Authors: John Updike
Once that blue mailbox gathering dust at the side of that three-lane New Hampshire highway had closed its iron mouth, I sensed that I had overstepped. There were limits, and proprieties, like the glass walls of her terrarium, within which Karen had given me freedom. Outside those limits there was danger, and death.
Not that there was much danger of Alan’s intercepting the letter. I knew the mail arrived at the Owenses’ house around eleven, when he would be at his office or still in bed from the night before. Alcohol was worming deeper and deeper into his system and making it hard for him to sleep at night. He and I both, for different reasons, were feeling our lives turn upside down.
Days of silence went by. At first I was relieved. But when camp ended, and we were in town all day as well as evenings, I had expected some message from Karen, at least a social gesture toward the two of us. Late-summer muddle—New England squeezing the last drops of fun out of its few warm months—was all around us, and school would soon begin again. In Chicago, the Democrats had nominated Humphrey while Johnson hid in the White House. The police were clobbering protesters while people like me cheered. That Thursday
morning a call from Karen at last came through; she and Alan were having some of the CMC over to watch the riots and Humphrey’s acceptance on television. The convention went on and on, everything sacred unravelling before our eyes, and we kept pace with brandy and beer and white wine. Instead of junk-food snacks, Karen served little saucers of health foods—raisins, sesame and sunflower seeds, even macadamia nuts, which nobody else could afford. Alan concentrated on the bourbon, and somehow around eleven I was delegated to go downtown and get him another bottle. The package stores were closed, but he was sure I could wangle a fifth from the bartender’s at Rudy’s. Rudy’s was the main dive in the factory district; my father had been a regular. I resented the errand—I had resented my father’s long evenings at Rudy’s—but performed it, counting out Alan his change to the penny. He said I could have kept the change. When he saw, foggy as he was, how badly this went over, he tried to cover up with jokes about connections. He told me, “It must be great, Frank, to have connections. My problem in town is, I don’t have the connections.” He meant this to be a joke: the Owenses were well connected and my people were nobodies. But in fact it was true: Mather, sluggish as it was, changed a bit from year to year, and had slipped away from the Owenses.
Around midnight the other concerned citizens began to drift home. Around one-thirty the four of us were left sitting at the four sides of the antique kitchen table, a cherrywood drop-leaf, made in Mather in the 1840s by the Shaker community that had existed here. The night was hot, with a last-gasp heat; along the coast, sea breezes lighten the summer, but in our river valley it hangs heavy until the maples start to turn. Crickets were singing outside the screen door. I had had insomnia the night before, and Monica had to get up early to
take our son Tommy to the orthodontist, but we didn’t make a move to go.
“So where are we?” Alan abruptly asked. He seemed to be focussed on Karen, across the table from him. Monica and I sat on his either side.
“Here and there,” Monica said, giggling. She had had plenty to drink and was more mischievous, more wakeful, than I was used to seeing her. Her liberated Catholic hair had a bushy outward thrust that was the coming look—tough, cheerful, ethnic. Karen’s look, the long ironed hair, the nervous vulnerability, belonged to a fading past.
“Let’s talk turkey,” Alan persisted through his blur, his long lashes blinking, his rather pretty mouth fixed helplessly in a sneer.
“Oh, what a good idea!” Monica said, glancing at me to see how I was taking all this.
“Alan, explain what you
mean
,” Karen said. Her voice with children sometimes had a wheedling tone. She was the least drunk of us all, and in a flash of alcoholic illumination I saw her as pedantic. He was being naughty and she was set to baby him, Socratically, as she had babied me about the kids going off to fight. Using her psychology. “Don’t hide behind your liquor,” she went on after Alan. “Explain what you
mean
.” Some old grievance between them seemed to be surfacing while the crickets droned.
It appeared to me he didn’t mean very much; he was just drunkenly making conversation. I was interested in the tremor of Karen’s stringy freckled hands as she maneuvered a cigarette to her mouth and was therefore slow to notice Monica’s plump hand on top of Alan’s. Accustomed to seeing her comfort children at the camp, I dismissed it as more Alan-babying, from his other side.
“He’s a Virgo,” Karen told Monica, smiling now that her cigarette was lit. “Virgos are
so
withholding.”
