by John Updike
Didn't mean to run on nostalgically like this—the cassette's the thing. Guard it with su vida, as they say. You won't see this grotesque stationery with its faux-naive logo any more, unless I steal some when I leave. I'm actually staying the night, tonight, which feels strange, since I've been using the dreary lobby, full of gun magazines, off and on these past months as a place to conduct my business. Some four-footed beastie keeps snarling and scratching and whining outside my sealed window, but if you turn the air-conditioner up to high it pretty well drowns him (or her—why do we always think predators are male?) out. The whole town of Forrest is sinister, in fact—the flattened-out flatness of it, the stagnant brook with its cottonwoods, and then in the distance these abrupt wrinkled mountains that seem pieces of another world. Pearl seems to be committed to a foolish marriage to some foppish young Dutchman—but who can say what marriage is more foolish than another? All have their merits and demerits and wear out before we do. Except in your case, of course. Maybe the language barrier you and Esmeralda had at first has lent a permanent touch,of romance. It's really not wise for married people (or lovers) to understand each other too well—communication, I fear, is hideously overrated. An abrazo for the two of you, and six kisses to the little ones from their rather frazzled
Tia Sarah
December 7
Dear Ducky—
On the run, but I've been wondering how you're doing. I bet sometimes you long to be back in the closet. I know I do. Can you let Charles know ever so minimally, in that wonderful grunting way men have of communicating, that we're ready to talk if he is? As you know better than I, he is highly motivated now, and we can make the terms. I'll settle for half of everything but begin by asking for it all—the properties and securities, that is. On my alimony—would four thousand a month be too reasonable? I caught a cold in the Kansas City airport (semicircular, and drafty) and feel dismal. Let's have lunch again, when we're two totally different people.
Love (warmed over),
Sarah
Dec. 12
Dear Martin—
The conch is a big food down here as well as a pretty shell. When I have an address I can give you, I'd love to hear if there's anything nice you can say about prison. Security? Lack of responsibility? Friendships forged in difficult circumstances? I meant to answer your last good long letter but was very busy.
My best wishes,
Sarah Worth
Dec. 12
Dear Eldridge—
These are palm trees, common as telephone poles in^ this area. Their seeds are entire coconuts that ride across the ocean from island to island and take root. Isn't that amazing? The island I'm on is small but pleasant. I bet Boston is freezing now. But bells and lights everywhere! Merry Xmas,
Sarah Worth
Dec. 12
Dear Shirlee & Marcus & Foster & Annette—
You've got your troubles, I've got mine. Isn't that an old Beatles song? Don't know why it keeps running through my head. Actually this island is a little paradise. I swim at the beginning and end of every day and my hair keeps bushing out from the saltwater and standing up as if in punk spikes. I'm letting it grow long again. Happy holidays,
Sarah Worth
Dec. 21
Dear Myron—
How strange you must think this, hearing from me after all these years! And I write inhibited not only by shyness but by the fear that my letter and these two enclosures will never reach you in care of a television station in Los Angeles. But over a month ago, when I was still living in the Arizona desert northwest of Forrest, as part of a religious commune you may have yourself heard about—seen about, I suppose one should say—on television, I was watching with the guru, who constantly hoped to see himself on the evening news, and I saw your name amid the credits scrolling (isn't that the word?) past after a fascinating and rather tragic PBS show about nature, mostly the California condor and its stupidity about not becoming extinct, even to pecking open its own eggs, that we had tuned in the tag end of. The scrolling was very fast but your dear name jumped out at me like a snatch of an old song and I remembered that the last thing I had heard about you, about five years ago, from Liz Bellingham, whom you may dimly remember from those college days and who later with her husband—he works for a mutual fund—moved to quite near me and my former husband on the North Shore, was that you were doing television scripts in Los Angeles. I was so pleased and proud to hear it—you were always so funny and quick, in this totally non-cruel way, and if you can't be Delmore Schwartz or Norman Mailer (your idols, as I recall) what nicer than to mingle your sparkle in with the great electronic bloodstream of America?
