by John Updike
‘Hi,’ Sally said, behind him, beside him. ‘You feel free?’
‘Are we free?’
‘Of some things.’ Saying this, she flipped back her hair and took a long step. She was tired. Bobby and Theodora had both been airsick above the checkerboard of the heartland states. Because Bobby was most like his father, Jerry found himself playing to him, whether attempting to overcome an instinctive dislike, or appealing to that odious authority he had felt in Richard, he couldn’t decide. Now he asked the boy, ‘How goes it, skipper?’
‘My throat’s sore,’ Bobby said, hiding his face against his mother’s thigh.
‘You’re thirsty,’ Jerry told him. ‘We’ll get you a Coke in the airport.’
‘I want a grape soda,’ Bobby said.
‘Where’s a cowboy?’ Peter asked. Already he seemed to have taken upon himself, young as he was, the task of interceding between his brother and stepfather, distracting them from the deadly business never to be settled between them.
‘I’ve seen twenty cowboys,’ Bobby said contemptuously, and it was true, even the mechanics on the field had been wearing ten-gallon hats. Inside the terminal building, there were so many cowboys that it seemed a troupe of dancers, in theatrically taut Levi’s, creased boots, open vests, and string ties, were waiting for a flight back to New York. But, no, these were real men, cured and warped to fit their costumes, which in turn fitted the land. With eyes whittled by weather to a kind of cruel ennui, with uncanny irises from which the sky had scooped all colour, the cowboys studied Sally, her calico beauty. Jerry touched her waist, to show possession and deny impotence – for he felt it was evident that the three children were not his. Sally started at his touch, and with a blankness of fright in her eyes turned and said sharply, ‘I’ll take Theodora while you get the bags.’
‘You can get Bobby a Coke over at that machine. Maybe it has grape soda.’
‘If I get him one I’ll have to get three. He can drink water at the fountain. He’s been throwing up, is why his throat hurts.’
‘I promised the kid a Coke.’
‘You’ll spoil him, Jerry.’
He wondered if he was not, for some dark reason, trying to win this child away from his mother, who seemed harsh. He felt in his situation patterns he had scarcely begun to explore; abruptly, managing all this, even claiming the luggage, which was undeniably theirs, seemed claustrophobically complex and, worse, improper, impious. He had presumed. To steer this ramifying mass of misplacements through the exits into the open appeared impossible.
Sally, sensing some of this, asked, ‘Glad you’re here?’
‘With you, yes.’
‘I’ll teach you to ride. You’ll look great on a horse.’
‘I’ll break my neck.’
‘Look, there are our bags. Theodora, don’t.’ The child, set down on her own legs on the floor, amid the hubbub of the loudspeaking system and the hurrying of the other passengers, had begun to cry. ‘Your new daddy will think you’re not a happy girl.’
‘Want Coke too,’ she said.
‘Here,’ Jerry told Sally. ‘Three dimes.’
Once the baggage had been collected, and the porter bribed, and a taxi secured, the spirit of adventure – the command to gamble that the parables enjoin upon us – united them again. Bobby sat up with the driver, Jerry and Sally and the two younger children occupied the rear. The taxi was a deep old Pontiac driven by an Indian. His voice, when he inquired after their destination, was deep and careful, as if each word were unearthed, or mentally translated from a language older than English. Bobby stared, frankly fascinated, at the greasy black hair and leathery cheek and the beadwork fetishes hanging from the rearview mirror, and Jerry relaxed, having for the moment appeased this intimidating child, his new conscience. The road, which upon leaving the airport had moved through treeless suburbs with slow-down bumps at the intersections, headed into the plain, and Jerry’s first impression, of benevolent spaciousness, was restored to him. He guessed, from the guidebooks he had read, at buffalo grass, at shooting stars and bluebells; there were peaceful spaces between the clumps of sagebrush where nothing offered to grow. Rather than greet so much joy alone he eased an arm behind the children’s backs and interlaced his fingers with Sally’s. She had been staring, dazed, at the monotonous land. Her touch was bony and tense, with that texture of having done work that he loved. Though she returned his timid pressure, which offered to shelter her, the corner of her mouth crimped with a fractional regret, as if acknowledging that she could no longer give freely what, through earning it, he had imposed on her as a duty. It was as if a chemical had been dropped. The air changed, slightly, but enough to tip the precarious balance of their mutual illusion. The smell of sage intensified; their speed had increased; pale green growths scudded by so quickly their tint became blue. The Indian’s head jutted impassively against the light. The children’s heads, finely outlined in black, appeared frozen; Jerry called ‘Hey?’ and Sally didn’t answer; the desert around them, and they with it, evaporated, vanished, never had been.
