John Updike - Toward the End of Time

I got back before seven and though the house was silent something had changed. An infinitesimal measurement had been made, and Deirdre and I were in another universe. There was an alteration in the air of the rooms. There was the scent of another man. She came downstairs languidly, already in a bathrobe. “I felt grubby after housework all day and took a shower,” she explained. “How was skiing?”

“Beautiful,” I said. “But Ken fell asleep at the wheel on the way back and nearly got us killed. Also, I can hardly move my knees, they’re not used to it. Anything happen while I was away?”

“No, nothing.”

“Nothing? Nobody call?”

“Some old lady. She was worried about the forty-point drop in the market today. I told her you were out having fun with some guys. She sounded sore about it. I said to her, ‘Lady, he’s retired. You can’t expect him to sit home all day watching your pot for you.’”

“Mrs. Fessenden, it must have been. I should call her and make reassuring noises. I’ll remind her she’s a long-term investor and shouldn’t worry about the ups and down day to day. These old people don’t have enough to do, so they worry.” I realized that from Deirdre’s point of view I was also old. I had forgotten my age, in the afterglow of the ski trip. “What’s for dinner, darling?”

“Oh,” Deirdre said, with a shifty lowering of her long-lashed eyes, “I’m not hungry. I’ve been kind of nibbling. There’s some cold ravioli in the fridge from last night you could zap in the microwave.”

“Thanks. Zapped ravioli, my favorite gourmet meal. Let me get out of these ski clothes.”

There was a bareness to the house, somehow. On the way upstairs I glanced into the living room and the dining room to see if anything conspicuous was missing. In Gloria’s time these rooms had been resplendent, showcases for the family antiques, but since her departure-disappearance? death?- the rooms had invisibly begun to slip into shabbiness. Even the rug, the great blue Tabriz, looked faded, up at the end with the French doors and the little oval-backed sofa whose ecru silk the sun was rotting as it traced its daily arc above the sea’s horizon. There seemed fewer trifles-candlesticks and silver picture-frames and Limoges figurines. In our bedroom, I thought I had left a few of my bureau drawers out a few inches; they were all snugly closed, and the bed seemed too tightly made. Such tidiness was unlike Deirdre, even on a day that she said she spent doing housework. I sniffed. Was the ashy trace in the air a cigarette, or a ghost in the fireplace? The previous owners used to build fires upstairs-one could tell by the charred bricks. They had used the house fully, confidently, as something theirs by right. The information on my olfactory cells decoded, suddenly, as a man in a baggy brown suit. His naked, plump, hairy reflection was embedded in the mercury backing of the oval mirror, if I had the technology to recover it. The technology of the future will be able to reconstruct the exact location of every atom in the past from its position in the present, just as technicians at the factory can recover every key-tap fed into the computer’s hard memory, even those obliterated by the command DELETE. One strange scientist, I read years ago in Scientific American , maintained that at the end of time, which he called the Omega Point, the kind souls of a fantastically advanced civilization spread across the entropie or imploding terminal universe would painstakingly reconstruct and resurrect us all, every human being who had ever lived, me and a medieval stableboy and a Neandert(h)al aurochs-hunter along with all of Gloria’s ancestors and the millions of Chinese civilians killed in the recent lamentable Sino-American Conflict. It seemed an unlikely thesis, though one partially anticipated by St. Paul, and no doubt rigorous in its physics.

The intruder would have left traces, also, on Deirdre’s nervous system, while I was clumsily courting ecstasy on the ski slopes. Going downstairs, I saw the carpeted steps as neatly aligned moguls, and imagined myself dancing, knees pressed together, from one side to the other, swerving around the newel posts on the landing. As I dutifully consumed my zapped ravioli, along with some tired broccoli whose browner florets I had cut away before tucking the stalks into the microwave dish, she hovered over me uncharacteristically. She was making an effort to be agreeable, though her conversational responses were sluggish, like those of a computer whose memory is loaded to capacity. No doubt about it, she was getting more input than mine. “God,” I said, rummaging in the chaotic fridge for something else half rotten to warm up, “it feels good to have had some exercise for a change! We should do more physical stuff, now that spring’s in the air. How’s your sex life?”

This startled her. “You should know,” she said at last. “The same as yours.”

“Is it? When did we last make love?” I asked.

She had the answer, dopey as she seemed. “Eight days ago. Last Tuesday, after you got turned on by the new talking head on Channel Seven.”

A crisp blonde woman with a glassy square cleft chin she tips up toward the camera as she reads the TelePrompTer through the lens. She has thin, darkly painted long lips that she rarely smiles with, except at the end, when she releases a wide satisfied smile that says it all. She is so cool and refined that she never banters with the weatherman or the oaf who does sports. “What a terrific talking cunt she is,” I agreed. “What’s on your schedule tonight?”

“Nothing.” But she dragged the word out, teasing.

“Want to go to bed early? I mean, right after the news, before the skiing catches up to me and I start snoring.”

“Su-ure,” Deirdre said, “if you want to. I was going to wash my hair.”

“Wash it afterwards. Let me mess it up first.”

“Mess it up how?” Thinking perhaps of some perverse trick she had once turned. She was taut, like the bed she had made for a second time today.

“Oh,” I said, reluctant to give her any satisfaction, “I don’t know how. I don’t want to feel inhibited, though, like your hair is offbounds. Wasn’t there some frozen yogurt? Peach was the flavor-I can see the carton, right here, next to the frozen lemon cake. Where is it? Who ate it?”

“Who ate what?”

“The peach yogurt, you dope.” She was reminding me annoyingly of herself the night she peed in the bed and refused to become aware of it. “It’s gone. Let’s unfreeze the lemon cake for tomorrow night. Let’s get into bed first and think of a way we can mess up your hair.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Deirdre said.

“I don’t like yours, either.”

“You seem hyper.”

“You seem like you’ve snorted or swallowed or mainlined something and have something to hide.”

“I’ll be fucked if FU fuck you in this nasty mood you’re in, just because you say to.”

“Some mysterious body has eaten all my peach frozen yogurt. Who the hell are you not to fuck me when I’m begging like this, when I pay all the damn bills?”

“I’m your wife, I guess you could say.”

“I liked you better when you were a whore, frankly.”

“Of course you did. Men do. Like whores better than wives.”

“You were purer then.”

“A man would think so.”

“You used to auction yourself off, piece by piece.”

“O.K., you bastard. A million welders, to come all over my hair.”

“I don’t have a million welders.”

“Yes you do. I’ve seen the statements.”

“Only a fraction of those assets are liquid, Miss Nosy. Let’s say two million, if you tell me what you were really doing all day.”