Authors: John Updike
“Couldn’t we have shared them?”
“No, you do it alone. I’m discovering you do everything alone. You know when I used to feel most alone? When we were making love.” The quality of the silence that followed demanded she soften this. She asked, “Have you heard from Foxy?”
“Nothing. Not even a postcard of the Washington Monument.” His lawn, he saw, beside the well and barn, had been killed in patches where the ice had lingered. Hard winter. The polar cap growing again. The hairy mammoths will be back. “It’s kind of a relief,” he told Angela.
The girls returned from the woods, their spring coats smirched with bark. “Go now,” Nancy said to Piet.
Ruth slapped at her sister. “Nancy! That is
not
very nice.”
“I think she’s trying to help,” Angela explained. “She’s telling Daddy it’s all right to go now.”
“Mommy,” Nancy told her, her plump hand whirling with her dizzy upgazing, “the stars went round and round and round.”
“And the
ba
by
cried
,” Ruth said.
Nancy studied, as if seeking her coördinates, and then sprang at her sister, pummeling Ruth’s chest. “Liar! Liar!”
Ruth bit her lower lip and expertly knocked Nancy loose with a sideways swerve of her fist. “
Ba
by
cried
,” she repeated, “
Hurt
ing
Dad
dy’s
feel
ings, making him
take
us out
ear
ly.”
Nancy sobbed against her mother’s legs. Her face where Piet would never be again. Convolute cranny, hair and air,
ambrosial chalice where seed can cling. “I’m sure it was very exciting,” Angela said. “And that’s why everybody is tired and cranky. Let’s go in and have supper.” She looked up, her eyes strained by the effort of refusing to do what was easy and instinctive and ask Piet in too.
Bernadette Ong bumped into Piet on the street, by the door of the book store, which sold mostly magazines. He was entering to buy
Life
and she was leaving with a copy of
Scientific American
. Her body brushing his felt flat, hard, yet deprived of its force; she was sallow, and the Oriental fold of upper-lid skin had sagged so that no lashes showed. She and Piet stood beneath the book-store awning; the April day around them was a refraction of apical summer, the first hot day, beach weather at last, when the high-school students shove down the crusty stiff tops of their convertibles and roar to the dunes in caravans. Above downtown Tarbox the Greek temple on its hill of red rocks was limestone white and the gold rooster blazed in an oven of blueness. Bernadette had thrown off her coat. The fine chain of a crucifix glinted in the neck of a dirty silk blouse. Descending into death, she had grown dingy, like a miner.
He asked her, immediately, guiltily, how John was, and she said, “About as well as we can expect, I guess.” From her tone, her expectations had sunk low. “They keep him under drugs and he doesn’t talk much English. He used to ask me why nobody visited him but that’s stopped now.”
“I’m so sorry, I thought of visiting him, but I’ve had my own troubles. I suppose you’ve heard Angela and I are separated.”
“No, I hadn’t heard. That’s
terrible
.” She pronounced it “tarrible”; all vowels tended in her flat wide mouth toward “a.”
Whan do I gat my duty dance?
“You’re the last couple I
would have thought. John, as you’ve probably guessed, was always half in love with Angela.”
Piet had never guessed any such thing. Impulsively he offered, “Why don’t I visit him now? I have the time, and aren’t you on your way back to the hospital?”
The Tarbox Veterans’ Memorial hospital was two miles from the center of town, on the inland side. Built of swarthy clinker bricks, with a rosy new maternity wing that did not quite harmonize, it sat on a knoll between disused railroad tracks and an outlay of greenhouses (Hendrick Vos & Sons—Flowers, Bulbs, and Shrubs). Behind the hospital was a fine formal garden where no one, neither patients nor nurses, ever walked. The French windows of John Ong’s room opened to a view of trimmed privet and a pink crabapple and a green-rusted copper birdbath shaped like a scallop shell, empty of water. Wind loosened petals from the crabapple, and billowed the white drapes at the window, and made the coarse transparent sides of the oxygen tent beside the bed abruptly buckle and snap. John was emaciated and, but for the hectic flushed spots, no larger than half dollars, on each cheekbone, colorless. So thin, he looked taller than Piet had remembered him. He spoke with difficulty, as if from a diminished pocket of air high in his chest, near the base of his throat. Only unaltered was the quick smile with which he masked imperfect comprehension. “Harya Pee? Wam weller mame waller pray terrace, heh?” Bernadette plangently translated: “He says how are you Piet? He says warm weather makes him want to play tennis.”
