John Updike - Toward the End of Time

“I was doing housework and feeling fond of you, if you must know. I was thinking how much I wanted to go to bed with you when you got back from skiing with those jerks. I swept and cleaned the whole upstairs, and picked up winter sticks and stuff outside on the lawn.” Tears, confounding me, had appeared like rheum on her lower lids, shellacking brighter the brown of her eyes. We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids. Our olfactory cells are open nerve ends embedded in a thin mucus that dissolves the volatile molecules we scent. “There were these little puddles,” she went on, her voice trembling, “of little turds everywhere.”

“Deer scat,” I said, abandoning my hopes of peach frozen yogurt and giving Deirdre a timid, paternal hug. “Let’s not go to bed,” I said. “We’re both in lousy moods. Let’s see what’s on TV.”

“Yeah, that blonde bitch you have the hots for.” She added, perversely aroused now, “Ben, I’ll be a whore if that’s what you want. Let’s think of some fun way to get you off.”

“Maybe while we’re watching,” I deferentially suggested, “that bitch on TV.”

Canada geese honking overhead are so common I don’t even look up. Two visited the pond down by the mailbox, now that the ice is off some of its surface. It melts from the edges in. The geese, with their haughty black faces and pearly gray bodies, are intruding upon a pair of mallards who have been in the pond since black water opened at the reedy edges and where the flow in and out is swiftest. I stood by the mailbox watching the ducks one day; my watching alarmed them, and the little brown female tried to paddle away and ran into slush. The drake with his sumptuous green head followed, and so she found herself performing as an ice-breaker, paddling her way through the slush, beating her wings to give herself extra thrust as the ice thickened. Her struggles carved a sinuous trail-the handsome drake serenely floating in her wake-before cutting back to some open water farther from the threat that my silent presence posed.

Odd, how perfectly both duck and drake seemed to agree that the task was hers. The female of the species takes on the serious business, while the male wears the plumage.

I visited little Keith and Jennifer yesterday, in the mint-green Lynnfield ranch house occupied by my youngest child, Roberta, and her contractor husband, Tony O’Brien. Jenny is six months old, her big silky cubical head adorned now by a coating of fine fuzz that stands up with a comical erectitude, as if suffused with static electricity. As I spooned in pureed carrots, her splay-fingered, transparently nailed hands, agitated by the strangeness of this craggy old man feeding her, would wander into her mouth with the food and thus make along with the silver feeding spoon a confusion of substances and purposes. Her tiny blue fist captured and squeezed an orange blob, and then sleepily rubbed it across a gossamer eyebrow. “Stop that,” I said sharply, and my daughter-whose own infancy is still coiled somewhere in the gray neuronic tangle of my atrophying memory-explained patiently to me that babies learn first how to grip things and only much later how to coordinate the niceties of letting go.

From my own infancy on, I have ascribed to things-toys, tools-a hostile intent, bent on opposing and frustrating me. An only child, I selfishly think of the universe as a big antagonistic sibling. Despite my gaffe of speaking to Jennifer as if she were a typically obstructive adult, I was allowed to give her the bottle, warmed in the microwave exactly one minute; Perdita and I had had to heat bottles in water simmering on the stove and then test them on the inside of our wrists, with a little kiss of blood-warm milk my veins have not forgotten. A cosmic calm descended, of food and appetite colliding. This was as close as I would ever come to having breasts. When I experimentally tugged at the bottle, I was astonished by the force with which Jennifer’s little mouth held it fast-again, serious business.

A defect in me, I fear, if not all male animals, is an inability to take serious business quite seriously. Feeding, fornicating, sleeping, dying-surely all a touch undignified and absurd. I used to marvel at the intensity with which Gloria would protest when I, at the wheel of one of our cars, would seem to her to be too close to another car, to be in the wrong lane, to be risking a slip on a patch of ice, or-and here I may have been guilty of teasing-to be insensitive to the dangers of the railroad tracks at the bottom of our hill. I liked to bounce over them without stopping and looking and, when the red lights were furiously dinging, to nose forward and see if the train was far enough down the line to take a chance and scoot across. What a squawking fuss Gloria would make, over her little life! Females carry the burden of the world, I think, but men the magic-the universal magic, the glittering super-dense sperm that spurted out of nothing to make the Big Bang. Male homosexuals, in my construction of it, disdain all the rosy, spongy allurements that nature has created to lead them fruitfully astray and go straight for this magic at which females also hurl themselves, defying destruction. Girls fall in love with serial murderers and with rock stars who like reptiles flicker their tongues between choruses. It hurt my feelings, it diminished me, when Gloria so furiously resisted the opportunity to die with me beneath the wheels of a commuter train. Once, as I slyly glided forward, she pulled out the car keys; another time, she opened the door on her side and would have jumped out had I not braked. Flirtation with death had no erotic charm for her. I was insulted. If not magical, men are not much.

A curious symptom, possibly fatal: when I stand holding an infant in my arms, my knees go weak, so watery-weak I fear I will fall down with my precious burden. An effort of will holds me upright until the fit passes, or else I ease my weight onto a chair. I first noticed this with my seventh grandson, Duncan. I nearly crumpled, there in the cream-colored maternity ward of the hospital. The boneless bundle in my arms, with a round face still blue from its passage through the vaginal channel, added seven nearly unbearable pounds to my own weight.

When I confided to Gloria my mystical symptom, she diagnosed simply a drop in blood pressure and prescribed water for me. She herself tried to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day. “Drink and tink” was a beauty tip from one of her bawdy Calpurnia Club friends. It kept the skin hydrated from within, moist as a baby’s, went the theory. I must say, baby Jennifer’s skin is so delicious that I cannot restrain myself from pushing my cracked old lips against her semi-liquid cheeks, her solemn great smooth brow, her fuzzy pate fragrant of shapeless, powdery thoughts. It is enough to make one laugh and even scream with delight, these infantile textures and aromas. I feel dizzyingly swept along by the whirl of life. I think that when my own children were infants I was too distracted by the world’s business-by the unstoppable, fortune-forming bull market that persisted through my thirties-to inhale. Not until the Crash of 2000, when the addled computers deleted billions and billions from the world economy, did I look up at my children, who were teenagers by then.

Jennifer is a charmer; we all tell her so. Her brother and eight male cousins, all of whom she has met, reinforce her power. She is a sacred larva being stuffed with royal jelly. It is she who will take the male magic into herself and carry the Turnbull DNA, diluted by half with some O’Brien stuff, toward eternity. Solemn in the authority of her slate-blue stare, the electric fuzz of her hair as yet colorless, she is a unitary person, with the full regalia of human interaction at her command. When she closes her mouth on the liquefied carrots and untidily smiles, I am pleased; I was hurt and offended when, at the beginning of the visit, she hid her face in her mother’s shoulder at the strange sight of me. We vie for her approval; I have an unworthy urge to tear her from her father’s thick arms and murmur in the velvety folds of her ear how his contracting business teeters on the edge of debt, how his creditors would have torn the shelter from over her head but for my discreet financial interventions. I am jealous of the young married life Tony leads, here in the pastel tract houses of Lynnfield, with my dear daughter as his chattel. Roberta stands in their little kitchen over the electric stove, and from the graceful, drifting way she turns, plastic spoon in hand, to attend to a gruff and complaining remark of Tony’s (“This kid smells like she needs a diaper change”), it could be Perdita of thirty-five years ago in the corner of my eye. Her elliptical physical style lives on in her daughters, who choose husbands, I am repeatedly assured, who resemble me. The resemblance eludes me.