John Updike - Toward the End of Time

I returned from a visit to two of my grandchildren, Torrance and Tyler, sons of my older son, Matthew, and his lovely, utterly blonde, slant-eyed wife, Eeva, a Finn from Rockport, an elfin child of its granite quarries and artists’ colonies. They live in Gloucester, among drug addicts and out-of-work Portuguese fishermen, in a sprawling do-it-yourself house one block back from the sparkling, underutilized harbor. Torrance is delicate, dark, and fey, with enormous girlish eyelashes, and club-footed Tyler sturdy and phlegmatic, with a Lapp streak in him somewhere. Both boys are heartbreaking if I focus on them, which is not easy to do; their fraternal tussles and sporadic forays into Grandfather’s attention span compete with Eeva’s explanation of the particular herbal tea she has opted to serve her aging father-in-law. And my true focus is upon my own child, Matthew. Of all my children, I feel guiltiest with him, though he is unfailingly cheerful and inscrutably benign. But in just the alacrity with which he comforts a squalling son I read my own conspicuous absence in his young life, off in Boston not only working the requisite ten-hour day but undergoing the post-hours male bonding, at the Federal Club and Brandy Pete’s and the Parker House bar, that a securities business needs, to cement contacts. In his patently monogamous affection for Eeva I read another rebuke, a determined reaction against the suburban polygamy that eventually produced my divorce from his mother. Like Perdita, Eeva has an artistic side, manifesting itself in carved lumps of linden wood and rather wonderful shapes of melted and half-blown glass. Her female beauty, in its full-figured prime at age thirty-four, sweeps over me with the fragrance of steeped chamomile flowers, orange peel, rose hips, lemon grass, hibiscus flowers, chicory, stevia leaves, allspice, and honey-the well-mulled combination of them excellent, she assures me, for blood pressure, regularity, and skin tone. Her arctic eyes narrow and she becomes a Finnish witch during this incantation. She left out the beneficial effect of sexual potency, I guiltily imagine, to spare my son’s fastidious feelings. He is pleasantly vague when I ask how his freelance architectural career is going, and when I stand, full of no-fat, no-sugar cookies, I feel that weakness in my knees which I associate with the extra weight of a child in my arms, though both boys are too big and wriggly to hold.

In the car, swerving around the circle that leads from Gloucester onto Route 128, I realize with a start why Torrance had so many new toys to show me and why both he and his mother glanced with a certain inquisitive alertness toward me as I sat, the perfect guest and eager consumer of health food, in the center of their oatmeal-colored sofa. It had been the boy’s birthday. If not this very day, somewhere toward the end of April. I had totally forgotten it. How old would he be? I tried to remember the hospital circumstances of his birth. He had crouched in a transparent plastic basket like a little skinned rabbit, fighting to live after being born prematurely. We all felt through the plastic how hard he was trying to live. Eeva had wept, because she could not nurse him, could not help him. Now he was eight. A critical birthday, marking his entry upon the third and final quadrennium of childhood, before the onslaught, at thirteen, of puberty’s stormy weather. It had slipped my poor old empty mind. I would call Matthew and lamely apologize-one more wound inflicted on this, my most innocent child, my uncomplaining son-and rush back onto 128 and to the penitential Peabody mall for some garish and superfluous present as soon as I got home.

When I got home, my mood of guilt and self-loathing took some of the sting and surprise out of finding the house dishevelled, the great rose and blue Tabriz rug stripped from the living-room floor amid other depredations, and an ill-written ballpoint note from Deirdre on the hall table:

Dear Ben-

I’m sorry I just can’t take it any more, life here is too boring, tho’ I know you try. We are just too different. I try to please you but I know I don’t a lot of the time. Also to be honest I miss dope too much. It takes me to another place which is the one way I feel good about myself. We took some nice things but left you plenty, Phil said you owed me something, it’s part of women’s rights.

Be well always my darling,

D.

Then the rusty draw-gate of my heart lifted to admit torrents of regret. As I went around the house checking on what had been stolen, I mentally inventoried instead her tight buttocks, like two perfect bronze hemispheres but for the arcs of white her thong bikini cut into them; the taut terrain of her spine and scapulae and attendant back muscles as she relaxed into sleep beside me; her tough-talking mouth forming its dulcet and docile O around my stirred-up member, down-down with a determined gulp like a child’s swallowing a dose of noxious medicine-to its tickly-haired root. She had wanted to be more than my lewd toy, my sex object, but I had ignored this silent plea. I had failed to take seriously her instinctive attempt, this last month, at spring cleaning, so inflexibly had I consigned her and our life together to the category of squalor. But the hormones of nest-building were in her as in every woman. I had given her attempts at homemaking no help; I had wanted only like some horn-brained buck to fuck her and between bouts of my erratic potency to ignore her. A shaky sense of irredeemable guilt rotated in my stomach as I mentally reconstructed her face, her shining round brown eyes as vulnerable as bubbles of jelly a stray needle might prick, her Sphinxy mass of ringlets, her blunt moist muzzle of a nose. I tormented myself with remembering the silken rivers of dark body hair that loving inspection discovered everywhere on her limbs, and the girlish secrets between her legs, the semi-liquid pink split pod with its magical pea and the drier other aperture like a tight-lidded reptilian wink. Her excitable quick way of moving through the house, the fits of sluggishness that buried her all afternoon in the bed, only a cushion of dark hair and a single shut eye visible in the tumble of covers. Lost, gone, all lost, and I had no appetite for another whore, even if I could find the thread to one in the anarchic tangle that stretched below my hill.

The house had been ransacked as if by a pair or trio of morons-some items of little value taken, some precious pieces left. Perhaps there was some bizarre code of fencibility operating, leaving Gloria’s grandmother’s finest Staffordshire china untouched in its mahogany cabinet and taking a plastic-and-aluminum coffee-maker that I never used, having sacrificed coffee decades ago to the obscure deities who control blood pressure. The living-room rug-what a weight for them to wrestle with!-was the greatest loss, but its absence exposed a maple parquet whose beauty had been long obscured. Each piece of surviving furniture was now doubled by a dim mirror-image in the floor’s waxy surface. Deirdre’s thefts seemed as random as a lover’s heart, which chooses to cherish this or that inconsequential detail of the beloved, and ignores features that could be universally agreed to be worthier. I always liked, for example, the way Perdita could never give up smoking or drinking, and went around all summer in bare feet so dirty the soles became black, and disliked the way she was always trying to help less fortunate others-sending money to Ethiopian charities, putting in a day a week at a Dorchester settlement house. I want women to be dirty, and focused solely on me.

Deirdre and I had together proved helpless before the gathering needs of the grounds and garden. The plants and weeds were coming along in a rush. The daylily leaves in the bed beside the driveway were as high as my knees; a few tulips had popped open in the far garden. The peonies needed to be propped: even I could see that. Gloria had always done everything, and supervised what she could not do. She had ever been on the telephone to lawn services, tree services, sprinkler-system maintainers, greenhouses, nurseries, and spent muddy-kneed hours out in the garden beds, digging, planting, transplanting, mixing manure and peat moss, mulch and loam, wearing a big battered straw hat we had once bought in St. Croix on holiday. I had liked the dirty way she looked, with earth smeared on her cheek where she had rubbed a mosquito bite with a muddy glove, and the way she, dog-tired at dusk, would leave all her caked and sweaty clothes in the laundry room, including her underpants, and walk upstairs nude, past her staring ancestral antiques, to soak her aching body in the tub, leaving me to put a quiche or a defrozen meat loaf in the oven for dinner. Men like being useful. I had liked serving my naked queen of tilth.