by John Updike
“No. I don’t do a fucking thing but smoke cheap dope and feel sorry for myself and listen to Paula say, ‘Da? Da?’ Actually, she talks better than that now. I dread if she gets a couple years older, the questions she’s going to ask.”
Dale asks, “Could I have a peek at her?”
“Help yourself.” She lights a cigarette. Dale pushes through the maroon curtain that divides the two rooms. The little girl is asleep in her barred crib a few inches from where the Hitachi cassette player is blaring. “Aaaall through the night,” sings a raucous female voice gone tender and croaky, “I’ll be awake and I’ll be with you.” Paula seems darker, less the shade of Diana Ross and more now that of Natalie Cole. Her breathing is snuffly and clogged, in the little flat-bridged nose with its whorled solemn nostrils. He touches her forehead. It is hot, velvety, furious as even the deadest things are furious with the motion of atoms.
Back in the other room, he asks Verna, “Are you giving her anything? Baby aspirin?”
“I broke a Tylenol in half but the little bitch wouldn’t swallow it.”
“If she doesn’t get better in a day or two, you should take her to a doctor.”
“You ever been to one of these clinics? You sit there two hours in the waiting room with these morons, inhaling every germ God ever invented. Then the doctor is some Iranian or something who can hardly speak English. Christ, you’re stupid, Dale.”
On the brick windowsills, the sparkling snow has at last melted, carried away by yesterday’s cold rain. Some twigs of the battered gray trees still hold ghostly casings of ice. “What questions,” Dale asks, “are you afraid she’s going to ask?”
“Oh, like ‘Why were you always screwing around, Mommy, dear?’ What do you care anyways? What do you care if I take those equivalency tests or not? What good would it do me? Are they going to get me out of this?” Her walls, her windows, her rug, her chairs. Her clothes, her skin. Her face, with its deceiving dimple and plump cheeks, undergoes a convulsion, submits to rage. She cries out, “Can’t you see I’m miserable? Can’t you see I have things to think about? Why do you keep coming around here with your goody-goody asshole smile? Why don’t you do me a favor and let me the holy shit alone?”
“I love you.”
“You don’t, I know you don’t, that’s such a dumb thing to say!” Tears afflict her already reddened eyes. Their being there, for him to see, watery evidence, enrages her further. “You don’t, and I don’t want you to. I think you’re a nerd, a simp. Go away. You’re a worm in my head, Dale; you gotta stop bothering me. Can’t you see I’ve been knocked up again? Oh, God, please go away.”
She begins to hit him, so ineffectually at first, like a kitten’s experimental batting, that he begins to laugh, lifting his forearms in defense; but then his laughing drives her to hit harder, harder, trying to erase his benign glassy smile, to wipe him away as her own face, its lashless amber eyes, seems wiped away by blind rage. She makes a small guttural noise, a kind of apology, with each attempted blow, a grunt such as the younger tennis players now attach to every serve. “Bastard, bastard, bastard!” she utters; Dale backs out the door, still trying not to laugh, though she has begun to kick too, and this might do some damage. When the blank green door is shut in his face he hears thumps and shouts of protest from other residents of the project, who have had to overhear the brawl.
Knocked up again. Esther strokes the black cross made perhaps of Korean yak horn. “Tell me,” she asks, with a just-fucked woman’s presumption, “how much does this mean to you?”
He wonders whether she means the fucking, and is about to assure her how very much, when he sees with surprise where her fingers and eyes are resting. These same slim fingers have dropped the sopping Kleenexes to the floor.
“Quite much,” he says, yet hesitantly. “I can’t follow all the details of the doctrine the way your husband can.…”
“He thinks they’re funny,” she says. “With him all those men arguing and killing each other over these ridiculous distinctions are just a kind of cruel joke.”
Dale is minded to argue, slightly, in my behalf—we men have our loyalties, through thick and thin, against these presumptuous, elastic others—but then senses the honest openness of Esther’s question, and makes a lunge of sincerity. “Without it,” he tells her, “I become too frightened. I become so frightened I can’t act. I get terribly lethargic, as if I’m at the bottom of the sea. In Idaho that year, with these woods all around, to the horizon on all sides, and the little noises they would make—it just seemed all so hideously Godless, if that makes any sense. I mean, I could feel the Devil. He was out there.…”
Her motherly and loving instincts are aroused, as he half expected; she hugs him again to her slenderness, her hundred pounds of womanly flesh and vein and bone. “You poor darling,” she says.
