Authors: John Updike
Angela’s even breathing broke pace; she turned with a slithering turmoil of sheets, and the stride of her unconscious sighing resumed.
Horribly awake, Piet tried to pray. His up-pouring thoughts touched nothing. An onyx dust of gas above his face. Something once solid had been atomized.
Thou shalt not covet. Whosoever lusteth in his heart
. Pedrick’s foolish twisting. A dour desert tribe: Dead Sea. Pots broken by a shepherd boy. Orange dust. One more dismal sect. Mormons. Salt Lake. Hymnals unopened all week stink of moldy paper: unwrapping a fish. Forgive me. Reach down and touch. He had patronized his faith and lost it. God will not be used. Death stretched endless under him. Life a scum, consciousness its scum. Piet lay as a shimmering upon an unfounded mineral imperviousness. His parents were twin flecks of mica squeezed in granite. No light touched them into light. The eternal loss of
light: in the plane’s plunge, not knowing he was dreaming, honest to his bones, he had phrased it so to himself, like any unchurched commuter whose day takes a bad turn. Why tease God longer? Busy old fellow has widows and orphans to interview, grieving Tehranese, still benighted. Bite down on death. Bite down. No screaming within the plane. All still in falling. Stoic grace learned from movies. Hope of heaven drains the sky. No Hottentot he. Away with the blindfold. Matter mostly nothing, a titter skinning a vacuum. Angela sleeps in the cradle of the stars, her uncle’s web. Nothing sacred. Triune like cock and balls: Freddy Thorne. Oh Lord, this steepness of sickness, this sliding. Patient parents thumbing home seeds in peat had planted a tree whose fruit he had fed to women. The voracious despair of women had swallowed God.
From his height of fear Piet saw his life dwindled small, distinct. The three new houses, sold, on Indian Hill as from a helicopter. Now Gallagher wanted acres more, saw himself a developer, a builder of cities. Gallagherville. Terrytown. Hanema Plaza. Angela Place. Maps, prospecti, underground garages, a grateful Commonwealth votes its thanks. Sir Matthew Galleyslave, having given employment to thousands, true prince of the Church, dinner at the White House starring Pablo Casals and Ruby Newman.
And Mr. President, this is my partner
. That flinty Irish smile, stiff-backed, wall-eyed. Jack:
This cunning little fellow? May I pet him?
Another voice, more musical:
Does he bite?
Feeling his thoughts expand into nonsense, Piet went tense with gratitude, with eager anticipation of sleeping, and snapped wide awake again, his heart churning. He needed to touch something. He could never rise with Gallagher because he needed to touch a tool. Grab the earth. The plane had
plunged and he had been without resources, unchurched, unmanned. He needed to touch Foxy, her nipples, her belly, in oblique moonlight. Her head was full of braid and crosses. She believed. She adored his prick. With billowing gauzy width she had flung herself onto him, was his, his woman given to him.
Angela obliviously stirred, faintly moaned. Piet got out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of milk. Whenever he was most lovesick for Foxy, that summer, he would go to the refrigerator, the cool pale box full of illuminated food, and feed something to the void within. He leaned his cheek against the machine’s cold cheek and thought of her voice, its southern shadows, its playful dryness, its musical remembrance of his genitals. He spelled her name with the magnetized alphabet the girls played with on the tall blank door.
FOXY
.
PIET L VES FOXY
. He scrambled the letters and traveled to bed again through a house whose familiar furniture and wallpaper were runes charged with malevolent magic. Beside Angela, he thought that if he were beside Foxy he could fall asleep on broken glass. Insomnia a failure of alignment. A rumbling truck passed, vanishing.
The weight of this stagnant night. Fear scurried inside him, seeking a place to stop. How Annabelle would spread her legs as if imperiously to seize his entire face in the lips of her young swamp. Foxy’s delicately questioning sideways glint: a dry mind that sized him up through veils of rapture. His daughters’ anxious great eyes: in a sense what a mercy to die and no longer torment his children with the apparition of their father. The death of another always a secret relief. Tides of life swing up to God for slaughter. Slum clearance. Dearest Lord do shelter Foxy my shyest candleflame from this holocaust Thy breath. Amen. Revolving terror scooped the shell
of him thin. A translucent husk emptied of seed, Piet waited to be shattered.
