by John Updike
“I like it,” she said, “when you talk about God.”
“I gave it up years ago.”
“Because of Esther?”
“She was an effect, not a cause.”
“You sound very natural when you talk about these crazy things.”
“I was much admired, actually, in my pulpit days. Raise the doubts, then do the reassurances. People have no idea what they’re hearing, they just want a certain kind of verbal music. The major, the minor, and back to the major, then Bless you and keep you, and out the door to the luncheon party.”
She shut her eyes; her curved eye-whites were eclipsed. “Sounds nice.”
I changed the subject. “I’m sorry you don’t like Esther.”
“No you’re not” was the flat answer.
I changed it again. “It’s getting cold out here in my underwear.”
“You’re cute, Nunc. Come under the covers.”
“No, I think you’ve cock-teased enough now and I should be heading home.”
“You think I cock-tease?” The idea seemed to awaken her, to sparkle on the surface of her numbness. “Maybe you pussy-tease. Take off those funny boxer things and fuck me.”
“I’m scared,” I said.
“What of, baby?”
“Of getting VD. There seem so many new kinds, since I was a boy.”
“Boy, you just ain’t kidding. Do you think AIDS is going to gobble us all up? I do.”
“Well, if not it, something else.”
“If that’s really the hang-up, I could just blow you.”
It had once enchanted me to discover, in my sneakered seminary days, when Latin and Greek were fresh springs in my desert of ignorance, that, far from its taboo meaning’s being derived from any inexact and displeasing analogy with wind instruments, “blow” is etymologically kin to the Latin flāre and the Greek . Verna’s plump and naked arms had snaked out from beneath the covers and she was pulling at my maligned undershorts, trying in clumsy sorrowful fashion to undress me, while her uncovered breasts slewed about on her chest. At her attack, the delicious flutter of ambiguity beat its wings, necessarily two, through all my suddenly feminized being. Not either/or but both/and lies at the heart of the cosmos. “This isn’t right,” I ventured, limp in some parts, stiff in others.
“Nunc, it’s no big deal,” my childish seductress reassured me. “I mean for me; it is for you. You wanted to fuck my mom all those years. Fuck me instead. I’m a better piece of ass, honest.”
“How do you know?”
“It goes with the times. Screwing has made real progress. Come on. Let me do something nice for somebody today; otherwise my self-image will be totally crappy.”
“But,” I said sharply, and her busy hands stopped tugging at my old body. “I’d like you to want it, too.”
Her face was again the featureless blur of luminous shadow it had been in the car. “Yeah, I do,” she whispered. I wondered if I had wrung this from her oppressively but then, the universe being so patently imperfect on many other counts, overrode the scruple.
What followed is less distinct in my refractory mind than my flexible wife’s many pictured infidelities with Dale. In the dark warmed space beneath the covers, the musty aroma of childhood poker beneath the attic eaves became abruptly powerful, resurging from the past; or was it in fact the futon’s stuffing, or my fifty-three-year-old flesh in a sweat of deferred pleasure? Verna’s nakedness was smooth and ample. There is lodged in my obstructed memory a sensation of billowing, of an elaborate fatty unscrolling, of something like a folded, watermarked letter fitting nicely into its creamy, lined, and well-licked envelope, though her cunt (if I may risk offending modesty in my desire to speak the truth) proved youthfully tight and resistantly dry, as if her compliance were absent-minded and her invitation had been somewhat formal. At the moment of entry I was reminded of the sensation of that plastic vagina into which, a lifetime ago, I had ejaculated (with a boost from Hot Pants Schoolmarm) so that my and Lillian’s joint barrenness might be analyzed into its lonely components.
