The Early Stories

by John Updike

  She mistook him, still viewing him as a conquest. Absurd in her booted nakedness, she cuddled against him and said in the slithering breathy voice of her propositions, “If you paid me enough I could stay all night. I bet you don’t have enough money for me to stay all night.”

  “I bet too I don’t,” he told her soberly.

  “For another thirty you might talk me into it.” Had she seen into his wallet? Or did she just know that all men are cheats?

  He calculated: if the alcohol wore off, and he got a few hours’ sleep, he could manage one more piece of ass; but then getting her out of here in the morning light, through the bustle of breakfast trays and suitcases, loomed as a perilous campaign. The men in the elevator had told him that she somehow looked like a whore. With her in this narrow bed with him he’d sleep badly and drag through the rest of the day. Not worth it. He told her, “Honest, Ann, I don’t have thirty more. I don’t have any more.”

  He stared down into her face for the seconds it took her to realize she was being spurned. His fear now was that she would offer to stay free. She sat up. He sat up on the edge of the bed with her. She waved her hand, as if to touch (but she did not touch) his penis, shrunken, wearing the trailing white prophylactic like an old-fashioned nightcap. And Ma in her kerchief, and I in my cap …

  She asked, “You gonna keep that as a souvenir?”

  He asked, “You want it back?”

  “No, Ed. You can keep it.”

  “Thanks. I keep saying ‘Thanks’ to you, you notice?”

  “I hadn’t noticed.” She stood, her buttocks fair as Parian marble. “Mind if I use your john before I go?”

  “No, please do. Please.”

  “Don’t want to keep you from your beauty sleep.” But even this mild revelation of injury must have tasted unprofessional, passing her lips, for she relented and, gesturing again at the sheath on his prick, offered, “Want me to flush that for you?”

  “No. It’s mine. I want it.”

  She gathered some clothes, and he regretted afterwards that he had not pressed into his memory these last poses of her naked body. But a wave of blankness was emitted by the still-operant alcohol and ended by the soft slam of the bathroom door. Delicately he pulled off the condom and held it, pendulous, laden, while debating where to set it. At home he was hyperconscious of wineglass and water stains on furniture; but here, looking for a coaster, he saw only an ashtray. Removing the matches, he laid the sheath in it. She was taking her time in the bathroom. He picked up the Blake and tried to resume where he had left off. He couldn’t find the place; instead his eye was taken by the typographical clasps of

  Every Morn & every Night

  Some are Born to sweet delight.

  Some are Born to sweet delight,

  Some are Born to Endless Night.

  What was she doing in the bathroom? Did he hear her gargle and spit? He read on, more lines that also seemed too simple:

  We are led to Believe a Lie

  When we see not Thro’ the Eye

  Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night

  When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.

  He didn’t understand this, nor why Blake hadn’t bothered to make the lines scan.

  Ann emerged from the bathroom wearing the purple boots, her antiseptically white bra, and the maxiskirt whose shade he had not observed before (charcoal). She glanced around for her sweater; he spotted its magenta spilled at the foot of the bed and held it out to her with a courtesy mocked by his total nakedness. She took it without a smile and pulled it over her head. She needed more fun in her life; in a better world his function might have been to brighten her gray classroom with a joke or two. She awkwardly reached behind her; he darted to her back and pulled up the zipper, covering her three cervical vertebrae and the faint dark down. In a serious voice he asked, “Want me to get dressed and escort you out of the hotel?”

  “No, Ed. I can find my way. I’ll be all right.”

  “All alone?”

  She did not accept his invitation to say that she was always alone.

  “I hate to think of you going back to stand around on that cold corner where it says Massage Parlor.”

  To this, too, any reply would have been playing his game.

  He chose to understand that she was eager to return, to the street of others grosser and more potent than he. You whore. You poor homely whore. You don’t love me, I don’t love you. “What do you do in the day?” he asked.

  That she answered surprised him, as did her answer. “Take care of my kid.”

  “You have a kid?” His sense of her underwent a revolution. Those small hard nipples had given milk; that brisk cunt had lent passage to a baby’s head.

  She nodded. The climate around her was exactly that as when she had answered, “Twenty-two.” A central fact had been taken from her. Of the many possible questions, the one he asked, with stupid solicitude, was, “Who’s taking care of it now?”

  “A baby-sitter,” Ann said.

  What color was the baby-sitter? What color was the child? What about its future schooling? When are you going back to the library? How do you get out of this? How do I? He said, “Your money. We got to get you your money.”

  He went to his pants and picked the wallet from them too swiftly; the thin wedge of a hangover headache was inserted with the motion. “Thirty,” he said, counting off tens to steady himself, “and then thirty more for staying the hour, and twenty for the Frenching. Right? And then let’s add ten for the baby-sitter. Ninety. O.K.?” Handing her the bills, he inspected her smile; it was not as wide as the smile she had brought forward from the doorway. An extra ten might have widened it, but he held it back, and instead said, to win her denial, “Sorry I was such a difficult customer.”

