nunc.”

  I did not dare ask if Dale had been talking. I wanted thoroughly to be away from this musty-stinking, dead-end project apartment and back at the Divinity School, amid the limestone, the ancient and rarely troubled books (the other day I opened up a squat two-volume edition of Tertullian, published by the Jesuits of Paris in 1675; the pages in over three centuries had never been cut): amid the majestic patience of the place.

  Yet, so volatile and nonsensical was my relationship with my niece, we had an affectionate kiss, full on her warm unpainted lips, at the door, and no sooner did the door close than the image of her naked, treasure I had spurned, overwhelmed me like a giant wave one has misjudged, body-surfing.

  I was going to do a watercolor. Dale said he wanted one to show somebody. Esther looks and says, “Touching. Under all that brass, this little pot of violets. Such pale little violets.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t have the right paint to make them purple,” says Dale loyally.

  Both are naked. White, white their bodies, no fat on either, suspended like elongating globules in a tall beaker of the gray shadows and grime of our wintry city. She has agreed to come, in the cause of love, to his dingy student apartment near the university’s scientific buildings, those domed and antennaed structures supported by mysterious vast financial infusions from the Pentagon and the corporate giants. He lives in a block of three-deckers owned by the university but not yet consigned to development—a parking lot or new academic facility. She has walked up the unpainted porch steps careful not to catch the pointy heels of her red leather boots in a rotten board. With beating heart she has picked her way through the crowd of rusty bicycles in the foyer and, above a bank of battered mailboxes with doubled and tripled name cards, rung KOHLER/KIM.

  Who is Kim? One of those hardworking young Orientals who, by the twenty-first century, will have a grip upon all the levers of the world. Dale has briefly described him to her, his flat colorless face and straight black hair, his unexpected barks of humor. His first name, or his last, it is not quite clear, is Tong-myong. Dale has promised that jolly, brilliant Mr. Kim will not be here—he will be attending his hydrogeology seminar and then parking cars at the movie theatre—between two-thirty, when her stint at the day-care center ends, and the time two hours later when she must return to Malvin Lane to greet Richie and then Roger, home from their respective schools.

  With gloveclad finger, Esther, my Esther—I can feel her heart beating! I can feel the watery sensation in her underpants—punches this button and waits with her hand on the brass door handle for his releasing buzz to sound. The extensive wear on the thumb latch, those thousands of thumbs, first working-class Irish thumbs and now student thumbs of all global races and God only knows what procession of weary aching thumbs between, reminds her of something: what? She remembers: those foot stands the old-fashioned shoeshine chairs used to have, oddly graceful, baroque curves lifting up this narrow metal mirror-image of a shoe sole and heel, the heel lower than the sole. Her father as he climbed in the business world had been a great man for shoeshines, and as a little girl she had more than once been made to wait beside one of those multiple thrones, once so common in the hotels and depots of Albany and Troy, with their smell of polish and cigar butts and their waxy rags and brushes and their old black men chuckling and bobbing their heads as they snapped the rag; waiting at her father’s ever-shinier feet, little Esther was aware of rough men’s eyes on her and of her father’s voice more growly and dragged-out than when he talked at home and of how dirty the shoeshine man’s dark hands would be on her dress if they decided amid the growling and chuckling to touch her. The shoeshine man’s head wobbled as he applied the last vigorous swipes; his palms and the underside of his fingers were the color of pink silver polish such as Mama used with the maid once a month. On those strangely graceful foot stands, as on this thumb latch, the brass had been worn down to its golden core: atom by atom the world wears out.