The Chinese knife across the eye. The electric chair dustless in the tiled room. The earthquake that snaps cathedral rafters. The engorged mineral ocean. The knotted silk cord. The commando’s piano wire. The crab in the intestine. The chicken bone in the windpipe. The slippery winter road. The misread altimeter. The firing squad crushing out its Spanish cigarettes in the baked clay courtyard, another dull dawn, exhaling philosophically. The boy from Ionia. The limp-limbed infant smothered in his crib. The rotting kidney turning the skin golden. The shotgun blast purging the skull of brains. The massive coronary. The guillotine. The frayed elevator cable. The booming crack and quick collapse of ice: in Michigan on the lakes the fishermen would ride their jalopies to the bottom in the air bubble and with held breaths ascend to the jagged light. The threshing machine. The random shark. Puffy-tongued dehydration. Black-faced asphyxia. Gentle leprosy. Crucifixion. Disembowelment. Fire. Gas in the shower room. The scalper’s hurried adze. The torturer’s intent watchmaker’s face. The pull of the rack. The suck of the sea. The lion’s kittenish gnawing. The loose rock, the slipping boot, the dreamlike fall. The anger of kings. The bullet, the bomb, the plague, the wreck, the neglected infection, the mistaken reaction. The splintered windshield. The drunken doctor’s blunder shrugged away. The shadow of fragility on the ice, beneath the implacably frozen stars: the muffled collapse, the opaque gasp, the unresisted plunge.
“Angela?” His voice sounded alien, dragged from a distance. “Could you wake up a little and put your arm round me? I’ve had a nightmare.”
She half-woke and half-obeyed, turning toward him but
sinking into sleep again on her stomach; her arm tried to reach him but lapsed at her side. He listened for the glinting of the hamster’s wheel and instead heard the refrigerator shudder and break into purring.
Dear Piet—
The tide is coming in high and so blue it seems ink. A little boy in a red shirt has been anchored in a rowboat off the island ever since my second cup of coffee. I have been thinking about us and there seems a lot to say until I sit down and try to write it. When we were together yesterday I tried to explain about Ken and me and “coming” but you chose to be haughty and hurt—my lover, don’t be. How timid I feel writing that odd word “lover.” And ridiculous too. But you must have a name and what else are you of mine?
Ken is my husband. I love him as such. I feel
right
, is what I tried to say, making love to him. There is no barrier between us except boredom which is not so serious since life is such a daily thing anyway. With you there are many barriers—my guilt of course, a true shyness and fear of seeming inadequate compared with the other women you’ve had, our fear of being discovered, a sometimes
(
I suggest
)
needless impatience and hurry in you, your annoying habit of mocking yourself and waiting to be contradicted, and even your extreme lovingness toward me, which I find sometimes dismaying, let me confess. To all this add the libidinous vagaries of the pregnant state. These barriers are piled high, so my not coming, dear Piet, does not mean I do not go high with you. I go very high. Do not ask me to say more. Do not ask me to deny my pledge to Ken—which I felt at the time and still feel is sacred above and beyond all discomfort and discontent—or try to compete. There is no competition. I do not understand why I have taken you into my life at this time of all
times but the place you occupy is one you have created and you must not be insecure in it
.
I have brought this letter outside to the sun, me in my underwear, casually enough, since none of my bathing suits fit. I trust the plumbers not to suddenly arrive. The boy in red has gone away. I don’t think he caught anything. Rereading this, it seems so poorly expressed, so self-protective and hedgy, I wonder if I will give it to you. Your sleepy but fond
Foxy
Undated and not always signed, Foxy’s letters accumulated in the back of a Gallagher & Hanema office filing cabinet, under the carbon paper, where Gallagher would never look. They were of varying shapes and sizes. Some consisted of as many as four sheets smoothly covered on both sides with a swift upright script. Others, holding a few hurried words, were mere scraps passed wadded into Piet’s hand at parties. Orderly, superstitious, Piet saved them all, and fitfully read them through in the numb days following his night of dread. He read them as an insignificant person seeks himself in a fable whose hero is a remote ancestor.
