The Early Stories

by John Updike

  The baby-sitter—their English-French dictionary gave no equivalent, and bébé-sitter, as a joke, was funnier than une qui s’assied avec les bébés—was named, easily enough, Marie, and was a short, healthy widow of about forty who each noon when she arrived would call “Bonjour, monsieur!” to Kenneth with a gay, hopeful ring that seemed to promise ripe new worlds of communication between them. She spoke patiently and distinctly, and in a few days had received from Janet an adequate image of their expectations and had communicated in turn such intricate pieces of information as that her husband had died suddenly of a heart attack (“Cœur—bom!”—her arm quickly striking from the horizontal into the vertical) and that the owners and summer residents of their villa were a pair of homosexuals (hands fluttering at her shoulders—“Pas de femmes. Jamais de femmes!”) who hired boys from Nice and Cannes for “dix mille pour une nuit.” “Nouveaux francs?” Kenneth asked, and she laughed delightedly, saying, “Oui, oui,” though this couldn’t be right; no boy was worth two thousand dollars a night. Marie was tantalizing, for he felt within her, as in a locked chest, inaccessible wealth, and he didn’t feel that Janet, who was stiffly fearful, in conversing with her, of making a grammatical mistake, was gaining access either. As a result, the children remained hostile and frightened. They were accustomed, in Boston, to two types of baby-sitters: teen-age girls, upon whom his elder daughter, aged seven, inflicted a succession of giggling crushes, and elderly limping women, of whom the grandest was Mrs. Shea. She had a bosom like a bolster and a wispy saintly voice in which, apparently, as soon as the Harrises were gone, she would tell the children wonderful stories of disease, calamity, and anatomical malfunction. Marie was neither young nor old, and, hermetically sealed inside her language, she must have seemed to the children as grotesque as a fish mouthing behind glass. They clustered defiantly around their parents, routing Janet out of her nap, pursuing Kenneth into the field where he had gone to sketch, leaving Marie alone in the kitchen, whose floor she repeatedly mopped in an embarrassed effort to make herself useful. And whenever their parents left together, the children, led by the oldest, wailed shamelessly while poor Marie tried to rally them with energetic “ooh”s and “ah”s. It was a humiliating situation for everyone, and Kenneth was vexed by the belief that his wife, in an hour of undivided attention, could easily have built between the baby-sitter and the children a few word bridges that would have adequately carried all this stalled emotional traffic. But she, with the stubborn shyness that was alternately her most frustrating and most appealing trait, refused, or was unable, to do this. She was exhausted. One afternoon, after they had done a little shopping for the Christmas that in this country and climate seemed so wan a holiday, Kenneth had dropped her off at the Musée d’Antibes and drove back in their rented Renault to the villa alone.

  Smoke filled the living room. The children and Marie were gathered in silence around a fire she had built in the fireplace. Her eyes looked inquisitively past him when he entered. “Madame,” he explained, “est, uh, visitée?—la musée.”

  Comprehension dawned in her quick face. “Ah, le Musée d’Antibes! Très joli.”

  “Oui. Uh”—he thought he should explain this, so she would not expect him to leave in the car again—“madame est marchée.” In case this was the wrong word, he made walking motions with his fingers, and, unable to locate any equivalent for “back,” added, “ici.”

  Marie nodded eagerly. “À pied.”

  “I guess. Yes. Oui.”

  Then came several rapid sentences that he did not understand at all. She repeated slowly, “Monsieur,” pointing at him, “travaille,” scribbling with her hands across an imaginary sketchbook.

  “Oh. Oui. Bon. Merci. Et les enfants?”

  From her flurry of words and gestures he gathered an assurance that she would take care of them. But when he did go outdoors with the pad and paintbox, all three, led by Vera, the two-year-old, irresistibly followed, deaf to Marie’s shrill pleas. Flustered, embarrassed, she came onto the patio.

