by John Updike
“You’re hurting me,” she says. Her voice arrives, tiny and dry, from a little box suspended in air behind his ear. As she tries to pull her wrist away her bangles pinch his fingers, and this is infuriating.
He wants to get her somewhere out of this. He pulls her across a hallway looking for a wall to prop her up against. He finds one, in a small side room; the light-switch plate beside her shoulder has been painted like an open-mouthed face with an off-on tongue. He puts his own face up against Pru’s and hisses, “Listen. You shape up for Chrissake. You’re going to hurt yourself if you don’t shape up. And the baby. What’re you tryin’ to do, shake him loose? Now you calm down.”
“I am calm. You’re the one that’s not calm, Nelson.” Their eyes are so close her eyes threaten to swallow his with their blurred green. “And who says it’s going to be a him?” Pru gives him her lopsided smirk. Her lips are painted vampire red in the new style and it’s not becoming, it emphasizes her hatchet face, her dead calm bloodless look. That blank defiance of the poor: you can’t scare them enough.
He pleads, “You shouldn’t be drinking and smoking pot at all, you’ll cause genetic damage. You know that.”
She forms her words in response slowly. “Nelson. You don’t give a shit about genetic damage.”
“You silly bitch. I do. Of course I do. It’s my kid. Or is it? You Akron kids’ll fuck anybody.”
They are in a strange room. Flamingos surround them. Whoever lives in this side room with its view of the brick wall across two narrow sideyards has collected flamingos as a kind of joke. A glossy pink stuffed satin one drapes its ridiculous long black legs over the back of the sofabed, and hollow plastic ones with stick legs are propped along the walls on shelves. There are flamingos worked into ashtrays and coffee mugs and there are little 3-D tableaux of the painted pink birds with lakes and palms and sunsets, souvenirs of Florida. For one souvenir a trio of them were gathered in knickers and Scots caps on a felt putting green. Some of the bigger ones wear on their hollow drooping beaks those limp candylike sunglasses you can get in five and dimes. There are hundreds, other gays must give them to him, it has to be Slim who lives in here, that sofabed wouldn’t be enough for Jason and Pam.
“It is,” Pru promises. “You know it is.”
“I don’t know. You’re acting awfully whorey tonight.”
“I didn’t want to come, remember? You’re the one always wants to go out.”
He begins to cry: something about Pru’s face, that toughness out of Akron closed against him, her belly bumping his, that big doll-like body he used to love so much, that she might just as easily have entrusted to another, its clefts, its tufts, and might just as easily take from him now, he is nothing to her. All their tender times, picking her up on the hill and walking under the trees, and the bars along Water Street, and his going ahead and letting her out there in Colorado make such a sucker of him while he stewed in Diamond County, nothing. He is nothing to her like he was nothing to Jill, a brat, a bug to be humored, and look what happened. Love feels riddled through all his body like rot, down clear to his knees spongy as punk. “You’ll do damage to yourself,” he sobs; tears add their glitter to the green of her dress at the shoulder, yet his own crumpled face hangs as clear in the back of his brain as a face on a TV screen.
“You’re strange,” Pru tells him, her voice breathier now, a whispery rag stuffed in his ear.
“Let’s get out of this creepy place.”
“That girl you were talking to, what did she say?”
“Nothing. Her boyfriend makes bug-killers.”
“You talked together a long time.”
“She wanted to dance.”
“I could see you pointing and looking at me. You’re ashamed of my being pregnant.”
“I’m not. I’m proud.”
“The fuck you are, Nelson. You’re embarrassed.”
“Don’t be so hard. Come on, let’s split.”
“See, you are embarrassed. That’s all this baby is to you, an embarrassment.”
“Please come. What’re you trying to do, make me get down on my knees?”
“Listen, Nelson. I was having a perfectly good time dancing and you come out and pull this big macho act. My wrist still hurts. Maybe you broke it.”
