by John Updike
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re pretty interesting anyway. Here, and here, and here.”
“I said really a nap.”
In the upstairs hall, on the other side of the closed bedroom door, the telephone rang. After four peals—icy spears hurled from afar—the ringing stopped, unanswered. There was a puzzled pause. Then a tentative, questioning pring, as if someone in passing had bumped the table, followed by a determined series, strides of sound, imperative and plaintive, that did not stop until twelve had been counted; then the lover hung up.
Commercial
It comes on every night, somewhere in the eleven-o’clock news. A CHILD runs down a STAIRCASE. A rotund ELDERLY WOMAN stands at the foot, picks up the CHILD, gives him a shake (friendly), and sets him down. There is MUSIC, containing the words “laughing child,” “fur-lined rug,” etc.
The STAIRCASE looks unexpectedly authentic, oaken and knobby and steep in the style of houses where we have childhoods. We know this STAIRCASE. Some treads creak, and at the top there is a branching many-cornered darkness wherein we are supposed to locate security and to sleep. The wallpaper (baskets of flowers, at a guess, alternating with ivy-wreathed medallions) would feel warm, if touched.
The CHILD darts offscreen. We have had time to register that it is a BOY, with long hair cut straight across his forehead. The camera stays with the ELDERLY WOMAN, whom by now we identify as the GRANDMOTHER. She gazes after the (supposedly) receding BOY so fondly we can imagine “(gazes fondly)” in the commercial’s script.
The second drags; her beaming threatens to become blank. But now, with an electrifying touch of uncertainty, so that we do not know if it was the director’s idea or the actress’s, GRANDMOTHER slowly wags her head, as if to say, My, oh my, what an incorrigible little rascal, what a lovable little man-child! Her heart, we feel, so brims with love that her plump body, if a whit less healthy and compact, if a whit less compressed and contained by the demands and accoutrements of GRANDMOTHERLINESS, would burst. GRANDMOTHERLINESS massages her from all sides, like the brushes of a car wash.
And now (there is so much to see!) she relaxes her arms in front of her, the fingers of one hand gently gripping the wrist of the other. This gesture tells us that her ethnic type is Anglo-Saxon. An Italian mama, say, would have folded her arms across her bosom; and, also, wouldn’t the coquetry of Mediterranean women forbid their wearing an apron out of the kitchen, beside what is clearly a front STAIRCASE? So, while still suspended high on currents of anticipation, we deduce that this is not a commercial for spaghetti.
Nor for rejuvenating skin creams or hair rinses, for the camera cuts from GRANDMOTHER to the BOY. He is hopping through a room. Not quite hopping, or exactly skipping: a curious fey gait that bounces his cap of hair and evokes the tender dialectic of the child-director encounter. This CHILD, who, though a child actor acting the part of a child, is nevertheless also truly a child, has been told to move across the fictional room in a childish way. He has obeyed, moving hobbled by self-consciousness yet with the elastic bounce that Nature has bestowed upon him and that no amount of adult direction can utterly squelch. Only time can squelch it.
We do not know how many “takes” were sifted through to get this second of movement. Though no child in reality (though billions of children have crossed millions of rooms) ever moved across a room in quite this way, an impression of CHILDHOOD pierces us. We get the message: GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE (and the montage is so swift we cannot itemize the furniture, only concede that it appears fittingly fusty and congested) is cozy, safe—a place to be joyful in. Why? The question hangs.
We are in another room. A kitchen. A shining POT dominates the foreground. The BOY, out of focus, still bobbing in that unnatural, affecting way, enters at the background, comes forward into focus, becomes an alarmingly large face and a hand that lifts the lid of the POT. STEAM billows. The BOY blows the STEAM away, then stares at us with stagily popped eyes. Meaning? He has burned himself? There is a bad smell? The director, offscreen, has shouted at him? We do not know, and we are made additionally uncomfortable by the possibility that this is a spaghetti commercial after all.
Brief scene: GRANDMOTHER washing BOY’S face. Bathroom fixtures behind. Theme of heat (cozy HOUSE, hot POT) subliminally emerges. Also: suppertime?
