by John Updike
“Don’t,” Joan whimpered, and cried, as darkness streamed by, torn by headlights.
In bed after the Dennises (it was nearly two; they were numb on brandy; Mack had monologued about conservation and Mrs. Dennis about interior decoration, redoing “her” house, which the Maples still thought of as Eleanor’s), Joan confessed to Richard, “I keep having this little vision—it comes to me anywhere, in the middle of sunshine—of me dead.”
“Dead of what?”
“I don’t know that, all I know is that I’m dead and it doesn’t much matter.”
“Not even to the children?”
“For a day or two. But everybody manages.”
“Sweetie.” He repressed his strong impulse to turn and touch her. He explained, “It’s part of being one with Nature.”
“I suppose.”
“I have it very differently. I keep having this funeral fantasy. How full the church will be, what Spence will say about me in his sermon, who’ll be there.” Specifically, whether the women he has loved will come and weep with Joan; in the image of this, their combined grief at his eternal denial of himself to them, he glimpsed a satisfaction for which the transient satisfactions of the living flesh were a flawed and feeble prelude—merely the backswing. In death, he felt, as he floated on his back in bed, he would grow to his true size.
Joan with their third eye may have sensed his thoughts; where usually she would roll over and turn her sumptuous back, whether as provocation or withdrawal it was up to him to decide, now she lay paralyzed, parallel to him. “I suppose,” she offered, “in a way, it’s cleansing. I mean, you think of all that energy that went into the Crusades.”
“Yes, I dare say,” Richard agreed, unconvinced, “we may be on to something.”
Nevada
Poor Culp. His wife, Sarah, wanted to marry her lover as soon as the divorce came through, she couldn’t wait a day, the honeymoon suite in Honolulu had been booked six weeks in advance. So Culp, complaisant to the end, agreed to pick the girls up in Reno and drive them back to Denver. He arranged to be in San Francisco on business and rented a car. Over the phone, Sarah mocked his plan—why not fly? An expert in petroleum extraction, he hoped by driving to extract some scenic benefit from domestic ruin. Until they had moved to Denver and their marriage exploded in the thinner atmosphere, they had lived in New Jersey, and the girls had seen little of the West.
He arrived in Reno around five in the afternoon, having detoured south from Interstate 80. The city looked kinder than he had expected. He found the address Sarah had given him, a barn-red boardinghouse behind a motel distinguished by a giant flashing domino. He dreaded yet longed for the pain of seeing Sarah again—divorced, free of him, exultant, about to take wing into a new marriage. But she had taken wing before he arrived. His two daughters were sitting on a tired cowhide sofa, next to an empty desk, like patients in a dentist’s anteroom.
Polly, who was eleven, leaped up to greet him. “Mommy’s left,” she said. “She thought you’d be here hours ago.”
Laura, sixteen, rose with a self-conscious languor from the tired sofa, smoothing her skirt behind, and added, “Jim was with her. He got really mad when you didn’t show.”
Culp apologized. “I didn’t know her schedule was so tight.”
Laura perhaps misheard him, answering, “Yeah, she was really uptight.”
“I took a little detour to see Lake Tahoe.”
“Oh, Dad,” Laura said. “You and your sightseeing.”
“Were you worried?” he asked.
“Naa.”
A little woman with a square jaw hopped from a side room behind the empty desk. “They was good as good, Mr. Culp. Just sat there, wouldn’t even take a sandwich I offered to make for no charge. Laura here kept telling the little one, ‘Don’t you be childish, Daddy wouldn’t let us down.’ I’m Betsy Morgan, we’ve heard of each other but never met officially.” Sarah had mentioned her in her letters: Morgan the pirate, her landlady and residency witness. Fred Culp saw himself through Mrs. Morgan’s eyes: cuckold, defendant, discardee. Though her eye was merry, the hand she offered him was dry as a bird’s foot.
He could only think to ask, “How did the proceedings go?”
The question seemed foolish to him, but not to Mrs. Morgan. “Seven minutes, smooth as silk. Some of these judges, they give a girl a hard time just to keep themselves from being bored. But your Sary stood right up to him. She has that way about her.”