  “C’est rien,” he told her, and wanted to tell her, “Don’t worry.” He tried to put this into his facial expression, and she laughed, shrugged, and went back into the house. Fort Carré was taking the sun on one chalk-yellow side in the cubistic way that happens only in French light, and the Mediterranean wore a curious double horizon of hazed blue, and Nice in the distance was like a long heap of pale flakes shed by the starkly brilliant Alps beyond. But Vera accidentally kicked the glass of water into the open paint tray, and as he bent to pick it up the freshly wet sketch fell face-down into the grass. He gathered up everything and returned to the house, the children following. Marie was in the kitchen mopping the floor. “I think we should have a French lesson,” he announced firmly. To Marie he added, with an apologetic note of interrogation, “Leçon français?”

  “Une leçon de français,” she said, and they all went into the smoky living room. “Fumée—foof!” she exclaimed, waving her hands in front of her face and opening the side doors. Then she sat down on the bamboo sofa with orange cushions—the two homosexuals had a taste for highly colored, flimsy furniture—and crossed her hands expectantly in her lap.

  “Now,” Kenneth said. “Maintenant. Comment dites-vous—?” He held up a pencil.

  “Le crayon,” Marie said.

  “Le crayon,” Kenneth repeated proudly. How simple, really, it all was. “Nancy, say ‘le crayon.’ ”

  The girl giggled and shuttled her eyes between the two adults, to make sure they were serious. “Luh crrayong,” she said.

  “Bon,” Kenneth said. “Charlie. ‘Le crayon.’ ”

  The boy was four, and his intelligence had a way of unpredictably sinking beneath waves of infantile willfulness. But, after a moment’s hesitation, he brought out “Le crayon” with an expert twang.

  “And Vera? ‘Le crayon’?”

  The baby was just learning English, and he did not press her when she looked startled and said nothing. The lesson continued, through le feu, le bois, la cheminée, and le canapé orange. Having exhausted the objects immediately before them, Kenneth drew, and Marie identified, such basic components of the universe as l’homme, la femme, le garçon, la jeune fille, le chien, le chat, la maison, and les oiseaux. The two older children took to bringing things from other parts of the room—un livre, une bouteille d’encre, un cendrier, and an old soulier of Charlie’s whose mate had mysteriously vanished out in the yard among the giant cactuses. Nancy fetched from her room three paper dolls of great men she had punched from a copy of Réalités left in the house. “Ah,” Marie said. “Jules César, Napoléon, et Charles Baudelaire.”

  Vera toddled into the kitchen and came back with a stale cupcake, which she held out hopefully, her little face radiant.

  “Gâteau,” Marie said.

  “Coogie,” Vera said.

  “Gâteau.”

  “Coogie.”

  “Non, non. Gâteau.”

  “Coogie!”

  “Gâteau!”

  The baby burst into tears. Kenneth picked her up and said, “You’re right, Vera. That’s a cookie.” To the other children he said, “O.K., kids. That’s all for now. Tomorrow we’ll have another lesson. Go outside and play.” He set the baby down. With a frightened backward look at the baby-sitter, Vera followed her brother and sister outdoors. By way of patching things up, Kenneth felt he should stay with Marie and make conversation. Both remained sitting. He wondered how much longer it would be before Janet returned and rescued them. The unaccustomed sensation of yearning for his wife made him feel itchy and suffocated.

  “Le français,” Marie said, spacing her words clearly, “est difficile pour vous.”

  “Je suis très stupide,” he said.

  “Mais non, non, monsieur est très doué, très”—her hand scribbled over an imaginary sketch pad—“adroit.”

  Kenneth winced modestly, unable to frame any disclaimer.

  She directed at him an interrogative sentence which, though sh
e repeated it slowly, with various indications of her hands, he could not understand. “Nyew Yurrk?” she said at last. “Weshington?”

  “Oh. Where do I come from? Here. Les États-Unis.” He took up the pad again, turned a new leaf, and drew the Eastern Seaboard. “Floride,” he said as he outlined the peninsula and, growing reckless, indicated “Le Golfe de Mexique.” He suspected from her blank face that this was wrong. He put in a few dark dots: “Washington, New York, et ici, une heure nord à New York par avion, Boston! Grande ville.”