  Esther is wearing suede gloves and a fawn cloth coat and looks every inch, with her fur hat and furrowed brow and oxblood boots, a faculty wife—saucy and mousy, dashing and prim, a well-dressed woman on the edge of middle age. So what is she doing here? Perhaps she is a tenant’s mother, or some kind of caseworker. The buzzer rasps, almost as ugly in its sound as our own front doorbell, and the door with a push and a click gives way, and she ascends the stairs carrying her proper, beating, timid heart like a baby smuggled beneath the thick lapels of her coat. At each landing, from behind closed doors, student sounds—typing, rock music, Bach fugues, loud voices tangling in male horseplay—threaten her; as she ascends she is praying that, or should we say that her mind is looping again and again through her intense desire that, no door open and no coarse young person see her, confront her, catch her stealthily climbing toward her tryst.

  Dale lives way up, on the fourth floor. Straining her neck, she sees his pale, beloved, guilt-strained face hanging over the landing railing above her like a kind of sickly sun. Her heartbeat strengthens; she is pulled up the stairs by a force stronger than the fear of social embarrassment. When she reaches his landing, with a young man’s clumsy strength he pulls her into his gaudy room, which overloads her senses with its blatant posters and tattered disarray and the pungent scent it has of young males cohabiting in a small space. He locks the door, slips the tarnished chain lock across. She becomes his mistress, a hundred-pound packet of shameless, tender carnality. They strip, they fuck.

  But first—wait, willing words!—they kiss: together they pry open above the thickness of Esther’s chilled clothes a window of warm lips and saliva, a warmth that from this small puckered point of origin spreads throughout their bodies, beneath the clothes, and reasserts their acquaintance, the claim they have staked over each other’s blood. She has never been to his room before and even while feeling his kiss expand within her tries to notice through fluttering eyelashes the Escher prints, the posters where the bodies of women and of automobiles flow one into the other, the custard-colored walls of gently buckling plaster, the single tall window with those tall old thin panes whose corners have cracked in a century of winds and been patched and repatched with Scotch tape that has sharply yellowed. A touch of Korea: a large black folding screen, decorated with busy bunched people in odd box hats and carrying all at the same slant complexly braced parasols, divides the room into the separate areas where the two young men sleep, exuding the odors of self-forgetfulness. The space left has been jammed with desks, hi-fi equipment, bookshelves concocted of cement blocks and pine planks from Grove Lumber, a few director’s chairs with the hinges breaking and the canvas coming unstitched, and an incongruous collection of dolls, all furry, scaly, and metallic.

  “Those are Kim’s,” Dale apologetically explains. “He collects space dolls.” E.T. with his mournful potato of a head, R2-D2 the dome-headed robot and his silver butler of a sidekick, C3-PO, sagacious Yoda with his long green ears, those furry chattering Ewoks from the Star Wars sequel after that—Esther recognizes them thanks to her association with Richie, and the movies she used to take him to, when he was a few years younger and not embarrassed by being taken. Someone, jolly Mr. Kim presumably and not her serious Dale, has gone to the trouble of tricking out the bigger of these figures with freakish sunglasses and those visored hats that she associates with men on farms but which now come stamped with the logos of all the beers and are worn by people in the city, a kind of redneck chic. “Kim does all that,” Dale confirms. “These Orientals, they’re not exactly like us, it turns out. They love the grotesque. They love Godzilla.”

&n
bsp; On the wall, beneath a poster of Reagan with Bonzo, hangs a big computer printout that when Esther squints becomes a naked woman on her side, pubic triangle and heavy breasts and hanging hair all done in mathematical and alphabetical symbols of varying density. And beneath a shelf laden with big paperback computer texts, above the bed that must be Dale’s, hangs a small black cross, four right angles. The room’s one window looks not across the river toward the skyscrapers at the heart of the city but back beyond the domes toward the virtually suburban neighborhood where the humanities buildings, the Divinity School, and her own home are located. Esther can make out above the treetops the limestone university chapel spire that, when she was newly moved up here with Roger, she would use to find her way back to Malvin Lane from shopping expeditions.

