by John Updike
He had rarely seen their friends except on weekends anyway, and in these days of domestic confusion his defection and part-time reappearance were casually accepted. The Reynoldses, of the couples they had known together, were kindest and most attentive to Carol in her singleness, and came by the house oftenest. Pat and she shared garden-club trips, aerobics classes, a night course in the English Romantic poets at the local community college. The Marston children gave Pat the logical nickname of Little Foot, as if by verbal magic to knit the Reynoldses closer together. “The Feet are here again,” one would shout, and Ed, if he was caught in the house, would sometimes have to make a fourth at tennis.
He always insisted that he and Pat be partners. That way, the sides were most even. Jason was a well-schooled but lumbering player, and Carol’s insouciance, her good-humored indifference to the exact outcome, undermined her natural grace at the game. Ed had a weak backhand but killer instinct at the net, and little Pat played, it seemed to him, like a weakly wound-up machine. She moved back and forth as if on tiptoe and her movements minced in the sides of his vision. Across the net from her, Ed would have gobbled up her ladylike forehands and pounded them back at her. As it was, he would growl, “Let’s go get ’em, Pat,” and count on her to cover the back line as he lunged from side to side, looking for the winning volley. The matches were fun, especially when fussy, no-fat-on-me Jason began to tut and mutter to himself, and Carol grew rosy in the face as she tried to play to please her lover while both acknowledging Ed’s ironic glances and keeping her expression blank for Pat’s benefit.
In a way, it was the three of them against Pat. Or was it the three of them keeping her safe in her bubble of ignorance? Ed felt alternately that they were a deceit machine, chewing her up, and a kind of cradle, holding her above the abyss. For what, really, he asked himself, would telling her the truth have done but force her to act and perhaps plunge them all into disaster? How much did Pat suspect? Nothing, it appeared, which seemed incredible to Ed; just looking at Jason and Carol across the net, hearing their mutual encouragements, feeling the easy warmth their partnership gave off should have told Pat the tale. Once he joked to her, “You know what they look like, those two? Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat.” It was true: in the stress of their long affair, Jason had become even thinner and Carol plumper. Pat laughed politely but emptily, intent on her serve. Though her strokes lacked fire, she did like to win; this much was human about her, and intelligible, and likable.
She was the youngest, their baby, not quite forty; and Ed, at forty-five, felt like the daddy, only playing at playing. His sense of their spatial relations, out on the court, was of himself enclosing the three others and of keeping them, with transparent lines of force, apart, as if under his direction had been struck one of those balances of gravity and inertia, rigidity and mass that form islands of stability within the universe. Pat’s ignorance, he decided, was a function of her social complacence, and thus more annoying than pitiable. She had snobbishly willed herself to be sexually blind.
Only once, that long sunny fall they shared, was he physically stirred by her; after three sets she complained of a blister, and on the bench by the side of the court took off her sneaker and sock. Little Foot. The neatness that through the rest of her body seemed rather wooden and mechanical here in her bare, pale foot was exquisite; here in the long low late-afternoon rays that slanted upon them, imprinting their sweaty bodies and tennis outfits with the fencing’s shadowy lozenges, Pat’s sharp, small anklebones and metatarsal tendons and unpainted toenails roused in Ed a desire to kneel in slobbering self-abasement and to kiss this tidy white piece of woman, to whose golden sole adhered a few cinnamon-red grains of clay-court topping.
Pat felt his eyes feasting on her foot and looked up as if he were a shoe salesman who had failed to answer a perfectly reasonable question. The moment passed.
“Doesn’t she think it strange,” Ed asked Carol, “always getting stuck with us, always being dragged here?”
“She likes me,” Carol said, with her endearing insouciance. “She feels sorry for me.”
“Does she ever ask why I left?”
“No. Not really. We don’t discuss that sort of thing. I think she just sees you as a rather wild, unpredictable person and there’s no accounting for what people like you do.”
“As opposed to people like Jason.”
“Mm-hm.” Just thinking of Jason made Carol’s lips draw in as though she were sucking a candy.
“What’s she going to do when she finds out?”
“I don’t know. Ask me to give him up, and I guess I’ll have to.”
“Have you ever thought of giving him up right now, before there’s an ugly crisis?”
Carol sipped at her drink and reminded him, “I offered to, and you said no.”
“That was in relation to us. I’m thinking of it now for your sake. Don’t you ever feel terribly guilty toward her?”
“All the time,” Carol confessed—rather cheerfully, Ed thought.
“Aren’t you ever afraid I’m going to tell her?”
“No. That’s the last thing you’d ever do.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a coward,” she promptly, lightly said, and softened it to “The same reason nobody tells her—even her own children. They discuss it with mine. Ours. We’re all cowards. Anyway, what would be in it for you? You got your exit visa, you don’t care what happens to us back in the old country.”
“Oh, but I do. I do. Apparently I wasn’t a very satisfactory husband for you. I’m trying to arrange one for you that is.”
“That’s very kind of you, dear,” Carol said. Ed couldn’t tell if she was being ironic. His deceptions included this ambiguity toward Carol: was he aiming truly to be rid of her or in some circuitous way to win her back—to show her who, underneath all, was boss?