My lover!—
My whole house breathes of you—the smell of planed wood is you, and the salt wind is you, and the rumpled sheets whose scent is sweetest and subtlest—of us—is you. I have been all open windows and blowing curtains and blue view these last hours—so much yours I must write and tell you, though Ken is downstairs waiting to go to the little-Smiths. In a few minutes I will see you. But surrounded by others. Accept this kiss
.
Other letters were more expansive and discursive, even didactic. Piet felt in them an itch to shape him, to rectify and justify.
Holy Firecracker Day
My dear lover—
I have gone far down the beach, the public end, past the holiday crowds (Italian grandmothers with aluminum chairs sitting right in the surf, skirts up to their knees and knitting in their laps) to where none of our mutual friends might ambush me. It is curiously different down here, cliffy and pebbly, and windier and the water choppier than the sheltered stretch where our lovely Tarbox matrons and their offspring dabble. Lacetown lighthouse seems very close in the haze. Now and then a pair of Boston or Cape fairies go by in their skimpy trunks—Freddy calls them ball-huggers—holding hands. Otherwise I am alone, a pregnant and therefore pass-proof lass with a crinkled New Yorker on her knees for a writing pad, coining funny phrases for her lover, who thinks he is a Jew
.
I explained badly about Peter. You are not he, the coincidence of your names notwithstanding. For years he has ceased to be a name for me, just a shadow, a shadow between me and my parents, between me and Ken. He didn’t love me—I amused him, awkward and innocent shiksa as I was. I was a toy for him (toy/goy), and the frightening thing I discovered, I liked it. I loved being used/abused. There was nothing he could do that did not intensify my love for him, even his terrible mood of coldness, the scorn that wished me away. He needed to be alone more than I could let him be alone. It was all very young and uncontrolled and must have been influenced for each of us by how our parents had behaved. My father’s absences had been cruel for my mother and as long as Peter was not absent
from me, even if his language was foul, I was grateful. Or perhaps I was attracted to just that pride, a kind of mechanical selfishness, in which he resembled my father. Do you know, he has become famous? His picture was in Time a year or so ago, with a junk sculpture he had welded. He still lives in Detroit. With his mother, unmarried. So I had years when I could have flown to him, years of being childless with Ken, and I didn’t. It would have been like eating chocolate sundaes again
.
You and I are different, surely. With you I feel for the first time what it is like not to be young. With you I feel that I at last have exercised my right of
choice
—free of habit or command or compulsion. In a sense you are my first
companion
. Our sweet sin is strangely mixed with the sweetness of pregnancy—perhaps Ken waited too long to make me pregnant and now that it is here I have turned toward someone else with the gratitude. I trust you and fear you. I feared Peter, and trust Ken. The conjunction is uniquely yours
.
Am I proposing marriage? Scheming woman!! Nothing of the kind—I am so securely tied to Ken I dare open myself to you as I might to a stranger in a dream, knowing I was all the time securely asleep beside my husband. Please do not fear I will try to take you from Angela. I know even better than you how precious she is to you, she and the home you have made together, how well, truly, you are wed. Isn’t it our utter captivity that makes us, in our few stolen afternoons together, so free? My hand is tired and shakes. Please don’t leave me yet. My flying Dutchman—contradiction in terms?
Later
.
I went down to swim—delicious, like being inside a diamond, the water at Woods Hole was much warmer—and examined the pebbles. Did you know, I once took a term of geology? I recognized basalt and quartz, the easy ones, black and white, God and the Devil, and then a lot of speckly candyish stones I mentally lumped as “granite.”
So much variety! And what a wealth of time we hold in our hands in the smoothness of these stones! I wanted to kiss them. Remembering your smoothness. I do love the beach. I wonder if I was ever myself until Ken moved me into sight of the sea
.
Then
, to my horror, who should come along but Janet and Harold! Damn!! It was I who was embarrassed, and they who should have been. They were brazen as always—they had left Frank and Marcia back with the children and what was I doing way up here in Fairyland? I told them the walk was necessary exercise and that I wanted to sketch the Lacetown lighthouse. They noticed that I had been writing a letter and were very twinkly and jolly and I think genuinely like me but seemed depressingly corrupt. Who am I to pass judgment? Yet I seem very righteous within myself still and virtually cried, as you saw, when I turned out to be Christine Keeler.