by John Updike
So I talked to Margaret about Larry, and she responded, showing really quite an acute sense of him. To me, considering so seriously the personality of a childhood friend, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn’t deeply believe that even in her world he mattered much. Larry Schuman, in little more than a year, had become nothing to me. The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself—the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.
She offered me more coffee. When she returned with it, she sat down, not opposite, but beside me, lifting me to such a pitch of gratitude and affection the only way I could think to express it was by not kissing her, as if a kiss were another piece of abuse women suffered. She said, “Cold. Cheap bastard turns the thermostat down to sixty,” meaning her father. She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand around her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds. Her lids lowered and I kissed her two lush eyebrows and then the spaces of skin between the rough curls, some black and some bleached, that fringed her forehead. Other than this I tried to keep as still as a bed would be. It had grown cold. A shiver starting on the side away from her would twitch my shoulders when I tried to repress it; she would frown and unconsciously draw my arm tighter. No one had switched the kitchen light off. On Margaret’s foreshortened upper lip there seemed to be two pencil marks; the length of wrist my badly fitting sleeve exposed looked pale and naked against the spiralling down of the smaller arm held beneath it.
Outside, on the street the house faced, there was no motion. Only once did a car go by: around five o’clock, with twin mufflers, the radio on and a boy yelling. Neil and the girl murmured together incessantly; some of what they said I could overhear.
“No. Which?” she asked.
“I don’t care.”
“Wouldn’t you want a boy?”
“I’d be happy whatever I got.”
“I know, but which would you rather have? Don’t men want boys?”
“I don’t care. You.”
Somewhat later, Mohn’s truck passed on the other side of the street. The milkman, well bundled, sat behind headlights in a warm orange volume the size of a phone booth, steering one-handed and smoking a cigar that he set on the edge of the dashboard when, his wire carrier vibrant, he ran out of the truck with bottles. His passing led Neil to decide the time had come. Margaret woke up frightened of her father; we hissed our farewells and thanks to her quickly. Neil dropped the other girl off at her house, a few blocks away; he knew where it was. Sometime during that night I must have seen this girl’s face, but I have no memory of it. She is always behind a magazine or in the dark or with her back turned. Neil married her years later, I know, but after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again either.
A pre-dawn light touched the clouds above the black slate roofs as, with a few other cars, we drove through Alton. The moon-sized clock of a beer billboard said ten after six. Olinger was deathly still. The air brightened as we moved along the highway; the glowing wall of my home hung above the woods as we rounded the long curve by the Mennonite dairy. With a .22 I could have had a pane of my parents’ bedroom window, and they were dreaming I was in Indiana. My grandfather would be up, stamping around in the kitchen for my grandmother to make him breakfast, or outside, walking to see if any ice had formed on the brook. For an instant I genuinely feared he might hail me from the peak of the barn roof. Then trees interceded and we were safe in a landscape where no one cared about us.
At the entrance to the Turnpike Neil did a strange thing: he stopped the car and had me take the wheel. He had never trusted me to drive his father’s car before, as if my not knowing all about crankshafts and carburetors the way he did handicapped my competence to steer. But now he was quite complacent. He hunched in his gabardine suit under an old mackinaw and leaned his head against the metal of the window frame and soon was asleep. We crossed the Susquehanna on a long smooth bridge below Harrisburg, then began climbing toward the Alleghenies. In the mountains there was snow, a dry dusting like sand, that waved back and forth on the road surface. Farther along there had been a fresh fall that night, about two inches, and the plows had not yet cleared all the lanes. I was passing a Sunoco truck on a high curve when without warning the scraped section gave out and I realized I might skid into the fence if not over the edge. The radio was singing “Carpets of clover, I’ll lay right at your feet,” and the speedometer said eighty. Nothing happened; the Chrysler stayed firm in the snow and Neil slept through the danger, his face turned skyward and his breath struggling in his nose. It was the first time I heard a contemporary of mine snore.
When we came into tunnel country the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match occurred the moment of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me.
The Persistence of Desire
Pennypacker’s office still smelled of linoleum, a clean, sad scent that seemed to lift from the checkerboard floor in squares of alternating intensity; this pattern had given Clyde as a boy a funny nervous feeling of intersection, and now he stood crisscrossed by a double sense of himself, his present identity extending down from Massachusetts to meet his disconsolate youth in Pennsylvania, projected upward from a distance of years. The enlarged, tinted photograph of a lake in the Canadian wilderness still covered one whole wall, and the walnut-stained chairs and benches continued their vague impersonation of the Shaker manner. The one new thing, set squarely on an orange end table, was a compact black clock constructed like a speedometer; it showed in arabic numerals the present minute—1:28—and coiled invisibly in its works the two infinities of past and future. Clyde was early; the waiting room was empty. He sat down on a chair opposite the clock. Already it was 1:29, and while he watched, the digits slipped again: another drop into the brimming void. He glanced around for the comfort of a clock with a face and gracious, gradual hands. A stopped grandfather matched the other imitation antiques. He opened a magazine and immediately read, “Science reveals that the cells of the normal human body are replaced in toto every seven years.”