“Yes, she did. Does. More and more. Girls, got your bags?”
“Right behind the sofy here. I would have kept their room one night more, but then this lady from Connecticut showed up yesterday could take it for the six weeks.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take them someplace with a pool.”
“They’ll be missed, I tell you truly,” the landlady said, and she kissed the two girls on their cheeks. This had been a family of sorts, there were real tears in her eyes; but Polly couldn’t wait for the hug to pass before blurting to her father, “We had pool privileges at the Domino, and one time all these Mexicans came and used it for a bathroom!”
They drove to a motel not the Domino. Laura and he watched Polly swim. “Laura, don’t you want to put on a suit?”
“Naa. Mom made us swim so much I got diver’s ear.”
Culp pictured Sarah lying on a poolside chaise longue, in the bikini with the orange and purple splashes. One smooth wet arm was flung up to shield her eyes. Other women noticeably had legs or breasts; Sarah’s beauty had been most vivid in her arms, rounded and fine and firm, arms that never aged, without a trace of wobble above the elbow, though at her next birthday she would be forty. Indeed, that was how Sarah had put the need for divorce: she couldn’t bear to turn forty with him. As if then you began a return journey that could not be broken.
Laura was continuing, “Also, Dad, if you must know, it’s that time of the month.”
With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair. She climbed from the pool and slapfooted to his side, shivering. “Want to walk around and play the slots?” Goose bumps had erected the white hairs on her thighs into a ghostly halo. “Want to? It’s fun.”
Laura intervened maternally. “Don’t make him, Polly. Daddy’s tired and depressed.”
“Who says? Let’s go. I may never see Reno again.” The city, as they walked, reminded him of New Jersey’s little municipalities. The desert clarity at evening had the even steel glint of industrial haze. Above drab shop fronts, second-story windows proclaimed residence with curtains and a flowerpot. There were churches, which he hadn’t expected. And a river, a trickling shadow of the Passaic, flowed through. The courthouse, Mecca to so many, seemed too modest; it wore the dogged granite dignity of justice the country over. Only the Reno downtown, garish as a carnival midway, was different. Polly led him to doors she was forbidden to enter and gave him nickels to play for her inside. She loved the slot machines, loved them for their fruity colors and their sleepless glow and their sudden gush of release, jingling, lighting, as luck struck now here, now there, across the dark casino. Feeling the silky heave of their guts as he fed the slot and pulled the handle, rewarded a few times with the delicious spitting of coins into the troughs other hands had smoothed to his touch, Culp came to love them, too; he and Polly made a gleeful, hopeful pair, working their way from casino to casino, her round face pressed to the window so she could see him play, and the plums jerk into being, and the bells and cherries do their waltz of chance, 1-2-3. One place was wide open to the sidewalk. A grotesquely large machine stood ready for silver dollars.
Polly said, “Mommy won twenty dollars on that one once.”
Culp asked Laura, who had trailed after them in disdainful silence, “Was Jim with you the whole time?”
“No, he only came the last week.” She searched her father’s face for what he wanted to know. “He stayed at the Domino.”
Polly drew close to lis
ten. Culp asked her, “Did you like Jim?”
Her eyes with difficulty shifted from visions of mechanical delight. “He was too serious. He said the slots were a racket and they wouldn’t get a penny of his.”
Laura said, “I thought he was an utter pill, Dad.”
“You don’t have to think that to please me.”
“He was. I told her, too.”
“You shouldn’t have. Listen, it’s her life, not yours.” On the hospital-bright sidewalk, both his girls’ faces looked unwell, stricken. Culp put a silver dollar into the great machine, imagining that something of Sarah had rubbed off here and that through this electric ardor she might speak to him. But the machine’s size was unnatural; the guts felt sluggish, spinning. A plum, a bar, a star. No win. Turning, he resented that Polly and Laura, still staring, seemed stricken for him.
Laura said, “Better come eat, Dad. We’ll show you a place where they have pastrami like back east.”