  “Ah,” Marie said.

  “We live,” Kenneth went on, “uh, nous vivons dans une maison comme ça.” And he found himself drawing, in avidly remembered detail, the front of their house on Marlborough Street, the flight of brown steps with the extra-tall top step, the carpet-sized front lawn with its wrought-iron fence and its single prisoner of forsythia like a weeping princess, the coarse old English ivy that winter never quite killed, the tall bay windows with their transom lights of Tiffany glass; he even put the children’s faces in the second-story windows. This was the window of Vera’s room, these were the ones that Nancy and Charlie watched the traffic out of, this was the living-room window that at this time of year should show a brightly burdened Christmas tree, and up here, on the third story, were the little shuttered windows of the guest bedroom that was inhabited by a ghost with a slender throat, sleek hair, and naked moonlit shoulders. Emotion froze his hand.

  Marie, looking up from the vivid drawing with very dark eyes, asked a long question in which he seemed to hear the words “France” and “pourquoi.”

  “Why did we come to France?” he asked her in English. She nodded. He said what he next said in part, no doubt, because it was the truth, but mainly, probably, because he happened to know the words. He put his hand over his heart and told the baby-sitter, “J’aime une autre femme.”

  Marie’s shapely plucked eyebrows lifted, and he wondered if he had made sense. The sentence seemed foolproof; but he did not repeat it. Locked in linguistic darkness, he had thrown open the most tightly closed window of his life. He felt the relief, the loss of constriction, of a man who has let in air.

  Marie spoke very carefully. “Et madame? Vous ne l’aimez pas?”

  There was a phrase, Kenneth knew, something like “Comme ci, comme ça,” which might roughly outline the immense ambiguous mass of his guilty, impatient, fond, and forlorn feelings toward Janet. But he didn’t dare it, and instead, determined to be precise, measured off about an inch and a half with his fingers and said, “Un petit peu pas.”

  “Ahhhh.” And now Marie, as if the languages had been reversed, was speechless. Various American phrases traditional to his situation—“a chance to get over it,” “for the sake of the kids”—revolved in Kenneth’s head without encountering any equivalent French. “Pour les enfants,” he said at last, gesturing toward the outdoors and abruptly following the direction of his gesture, for Vera had begun to cry in the distance. About twice a day she speared herself on one of the cactuses.

  Janet was walking up the driveway. As he saw her go in to the babysitter he felt only a slight alarm. It didn’t seem possible that he could have been indiscreet in a language he didn’t know. When he came indoors, Marie and his wife were talking at cheerful length about what he gathered to be the charm of Le Musée d’Antibes, and it occurred to him that the reserve that had existed between the two women had been as much the baby-sitter’s as Janet’s. Now, from this afternoon on, Marie became voluble and jolly, open and intime, with her mistress; the two held long kitchen conversations in which womanly intuition replaced whatever was lost in nuances of grammar. The children, feeling the new rapprochement, ceased yowling when their parents went away together, and under Marie’s care developed a somewhat independent French, in which, if pencils were called crayons, crayons must be called pencils. Vera learned the word gâteau and the useful sentence “Je voudrais un gâteau.” As to Kenneth, he was confident, without knowing what the women said to each other, that his strange confession was never mentioned. The bébé-sitter kept between herself and him a noticeable distance, whether as a sign of disapproval or of respect, he could not decide; at any rate, when she was in the house he was encouraged to paint by himself in the fields, and this isolation, wherein his wife’s growing fluency spared him much further trouble of communication, suited his preoccupied heart. In short, they became a ménage.

