by John Updike
I could not quite make out whether Verna were offering herself unconditionally, or only if I disavowed any affection for Edna. She said sullenly, like a child in the wrong, “I don’t think you much like anybody, Uncle Roger.”
We were back on ground where I felt secure: argument and counter-argument. “Tell me whom you like, Verna. Tell me about these mysterious men who hassle you, who take you to the Domino.”
“They’re O.K. All they see when they look at me is a white ass, but that’s O.K. They respect me, for having an ass. You know: it’s something of value.”
“An asset, you might even say.”
“Ha ha.” Her voice croaked, and I recalled my impression, outside the door, that she had been crying.
“You have a mind, too, you know.”
“Big deal. Next thing you’ll tell me I have a soul. That’s Dale’s line. Everybody has a line. Oh, you really stupid intellectual men. Lemme start with these.” She reached down and removed her ballet slippers, one and then the other, much like her mother in that far-off game of strip poker. My face felt windburned, as if I were clinging to a rocky height. Her feet were small, shapelier than Edna’s, and pink along the sides, with rough golden heels.
“Tell me about Dale.” My voice was shrinking, had lost all connection with my diaphragm.
“He’s O.K., for a nerd.” She stood up, her feet wide apart, like a judo fighter’s, on the purple shag rug. “Come on, Nunc. Let’s tangle. I feel horny.”
I pretended I wasn’t hearing her. “Do you know where this lumberyard is where he works?”
“Sure. Back up the boulevard two blocks, then three blocks to the left, along the tracks. Come on, let’s just have a taste, you don’t have to ring my gong. Little Shitface is going to wake up any second anyways.”
I wondered if her language was designed to make her seem repulsive; for it was having that effect.
Her eyes were intense and stony and did not give me any relief, by moving from my own. “You got me all stirred up the first time you came in here, all those fuzzy shades of gray. You seemed so gray and broody, so evil. Why’djou think I flashed that tit?”
“You knew you were doing that?”
“C’mon, Nunc. You know about girls. Girls know everything. At least in that line they do.” The dimple in her left cheek had returned, and I thought gratefully that this might all be a form of mischief. But then Verna crossed her plump hands at her waist and, smoothly, bowing forward as if in abrupt obeisance, pulled her white jersey over her head, with a lovely tumble of hair. She straightened up, pushing hair back from her face. She was wearing a bra, but a very little one; it seemed a dirty overburdened sling, and in her eyes was a watery something like pleading. “Don’tcha wanta play with my boobs?” she asked, so slangy and slurred I wondered if before I had come she had taken a drug which was just now coming to bloom in her veins. “Lick ’em, suck ’em?” Her hands lifted them, one under each.
I stood my distance from her, thinking how powerful the sexual impulse is, ever to leap the huge gap between the sexes. “Yes,” I admitted.
“Wouldn’t you like to fuck the bejesus out of me?”
The phrase seemed odd, forced. I felt what women must often feel: the irritating constraint of being inside someone else’s sexual fantasy. “Do you have to keep calling it ‘fuck’?”
The bra was beige and her shoulders had a ghost of tan and with the amber eyes and chestnut hair partly peroxided Verna seemed a portrait in sepia, in a deliberately limited palette, posed with a piece of the city off to her right like a poster. Her arms had gone limp at her sides in an awkward, defenseless manner. Her eyes went from watery to dreamy; her voice was a thin, croaky thread. “You’re a funny guy, Nunc. Don’t want to fuck, don’t want to die. What do you want to do?”
“I want to end this tutorial session.”
“But Nunc, what about us?” And she took a step forward and touched my arm, just below the shoulder, and I felt the question was sincere, girlish; she expected me to have an avuncular answer.
“You’re my niece,” I told her.
“But that just makes it friendlier. All that taboo stuff was just to avoid making pinheaded babies; but nobody makes babies any more.” She was reverting a bit to her wised-up persona, the fun girl.
“You did,” I pointed out.
“That was crazy. God, what a mistake.” I was powerfully aware, now that her breasts had slipped from her own mind, of their glowing amplitude in the little elastic bra, the weighty breadth of them, and the depth of the sallow hollow between, inviting a finger, a tongue, even a phallus with its ache.
“But a mistake you must live with, Verna.”
“Like you live with Esther.”
“You think she’s a mistake?”
“My mother thought so. She said it got you kicked out of the ministry. Getting laid by Esther.”
“Small loss on either side. Me and the ministry.”