He always boarded the train south, back to his apartment and his block, with some relief to be out of the suburban cat’s-cradle he had helped weave. But his life, his life as his reptile brain grasped it, was still back there, witnessing Carol’s wifely blushes on the other side of the net and the other woman’s exposed bare foot, like the helpless cold foot of a cadaver, in the warm sunset light. Sunday nights, in bed, he could not stop replaying the tennis match, its diagonals and elastic, changing distances. Round watching faces, children’s faces in the grandstands—though in fact the children rarely came to watch; they snubbed it all—became frustratingly confused with the fuzzy balls being battered back and forth. Eventually he would fall asleep, with no boundary between insomnia and dream and no healing sense, when he awoke, of having slept soundly. Being alone in bed made even a small room seem large, and reverberant, like a great drum with the ceiling for a skin.
At last, mercifully, the weather became too cold for tennis. He did not want to face Pat anymore, however securely this woman was sealed in her bubble of unknowing. The lovers had come to accept their precarious situation as settled, and Ed’s complicity as their right. His role as confidant subtly expanded to that of pander. Carol took to asking, in that casual, irresistible way of hers, if they could borrow his apartment during the day, when he was off at work. Returning through the winter dark, he would find his bed made with an alien neatness, and sometimes a bottle of wine in the refrigerator, or his Martini pitcher used as a vase for a bright bouquet of flowers, the kind of bouquet peddled, in a paper cone, at subway entrances or from gloomy traffic islands.
The city was slowly absorbing Ed. He had made a few friends, if not commitments, and asked that on weekends Carol send the children, those young enough still to be interested, in on the train. The echoing halls of the Museum of Natural History welcomed him back from his own childhood; many of the exhibits were jazzier, and pedagogic voices talked from the walls, but the extinct creatures had not aged, and the African dioramas still had the same airless, suspenseful enchantment of Christmas windows along Fifth Avenue. A dry tuft of foreground grass or a few presumably geologically
accurate pebbles scattered to lend verisimilitude would fascinate him, as if these humble details, just inches inside the great glass pane, had a secret vitality denied the stiff stuffed creatures at the center of the exhibit. When, late that winter, Pat’s bubble at last broke, Ed felt well removed from the crisis, which was muffled by a snowstorm in any case. Carol kept phoning him, and several times a cloud of static overwhelmed her voice, and the connection was broken.
Apparently a maiden aunt of Pat’s, who lived in the next town to the south, in one of those big Hudson River houses that had not yet been condominiumized, had seen Jason and Carol in a car together, at eight-thirty on a weekday morning. Ed knew it was their habit for Jason to miss the train that Pat had dropped him off to catch, walk a block or two to where Carol would pick him up, and then take the next train from the station farther down the line; in this way they stole a half-hour for themselves. A dangerous habit, and hardly worth it, Ed had advised Carol long ago. But the little wifely act of putting Jason on a train had been precious to her. The aunt, seeing them with dim eyes from her own moving car, had thought Carol must be Pat, but heavier than she had ever seen her, with bushier hair, and the car didn’t seem exactly familiar, either; yet there was no mistaking Jason—that long head, thin as a knife. Troubled by the possibility that she was going senile and seeing things, the innocent old lady telephoned to have her vision confirmed.
“Evidently,” Carol told Ed, “Pat very coolly lied and said yes, she had been taking Jason to a different station because they had dropped off their other car at a gas station near the town line.”
“What she could have said that would have been better,” Ed pointed out, “was that Jason had accepted a ride that particular morning with a woman they both know who also commutes. It happens all the time. I assume you were driving the Honda.”
“It needs its snow tires, by the way. I totally forgot to have them put on. I’ve been nearly getting killed.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, I guess she stewed all day, but still hoped Jason would have some explanation when he came back. But this image, of a fat woman with messy hair, she instantly connected with me. How do you like that for an insult?”
Ed saw Carol’s expression as she said this, her self-mocking face, eyes rounded, corners of her lips drawn down. It occurred to him that Pat had been snobbishly unable to believe that he and Carol, messy and clownish as they were, could ever do anything that would matter, seriously, to herself and her husband. “Well, he’s here. I mean, he was here. He’s had to go back because she isn’t there, it turns out.” In a flurry of static, an annoyed operator came on and told them that this line was being preëmpted for an emergency call. In the imposed silence, snow continued to pile up in parallel ridges on the fire escape. The lights of upper Broadway were burning a yellow-pink patch into the streaming sky. An occasional siren could be heard, trying to clear a path for itself, but the city was inexorably filling up with a smothering, peaceable snow. Ed paced back and forth; his hands, as he mixed himself a drink, were jumping. His old calculations were being upheld, miles and miles away.
Carol got through in an hour and continued her story. “Well, she’s apparently left the house. Leaving the two children there. In the middle of this blizzard. It’s crazy. Jason is very upset, but I think it’s just her rigid way of doing things. She has no sense,” she said, in the pedagogic voice of the experienced woman, “of riding with the punches.”
