by John Updike
“How lovely to think that,” Thelma says. “It makes you” - the word is hard for her to find - “radiant. And sad.” She gives him advice on some points. She thinks he should seek out Ruth and ask her point-blank if that is his daughter, and if so is there anything he can do to help? On the subject of Nelson, she thinks the child’s problem may be an extension of Harry’s; if he himself did not feel guilty about Jill’s death and before that Rebecca’s, he would feel less threatened by Nelson and more comfortable and kindly with him. “Remember,” she says, “he’s just a young man like you once were, looking for his path.”
“But he’s not like me!” Harry protests, having come at last into a presence where the full horror of this truth, the great falling-off, will be understood. “He’s a goddam little Springer, through and through.”
Thelma thinks he’s more like Harry than he knows. Wanting to learn to hang glide - didn’t he recognize himself in that? And the thing with two girls at once. Wasn’t he, possibly, a bit jealous of Nelson?
“But I never had the impulse to screw Melanie,” he confesses. “Or Pru either, much. They’re both out of this world, somehow.”
Of course, Thelma says. “You shouldn’t want to fuck them. They’re your daughters. Or Cindy either. You should want to fuck me. I’m your generation, Harry. I can see you. To those girls you’re just an empty heap of years and money.”
And, as they drift in talk away from the constellations of his life, she describes her marriage with Ronnie, his insecurities and worries beneath that braggart manner that she knows annoys Harry. “He was never a star like you, he never had that for a moment.” She met him fairly well along in her twenties, when she was wondering if she’d die a spinster schoolteacher. Being old as she was, with some experience of men, and with a certain gift for letting go, she was amused by the things he thought of. For their honeymoon breakfast he jerked off into the scrambled eggs and they ate his fried jism with the rest. Ifyou go along with everything on that side of Ronnie, he’s wonderfully loyal, and docile, you could say. He has no interest in other women, she knows this for a fact, a curious fact even, given the nature of men. He’s been a perfect father. When he was lower down on the totem pole at Schuylkill Mutual, he lost twenty pounds, staying awake nights worrying. Only in these last few years has the weight come back. When the first diagnosis of her lupus came through, he took it worse than she did, in a way. “For a woman past forty, Harry, when you’ve had children …. If some Nazi or somebody came to me and they’d take either me or little Georgie, say - he’s the one that’s needed most help, so he comes to mind - it wouldn’t be a hard choice. For Ronnie I think it might be. To lose me. He thinks what I do for him not every woman would. I suspect he’s wrong but there it is.” And she admits she likes his cock. But what Harry might not appreciate, being a man, is that a big one like Ronnie’s doesn’t change size that much when it’s hard, just the angle changes. It doesn’t go from being a little bonneted sleeping baby to a tall fierce soldier like this. She has worked him up again, idly toying as she talks, while the night outside their louvered window has grown utterly still, the last drunken shout and snatch of music long died, nothing astir but the incessant sighing of the sea and the piping of some high-pitched cricket they have down here. Courteously he offers to fuck her through her blood, and she refuses with an almost virginal fright, so that he wonders if on the excuse of her flow she is not holding this part of herself back from him, aloof from her love and shamelessness, pure for her marriage. She has explained, “When I realized I was falling in love with you, I was so mad at myself, I mean it couldn’t contribute to anything. But then I came to see that something must be missing between me and Ronnie, or maybe in any life, so I tried to accept it, and even quietly enjoy it, just watching you. My little hairshirt.” He has not kissed her yet on the mouth, but now having guessed at her guilty withholding of herself from being simply fucked he does. Guilt he can relate to. Her lips feel cool and dry, considering. Since she will not admit him to her cunt, as compromise he masturbates her while sitting on her face, glad he thought of washing where he did. Her tongue probes there and her fingers, as cool on top of his as if still filmed with Vaseline, guide his own as they find and then lose and find again the hooded little center that is her. She comes with a smothered cry and arches her back so this darkness at the center of her pale and smooth and unfamiliar form rises hungrily under his eyes, a cloud with a mouth, a fish lunging upwards out of water. Getting her breath, she returns the kindness and with him watches the white liquid lift and collapse in glutinous strings across her hand. She rubs his jism on her face, where it shines like sun lotion. The stillness outside is beginning to brighten, each leaf sharp in the soft air. Drunk on fatigue and selfexposure, he begs her to tell him something that he can do to her that Ronnie has never done. She gets into the bathtub and has him urinate on her. “It’s hot!” she exclaims, her sallow skin drummed upon in designs such as men and boys drill in the snow. They reverse the experience, Thelma awkwardly straddling, and having to laugh at her own impotence, looking for the right release in the maze of her womanly insides. Above him as he waits her bush has a masculine jut, but when her stream comes, it dribbles sideways; women cannot aim, he sees. And her claim of heat seems to him exaggerated; it is more like coffee or tea one lets cool too long at the edge of the desk and then must drink in a few gulps, this side of tepid. Having tried together to shower the ammoniac scent of urine off their skins, Thelma and Harry fall asleep among the stripes of dawn now welling through the louvers, they sleep as if not a few more stolen hours but an entire married life of sanctioned intimacy stretches unto death before them.