“Soon you’ll be out there,” Piet said, and tossed up and served an imaginary ball.
“Is emerybonny?”
“He asks how is everybody?”
“Fine. Not bad. It’s been a long winter.”
“Hanjerer? Kiddies? Feddy’s powwow?”
“Angela wants to come see you,” Piet said, too loud, calling as if to a receding car. “Freddy Thorne’s powwow has been pretty quiet lately. No big parties. Our children are getting too big.”
It was the wrong thing to say; there was nothing to say. As the visit grew stilted, John Ong’s eyes dulled. His hands, insectlike, their bones on the outside, fiddled on the magazine Bernadette had brought him. Once, he coughed, on and on, an interminable uprooting of a growth with roots too deep. Piet turned his head away, and a robin had come to the lip of the dry birdbath. It became clear that John was drugged; his welcome had been a strenuous leap out of hazed tranquillity. For a moment intelligence would be present in his wasted face like an eager carnivorous power; then he would subside into an inner murmuring, and twice spoke in Korean. He looked toward Bernadette for translation but she shrugged and winked toward Piet. “I only know a few phrases. Sometimes he thinks I’m his sister.” Piet rose to leave, but she sharply begged, “Don’t go.” So he sat fifteen more minutes while Bernadette kept clicking something in her lap and John, forgetting his guest, leafed backwards through
Scientific American
, impatiently skimming, seeking something not there. Rubber-heeled nurses paced the hall. Doctors could be heard loudly flirting. Portentous baskets and pots of flowers crowded the floor by the radiator, and Piet wondered from whom. McNamara. Rusk. The afternoon’s first cloud darkened the crabapple, and as if held pinned by the touch of light a scatter of petals exploded toward the ground. The room began to lose warmth. When Piet stood the second time to break away, and took the other man’s strengthless fingers into
his, and said too loudly, too jokingly, “See you on the tennis court,” the drug-dilated eyes, eyes that had verified the chaos of particles on the floor of matter, lifted, and dragged Piet down into omniscience; he saw, plunging, how plausible it was to die, how death, far from invading earth like a meteor, occurs on the same plane as birth and marriage and the arrival of the daily mail.
Bernadette walked him down the waxed hall to the hospital entrance. Outdoors, a breeze dragged a piece of her hair across her eye and a sun-shaped spot on the greenhouses below them glared. Her cross glinted. He felt a sexual stir emanate from her flat-breasted body, her wide shoulders and hips; she had been too long torn from support. She moved inches closer, as if to ask a question, and the nail-bitten fingers rising to tuck back the iridescent black strand whose windblown touch had made her blink seemed to gesture in weak apology for her willingness to live. Her smile was a grimace. Piet told her, “There
are
miracles.”
“He rejects them,” she said, as simply as if his assertion, so surprising to himself, had merely confirmed for her the existence of the pills she administered daily. A rosary had been clicking.
The adventure of visiting the dying man served to show Piet how much time he had, how free he was to use it. He took long walks on the beach. In this prismatic April the great Bay was never twice the same. Some days, at high tide, under a white sun, muscular waves bluer than tungsten steel pounded the sand into spongy cliffs and hauled driftwood and wrack deep into the dunes where tide-change left skyey isolated pools. Low tide exposed smooth acres that mirrored the mauves and salmons and the momentary green of sunset. At times the sea was steeply purple, stained; at others, under a
close warm rain sky, the no-color of dirty wash; choppy rows hurried in from the horizon to be delivered and disposed of in the lick and slide at the shore. Piet stooped to pick up angel wings, razor-clam shells, sand dollars with their infallibly etched star and the considerate airhole for an inhabiting creature Piet could not picture. Wood flecks smoothed like creek pebbles, iron spikes mummified in the orange froth of oxidation, powerfully sunk horsehoe prints, the four-tined traces of racing dog paws, the shallow impress of human couples that had vanished (the female foot bare, with toes and a tender isthmus linking heel and forepad; the male mechanically shod in the waffle intaglio of sneaker soles and apparently dragging a stick), the wandering mollusk trails dim as the contours of a photograph overdeveloped in the pan of the tide, the perfect circle a blade of beach grass complacently draws around itself—nothing was too ordinary for Piet to notice. The beach felt dreamlike, always renewed in its strangeness. One day, late in an overcast afternoon, with lateral flecks of silver high in the west above the nimbus scud, he emerged from his truck in the empty parking lot and heard a steady musical roaring. Yet approaching the sea he saw it calm as a lake, a sullen muddy green. The tide was very low, and walking on the unscarred ribs of its recent retreat Piet percieved—diagnosed, as if the sustained roaring were a symptom within him—that violent waves were breaking on the sand bar a half mile away and, though little of their motion survived, their blended sound traveled to him upon the tranced water as if upon the taut skin of a drum. This effect, contrived with energies that could power cities, was his alone to witness; the great syllable around him seemed his own note, sustained since his birth, elicited from him now, and given to the air. The air that day was warm, and smelled of ashes.
