Authors: John Updike
Monica and I had both been raised Catholic. I let it go in about my sophomore year of college, when my father died, but Monica kept it up until she went on the Pill. Our three children had been born in the first four years of our marriage. At first she attended Mass, though she couldn’t take Communion; then she stopped even that. I was sorry to see it—it had been a part of her I had understood—and to hear her talk about the Church with such bitterness. That’s how women can be, mulling something over and getting madder and madder about it, all in secret, and then making a sudden quantum jump: revolutionaries. My impression was that Karen had courted Monica at the teachers’ Christmas party, asking her to come over during the holidays and help address circulars. Monica jumped right in. She stopped getting perms and painting her fingernails. She pulled her springy black hair back into a ponytail and wore sneakers and jeans not only around the house but out to shop. She stopped struggling against her weight. Monica bloomed, I suppose; she had been a jock at Mather High (field hockey, girls’ basketball) and a cheerleader, and now, fifteen years later and fifteen pounds heavier, that old girlish push, that egging-on fierceness, had come back. I didn’t much like it but wasn’t consulted. Somehow in all this I had become the oppressor, part of “the system,” and the three children we had “given” each other, as they used to say, had been some kind of dirty trick. She said the Pill was carcinogenic and I should get a vasectomy. I told her to go get her tubes tied if she was into mutilation and she said that was what Karen Owens had advised. I asked angrily,
hungrily, if Karen Owens’s tubes were tied and Monica replied with a certain complacence that, no, that wasn’t the reason Karen and Alan didn’t have children; she knew that much, and knew I’d be interested. I ignored the innuendo, excited to think of Karen in this way and alarmed by Monica’s tone. It was one thing to stop going to Mass—after all, the Church had betrayed
us
, taking away Latin and Saint Christopher and fish on Friday—but this was beginning to feel evil.
Still, I went to the meetings with her, across town through the factory district and up Elm Hill. Support the Blacks, Stop the War, Save Ecology—Karen often sat up beside the speaker, entwining her legs with the chair legs so her kneecaps made white squares and, in a kind of V for Victory, resting the tips of her middle and index fingers at the corners of her lips, as if enjoining herself not to say too much. When she did talk, she would keep tucking her hair behind her ears, a gesture I came later to associate with our lovemaking. Sometimes she laughed, showing her engagingly imperfect teeth. She hadn’t been born rich, I deduced.
Alan would sit in one of the back rows of the chairs they had assembled, looking surly and superior, already by that time of evening stupid with booze but backing her up in his supercilious deep voice when she needed it. As a lawyer in town he had already taken on enough fair-housing and draft-resistance cases to hurt his practice with the people who could pay. It was hard to know how unhappy this made him; it was hard to decipher what he saw, slumped down in the back, watching with sleepy eyes. He had great long lashes, and hardly any eyebrows, and a high, balding forehead sunburned in summer.
I disliked him. He took up my oxygen when he was in the room. He was tall, tall as the rich get, plants with no weeds
around them. When he looked down at me, it wasn’t as if he didn’t see me, he saw me too well; his eyes—with their lashes like an ostrich’s and a yellowish cast to the whites—flicked through and away, having taken it all in and been instantly bored. Whatever had happened to him out there on the West Coast, it had left him wise in a way that made the world no longer very useful to him. Yet he also had Karen, and this Victorian mansion, and golf clubs and shotguns and tennis presses in the closets, and his father’s deer heads in the library, and a name in the town that would still be worth something when this war and its protest had blown over.
In fairness, Alan could be entertaining, if he hadn’t drunk too much. After the meetings a favored few of us would stay to tidy up, and Alan might get out his banjo and play. As a teenager, off at private schools since he was eleven, he had been a bluegrass freak and had taught himself this lonely music, fashionable then. When he got going, cracking his voice and yowling, I would see green hills, and a lone hawk soaring, and the mouths of coal mines, and feel so patriotic that tears would sting my corneas; all the lovely country that had been in America would come rushing back, as it was before we filled the land too full. Tipping back his head to keen the hillbilly chorus, Alan exposed his skinny throat as if to be cut.