A savage rattling at the door. “Thelma. Harry. It’s us.” Thelma puts on a robe to answer the knocking while Rabbit hides beneath the sheet and peeks. Webb and Ronnie stand there in the incandescence of another day. Webb is resplendent in grape-colored alligator shirt and powder-blue plaid golf pants. Ronnie wears last night’s dinner clothes and needs to get inside. Thelma shuts the door and hides in the bathroom while Harry dresses in last night’s rumpled suit, not bothering to knot the necktie. He still smells of urine, he thinks. He runs to his own bungalow to change into a golf outfit. Black girls, humming, pursued by yellow birds, are carrying tinkling breakfast trays along the cement paths. Janice is in the bathroom, running a tub.
He shouts out, “You O.K.?”
She shouts back, “As O.K. as you are,” and doesn’t emerge.
On the way out, Harry stuffs an unbuttered croissant and some scalding sips of coffee into his mouth. The papery orange and magenta flowers beside the door hurt his head. Webb and Ronnie are waiting for him where the green cement paths meet. Among the three men, as they push through their golf, there is much banter and good humor, but little eye-contact. When they return from the course around one o’clock, Janice is sitting by the Olympic pool in the same off-white linen suit she wore down in the airplane. Linen wrinkles terribly. “Harry, Mother phoned. We have to go back.”
“You’re kidding. Why?” He is groggy, and had pictured a long afternoon nap, to be in shape for tonight. Also his foreskin was tender after last night’s workout and slightly chafed every time he swung, thinking of Cindy, hoping her vagina would be nonfrictional. His golf, threaded through vivid after-images of Thelma’s underside and a ticklish awareness of his two businesslike partners as silently freighted with mental pictures of their own, was mysteriously good, his swing as it were emptied of impurities, until fatigue caught him on the fifteenth hole with three balls sliced along the identical skyey groove into the lost-ball terrain of cactus and coral and scrub growth. “What’s happened? The baby?”
“No,” Janice says, and by the easy way she cries he knows she’s been crying off and on all morning, here in the sun. “It’s Nelson. He’s run off.”
“He has? I better sit down.” To the black waiter who comes to their glass table under its ftinged umbrella he says, “Piña colada, Jeff. Better make that two. Janice?�
� She blearily nods, though there is an empty glass already before her. Harry looks around at the faces of their friends. “Jeff, maybe you should make that six.” He has come to know the ropes in this place. The other people sitting around the pool look pale, newly pulled from the airplane.
Cindy has just come out of the pool, her shoulders blue-black, the diaper-shape ofher bikini bottom wetly adhering. She tugs the cloth to cover the pale margin of skin above, below. She is getting fatter, day by day. Better hurry, he tells himself. But it is too late. Her face when she turns, towelling her back with a contortion that nearly pops one tit out of its triangular sling, is solemn. She and Thelma have heard Janice’s story already. Thelma is sitting at the table in that ankle-length wrapper, the same dustypink as her nose, that she bought down here along with the wide straw hat. The big brown sunglasses she brought from home, tinted darker at the top, render her expressionless. Harry takes the chair at the table next to her. His knee accidentally touches one of hers; she pulls it away at once.
