by John Updike
For three days after her commended decision, Lynne came and went, marvelling at the fury of her father’s will to live. His face, parched and unfed, grew rigid. His mouth made an O like a baby’s at the breast. His breathing poured forth a stench like a stream of inexpressible scorn. His hand lived in hers. He could not die, she could not stay; as with the participants of a great and wicked love, there was none to forgive them save each other.
He died unobserved. Shortly a nurse noticed and drew the sheet up over his face and called his nearest relative. Lynne had been raking leaves from her frostbitten lawn, thinking she should be with him. The world, which had made a space of privacy and isolation around them, then gathered and descended in a fluttering of letters and visits, of regards and reminiscences; her father’s long, successful life was rebuilt in words before her. The funeral was a success, a rally of the surviving, a salute to the useful and presentable man who had passed away some time ago, while his body had still lived. Her sisters descended from airplanes and cried more than she could. Elderly faces that had floated above her childhood, her father’s old friends, materialized. Lynne was kissed, hugged, caressed, complimented. Yet she had been his executioner. There was no paradox, she saw. They were grateful. The world needed death. It needed death exactly as much as it needed life.
After the burial service, Martin came home with her and the children. “I’m surprised,” Lynne said to him as soon as they were alone, “Harriet wasn’t there.”
“Did you want her to be? We assumed you didn’t.”
“That was correct.”
“She would have liked to be, of course. She admired what you did.”
Lynne saw that for him the funeral had been an opportunity for Harriet’s advancement. In his mind he had leaped beyond their separation, beyond the divorce, to some day when she, his first wife, would be gracious to his second, repaying this supposed admiration. How small, Lynne thought, he had grown: a promoter, a liaison man. “I did nothing,” she said.
“You did everything,” he responded, and this, too, was part of his game: to sell her herself as well as Harriet, to sell her on the idea that she was competent and independent; she could manage without him.
Could she? Not for the first time since the nurse had given her, over the telephone, the awaited gift of her father’s death did Lynne feel in her new freedom an abysmal purposelessness; she glimpsed the possibility that her father had needed her as none of the living did, that her next service to everyone, having killed him, was herself to die. Martin was lethal in his new manner, all efficient vitality, hugging the children ardently, talking to each with a self-conscious and compressed attentiveness unknown in the years when he had absent-mindedly shared their home. He even presumed to tap Lynne on the bottom as she stood at the stove, as if she were one more child to be touched. In the hour before dinner, he raced around the house changing lightbulbs, bleeding the furnace, replacing window shades that had fallen from the temperamental little sockets up high. His virtuoso show of dutifulness—his rapid survey of the photographs the boys had developed in their darkroom, the brisk lesson in factoring he administered to his younger daughter—to Lynne felt intended to put her to shame. His removal, rather than bringing her and the children closer together, had put distance between them. They blamed her for losing him. They blamed themselves. Night after night they sat wordless around the dinner table, chewing their failure. Now he was here, pulling the wine cork, celebrating her father’s death. “Lynne, dear”—a locution of Harriet’s he had acquired—“tell us all why you can’t seem to replace the burned-out light bulbs. Is it the unscrewing or the screwing in that frightens you?” Lethal, but attractive; Harriet had made of him something smaller but more positive, less timorous and diffuse. Before, he had been in the house like the air they unthinkingly breathed; now he manifested himself among them as a power, his show of energy and duty vindictive—the display of a treasure they had wasted.
Lynne told him, “I’ve been so busy getting my father to die I didn’t notice which bulbs were on and which were off. I haven’t even read a newspaper for days.”
Martin ignored her defense. “Poor Grandpa,” he said, gazing about at the children as if one more parental duty fallen to him was to remind them to mourn.
Hate, pure tonic hatred of this man, filled her and seemed to lift her free; he sensed it, from his end of the table, through the candlelit mist of children, and smiled. He wanted her hate. But it flickered off, like a bad lightbulb. She was not free.
He helped her do the dishes. Living alone, Martin had learned some habits of housework: another new trick. As he moved around her, avoiding touching her, drying each dish with a comical bachelor care, she felt him grow weary; he, too, was mortal. In his weariness, he had slipped from Harriet’s orbit back into hers. “Want me to go?” he asked, shyly.
“Sure. Why not? You always do.”
“I thought, Grandpa dead and everything, you might get too depressed alone.”
“Don’t you want to go tell Harriet all about the marvellous funeral she missed?”
“No. She doesn’t expect it. She said to be nice to you.”
So his offer came from Harriet, not him. He was being given a night out, like the vulgarest of lower-class husbands. And Lynne was herself too weary to fight the gift, to scorn it.
“The children are all here,” she told him. “There’s no extra bed. You’ll have to sleep with me.”
“It won’t kill us,” he said.
“Who’s us?” Lynne asked.