He tries to lift her wrist to kiss it but she stiffly resists: at times she seems to him, body and soul, a board, flat, with that same abrasive grain. And then the fear comes upon him that this flatness is her, that she is not withholding depths within but there are no depths, this is what there is. She gets on a track sometimes and it seems she can’t stop. His pulling at her wrist again, only to kiss it but she doesn’t want to see that, has made her altogether mad, her face all pink and pointy and rigid. “You know what you are?” She tells him, “You’re a little Napoleon. You’re a twerp, Nelson.”
“Hey don’t.”
The space around her vampire lips is tight and her voice is a dead level engine that won’t stop. “I didn’t really know you. I’ve been watching how you act with your family and you’re very spoiled. You’re spoiled and you’re a bully, Nelson.”
“Shut up.” He mustn’t cry again. “I was never spoiled, just the opposite. You don’t know what my family did to me.”
“I’ve heard about it a thousand times and to me it never sounded like any big deal. You expect your mother and poor old grandmother to take care of you no matter what you do. You’re horrid about your father when all he wants is to love you, to have a halfway normal son.”
“He didn’t want me to work at the lot.”
“He didn’t think you were ready and you weren’t. You aren’t. You aren’t ready to be a father either but that’s my mistake.”
“Oh, even you make mistakes.” The green she is wearing is a hateful color, shimmery electric arsenic like a big fat black hooker would wear to get attention on the street. He turns his eyes away and sees over on a bureau top some bendable toy flamingos have been arranged in a copulating position, one on top of the other’s back, and another pair in what he supposes is a blow job, but the droopy beaks spoil the effect.
“I make plenty,” Pru is going on, “why wouldn’t I, nobody has ever taught me anything. But I’ll tell you one thing Nelson Angstrom I’m going to have this baby no matter what you do. You can go to Hell.”
“I can, huh?”
“Yes.” She has to weaken it. Her very belly seems to soften against his, nestling. “I don’t want you to but you can. I can’t stop you and you can’t stop me, we’re two people even if we did get married. You never wanted to marry me and I shouldn’t have let you, it turns out.”
“I did though, I did,” he says, fearful that confessing this will make his face crumple again.
“Then stop being a bully. You bullied me to come here and now you’re bullying me to go. I like these people. They have better senses of humor than the people in Ohio.”
“Let’s stay then.” There are things other than flamingos in the room -hideous things, he sees. A plaster cast of Elvis Presley with votive candles in red cups at its base. An aquarium without fish in it but full of Barbie dolls and polyplike plastic things he thinks are called French ticklers. Tacked-up postcards of women in tinsel triangles somersaulting, mooning, holding giant breasts in their silvergloved hands, postcards from Germany printed on those tiny ridges that hold two views, one coy and one obscene, depending on how you move your head. The room all over has the distinctness and variousness of vomit that still holds whole green peas and orange carrot dice from the dinner of an hour ago. He can’t stop looking.
As he moves from one horror to the next Pru slips away, giving his hand a squeeze that may be apologetic for all they’ve said. What have they said? In the kitchen the girl with bare tits has put on a T-shirt saying ERA, Jamie has taken off his coat and his necktie. Nelson feels very tall, so tall he can’t hear what he himself is saying, but it doesn’t matter, and they all laugh. In a dark bedroom off the kitchen someone is watching the eleven-t
hirty special report from Iran, time slips by in that rapid spasmodic skid of party time. When Pru returns to him asking to go she is dead pale, a ghost with the lipstick on her face like movie blood and worn in the center where her lips meet. Things are being dyed blue by something in his head and her teeth look crooked as she tells him almost inaudibly that she has taken off her shoes like he wanted her to and now she can’t find them. She plops down on a kitchen chair and stretches her orange legs out so her belly thrusts up like a prick and laughs with all those around her. What pigs. Nelson in searching for her shoes finds instead in the side room of horrible tinsel and flamingos the girl in white pants asleep on the sofabed. With her face slack she looks even younger than before. Her hand curls beside her snub nose pale palm up. The calm and mildly freckled bulge of her forehead sleeps without a crease. Only her hair holds that deep force of a woman, unbundled from its pins and many-colored in the caves and ridges of its tangle. He wants to cover her up but sees no blanket, just the French ticklers and Barbie dolls brilliant in their aquarium. A sliver of milky bare skin peeps where her russet knit sweater has ridden up from the waist of her slacks. Nelson looks down and wonders, Why can’t a woman just be your friend, even with the sex? Why do you have to keep dealing with all this ego, giving back hurt just to defend yourself ? Gazing down at that milky bit of skin, he forgets what he came in here to find. He needs to urinate, he realizes.
