by John Updike
Nelson says to Pru, as they drive together into Brewer in Ma Springer’s stately old navy-blue Chrysler, “Now guess what. He’s talked Mom into them getting a house. They’ve looked at about six so far, she told me. They all seem too big to her but Dad says she should learn to think big. I think he’s flipping out.”
Pru says, quietly, “I wonder how much it has to do with us in moving in.” She had wanted them to find an apartment of their own, in the same general neighborhood as Slim and Jason and Pam, and couldn’t understand Nelson’s need to live with his grandmother.
A defensive fury begins to warm him. “I don’t see why, any decent father would be glad to have us around. There’s plenty of room, Mom-mom shouldn’t live by herself.”
“I think maybe it’s natural,” his wife offers, “in a couple that age, to want your own space.”
“What’s natural, to leave old ladies to die all alone?”
“Well, we’re in the house now.”
“Just temporarily.”
“That’s what I thought at first, Nelson, but now I don’t believe you want us to have a place of our own. I’d be too much for you, just the two of us, you and me.”
“I hate ticky-tacky apartments and condos.”
“It’s all right, I’m not complaining. I’m at home there now. I like your grandmother.”
“I hate crummy old inner-city blocks getting all revitalized with swish little stores catering to queers and stoned interracial couples. It all reminds me of Kent. I came back here to get away from all that phony stuff. Somebody like Slim acts so counterculture sniffing coke and taking mesc and all that, you know what he does for a living? He’s a biller for Diamond County Light and Power, he stuffs envelopes and is going to be Head Stuffer if he keeps at it for ten more years, how’s that for Establishment?”
“He doesn’t pretend to be a revolutionary, he just likes nice clothes and other boys.”
“People ought to be consistent,” Nelson says, “it isn’t fair to milk the society and then sneer at it at the same time. One of the reasons I liked you better than Melanie was she was so sold on all this radical stuff and I didn’t think you were.”
“I didn’t know,” Pru says, even more quietly, “that Melanie and I were competing for you. How much sexual was there between you two this summer?”
Nelson stares ahead, sorry his confiding has led to this. The Christmas lights are up in Brewer already, red and green and shivering tinsel looking dry and wilted above the snowless streets, the display a shadow of the seasonal glory he remembers as a boy, when there was abundant energy and little vandalism. Then each lamppost wore a giant wreath of authentic evergreen cut in the local hills and a lifelike laughing Santa in a white-and-silver sleigh and a line of eight glassy-eyed reindeer coated in what seemed real fur were suspended along cables stretched from the second story of Kroll’s to the roof of the cigar-store building that used to be opposite. The downtown windows from below Fourth up to Seventh were immense with painted wooden soldiers and camels and Magi and golden organ pipes intertwined with clouds of spun glass and at night the sidewalks were drenched with shoppers and carols overflowing from the heated stores into air that prickled like a Christmas tree and it was impossible not to believe that somewhere, in the dark beyond the city, baby Jesus was being born. Now, it was pathetic. City budget had been cut way back and half the downtown stores were shells.
Pru insists, “Tell me. I know there was some.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
He decides to attack: let these young wives get the upper hand now they’ll absolutely take over. “You don’t know anything,” he tells her, “the only thing you know is how to hang on to that damn thing inside you, that you’re really good at. Boy.”
Now she stares ahead, the sling on her arm a white blur in the corner of his vision. His eyes are stung by perforations of festive light in the December darkness. Let her play the martyr all she wants. You try to speak the truth and all you get is grief.
Mom-mom’s old car feels silky but sluggish under him: all that metal they used to put in, even the glove compartment is lined with metal. When Pru goes silent like this, a kind of taste builds up in his throat, the taste of injustice. He didn’t ask her to conceive this baby, nobody did, and now that he’s married her she has the nerve to complain he isn’t getting her an apartment of her own, give them one thing they instantly want the next. Women. They are holes, you put one thing in after another and it’s never enough, you stuff your entire life in there and they smile that crooked little sad smile and are sorry you couldn’t have done better, when all is said and done. He’s gotten in plenty deep already and she’s not getting him in any deeper. Sometimes when he looks at her from behind he can’t believe how big she has grown, hips wide as a barn getting set to hatch not some little pink being but a horny-bided white rhinoceros no more in scale with Nelson than the mottled man in the moon, that’s what cunts do to you when Nature takes over: go out of control.
The build-up of the taste in his throat is too great; he has to speak. “Speaking of fucking,” he says, “what about us?”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to this late. Anyway I feel so ugly.,
“Ugly or not, you’re mine. You’re my old lady.”
“I get so sleepy, you can’t imagine. But you’re right. Let’s do something tonight. Let’s go home early. If somebody asks us back from the Laid-Back to their place let’s not go.”
“See if we had an apartment like you’re so crazy for we’d have to ask people back. At least at Mom-mom’s you’re safe from that.”