When I was spent and my niece released, we lay together on a hard floor of the spirit, partners in incest, adultery, and child abuse. We wanted to be rid of each other, to destroy the evidence, yet perversely clung, lovers, miles below the ceiling, our comfort being that we had no further to fall. Lying there with Verna, gazing upward, I saw how much majesty resides in our continuing to love and honor God even as He inflicts blows upon us—as much as resides in the silence He maintains so that we may enjoy and explore our human freedom. This was my proof of His existence, I saw—the distance to the impalpable ceiling, the immense distance measuring our abasement. So great a fall proves great heights. Sweet certainty invaded me. “Bless you” was all I could say.
“You’re quite a horny old fart, it turns out,” was her compliment in return.
“How’s your self-image?”
“Better.”
“Think you can sleep now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m beat.”
As I struggled up from the floor and into my clothes, her infantile lassitude and passivity annoyed me. “Shouldn’t you be doing something about not making yet another baby? Take a douche or put in some spermicide or something?”
“Relax, Nunc. I just had my period a couple days ago. Anyways I could always get another abortion now that you’ve showed me how.”
I saw that she was teasing me with the possibility of her pregnancy and supposed that she had the right. I let myself out. The hall shocked me by being lit, as if its glaring vacuity, lined with shut doors, had been all this time eavesdropping.
Sex surprises us with how little time it actually takes. My Omega’s hands were splayed at the apogee of the dial face: five of one. I danced, considerably lightened, down the vibrating project stairs and into the Audi, its gray paint sucked empty of color by the sulphurous streetlamp overhead. I got in and drove away. Sumner Boulevard at that hour, though not totally devoid of people—isolated hunters, poised in the doorways and spindly as Giacomettis—or of automobiles, had a rolling empty splendor and seemed wide as a noontide wheatfield. The stoplights had automatically shifted to the blink mode. A drunk hailed me as if I were a cab, and some Scarlatti, played with authentic period instruments, came on, daintily tintinnabulating, the university radio station. Music as I prefer it: on the verge of the inaudible. Go, Scarlatti, go! Keep telling it to those angels! Any Wagner or Brahms, and reality might have crushed me.
The two phosphorescent hands of my Omega had merged—five after one—as I pattered up my porch steps to face Esther. She was still up, as I had foreseen; her face looked puffy, and her wondering green eyes hyperthyroid. Her unruly hair was strangely neat, as if let down and then repinned.
“I was getting terribly worried,” she said, and I realized that though my presence gave her no pleasure my absence gave her pain. I recounted the evening accurately, allowing thirty-five undescribed minutes to be absorbed by the hospital’s white spaces and tranced procedures.
“So poor little Paula is being held for her own protection against her own mother in the hospital.”
“That’s a way of putting it.”
“But Verna, how did she take that? I would be devastated; any mother would be, good or bad.”
“She cried,” I agreed, cautiously, for the untold part of the evening loomed under me like a tiger trap covered with loose thatch. “But I think she expects to get the child in the morning and that things will go on as before. I’m not so sure they will.”
Esther wasn’t quite listening; she was looking at my face. “It happened, didn’t it?”
“What? What happened?”
“Whatever it is has been building between you and Verna ever since you went calling on her the first time last autumn. That was quite uncharacteristic of you, Rog—playing the uncle. You hate those Cleveland people. You couldn’t even stand it about Lillian that she reminded you of them. At least that’s what you used to tell me.”
As if her sensation of my lying now made me a liar then and always. I counterattacked blindly. “It was that damn Dale Kohler,” I said. “He came around with his lugubrious face and told me I should try to help her. That’s the trouble with these holy rollers, always stirring things up.”
“Don’t change the subject, you’re always doing that. We’re not talking about Dale, we’re talking about Verna. Did you just drop her off, at the project?”
“Actually,” I said truthfully, trusting my face, that thin-skinned traitor, to back me up, “I suggested she might come back here and sleep somewhere. Maybe on the third floor.”
Esther’s eyes narrowed a bit, and her lips with them. “There’s nothing on the third floor,” she said. “Just those old paintings I never work on any more.”
“You should paint again. You were really loosening up, I liked those big angry abstractions you were doing last summer. Verna’s evidently taking art lessons now; she has one tomorrow, that was the reason she gave for not coming back here. So”—I sighed, genuinely exhausted—“I just dropped her off.”