And in the bathroom after his bladder has emptied in those unsteady dribbles that mean it’s been allowed to get too full he becomes fascinated by a big slick book sitting on the hamper, belonging to Slim most likely, an album printed of photographs and posters from the Nazi days in Germany, beautiful blond boys in rows singing and a handsome fat man in a white uniform loaded with medals and Hitler looking young and lean and gallant, gazing toward some Alps. Having this here is some kind of swish thing like those tinselled cards showing women as so ugly and there seems no protection against all the ugliness that is in the world, no protection for that girl asleep or for him. Pru has found her horrible green platform shoes and in the kitchen is sitting in a straight chair while that Puerto Rican she picked up with like little knife cuts all over his face kneels at her feet doing up the little buckles on the straps like gimp. When she stands she acts rocky, what have they been giving her? She lets herself be slipped into that velvet jacket she used to wear in fall and spring at Kent, red so with the bright green dress she looks like Christmas six weeks early, all wrapped up. Jason is dancing in that front room where now Jamie and the girl with ERA across her pathetic tits are trying it out too, so they say their goodbyes to Pam and Slim, Pam giving Pru a kiss on the cheek woman to woman as if whispering the code word in her ear and Slim putting his hands together in front of his chest and bowing Buddha-style. That slanty look to his eyes, Nelson wonders if it’s natural or comes with doing perverted things. The jellyfish of intensity crawls across Slims lips. Last little waves and smiles and the door closes on the party noise.
The door to the apartment is an old-fashioned heavy one of yellow oak. He and Pru on this third-floor landing are sealed into something like silence. Rain is tapping on the black skylight of chicken-wire glass above their heads.
“Still think I’m a twerp?” he asks.
“Nelson, why don’t you grow up?”
The solid wooden banister on the right does a dizzying double loop down the two flights to the first floor. Looking down, Nelson can see the tops of two plastic garbage cans set in the basement far below. Impatiently Pru passes him on the left, fed up with him and anxious to be out in the air, and afterwards he remembers her broad hip bumping into his and his anger at what seemed her willful clumsiness, but not if he gives her a bit of hip back, a little vengeful shove. On the left of the stairwell there is no banister, and the plaster wall here is marred by ragged nail holes where the renovators stripped away what must have been panelling. So when Pru in those wedgy platforms turns her ankle, there is nothing for her to hold on to; she gives a little grunt but her pale face is impassive as in the old days of hang gliding, at the moment of launch. Nelson grabs for her velvet jacket but she is flying beyond his reach, her legs no longer under her; he sees her face skid past these nail holes as she twists toward the wall, clawing for support there, where there is none. She topples then twisting sideways, headfirst, the metal-edged treads ripping at her belly. It is all so fast yet his brain has time to process a number of sensations - the touch of her velvet humming in his fingertips, the scolding bump her hip gave him, his indignation at her clunky shoes and the people who stripped the staircase of its banister, all precisely layered in his mind. Distinctly he sees the patch of darker orange reinforcing at the crotch of her tights like the center of a flagrant green flower as her dress is flung wide with her legs by first impact. Her arms keep trying to brace her slithering body and one arm ends at an angle when she stops, about halfway down the steep flight, a shoe torn loose on a string of gimp, her head hidden beneath the splayed mass of her beautiful hair and all her long form still.
Fallt’s Bubbli nunner!