In his loneliness he detected companionship in the motion of waves, especially those distant waves lifting arms of spray along the bar, hailing him. The world was more Platonic than he had suspected. He found he missed friends less than friendship; what he felt, remembering Foxy, was a nostalgia for adultery itself—its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master.
Sometimes, returning to the parking lot by way of the dunes, he saw the Whitmans’ house above its grassy slope, with its clay scars of excavation and its pale patches of reshingling. The house did not see him. Windows he had often gazed from, euphoric and apprehensive, glinted blank. Once, driving past it, the old Robinson house, he thought that it was fortunate he and Angela had not bought it, for it had proved to be an unlucky house; then realized that they had shared in its bad luck anyway. In his solitude he was growing absent-minded. He noticed a new woman downtown—that elastic proud gait announcing education, a spirit freed from the peasant shuffle, arms swinging, a sassy ass, trim ankles. Piet hurried along the other side of Charity Street to get a glimpse of her front and found, just before she turned into the savings bank, that the woman was Angela. She was wearing her hair down and a new blue cape that her parents had given her, as consolation.
How strange she had been to be jealous of his dreams, to accuse him of dreaming too easily! Perhaps because each night he dosed himself with much gin, his dreams now were rarely memorable—clouded repetitive images of confusion and ill-fittingness, of building something that would not stay joined or erect. He was a little boy, in fact his own father, walking beside his father, in fact his own gandfather, a
faceless man he had never met, one of hundreds of joiners who had migrated from Holland to work in the Grand Rapids furniture factories. His thumbs were hugely callused; the boy felt frightened, holding on. Or he was attending John Ong’s funeral, and suddenly the casket opened and John scuttled off, behind the altar, dusty as an insect, and cringing in shame. Such dreams Piet washed away along with the sour-hay taste in his mouth when, before dawn, he would awake, urinate, drink a glass of water, and vow to drink less gin tomorrow. Two dreams were more vivid. In one, he and a son, a child who was both Nancy and Ruth yet male, were walking in a snowstorm up from the baseball diamond near his first home. There was between the playground and his father’s lower greenhouses a thin grove of trees, horsechestnut and cherry, where the children would gather and climb in the late afternoon and from which, one Halloween, a stoning raid was launched upon the greenhouses that ended with an accounting in police court and fistfights for Piet all November. In the dream it was winter. A bitter wind blew through the spaced trunks and the path beneath the snow was ice, so that Piet had to take the arm of his child and hold him from slipping. Piet himself walked in the deeper snow beside the tightrope of ice; for if both fell at once it would be death. They reached the alley, crossed it, and there, at the foot of their yard beside the dark greenhouses, Piet’s grandmother was waiting for them, standing stooped and apprehensive in a cube of snowlessness. Invisible walls enclosed her. She wore only a cotton dress and her threadbare black sweater, unbuttoned. In the dream Piet wondered how long she had been waiting, and gave thanks to the Lord that they were safe, and anticipated joining her in that strange transparent arbor where he
clearly saw green grass, blade by blade. Awake, he wondered that he had dreamed of his grandmother at all, for she had died when he was nine, of pneumonia, and he had felt no sorrow. She had known little English and, a compulsive housecleaner, had sought to bar Piet and Joop not only from the front parlor but from all the downstairs rooms save the kitchen.