As Route 40 poured east, Nevada opened into a strange no-color—a rusted gray, or the lavender that haunts the corners of overexposed color slides. The Humboldt River, which had sustained the pioneer caravans, shadowed the expressway, tinting its valley with a dull green that fed dottings of cattle. But for the cattle, and the cars that brushed by him as if he were doing thirty and not eighty miles an hour, and an occasional gas station and cabin café promising SLOTS, there was little sign of life in Nevada. This pleased Culp; it enabled him to run off in peace the home movies of Sarah stored in his head. Sarah pushing the lawn mower in the South Orange back yard. Sarah pushing a blue baby carriage, English, with little white wheels, around the fountain in Washington Square. Sarah, not yet his wife, waiting for him in a brown-and-green peasant skirt under the marquee of a movie house on Fifty-seventh Street. Sarah, a cool suburban hostess in chalk-pink sack dress, easing through their jammed living room with a platter of parsleyed egg halves. Sarah after a party, drunk in a black lace bra, doing the Twist at the foot of their bed. Sarah in blue jeans crying out that it was nobody’s fault, that there was nothing he could do, just let her alone; and hurling a quarter-pound of butter across the kitchen, so the calendar fell off the wall. Sarah in miniskirt leaving their house in Denver for a date, just like a teen-ager, the sprinkler on their flat front lawn spinning in the evening cool. Sarah trim and sardonic at the marriage counsellor’s, under the pressed-paper panelling where the man had hung not only his diplomas but his Aspen skiing medals. Sarah some Sunday long ago raising the shades to wake him, light flooding her translucent nightgown. Sarah lifting her sudden eyes to him at some table, some moment, somewhere, in conspiracy—he hadn’t known he had taken so many reels, they just kept coming in his head. Nevada beautifully, emptily poured by. The map was full of ghost towns. Laura sat beside him, reading the map. “Dad, here’s a town called Nixon.”
“Let’s go feel sorry for it.”
“You passed it. It was off the road after Sparks. The next real town is Lovelock.”
“What’s real about it?”
“Should you be driving so fast?”
In the back seat, Polly struggled with her needs. “Can we stop in the next real town to eat?”
Culp said, “You should have eaten more breakfast.”
“I hate hash browns.”
“But you like bacon.”
“The hash browns had touched it.”
Laura said, “Polly, stop bugging Daddy, you’re making him nervous.”
Culp told her, “I am not nervous.”
Polly told her, “I can’t keep holding it.”
“Baby. You just went less than an hour ago.”
“I’m nervous.”
Culp laughed. Laura said, “You’re not funny. You’re not a baby any more.”
Polly said, “Yeah, and you’re not a wife, either.”
Silence.
“Nobody said I was.”
Nevada spun by. Sarah stepped out of a car, their old Corvair convertible, wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Her hair was stiff and sun-bleached and wild. She was eating a hot dog loaded with relish. Culp looked closer and there was sand in her ear, as in a delicate discovered shell.
Polly announced, “Dad, that sign said a place in three miles. ‘Soft Drinks, Sandwiches, Beer, Ice, and Slots.’ ”
“Slots, slots,” Laura spat, furious for a reason that eluded her father. “Slots and sluts, that’s all there is in this dumb state.”
Culp asked, “Didn’t you enjoy Reno?”
“I hated it. What I hated especially was Mom acting on the make all the time.”
“On the make,” “sluts”—the language of women living together, it occurred to him, coarsens like that of men in the Army. He mildly corrected, “I’m sure she wasn’t on the make, she was just happy to be rid of me.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Dad. She was on the make. Even with Jim about to show up she was.”
“Yeah, well,” Polly said, “you weren’t that pure yourself, showing off for that Mexican boy.”
“I wasn’t showing off for any bunch of spics, I was practicing my diving, and I suggest you do the same, you toad. You look like a sick frog, the way you go off the board. A sick fat frog.”
“Yeah, well. Mommy said you weren’t so thin at my age yourself.”
Culp intervened: “It’s nice to be plump at your age. Otherwise, you won’t have anything to shape up when you’re Laura’s age.”
