Authors: John Updike
Museums and Women (23 page)
The party was thickening. A host of protozoans drifted in on a raft of sphagnum moss: a trumpet-shaped stentor, apparently famous and interlocked with a lanky, bleached spirostomum; a claque of paramecia, swishing back and forth, tickling the crustacea on the backs of their knees; an old vorticella, a plantlike animalcule as dreary, the cyclops thought, as the batch of puffs rooted to the flap of last year’s
succès d’estime
. The kitchen was crammed
with ostracods and flagellates engaged in mutually consuming conversation, and over in a corner, beneath an African mask, a great brown hydra, the real thing, attached by its sticky foot to the hissing steam radiator, rhythmically swung its tentacles here and there until one of them touched, in the circle of admirers, something appetizing; then the poison sacs exploded, the other tentacles contracted, and the prey was stuffed into the hydra’s swollen coelenteron, which gluttony had stretched to a transparency that veiled the preceding meals like polyethylene film protecting a rack of dry-cleaned suits. Hairy with bacteria, a simocephalus was munching a rapt nematode. The fairy shrimps, having multiplied, their crimson tails glowing with hemoglobin, came cruising in from the empty bedrooms. The party was thinning.
Suddenly fearful, fearing he had lost her forever, the cyclops searched for the water mite, and found her miserably crouching in a corner, quite drunk, her seventh and eighth legs almost sprouted. “What do you see?” he now dared ask.
“Too much,” she answered swiftly. “Everything. Oh, it’s horrible, horrible.”
Out of mercy as much as appetite, he ate her. She felt prickly inside him. Hurriedly—the rooms were almost depleted, it was late—he sought his hostess. She was by the doorway, her antennae frazzled from waving goodbye, but still magnificent, Daphnia, her carapace a liquid shimmer of
psychedelic pastel. “Don’t go,” she commanded, expanding. “I have a
minuscule
favor to ask. Now that my children, all thirteen million of them, thank God, are off at school, I’ve taken a part-time editing job, and my first real break is this manuscript I’d be
so
grateful to have you read and comment on, whatever comes into your head; I admit it’s a little long, maybe you can skim the part where Napoleon invades Russia, but it’s the first
effort
by a perfectly delightful midge larva I know you’d enjoy meeting—”
“I’d adore to, but I can’t,” he said, explaining, “my eye. I can’t afford to strain it, I have only this one.…” He trailed off, he felt, feebly. He was beginning to feel permeable.
“You poor dear,” Daphnia solemnly pronounced, and ate him.
And the next instant, a fairy shrimp, oaring by inverted, casually gathered her into the trough between his eleven pairs of undulating gill-feet and passed her toward his brazen mouth. Her scream, tinier than even the dot on this
i
, went unobserved.
During the Jurassic
W
AITING FOR THE FIRST GUESTS
, the iguanodon gazed along the path and beyond, toward the monotonous cycad forests and the low volcanic hills. The landscape was everywhere interpenetrated by the sea, a kind of metallic-blue rottenness that daily breathed in and out. Behind him, his wife was assembling the hors d’oeuvres. As he watched her, something unintended, something grossly solemn, in his expression made her laugh, displaying the leaf-shaped teeth lining her cheeks. Like him, she was an ornithischian, but much smaller—a compsognathus. He wondered, watching her race bipedally back and forth among the scraps of food (dragonflies wrapped in ferns, cephalopods on toast), how he had ever found her beautiful. His eyes hungered for size; he experienced a rage for sheer blind size.
The stegosauri, of course, were the first to appear. Among their many stupid friends these were the most stupid, and the most punctual. Their front legs bent outward and their tiny, beak-tipped, filmy-eyed faces virtually skimmed the ground; the upward sweep of their backs was mountainous, and the double rows of giant bone plates along the spine clicked together in the sway of their cumbersome gait. With hardly a greeting, they dragged their tails, quadruply spiked, across the threshold and maneuvered themselves toward the bar, which was tended by a minute and shapeless mammal hired for the evening.
Next came the allosaurus, a carnivorous bachelor whose dangerous aura and needled grin excited the female herbivores; then the rhamphorhynchus, a pterosaur whose much-admired “flight” was in reality a clumsy brittle glide ending in
an embarrassed bump and trot. The iguanodon despised these gangly pterosaurs’ pretensions; he thought grotesque the precarious elongation of the single finger from which their levitating membranes were stretched, and privately believed that the less handsomely underwritten archaeopteryx, though sneered at as unstable and feathered, had more of a future. The hypsilophodon, with her graceful hands and branch-gripping feet, arrived escorted by the timeless crocodile—an incongruous pair, but both were recently divorced. Still the iguanodon gazed down the path.
Behind him, the conversation gnashed on a thousand things—houses, mortgages, lawns, fertilizers, erosion, boats, winds, annuities, capital gains, recipes, education, the day’s tennis, last night’s party. Each party was consumed by discussion of the previous one. Their lives were subject to constant cross-check. When did you leave? When did you leave? We’d been out every night this week. We had an amphibious babysitter who had to be back in the water by one. Gregor had to meet a client in town, and now they’ve reduced the Saturday schedule, it means the 7:43 or nothing. Trains? I thought they were totally extinct. Not at all. They’re coming back, it’s just a matter of time until the government … In the long range of evolution, they are still the most efficient … Taking into account the heat-loss/weight ratio and assuming there’s no more glaciation … Did you know—I think this is fascinating—did you know that in the financing of those great ornate stations of the eighteen-eighties and nineties, those real monsters, there was no provision for amortization? They weren’t amortized at all, they were financed on the basis of eternity! The railroad was conceived of as the end of Progress!
I
think—though not an expert—that the key word in this overall industrio-socio-what-have-you-oh nexus or syndrome or bag
or whatever is “overextended.” Any competitorless object
bloats
. Personally, I miss the trolley cars. Now, don’t tell me I’m the only creature in the room old enough to remember the trolley cars!
The iguanodon’s high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split; the brontosaurus was coming up the path.
Her husband, the diplodocus, was with her. They moved together, rhythmic twins, buoyed by the hollow assurance of the huge. She paused to tear with her lips a clump of feathery leaves from an overhanging paleocycas. From her deliberate grace the iguanodon received the impression that she knew he was watching her. Indeed, she had long guessed his love, as had her husband; the two saurischians entered his party with the languid confidence of the specially cherished. Even as the iguanodon gritted his teeth in assumption of an ironical stance, her bulk, her gorgeous size, enraptured him, swelling to fill the massive ache he carried when she was not there. She rolled outward across his senses—the dawn-pale underparts, the reticulate skin, the vast bluish muscles whose management required a second brain at the base of her spine.