by John Updike
“Do you have any thoughts as to why not?”
“There’s nothing profound about it. It’s a casual dress. It’s young. It’s not the identity a woman comes to Boston in. I don’t come in just to see you; I buy things, I visit people, sometimes I meet Harold afterward for a drink and we have dinner and go to a movie. Do you want me to talk about how I feel in the city?” She was suddenly full of feelings about herself in the city, graceful, urgent feelings of sunlight and release that she was sure explained a great deal about her.
He insisted. “Yet you wore this quite informal dress to a dinner party last weekend?”
“It was a party of our friends. It’s summer in the suburbs. The dress is simple. It’s not shabby.”
“When you picked it to wear to this party where you knew he would see you, did you remember his special fondness for it?”
She wondered if he wasn’t overdirecting her. She was sure he shouldn’t. “I don’t remember,” she said, realizing, with a flash of impatience, that he would make too much of this. “You think I did.”
He smiled his guarded, gentle smile and shrugged. “Tell me about clothes.”
“Just anything? You want me to free-associate about clothes in general?”
“Whatever comes to your mind.”
The air conditioner flooded her silence with its constant zealous syllable. Time was pouring through her and she was wasting her session. “Well, he”—it was queer, how her mind, set free, flew like a magnet to this pronoun—“was quite funny about my clothes. He thought I overdressed, and used to kid me about what an expensive wife I’d make. It wasn’t true, really; I sew quite well, and make a lot of my things, while Nancy wears these quiet clothes from R. H. Stearns that are really quite expensive. I suppose you could say my clothes were a fetish with him; he’d bury his face in them after I’d taken them off, and in making love sometimes he’d bring my underclothes back, so they’d get all tangled up between us.” She stared at him defiantly, rather than blush. He was immobile, smiling the lightest of listening smiles, his brushed hair silvered by the window light. “Once, I remember, when we were both in the city together, I took him shopping with me, thinking he’d like it, but he didn’t. The salesgirls didn’t know quite who he was, a brother or a husband or what, and he acted just like a man—you know, restless and embarrassed. In a way, I liked his reacting that way, because one of my fears about him, when I was thinking of him as somebody I had a stake in, was that he might be effeminate. Not on the surface so much as down deep. I mean, he had this passive streak. He had a way of making me come to him without actually asking.” She felt she was journeying in the listening mind opposite her and had come to a narrow place; she tried to retreat. What had she begun with? Clothes. “He was rather lazy about his own clothes. Do you want to hear about his clothes, or just my clothes? Next thing, I’ll be talking about the children’s clothes.” She permitted herself to giggle.
He didn’t respond, and to punish him she went ahead with the topic that she knew annoyed him. “He’s sloppy. Even dressed up, the collars of his shirts look unbuttoned, and he wears things until they fall apart. I remember, toward the end, after we had tried to break it off and I hadn’t seen him for several weeks, he came to the house to see how I was for a minute, and I ran my hand under his shirt and my fingers went through a hole in his T-shirt. It just killed me, I had to have him, and we went upstairs. I can’t describe it very well, but something about the idea of this man, who had just as much money as the rest of us, with this big hole in his undershirt, it make me weak. I suppose there was something mothering about it, but it felt the opposite, as if his dressing so carelessly made him strong, strong in a way that I wasn’t. I’ve always felt I had to pay great attention to my appearance. I suppose it’s insecurity. And then in lovemaking, I’d sometimes notice—is this too terrible, shall I stop?—I’d notice that his fingernails were dirty.”
“Did you like that?”
“I don’t know. It was just something I’d notice.”
“Did you like the idea of being caressed by dirty hands?”
“They were his hands.”
She had sat bolt upright, and his silence, having the quality of a man’s pain, hurt her. She tried to make it up to him. “You mean, did I like being—what’s the word, I’ve suppressed it—debased? But isn’t that a sort of womanly thing that everybody has, a little? Do you think I have it too much?”