So I thought it bad to be you—the coincidence would be too great. I do hope I am right, and that the simple number of the channel is enough for the post office, and then that you are important enough for the channel to find you and hand you the envelope. It all seems rather a long shot, but everything in nature is a long shot, from our father's sperm breaking into our mother's egg to the California condor hatching its own eggs. Your mother may be still living in Dorchester but, to be honest, I've quite forgotten the number, though I remember the street—Juliette, my Romeo. It seemed likely that on the wings of your Hollywood affluence—not that condors are Bill Cosby, exactly—she had flown to a gray-shingled cottage in Quincy or perhaps Nahant, where my ancestors used to summer, when it was the North Shore and everything beyond it the forest primeval. I do hope she is happy and well. She used to be so nice to me, so cheerfully overriding my egregious goyishness, always asking after my parents as if she knew them, and as if they weren't a pair of insufferable Wasp pricks. Those little macaroons with the half-cherry in the center she used to force on me, saying I was too thin (my own mother constantly telling me I was too fat), and that nice blackberry-flavored tea she said was good for colds and cramps, and your little sister with the deep shadows below her eyes—such a solemn wraithlike relief from my jokey snobby towheaded brother—and your dead father, in his several framed pictures scattered around, somehow more there, emotionally, than my own father, who was certifiably alive at the time. Confession: it was not just you I was infatuated with, it was your family, tucked with all those others in this hilly wooden three-decker part of Boston I had never been to before, and that overheated long floor-through so different from the chilly bare Dedham house, so full of wallpaper patterns and kinds of plush and fat friendly knobby furniture and embroidered doilies and doodads still savoring of Europe, Europe as a place of actual living life and not just a vague distant source of authenticity and privilege. I used to love to step onto your tippy back porch, with its drying wash and cat and dog dishes and view of the gas tanks and Squantum and the harbor, and feel dizzy, as if I was on the prow of a ship that was moving, that was just docking in the New World. Your porch always felt thrillingly untied to anything, and there was this tumbling feeling in your apartment—words, cookies, souvenirs, meanings crowded one upon the other with this cheerful exalting intimate (though of course you weren't rich) abundance, a sweetly crammed feeling that made me feel crammed with my own existence, alive to all my corners and cherished or at least forgiven for being myself, my womanly self, into which I had rather recently grown and which I felt was something of a vexation for my own family, a kind of competitive messiness my mother didn't need. Puritanism in my parents had dwindled to a sort of housekeeping whose most characteristic gesture was to take something to the attic because it was undistinguished or vaguely reminiscent of some relative we preferred to forget. And I was so tall, and pungently healthy, and oddly dark—my skin was my father's but my mother often said she didn't know where I had gotten such broad hips, and blamed some aunt of my father's she had never liked, a poor soul from Bridgeport whose husband had given her syphilis and who died quite insane while he lived on forever, with a little pain in his spine but nothing more, it was said in the family that' a Ziegfeld girl in New York had given it to him—I felt as if my femaleness was embarrassing to everybody and until y
ou I had nowhere to put it, no place but your funny home in which I was at home. Don't be offended if I say that I think your Jewishness, though of course very bouncy and with its huge tragic history rather majestic, was the least of it—at that point in my life any family, Italian or Armenian or even Irish, would have struck me as a haven, a blessed relief from the terrible sparsity in which I had been raised, the curious correct emptiness of our lives as if half the normal human baggage had been left back in Suffolk, England, in 1630. Or did I say all this at the time? Dear old Myron, can you really be baldish now, and with a potbelly, and three ex-wives, and wear safari jackets and sport shirts with an open neck and a gleaming gold chain? I try to picture it and still see that wiry bright-eyed fast-talking Harvard scholarship sophomore with a comic way of tipping his head back and half-closing his lids, as though I were some kind of blinding treasure who couldn't be appraised all at one go. Forgive me, now, for going on at such length, but if I have you—if you are at that channel—I don't want to let you go too soon. I have a great deal of time here, in my seaside cabana. Other guests at this strung-out hotel go down to the beach all day and noisily play at wind-surfing and pedalboats, but I'm determined not to get all pruny and full of keratoses like my mother, who is having a second girlhood in Florida even sillier than her first. I sit inside and embroider my letters and read. Even so, just taking a dip early mornings and late afternoons, I've become brown as a Polynesian, and my hair is like thatch, stiff with saltwater. I wish you could see me. You'd be proud of how I've struggled to keep my figure and dignity, my feminine gentility, though I've stopped using Clairol and'some gray shows now, amid the gleams of reflected sunlight.
This place, Samana Cay, is where some recent experts, working from the logs, think Columbus really landed, not Watling Island sixty miles to the northwest of here, and the locals hope to make a great thing of it, with monuments and a replica of the Santa Maria as a nightclub wing for the hotel and special postage stamps and so on. They want to take the name San Salvador, which Columbus gave his first island, whichever it was, from Watling, but I think the Bahamas government in Nassau is cool to the idea, at least until more evidence emerges. But what evidence do they expect?—things as they happen are always more confusing than they should be—maya is full of these airy holes—and it seems strange that if Columbus was to discover a whole new world he would blunder around in these Bahamas which all look pretty much alike and are just glorified sandbars really. When they taught us in school about October 12, 1492, I pictured the three ships just rolling right up to the East Coast, probably the pier at Atlantic City, and not fiddling around way out here on the edge of nowhere, where the Western Hemisphere thins out to almost nothing. Columbus called his island flat and green and that pretty well says it for Samana Cay. The only cash crops are dried conch meats and cascarilla bark, which is used to flavor Campari. The Indian name for the place, according to Columbus's log, was Guanahand, and a little group of Indians gathered on the beach when the Pinta went ashore and were, according to the log, "naked as their mother bore them" and had the widest heads and foreheads Columbus had ever seen, because of the Lucayan custom of head-binding. The Spaniards evidently traded glass beads and falconry bells for live parrots and native spears tipped with fish teeth. Myron, what language did they talk to make these trades? These poor Indians, who were all to go extinct in a few more decades thanks to our diseases and guns, had never seen anything like European men and clothes and ships and yet didn't seem terribly surprised—it's as if somebody else, anonymously, had already been there, and paved the way. There are these ghosts all through the history of discovery, softening its shocks—a shadowy person who has been there before the ones who get their names in all the history books, a kind of nameless aura men throw ahead of them.