  “You think you can feel relaxed here?” Dale shyly asks. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I would,” she says, briskly turning from the window, aware—as if in pivoting she has traversed a decade—of herself as a woman nearly forty, in the wrong part of the city, an adulteress in the long view from the chapel spire, a wicked woman who must look, by the merciless light admitted by the tall cracked window, her age—the skin beside her eyes etched and the backs of her hands freckled and so dry they are chalky. Coming straight from the school, she had no opportunity to prepare herself, to shower, freshen, apply a moisturizing lotion. “I had juice and a cookie at ten-thirty, and then a peanut-butter sandwich at noon.” She tells him this as a wry joke on herself, this child’s diet, but also as lovers tell everything about themselves, trusting the other to care.

  “You may not want to, you know, make love here,” Dale says, busying himself in the tiny kitchen, just an alcove where a double hotplate sits on top of a half-refrigerator. He sounds almost hopeful this will be so. She unbuttons her coat and drapes it over a frazzled director’s chair, which nearly topples under the weight. She sets her fur hat—ruddy, like her hair, like her oxblood boots—on top of the coat, and then her wool scarf. A resentful wave of lust has risen within her at his remark. She watches his body make angles in the little alcove as he reaches up for a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, down to the cabinet for the red box of Lipton teabags, into the refrigerator for the milk carton, and up again for the sugar bowl. He stoops over the kettle of water on the hotplate, anxiously waiting for it to boil. How touching men’s backs are, that whole blind side of them they can’t defend. At the base of his long back Dale’s ass looks cute, a tightly stitched package in his worn jeans, the tail of his plaid shirt half out. He wears a broad cowpuncher’s belt, she has noticed before, with a buckle showing in bas-relief the head of a staring longhorned steer. She sits on his bed to pull off her high-heeled boots. The faces of the children she has been dealing with all day, the multiracial waifs of working or lazing mothers, float in the red behind her eyelids, and lift away with the boots. She wonders what substance the little cross is. It doesn’t seem to have a grain, like wood, or any rims, as metal would. Can it be plastic? She wants to touch it but he might see her and think it presuming. Cupid and Psyche. She resolves, Later, and goes to stand beside him and to wait with him for the water to boil, knowing he will find her sudden drop in height sexy, and the sight of her stockinged feet on his uncarpeted tenement floor boards. She puts her hand on his cute, defenseless ass.

  Then her arm drifts around his waist, and her fingers explore the little triangle of skin the torn shirt has bared above his belt. He toys in response with the back of her neck, his fingers sliding beneath the pinned wings of her gingery hair to the softer finer looser wisps at her nape. Away from her house and that attic crowded with her own broad wild brushstrokes she has sacrificed authority; here in this unaccustomed room the lovers are shy, as they might be if suddenly thrust out into the world, a mismatched couple absurd except to themselves. In a spasm of remorse and protectiveness Dale embraces her, and the molecular reactions of their chemistry take hold. The water boils, the kettle sings. They never bother to make the tea. God, she thinks, taking him into her flattened body; he was so suddenly aroused, she is slightly dry, and hurts at first, but then her smarting yields in the redness behind her closed eyelids to that swelling sense of completion, of being so filled that the fear of death itself is thrust beyond the rim, an eclipse of roundnesses, of holes and suns, which she does not recall Roger ever giving her, though he must have, for she had loved him enough to take him away from his wife, and attach her own life, which had already developed some fibers of independence, to his.

  Dale is above her, sobbing. The smooth white curve of his bony back reveals to the fingertips of her left, caressing hand a few pimples, while her idle right reaches out and touches the cross. As she thought: not wood, not metal. Plastic. No little plastic man on it, however, no space doll about to mount His rocket. Just the empty launching pad, the slingshot. “That was amazing,” Esther says. “You were so ready. Why are you crying?”

  “Because it was. So fucking perfect. We shouldn’t be doing this. The worst thing is, I don’t mind that we shouldn’t be, except it means we’ll have to stop some day. Some day soon.” He sniffs back his phlegm so hard the little bed heaves.