The top half of a Dutch door at the other end of the room opened, and, framed in the square, Pennypacker’s secretary turned the bright disc of her face toward him. “Mr. Behn?” she asked in a chiming voice. “Dr. Pennypacker will be back from lunch in a minute.” She vanished backward into the maze of little rooms where Pennypacker, an eye, ear, nose, and throat man, had arranged his fabulous equipment. Through the bay window Clyde could see traffic, gayer in color than he remembered, hustle down Grand Avenue. On the sidewalk, haltered girls identical in all but name with girls he had known strolled past in twos and threes. Small-town perennials, they moved rather mournfully under their burdens of bloom. In the opposite direction packs of the opposite sex carried baseball mitts.
Clyde became so lonely watching his old street that when, with a sucking exclamation, the door from the vestibule
opened, he looked up gratefully, certain that the person, this being his home town, would be a friend. When he saw who it was, although every cell in his body had been replaced since he had last seen her, his hands jerked in his lap and blood bounded against his skin.
“Clyde Behn,” she pronounced, with a matronly and patronizing yet frightened finality, as if he were a child and these words the moral of a story.
“Janet.” He awkwardly rose from his chair and crouched, not so much in courtesy as to relieve the pressure on his heart.
“Whatever brings you back to these parts?” She was taking the pose that she was just anyone who once knew him.
He slumped back. “I’m always coming back. It’s just you’ve never been here.”
“Well, I’ve”—she seated herself on an orange bench and crossed her plump legs cockily—“been in Germany with my husband.”
“He was in the Air Force.”
“Yes.” It startled her a little that he knew.
“And he’s out now?” Clyde had never met him, but, having now seen Janet again, he felt he knew him well—a slight, literal fellow, to judge from the shallowness of the marks he had left on her. He would wear eyebrow-style glasses, be a griper, have some not-quite-negotiable talent, like playing the clarinet or drawing political cartoons, and now be starting up a drab avenue of business. Selling insurance, most likely. Poor Janet, Clyde felt; except for the interval of himself—his splendid, perishable self—she would never see the light. Yet she had retained her beautiful calm, an unsleeping tranquillity marked by that pretty little lavender puffiness below the eyes. And either she had grown slimmer or he had grown more tolerant of fat. Her thick ankles and the general obstinacy of her flesh used to goad him into being cruel.
“Yes.” Her voice indicated that she had withdrawn; perhaps some ugliness of their last parting had recurred to her.
“I was 4-F.” He was ashamed of this, and his confessing it, though she seemed unaware of the change, turned their talk inward. “A peacetime slacker,” he went on, “what could be more ignoble?”
She was quiet a while, then asked, “How many children do you have?”
“Two. Age three and one. A girl and a boy; very symmetrical. Do you”—he blushed lightly, and brushed at his forehead to hide it—“have any?”
“No, we thought it wouldn’t be fair, until we were more fixed.”
Now the quiet moment was his to hold; she had matched him failing for failing. She recrossed her legs, and in a quaint strained way smiled.
“I’m trying to remember,” he admitted, “the last time we saw each other. I can’t remember how we broke up.”
“I can’t either,” she said. “It happened so often.”
Clyde wondered if with that sarcasm she intended to fetch his eyes to the brink of tears. Probably not; premeditation had never been much of a weapon for her, though she had tried to learn it from him.
He moved across the linoleum to sit on the bench beside her. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much, of all the people in this town, you were the one I wanted to see.” It was foolish, but he had prepared it to say, in case he ever saw her again.
“Why?” This was more like her: blunt, pucker-lipped curiosity. He had forgotten it.
“Well, hell. Any number of reasons. I wanted to say something.”
“What?”
“Well, that if I hurt you it was stupidity, because I was young. I’ve often wondered since if I did, because it seems now that you were the only person outside my family who ever, actually, liked me.”
“Did I?”
“If you think by doing nothing but asking monosyllabic questions you’re making an effect, you’re wrong.”
She averted her face, leaving, in a sense, only her body—the pale, columnar breadth of arm, the freckled crescent of shoulder muscle under the cotton strap of her summer dress—with him. “You’re the one who’s making effects.” It was such a wan, senseless thing to say to defend herself; Clyde, virtually paralyzed by so heavy an injection of love, touched her arm icily.
With a quickness that suggested she had foreseen this, she got up and went to the table by the bay window, where rows of overlapping magazines were laid. She bowed her head to their titles, the nape of her neck in shadow beneath a half-collapsed bun. She had always had trouble keeping her hair pinned.
Clyde was blushing intensely. “Is your husband working around here?”
“He’s looking for work.” That she kept her back turned while saying this gave him hope.