We do not witness supper. We are back at the STAIRCASE. New actors have arrived: a tall and vigorous YOUNG COUPLE, in stylish overcoats. Who? We scarcely have time to ask. The BOY leaps (flies, indeed; we do not see his feet launch him) upward into the arms of the MAN. These are his PARENTS. We ourselves, watching, welcome them; the depth of our welcome reveals to us a dread within ourselves, of something morbid and claustral in the old HOUSE, with its cunningly underlined snugness and its lonely household of benevolent crone and pampered, stagy brat. These other two radiate the brisk air of outdoors. To judge from their clothes, it is cold outside; this impression is not insignificant; our sense of subliminal coherence swells. We join in the BUSTLE OF WELCOME, rejoicing with the YOUNG COUPLE in their sexual energy and safe return and great good fortune to be American and modern and solvent and fertile and to have such a picture-book GRANDMOTHER to baby-sit for them whenever they partake of some innocent, infrequent SPREE.
But whose mother is GRANDMOTHER, the FATHER’S or the MOTHER’S?
All questions are answered. The actor playing the YOUNG FATHER ignores GRANDMOTHER with the insouciance of blood kinship, while the actress playing the YOUNG MOTHER hugs her, pulls back, reconsiders, then dips forward to bestow upon the beaming plump cheek a kiss GRANDMOTHER does not, evidently, expect. Her beaming wavers momentarily, like a candle flame when a distant door is opened. The DAUGHTER-IN-LAW again pulls back, as if coolly to contemplate the product of her affectionate inspiration. Whether her tense string of hesitations was spun artfully by an actress fulfilling a role or was visited upon the actress as she searched her role for nuances (we can imagine how vague the script might be: “Parents return. Greetings all around. Camera medium tight”), a ticklish closeness of maneuver, amid towering outcroppings of good will, has been conveyed. The FAMILY is complete.
And now the underlying marvel is made manifest. The true HERO of these thirty seconds unmasks. The united FAMILY fades into a blue cartoon flame, and the MUSIC, no longer obscured by visual stimuli, sings with clarion brilliance, “NATURAL GAS is a Bee-uti-ful Thing!”
A MAN, discovered in BED, beside his WIFE, suffers the remainder of the NEWS, then rises and turns off the TELEVISION SET. The screen palely exudes its last quanta of daily radiation. The room by default fills with the dim light of the MOON. Risen, the MAN, shuffling around the BED with a wary gait suggestive of inelasticity and an insincerely willed silence, makes his way into the bathroom, where he urinates. He does this, we sense, not from any urgent physical need but conscientiously, even puritanically, from a basis of theory, to clear himself and his conscience for sleep.
His thoughts show, in vivid montage. As always when hovering above the dim oval of porcelain, he recalls the most intense vision of beauty his forty years have granted him. It was after a lunch in New York. The luncheon had been prolonged, overstimulating, vinous. Now he was in a taxi, heading up the West Side Highway. At the Fifty-seventh Street turnoff, the need to urinate was a feathery subliminal thought; by the Seventies (where Riverside Drive begins to rise), it was a real pressure; by the Nineties (Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument crumbling, Riverside Park a green cliff looming), it had become an agonizing imperative. Mastering shame, the MAN confessed his agony to the DRIVER, who, gradually suspending disbelief, swung off the highway at 158th Street and climbed a little cobblestone mountain and found there, evidently not for the first time, a dirty triangular GARAGE. Mechanics, black or blackened, stared with white eyes as the strange MAN stumbled past them, back through the oily and junk-lined triangle to the apex: here, pinched between obscene frescoes, sat the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Or would ever see. It was a TOILET BOWL, a TOILET BOWL in its flaw
ed whiteness, its partial wateriness, its total receptiveness: in the harmonious miracle of its infrangible ens, its lowly but absolute beauty. The beautiful, it came to him, is no more or less than what you need at the time.
Quick cameo mug shots of Plato, Aquinas, Santayana, and other theorists of beauty, X’ed in rough strokes to indicate refutation.
Brief scene: MAN brushing teeth, rinsing mouth, spitting.
Cut to MOON, impassive.
Return to MAN. He stands before the bathroom cabinet, puzzling. He opens the door, which is also a mirror. Zoom to tiny red BOX. What is in the BOX? Something, we sense, that he resists because it does not conform to his ideal of healthy normality. He closes the door.