“You didn’t tuck her in? You let her go into that dreadful place unescorted?”
“Baby”—where did I get the “baby”?—“she lives there, she’s the big white queen. That project is to her as water to a fish, as the briar-patch is to Br’er Rabbit.” Even I, I did not say, was feeling more at home there; like any ecological niche, it was more accommodating than one might at first think. Cocky, light in the balls, I pressed my luck: “As to the third floor, I seem to remember an old mattress up there. She wouldn’t have minded that; she sleeps on what they call a futon. The kids now, they think it’s more spiritual than a mattress.”
Esther’s eyes sparked, making unspeakable connections. She said, “I don’t want that slutty girl in the house, I don’t want Richie exposed to her any more than absolutely necessary.” She angrily turned, giving me my favorite view, that iconic view of a woman from the rear.
I went into my study and rescued poor Tillich, another fool for love, from his undignified position face down on the armchair arm beneath my still-burning bridge lamp. Esther and I have different territories within the house, and our estrangement is such that she had left the library in its evident disarray untouched. Since it might be an aeon before I looked into this volume again, I glanced at the last pages, strident with concluding italics. “The salvation of European society from a return to barbarism lies in the hands of socialism.” This had been written in 1933, when Hitler came to power and I had just learned to toddle. Like so much Tillich says, it seemed both true and false. Barbarism had come, and some of it had called itself socialism.
In bed, Esther’s slender, scratchy hands sought me out, to inspect and test me; but though I felt such cheerful lust for her as not for years, I did not trust my elderly body and feigned a sleepiness that insensibly became true sleep, freighted with atrocious dreams of garbled, slashed, babyish bodies displayed on flat surfaces, under strong light.
V
i
In a stable society, traditions accumulate; it has become our custom, Esther’s and mine, to give a large cocktail party in the second week of May, at the juncture where classes give way to the looser travail of final examinations. She insisted that Dale be invited; I did not ask that Verna also be included. She was not an academic—indeed, not even a high-school graduate, for all my guidance and advice—and would have felt ill-at-ease amid our brilliant company. Her comportment at Thanksgiving had not impressed me as discreet, and now we had an achieved small secret to protect.
Since our joint immersion in despair after depositing broken little Paula at the hospital, our communications had been perfunctory, restricted mostly to the enlarging shadow of the Department of Social Services over our tenuously connected lives. The department had been that next morning informed of the curious nature of Paula’s green-stick fracture, and when the diligent art student did show up at the hospital—closer to two o’clock than at the promised noon—to retrieve her child, she found there her “worker,” who had been described to me as big and black and very smart and stuffy and who was by no means amused at having missed her own lunch while Verna dawdled over hers. In her panic at seeing access to her daughter barred, Verna invoked my respectable name, for which I did not thank her. Messy depths had opened under me, where poverty and government merged. You sleep with somebody in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.
Esther, bless her, accompanied me to our conference in the big brick city building across from the adult-pastry shop, and it was she, unusually animated and authoritative, who proposed the acceptable compromise to the two executors of welfare present: Verna’s plump but muscular worker, her gilt-and-ruby half-glasses attached to a velvet cord that drooped regally from either ear, and a fretful gaunt white man with skin as dingy as paper shuffled with carbon paper. A Form 51A had been filed by the hospital, he informed us, and it couldn’t be filed away without notation of action.
Esther had worked for a lawyer and they, of course, like social workers and clergymen, dwell in that chiaroscuro where our incorrigible selves intertwine with society’s fumbling discipline. The board that sat behind Verna’s social worker, much as the Nicene Council sat behind the barefoot and bibulous village priest in those imperfect centuries, had recommended that Verna seek psychiatric counselling along with her parents. Esther pointed out that her parents were many states away and that the father, as a resolute Christian, had turned his back on his daughter.