• • •
“Mr. Behn?” The petite secretary-nurse, switching like a pendulum, led him back through the sanctums and motioned for him to sit in a high hinged chair padded with black leather. Pennypacker’s equipment had always made him nervous; tons of it were marshalled through the rooms. A complex tree of tubes and lenses leaned over his left shoulder, and by his right elbow a porcelain basin was cupped expectantly. An eye chart crisply stated gibberish. In time Pennypacker himself appeared: a tall, stooped man with mottled cheekbones and an air of suppressed anger.
“Now what’s the trouble, Clyde?”
“It’s nothing; I mean it’s very little,” Clyde began, laughing inappropriately. During his adolescence he had developed a joking familiarity with his dentist and his regular doctor, but he had never become cozy with Pennypacker, who remained, what he had seemed at first, an aloof administrator of expensive humiliations. He had made Clyde wear glasses when he was in the third grade. Later, he annually cleaned, with a shrill push of hot water, wax from Clyde’s ears, and once had thrust two copper straws up Clyde’s nostrils in a futile attempt to purge his sinuses. Clyde always felt unworthy of Pennypacker—felt himself to be a dirty conduit balking the smooth onward flow of the doctor’s reputation and apparatus. He blushed to mention his latest trivial stoppage. “It’s just that for over two months I’ve had this eyelid that twitters and it makes it difficult to think.”
Pennypacker drew little circles with a pencil-sized flashlight in front of Clyde’s right eye.
“It’s the left lid,” Clyde said, without daring to turn his head. “I went to a doctor up where I live, and he said it was like a rattle in the fender and there was nothing to do. He said it would go away, but it didn’t and didn’t, so I had my mother make an appointment for when I came down here to visit.”
Pennypacker moved to the left eye and drew even closer. The distance between the doctor’s eyes and the corners of his mouth was very long; the emotional impression of his face close up was like that of those first photographs taken from rockets, in which the earth’s curvature was made apparent. “How do you like being in your home territory?” Pennypacker asked.
“Fine.”
“Seem a little strange to you?”
The question itself seemed strange. “A little.”
“Mm. That’s interesting.”
“About the eye, there were two things I thought,” Clyde said. “One was, I got some glasses made in Massachusetts by a man nobody else ever went to, and I thought his prescription might be faulty. His equipment seemed so ancient and kind of full of cobwebs—like a Dürer print.” He never could decide how cultured Pennypacker was; the Canadian lake argued against it, but he was county-famous in his trade, in a county where doctors were as high as the intellectual scale went.
The flashlight, a tepid sun girdled by a grid of optical circles behind which Pennypacker’s face loomed dim and colorless, came right to the skin of Clyde’s eye, and the vague face lurched forward angrily, and Clyde, blind in a world of light, feared that Pennypacker was inspecting the floor of his soul. Paralyzed by panic, he breathed, “The other was that something might be in it. At night it feels as if there’s a tiny speck deep in under the lid.”
Pennypacker reared back and insolently raked the light back and forth across Clyde’s face. “How long have you had this flaky stuff on your lids?”
The insult startled Clyde. “Is there any?”
“How long
have you had it?”
“Some mornings I notice little grains like salt that I thought were what I used to call sleepy-dust—”
“This isn’t sleepy-dust,” the doctor said. He repeated, “This isn’t sleepy-dust.” Clyde started to smile at what he took to be kidding of his babyish vocabulary, but Pennypacker cut him short with “Cases of this can lead to loss of the eyelashes.”
“Really?” Clyde was vain of his lashes, which in his boyhood had been exceptionally long, giving his face the alert and tender look of a girl’s. “Do you think it’s the reason for the tic?” He imagined his face with the lids bald and the lashes lying scattered on his cheeks like insect legs. “What can I do?”
“Are you using your eyes a great deal?”
“Some. No more than I ever did.”
Pennypacker’s hands, blue after Clyde’s dazzlement, lifted an intensely brown bottle from a drawer. “It may be bacteria, it may be allergy; when you leave I’ll give you something that should knock it out either way. Do you follow me? Now, Clyde”—his voice became murmurous and consolatory as he placed a cupped hand, rigid as an electrode, on the top of Clyde’s head—“I’m going to put some drops in your eyes so we can check the prescription of the glasses you bought in Massachusetts.”
Clyde didn’t remember that the drops stung so; he gasped outright and wept while Pennypacker held the lids apart with his fingers and worked them gently open and shut, as if he were playing with snapdragons. Pennypacker set preposterously small, circular dark-brown glasses on Clyde’s face and in exchange took away the stylish horn-rims Clyde had kept in his pocket. It was Pennypacker’s method to fill his little rooms with waiting patients and wander from one to another like a dungeon-keeper.
Clyde heard, far off, the secretary’s voice tinkle, and, amplified by the hollow hall, Pennypacker’s rumble in welcome and Janet’s respond. The one word “headaches,” petulantly emphasized, stood up in her answer. Then a door was shut. Silence.