He looked at his wife with his fishy, starry, stunned eyes and I saw that he loathed the brightness that I loved. Much as I disliked him, my thought was that he must have reasons. He opened his mouth to speak and she prompted “Yes?” too eagerly; her sharp smile chased him back into his shell.
He hunched lower over the table, and Hubert Humphrey’s high-pitched old-womanish voice came out of his mouth. “Let’s put America back on track,” Alan said, imitating the acceptance speech we had heard, interspersed with shots of the violence outside. “Let’s not talk about the green belt.” Karen’s latest project had been to arouse community interest in creating a green belt around our tired little city. “Let’s talk about—”
“Below the belt,” Monica finished for him, and she and I laughed. Across the table from me she looked enlarged, her hair puffed out and her face broadening under its genial film of alcohol. Her mother was fat, with a distinct mustache, but I had never thought Monica would grow to resemble her. Now that she had, I didn’t mind; I felt she would take care of me, even though I had recently flung into the mailbox a letter offering to leave her. Her glances toward me were like holes in the haze that the Owenses were generating, working something out between themselves. She and I and, in his way, Alan were in tune with the crickets and the occasional swish of cars passing, but our camaraderie was weakened by something resistant in Karen and by our common fatigue; watching too much television, we, too, had become staticky and unreal. We kissed one another good night then, Karen and I primly—what a dry little mouth she gave me!—and Alan and Monica lingeringly, like a pair of sentimental drunks. Out on his
porch, he did not want to let go of Monica’s hand. A warm drizzle had begun. My wife fell asleep in the car beside me as the windshield wipers swept away the speckles of rain. Downtown was deserted, the great empty factories looking majestic and benevolent, asleep. We lived across the river, in a development a mile beyond the high school.
That was our last evening with the Owenses. Next morning, Karen called the house when she knew Monica would be off with Tommy. “I told him,” she told me.
“You did?” A great numbness hit my heart and merged with my hangover. “But why?” I had answered on the upstairs phone and could see on the curving street below, under the development saplings, a few yellow leaves, the first fallen, lying in spots of damp from last night’s rain.
Karen’s voice, husky from lack of sleep, picked its way carefully, as if spelling out things to a child. “Didn’t you under
stand
what
Alan
”—I hated the slightly strengthened way she pronounced the sacred name of Alan—“was saying last night? He was saying he wanted to go to bed with your wife.”
“Well, something like that. So?”
Karen didn’t answer.
I supplied, “You think he should have asked her in private, instead of making it a committee matter.”
She said, “The reason he couldn’t get it out, he didn’t think you’d accept me in exchange.” Her voice snagged, then continued, roughened by tears, “He’s only ever seen us quarrel. About Vietnam.”
“That’s touching,” I said. I didn’t find Alan touching, actually. But she was enrolling me in her decision.
“I couldn’t bear it, Frank. His being so innocent.”
“How did he take the news?”
“Oh, he was exhilarated. He kept me up all night with it.
He couldn’t believe—I shouldn’t tell you this—he couldn’t believe I’d sleep with a townie.”
Downstairs my two younger children had grown bored with television and were punching each other. I said, “But with a non-townie he’d believe it? How many non-townies have you slept with?”
“Frank, don’t.” She hesitated. “You know how I am. He doesn’t give me shit, Frank. He’s
sink
ing.”
“Well, let him.” A coldness, the cold of death, had come over me.
“I can’t.”
“O.K. I don’t think it was very nice of you to turn us in without even warning me,” I said, all weary dignity.
“You would have argued.”
“You bet. I love you. Loved you.”
“I did it for you, too. For you and Monica.”
“Thanks.” The day outside was bright, with a rinsed brightness, and I thought,
When she hangs up, I must open the window and let in some air
. “Did you get my letter?” I asked her.
“Yes. That was another thing. It frightened me.”
“I meant it to be a nice letter.”
“It
was
nice. Only—a little possessive?”
“Oh. Maybe so. Pardon me.”
I’ll never sleep with her again, never, ever
, I thought, and the window whose panes I stared through seemed a translucent seal barring me from great volumes of possibility, I on one side and my life on the other, my life and the naked bright day.