“Was her reaction anger, or despair, or what?”
Carol paused before selecting, “Indignation. She was indignant, first off, that her aunt had been sullied somehow; she thinks that idiotic family of hers is something sacred. Then I guess she was indignant that Jason couldn’t come up with a cover story that would get us all off the hook; he says he’d just come off the train after a rotten day at the bank and was too tired to think. So instead he kind of collapsed and told her everything. What really got to her, what she couldn’t get over, was how everybody except her had known or guessed about us for years. She kept reliving everything, all these little moments that came back. She had even seen us holding hands a couple of times, it turns out, but couldn’t believe her eyes.”
“Was she especially sore at me? It must have come out that I knew, too.”
Carol paused again; Ed felt she was being tactful. “Not especially. I don’t think they discussed you much. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re really a very minor figure in all this. It was more the notion of the community at large, of looking like a fool in front of everybody for so long.”
“In her pretty bubble,” Ed said. Carol had been right: he was a coward. For a year he had been dreading the phone call from Pat asking for a conference, asking him what he knew. The call had never come; in her doughty innocence she had never asked, and he had been almost grovellingly grateful to her for that. Perhaps she too had done some stress analysis. Now, evidently, she had stormed out of the house, in the thick of a blizzard. She had cracked. Ed circled the room in his triumph, in his agitation. All night, as the plows on the street kept scraping holes in his sleep, he imagined that Pat, who was missing, would rap on his door. The secret he had so long kept was off his hands, and out whirling in the world. The voice of the wind was her voice, so coolly and multiply wronged. He would comfort her, she would take off her soaked boots and be barefoot, exposing again that little foot so tidily formed and yet somehow in essence immature, a child’s foot, ignorant, luminous.… He awoke, and it was morning, and a stark brilliance like that of an offended angel stood at the window. The sky was blank blue, and a hush as of guilt lay everywhere. With scraping shovels and whining tires, the city began to put itself back together.
Pat, it turned out, had done the conventional thing: she had fled to her mother’s, on Long Island. “She drove right across greater New York,” Carol explained to Ed, “along all these choked highways, through this blinding storm.”
“What an epic,” he said, relieved that Pat was still alive.
“I’ve been talking to Jason about it,” Carol said, as loosely chatty as if to a psychotherapist, “and as I told him, I think it was typical. Everything with her has to be black or white; she has no feeling for gray areas.”
Pat never returned to the husband or the town that had deceived her. The teen-aged children elected to stay with their schools and friends, which meant that they stayed with their father, which meant that Carol coped. The two households were gradually merged into one. Mothering the wounded and hostile Reynolds children suited Carol’s talents better than the zoning commission. In the summer, Jason moved in with her—he had always coveted, Ed thought, their bigger yard, and tennis court, and the stand of woods out back, and the screen of tall arborvitae in front, between the house and the road. The Marston children coined a nickname for their mother: they called her Happy Foot. Pat at her distance disdained the new realities as she had disdained the old; though initially she had all society’s sympathy and legal bias on her side, her rigid, vindictive behavior, especially toward her own children (they, too, had known, she maintained, and had kept her in the dark), eroded her advantages, and by the fall Jason’s lawyer saw no insurmountable obstacle to achieving divorce and custody, though Pat had vowed to give him neither.
Ed was kept abreast of all this not only through Carol, whose calls gradually became less frequent and less confiding, but through the children and their visits, and through Georgene Fuller, his lanky friend of old, who also paid visits. His interest in the episode lessened, as toward any completed job. His former wife was happy, his children were virtually adult, and the new Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds (who honeymooned in St. Thomas) sent him, when February rolled round once again, a homemade valentine.
On a bright day one April—the squinting, wincing kind when winter’s grit is swirled from the city streets and green garbage bags torn by dogs go loping down the sidewalks—Ed saw Pat Reynolds a half-block away. It was an unlikely neighborhood, the West Thirties, to bump i
nto anyone you knew. He was hurrying to a dreaded appointment with his periodontist; he had fallen into the hands of a team of young specialists who were going to give him, in their cheery words, “a new mouth.” Root canals, refashioned crowns and bridges—but the worst of all was the gum work, with tiny quick knives and sickles and scrapers, by a humming young man who wore a thick gold chain around his neck.
Pat, when Ed thought of her, was another kind of soreness, an ache as if a rib had been long ago removed or as if, that first glaring morning after the snowstorm, the side of him toward the window had been exposed to radiation. In all the world she was the person he least wanted to see. He considered ducking into a jeweller’s entryway, or hiding in a store that offered souvenirs to the tourists straggling back from the Empire State Building; but his appointment wouldn’t wait, and Pat’s face was momentarily turned the other way. She wore a bright red scarf on her head and carried a shopping bag, which, with her sneakers and black raincoat, gave her a forlorn, wandering air. He had the irrational impression that she was in this neighborhood for some sort of medical attention also; she was hesitating right in front of the very entryway, a large mustard-colored arch, that he must pass through to have his gums cut. He had almost slipped by, squinting against the gritty wind, when she turned her head and recognized him.
