John Updike - Toward the End of Time

“Gloria’s not much here, is she?” Beatrice asked, showing me her profile as she gazed toward the boys, softening any malice in the question.

“Gloria,” I said loyally, “is astonishingly busy. She works like a dog on this place, and then rushes over to the gift shop. Her two partners, she says, are utter featherheads. And then there are appointments with her hairdresser, her manicurist, her aerobics instructor-I can’t keep track of how many people she has on her personal maintenance crew.”

“Gloria is very beautiful,” Beatrice said, but listlessly. “Maybe an aerobics class is what I need. That, or give up alcohol. They say you drop five to ten pounds right away. How do you find it, Ben, not drinking?”

“Like waking up in Kansas every morning. But at least you don’t have a headache or a lot of fuzz in your mouth.”

“I need the lift,” she confessed. “Allan says it’s all right, the Asians drink like fish. He says they never had their heads fucked over by the Judaeo-Christian God. The Japanese killed the missionaries, and the Chinese let them in here and there but never let them get an audience with the emperor. Just kept them waiting outside the palace for generations. Duncan, stop that!”

The smaller boy was tormenting the older, by gleefully pretending to pull down his pants. Young as Duncan was, he knew where his brother’s weak spot was. Quentin wheeled frantically, trying to fend him off. The mockingbird had set up a sympathetic screeching from within the big yew bush the deer had nibbled. In mating season the bird had amused us by perching on the top of the flagpole, leaping up with a complicated call and turning in mid-air and then settling on the top of the flagpole again. The boys’ agitated whirling was like that, only suffused with Quentin’s embarrassment and little Duncan’s ferocity. “Poo!” Duncan kept shouting with fierce glee. “Poo!”

Sunlight had crept up our ankles and bounced dazzlingly off the glass top of the wicker table and the china cups and saucers. When Beatrice bent forward to douse her cigarette in the remains of her tea, sunlight plunged down her coral-colored neckline into the socket of damp, warm space between her breasts. The kiss of the doused cigarette hung in the air. “They’re at each other like that all day,” she said. “I pray for first grade next year.” Her eyes stayed fixed on her plump hand, where it hovered with opened fingers above the cup of cooled tea. Her eyebrows had knit up a vertical wrinkle between them. How nice it would be, I thought, to be beneath her and feel her breasts sway, heavy and liquid, across my face, my open mouth, my closed eyelids.

In his desperation Quentin had seized a croquet mallet and I feared would do his savage little brother an injury; I raced out onto the lawn and took the weapon from him, while snapping, “Stop it! Enough is enough.” The boys, with their workaholic father, were so little used to masculine discipline that both made teary faces and ran to their mother, where she sat on the white wicker sofa in a kind of slumber, a non-intervening goddess. She took my intervention as a criticism, and bestirred herself to depart, replacing her cup on my tray, and attempting to stand. Quentin slouched against her so tuggingly that one strap of her frock slipped down a rounded brown shoulder and bared a milk-white strip of bulbous boob. The darker, areolar flesh around her nipple would be pimpled, I figured, with a delicious roughness. “That was darling, Ben,” she said, readjusting her strap without hurry. “Good tea. You must bring Gloria to Wellesley one of these days; I need all kinds of advice with the garden. It’s getting out of hand, just like the children. Allan works these beastly hours, but the fault is mostly mine. I’ve become such a slob; all I want to do is sleep all day and eat all night, and then throw up in the morning.” She stood, and yawned.

“It sounds like-”

“It is. We’ve been keeping the news to ourselves, hoping it would go away. Seven and a half more months, I can’t stand it! I’m too old to be making babies.”

“Bea, that’s beautiful.” I lurched toward her, barking a shin on the glass-topped wicker table.

“Or plain stupid,” she said, closing her eyes and letting herself be kissed on the cheek much as Duncan had let me kiss his pricked thumb.

“How much of a secret is it?” I asked.

“You can tell Gloria, but not your children, if you don’t mind. Allan’s a little embarrassed, he doesn’t want Matt especially to tease him. It wasn’t planned, of course. We don’t believe in more than two.”

“That’s very old-fashioned of you. The world must be re-populated,” I told her.

“For another slaughter of some kind,” she sighed. “Still, I wouldn’t mind if it were a girl. Among the cousins, the tide seems to have turned that way.”

“Give Jennifer a little competition,” I said encouragingly.

“Competition,” Beatrice said, closing her eyes once more and shuddering. Standing in the slant light, she was cut diagonally in half, like the big-eyed queen of spades. She wears her glossy hair centrally parted and twisted up into a chignon, so the nape of her neck shows, with its symmetrical swirl of fine uncaught hairs. To put one’s lips into that down: like an armpit, but softer.

“Makes the world go round,” I finished for her. “That’s thrilling,” I said, trying to strike the right briskly enthusiastic fatherly-in-law note, “about the baby.” But the prospect of an eleventh grandchild made my life feel even more superfluous and ridiculous, lost in a sea of breeding. The three Wellesley Turnbulls buckled themselves back into their claret-red Mazda with a smoothing show of familial affection and sticky kisses, but the visit left me depressed. My exchange with Beatrice had been all irritable foreplay, ending in biological jealousy of my son; through the interplay of his two boys I had looked down once again into the dismal basement of life, where in ill-lit corners spiders brainlessly entrap segmented insects, consume them bit by bit, leave a fuzzy egg sac, and die. All those leggy spider corpses, like collapsed gyroscopes, that we see dangling from cobwebs-did they perish of starvation, having spun a web in vain, or of old age, in the natural course of things, after years of drawing upon Medicare and Social Security?

Lonely, frightened, I walked into the woods and down the slope, grabbing branches to prevent a skid that might break old bones, to see if my friends from Lynn were at their post. I could hear voices, including a female voice, halt as my steps crackled on the sticks underfoot. An extension had been made to the hut, a wing roofed in the corrugated opaque plastic sold in lumber-supply depots and framed in crisp two-by-fours-no more dead branches as supporting timbers. There was a raised plywood floor and a wall of mosquito netting. Two shadows lurked behind the netting, and the face of the blonde girl appeared in a parting. “Oh it’s you,” she said, in a voice flat but not especially hostile.

“Am I interrupting anything?”

“Just sittin’ and socializin’,” the other shadow called out. It was the loose light voice of the youngest of the three boys. “Wasn’t you just havin’ company?”

“My daughter-in-law and two grandsons.”

“That’s some red Mazda she drives. Drives it fast, too.”

I didn’t like the sensation of being spied on; Gloria and I had bought this place because of its privacy. “Where’re your two associates?” I asked.

“Out hustlin’,” the boy said.

“Doing stuff,” the girl amplified, distrustfully.

But I had paid up my tribute until the first of July and was determined not to be rebuffed. “I see you’ve added a screened porch.”