Karen was crying, less in grief, I thought, than in exasperation. “I
wanted
to talk to you about it, but there wasn’t any way to get
to
you; I haven’t even had a chance to give you the present I brought from Santa Barbara.”
“What was it?”
“A shell. A beautiful shell.”
“That you found on the beach?”
“No, those are too ordinary. I bought it in a shop, a shell from the South Seas. A top shell, silvery white outside with pink freckles underneath. You know how you go on about my freckles.”
“Your gorgeous freckles,” I said.
Karen didn’t substitute-teach that fall; she went into Boston and worked long days for the peace movement. Friends of ours who had remained in the Owenses’ inner circle told us that some nights she didn’t come home. If you look at the memoirs of the celebrity-radicals of that time, a lot of it was sex. Liberals drink and smoke, radicals use dope and have sex. Karen and Alan split up finally, sometime between when Nixon and Kissinger finagled our troop withdrawal and when South Vietnam collapsed. His drinking became worse; he ceased to function as a lawyer at all, though the name stayed up in the lobby of the office block downtown where he had rented space. She went back to the West Coast; he stayed with us, like the gutted factories. Though I didn’t see him from one year to the next, I thought of him often, always with joy at his fall. Monica and I had moved, actually, into his neighborhood; we allowed ourselves a fourth child before she got her tubes tied, and, with heating oil going higher and higher, we were able to pick up very reasonably—my brother was the realtor—a big turn-of-the-century house on Elm Hill, with a finished third floor and a porch on two sides. We’ve closed off some of the rooms and put in a wood-burning stove in the living room.
Betty Kurowski’s mother cleaned, twice a week, the Owens
house two blocks farther up the hill. It was Betty who told me how bad Alan was getting. “A skeleton,” she said. “You should go see him, Frank. I went in there last week and talked with him and he asked about you. He saw in the paper how you’ve become assistant principal.”
“Why would I want to go see that snide bastard?”
Betty looked at me knowingly, under those straight black eyebrows that didn’t go with her bleached hair. “For old times’ sake,” she said, straight-faced.
I asked Monica to go with me and she said, “It’s not me he wants to see.”
“It was you he liked.”
“That was pathetic, that was his attempt to fight back. He’s not fighting back anymore. Poor Alan Owens. That whole family was just too good for this world.” She sounded like her mother. But Monica hasn’t gotten fat. She counts those calories and is taking a night course in computer science. She’s been working mornings as receptionist and biller for a photo-developing lab that has taken half a floor of the old Pilgrim mill, and they want her to learn to use the computer. I’m proud of her, seeing her go off nights in her trim skirt and blouse. She’s tough. Old cheerleaders keep that toughness. Win or lose, is the way they figure. The truth about Karen and me, when it came out, simply made her determined to win.
Karen sends us mimeographed Christmas letters. She’s remarried, has a son and a daughter, and got a degree in landscape architecture. Alan had been holding her back, but a dozen years ago she was too uncertain of herself to know that. It hadn’t occurred to me, then, that being sexy could be a woman’s way of repressing her other problems.
Nobody answered my knock. The Owens house has a front door as wide as a billiard table, with gray glass sidelights into
which a lacy pattern of frosting has been etched, so people can peek in only in spots. The clapboards in the shelter of the porch were pumpkin-colored, but those out in the weather were faded pale as wheat, and peeling. There were dry leaves all over the porch; it was that season again. Advertising handouts had been allowed to collect on the welcome mat. The door was unlocked and swung open easily. The downstairs showed Mrs. Kurowski’s work; indeed, it was uncannily clean and tidy in the big rooms, as if no one ever walked through. The long kitchen, with its little Shaker table, looked innocent of meals. Two tangerines in a pewter bowl had turned half green with mold.
“Alan?” I was sorry I had come; being in their house after so many years awakened in my stomach the sour tension of those noontime visits that would never come again. Sun slanted in at the kitchen windows the way it always had, making the scratched lip of the aluminum sink sparkle, drying out the bar of soap in its cracked rubber dish. She had liked those stained-glass flowers and butterflies people use as shade-pulls, and a few of these were still hanging here, picking up the light. I stood at the foot of the dark back stairs at whose head naked Karen used to flicker like a piece of sky, and called again, “Alan?”