by John Updike
“Just the bucks. Just the fucking bucks, Wonder Woman.” Blind, he feels amid the pure strangeness of the gold his prick firming up and stretching the fabric of his jockey shorts.
“Harry. How much did you spend?”
He wills her to lift down the elastic of his underpants and suck, suck until she gags. When she fails to read his mind and do this, he removes the coins and gazes up at her, a dead man reborn and staring. No coffin dark greets his open eyes, just his wife’s out-of-focus face, framed in dark hair damp and stringy from the shower and fringy across the forehead so that Mamie Eisenhower comes to mind. “Eleven thousand five hundred more or less,” he answers. “Honey, it was just sitting in the savings account drawing a lousy six per cent. At only six per cent these days you’re losing money, inflation’s running about twelve. The beauty of gold is, it loves bad news. As the dollar sinks, gold goes up. All the Arabs are turning their dollars into gold. Webb Murkett told me all about it, the day you wouldn’t come to the club.”
She is still examining the coin, stroking its subtle relief, when he wants her attention to turn to him. He hasn’t had a hard-on just blossom in his pants since he can’t remember when. Lorry Bingaman days. “It’s pretty,” Janice admits. “Should you be supporting the South Africans though?”
“Why not, they’re making jobs for the blacks, mining the stuff. The advantage of the Krugerrand, the girl at this fiscal alternatives place explained, is it weighs one troy ounce exactly and is easier to deal with. You can buy Mexican pesos if you want, or there’s a little Canadian maple leaf, though there she said it’s so fine the gold dust comes off on your hands. Also I liked the look of that deer on the back. Don’t you?”
“I do. It’s exciting,” Janice confesses, at last looking at him, where he lies tumescent amid scattered gold. “Where are you going to keep them?” she asks. Her tongue sneaks forward in thought, and rests on her lower lip. He loves her when she tries to think.
“In your great big cunt,” he says, and pulls her down by the lapels of her rough robe. Out of deference to those around them in the house - Ma Springer just a wall’s thickness away, her television a dim rumble, the Korean War turned into a joke - Janice tries to suppress her cries as he strips the terrycloth from her willing body and the coins on the bedspread come in contact with her skin. The cords of her throat tighten; her face darkens as she strains in the grip of indignation and glee. His underwear off, the overhead light still on, his prick up like a jutting piece of pink wreckage, he calms her into lying motionless and places a Krugerrand on each nipple, one on her navel, and a number on her pussy, enough to mask the hair with a triangle of unsteady coins overlapping like snake scales. If she laughs and her belly moves the whole construction will collapse. Kneeling at her hips, Harry holds a Krugerrand by the edge as if to insert it in a slot. “No!” Janice protests, loud enough to twitch Ma Springer awake through the wall, loud enough to jar loose the coins so some do spill between her legs. He hushes her mouth with his and then moves his mouth south, across the desert, oasis to oasis, until he comes to the ferny jungle, which his wife lays open to him with a humoring toss of her thighs. A kind of interest compounds as, seeing red, spilled gold pressing on his forehead, he hunts with his tongue for her clitoris. He finds what he thinks is the right rhythm but doesn’t feel it take; he thinks the bright overhead light might be distracting her and risks losing his hard-on in hopping from the bed to switch it off over by the door. Turning then in the half-dark he sees she has turned also, gotten up onto her knees and elbows, a four-legged moonchild of his, her soft cleft ass held high to him in the gloom as her face peeks around one shoulder. He fucks her in this position gently, groaning in the effort of keeping his jism in, letting his thoughts fly far. The pennant race, the recent hike in the factory base price of Corollas. He fondles her underside’s defenseless slack flesh, his own belly massive and bearing down. Her back looks so breakable and brave and narrow - the long dent of its spine, the cross-bar of pallor left by her bathing-suit bra. Behind him his bare feet release a faraway sad odor. Coins jingle, slithering in toward their knees, into the depressions their interlocked weights make in the mattress. He taps her ass and asks, “Want to turn over?”
“Uh-huh.” As an afterthought: “Want me to sit on you first?”
“Uh-huh.” As an afterthought: “Don’t make me come.”
Harry’s skin is bitten as by ice when he lies on his back. The coins: worse than toast crumbs. So wet he feels almost nothing, Janice straddles him, vast and globular in the patchy light that filters from the streetlight through the big copper beech. She picks up a stray coin and places it glinting in her eye, as a monocle. Lording it over him, holding him captive, she grinds her wet halves around him; self to self, bivalve and tuber, this is what it comes to. “Don’t come,” she says, alarmed enough so that her mock-monocle drops to his tense abdomen with a thud. “Better get underneath,” he grunts. Her body then seems thin and black, silhouetted by the scattered circles, reflecting according to their tilt. Gods bedded among stars, he gasps in her ear, then she in his.