Months had passed since she had felt his body next to hers in bed. He had grown thinner, harder, more precisely knit, as if exercised by the distance he strained to keep between them. Perhaps only at first had it been a strain for him. When with a caress she offered to make love, he said, “No. That would be too much.” In her fatigue, she was relieved. Sleep came to her swiftly, even though his presence barred her from the center of the bed, to which she had grown accustomed. In a dream, she was holding her father’s hand, and he horrified her by sitting up energetically and beginning to scold, in that sardonic way Lynne felt he had always reserved for her, the oldest; he showed her younger sisters only his softer side. She awoke and found her husband twisting next to her. It did not surprise her that he was there. Surprise came the other nights, when the bed was empty. Martin was up on one elbow, trying to plump his pillow. “Why,” he asked, as if they had been talking all along, “have you given the kids all the airfoam pillows and left yourself with these awful old feather things? It’s like trying to sleep with your head on a pancake.”
“Can’t you go to sleep?”
“Of course not.”
“Have I been asleep?”
“As usual.”
“What do you think’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. Guilt, I suppose. I feel guilty about Harriet. Sleeping with you.”
“Don’t tell me about it. This was your idea, not mine.”
“Also, I feel rotten about Grandpa. He was so good. He knew something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The way he said ‘allegedly’ that time. And that day we took him to the nursing home—the way he accepted me as the boss. So brave and quiet, like a child going off to camp. This big Boston lawyer, who had always looked at me as sort of a chump, really. I had become the boss. Remember how he kept advising me to watch out for the other cars? He had become—what’s the word?—deferential.”
“I know. It was pathetic.”
“He didn’t want me to hit another car, though. He wanted good care of himself taken.”
“I know. I loved his will to live. It put me to shame. It puts us all to shame.”
“Why?”
His blunt question startled her: the new Martin. The old one and she had understood each other without trying. She understood him now: he was saying, Put yourself to shame, put yourself to death, but don’t include me: I’m alive. At last. She tried to explain, “I feel very disconnected these days.”
“Well, I guess you are.”
“Not just from you. Disconnected from everybody. The sermon today, I couldn’t cry. It had nothing to do with Daddy, with anybody real. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you and the boys. The way the backs of your heads were all the same.”
He twisted noisily, and looped his arm around her waist. Her heart flipped, waiting for his hand to enclose her breast, his old way. It didn’t happen. It was as if his arm had been sliced off at the wrist. He said, in a soft, well-meant voice, “I’m sorry. Of course I feel guiltiest about you. Lying here is very conflicting. I felt conflicted all week, you calling me every hour on the hour to say your dear father hadn’t kicked the bucket yet.”
“Don’t exaggerate. And don’t say ‘dear.’ ”
“You called a lot, I thought. And it went on and on, he just wouldn’t die. What a tough old farmer he turned out to be.”
“Yes.”
“You were in agony. And there I sat in Back Bay, no use at all. I hated myself. I still do.”
His confession, Lynne saw, was an opportunity another woman—Harriet, certainly—would seize. His taut body wanted to make love. But, as had happened so many nights when they were married, by the same mechanism whereby the television news had lulled her, commercials and disasters and weather and sports tumbling on with the world’s rotation, so her awareness of Martin’s wishing to make love—of male energy alive in the world and sustaining it—put her to sleep, as her father’s once sitting by her bedside had.
• • •
When Lynne awoke again, he was still fighting with the pillow. By the quality of the moonlight, time had passed, but whether two minutes or an hour she couldn’t tell. She knew she had failed once more, but the quality of this, too, was different. It was not so grievous, because everything was steeped and flattened in the moonlight of grief. She asked, “How can you be still awake?”
“This is a very unsuccessful experiment,” he said, with satisfaction, of their sleeping together. “You do something to the bed that makes me nervous. You always did. With Harriet I have no problem. I sleep like a baby.”
“Don’t tell me about it.”
“I’m just reporting it as a curious physiological fact.”
“Just relax. Re-lax.”
“I can’t. Evidently you can. Your poor father’s being dead must be a great relief.”
“Not especially. Lie on your back.”
He obeyed. She put her hand on his penis. It was warm and silky-small and like nothing else, softer than a breast, more fragile than a thumb, yet heavy. Together, after a minute, they realized it was not rising, and would not rise. For Martin, it was a triumph, a proof. “Come on,” he taunted. “Do your worst.”
For Lynne it had been, in his word, an experiment. Among her regrets was one that, having held her dying father’s hand so continuously, she had not been holding it at the moment in which he passed from life to death; she had wanted, childishly, to know what it would have felt like. It would have felt like this. “Go to sleep,” someone was pleading, far away. “Let’s go to sleep.”
Problems
1. During the night, A, though sleeping with B, dreams of C. C stands at the farthest extremity or (if the image is considered two-dimensionally) the apogee of a curved driveway, perhaps a dream-refraction of the driveway of the house that had once been their shared home. Her figure, though small in the perspective, is vivid, clad in a tomato-red summer dress; her head is thrown back, her hands are on her hips, and her legs have taken a wide, confident stance. She is flaunting herself, perhaps laughing; his impression is of intense female vitality, his emotion is of longing. He awakes troubled. The sleep of B beside him is not disturbed; she rests in the certainty that A loves her. Indeed, he has left C for her, to prove it.
