John Updike - Toward the End of Time

Mrs. Fessenden, whose senility has advanced a notch, has developed the fixed fear that all her funds have disappeared in the electronic maze of computerized finance. It is a reasonable fear: data banks blank out, governments fade away, inflation makes a mockery of currency. But the genius of capitalism dictates that wealth, once established, endure, to lure others to labor for it. Wealth survives wars, idiocy, and high personal unworthiness. So from MGH I trudged through the acres of brick-and-concrete rubble (Government Center, they used to call it) where the John E Kennedy Building and City Hall used to stand (both blown up by American sympathizers with the Chinese cause during the war, though all the inhabitants of Chinatown had been interned on the harbor islands) to State Street and my old offices at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise. Here I had been happy; here I had been, in a small way, mighty. I often dream I am riding the elevator up, and finding everything beyond the receptionist’s desk nightmarishly changed. It was necessary today to secure tangible proof for Mrs. Fessenden that she was still a wealthy woman, however the world wagged. Yet what could I get for her but more suspect computer printouts? They all looked alike and could mean anything, she said. With the grudging help of Ned Partridge, who now has a wispy assistant with the economical name of Gary Gray, I found in a back room of old-fashioned “hard” files some engraved Chicago Municipal Water Authority Board from the 1920s that had been left to her in her father’s estate. They were beautifully ornamented with crosshatched fountains, overflowing urns, nude Nereids, and bearded heads of a jubilant Neptune. Along the bottom edge, above the lacily etched border, ran a tableau of a French fur trader, in company with two buckskinned Indians, surveying the horizon of Lake Michigan from the marshy mouth of the Chicago River. Another of Ned’s assistants, a compactly built girl in a jade-green sheath that clung tightly to her honey-colored skin-Africa had recently bumped into Asia somewhere in her gene map-helped me take state-of-the-art color Xeroxes of these antiquated proofs of financial substance, and collusively agreed to FedEx them, at the expense of the firm, to Mrs. Fessenden in Chestnut Hill.

The air-conditioned offices in their shades of ecru fluorescence formed a kind of paradise and I was tempted to linger. Once I had been welcome here, and it was not the least unkind trick of time that I had become an alien body, a germ to be neutralized and expelled. The comely underlings understood this less well than the higher-ups. One of the disagreeable things about Ned Partridge’s face, besides its papery indoor pallor, is the way in which his long lustreless nose somehow appears in profile even when he is looking at you head-on. In the Picassoesque scramble his fishy eyes seem to intersect, also. “The place isn’t the same without you, Ben,” he told me, with such evident insincerity that the mixed-blood beauty darted an eyelash-begemmed glance in his direction.

“You all seem to be managing,” I said.

“Yeah, but there’s no give-and-take any more. No fun.”

“Was I fun?” I asked incredulously.

“There’s no graciousness,” he went on, avoiding my question. The Afro-Asian assistant demurely lowered her lids on the moist treasure, in its shining lashed vessels, of her gaze.

As if I, a poor boy from outer Hammond Falls, had been the standard-bearer for fading gentility. “You still have Firman Frothingham,” I pointed out. “He’s fun.”

“Yaah, he’s still around, but between us”-his face jumped closer, out of focus-“Frothy’s lost a lot of his fire, his esprit . It’s all cut-throat now,” Ned said, settling back into his chair with a shuffling of lips and nostrils. “Savages,” he snorted. “Everybody carving out their little turf and pulling up the drawbridge. Bingo, and fuck you, Mac. Let Pat show you out, Ben-we have a new floor plan since you left.”

Pat, indeed. Pat pat. As we threaded through the vanilla lambency of the offices, I observed how her green sheath, with its split exposing a golden-brown sliver of thigh, fit her discreetly but undeniably steatopygous buttocks with enough snugness to declare their cleavage. Even her face, as it smiled goodbye forever, had its muscular bulges. She was a choice cut of meat and I hoped she held out for a fair price.

Then, expelled, I descended to the steamy squalid streets, with their throngs of ghastly hoi polloi. It was as if the world’s population had never been halved. All the sickly marbled tints of Occidental skin spilled and milled about on Congress Street as I bucked through the tumbling flesh toward North Station. Within, the stench of the cheese and pulped tomatoes of Italian fast food nearly made me gag. Overweight girls in their random search for stimulation were staring right through me. The commuter train in summer becomes a cargo carrier to the North Shore beaches, and the vinyl seats take on an aroma of salt water and suntan lotion and of wet towels and sleepy sunburned young bodies dying to take a piss. As we age and appetite dwindles, I notice, we become fussier about our food-we smell unsavory ingredients that youth greedily gobbles up, and also resent the secretive fumes of breeding, from the sour fermented beverages that loosen our inhibitions to the post-coital puddles. Odorous rumors of all those necessary secretions and excessively clever gametes make us queasy.

I write this while doubting its truth. There is a rapacious splendor in the way our ugly, multi-digited species, with its absurd patches of hair and oversized skull, slaughter by slaughter covered the world in waves of anthropic fat, wiping out the mammoth and aurochs and dodo and rhino and pressing the tiger and cheetah and Sus scrofa into unsanitary zoos, where they smell nothing on the night air but people-an ocean of human scent and excrement and semen. I am part of it, still; in the same shameful nook of me that craves perpetuation I am as carnal as ever.

I can remember that first, rapt taste, chalky and exalted like a primal malt ball, of childhood pornography. Grubby pages were passed around, from hand to hand, in that Dark Age of text duplication, in tattered mimeograph and even blurred carbon copy. There was an inspiriting prose tale of a sixth-grade boy whose teacher has him stay late at school; she mounts a ladder to affix a Christmas decoration and lets him look up her legs to see that she is wearing no underpants. Later in the saga she makes him taste her copious fluids and extracts from his fly his silver virgin rod. Amazing! We schoolboys wondered, Did such things truly happen? In some universe, perhaps, but certainly not this. I, a businessman in bud, asked myself who were the adults who showered such delicious fantasies upon us starving juveniles, and how such a business reaped its profit. Another item of sexual samizdat took the female point of view, in rhyme:

I took out my tits, shyly proud of their size,

And blushed as Ted’s finger explored ’tween my thighs.

I gulped when his member was thrust into view,

But he bid me caress it, and lick at it, too.

How often I have wished I recalled more than this one stanza, and cursed myself for having an indifferent memory. But other boys were leaning on me, stabbing with smudged fingers at the fragile, often-folded hectographed copy, threatening to tear the revelatory text into fragments. One detail was unforgettable in its technical interest: as Ted prepared the heroine for her deflowering, he knowingly placed a pillow under her hips. Pillowy ass upon ass-kissing pillow: a sacred secret here, the vaginal canal lifted skyward at the proper tilt, like an ack-ack gun, to bring down ecstasy from on high. I hugged this rakish bit of sexual insiderism to my heart’s foul underside but in the next fifty-five years have found less use for the tip than I would have thought. Education is so wasteful, so hit-or-miss.