I chuckled at that, but no one else even smiled; they saw no paradox. Nor did our Saviour: He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
There also was the embarrassment, from the standpoint of social order, that (as Esther further pointed out) no one had admitted or could prove that Verna had injured her child. Paula herself, Exhibit A, sat there in her mother’s lap, in a leg cast upon which Verna had painted in watercolor some realistic flowers and idealized hearts. Perhaps these hearts softened the social workers’; or perhaps it was Esther’s firm-sounding offer that Verna would voluntarily seek counselling. And we, she and I, she unexpectedly volunteered, would promise to share the guardianship of Paula with her mother; the day-care center already had de facto custody of the child for much of most days, and we would be willing to take the child for as many nights as Verna felt she needed to recover her poise and take possession of her life. These last pretty phrases startled us all and gave a kind of glistening frame to what had seemed a rather shabby picture.
In the end, warily and wearily, Esther’s assurances were accepted, with due notations clipped to form 51A, as the best deal the system could strike until Paula’s next leg was broken and the state could move with due process to assume custody and place her in an official foster home. This threat was delivered by the male worker, whose smudged features were eerily mobile: his lower lip kept sliding into prominence with a kind of rubbery preening as he chewed his melancholy, chastening words.
I watched to see if Verna and Esther made eye contact at any point in these transactions. The chemistry between two women we have fucked fascinates us, perhaps, with the hope that a collusion will be struck to achieve our total, perpetual care. Though Esther in her animated gestures several times reached out to touch Verna as one would Exhibit B, I saw no actual contact occur; rather, Esther’s long-nailed fingers froze an inch above the skin of Verna’s forearm, whose fine hairs responsively rose up, bristling. The girl was holding Paula on her lap with the stunned obstinacy of one who resists having a tooth pulled even though it hurts. Her short-lashed, slightly slanted eyes pinkly filled with tears from time to time and then dried, emptying down her cheeks, at which she bumped ineffectually with the back of one hand. In her lap, Paula—lighter in tone than Verna’s worker by three notches, yet with an identically shaped, bridgeless nose—prattled, cooed, solemnly stared in mimicry of our grown-up solemn stares, and gave friendly pats to the knee of her cast, where the stem of
a rather skillfully rendered purple iris curved with the plaster. Verna’s art lessons were paying off.
And so it was that some afternoons and evenings and nights Paula came to stay with us on Malvin Lane, while Verna exercised elsewhere her constitutional right to pursue happiness. My sexual jealousy roused itself only after midnight, in that casket of an hour, the clock’s weest, wherein she and I, poppets ever smaller with the passage of time, had copulated. Esther, drugged by her dose of synthetic motherhood and noisily converted to mouth-breathing by this May’s onslaught of pollen, snored steadily at my side. Even then, I remembered my niece’s unscrolling, fatty, yet tightly valved white body with more dread than desire; two weeks had passed and I had night and morning checked myself by the bathroom glare for signs of any of those new state-of-the-art venereal diseases that have nipped the sexual revolution, so to speak, in its buds. No intimate pimple or furtive urinary burning had yet shown, but I did not feel safe, would never feel safe. I had been contaminated, if not by herpes or AIDS, by DSS; from my corbelled limestone academic precincts I had been dragged down into that sooty brick parish of common incurable muddle and woe from which I had escaped twice before, in leaving Cleveland, and in leaving the ministry. Now I had an illegitimate mulatto child under my roof, along with an adulterous wife and a son with learning disabilities. By what you use, you are used, per carnem. I have filed as mere psychological data the sublime buoyancy, the joy of release with which I had driven home from Verna that moonless misty night, through the wheatfield of waving skeletons while dead-as-dust Scarlatti jubilated on and on.
Indeed, it has occurred to me that in my sensation of peace post coitum, of sweet theistic certainty beneath the remote vague ceiling, of living proof at Verna’s side, I was guilty of heresy, the heresy of which the Cathars and Fraticelli were long ago accused amid the thunders of anathema—that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God’s forgiveness can magnificently play. Más, más. But thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God.