Janice is telling him, through tears, “He and Pru had a fight Saturday night, he wanted to go into Brewer for a party with that Slim person and Pru said she was too pregnant and couldn’t face those stairs again, and he went by himself.” She swallows. “And he didn’t come back.” Her voice is all roughened from swallowing the saltwater of the tears. With scrapings that hurt Harry’s head Webb and Ronnie pull chairs to their table in its tight circle of shade: When Jeff brings their round of drinks Janice halts her terrible tale and Ronnie negotiates for lunch menus. He, like his wife, wears sunglasses. Webb wears none, trusting to his bushy brows and the crinkles of his flinty eyes, which gaze at Janice like those of some encouraging old fart of a father.
Her cheeks are drenched with the slime of distress and Harry has to love her for her ugliness. “I told you the kid was a rat,” he tells her. He feels vindicated. And relieved, actually.
“He didn’t come back,” Janice all but cries, looking only at him, not at Webb, with that smeared lost balked expression he remembers so well from their earliest days, before she got cocky. “But Mother didn’t want to b-bother us on our vacation and P-Pru thought he just needed to blow off steam and pretended not to be worried. But Sunday after going to church with Mother she called this Slim and Nelson had never showed up!”
“Did he have a car?” Harry asks.
“Your Corona.”
“Oh boy.”
“I think just scrambled eggs for me,” Ronnie tells the waitress who has come. “Loose. You understand? Not too well done.”
This time Rabbit deliberately seeks to touch Thelma’s knee with his under the table but her knee is not there for him. Like Janice down here she has become a piece of static. The waitress is at his shoulder and he is wondering if he might dare another crabmeat-salad sandwich or should play it safe with a BLT. Janice’s face, which the movement of the sun overhead is hoisting out of shadow, goes wide in eyes and mouth as she might shriek. “Harry you can’t have lunch, you must get dressed and out of here! I packed for you, everything but the gray suit. The woman at the front desk was on the phone for me nearly an hour, trying to get us back to Philadelphia but it’s impossible this time ofyear. There’s not even anything to New York. She got us two seats on a little plane to San Juan and a room at the hotel airport so we can get a flight to the mainland first thing in the morning. Atlanta and then Philadelphia.”
“Why not just use our regular reservations Thursday? What good’s an extra day going to do?”
“I cancelled them. Harry, you didn’t talk to Mother. She’s wild, I’ve never heard her like this, you know how she always makes sense. I called back to tell her the plane on Wednesday and she didn’t think she could drive the Philadelphia traffic to meet us, she burst into tears and said she was too old.”
“Cancelled.” It is sinking in. “You mean we can’t stay here tonight because of something Nelson has done?”
“Finish your story, Jan,” Webb urges. Jan, is it now? Harry suddenly hates people who seem to know; they would keep us blind to the fact that there is nothing to know. We are each of us filled with a perfect blackness.
Janice gulps again, and snufes, calmed by Webb’s voice. “There’s nothing to finish. He didn’t come back Sunday or Monday and none of these friends they have in Brewer had seen him and Mother finally couldn’t stand it anymore and called this morning, even though Pru kept telling her not to bother us, it was her husband and she took the responsibility.”
“Poor kid. Like you said, she thought she could work miracles.” He tells her, “I don’t want to leave before tonight.”
“Stay here then,” Janice says. “I’m going.”
Harry looks over at Webb for some kind of help, and gets instead a sage and useless not-my-funeral grimace. He looks at Cindy but she is gazing down into her piña colada, her eyelashes in sharp focus. “I still don’t understand the rush,” he says. “Nobody’s died.”
“Not yet,” Janice says. “Is that what you need?”
A rope inside his chest twists to make a kink. “Son of a fucking bitch,” he says, and stands, bumping his head on the fringed edge of the umbrella. “When’d you say this plane to San Juan is?”
Janice snuffles, guilty now. “Not until three.”