“I do feel safe there,” she says, sighing. Meaning what? Meaning he shouldn’t be bringing her out at night: he’s married now, he works, he’s not supposed to have any fun. Nelson dreads work, he wakes every workday morning with a gnawing in his stomach like he’s the one with something inside him, that white rhinoceros. Those convertibles staring at him unbought every day and the way Jake and Rudy can’t get over his taking that little Kawasaki, as if it’s some great joke he’s deliberately played on Dad, when he hadn’t meant it that way at all, the guy had been so pleading and Nelson was anxious to get the Mercury off the lot, it reminded him every time he saw it of that time Dad had been so scoffing, wouldn’t even listen, it wasn’t fair, he had had to ram the two cars together to wipe that you’ve-got-to-be-kidding smirk off his face.
On that showroom floor it’s like a stage where he hasn’t quite learned the lines yet. Maybe it’s the stuff he’s been taking, too much coke burns the septum out and now they say pot really does rot your brain cells, the THC gets tucked in the fatty tissue and makes you stupid for months, all these teen-age boys coming through with breasts now because something was suppressed when they were turning on at age thirteen, Nelson has these visions lately though he’s standing upright with his eyes open, people with holes where their noses should be because of too much coke, or Pru lying there in the hospital with this pink-eyed baby rhinoceros, maybe it has to do with that cast on her arm, dirty and crumbling at the edges now, the gauze underneath the plaster fraying through. And Dad. He’s getting bigger and bigger, never jogs anymore, his skin glows like his pores are absorbing food out of the air.
One of the books Nelson had as a child, with those stiff shiny cartoon covers and a black spine like electrical tape, had a picture in it of a giant, his face all bumpy and green with hairs coming out ofit here and there, and smiling- that made it worse, that the giant was grinning, looking in, with those blubbery lips and separated teeth giants have, looking into some cave where two children, a boy and a girl, brother and sister probably, who were the heroes -of the story are crouching, silhouettes in shadow, you see only the backs of their heads, they are you, looking out, hunted, too scared to move a muscle or breathe a breath as the great bumpy gleeful face fills the sunny mouth of the cave. That’s how he sees Dad these days: he Nelson is in a tunnel and his father’s face fills the far end where he might get out into
the sun. The old man doesn’t even know he’s doing it, it comes on with that little nibbly sorry smile, a flick of dismissal as he pivots away, disappointed, that’s it, he’s disappointed his father, he should be something other than he is, and now at the lot all the men, not just Jake and Rudy but Manny and his mechanics all grimy with grease, only the skin around their eyes white, staring, see that too: he is not his father, lacks that height, that tossing off that Harry Angstrom can do. And no witness but Nelson stands in the universe to proclaim that his father is guilty, a cheat and coward and murderer, and when he tries to proclaim it nothing comes out, the world laughs as he stands there with open mouth silent. The giant looks in and smiles and Nelson sinks back deeper into the tunnel. He likes that about the Laid-Back, the tunnel snugness of it, and the smoke and the booze and the joints passed from hand to hand under the tables, and the acceptance, the being all in the smoky tunnel together, rats, losers, who cares, you didn’t have to listen to what anybody said because nobody was going to buy a Toyota or insurance policy or anything anyway. Why don’t they make a society where people are given what they need and do what they want to do? Dad would say that’s fantastic but it’s how animals live all the time.
“I still think you fucked Melanie,” Pru says, in her dried-up slum cat’s flat voice. One track and that’s it.
Without braking Nelson swings the big Chrysler around the corner where that shaggy park blocks the way down Weiser Street. Pine Street has been made one way and he has to approach it from around the block so Pru doesn’t have too far to walk. “Oh, what if I did?” he says. “You and I weren’t married, what does it matter now?”
“It doesn’t matter because of you, we all know you’ll grab anything you can get you’re so greedy, it matters because she was my friend. I trusted her. I trusted you both.”
“For Chrissake, don’t snivel.”
“I’m not snivelling.” But he foresees how she will sit there beside him in the booth sulking and not saying anything, not listening to anything but that kicking in her belly, her broken arm making her look even more ridiculous, belly and sling and all, and picturing it that way makes him feel a little sorry for her, until he tells himself it’s his way of taking care of her, bringing her along when a lot of guys wouldn’t.
“Hey,” he says grufy. “Love you.”
“Love you, Nelson,” she responds, lifting the hand not in a sling from her lap as he lifts one of his from the wheel to give hers a squeeze. Funny, the fatter the middle of her is getting the thinner and drier her hands and face seem.
“We’ll leave after two beers,” he promises. Maybe the girl in white pants will be there. She sometimes comes in with that big dumb Jamie and Nelson can tell it is she who gets them here; she digs the scene and he doesn’t.