After this payoff, regaining their breaths, they can count in the semi-dark only twenty-nine Krugerrands on the rumpled bedspread, its landscape of ridged green patches. He turns on the overhead light. It hurts their eyes. By its harshness their naked skins seem also rumpled. Panic encrusts Harry’s drained body; he does not rest until, naked on his knees on the rug, a late strand of spunk looping from his reddened glans, he finds, caught in the crack between the mattress and the bed side-rail, the precious thirtieth.
He stands with Charlie gazing out at the bleak September light. The tree over beyond the Chuck Wagon parking lot has gone thin and yellow at its top; above its stripped twigs the sky holds some diagonal cirrus, bands of fat in bacon, promising rain tomorrow. “Poor old Carter,” Harry says. “D’ya see where he nearly killed himself running up some mountain in Maryland?”
“He’s pushing,” Charlie says. “Kennedy’s on his tail.” Charlie has returned from his two weeks’ vacation with a kiss of Florida tan undermined by a weak heart and the days intervening. He did not come from Florida directly. Simultaneously with his return Monday a card sent from Ohio arrived at Springer Motors, saying in his sharply slanted book-keeper’s hand,
Hi Gang -
Detoured on way back from Fla. thru Gt. Smokies. Southern belles, mile after mile. Now near Akron, exploded radial capital of the world. Fuel economy a no-no out here, big fins & V-8s still reign.
Miss you all lots.Chas.
The joke especially for Harry was on the other side: a picture of a big flat-roofed building like a quarter of a pie, identified as KENT STATE STUDENT COMPLEX, embracing the largest open-stack library in northeastern Ohio.
“Sort of pushing yourself these days, aren’t you?” Harry asks him. “How was Melanie all that while?”
“Who says I was with Melanie?”
“You did. With that card. Jesus, Charlie, a young kid like that grinding your balls could kill you.”
“What a way to go, huh champ? You know as well as I do it’s not the chicks that grind your balls, it’s these middle-aged broads time is running out on.”
Rabbit remembers his bout with Janice amid their gold, yet still remains jealous. “Whajja do in Florida with her?”
“We moved around. Sarasota, Venice, St. Pete’s. I couldn’t talk her out of the Atlantic side so we drove over from Naples on 75, old Alligator Alley, and did the shmeer - Coral Gables, Ocean Boulevard, up to Boca and West Palm. We were going to take in Cape Canaveral but ran out of time. The bimbo didn’t even bring a bathing suit, the one we bought her was one of these new ones with the sides wide open. Great figure. Don’t know why you didn’t appreciate her.”
“I couldn’t appreciate her, it was Nelson brought her into the house. It’d be like screwing your own daughter.”
Charlie has a toothpick left over from lunch downtown, a persimmon-colored one, and he dents his lower lip with it as he gazes out
the tired window. “There’s worse things,” he offers bleakly. “How’s Nelson and the bride-to-be?”
“Pru.” Harry sees that Charlie is set to guard the details of his trip, to make him pull them out one by one. Miles of Southern belles. Fuck this guy. Rabbit has secrets too. But, thinking this, he can picture only a farm, its buildings set down low in a hollow.
“Melanie had a lot to say about Pru.”
“Like what?”
“Like she thinks she’s weird. Her impression is that shy as she seems she’s a tough kid up from a really rocky upbringing and isn’t too steady on her feet, emotionally speaking.”
“Yeah well, some might say a girl who gets her kicks screwing an old crow like you is pretty weird herself.”
Charlie looks away from the window straight up into his eyes, his own eyes behind their tinted spectacles looking watery. “You shouldn’t say things like that to me, Harry. Both of us getting on, two guys just hanging in there ought to be nice to each other.”
Harry wonders from this if Charlie knows how threatened his position is, Nelson on his tail.
Charlie continues, “Ask me whatever you want about Melanie. Like I said, she’s a good kid. Solid, emotionally. The trouble with you, champ, is you have screwing on the brain. My biggest kick was showing this young woman something of the world she hadn’t seen before. She ate it up - the cypresses, that tower with the chimes. She said she’d still take California though. Florida’s too flat. She said if this Christmas I could get my ass out to Carmel she’d be happy to show me around. Meet her mother and whoever else is around. Nothing heavy.”
“How much - how much future you think you two have?”
“Harry, I don’t have much future with anybody.” His voice is whispery, barely audible. Harry would like to take it and wirebrush it clean.
“You never know,” he reassures the smaller man.
“You know,” Stavros insists. “You know when your time is running out. If life offers you something, take it.”
“O.K., O.K. I will. I do. What’d your poor old Manna mou do, while you were bombing around with Bimbo in the Everglades?”
“Well,” he says, “funny thing there. A female cousin of mine, five or so years younger, I guess has been running around pretty bad, and her husband kicked her out this summer, and kept the kids. They lived in Norristown. So Gloria’s been living in an apartment by herself out on Youngquist a couple blocks away and was happy to babysit for the old lady while I was off and says she’ll do it again any time. So I have some freedom now I didn’t used to have.” Everywhere, it seems to Harry, families are breaking up and different pieces coming together like survivors in one great big lifeboat, while he and Janice keep sitting over there in Ma Springer’s shadow, behind the times.