“My mother didn’t think so. She thought you really had it, you know, the bug. Even as a little kid, you were terribly good. Your mother was real neurotic and selfish and you just put up with it. Also, she liked whatsername, the first—”
“Lillian.” Again, I had that sensation within my mind of skin, of some part of my soul that rarely saw the sun being stripped into view. “I’m sorry you don’t like Esther,” I said. “She liked you.”
“In a pig’s fart she did. She knew why I was there at Thanksgiving.”
“Why was that?”
“For, you know. Balance. You know fucking well why.”
In the other room, Paula cried. In the window, the short winter day was lowering; the heavenly wool, its promise of rain still undischarged, was turning black in foreshadow of night. Verna ignored the child’s yammer, that protest children make when awaking, wet and hungry and exiled from their dreams, into the raw world; instead she stayed standing at my side, her hand frozen on the tweed of my sleeve, her head of hair a luxuriant tangy mass I again wished to immerse my face in. I had, after all, for all my quick retreat from her perhaps mocking response, made the first move, the “pass.” Now we stood like a couple listening together, almost calm, waiting for punishing utterance, like that first couple our parents, welded together by guilt in the shadows of their leafy den. “That kid is out to get me,” Verna confided to my lapel. “I brought her black into Whitey’s world and I’m the only one around to blame.”
“Where is her father?”
“Who knows? He split. It’s not like it sounds; we agreed it would be best, I’d do better on my own, among whites.”
“And yet here you are, in a project half black.”
She flipped her head cockily. “Well, Nunc, it must be I like the jive. They dig me. Sorry you don’t.”
“Did I say that?”
“You sure did. You should have seen your face when I flashed both tits.”
The child was becoming unignorable; her yammering had become a yell. Verna slashed back the maroon curtain and fetched Paula from the other room. The child’s hair stood out from her sleep-creased cranky face in damp wisps. Verna—making some ironical point, squeezing down on her anger—held her tight against her, as if to make them one creature, pressing their faces side by side. I was struck by how nearly the same size their heads were, for all the disparity in height and weight and tint. Paula’s eyes, puffy from sleep, also looked lashless and slanted. “See, Nunc? Mother and child.”
“Lovely,” I said.
The child reached out her hand with its pale-tipped fingers, but, instead of asking, “Da?,” had the word for me today: “Man.” Pronouncing it made her voice comically deep.
“White man,” her mother amplified. “White man go bye-bye.”
“I must,” I said, and my desire to flee stumbled in reflex upon an aspect of the last time’s parting. “How’s your money holding out?” I asked Verna.
“But we didn’t fuck, Nunc. No charge. No fuckee, no tickee.”
I became confused, someho
w startled that she would talk this way with the child in her arms. Her chest-slope of skin, above the skimpy bra, seemed to blaze with light. Of course, to her daughter this skin would not seem threatening: mother skin. “You’re making a false connection,” I said, as if to a student, even while fishing in my wallet for another loan.
“I know my assets,” she said, echoing me as witty students will. “This must be advance payment. Girls like us don’t usually get advance payment.” She took the three twenties. The amount seemed stingy this time—we seemed to be progressing—so I added a fourth bill. Banks now automatically pay out cash in twenties; tens are going the way of the farthing.
“Man bye-bye,” Paula recited, solemn animal wisdom brimming in her dark blue eyes.
“Read around in that anthology,” I instructed, putting myself back into my two coats. “Try to find some stuff you like. I was just kidding about ‘Luck of Roaring Camp.’ Look at the Hemingway or some James Baldwin. Maybe I should bring a grammar handbook next time. Do you know what a predicate is? A participial phrase?”
Verna joggled the girl on her hip and in sympathy her breasts bounced. “Fuck next time, Nunc. There isn’t going to be a next time. I don’t know exactly what your creepy game is, but I don’t want to get involved. Don’t bother to come around here ever again, we won’t let you in. Right, Poopsie?” She jiggled the child and made a cross-eyed face an inch from her face, so that Paula laughed, her spitty little baby-laugh from deep inside.
I suspected that this comedic turning to the child was a cover-up for her careless use of “we.” We won’t let you in. No doubt, there were shadows behind Verna, a population of shadows. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Use me. You want a high-school degree and a better life. I’ll help you make a start. You want to live in a project on welfare the rest of your life?”
Her face had gone stiff, in the manner of a child, for whom fury and panic are one emotion. “I don’t see what good passing some dumb non-test would do me and if I did I could pass it myself. If you come back here any more I’ll call up my mom and she’ll have the police after you.”