PROBLEM: Which has he more profoundly betrayed, B or C?
2. A lives 7 blocks from the Laundromat he favors. He lives 3.8 miles from his psychiatrist, the average time of transit to whom, in thick afternoon traffic, is 22 minutes. The normal session, with allowances for preand post-therapy small talk, lasts 55 minutes. The normal wash cycle in the type of top-loader the Laundromat favors runs for 33 minutes. The psychiatrist and the Laundromat are in the same outbound direction.
PROBLEM: Can A put his laundry in a washer on the way to his psychiatrist and return without finding his wet clothes stolen?
PROBLEMS FOR EXTRA CREDIT: If the time of the psychiatric appointment is 3 p.m., and a city block is considered to be one-eighth (⅛) of a mile, and if A arranges the 2 purgative operations serially, placing the laundry second, and if, further, the drying cycle purchasable for a quarter (25¢) lasts a quarter of an hour (15 minutes) and the average load requires 2 such cycles or else is too damp to be carried home without osmotically moistening the chest of the carrier, at what time will A be able to pour himself a drink? Round to the nearest minute.
Calculate the time for 2 drinks.
Calculate the time for 3, with a wet chest.
3. A has 4 children. Two are in college, 2 attend private school. Annual college expenses amount to $6,300 each, those of private school to $4,700. A’s annual income is n. Three-sevenths (3/7) of n are taken by taxes, federal and state. One-third (⅓) goes to C, who is having the driveway improved. Total educational expenses are equivalent to five-twenty-firsts (5/21) of n. The cost each week of a psychiatric session is $45, of a Laundromat session $1.10. For purposes of computation, consider these A’s only expenses.
PROBLEM: How long can A go on like this? Round to the nearest week.
4. The price of pea stone is $13 a cubic yard. A truckload consists of 3¼ cubic yards. C’s driveway is 8′ 6″ wide and describes an ellipse of which the foci are 2 old croquet stakes 31 yards apart. A line perpendicular to a line drawn between the stakes and intersecting this line at midpoint strikes the edge of the driveway in just 9 paces, as paced off by the driveway contractor. He is a big man and wears size 12 shoes. The average desirable depth, he says, of pea stone in a suburban driveway is one and one-half inches (1½″). Any more, you get troughing; any less, you don’t get that delicious crunching sound, like marbles being swished in a coffee can.
In addition to the ellipse there is a straight spur connecting it to Pleasant Avenue. The length of the spur is to the radius of the ellipse as is to.
In addition to the base cost per truckload there is $10.50 an hour for the driver, plus an occasional gratuitous, graciously offered beer, @ $1.80 per six-pack.
PROBLEM: Why is C doing all this?
5. A’s psychiatrist thinks he is experiencing growth, measurable in psychic distance attained from C. However, by Tristan’s Law appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability. Attainability is somewhat proportional to psychic distance. As a psychic mass M is reduced in apparent size by the perspectives of recession, its gravitational attraction proportionally increases. There exists a curve whereby gravitational attraction overpowers reason, though the apparent source of attraction may be, like the apparent position of all but the nearest stars, an illusion.
PROBLEM: Plot this curve. Find the starlike point where A’s brain begins to bend.
HELPFUL HINTS: The “somewhat” above translates to 3/7.
Midas’s Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.
6. B is beautiful. Clear blue eyes, blue denim miniskirt, dear little blue veins behind her silken knees. C is receding rapidly, a tomato-red speck in an untroubled azure. A’s 4 children have all been awarded scholarships. His psychiatrist has moved his couch to walnut-panelled, shag-carpeted quarters above the Laundromat, up just one quick flight of 22 steps. The price of pea stone has dropped dramatically, because of the recession. It is a beautiful day, a bright-blue Monday.
PROBLEM: Something feels wrong. What is it?
The Man Who Loved
Extinct Mammals
Sapers lived rather shapelessly in a city that shall be nameless. It was at a juncture of his life when he had many ties, none of them bind
ing. Accordingly, he had much loose time, and nothing, somehow, better filled it than the perusal of extinct mammals. Living species gave him asthma, and the dinosaurs had been overdone; but in between lay a marvellous middle world of lumpy, clumping, hairy, milk-giving creatures passed from the face of the earth. They tended to be large: “During these early periods,” writes Harvey C. Markman in his pamphlet Fossil Mammals (published by the Denver Museum of Natural History), “many of the mammals went in for large size and absurdity.” For example, Barylambda. It was nearly eight feet long and half as high. It had a short face, broad feet, muscular legs, and a very stout tail. “It combined”—to quote Markman again—“many anatomical peculiarities which together had little survival value. One might say of this race, and other aberrant groups, that they tried to specialize in too many ways and made very little progress in the more essential directions.” It was extinct by the end of the Paleocene. “Who could not love such a creature?” Sapers asked himself.