“Nothing like freedom,” he tells his friend. “Don’t abuse it now. You asked about Nelson. The wedding’s this Saturday. Immediate family only. Sorry.”
“Wow. Poor little Nellie. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
Harry hurries by this. “From what Janice and Bessie let drop the mother will probably show up. The father’s too sore.”
“You should see Akron,” Charlie tells him. “I’d be sore too if I had to live there.”
“Isn’t there a golf course out there where Nicklaus holds a tournament every year?”
“What I saw wasn’t any golf course.”
Charlie has come back from his experiences tenderized, nostalgic it seems for his life even as he lives it. So aged and philosophical he seems, Harry dares ask him, “What’d Melanie think of me, did she say?”
A very fat couple are prowling the lot, looking at the little cars, testing by their bodies, sitting down on air beside the driver’s doors, which models might be big enough for them. Charlie watches this couple move among the glittering roofs and hoods a minute before answering. “She thought you were neat, except the women pushed you around. She thought about you and her balling but got the impression you and Janice were very solid.”
“You disillusion her?”
“Couldn’t. The kid was right.”
“Yeah how about ten years ago?”
“That was just cement.”
Harry loves the way he ticks this off, Janice’s seducer; he loves this savvy Greek, dainty of heart beneath his coat of summer checks. The couple have wearied of trying on cars for size and get into their old car, a ‘77 Pontiac Grand Prix with cream hardtop, and drive away. Harry asks suddenly, “How do you feel about it? Think we can live with Nelson over here?”
Charlie shrugs, a minimal brittle motion. “Can he live with me? He wants to be a cut above Jake and Rudy, and there aren’t that many cuts in an outfit like this.”
“I’ve told them, Charlie, if you go I go.”
“You can’t go, Chief. You’re family. Me, I’m old times. I can go.”
“You know this business cold, that’s what counts with me.”
“Ah, this isn’t selling. It’s like supermarkets now: it’s shelfstacking, and ringing it out at the register. When it was all used, we used to try to fit a car to every customer. Now it’s take it or leave it. With this seller’s market there’s no room to improvise. Your boy had the right idea: go with convertibles, antiques, something with a little amusement value. I can’t take these Jap bugs seriously. This new thing called the Tercel we’re supposed to start pushing next month, have you seen the stars? One point five liter engine, twenty-inch tires. It’s like those little cars they used to have on merry-go-rounds for the kids who were too scared to ride the horses.”
“Forty-three m.p.g. on the highway, that’s the star people care about, the way the world’s winding.”
Charlie says, “You don’t see too many bugs down in Florida. The old folks are still driving the big old hogs, the Continentals, the Toronados, they paint ‘em white and float around. Of course the roads, there isn’t a hill in the state and never any frost. I’ve been thinking about the Sun Belt. Go down there and thumb my nose at the heating-oil bills. Then they get you on the air-conditioning. You can’t escape.”
Harry says, “Sodium wafers, that’s the answer. Electricity straight from sunlight. It’s about five years off; that’s what Consumer Reports was saying. Then we can tell those Arabs to take their fucking oil and grease their camels with it.”
Charlie says, “Traffic fatalities are up. You want to know why they’re up? Two reasons. One, the kids are pretty much off drugs now and back into alcohol. Two, everybody’s gone to compacts and they crumple like paper bags.”
He chuckles and twirls the flavored toothpick against his lower lip as the two men gaze out the window at the river of dirty tin. An old low-slung station wagon pulls into the lot but it has no wooden rack on top; though Harry’s heart skips, it is not his daughter. The station wagon noses around and heads out into 111 again, just casing. Burglaries are up. Harry asks Charlie, “Melanie really thought about” - he balks at “balling,” it is not his generation’s word -“going to bed with me?”
“That’s what the lady said. But you know these kids, they come right out with everything we used to keep to ourselves. Doesn’t mean there’s more of it. Probably less as a matter of fact. By the time they’re twenty-five they’re burnt out.”
“I was never attracted to her, to tell you the truth. Now this new girl of Nelson’s -“
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Charlie says, pivoting to go back to his desk. “They’re about to get married, for Chrissake.”
Running. Harry has continued the running he began up in the Poconos, as a way of getting his body back from those sodden years when he never thought about it, just ate and did what he wanted, restaurant lunches downtown in Brewer plus the Rotary every Thursday, it begins to pack on. The town he runs through is dark, full of slanty alleys and sidewalks cracked and tipped from underneath, whole cement slabs lifted up by roots like crypt lids in a horror movie, the dead reach up, they catch at his heels. He keeps moving, pacing himself, overriding the protest of
his lungs and fashioning of his stiff muscles and tired blood a kind of machine that goes where the brain directs, uphill past the wideeaved almost Chinese-looking house where the butch women hammer, their front windows never lit, must watch a lot of television or else snuggle into whatever it is they do early or else saving electricity, women won’t get paid the same as men until ERA passes, at least having a nest of them moving into the neighborhood not like blacks or Puerto Ricans, they don’t breed.