Jerry and Ruth descended at Nice. As the plane banked, the glittering Mediterranean leaped upward at them; the pilot had made a fatal mistake. At the last moment, like a card dealt from the bottom of the deck, land was flipped under them; the wheels touched down with a strut-cracking shudder; everything swayed, the engines reversed furiously; and they were down. Charlie laughed. The little tile-roofed houses of the Côte d’Azur were pulled slowly past like a string of boxcars as they taxied to a stop. The attachez vos ceintures sign flicked off, then the defense de fumer. They grappled with their coats and stood, and in the murmur of voices around them Jerry heard that the interior of the plane, so plasticized and powder-blue and American at Idlewild, had been annexed to France. Everyone was speaking French, which he could not understand. ‘Au revoir,’ the stewardess said, and they went down the metal steps. The air was soft, clear, and somehow fractionated, Cubistically portioned and dislocated by the diagonal rays of a tepid sun. There were worlds to see here, but Jerry’s eyes were mute; loss had dulled them; his children and his wife carried his senses tottering across a width of coded concrete, through a series of broken impressions. In the patter surrounding the relinquishment of their passports he heard, because it was repeated, with an irritated note of surprise from the blue-uniformed official, ‘Trois enfants.’ Jerry heard his wife talking French to this man and wondered what strange woman this was by his side, who could keep an entire language locked within her. And within the terminal there stood, amid this dreamlike shuffle alien to him, Marlene Dietrich, wearing chamois slacks and high-heeled boots and smoking a cigarette in a long pearl holder. His children, ecstatic at being safe and free, rushed under her gaze, and this ghost, this construct of light and shadow from his own childhood, contemplated them with a frank interest and benevolence unexpected from an apparition.
Marlene Dietrich looked young, behind her battlement of luggage. Jerry saw in her proof of the truth that travel is a forestallment, a method of buying life with miles. He was travelling because Richard’s lawyer had suggested he go away for a while. He had taken a leave from the agency and was going to paint. He and Ruth were going to paint side by side again. He passed through glass into the open, where a rank of taxis, incongruously labelled taxis, waited.
‘A Nice?’ a driver asked, dressed in a coat of a blue Jerry had only seen in paintings.
‘Oui, à Nice, s’il vons plaît,’ Ruth said, blushing as she named the hotel, as if their travel agent might have betrayed them. ‘Votre voiture, est-ce que c’est assez grand pour trois enfants?’
‘Oui, oui, ςα va, madame, les enfants sont petits.’
Charlie got in the front with the driver; the four others got into the rear. Geoffrey whimpered that they were squishing him. ‘We’re all being squished,’ Jerry told him, fighting to fend the congregation in his lungs, which had become morbidly responsive to his nerves.
Ruth said, ‘Everybody look out my window, it�
��s just like a painting.’ On the side of the road away from the sea, a young terrain supported an ancient agriculture; miserly care had partitioned into fields and terraces steep green mountains that, compared to the worn knolls of Connecticut, had just sprung into shape; towns climbed these hills in medieval perspective. Europe was pellucid in colour and in drawing crowded. The tint of grey-green on the near hills, like the nearly colourless shimmer that whips through a woman’s hair as she combs it, must be olive trees. On the other side, the scurvy width of drab sand, scarcely wider than the highway, ribbed with sea-wrack and studded with concrete obstructions, was nothing like what Jerry called a beach, and needed another name. A green sign gave it: PLAGE.
Joanna, squeezed between him and the window, said in a voice of stately detachment, ‘All the road signs have little pictures on.’ He felt she was addressing less her own parents than the ideal parents in grade-school readers – raceless and happy and mechanically fascinated by the workings of reality.