While Monica and I would sit enthralled, joining in on the choruses, Karen would keep moving about, picking up the glasses and ashtrays, her determined manner and small set smile implying that this was an act Alan saved for company. First it had been her turn to howl; now it was his. When his repertoire ran out, she took over again, organizing word games, or exercises to enhance our perceptions. She had brought these games and exercises from California. One Saturday night, I remember, all the women there hid behind a
partition of blankets and extended one hand for the men to identify, and to my embarrassment I recognized Karen’s, its blue veins, and couldn’t find Monica’s—it was thicker and darker than it should have been, with a hairier wrist.
In many ways I did not recognize my wife. Her raised consciousness licensed her to drink too much, to stay up too late. She never wanted to go home. The Owenses, the times, had corrupted her. However my own heart was wandering, I wanted to have her at home, raising the children, keeping order against the day when all this disturbance, this reaching beyond ourselves, blew over. I had been attracted to what was placid in Monica, the touch of heaviness already there when she was seventeen, her young legs glossy and chunky in the white cheerleader socks. She had an athlete’s slow heartbeat and fell asleep early. When I came to sleep with Karen, in the bright back bedroom of her big ornate house, I had trouble accepting the twittery fervor she brought to acts that with Monica possessed a certain solemn weight, as of something yielded. Monica had once confessed to me that she held back out of dread of losing her identity in the sex act; Karen seemed to be pushing toward just such a loss. Her quick, dry lips, kissing mine for the first time in the hazardous privacy of the teachers’ room, took their style (it crossed my mind) from the adolescents thundering all around us. I couldn’t be worth, surely, quite such an agitation of lips and tongue, quite so hard a hug from this slender, overheated person, whose heart I could feel tripping against my own through my coat and shirt and tie, and the wool of her sweater, and the twin cages of our ribs. Even in this moment of first surrender I observed that the wool was cashmere. It crossed my mind that she had mistaken me for a stud, an obediently erect conscript from the working class. I was a little repelled by the something
schooled
in her embrace—something pre-readied and too good
to be true. But in time I accepted this as simply her metabolism, her natural way. She was love-starved. So was I.
Days when she didn’t substitute became our days, set up with sweaty phone calls from the pay phone outside the cafeteria, which the kids had usually clogged with gum or clumsy slugs. The Owenses’ house backed up to some acres of woods that they owned. Bird-chirp and pine-scent would sift through her windows. The abundant light was almost pornographic; I was used to the uxorious dark. She kept an aquarium and a terrarium back here, to take advantage of the sun, and wildlife posters all around:
we
were wildlife, naked and endangered. The bestial efficiency of our encounters had to do for tenderness. She knew to the minute when I would arrive and was ready, clothes off and the phone off the hook. She knew to the minute when I must go. When one of my free periods backed onto the lunch hour, and we had more time, we wasted it in bickering. When LBJ announced he would not run, I told her this would bring in Nixon, and hoped she was happy. I taunted her with this while the happiness of our lovemaking was still in her eyes. She had light-hazel eyes that darkened when we made love. She had a way of looking me over, of examining me as reverently as she did the toad and garter snake in her terrarium, flicking back her hair to get a closer look, or to take me into her mouth. I, with my foreskin and sexual hunger and blue-collar resentments, was simply life to her, a kind of treasure.
And she to me? Heaven, of a sort. When I sneaked in the back, past the plastic trash cans smelling of Alan’s empties, Karen would be standing at the head of the back stairs like a bright, torn piece of sky. Up close, her body was a star map, her shoulders and shins crowded with freckles. Even those patches of skin shaped like the pieces of a bathing suit revealed to inspection a dark dot or two where the sun had somehow pricked.
“You really ought to go, darling,” she would soon say. More practiced than I (I hated to think this, but it must have been the case), Karen was the policeman of our affair. I began to feel disciplined, and to resent it.
At school, when she came to substitute, it drove me wild to see her in the halls, her red hair bouncing on her back, her whippy little body full of our secrets. The Movement was in the air even here now; our young Poles and Portuguese were no longer willing to be drafted unquestioningly, and the classes in government and history, even in general science, had become battlefields. At Columbia and in Paris that spring, students were rioting. Whole masses of rooted presumption were being torn up around me, but I no longer cared. I felt so foolishly proud, linking myself with Karen in those minutes between classes, in the massive shuffle smelling of perfume and chewing gum and bodily warmth.
