John Updike - Toward the End of Time

“You can’t just cop out,” she said, getting wild. “What about me ?”

“What about you, my dear? You’re comfortable, aren’t you? You’re fed and housed up here. You’re a lot better off than when you were turning tricks three or four a night and getting ripped off by the escort agency and terrified of being slashed or strangled by some sicko who could never come to terms with his own libidinous impulses.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But there’s not enough here for me to do . Everything I want to do to change the place you resist, because Gloria wouldn’t have done it that way. Gloria, Gloria. Ben, it’s boring for me here. Even banging you, you seem to want it less.”

“I’ll want it more,” I promised, “when it stops being spring. I just get down in the spring, I don’t know what it is. We’ll be fine, eventually.” Some of that ancient dollhouse panic began to rise in my throat, thickening it. “Stick with me, darling. There’s nothing out there but-”But what? Paganism. Imported Oriental gods, fraudulent magi and seers. The decline of Rome.

The lilac buds are two-pronged, showing the first unsheathing of leaves. Each sharp forsythia bud reveals a gleam of yellow. The daylilies are now well up-clusters of scimitar shapes. The peonies are a red inch out of the ground. A lone daffodil blows its golden one-note above the sagging crocuses in the driveway circle. The dead lawn shows a green blush. It is all up with winter and its low-ceilinged safety.

Rounding the pond back from a nocturnal trip to Christy’s convenience store for nibbles, milk, and orange juice, I heard the peepers-I rolled down my window to hear them better. The noise was like armor, metallic, composed of overlapping shining scales, ovals of sound beaten thin, a brainless urgent pealing chorus that filled the air solid, whether rising from the mud or descending from the trees was hard to tell in the dark. The sound hung in midair, nowhere yet everywhere, like last month’s skunk smell.

The next day, a steady spring downpour drummed in the gutters and whipped against the windows with an insulting sting. Deirdre in a morose sulk did aerobics to an antique Jane Fonda tape of Gloria’s while I rummaged in the encyclopedia and the seldom-consulted family Bible, nagged ever since Easter by thoughts of St. Paul. Without him, there might have been a Christ, but there would have been no Christology, and no crisis theology. From the standpoint of two thousand years later, his travels seem wormholes in petrified wood, the already rotten eastern end of the Empire, dotted lines traced from one set of ruins to another, or to empty Turkish spaces where even the names Paul knew- Lystra, Derbe-have been wiped away by time’s wind. Antioch of Pisidia, where Paul founded the first Galatian church, deteriorated over the centuries into a rubble of marble blocks and broken aqueduct arches; the site was not rediscovered until the explorations of the English clergyman Arundell in 1833. Iconium, rivalling the second Antioch as a center of Christianity in inner Asia Minor, consisted of, after Paul’s visitations, a patriarchate with many lesser churches on the slopes of the surrounding mountains. A city located in a flowering oasis surrounded by desert at an altitude of three thousand feet, Iconium had been founded by the Emperor Claudius as a colony of army veterans; these, together with Hellenized Galatians and Jews and ethnic Phrygians, made up the population. Poppaea, Nero’s wife, appeared on the settlement’s coins as a goddess. In later days Iconium became the residence of the Seljuk sultans of Rum and the headquarters for the Mevlevi dancing dervishes of Turkey; the Armenians of the region remained loyal to Christianity but were savagely slaughtered during World War I.

It was in Iconium that Paul encountered Thecla, a pagan girl who, falling under the spell of his preachments on virginity, became a saint and, in the terms of the adoring Eastern church, “protomartyr among women and equal with the apostles.” The apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla , composed by an imaginative priest in the second century, contains the only known physical description of Paul, as “a man of small stature, with his eyebrows meeting and a rather large nose, somewhat bald-headed, bandylegged, strongly built, of gracious presence, for sometimes he looked like a man and sometimes he had the face of an angel.”

The ages have not found it easy to love Paul, for all his feats of marketing Christianity to the world. Marketing it, nay-inventing it, and Protestantism as well, which after fifteen centuries at last took up in earnest his desperate, antisocial principle that a man is justified by faith and not the works of the law. What an impossible item, after all, he was selling: Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness. To the Gentiles Paul appeared too Jewish-a Pharisee, a temple spieler-and to the Jews too much infatuated with the Gentiles. There was too much hair in his nostrils, too much moisture on his rapid lips; the hunched-over little tentmaker, bald and gnarled, had been twisted into something superhuman by his fit on the road to Damascus-a bragged-of burst of light that had left him hyperactive, insufferable with a selfish selflessness that laid him repeatedly open to scourgings and filthy abuse. Greek poured from him in an ungrammatical, excited tumble, and I, called John Mark, cousin of Barnabas, resented the way in which my pious and prudent older cousin on his own island, among the friends and relatives that had welcomed us on this our first mission from Syrian Antioch, was insidiously displaced as the leader of our expedition.

The turning point came in New Paphos, at the far end of the Roman road from Salamis, where we-Barnabas and Paul and I-had landed to preach among the synagogues; the governor, Sergius Paulus, like so many of his patrician class of colonial officials a foppish dabbler in poetry and philosophy, summoned us to his court, to dispute with the crowd of learned fools he had collected about him. Prominent among them was Barjesus, one of those Jewish magicians called Elymas, who infiltrated everywhere in those sick times of sorcery and febrile Asian cults; this snake-tongued man heckled and contradicted Paul’s account as the self-designated apostle strove to set before the governor the intricately bold claims of our faith. At last Paul turned with fury in his eyes and-as ragefully as, within the memories of believers, he had led the persecution of Stephen, hurling rocks and curses alike upon the fainting martyr-Paul called Barjesus a child of the devil and an enemy of righteousness and a perverter of the ways of the Lord. His lips frothing and his eyes rolling upward as they did before one of his fits, Paul told Barjesus, “The hand of the Lord is upon you; you will not see the sun for a season.” What happened then was incredible: the mist of darkness enveloped the man and he fell silent, but for begging to be led from the hall. Naturally, Sergius Paulus was impressed, as the Romans were always impressed by a show of cruelty. The governor asked for private sessions of enlightenment as to this Messiah crucified and risen, and the new dispensation that He had brought into the world.

It disgusted me to see Paul preen upon his conquest among our occupiers, and yet I was too young to protect my good-natured cousin from the tentmaker’s grandiose impulses. Paul was on fire now with the desire to spread our word westward, into the vastness of Asia Minor, with their mongrel, uncircumcised populations. He wished to sail to Ephesus, because he believed that the word of Jesus, like a Heavensent plague, would spread best from the teeming ports. He had to settle for a ship to Attalia, on the same swampy coast as his native Tarsus, only to the west.