Authors: John Updike
“Oh, Freddy, we all are.”
The receptionist, who had been tinkling in the corner with the sterilizer, flashed a naughty smile behind Freddy’s back. Sensing teasing, he became dryer in manner. “We discussed fertility; did she tell you?” The receptionist left the room.
“Breathlessly. All about myths.”
“In part. We concluded, as I remember, that women could as easily be fertilized by the wind as by men, if they believed in it. That all conception is immaculate, on the handiest excuse.” That blurred smirk: what was she supposed to imagine it implied?
Foxy said, “How silly. We’re obviously helpless.”
“Are you?”
“Otherwise why would there be so many only children? I
hated
being an only child. My father just wasn’t there. We had plenty of electric fans.”
“Did you?” He had lost track of the joke, the wind.
“One in every room. I know I certainly don’t intend my child to be only.” There it was: just when Foxy had decided for the hundredth time that Freddy was contemptible, she found she had been drawn out.
He asked, “Numb yet?”
She said, “Almost. What’s that cot for?” She gestured toward the nether room, to fling the conversation from herself. A small cloud crossed the sun and dipped them into momentary shadow as if into intimacy. The music was mechanically doing “Tea for Two.” She was suddenly hungry for English muffins.
“Not what you think,” Freddy said.
“I don’t think anything. I’m just asking.”
“Instead of lunch sometimes I take a nap.”
“I’ve wondered how you keep going with all those parties. But what did you think I thought?” She made silent motions indicating the young receptionist, doing her doll stare and touching her forehead for the skunk bangs, and, folding her hands beside her face, sleep. She formed a kissing mouth to cement her meaning.
“No,” Freddy whispered. “That I give abortions.”
Shocked, stifled by shock, Foxy wanted to flee the chair. “I
never
thought that.”
“Oh, but dentists do. It’s a perfect set-up. They have everything, the chair, anesthetic, instruments …”
She judged he was saying these things to enlarge himself in her eyes, to inflame with innuendo her idea of him. If he had gone to medical school, he had aspired to power over life and death; having failed, having settled for dentistry, a gingerly meddling at the mouth of life, he still aspired. She put him down: “I don’t want to hear about it.”
He answered, “You must be numb now,” and began to drill. Upside down, his warm cheek close against her head, Freddy resolved into a pair of hairy nostrils, a dance of probing fingers, and glinting crescents of curved glass. His aura was maternal, soapy. Foxy relaxed. Her breasts began to sting and she anticipated release, leaving this office, collecting the baby in his vanilla Carry-Cot at Bea Guerin’s, driving down the winding beach road to her empty house, undoing her upper clothes, and giving her accumulated richness over to that tiny blind mouth so avid to suck. He had begun on the right breast this morning, so it would be the left this noon. Twenty minutes, and the Novocain would be wearing off, and she could
make a lunch of leftover salad and a tuna sandwich. How innocently life ate the days. How silly she was, how Christianly neurotic, to feel beneath the mild mixed surface of aging and growing, of nursing and eating and sleeping, of love feigned and stolen and actual, a terror, a tipping wrongness, a guilt gathering toward discharge. Poor Freddy, their ringleader, was revealed as a competent dentist. “Lady Be Good” was played. Beneath the red blanket of her closed eyelids Foxy saw that she must soon break with Piet, and felt no pain.
In mid-melody the radio music stopped.
The characterless male voice, winded, hurried, as if called back to the microphone from a distance, pronounced, “A special bulletin. Shots have been heard in Dallas in the vicinity of the Presidential motorcade. We repeat. Gunshots have been reported in Dallas in the vicinity of President Kennedy’s motorcade.”
There was a second of sharp silence. Then the needle was returned to the groove and the toothpaste music smoothly resumed “Lady Be Good.” The black clock said 1:36.
Freddy held the drill away from her mouth. “You hear that?”
She asked him, “What does it mean?”
“Some crazy Texan.” He resumed drilling. The pitch of speed lifted impatiently. The star of heat pricked its cloud of spray, and hurt. Freddy sighed mint. “You may spit.”