The Laid-Back under this new name is such a success that parking along Pine is hard to find; he wants to spare Pru at least a long walk in the cold, though the doctor says exercise is good. He hates the cold. When he was little he had loved December because it had Christmas in it toward the end and he was so excited by all the things there were to get in the world that he never noticed how the dark and cold closed in, tighter and tighter. And now Dad is taking Mom off for this fancy holiday on some island with these putrid other couples, to lie there and bask while Nelson freezes and holds the fort at the lot; it’s not fair. The girl doesn’t always wear white slacks, the last time he saw her she had on one of that new style of skirt with the big slit down the side. There is a space in front of the long low brick building that used to be the Verity Press, between an old two-tone Fairlane and a bronze Honda station wagon, that looks big enough, just. The trick of tight parking is to swing your back bumper square into the other guy’s headlights and don’t leave yourself too far out from the curb or you’ll be forever jockeying in. And don’t be afraid to cut it tight on the left, you always have more room than you think. He pulls so close to the Fairlane Pru speaks up sharply, “Nelson.”
He says, “I see him, I see him, shut up and let me concentrate.” He intends, with that heavy Chrysler’s veloured steering wheel -a ratio on the power steering you could turn a cruise ship with to snap the car into its slot slick as a skater stopping on ice. God, figure skaters’ costumes are sexy, the way their little skirts flip up when they skate ass-backwards, and he remembers, straining to see the Honda’s rather low little headlights, how that girl’s slit skirt fell away to show a whole long load of shining thigh before she arranged herself on the barstool, having given Nelson a brief shy smile of recognition. Mom-mom’s ponderous Chrysler slips into reverse and his anticipation of ideal liquid motion is so strong he does not hear the subtle grinding of metal on metal until it has proceeded half the car’s length and Pru is yelping, Jesus, like she’s having the baby now.
Webb Murkett says gold has gone about as far as it can go for now: the little man in America has caught the fever and when the little man climbs on the bandwagon the smart money gets off. Silver, now that’s another story: the Hunt brothers down in Texas are buying up silver futures at the rate of millions a day, and big boys like that must know something. Harry decides to change his gold into silver.
Janice was going to come downtown anyway to do some Christmas shopping, so he meets her at the Crépe House (which she still calls Johnny Frye’s) for lunch, and then they can go to the Brewer Trust with the safe-deposit key and take out the thirty Krugerrands Harry bought for $11,314.20 three months before. In the cubicle the bank lets you commune with your safe-deposit box in, he fishes out from behind the insurance policies and U.S. Savings Bonds the two blue-tinted cylinders like dollhouse toilets, and passes them into Janice’s hands, one into each, and smiles when her face acknowledges with renewed surprise the heft, the weight of the gold. Solid citizens by this extra degree, then, the two of them walk out between the great granite pillars of the Brewer Trust into the frail December sunlight and cross through the forest, where the fountains are dry and the concrete park benches are spray-painted full of young people’s names, and on down the east side of Weiser past two blocks of stores doing scattered Christmas business. Underfed little Puerto Rican women are the only ones scuttling in and out of the cut-rate entranceways, and kids who ought to be in school, and bleary retirees in dirty padded parkas and hunter’s hats, with whiskery loose jaws; the mills have used these old guys up and spit them out.
The tinsel of the wreaths hung on the aluminum lampposts tingles, audibly shivering, as Harry passes each post. Gold, gold, his heart sings, feeling the weight balanced in the two deep pockets of his overcoat and swinging in time with his strides. Janice hurries beside him with shorter steps, a tidy dense woman warm in a sheepskin coat that comes down to her boots, clutching several packages whose paper rattles in this same wind that stirs the tinsel. He sees them together in the flecked scarred mirror next to a shoestore entrance: him tall and unbowed and white of face, her short and dark and trotting beside him in boots of oxblood leather zippered tight to her ankles, with high heels, so they thrust from her swinging coat with a smartness of silhouette advertising as clear as his nappy black overcoat and Irish bog hat that he is all set, that they are all set, that their smiles as they walk along can afford to discard the bitter blank glances that flicker toward them on the street, then fall away.
Fiscal Alternatives with its long thin Venetian blinds is in the next block, a block that once had the name of disreputable but with the general sinking of the downtown is now no worse than the next. Inside, the girl with platinum hair and long fingernails smiles in recognition of him, and pulls a plastic chair over from the waiting area for Janice. After a telephone call to some far-off trading floor, she runs some figures through her little computer and tells them, as they sit bulky in their coats at the corner of her desk, that the price of gold per ounce had nearly touched five hundred earlier this morning but now she can offer them no more than $488.75 per coin, which will come to - her fingers dance unhampered by her nails; the gray display slot of the computer stagge
rs forth with its bland magnetic answer - $14,662.50. Harry calculates inwardly that he has made a thousand a month on his gold and asks her how much silver he can buy for that now. The young woman slides out from under her eyelashes a glance as if she is a manicurist deciding whether or not to admit that she does, in the back room, also give massages. At his side Janice has lit a cigarette, and her smoke pours across the desk and pollutes the relationship this metallic temptress and Harry have established.
The girl explains, “We don’t deal in silver bullion. We only handle silver in the form of pre-‘65 silver dollars, which we sell under melt value.”
“Melt value?” Harry asks. He had pictured a tidy ingot that would slip into the safe-deposit box snug as a gun into a holster.