The man reshifted his weight in the chair and his strikingly clean hands moved in the air diagrammatically; a restrained agitation possessed his presence, like a soft gust passing over a silver pond. “I think there are several things working here,” he said. “On the one hand you have this aggressiveness toward the man—you go up to him at parties, you drag him on shopping expeditions that make him uncomfortable, you go to bed with him, you’ve just suggested, on your initiative rather than his.”
She sat shocked. It hadn’t been like that. Had it?
The man went on, running one hand through his hair so that the youthful lock, recoiling, fell farther over his forehead. “Even now, when the affair is supposedly buried, you continue to court him by wearing a dress that had a special meaning for him.”
“I’ve explained about the dress.”
“Then there is this dimension, which we keep touching on, of his crooked teeth, of his being effeminate, feeble, in tatters; of your being in comparison healthy and masterful. In the midst of an embrace you discover a hole in his undershirt. It confirms your suspicion that he is disintegrating, that you are destroying him. So that, by way of repair in a sense, you take him to bed.”
“But he was fine in bed.”
“At the same time you have these notions of ‘womanliness.’ You feel guilty at being the dynamic party; hence your rather doctrinaire slavishness, your need to observe that his fingernails are dirty—to go under, so to speak. Also in this there is something of earth, of your feelings about dirt, earth, the country versus the city, the natural versus the unnatural. The city, the artificial, represents life to you; earth is death. This man, this unbuttoned, unwashed man who comes to you in the country and is out of his element shopping with you in the city, is of the earth. By conquering him, by entangling him in your clothes, you subdue your own death; more exactly, you pass through it, and become a farm girl, an earth-girl, who has survived dying. It is along these lines, I think, that we need more work.”
She felt sorry for him. There it was, he had made his little Thursday effort, and it was very pretty and clever, and used most of the strands, but it didn’t hold her; she escaped. Shyly she glanced at the air conditioner and asked, “Could that be turned lower? I can hardly hear you.”
He seemed surprised, rose awkwardly, and turned it off. He did not move well; like many men who sit for a living, he tended to waddle. She giggled again. “I’m proving your point, how bossy I am.” He returned to his chair and glanced at his watch. Street noises—a bus shifting gears, a woman in heels walking rapidly—entered the room through the new silence at the window, and diluted its unreal air. “Can’t earth,” she asked, “mean life as much as death?”
He shrugged, displeased with himself. “In this sort of language, opposites can mean the same thing.”
“If that’s what I saw in him, what did he see in me?”
“I feel you fishing for a compliment.”
“I’m not, I’m not fishing. I don’t want compliments from you, I want the truth. I need help. I’m ridiculously unhappy, and I want to know why, and I don’t feel you’re telling me. I feel we’re at cross-purposes.”
“Can you elaborate on this?”
“Do you really want me to?”
He had become totally still in his chair, rigid—she brushed away the impression—as if with fright.
“Well”—she returned her eyes to the brass catch of her purse, where there was a mute focus that gave her leverage to lift herself—“when I came to you, I’d got the idea from somewhere that by this time somethin
g would have happened between us, that, in some sort of way, perfectly controlled and safe, I would have … fallen in love with you.” She looked up for help, and saw none. She went on, in a voice that, since the silencing of the air conditioner, seemed harsh and blatant to her. “I don’t feel that’s happened. What’s worse—I might as well say it, it’s a waste of Harold’s money if I keep anything back—I feel the opposite has happened. I keep getting the feeling that you’ve fallen in love with me.” Now she hurried. “So I feel tender toward you, and want to protect you, and pretend not to reject you, and it gets in the way of everything. You put me into the position where a woman can’t be honest, or weak, or herself. You make me be strategic, and ashamed of what I feel toward Paul, because it bothers you. There. That’s the first time today either of us has dared mention his name. You’re jealous. I pity you. At least, in a minute or two—I saw you look at your watch—I can go out into the street, and go buy a cheesecake or something at the bakery, and get into the car and drive through the traffic over the bridge; at least I loved somebody who loved me, no matter how silly you make the reasons for it seem. But you—I can’t picture you ever getting out of this room, or getting drunk, or making love, or needing a bath, or anything. I’m sorry.” She had expected, after this outburst, that she would have to cry, but she found herself staring wide-eyed at the man, whose own eyes—it must have been the watery light from the window—looked strained.