He goes on into her ear, urging the moist words home, trying to explain. “Without it—faith, I mean—there’s this big hole, and, what’s strange, the hole is a certain shape, that it just exactly fills. That He just exactly fills.”
It all seems so messy and sad and hopeless to her that she squeezes his curved, bony back, its cool skin constellated with patches of raised pimples. Why does it make her want to be fucked, this confession of terror and despair from this boy, with only the toy, the ramshackle antique rig, of Christianity distracting him and enabling him, along with the rest of us, to live from day to day, from sleep to sleep? “Are you always frightened?” she asks.
“Oh no,” Dale says. “At times, much of the time in fact, walking down an ordinary street for instance, I feel exultant, with the sureness of it. Really. It’s only at moments it feels fragile. And you have to have those moments of despair, the New Testament is full of them, not just Peter but Jesus Himself; they’re part of it. They’re what you earn it with. And you survive them. That’s the proof, right there. You come out the other side. All you need, as it says, is as much as a mustard seed. Pray with me sometime, Esther. Not today. Not here, I know this place feels grubby to you. But sometime. That would be so nice. For me.”
Under this barrage of his breath in her ear her soul is so strained by desire that she can scarcely call out, as if on the verge of fainting. “Is there anything I can do right now,” she manages to ask, “to get you hard again?”
“I don’t think,” he answers in much the same strained voice, “you’ll have to do much.”
iii
The Grants Committee usually meets in the Roland L. Partch Memorial Room. Partch’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been Presbyterian ministers, and although Partch himself heeded instead the call to invest in inner-city real estate—he smelled gentrification coming before there was a word for it—pangs of benefaction overtook him in his middle age, as if in anticipation of his sadly early death, when the propane tank fuelling his outdoor grill exploded. His son, Andy Partch, was an apple-cheeked student here in my first years, and now, I believe, enjoys a pleasant parish in suburban Maryland, in the neo-Biblical town of Bethesda. The Partch Room had been formerly a part of Hooker Hall’s storage basement; as our interview of Dale Kohler proceeded, the ground-level windows above our heads flickered like a set of television screens with the insigniaed running shoes and woolly ankles and torn pants cuffs of students passing on the cement walk outside, and the intermittent apparition of a flying saucer slanting across the white sky—an early-season Frisbee game being played on the campus and its late-winter mixture of matted brown grass, mud, and grime-speckled leftovers of snow.
I have described Jesse Closson. He is square-headed, ex-Quaker, ecumenically imperturbable. He is broader, in shoulders and wrists, than I may have conveyed, and unexpectedly rank, since he takes snuff, not up the nostrils but against the gum. When he turns his great boxy head toward you with a comradely brown-toothed smile, the spittoon stench is almost unbearable. But make no mistake: he knows his Husserl and Heidegger, his Schleiermacher and Harnack, his Troeltsch and Overbeck.
Reb
ecca Abrams, our female professor of Hebraic, Old Testament, and intertestamental studies, is thin, tall, curt and nimble in her motions, with long nostrils, glinting steel spectacles, mannish eyebrows, and black hair pulled back in a bun; yet her hair in its kinky energy sets a halo of frizz around the severe do, and her face has that Jewish way of abruptly hopping into a transcendent warmth and confident charm, like the gush of water when Moses smote the rock in Horeb. Jeremy Vanderluyten, the black on the Grants Committee, from the Faculty of Ethics and Moral Logistics, is a grave man the color of iron filings; he moves in his three-piece suits with a certain stiff heaviness, and his lower lids pinkly droop as if they, too, feel the weight of Christian praxis. And Ed Snea (two syllables, Sne-a), a specialist in Bultmannism and holo-caustics, is a short, slight, fair nominal Presbyterian who has become, by one of those tricks of fashion that animate academic communities, the Marrying Sam of Godless weddings; when the Czech-émigré astrophysicist’s daughter marries a Japanese Buddhist graduate student in semantics, it is Ed who tailors the rite to their exact shade of polite disbelief, silently rolling his eyes upward when a single spoken word of Heavenly appeal would be too much. For those to whom even the vaguest mention of natural harmony or everlasting love would savor unduly of barbaric theism, Ed, with his touch of Southern accent and his suede-colored smudge of mustache, has a way of intoning empty phrases so that not a pinfeather of the agnostic couple’s integrity is ruffled while the bride’s staunchly Episcopalian step-grandmother (who doesn’t hear too well anyway) leaves the service also placated. He has not gotten rich on this sideline, but he has partaken of much champagne and vanilla layer cake; indeed, Ed is so well known to the local caterers that he sometimes hitches a ride home in their van, and takes his neglected family a feast of leftover chicken livers wrapped in bacon and speared with tinted toothpicks.