Wanting to be what she wanted, Jerry told her, ‘That’s so dummies like us won’t get lost.’ Everywhere, when you travel, there are clues, signs, instructions. Only at home are there none.
Joanna asked, ‘Why are there so many of those glass places?’
‘Greenhouses?’
‘I guess so.’
‘They’re growing flowers for the perfume industry.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m just guessing.’
A blonde woman, her hair loose to the wind, passed them on a motorscooter. She wore white St Tropez pants and a striped jersey of some sort; Jerry pressed his foot to the floor, to accelerate and overtake her and see her face. His heart raced but the taxi’s speed remained the same. Ruth had turned to watch his face, and what she saw there, rebounding to her own and rebounding back, like the multiplication between two mirrors, filled the small space of the car with a sickening hush and tension. He offered to her weakly, ‘Uncanny.’
Ruth said, ‘You didn’t see her as soon as I did. There was very little resemblance.’
‘Too bad,’ he said. She turned her face away; he felt her spirits sink, and a proportionate exultation lifted his. He took Geoffrey onto his lap, squeezed him, and asked, ‘How goes it, skipper?’
‘Fine.’ The child always said it sadly, with a dragged diphthong, ‘oi’.
‘Still feel squished?’
‘Not so much.’
Charlie, who had been staring fascinated at the taxi driver, turned, his freckled face bright with mischief, and said, ‘He always complains because he’s a baby.’
Geoffrey’s lower lip trembled and his belly billowed beneath his father’s fingers as he took in a breath to cry. Jerry said quickly, ‘Look! We’re coming into a city that says it’s nice!’
They entered Nice; it was like entering a prism. High white hotels basked their façades in a sun that from cornices and canopies struck blue shadows at a precise angle of forty-five degrees. Underneath palm trees, ladies and gentlemen sat in overcoats at round glass tables. Along La Promenade des Anglais strollers were divided exactly into halves of shadow and light, like calendar moons. Jerry glimpsed, actually, a monocle. He saw a woman in a chinchilla jacket buying a dense bouquet of mountain violets in a cone of newspaper as a pair of grey poodles symmetrically entwined her legs in their leashes. Beyond the green railing of the promenade a beach curved into a distance where what appeared to be a fort of a fragile pink overhung the glistening steel of the sea; the beach was entirely of pebbles, loose washed pebbles in whose minuscule caves and crevices the ocean musically sighed as through the gills of an organ. On the shore of this music hovered sun, sparkle, colours, umbrellas. He told Ruth, to tell someone, ‘I love it. I might like it here.’
She took the remark as an aesthetic appraisal and checked it by gazing through her window. ‘Isn’t this where all the kings in exile come?’ she asked.
The taxi turned off this, the Quai des États-Unis, and up a side street past the rusted shed of a flower market and a MAGASIN with filigreed iron balconies. ‘Nous sommes arrivés, mes enfants,’ the driver announced, and turned to include all in the gappy, tobaccoish teeth of a joke. ‘Ve – is – ’ere!’ From the hotel the concierge and two assistants emerged to greet them, greedily, gaily, for at this time of year guests were scarce. It was early November. They followed their baggage in, Ruth leading; they climbed, endlessly, towards a wedding-cake façade, cool stairs of greyish-green marble.
Jerry got off at St Croix. The tropical air, vivid and soft as a gust from an atomizer, that had greeted his face that dawn in San Juan, was drier here. His body felt light and his sensations were pleasantly scattered; he had slept two hours, in a night flight from Idlewild, taken impulsively, to escape constriction. The weight from his lungs had lifted. The terminal was newly built, without doors, so that shade alone marked the difference between within and without. A breeze flowed through, smelling of earth and flowers. Beyond the edge of shade, through the haze of a rhythmic sprinkler and the mesh of an airfield fence, the backwash from the props of the Carib-air plane that had brought him raised a torrent of dust in which the black baggage-handlers hung legless. A low green hill, dull as if its colour had sunk into an unprimed canvas, supported a conical mass Jerry guessed was a ruined sugar mill. The land looked both exhausted and innocent. It seemed the right place for him to have come to.