He shifted lazily in the chair and spread his hands on the glass top of his desk. “One of the arresting things about you,” he said, “is your insistence on protecting men.”
“But I wasn’t like that with him. I mean, I knew I was giving him something he wanted and needed, but I did feel protected. I felt”—she glanced down, feeling herself blush—“that he was on top.”
“Yes.” He looked at his watch, and his nostrils dilated with the beginnings of a sigh. “Well.” He stood and made worried eyebrows. A little off guard, she stood a fraction of a second later. “Next Thursday?” he asked.
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said, turning at the door to smile; it was a big countryish smile, regretful at the edges. The white of it matched, he noticed with an interior decorator’s eye, her hair, her suit, and the white of her pocketbook and her shoes. “I am kind of crazy,” she finished, and closed the door.
The sigh that he had begun while she was in the room seemed to have been suspended until she had left. He was winning, it was happening; but he was weary. Alone, in a soundless psychic motion like the brief hemispherical protest of a bubble, he subsided into the tranquil surface of the furniture.
Harv Is Plowing Now
Our lives submit to archaeology. For a period in my life which seems longer ago than it was, I lived in a farmhouse that lacked electricity and central heating. In the living room we had a fireplace and, as I remember, a kind of chocolate-colored rectangular stove whose top was a double row of slots and whose metal feet rested on a sheet of asbestos. I have not thought of this stove for years; its image seems to thrust one corner from the bottom of a trench. It was as high as a boy and heated a rectangular space of air around it; when I was sick, my parents would huddle me, in blankets, on a blue sofa next to the stove, and I would try to align myself with its margin of warmth while my fever rose and fell, transforming at its height my blanketed knees into weird, intimate mountains at whose base a bowl of broth seemed a circular lake seen from afar. The stove was fuelled with what we called coal oil. I wonder now, what must have been obvious then, if coal oil and kerosene are exactly the same thing. Yes, they must be, for I remember filling the stove and the kerosene lamps from the same can, a five-gallon can with a side spout and a central cap which had to be loosened when I poured—otherwise by some trick of air pressure the can would bob and buck in my hands like an awkwardly live thing, and the spurting liquid, transparent and pungent, would spill. What was kerosene in the lamps became coal oil in the stove: so there are essential distinctions as well as existential ones. What is bread in the oven becomes Christ in the mouth.
When spring came, our attention thawed and was free to run outdoors. From where we lived not a highway, not a tower, not even a telephone pole was visible. We lived on the side of a hill, surrounded by trees and grass and clouds. Across a shallow valley where a greening meadow lay idle, another farm faced ours from a mirroring rise of land. Though the disposition of the barns and sheds was different, the houses were virtually identical—sandstone farmhouses, set square to the compass and slightly tall for their breadth, as if the attic windows were straining to see over the trees. They must have been built at about the same time in the early nineteenth century, and had been similarly covered, at a later date, with sandy, warm-colored stucco now crumbling away in patches. On chill April and May mornings, thin blue smoke from the chimney of the far house would seem to answer the smoke from the chimney of ours and to translate into another dimension the hissing blaze of cherry logs I had watched my father build in our fireplace.
The neighboring farm was owned and run by a mother, Carrie, and a son, Harvey. Even in her prime Carrie could not have been much over five feet tall. Now she was so bent by sixty years of stooping labor that in conversation her face was roguishly uptwisted. She wore tight high-top shoes that put a kind of hop into all her motions, and an old-fashioned bonnet, so that in profile she frightened me with her resemblance to the first bogey of my childhood, the faceless woman on the Dutch Cleanser can, chasing herself around and around with a stick. Harvey—called, in the country way, Harv—was fat but silent-footed; his rap would rattle our door before we knew he was on the porch. There he would stand, surrounded by beagles, an uncocked shotgun drooping from his arm, while my parents vainly tried to invite him in. He preferred to talk outdoors, and his voice was faint and far, like wind caught in a bottle; when, at night, he hunted coons in our woods, which merged with his, the yapping of his beagles seemed to be escorting a silent spirit that travelled through the trees as resistlessly as the moon overhead travelled through the clouds.