Dale didn’t look well for this interview; his waxy pallor had slid over into the sickly. He seemed to be sweating, and he had put on a checkered sports jacket over his lumberjack shirt, with discordant effect. He had confided to me beforehand that he had been up all night at the Cube, crunching out additional research.
I was allowed to be present at his interrogation because of my prior involvement, but was not supposed to speak. From where I sat, at the side, in one of those old-fashioned wooden classroom chairs whose left arm atrophied and whose right has enlarged like a lobster’s fighting claw, the faces of the four committee members were seen in three-quarters profile, in shadow but for the tops of their heads, Closson’s bald pate pathetically modified by raked stripes of uncut side-hair. Dale’s checkered shoulders were turned somewhat away from me. When, in some agony of inquisition, he twisted, I could see in profile his speckled, laboring jaw and the many nervous blinks of his long eyelashes. Up above this tableau, indifferent feet constantly flickered past in mid-February’s stark sunshine.
Dale described to the committee, as he had to me, the remarkable unlikelihood of the extremely delicate balance of fundamental forces evidently struck in the instant of the Big Bang, a balance of forces which alone could have produced a universe sustained and stable enough to evolve life and, in the case of our planet’s leading primates, consciousness, abstract thinking, and morality.
The committee listened in shadowy silence, beneath the flickering bright feet. When Dale got a little lost in the relation of the strong force to deuterium production and thence to nuclear reaction, Jeremy Vanderluyten, out of conversational mercy, cleared his throat and with his elegant and grave elocution observed, “That’s all of indubitable interest, Mr. Kohler, but—correct me if I’m wrong—these figures have been on the table quite a few years now. Cosmologies change, and I expect have changed not for the last time. What strikes me, if I may interject, is the manner in which our ethical and religious concerns persist no matter what the prevailing cosmology. Think of the eighteenth century and how convinced its scientists were that mechanistic materialism had all the answers. The universe was like a wound-up watch, they said, and Newtonian physics was deemed airtight. Yet what happened within the Judaeo-Christian faith? Pietism, and the Wesley revival, and the great missionary surge to every part of the globe. Look at the young people today, when the so-called death of God has been certified over and over: the most religious generation in a century, and all out of inner imperatives.” The black man laid his hand across his rep necktie, and his iron face, deeply creased, seemed on the verge of smiling. “The stars alone won’t do it; it’s the stars plus. Plus ethics. Do you remember what Kant said?”
I could see Dale’s poor unkempt head shake negatively. It was not a good haircut, seen from behind. Had Esther given it to him, in a Delilahlike spirit of erotic play? Verna?
“Der bestirnte Himmel über mir,” Jeremy pronounced in ringing tones, “und das moralische Gesetz in mir. ‘The starry heavens over me,’ ” he obligingly translated, holding up a lengthy forefinger, then tapping his necktie, “ ‘and the moral law within me.’ The two things together, you see.”
“I see, of course,” poor Dale said, impatient in his fatigue, and out of his field. “It’s just that people should know, you see, that the universe has these kinks, these telltale signs, so the moral impulse and our will to believe have a place to grab hold, if you follow me.”
“We follow you, Mr. Kohler,” Rebecca Abrams said tartly. “We’re here to follow you. So where else are you leading?”
He outlined to them, with increasing agitation of his hands, the kinks in evolutionary theory, its unavoidable strangeness once you looked closely, from the impossibly long odds of the first self-replicating unit assembling itself in the so-called primordial soup on up to the absurd hypothetical leaps, utterly unattainable by any gradualist accumulation of accidental small mutations, of such actual wonders in the world as our eyeballs and the whale’s tail. The giraffe’s neck and the ostrich’s calluses, as before in conversation with me, were cut short in explication.