I had to smile at that. All this indignation and rejection of hers was a dance, the dance of the trapped. Was it Ortega y Gasset who said that once a man has gained a woman’s attention, anything he does, anything at all, to keep her attention furthers his cause? It seemed to me I had made good headway today. After closing the door, I hesitated long enough to hear Verna say to little Paula, in a level voice, “You stink, you know that? You really do.”
My chief concern, as I went down the familiar, echoing metal stairs, was how to pry Verna loose from this infant, so I could have the uninhibited use of her body in that deliciously shabby and warm apartment, in the room behind the maroon curtain, which I had never seen but could imagine: a secondhand crib, a mattress or futon on the floor for the mother, a cheap pine dresser enamelled some hideous girlish color like lilac or salmon, and the sadness of the scuffed walls relieved by rock posters and a few of Verna’s mediocre, painstaking watercolor studies of the corners of her cage.
As I stepped into the misty chill December dusk, the answer came to me: Esther’s day-care center. It existed to generate just such freedoms.
My Audi sat at the curb unharmed, though its little self-appointed guardian was nowhere to be seen. Several black women, wearing the grape-colored quilted long coats that have become a universal winter uniform in the city, sat on benches while their toddlers utilized the minimal amusements of the shatterproof playground, its cement pipes and rubber tires. It was not yet quite the time I usually returned from the Divinity School (if Esther asked why I had taken the car, I would say I had come back to the house for a bite of lunch, her delicious quiche, and to pick up a book I needed, on the Cappadocian Fathers, for a tutorial conference, and then had driven back to save a minute, and also because I had left my sheepskin coat in my office and discovered the air to be turning colder); so I thought of detouring past Dale’s lumberyard, in order to satisfy my morbid curiosity and to help erase the pulsing mental afterimage of Verna pulling her stretchy white jersey upward and off in an explosion of glossy shoulder skin and heedless, stringy, semi-bleached, shampoo-scented curls.
Prospect was one-way the right way now. I drove down it, past the semi-abandoned houses and the towering ginkgo, which had lost all its leaves. Back up the boulevard two blocks, she had said, and then to the left, at the railroad tracks. And there was a street here, devoid of houses, that led into an industrial limbo, surviving perhaps from an era when this section lay on the edge of the city, a nest of mills later engulfed and isolated, a wilderness of rusting sheds and cinder-block warehouses, of factories whose painted names had left ghosts of letters on the brick, in the ornate style of the last century—vast shelters long since fallen away from their original purpose of manufacture, rented and resold and reused in fractions of floor space, and dropping ever lower on the rotting rungs of capitalism. An old coalyard lingered in here, its tilted bins glistening with lumps of graded size, and a sand-and-gravel company that had created its own miniature gray mountains, had moved mountains not through faith but with a rickety tall tramway of triangular buckets on wheels. The asphalt beneath the Audi crumbled away, and the road became a chain of puddles and hard-packed spots in an earth saturated with oil and cinders and gypsum, with flattened containers and towering dry tufts of God’s toughest, wiriest weeds. Yet this road—scarcely a road, a black path—kept going, and from the rear approached fenced acres of a lumberyard that fronted on a less informal street, with streetlights and gas stations though no visible pedestrians. GROVE, a modest orange sign proclaimed, scarcely legibly, for the day was turning to evening. Already electric lights burned in the sales office and in the tall sheds, roofed in corrugated iron, that housed the racks of lumber.
I turned into an opening in the woven-wire fence and parked well away from the bright office and crept out into the dusk, which was indeed turning cold enough to make me grateful for my sheepskin coat. Smells of pine, fir, spruce—resiny fresh corpses from the north, stacked in their horizontal phalanxes of two-by-fours, four-by-fours, four-by-sixes, some knottier than others, as with books and lives, but almost none without knots, without those dark resinous oblongs that, no matter how we shellac and paint and overpaint, weep through. I detected a faint holy whiff of cedar, of shingles and clapboards bundled with steel ribbons, and heard a distant stir of men banging wood and talking to one another within echoing spaces, toward the end of a weary day. I feared that Dale might be on duty. Above Grove’s sheds and the shabby neighborhood, some of the university’s science buildings, including that newish monstrosity, that nine-storied concrete bunker called the Cube, loomed surprisingly near—tall Argus-eyed beasts which by some twist of the city’s geography had been allowed to creep close, and might pounce.