  She considered her answer deliberately; she was not an easy grader. “You weren’t a difficult customer, Ed. I’ve had lots worse, believe me. Lots worse.” Her lingering on this thought felt irritatingly like a request for sympathy.

  “Pass with push, huh?” he said.

  The joke didn’t seem to register; perhaps by the time she had gone to high school the phrase had disappeared. She lifted her skirt and tucked the folded bills into one of her boots. Her boots were her bank, no wonder she wouldn’t remove them. Still, by keeping them on, she had held off a potential beauty in him—in him and her together, naked, with the bare feet of animals made in the image of Blake’s angels. “I hate thinking,” he said, “of you walking down that long corridor all by yourself.”

  “I’ll be all right, Ed.” Her saying his false name had become a nagging. As she put on her heavy all-concealing coat, he felt her movements were slowed by the clinging belief that he would relent and ask her to spend the night.

  Naked, he dodged past her to the door. Her coat as he passed breathed the chill of outdoors onto his skin. “O.K., Ann. Here we go. Thank you very much. You’re great.”

  She said nothing, merely tensed—her long nose wax-white, her eyelids the color of crème de menthe—in expectation of his opening the door. As he reached for the knob, his hand appeared to him a miracle, an intricate marvel of bone and muscle and animating spirit. An abyss of loss seemed disclosed in the wonder of such anatomy. Her body, breathless and proximate, participated in the wonder; yet, anxious to sleep and seal himself in, he could not think of anything to do but dismiss this body, this wild flower.

  The turn and click of the knob came like the snap of a bone breaking. He opened the door enough to test the emptiness of the corridor, but while he was still testing she pushed around him and into the hall. “Hey,” he said. “Goodbye.” Forgive me, help me, adore me, screw me, forget me, carry me with you into the street.

  Ann turned in surprise, recalled to duty. She whispered, from afar, “ ’Bye,” and gave him half of her slash of a smile, the half not turned to the future. With that triggered quickness of hers she turned the corner and was gone. Her steps made no retreating sound on the hotel carpet.

  E
d closed the door. He put across the safety chain. He took the prophylactic from the ashtray into the bathroom, where he filled it full of water, to see if it leaked. The rubber held, though it swelled to a transparent balloon in which water wobbled like life eager within a placenta. Good girl. A fair dealer. He had not given her a baby, she had not given him venereal disease.

  What she had given him, delicately, was death. She had made sex finite. Always, until now, it had been too much, bigger than all systems, an empyrean as absolute as those first boyish orgasms, when his hand would make his soul pass through a bliss as dense as an ingot of gold. Now, at last, in the prime of life, he saw through it, into the spaces between the stars. He emptied the condom of water and brought it with him out of the bathroom and in the morning found it, dry as a husk, where he had set it, on the glass bureau top among the other Christmas presents.

  Augustine’s Concubine

  To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought that I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares.

  She was, in that cauldron of the dark and slim, fair enough to mock, with a Scythian roundness to her face, and in her curious stiff stolidity vulnerable, as the deaf and blind are vulnerable, standing expectant in an agitated room. “Why do you hate me, Aurelius?” she asked him at a party preceding a circus.

  “I don’t,” he answered, through the smoke, through the noise, through the numbness that her presence even then worked upon his heart. “Rather the contrary, as a matter of fact.” He was certain she heard this last; she frowned, but it may have been an elbow in her side, a guffaw too close to her ear. She was dressed compactly, in black, intensifying her husband’s suit of dark gray, suiting her female smallness, which was not yet slimness, her waist and arms and throat being, though not heavy, rounded, of substance, firm, pale, frontal. She had, he felt, no profile; she seemed always to face him, or to have her back turned, both positions expressive not of hostility (he felt) but of a resolution priorly taken, either to ignore him, or to confront him, he was undecided which. She was, he sensed, new, new, that is, to life, in a way not true of himself, youth though he was (aet. eighteen), or true of the Carthaginians boiling about them.

  “Love your dress,” he said, seeing she would make no reply to his confession of the contrary of hatred.

  “It’s just a dress,” she said, with that strange dismissive manner she had, yet staring at him as if a commitment, a dangerous declaration, had been made. They were to proceed by contradiction. Her eyes were of a blue pale to the whiteness of marble, compared with the dark Mediterranean glances that upheld them like the net of a conspiracy, beneath the smoke and laughter and giddying expectation of a murderous circus.

  “Absolute black,” he said. “Very austere.” Again meeting silence from her, he asked, a touch bored and ergo reckless, “Are you austere?”

  She appeared to give the question unnecessarily hard thought, the hand accustomed to holding the cigarette (she had recently given up smoking) jerking impatiently. Her manner, contravening her calm body, was all stabs, discontinuous. “Not austere,” she said. “Selective.”

  “Like me,” he said, instantly, with too little thought, automatically teasing his precocious reputation as a rake, her manner having somehow saddened him, sharpened within him his hollow of famine, his hunger for God.

  “No,” she replied, seeming for the first time pleased to be talking with him, as pleased as an infant who has seized, out of the blur of the world, a solid toy, “not like you. The opposite, in fact.”