  “Oh,” Esther says idly, toying with the shaved back of his neck while her mind ascends, travelling out the window toward the spire, travelling upward with the ascended Jesus like a helium balloon she once accidentally released from her hand at a sleazy cotton-candy fair her father once took her to when she was perhaps eight. She had gotten sick on a mixture of candy apple and crab cake, and Mama had been furious with her father when they got home. Then after a while, years that seem now days, her mother had died, and Daddy and she could go where they pleased. “You could carry me off.”

  “I can’t,” Dale says, with a shudder of his chest that shows he has considered it. “I can’t support you. I can’t even support myself. I live on pizza and those little transparent packages you boil for twelve minutes. Kim jogs every morning but I don’t go with him because I don’t want to use up the calories. And what about Richie? What about Professor Lambert?”

  “Oh, Professor Lambert. I think he’d manage.”

  “How could he, without you?”

  “I’m not the same with him as I am with you,” Esther says.

  “He adores you. He must.”

  “He did, but that was a long time ago.” She is beginning to find Dale’s weight on her chest oppressive: it is nearly twice hers, even on his supposed poverty diet. His self-description of living on pizza has made him a bit repulsive. Tears look repulsive on his waxy face; they slide down toward his chin in little fat clouded balls. After all, she offered to be carried off, and he has declined. She made the definitive female gesture of total helplessness, and he has cast her back on her own resources. She says to him, “Such a sad little plain black cross.” She lets him see her stroking it, with the fingers that minutes before had grasped his lovely alarmingly large warm ridged cock, steering it home. The ridges were as of gristle, suggesting to her touch the rippled ice on a river that freezes on a windy day. “What is it made of?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not mine, it’s Kim’s. A lot of Koreans are Christian, you know; look at Moon and the Moonies. Some kind of horn, I think. Could there be a kind of yak or arctic musk ox or something with smooth dark horn like that, that the Koreans might shoot?”

  “Looks like plastic,” Esther lazily insists.

  “I just remembered. You were interested in Verna’s watercolors and I got her to do me one. It’s over there on the desk.” He withdraws from her body and the bed. His slimy semi-erection swings loosely from side to side, like a snake looking for what has annoyed it.

  While he is up, Esther calls, letting her thighs lie flopped open as he has left them, “Could you bring me a couple of Kleenex or a paper towel? I’m absolutely swimming in your sperm.”

  Touching. Under all that brass, this little pot of violets. Dale doesn’t tell Verna that; he lies, “She really admired it, she thought you have a very delica
te color-sense. She thinks you have talent, and she would know.”

  Verna is angry. She is angry at many things, but Dale is the person who has shown up, on this Groundhog Day, a sunless Saturday, following a day of freezing drizzle. Paula is sick, with a fever, so Verna can’t go out. “I wouldn’t have given it to you if I thought you were going to show it to that stuck-up cunt. When do you see her, anyways?”

  “When I tutor Richie. Sometimes she gives me tea afterwards.”

  “Better watch it, big boy. These sex-starved snobby housewives, they’ll take anybody for a stud.”

  “She’s really nicer than you make out,” Dale tells her, blushing.

  “You know, Bozo,” Verna tells him, staring hard at his face as if having suddenly come to a decision. “You’re kind of a non-person. You really drive me crazy.”

  He goes into his maddeningly patient, benign, slightly dazed mode. “It’s not me driving you crazy,” he says. “It’s something in yourself, Verna.”

  “Spare me the sermon.” She is wearing her bathrobe and there is a smell of hot water and bubble bath and of something acrid-sweet in the air. Her eyes look pink and poorly slept, and her face seems fatter, though this might be his being accustomed to Esther’s lean, top-heavy face, with its clever, wry, wistful mouth.

  “What do you think’s the matter with Paula?”

  “Who knows? The flu or something. They have a million germs over at the day-care center; I’m thinking of pulling her out.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Who says?” Verna’s mouth gets an ajar, blankly stubborn look.