The receptionist, wide-eyed from having overheard the radio, came in from the anteroom to whip the silver and to listen. “Do you think it was Communists?” the girl asked. The music halted again. She signed herself with the cross. On the slates opposite, a small flock of pigeons, having settled near the post office chimney for warmth, clumsily swirled and lifted. The bulletin was repeated, with the additional information
that the motorcade had definitely been fired
at
. Three shots had been counted. The pigeons gripped flight in their dirty wings and beat away, out of Foxy’s sight. The girl brought a pellet of silver in a chamois pad and set it on the impeccable circular napkin of Freddy’s tool tray. Freddy rolled it tighter with his fingertips. The blunder of resuming the music was not repeated. Words spaced by silence filled in the solid truth. The President had been shot at, the President had been hit, he had been hit in the head, his condition was critical, a priest had been summoned, the President was dead. By two o’clock, all of this was known. Amid medicinal whiffs, Freddy had swabbed Foxy’s cavity and flanked the tooth with cotton and clamps and pressed the silver filling tight. Foxy had waited in the chair ten additional minutes to hear the worst. Kennedy dead, she left. The nurse was crying, her eyes still held wide, as if like a doll’s unable to close unless she lay down. Foxy, grateful to her for showing emotion, patted her hand, a cool tap in passing. Living skin seeks skin. The girl blurted, “We didn’t even vote for him, my family, but would have the next time.”
Freddy seemed distended and titillated by this confirmation of chaos. Escorting Foxy out through the anteroom, he said in the hall, “This fucks up our party, doesn’t it?”
“You must cancel,” Foxy told him. She would not see Piet tonight.
“But I’ve bought all the
booze
,” Freddy protested.
Foxy went out into Freddy’s tiny front yard, which held a crabapple tree skeletal and spidery without leaves. The post office flag was already at half-mast. Divinity Street was so silent she heard an electric sander working well down the block. Through the plate-glass windows of the pizza shop and the Tarbox
Star
and the shoe-repair haven that was also a bookie
joint, she saw shadows huddled around radios. She thought of the little blond radio’s embarrassed fall from its empyrean of bland music, of the receptionist’s navy-blue eyes lacquered by tears, of Freddy’s stupid refusal to mourn, mistaken and contemptible, yet—what was better in herself? She tried to picture the dead man, this young man almost of her generation, with whom she could have slept. A distant husband had died and his death less left an emptiness than revealed one already there. Where grief should have dwelt there was a reflex tenderness, a personal cringing. At Cogswell’s corner she glanced up toward the Congregational Church and her heart, blind lamb, beat faster. The Plymouth was parked by the rocks; she must hurry to the baby. Striding uphill through the spotty blowing sunlight, Foxy imagined her son’s avid toothless mouth. Her left breast eagerly ached. She tested the right side of her mouth and found it still numb. Would her lopsided smile frighten him? Then it seemed to her that the cocky pouchy-eyed corpse had been Piet and the floor of her stomach fell and the town around her gripped guilt in its dirty white gables and tried to rise, to become a prayer.
The Thornes decided to have their party after all. In the late afternoon, after Oswald had been apprehended and Johnson sworn in, and the engines of national perpetuity had demonstrated their strength, Georgene called all the houses of the invited and explained that the food and liquor had been purchased, that the guests had bought their dresses and had their tuxedos cleaned, that she and Freddy would feel lonely tonight and the children would be
so
disappointed, that on this terrible day she saw nothing wrong in the couples who knew each other feeling terrible together. In a way, Georgene
explained to Angela, it would be a wake, an Irish wake, and a formal dinner-dance was very fitting for the dead man, who had had such style. Do come. Please. Freddy will be very hurt, you know how vulnerable he is.