At the taxi rank, a Negro with a cigarette behind each ear asked him where he wanted to go, Christiansted or Fredericksted. He had not expected there to be a choice. ‘Which do you recommend?’
The Negro shrugged delicately. ‘Your decishun, man. One’s that way and one’s’ – he rolled his eyes to indicate – ‘the other.’
‘So I can’t go to both?’ Jerry said, offering to joke.
Tranquil silence met his self-answering question; he breathed easy, sensing, and beginning to love, the tropical manner of outwaiting everything. He said, ‘All I want is a room and a beach.’ It was March, he had been told the hotels would be growing empty.
The Negro gazed over Jerry’s shoulder, then turned and tenderly opened the door of his taxi. ‘We’ll fix you up fine,’ he said. Jerry got in, and as he waited for the car to move, other Negroes, two and then one more, wandered from the shade of the airport terminal and climbed in with him – one in front with the driver, two in back with him. He was crowded into a corner of the seat. The Negroes, all adult men, giggled and chattered incomprehensively; they talked among themselves a family language of stabbing murmurs and incompleted allusions that was unintelligible, though English. The driver steered the taxi at high speed down the left side of a straight road walled on both sides by sugar cane; another taxi shot towards them also on the wrong side and passed safely, like a miracle worked with mirrors. They passed stone shells showing slots for the axles of vanished millstones, and shacks of overlapping tin, and newer, somehow American houses of white stucco, with louvred windows, bougainvillea, and gutter-fed cisterns. At an intersection, a sign pointed to Upper Love; the taxi stopped, and one Negro got out. The driver asked aloud, in a different voice, meant for Jerry to understand, ‘Would you love to go by de mountens?’
‘Sure,’ he said. Submit. Forget.
They climbed into a region of rough pastures and vast trees with bleached pods hanging stiffly down like the leaves of trees killed in midsummer. Higher and higher views of the turquoise ocean, mottled with lavender, opened and closed. Now a forest closed around them, where hairy vines dipped through clouds of hibiscus and mahogany roots twisting from the earth formed shrine-sized caves by the side of the road. A quicksilver shape darted under the wheel of the taxi, there was conversational excitement within it, and the driver said, in the voice intended for Jerry, ‘Mongoose.’ Rattling around a bend in the wretched, pitted road, they emerged from the forest into the sky and stopped. The pair of Negroes walked away from the car without looking back, towards a home unseen. Jerry realized that he would never see their homes. Moving to the other side of the empty b
ack seat, he saw a ribbon of beach, a thread of highways, a scattering of red roofs from the altitude at which, a month before, he had seen the grey roofs of Queens, packed one against the other like cartons in a storage room.
The engines had roared in a graver key, black water lifted towards them, the children fell silent. Ruth squeezed his hand. The wheels smacked the runway, the great powder-blue body swayed and complained, the moment passed. They were home.
From the bedroom window of the house they had rented in Haut-de-Cagnes, Jerry, gasping from his bed as Ruth lay sleeping the sleep of the just, could see, across the sharp small valley where Modigliani had once lived with his mistress, the constellation Orion. The constellation seemed to be the companion of the sea, and its form, so long-limbed and masculine, constituted a sort of pledge the sight of which comforted him beyond reason, and eased his lungs. Restored to America, he found the constellation hard to find, obscured by the ubiquitous trees, overpowered by artificial lights, and subtly re-oriented in the stellar hemisphere. And when, from some open field, he did sight the solace of his exile, Orion had lost the friendly aura gathered perhaps from the proximate moon-clad body of his watery mistress the Mediterranean, above whose rustling sleep the slain hunter had seemed to watch, awake, propped on one elbow.
Back in Greenwood there was no glimpse of Sally, though Richard, driving a new car, a white Porsche convertible, could be seen around town weekends; once indeed, in the dusk of an unseasonably mild day in March, on a relatively little-travelled road, Jerry saw Richard and Janet Hornung riding together with the top down, looking like children surprised in the bathtub.
The driver took a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it; they were descending towards the beach and the town. A congregation of rocks on a hillside became sheep. There were houses, but no people.
Hey, Sally?