A bare bulb burned thinly in a far small stall. A circular saw blade gleamed beneath an apparatus of giant leather straps, the glint of its teeth regular as ticks of an atomic clock. Sawdust, its virginal aroma, permeated the crystallizing black air, and a multitude of straight shadows hurled transversely from within the open framework of the lumber racks suggested a silent diagonal toppling of trees. Fear not. I felt surrounded by a blessing, by a fragrant benignity, and yet with criminal haste hurried back into my car when a shadow of a man approached and asked if he could help me.
III
i
Quem enim naturae usum, quem mundi fructum, quem elementorum saporem non per carnem anima depascitur? For what use of Nature, what enjoyment of the world, what taste of the elements is not consumed by the soul per carnem—by the agency of the flesh? Tertullian wrote these words in De resurrectione carnis around 208, well after he had fallen away from orthodoxy into Montanism. Still, I could sniff out nothing unorthodox in his ardent exposition; on the contrary, the resurrection of the flesh is the most emphatic and intrinsic of orthodox doctrines, though in our present twilight of faith the most difficult to believe. Yet how incontrover
tibly and with what excited eloquence does Tertullian build up his argument that the flesh cannot be dispensed with by the soul! Quidni? he asks—how not, how could it be otherwise? Per quam omni instrumento sensuum fulciatur, visu, auditu, gustu, odoratu, contactu? By its means all the apparatus of sense is supported—sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Then a rather delicate, Saussurian argument, linking the power of effectuation, glorified as a divina potestas, to the faculty of speech, in turn dependent upon a physical organ: Per quam divina potestate respersa est, nihil non sermone perficiens, vel tacite praemisso? Et sermo enim de organo carnis est. The vel tacite praemisso (literally, “even if only advanced in silence,” i.e., tacitly indicated by the existence of speech, of words) seemed an especially scrupulous touch, and it occurred to me that perficiens above might be read as conceptualization, so that the Heavenly mystery of the Logos was made to descend, by means of a Platonic scaffolding of degrees of ideality, down into reality via ultimate dependence upon that repulsive muscle housed among our salivating mouth membranes and rotting teeth—the eyeless, granular, tireless tongue. De organo carnis indeed. The arts, too, rest on this slippery foundation: Artes per carnem, studia, ingenia (confirming my thesis above) per carnem, opera, negotia, officia (we must take a body to the office, every day) per carnem, atque adeo totum vivere animae carnis est, ut non vivere animae nil aliud sit quam a carne divertere. Did he mean to go quite so far, to assert that so totally is the soul’s life derived from the flesh that for it to be separated is none other than death? To deny us, that is, O furious Tertullian, even the wispiest hope of a harp-strumming ghost in our machine, of an ethereal escape clause in this terrible binding contract with eyeballs, nostril hairs, ear bones, and edible gray brain cells, a contract that after all we never signed, which our ubiquitous agent Dan N. (for Nobodaddy) Amino initialled for us, without consultation? We want to break the contract, help! But our Carthaginian lawyer in his mad faith careers on, ever more zealously committing himself and us to an impossible miracle: Porro si universa per carnem subiacent animae, carni quoque subiacent. Further, if all things are subject to the soul per carnem, through the flesh, then they are also subject to the flesh. He knits us, soul and flesh, ever tighter, toward some smiling courtroom reversal. But the suspense is keen. Per quod utaris, cum eo utaris necesse est. That compression of old Latin: links of pounded iron; to paraphrase is to weaken the chain. What you use, with that you must use: utor here must have, like fruor above, the sense of “enjoy”—our poor body, used for our (the soul’s, his implication is: we are, notice, anima and not caro after all) enjoyment, necessarily partakes of that enjoyment. Dear Flesh: Do come to the party. Signed, your pal, the Soul. Ita caro, dum ministra et famula animae deputatur, consors et cohaeres invenitur. So the flesh, up to now deputed the soul’s minister and servant, is found to be its consort and co-heir. Si temporalium, cur non et aeternorum? If temporarily, why not eternally? Why not indeed? The thought of all our pale and rancid bodies jostling perpetually in some eternal locker room of a Heaven sickened me. And yet beyond the depressing mechanics of it, the general dim idea of our eternal survival, much as we are, athlete’s feet and all, does lift up the heart. The old fanatic’s logic and fervor and right grasp of our situation cannot be denied. Always, remember, he had Marcion on his mind—Marcion, who believed that Christ had been a phantom, a kind of holograph, on Earth and that no God worth worshipping could have dirtied His hands in the creation of this vile swamp of excrement and semen.