So mysterious encounters are the way of the world, including ours. Yours and mine. With our impossibly broad faces we were exchanging glass beads for live parrots. Weren't those nice times we had? Remember Elsie's, that big black man behind the counter we called "Heavy" for "heavy on the dressing" on the Elsie's Specials, and the Hayes-Bick at two in the morning, and the folk-singing at Club 47 before it got too protesty, and downstairs at the Casablanca, where we felt we were somehow stepping into the movie itself, and Peter Lorre might sidle up to the bar in a white jacket at any minute, or Sydney Greenstreet in a fez or Claude Rains in a kepi, while time kept going by on the piano and Bogie and Bergman locked eyes in lost love forever? Can you remember how you used to adore me? I do remember, and in a sense have sailed through life ever since on the love you gave me then, though I suppose any post-adolescent young male would have done something like it—voted for me as I was, solid and sweaty, and not for some wispy docile entity caught in the webs of family and finance and whatever else gave me reality and justified my existence in society's eyes. I wish now I had given my virginity to you. We were like Columbus in a way, poking from island to island and never reaching the mainland. Maybe it was better; I used to feel you come through all our tangled clothes and be so proud of myself. Can it really be that nothing will ever bring us back, Shiva and Shakti for the first time in our lives, and that the overheated interior of that aquamarine Bel Air you used to borrow from your roommate has melted for keeps into the cold cosmic void, into past time? Our pastimes. I loved you then and would love you now and am truly sorry I didn't have the courage to defy my family and all that inherited silver and go off with you and be your woman forever.
I would like Hollywood, I do believe. I have read somehow that it's a woman's town—the only town in America where women wield real power, though they tend of course by their sexist conditioning to hand it back to the male agents and those deplorable weak and grabby hanger-on husbands they choose—the stars, the gossip columnists, the porn queens even, enslaving themselves to these deplorable men when there seems no reason. Why are we—women—such a dependent and self-destructive lot? The act of childbirth is such a risk, I suppose, we build prapatti (self-surrender) in. The reading matter around here is rather limited (I've already given you the gist of a pamphlet they hand out about this being where Columbus landed) even though there is a so-called bookstore right in the middle of the village—hardly a village, just six or so tin-roofed shanties with this one new posh-rustic hotel and a few attached shops for the Americans and Canadians and this bookstore with almost nothing in it but last year's bestsellers and loads of Oriental mysticism—I've been driven to read a battered old college textbook on zoology some island-hopping camper left in the hotel lobby to lighten his backpack. The book talks about "the simultaneous eagerness of the female for sexual stimulation and her inherent fear of body contact with any other animal, including a male of her own species." I found that so touching. The story of my life and all our lives really. Scared of our species. It goes on to talk about how lady gray squirrels—and if you've ever seen them chasing around trees you'll know just what it means—"feel torn between two powerful instincts: they want to escape and at the same time they want to greet the male."
And so, having escaped over, twenty years ago, I still greet you. I wanted to apologize to you for letting everybody bully me into marrying Charles Worth when you did more for my blood, my rajas, my ego, and the atman that lies beyond and within the ego. (My marriage, as you can guess, is kaput, though it produced one lovely child—a fair-haired daughter—and twenty-two years' worth of distractions and genteel pretense.) I wanted you to know, in case I die here or am put into prison for some technical reasons I won't bore you with, how your texture, your voice (so quick, and sensitive, and yet sweetly tentative, and even lulling), your chest with all its downy hair, and the milky musty smell of us entwined together were woven into my nerves and will never be unwoven. Having apologized, dear Myron, and having mailed you this rather heavy-breathing bit of the past (scientists, I just read in the Samana Cay Gazette, are doing things with "old air" captured inside hollow brass buttons and tightly corked bottles), let me ask you for two tiny favors: please stamp
and mail the enclosed two letters. Again for technical reasons, I don't want the recipients to have any idea where I am, and a Los Angeles postmark would be. a wonderful parting gift to
Your unextinguished old flame,
Sarah née Price
December 19
Revered Master—
To quote the blessed Dhammapada: "I have conquered all; I know all, and my life is pure; I have left all, and I am free from craving. I myself found the way. Whom shall I call Teacher? Whom shall I teach?"