The fashion that fall was for deep décolletage; Piet, arriving at nine, was overwhelmed by bared breasts. He had been reluctant to come. His superstitious nature had groped for some religious observance, some ceremony of acknowledgment to gallant dead Kennedy, though he was a Republican. He knew Freddy would be blasphemous. Further, he felt unwell: his tongue and gums had developed a rash of cankers, and since Foxy had become inaccessible Angela had also ceased to make love to him, and his tuxedo was old, a hand-me-down from his father-in-law, and unfashionably wide-lapelled, and the black shoulders showed his dandruff. Entering the Thornes’ living room he saw naked shoulders and flaringly bared bosoms floating through the candlelight, haunting the African masks, the gaudy toss pillows, the wickerwork hassocks and strap-hinged Spanish chests and faded wing chairs. Logs burned in the fieldstone fireplace. The bar table of linen and glasses and bottles formed an undulant field of reflected fire. Janet Appleby wore an acid-green gown whose shoelace straps seemed unequal to the weight squeezed to a sharp dark cleavage like the vertical crease of a frowning brow. Marcia little-Smith, in a braless orange bodice, displayed, as she reached forward, earrings shuddering, to tap a cigarette into a copper ashtray each dent of which was crescental in the candlelight, conical tits hanging in shadow like tubular roots loose in water. Georgene wore white, two filmy breadths of cloth crossed to form an athletic and Attic binder, her breasts flattened boyishly, as if she were on her back. Carol Constantine had stitched herself a blue silk sheath severely
narrow at the ankles and chastely high in front but scooped in the back down to her sacral vertebrae. Irene Saltz—for the Saltzes had come, partly renewed confidence brought on by Irene’s job, partly impish insistence on Freddy’s part—had put on a simple cocktail dress of black velvet; its oval neckline inverted the two startled arcs of her eyebrows as she jealously, anxiously surveyed the room for the whereabouts of Ben and Carol and Eddie. Piet was touched by her. Like him, she felt it was wrong to have come. She had lost weight. Humiliation flattered her.
Bea Guerin drifted toward him with uplifted face; her bosom, sprinkled with sweat, was held forward in a stiff scarlet carapace like two soft sugared buns being offered warm in the metal vessel of their baking. “Oh Piet,” she said, “isn’t it awful, that we’re all here, that we couldn’t stay away, couldn’t stay home and mourn decently?” With lowered lids he fumbled out a concurrence, hungering for the breasts that had risen to such a roundness their upper rims made a dimpled angle with Bea’s chest-wall.
Why don’t you want to fuck me?
Her lifted upper lip revealed the little gap between her front teeth; she laid a trembling hand on his arm, for balance, or as a warning.
You’re surrounded by unkind people
. Embarrassed, he sipped his martini, and the cankers lining his mouth burned.
He said, “I hear you’re seeing a lot of the Constantines.”
“They’re bores, Piet. Roger enjoys them, but they’re self-centered bores. After a while one minds their not having gone to college.”
“Who does Roger enjoy most, Eddie or Carol?”
“Don’t be wicked, Piet. I don’t mind it from these others, but I hate it from you. You’re not wicked, why pretend?”
“Answer my question.”
“Carol can be fun,” Bea said, “but she’s
so
cold. Cold and crude. I think—this is terribly sad—I think she was honestly in love with Ben, terribly in love, and never let herself know it, and now she can’t admit it, it’s too undignified, and does the
cruelest
imitations of him.”
“But Ben is so boring.”
“Piet, I don’t think they noticed, they’re such bores themselves. Oh, it’s awful, everybody is so boring. Roger is so ex
treme
ly boring.”
“You think I wouldn’t be?”
“Not for a while, sweet Piet. Not for a long while. But you don’t like short women, it’s
so
Napoleonic of you.”
Piet laughed and gazed over Bea’s head. Where was Foxy? He searched the flickering room in vain. He felt that in her staying away she had achieved over him a moral ascendancy that completed the triumph, the royal disregard, of her giving birth to a son. Pity sucked at him; he felt abandoned, small. He asked Bea, “Where are the Gallaghers?”
“Matt told Georgene they were going with their children to a special mass. She said he was polite over the phone but just barely.”
“Matt is getting very independent. And the Ongs?”
“John was too sick.”
“How sick is he?”
“Freddy says he’s dying,” Bea said, the curve of her cheek a Diana’s bow in candlelight. Dying. Before coming to the party Piet and his daughters had watched, on television, the casket being hauled from the plane amid the spotlights of the air field: a long gleam on the polished wood as sudden as a bullet, the imagined airless privacy within, the flooding lights without, the widow blanched amid rapid shadows, the eclipsing shoulders of military attachés. The casket had
tipped, bumped. Bea said to Piet, “You haven’t asked where are the Whitmans.”
“Oh, aren’t they here?”
“Piet, you’re
so
obvious. I have
no
idea where they are, but you’ve been looking over my head
all
this time. It’s not very flattering.”
“I was thinking I should get another drink.” To quench panic. The refrigerator. The stars.
“Piet,” Bea said swiftly, softly, seeing he was pulling away. “I could love you, if you’d let me.”