In soft sweeps the rain patters on the skylight. Music leaks through the walls from the party. The noise of her fall must have been huge, for the yellow oak door pops open at once and people thunder all around, but the only sound Nelson heard was a squeak Pru gave when she first hit like one of those plastic floating bath toys suddenly accidentally stepped on.
Soupy is in fine form at the hospital, kidding the nurses and staff and moving through this white world in his black clothes like a happy germ, an exception to all the rules. He comes forward as if to embrace Ma Springer but at the last second holds back and gives her instead a somewhat jaunty swat on the shoulder. To Janice and Harry he gives his mischievous small-toothed grin; to Nelson he turns a graver, but still bright-eyed, face. “She looks just dandy, except for the cast on her arm. Even there she was fortunate. It’s the left arm.”
“She’s left-handed,” Nelson tells him. The boy is grouchy and stoops with lack of sleep. He was with her at the hospital from one to three and now at nine-thirty is back again. He called the house around one-fifteen and nobody answered and that has been added to his twenty years of grievances. Mom-mom had been in the house but had been too old and dopey to hear the phone through her dreams and his parents had been out with the Murketts and Harrisons at the new strip joint along Route 422 beyond the Four Seasons toward Pottstown and then had gone back to the Murketts’ for a nightcap. So the family didn’t hear the news until Nelson, who had crawled into his empty bed at three-thirty, awoke at nine. On the ride over to the hospital in his mother’s Mustang he claimed he hadn’t fallen asleep until the birds began to chirp.
“What birds?” Harry said. “They’ve all gone south.”
“Dad, don’t bug me, there are these black sort of birds right outside the window.”
“Starlings,” Janice offered, peacemaking.
“They don’t chirp, they scrawk,” Harry insisted. “Scrawk, scrawk.”
“Doesn’t it stay dark late now?” Ma Springer interposed. It’s aging her, this constant tension between her son-in-law and her grandson.
Nelson sitting there all red-eyed and snuffly and stinking of last night’s vapors did annoy Harry, short of sleep and hungover himself. He fought down the impulse to say Scrawk again. At the hospital, he asks Soupy, “How’d you get here so soon?” genuinely admiring. Snicker all you want, the guy is magical somehow.
“The lady herself,” the clergyman gaily announces, doing a little side-step that knocks a magazine to the floor from a low table where too many are stacked. Woman’s Day. Field and Stream. A hospital of course wouldn’t get Consumer Reports. A killing article in there a while ago about medical costs and the fantastic mark-up on things like aspirin and cold pills. Soupy stoops to retrieve the magazine and comes up slightly breathless. He tells them, “Evidently, after they calmed the dear girl down and set her arm and reassured her that the fetus appeared unaffected she still felt such concern t
hat she woke up at seven a.m. and knew Nelson would be asleep and didn’t know who to call. So she thought of me.” Soupy beams. “I of course was still wrapped in the arms of Morpheus but got my act together and told her I’d rush over between Holy Communion and the ten o’clock service and, behold, here I am. Ecce homo. She wanted to pray with me to keep the baby, she’d been praying constantly, and at least to this point in time as they used to say it seems to have worked!” His black eyes click from one to another face, up and down and across. “The doctor who received her went off duty at eight but the nurse in attendance solemnly swore to me that for all of the mother’s bruises that little heartbeat in there is just as strong as ever, and no signs of vaginal bleeding or anything nasty like that. That Mother Nature, she is one tough old turkey.” He has chosen Ma Springer to tell this to. “Now I must run, or the hungry sheep will look up and be not fed. Visiting hours here don’t really begin until one p.m., but I’m sure the authorities wouldn’t object if you took a quick peek. Tell them I gave you my blessing.” And his hand reflexively lifts, as if to give them a blessing. But instead he lays the hand on the sleeve of Ma Springer’s glistening fur coat. “If you can’t make the service,” he entreats, “do come for the meeting afterwards. It’s the meeting to advise the vestry on the new tracker organ, and a lot of pennypinchers are coming out of the woods. They put a dollar a week into the plate all year, and their vote is as good as mine or thine.” He flies away, scattering the V-for-peace sign down the hall.