Polly giggled, scandalized. Laura said, “Don’t flirt, Dad,” and crossed her thighs; she was going to be one of those women, Culp vaguely saw, who have legs. She smoothed back the hair from her brow in a gesture that tripped the home-movie camera again: Sarah before the mirror. He could have driven forever this way; if he had known Nevada was so easy, he could have planned to reach the Utah line, or detoured north to some ghost towns. But they had made reservations in Elko, and stopped there.
The motel was more of a hotel, four stories high; on the ground floor, a cavernous dark casino glimmered with the faces of the slots and the shiny uniforms of the change girls. Though it was only three in the afternoon, Culp wanted to go in there, to get a drink at the bar, where the bottles glowed like a row of illumined stalagmites. But his daughters, after inspecting their rooms, dragged him out into the sunshine. Elko was a flat town, full of space, as airy with emptiness as an old honeycomb. The broad street in front of the hotel held railroad tracks in its center. To Polly’s amazed delight, a real train—nightmarish in scale but docile in manner—materialized on these tracks, halted, ruminated, and then ponderously, thoughtfully dragged westward its chuckling infinity of freight cars. They walked down broad sunstruck sidewalks, past a drunken Indian dressed in clothes as black as his shadow, to a museum of mining. Polly coveted the glinting nuggets, Laura yawned before a case of old-fashioned barbed wire and sought her reflection in the glass. Culp came upon an exhibit, between Indian beads and pioneer hardware, incongruously devoted to Thomas Alva Edison. He and Sarah and the girls, driving home through the peppery stenches of carbon waste and butane from a Sunday on the beach at Point Pleasant, would pass a service island on the Jersey Turnpike named for Edison. They would stop for supper at another one, named for Joyce Kilmer. The hot tar on the parking lot would slightly yield beneath their rubber flip-flops. Sarah would go in for her hot dog wearing her dashiki beach wrapper—hip-length, with slits for her naked arms. These lovely arms would be burned pink in the crooks. The sun would have ignited a conflagration of clouds beyond the great retaining tanks. Here, in Elko, the sun rested gently on the overexposed purple of the ridges around them. On the highest ridge a large letter E had been somehow cut, or inset, in what seemed limestone. Polly asked why.
He answered, “I suppose for airplanes.”
Laura amplified, “If they don’t put initials up, the pilots can’t tell the towns apart, they’re all so boring.”
“I like Elko,” Polly said. “I wish we lived here.”
“Yeah, what would Daddy do for a living?”
This was hard. In real life, he was a chemical engineer for a conglomerate that was planning to exploit Colorado shale. Polly said, “He could fix slot machines and then at night come back in disguise and play them so they’d pay him lots of money.”
Both girls, it seemed to Culp, had forgotten that he would not be living with them in their future, that this peaceful dusty nowhere was an exception to the rule. He took Polly’s hand, crossing the railroad tracks, though the tracks were arrow-straight and no train was materializing between here and the horizon.
Laura flustered him by taking his arm as they walked into the dining room, which was beyond the dark grotto of slots. The waitress slid an expectant glance at the child, after he had ordered a drink for himself. “No. She’s only sixteen.”
When the waitress had gone, Laura told him, “Everybody says I look older than sixteen; in Reno with Mom, I used to wander around in the places and nobody ever said anything. Except one old fart who told me they’d put him in jail if I didn’t go away.”
Polly asked, “Daddy, when’re you going to play the slots?”
“I thought I’d wait till after dinner.”
“That’s too long.”
“O.K., I’ll play now. Just until the salad comes.” He took a mouthful of his drink, pushed up from the table, and fed ten quarters into a machine that Polly could watch. Though he won nothing, being there, amid the machines’ warm and fantastic colors, consoled him. Experimenting, he pressed the button marked CHANGE. A girl in a red uniform crinkling like embers came to his side inquisitively. Her face, though not old, had the Western dryness—eyes smothered in charcoal, mouth tightened as if about to say, I thought so. But something sturdy and hollow-backed in her stance touched Culp with an intuition. It was a little like oil extraction: you just sensed it, below the surface. Her uniform’s devilish cut bared her white arms to the shoulder. He gave her a five-dollar bill to change into quarters. The waitress was bringing the salad. Heavy in one pocket, he returned to the table.