He sniffs. As he has been standing puzzling, the odor of his own body has risen to him, a potato-ish, reproachful odor. When he was a child living, like the CHILD in the commercial, with adults, he imagined that adults emitted this odor on purpose, to chasten and discipline him. Now that it is his own odor, it does not seem chastening but merely nagging, like the pile of SLIT ENVELOPES that clutter the kitchen table every afternoon. Quick still of ENVELOPES. Replay of CHILD running down STAIRCASE to awaiting arms. We are, subliminally, affected.
Shuffling (in case he stubs his toe or steps on a pin), the MAN returns from the bathroom and proceeds around the BED. The TELEVISION SET is cold now. The MOON is cold, too. As if easing a read letter back into a slit envelope, he eases himself back into BED beside his WIFE. He sneaks his hand under her nightie and rubs her back; it is a ritual question. In ritual answer, the WIFE stirs in her sleep, awakens enough to realize that the room is cold, presses her body tight against that of the MAN, and falls again asleep. Asleep again. Again again. Asleep.
Now his half of the BED has been reduced to a third—a third, furthermore, crimped and indented by oblivious elbows and knees. The MAN’S eyes close but his EARS open wider, terrible auditory eyes from which lids have been scissored, avid organs hungry for the whispers and crackles of the WORLD. He buries his EARS alternately in the pillow, but cannot stanch both at once. He thinks of masturbating, but decides there is not enough room. And there is the problem of the SPOT on the SHEET.
A radiator whistles: steam heat, oil-fired. Would natural gas be noiseless? A far car whirs. Surf, or wind, murmurs; or can it be a helicopter?
Now the CAT—a new actor!—mews a foot below the MAN’S face. Svelte and insistent, the CAT wants to go out. The MAN, almost gratefully, rises. Better action than inaction, he thinks—in this a typical citizen of our unmeditative era. The CAT’S whiskers, electric, twitching, tingle like frost on the MAN’S bare ankles.
Together MAN and CAT go down a STAIRCASE. No oaken knobs here. The style is bare, modern. The MAN touches the wall: chill plaster.
The MAN opens the front door. GRASS, TREES, SKY, and STARS, abruptly framed, look colorless and flat, as if, thus surprised, they had barely had time to get their outlines together. The STARS, especially, appear perfunctory: bullet holes in a hangar roof. The CAT darts offscreen.
We are back in the BED. The MAN turns the pillow over, to explore with his cheek its dark side. Delicately, yet borrowing insistence from the CAT’S example, he pushes his WIFE’S body toward her side of the BED, inch by inert inch. Minutes of patient nudging are undone when, surfacing toward consciousness, she slumps more confidingly into him. Does she wake, or sleep? Is her reclamation of two-thirds of the BED an instinctive territorial assertion of her insensate body, or is it the product, cerebral enough, of some calculation scribbled on the shifting, tricky, flesh-heated marital ground between them? Here the MAN, our inadequate hero, seems to arrive at one of those fumbling points that usefully distract the brain with the motions of thinking while the body falls into thought-free bliss. Hopeful pits and bubbles and soft, stretching aches develop within him, forerunners of sleep’s merciful dissolution of the tensions and desires of the day.
Abrupt cut: within a child’s room—another new actor!—the HAMSTER, yielding to some sudden fantasy of speed and space, accelerates within his unoiled running wheel. The clatter is epic; the HAMSTER twirls the WORLD on a string.
We are back in the bathroom. The MAN decides he must urinate again. The shadowy TOILET BOWL again reminds him of absolute beauty. A forlorn sense of surrender suffuses the aroma of overripe potatoes. He is removing the little red BOX from the cabinet whose door is a mirror. He takes two small objects from this BOX. Zoom. They are little balls of WAX. Why? What in the WORLD?
Back in the bedroom. The MOON in the window has shrunk in size. In contracting, it has gained heat; its pallor looks white-hot, almost solar.