“O.K.” He sighs. In a way this is a relief. “I’ll go change and bring the suitcases. Could one of you guys at least order me a hamburger? Cindy. Thel. See you around.” The two ladies let themselves be kissed, Thelma primly on the lips, Cindy on her apple-firm cheek, toasty from the sun.
Throughout their twenty-four-hour trip home Janice keeps crying. The taxi ride past the old sugar mills, through the goat herds and the straggling black towns and the air that seems to be blowing them kisses; the forty-minute hop in a swaying two-engine prop plane to Puerto Rico, over mild green water beneath whose sparkling film lurk buried reefs and schools of sharks; the stopover in San Juan where everybody is a real spic; the long stunned night of porous sleep in a hotel very like that motel on Route 422 where Mrs. Lubell stayed so long ago; and in the morning two seats on a jet to Atlanta and then Philly: through all this Janice is beside him with her cheeks glazed, eyes staring ahead, her eyelashes tipped with tiny balls of dew. It is as if all the grief that swept through him at Nelson’s wedding now at last has reached Janice’s zone, and he is calm and emptied and as cold as the void suspended beneath the airplane’s shuddering flight. He asks her, “Is it just Nelson?”
She shakes her head so violently the fringe of bangs bobs. “Everything,” she blurts, so loud he fears the heads just glimpsable in the seats ahead might turn around.
“The swapping?” he pursues softly.
She nods, not so violently, pinching her lower lip in a kind of turtle mouth her mother sometimes makes.
“How was Webb?”
“Nice. He’s always been nice to me. He respected Daddy.” This sets the tears to flowing again. She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “I felt so sorry for you, having Thelma when you wanted Cindy so much.” With that there is no stopping her crying.
He pats her hands, which are loosely fisted together in her lap around a damp Kleenex. “Listen, I’m sure Nelson’s all right, wherever he is.”
“He” - she seems to be choking, a stewardess glances down as she strides by, this is embarrassing - “hates himself, Harry.”
He tries to ponder if this is true. He snickers. “Well he sure screwed me. Last night was my dream date.”
Janice sniffs and rubs each nostril with the Kleenex. “Webb says she’s not as wonderful as she looks. He talked a lot about his first two wives.”
Beneath them, through the scratched oval of Plexiglas, there is the South, irregular fields and dry brown woods, more woods than he would have expected. Once he had dreamed of going south, of resting his harried heart amid all that cotton, and now there it is under him, like the patchwork slope of one big hill they are slowly climbing, fields and woods and cities at the bends and mouths of rivers, streets e
ating into green, America disgraced and barren, mourning her hostages. They are flying too high for him to spot golf courses. They play all winter down here, swinging easy. The giant motors he is riding whine. He falls asleep. The last thing he sees is Janice staring ahead, wide awake, the bulge of tears compounding the bulge of her cornea. He dreams of Pru, who buts while he is trying to manipulate her limbs, so there is too much water, he begins to panic. He is changing weight and this wakes him up. They are descending. He thinks back to his night with Thelma, and it seems in texture no different from the dream. Only Janice is real, the somehow catastrophic creases in her linen sleeve and the muddy line of her jaw, her head slumped as from a broken neck. She fell asleep, the same magazine open in her lap that she read on the way down. They are descending over Maryland and Delaware, where horses run and the du Ponts are king. Rich women with little birdy breasts and wearing tall black boots in from the hunt. Walking past the butler into long halls past marble tables they flick with their whips. Women he will never fuck. He has risen as high as he can, the possibility of such women is falling from him, falling with so many other possibilities as he descends. No snow dusts the dry earth below, rooftops and fields arid roads where cars are nosing along like windup toys in invisible grooves. Yet from within those cars they are speeding, and feel free. The river flashes its sheet of steel, the plane tilts alarmingly, the air nozzles hissing above him may be the last thing he hears, Janice is awake and bolt upright. Forgive me. Fort Mifflin hulks just under their wheels, their speed is titanic. Please, God. Janice is saying something into his ear but the thump of the wheels drowns it out. They are down, and taxiing. He gives a squeeze to Janice’s damp hand, that he didn’t realize he was holding. “What did you say?” he asks her.