  For this space of nine years (from my nineteenth year to my eight-and-twentieth) we lived seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, in divers lusts; openly, by sciences which they call liberal; secretly, with a false-named religion; here proud, there superstitious, every where vain!

  At their first trysts, the pressure of time, which with his other conquests had excited him to demonstrations of virile dispatch, unaccountably defeated him; her calm pale body, cool and not as supple as the dark warm bodies he had known, felt to exist in a slower time, and to drag him into it, as a playful swimmer immerses another. What was this numbness? Her simplicity, it crossed his mind, missed some point. She remained complacent through his failures, her infant’s smile of seizure undimmed. Her waist was less voluptuously indented than he had expected, her breasts were smaller than they appeared when dressed. She offered herself unembarrassed. There was some nuance, of shame perhaps, of sin, that he missed and that afflicted him, in the smiling face of her willingness, with what amounted to loss of leverage. Yet her faith proved justified. She led him to love her with a fury that scourged his young body.

  Strangely, he did not frighten her. She met his lust frontally, amused and aroused, yet also holding within her, companion to her wanton delight, the calm and distance of the condemned.

  In those years I had one,—not in that which is called lawful marriage, but whom I had found out in a wayward passion, void of understanding; yet but one, remaining faithful even to her; in whom I in my own case experienced what difference there is betwixt the self-restraint of the marriage-covenant, for the sake of issue, and the bargain of a lustful love, where children are born against their parents’ will, although, once born, they constrain love.

  Her husband, dark-gray shadow, she did not forsake; nor did she, under questioning, reveal that love between them had been abandoned. Rather, she clave to this man, in her placid and factual manner, and gave him what a man might ask; that her lover found this monstrous, she accepted as another incursion, more amusing than not, into this her existence, which she so unambiguously perceived as having been created for love.

  “You love him?” However often posed, the question carried its accents of astonishment.

  Her hand, small and rounded as a child’s, though cleaner, made its impatient stab in air, and an unintended circlet of smoke spun away. She had resumed the habit, her one concession to the stresses of her harlot’s life. “We make love.”

  “And how is it?”

  She thought. “Nice.”

  “Perhaps you were right. I do hate you.”

  “But he’s my husband!”

  The word, religious and gray, frightened him. “Is it as it is,” he asked, “with me?”

  “No. Not at all.” Her white eyes stared. Was she sincere?

  How often do you do it? In what positions? Are you silent, or do the two of you speak throughout? What do you say? The litany, attempting to banish the mystery of her rounded limbs so simply laid open for another, won from her more tears than answers; it appeared, to this amorous youth whose precocious and epochal intuition it already was to seek truth and truth’s Lord not in mathematics nor the consensus of the polis but in one’s own unique and uniquely configured self, that the details eluded her; she had forgotten; they didn’t matter. Incredible! His jealousy would not rest, kept gnawing at this substantial shadow, her husband. He permitted the scandal to become open, and her husband faded a little, out of pride. The man’s attentions, sensed through the veil of her, became indifferent, ironical; still her husband lived with her, shared her nights, could touch her at whim, shared the rearing of their children, a sacred sharing. This could not be borne. Aurelius made her pregnant.

  And the husband did vanish, with their common goods. The lover and his concubine travelled to Rome, and then to Milan. Their child they called Adeodatus. The name, surprisingly, came from her; it subtly displeased him, that she fancied herself religious.

  … time passed on, but I delayed to turn to the Lord; and from day to day deferred to live in Thee, and deferred not daily to die in myself. Loving a happy life, I feared it in its own abode, and sought it, by fleeing from it. I thought I should be too miserable, unless folded in female arms.…

  Her compliance disturbed him. Her love seemed of the darkness, demonic in its exemption from
fatigue. Years after she should have wearied of his body, he would wake and find that in their sleep she had crowded him to the edge of the bed, her indistinct profile at rest in the curve of his armpit. Milan’s night traffic gleamed and glittered below; travelling torchlight shuddered on the walls. A cry arose, close to them. She would rise and smother the child with her breasts, that the father might sleep. Lying nevertheless awake, he felt her merge with the darkened room, in which there was this unseen horizon, of smallness and limit, of the coolness with which she assumed any position, placated any need, however sordid. Her spirit was too bare, like her face when, each morning, for coolness in the humid submontane heat, she pulled back her hair with both hands to knot it; her face gleamed taut and broad, perspiring, a Scythian moon of a face. She had grown plump in her years of happiness. He remembered how she smoked, and wished she would begin again. He wished she would die. The blanched eyes, the blunt nose, the busy plump self-forgetful hands. Her lips, pouting in concentration, were startled to a smile by sudden awareness of his studying her; she would come forward and smother him as if he, too, had been crying. Concupiscentia. Its innocence disturbed him, the simplicity of her invitation to descend with her into her nature, into Nature, and to be immersed. Surely such wallowing within Creation was a deflection of higher purposes. Like bubbles, his empty spaces wanted to rise, break into air, and vanish. Their bodies would become one, but his soul was pulled back taut, like the hair at the back of her skull.

  Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied, and, my concubine being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Afric, vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her.