  Four Sides of One Story

  Tristan

  My love:

  Forgive me, I seem to be on a boat. The shock of leaving you numbed me rather nicely to the usual humiliations of boarding—why is it that in a pier shed everyone, no matter how well-born and self-esteeming, looks like a rag-clad peasant, and is treated accordingly?—and even though we are now two days out to sea, and I can repose, technically, in your utter inaccessibility, I still am unable to focus on my fellow-passengers, though for a split second of, as it were, absent-minded sanity, I did prophetically perceive, through a chink in my obsession, that the waiter, having sized me up as one of the helpless solitaries of the world, would give me arrogant service and expect in exchange, at journey’s end, an apologetically huge tip. No matter. The next instant, I unfolded the napkin, and your sigh, shaped exactly like a dove, the blue tint of its throat visibly clouding for a moment the flame of the candle on the table, escaped; and I was plunged back into the moist murmurs, the eclipsed whispers, the vows instantly hissingly retracted, the exchanged sweats, of our love.

  The boat shakes. The vibration is incessant and ubiquitous; it has sniffed me out even here, in the writing room, a dark nook staffed by a dour young Turinese steward and stocked, to qualify as a library, with tattered copies of Paris Match and, behind glass, seventeen gorgeously bound and impeccably unread volumes of D’Annunzio, in of course Italian. So that the tremor in my handwriting is a purely motor affair, and the occasional splotches you may consider droplets of venturesome spray. As a matter of fact, there is a goodly roll, though we have headed into sunny latitudes. When they try to fill the swimming pool, the water thrashes and pitches so hysterically that I peek over the edge expecting to see a captured dolphin. In the bar, the bottles tinkle like some large but dainty Swiss gadget, and the daiquiris come to you aquiver, little circlets of agitation spinning back and forth between the center and the rim. The first day, having forgotten, in my landlocked days with you, the feel of an ocean voyage, I was standing in the cabin-class lobby, waiting to try to buy my way toward a higher deck and if possible a porthole, when, without any visible change in the disposition of furniture, lighting fixtures, potted palms, or polyglot bulletin board, the floor like a great flat magnet suddenly rendered my blood heavy—extraordinarily heavy. There were people around me, and their facial expressions did not alter by one millimeter. It was quite comic, for as the ship rolled back the other way my blood absolutely swung upward in my veins—do you remember how your arm feels in the first instant after a bruise?—and it seemed imminent that I, and, if I, all these deadpanned others too, would lift like helium balloons and be bumpingly pasted to the ceiling, from which the ship’s staff would have to rescue us, irritably, with broom handles. The vision passed. The ship rolled again. My blood went heavy again. It seemed that you were near.

  Iseult. I must write your name. Iseult. I am bleeding to death. Certainly I feel bloodless, or, more precisely, diluted, diluted by half, since everything around me—the white ropes, the ingenious little magnetic catches that keep the doors from swinging, the charmingly tessellated triangular shower stall in my cabin, the luxurious and pampered textures on every side—I seem to see, or touch, or smile over, with you, which means, since you are not here, that I only half see, only half exist. I keep thinking what a pity all this luxury is wasted on me, Tristan the Austere, the Perpetually Grieving, the Orphaned, the Homeless. The very pen I am writing this with is an old-fashioned dip, or nib, pen, whose flexibility irresistibly invites flourishes that sit up wet and bluely gleaming for minutes before finally deigning
to dry. The holder is some sort of polished Asiatic wood. Teak? Ebony? You would know. It was enchanting for me, how you knew the names of surfaces, how you had the innocence to stroke a pelt and not flinch from the panicked little quick-eyed death beneath; for me, who have always been on the verge of becoming a vegetarian, which Mark, I know, would say was a form of death wish (I can’t describe to you how stupid that man seems to me; unfairly enough, even what tiny truth there is in him seems backed by this immense capital—these armies, this downright empire—of stupidity, so that even when he says something intelligent it affects me like Gospel quoted in support of the separation of the races. This parenthesis has gotten out of all control. If it seems ugly to you, blame it on jealousy. I am not sure, however, if I hate your husband because he—if only legally—possesses you, or if, more subtly, because he senses my own fear of just such legal possession, which gives him, for all his grossness, his grotesque patronization and prattling, a curious moral hold over me which I cannot, writhe as I will, break. End parenthesis).