Rebecca sighed impressively out of her stately nostrils. Her nose had no Semitic hook to it and in its straightness reached abnormally far from her face, giving her, when she removed her glasses, an extended, challenging look. “But, Dale,” she said, putting him on a first-name basis and leaning toward him and then pulling back so rapidly that her nose left a white smear on the shadows, or so my retina reported, “do you really find creationist doctrine more comfortable? How do you picture those events? Do you really see God’s hand coming down and fiddling with the clay and patting it smooth? As you know, ‘Adam’ does mean ‘clay,’ ‘red earth.’ I say creationist doctrine, but there isn’t any, of course; they don’t attempt to explain any detail of how matter took form, or why there are so many extinct species, or why it all took so much time. All they offer you is the first chapter of Genesis, verse twenty on. Even there, of course, it says God said, ‘Let the waters swarm, let the earth bring forth,’ et cetera: ‘Vayyomer elohim toe ha’are nefesh hayyah leminah,’ et cetera. Simple subjunctives. ‘May this and that happen,’ in other words. As if He can hardly help it, really, is just giving permission, a kind of blessing. Otherwise”—she sniffed, again magnificently—“and if you take it all literally, you get into exceedingly grotesque positions, such as arguing the rocks aren’t really that old, they all began in 4004 B.C., that they’re not even as old as bristle-cone pines where you can actually count the rings, some of my creationist students, oh, the poor dears”—she looked around at her fellow faculty members, who knew what she suffered—“you could actually feel sorry for them, if they weren’t so exasperating.” She challenged Dale: “Is this what you’re offering us?”
I felt sorry for him, as I studied the spiky back of his ill-trimmed head. His hair stood up as if he had freshly pulled off his wool cap, releasing its load of static electricity. He said, “I’m all for science, ma’am”—he paused, doubting that the word was adequate for a lady professor, yet unable to think of anything better—“whatever it can show us; I love science, and never meant to get into any of”—his
gesture was so vague as to seem despairing; it loosely included this room, the sky beyond the basement windows, the five of us—“this divinity business. I was taught I guess the Bible in Sunday school but I’ve never, frankly, paid a lot of close attention to it since. The God it shows us was what the technology, the social awareness of the times was up to but He looks pretty brutal now, all that sacrifice and smiting enemies and I am What I am and so forth. I don’t want to knock it but no, I don’t exactly picture a hand coming down into the clay, I don’t know what I picture. I do know at times I feel I’m being touched inside and molded, that something is reaching down and touching me, but if you want to call that a subjective sensation or a hallucination or hysteria or whatever, I wouldn’t argue; I think a lot of times the words we put on things just show our feelings rather than anything about the thing. I mean, some say ‘vision’ and others say ‘hallucination’ and these express opposed opinions about whether or not anything was there.”
Closson said, perhaps feeling the boy was floundering and wanting to help him along, “And as Berkeley and Husserl and in his way Wittgenstein among others have indicated, the basic issue of whether anything at all is there or not, and if so what its nature is, is by no means undebatable, it has to do quite a bit with how we define there. Esse est percipi,” the old Quaker added in kindly manner, tilting back his big head so that his reptilian wrinkled eyelids leaped in the thick curved glass of his half-spectacles. His brown gums showed in a twitch of a smile.
“I’m not even saying exactly that,” Dale said, twisting in his chair, getting excited in spite of his fatigue, in spite of the terrible drag that Esther’s love and lips, sucking, sucking, had placed upon his body and the movements of his mind. “I’d like to see religion get away from all this hiding inside the human, this sort of cowardly appeal to so-called subjective reality—to wishful thinking, in a way. What I’m trying to offer, since you ask me what I’m trying to offer, is what science is trying to tell us, objectively, in its numbers, since the scientists themselves don’t want to, they want to stay out of it, they want to stay pure. There are these numerical coincidences,” he explained, and he told the committee about ten to the fortieth power, how it recurs in widely varied contexts, from the number of charged particles in the observable universe to the ratio of electrical force to gravitational, not to mention the ratio between the age of the universe and the time it takes light to travel across a proton. He tried to explain the remarkable coincidence whereby the difference between the masses of the neutron and the proton almost equals the mass of the electron, and furthermore whereby this difference times the speed of light squared equals the temperature at which protons and neutrons cease transmuting into one another and the numbers of both in the universe are frozen. Equally marvellous, to him, was another equation, which showed how the temperature at which matter decoupled from radiation equalled that at which the energy density of photons equalled that of matter, mainly protons. Also, the element carbon, so crucial to the forms of life, is synthesized in stars through an extraordinary set of nuclear resonances that apparently just happen—