She warned me: “I love your touch, but, Frank, you mustn’t touch me in public.”
“When did I?”
“Just now. In the hall.” We were in the teachers’ room. She had lit a cigarette. She seemed extra nervous, indignant.
“I wasn’t aware,” I told her. “I’m sure nobody noticed.”
“Don’t be stupid. The children notice everything.”
It was true. I had seen our names pencilled together, with the correct verb, on a lavatory wall. “You care?”
“Of course I care. So should you. We could both be hurt.”
“By whom? The school board? The American Legion? I thought the revolution was on and there was naked dancing in the streets. I’m all for it; watch.”
“
Frank
. Someone could come in that door any second.”
“We used to neck in here like mad.”
“That was before we had our days.”
“Our half-hours. I’m sick of rushing back to the table of elements in a post-coital coma.”
“You are?”
The fear in her face insulted me. “Yes,” I told her, “and I’m sick of the hypocrisy. I’m sick of insomnia. I can’t sleep anymore, I want you beside me. Only you. I thrash around, I take Sominex. Sometimes I cry, for a change of pace.”
She tucked her hair behind her ears. Her face looked narrow, its skin tight at the sides of her eyes, a glaze across the tiny wrinkles. “Has Monica noticed?”
“No, she slumbers on. Nothing wakes her up. Why? Has Alan noticed any difference in you?”
“No, and I don’t want him to.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“Need you ask?” The sarcasm made her face look quite evil. There was a set of smug assumptions behind it that I hated.
My voice got loud. “You bet your sweet ass I need to ask.” I repeated, “Why the hell not?”
“
Shh
. He’s my husband, that’s why.”
“That seems simplistic. And rather reactionary, if I may say so.”
Betty Kurowski, first-year algebra and business math, opened the door, looked at our faces, and said, “Oh. Well, I’ll go smoke in the girls’ lavatory.” As she was closing the door we both begged her to come back.
“We were just arguing about Vietnam,” Karen told her. “Frank wants to bomb South China now.”
For summer employment, Monica and I were counselors at a day camp in New Hampshire, about forty minutes’ drive
from Mather. As if this were not separation enough, Karen and Alan spent a month in Santa Barbara visiting her family. I had been wrong about her not being rich; the parents lived in a million-dollar house near the beach. She would wear a bikini all day long. At night, while Monica slept, I masturbated like a kid. Even during the day, amid the
plockety-pock
of table tennis and the shouts of horseplay from our little brown lake, I could not stop thinking of Karen—her freckled flesh, the sunlight in her room, the way she fed on me with her eyes and mouth. I was weary of children, including my own, yet part of my fantasy was that I would give her a child. A child with her hazel eyes and my black hair: an elf child that would never need to have its diapers changed.
In August the Owenses returned from their month away, and Monica telephoned them the first night, as if she had been missing them, too. She and Karen arranged to have Karen come up to the camp one day to lead a nature walk. She fixed up a bottle with a jeweller’s loupe so that the children could peer into a sample of pond water and see the frenzy of minute life there—little transparent ovals and cylinders bumping around like Dodg’em cars, trying to find something to eat without being eaten. She was honey-colored from the California sun, and her hair had been bleached to the pallor of an orange-juice stain on a tablecloth, but her teeth were still slightly crooked, and her knees bony and intense.
In the aftermath of this visit, this glimpse of her functioning with such sweet earnestness as a teacher, I wrote her on our camp stationery, which was beige, with a green letterhead spelling out the camp name in little birch logs. I came across some stolen sheets of it a few years ago, when we changed houses, and had to laugh. My letter recounted details of our lovemaking and proposed that we break out of our marriages
and get married to each other. More a violent dream than a proposal: the surge of writing, in a corner of the picnic pavilion while Monica was out on the lake with a canoeing class, carried me into it, and the fact that I was out of Mather, writing a letter back into it. It was what they call now an out-of-body experience. I could see myself, very small, back in Mather, and I was easy to manipulate, into a life of love with this other doll. I held off mailing it for a day. But on rereading, the words seemed frightening but true, like the cruel facts of pond life.