Authors: John Updike
Museums and Women (24 page)
Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned a conventional career in finance to enter an Episcopalian seminary. This regression—as the iguanodon felt it—seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.
How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was exquisite. Her facial essence appeared to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of
her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realized, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, to be impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs—strange adaptation!—were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.
“Comment va le bon Dieu?”
“Ah?” The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humored. Seconds elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.
The iguanodon insisted. “How are things in the supernatural?”
“The supernatural? I don’t think that category exists in the new theology.”
“
N’est-ce pas?
What
does
exist in the new theology?”
“Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith.”
“Work? I had thought you had quit work.”
“That’s an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I’ve changed employers.”
The iguanodon felt in the other’s politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said gnashingly, “The Void pays wages?”
“Ah?”
“You mean there’s a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense.”
“Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I’m not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my life, I feel on the verge of finding myself.”
“Yourself? That little thing?
Cette petite chose?
That’s all you’re looking for? Have you tried pain? Myself, I have found pain to be a great illuminator.
Permettez-moi
.” The iguanodon essayed to bite the veined base of the serpentine throat lazily upheld before him; but his teeth were too specialized and could not tear flesh. He abraded his lips and tasted his own salt blood. Disoriented, crazed, he thrust one thumb deep into a yielding gray flank that hove through the smoke and chatter of the party like a dull wave. But the nerves of his victim lagged in reporting the pain, and by the time the distant head of the diplodocus was notified, the wound was already healing.
The drinks were flowing freely. The mammal crept up to the iguanodon and murmured that the dry vermouth was running out. He was told to use the sweet, or else substitute white wine. Behind the sofa the stegosauri were Indian-wrestling; each time one went over, his spinal plates raked the recently papered wall. The hypsilophodon, tipsy, perched on a banister; the allosaurus darted forward suddenly and ceremoniously nibbled her tail. On the far side of the room, by the great slack-stringed harp, the compsognathus and the brontosaurus were talking. The iguanodon was drawn to the pair, surprised that his wife would presume to engage the much larger creature—would presume to insert herself, with her scrabbling nervous motions and chattering leaf-shaped teeth, into the crevices of that queenly presence. As he drew closer to them, music began. His wife confided to him, “The salad is running out.”
“Amid all this greenery?” he responded, incredulous, and turned to the brontosaurus.
“Chère madame, voulez-vous danser avec moi?”
Her dancing was awkward, but even in this awkwardness, this ponderous stiffness, he felt the charm of her abundance. “I’ve been talking to your husband about religion,” he told her, as they settled into the steps they could do.
“I’ve given up,” she said. “It’s such a deprivation for me and the children.”
“He says he’s looking for himself.”
“It’s so selfish,” she blurted. “The children are teased at school.”
“Come live with me.”
“Can you support me?”
“No, but I would gladly sink under you.”
“You’re sweet.”
“Je t’aime.”
“Don’t. Not here.”
“Somewhere, then?”
“No. Nowhere. Never.” With what delightful precision did her miniature mouth encompass these infinitesimal concepts!
“But I,” he said, “but I lo—”
“Stop it. You embarrass me. Deliberately.”
“You know what I wish? I wish all these beasts would disappear. What do we see in each other? Why do we keep getting together?”
She shrugged. “If they disappear, we will too.”
“I’m not so sure. There’s something about us that would survive. It’s not in you and not in me but between us, where we almost meet. Some vibration, some enduring cosmic factor. Don’t you feel it?”
“Let’s stop. It’s too painful.”
“Stop dancing?”
“Stop being.”
“That is a beautiful idea.
Une belle idée
. I will if you will.”
“In time,” she said, and her fine little face precisely fitted this laconic promise; and as the summer night yielded warmth to the multiplying stars—fresher, closer, bigger then—he felt his blood sympathetically cool, and grow thunderously, fruitfully slow.
The BaluchitheriumI
N 1911
, C. Forster-Cooper of the British Museum unearthed in Baluchistan some extraordinary foot bones and a single provocative neck vertebra. Thus the baluchitherium first intruded upon modern consciousness. Eleven years later, in Mongolia, an almost complete skull of the creature was uncovered, and in 1925 the four legs and feet of another individual, evidently trapped and preserved in quicksand, came to light. From these unhappy fragments an image of the living baluchitherium was assembled. His skull was five feet long, his body twenty-seven. He stood eighteen feet high at the shoulders (where the North American titano-there measured a mere eight feet, the bull African elephant eleven). Though of the family Rhinocerotidae, the baluchitherium’s
face was innocent of any horn; his neck was long and his upper lip prehensile, for seizing leaves twenty-five feet above the ground. He was the largest mammal that ever lived on land.
Recently, I had the pleasure of an interview with the baluchitherium. The technical process would be tedious to describe; in brief, it involved feeding my body into a computer (each cell translates into approximately 120,000,000 electronic “bits”) and then transecting the tape with digitized data on the object and the coördinates of the moment in time-space to be “met.” The process proved painless; a sustained, rather dental humming tingled in every nerve, and a strange, unpopulous vista opened up around me. I knew I was in Asia, since the baluchitheres in the millions of years of their thriving never left this most amorphous of continents. The landscape was typical Oligocene: a glossy green mush of subtropical vegetation—palms, fig trees, ferns—yielded, on the distant pink hillsides of aeolian shale, to a scattering of conifers and deciduous hardwoods. Underfoot, the spread of the grasses was beginning.
Venturing forward, I found the baluchitherium embowered in a grove of giant extinct gymnosperms. He was reading a document or missive printed on a huge sheet of what appeared to be rough-textured cardboard. When I expressed surprise at this, the baluchitherium laughed genially and explained, “We pulp it by mastication and then stamp it flat with our feet.” He held up for my admiration one of his extraordinary feet—columnar, ungulate, odd-toed. What I had also not been led by the fossil record to expect, his foot, leg, and entire body as far as my eye could
reach were covered by a lovely fur, bristly yet lustrous, of an elusive color I can only call reddish-blue, with tips of white in the underparts. Such are the soft surprises with which reality pads the skeleton of hard facts.
“How curious it is,” the baluchitherium said, “that you primates should blunder upon my five-foot skull without deducing my hundred-kilogram brain. True, our technology, foreseeing the horrors of industrialism, abjured the cruel minerals and concerned itself purely with vegetable artifacts—and these solely for our amusement and comfort.” He benignly indicated the immense chaise longue, carved from a single ginkgo trunk, that he reposed upon; the rug beside it, artfully braided of wisteria vines; the hardwood sculptures about him, most of them glorifying, more or less abstractly, the form of the female baluchitherium. “All, of course,” he said, “by your time sense, fallen into dust aeons ago.”