In the spring, Harv hitched up their mule and in furrows parallel to the horizon plowed the gradual rise of land that mirrored the one where I stood in our front yard. The linked silhouettes of the man and the mule moved back and forth like a slow brush repainting the parched pallor of the winter-faded land with the wet dark color of loam. It seemed to be happening in me; and as I age with the twentieth century, I hold within myself this memory, this image unearthed from a pastoral epoch predating my birth, this deposit lower than which there is only the mineral void.
The English excavators of Ur, as they deepened their trench through the strata of rubbish deposited by successive epochs of the Sumerian civilization, suddenly encountered a bed of perfectly clean clay, which they at first took to be the primordial silt of the delta. But measurements were taken and the clay proved too high to be the original riverbed; digging deeper, they found that after eight feet the clay stopped, yielding to soil again pregnant with flints and potsherds. But whereas Sumerian pottery had been turned on a wheel and not painted, these fragments bore traces of color and had been entirely hand-formed. In fact, the remnants were of an entirely different civilization, called “al ‘Ubaid,” and the eight feet of clay were the physical record of the legendary Flood survived by Noah.
My existence seems similarly stratified. At the top there is a skin of rubbish, of minutes, hours, and days, and the events and objects that occupy these days. At the bottom there is the hidden space where Harv—who since his mother died has sold the farm and married and moved to Florida—eternally plows. Between them, as thick as the distance from the grass to the clouds and no more like clay than fire is like air, interposes the dense vacancy where like an inundation the woman came and went. Let us be quite clear. She is not there. But she was there: proof of this may be discerned in the curious hollowness of virtually every piece of debris examined in the course of scavenging the days. While of course great caution should attend assertions about eviden
ce so tenuous and disjunct, each fragment seems hollow in the same way; and a kind of shape, or at least a tendency of motion which if we could imagine it continuing uninterrupted would produce a shape, might be hypothesized. But we will be on firmer ground simply describing the surface layer of days.
Abundantly present are small items of wearing apparel, particularly belts and shoelaces; china plates, patterned and plain; stainless-steel eating implements; small tables with one loose leg; glasses containing, like irregular jewels hurriedly stashed at the cataclysmic end of an antique queen’s reign, ice cubes; children’s faces, voices, and toys; newspapers; and isolated glimpses of weather, sky, towers, and vegetation. The order of occurrence is not random; generally, in the probing of each fresh stratum, a toothbrush is the first object encountered, often followed by an automobile gearshift and a ballpoint pen, or a fountain pen which is invariably dry. Contraceptive devices and vials apparently of medicine are not uncommon. Sometimes the page of a book is found involved with a bar of soap, and confusing snowstorms of cigarette filters and golf balls must be painstakingly worked through. Care is crucial; days, though in sum their supply of rubbish seems endless, are each an integument of ghostly thinness. At Ur, in the delicate excavations of the tomb of Queen Shub-ad, a clumsy foot might crush a hidden skull, or a pick driven an inch too deep might prematurely bring to light a bit of gold ribbon, or a diadem, or a golden beech leaf more fragile than a wafer.
So, too, the days of my life threaten, even where the crust appears to be most solid, to crumble and plunge my vision into a dreadful forsaken gold. At the touch of a memory, the wallpaper parts and reveals the lack of a wall. A lilac bush, and the woman’s hair engulfs me. Guitar music drifts from a window, and I turn to see if she notices, and newly discover that she is not there: grief fills the cavern of my mouth with a taste like ancient metal, and loss like some sweeping hypothesis floods the transparent volume between the grass and the clouds. Broad streets open up, stream outward, under the revelation, and the entire world, cities and trees, seems a negative imprint of her absence, a kind of tinted hollowness from which her presence might be rebuilt, as wooden artifacts, long rotted to nothing, can be re-created from the impress they have left in clay, a shadow of paint and grain more easily erased by a finger than the dusty pattern on a butterfly’s wing.