The MAN inserts himself back into the BED. He inserts the WAX EAR PLUGS into his ears. The sharp bright wires of noise etched on darkness dull down into gray threads, an indistinct blanket. He grows aware of the tangible wool blanket, as a source of goodness, a sheltering firmament tangent to him. His WIFE mysteriously, voluntarily shifts her weight away, toward the other side of the bed, toward the wide horizon where all pressures meet in a dull wedge. A subterranean whistling noise dawns upon the MAN as the sound of his own breathing. He is suppressing himself, his ens. The cave of his skull furs with nonsense. (Pan, fade, dissolve.)
That is how it happens most every night.
What is being advertised? Pick one:
(1) Ear plugs (2) Natural gas (3) Lucifer’s fall (4) Nothing whatsoever.
Minutes of the Last Meeting
The chairman of the Committee again expressed his desire to resign.
The Secretary pointed out that the bylaws do not provide for resignation procedures, they provide however for a new slate of officers to be presented annually and a new slate of officers was being accordingly presented.
The Chairman responded that however on the new slate his name was again listed as Chairman. He said he had served since the founding of the Committee and sincerely felt that his chairmanship had become more of a hindrance than a help. He said that what the Committee needed at this point was new direction and a refined sense of purpose which he could not provide, being too elderly and confused and out of sympathy with things. That the time had come either for younger blood to take over the helm or possibly for the Committee to disband.
The Secretary pointed out that the bylaws do not provide for disbandment.
In answer to a query from the Chairman, Mrs. Hepple on behalf of the Nominating Sub-Committee explained that the Sub-Committee felt as a whole that the Chairman was invaluable in his present position, that support in the wider community would be drastically weakened by his resignation, and that the nomination of two vice-chairmen and the creation of appropriate sub-committees would effectively lighten his work load.
The Chairman asked how often the Nominating Sub-Committee had met. Mrs. Hepple responded that due to the holiday season they had convened once, by telephone. There was laughter. In the same humorous spirit the Chairman suggested that the only way he could effectively resign would be to shoot himself.
Mr. Langbehn, one of the newer members, said before presuming to participate in this discussion he would be grateful for having explained to him the original purposes and intents of the Committee.
The Chairman answered that he had never understood them and would be grateful himself.
Miss Beame then volunteered that though the youngest Founder present she would offer her impressions, which were that at the founding of the Committee their purpose was essentially the formal one of meeting to give approval to the activities of the Director. That without the magical personality and earnest commitment of the Director they would not have been gathered together at all. That beyond appointing him Director the bulk of the business at the first meeting had centered upon the name of the Committee, initially proposed as the Tarbox Betterment Committee, then expanded to the Committee for Betterment and Development of Human Resources. That the Director had felt that the phrase Equal Opportunity should also be included, and perhaps some special emphasis on youth as well, without appearin
g to exclude the senior citizens of the community. Therefore the title of Tarbox Committee for Equal Development and Betterment for Young and Old Alike was proposed and considered.
Dr. Costopoulos, a Founder, recalled that the Director did not however wish the Committee to appear to offer itself as a rival to already extant groups like the Golden Agers and the Teen Scene and had furthermore regretted in the official committee title any indication of a pervasive ecological concern. So a unanimous vote was taken to leave the name of the Committee temporarily open.
Mrs. Hepple added that even though the Director had been rather new in town it all had seemed a wonderful idea. He was the kind of young man who made things happen, she added.
Mrs. MacMillan, a new member, asked where the Director was.
Miss Beame explained that the Director had vanished after the founding meeting.
Leaving behind a cardboard suitcase and an unpaid phone bill, the Chairman volunteered. There was laughter.
The Secretary pointed out that the bylaws perfectly clearly specify the purpose of the Committee and read excerpts spelling out that “no political candidates or partisan causes should be publicly espoused,” “no stocks or bonds were to be held with the objective of financial profit or gain,” and “no gambling or licentious assignation would be permitted on any premises leased or owned entirely or in part by the said Committee.”
Mr. Langbehn asked to see the bylaws.
The Secretary graciously complied.
Mr. Langbehn claimed after examination that this was a standard form purchasable in any office-supplies or stationery store.
Mrs. Hepple said she didn’t see that it made any difference, that here we all are and that is the main point.
Mrs. MacMillan inquired as to why the Committee kept meeting in the absence of the Director.
The Treasurer interrupted to ask the evening’s Hostess, Mrs. Landis, if it weren’t time for refreshments to be served.
