John Updike - Toward the End of Time

I didn’t want to hear this, particularly, but I did like being able to talk about Deirdre openly-to drag with my tongue the sweet secret of her name out from the granular dark of my memory cells. The way she would pantingly negotiate the price for every new twist of lovemaking. Her tight butternut ass, with its white thong shadow, up in the air, the little flesh-knot between the glassy-smooth buttocks visible in moonlight that entered the third-story window at just the right celestial angle. The flat planes of her face harking back to the Egyptian Sphinx or some heavy Aztec head of solid sandstone, only transposed to a smaller, female scale, with modern nihilist nerves. The way her stiffish purple dress with its little white collar rustled beside me in church last Easter as the boyish clergywoman preached of how the risen Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, “Touch me not.” Her searing wish-I felt it now, at last-to be sheltered.

I drew closer to Phil, as if to a squat radiator on a bleak winter day. There is a warmth in the proximity of a man who has fucked the same woman you have. It is as if she took off her clothes as a piece of electric news she wished him to bring to you. He has heard the same soft cries, smelled the same stirred-up scent, felt the same compliant slickness, seen the same moonlit swellings and crevices and tufts-it was all in Phil’s circuitry, if I could but unload it. He was a healthy FedEx man, wearing the attractive uniform of power; he could afford to be casual about his conquests, but I no longer could. My sexual memories had become epics of a lost heroic age, when I was not impotent and could shoot semen into a woman’s wincing face like bullets of milk. Deirdre’s flanks in memory had acquired the golden immensity of temple walls rising to a cloudless sky and warmed by an Egyptian sun. Whore though he thought her, a nimbus of her holy heat clung to Phil-his oily black pubic curls had tangled with hers-and I moved another inch closer to him, as the two ducks on the pond suddenly tussled, with a quacking and thrashing that sent concentric ripples crashing into the reflected red image of the maples.

Phil mistook the reason for my intimacy. He thought working for the expanding FedEx conglomerate was the most important thing about him. He lowered his voice confidentially to tell me, “In a coupla months, we’ll have the circuitry in place so we don’t even have to collect in person; the monthly charge will be automatically deducted from your bank account. Neat, huh?”

“How do I know you won’t deduct too much?”

“It’s a matter of trust, like you always said. Trust us. You won’t feel a thing.”

“With you, did she come?”

“Huh?”

“Deirdre.” I was shameless now, in my decrepitude. In a world of dwindling days, why wait to seek the truth? “Were you able to give her climaxes?”

“Hey, Ben, come on. What does this have to do with the price of cheese?” He glimpsed my need and smilingly despised me for it.

“I want to know,” I pleaded. “I miss her. Deirdre.” Saying her name-did my penis stir? I felt something . “I wish her well.”

“Like I said, she was a whore. Her coming wasn’t the issue.”

“I tried to make it an issue,” I confessed. “I worked at it. But I could never be sure, she was so good at faking it. Her mind was always a little elsewhere, didn’t you think?”

He saw that he mattered to me only as an emanation of our shared cunt, and he felt indignant. He cut me off. “On her next fix is where it was,” he said. “They’re all like that. They hate the tricks they turn, don’t kid yourself, Ben. Hey, you don’t look so good suddenly. Think you can make it back up that hill?”

“My doctors want me to exercise,” I told him. “They want me to drop dead.” As I shuffled my way up the curved asphalt, past the fruit trees with their rotting dropped fruit, the lilacs turning purple leaf by leaf, the sassafras shaped like an upside-down bowl, and the cedar with its frost of tiny berries, I decided that the stir of my penis at the mention of Deirdre’s name had likely been just a leak of warm urine I had happened to notice. I resolved to work harder on my Kegel exercises.

Rain for three days, one of those fall nor’easters that knock the leaves from the trees and paste them to the wet earth, Still, the hickory outside my upstairs window has scarcely turned, but for patches of yellow. Agitated squirrels tousle it, clambering out on its downward-drooping twigs, and then scamper thunderously across the roof above my head.

The gutter at one end was plugged, and the overflow built up a puddle behind the pachysandra that was draining into a basement window. In a burst of vitality that alarmed Gloria, I put on my old foul-weather sailing gear and in the driving rain set up the extension ladder and climbed its slick rungs and, not daring to look down into the steep triangular space beneath my feet, cleared away a plug of twigs and leaves with my hands. There was primitive satisfaction in seeing a vortex appear and the level of water standing in the old wooden gutter go slowly down, obedient to the patient, omnipresent laws of physics. Childhood games: getting the elements back on track. Man as hydraulic traffic cop. Down on the ground I tried with the point of a pick to gouge a runnel through the pachysandra to drain the puddle into the driveway, but gravity was against me. If gravity be against us, what can be for us? I liked being out in the rain, because it made my soaked paper diaper feel natural, a piece of saturated nature.

Inside the house, arranging everything in the laundry room to dry, I was aware of the heat from the radiators, as touched and grateful as if a faithful servant had thought to set out for me a tray of tea and warm scones. The house and its appurtenances of wiring and piping pursue an independent life, like a motherly, stationary megatrinket.

Gloria professed alarm at my exertions but in fact I felt invigorated, my face tingling. It was only in the evening, as I tried to read in bed a popular book about cosmology, that a terrific fatigue hit me-that degree of unforswearable weariness that brushes even the certainty of death aside in its haste to close our eyes.

Alive, I’m alive, I sometimes think now, listening to the rain in the gutters, feeling the extension of my limbs beneath the soft sheets. What bliss life is, imagined from the standpoint of a stone or of a cubic yard of black water in the icy ocean depths. Even there, apparently, conglomerated molecules manage to light a tiny candle of consciousness. The universe hates death, can it be? If God be for us, who can be against us? Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the … Alive. A pitiable but delicious reprieve from timelessness. I think of all the sons of bitches like Gary Gray and Firman Frothingham who would just as soon see me dead and the pleasure of spiting my enemies warms my cooling heart.

The sky this dawn was a pink blotting paper, set above a sea whose blue presented the same misty, fibrous texture. In the foreground the golden trees looked sullen and darker now, curdled and rust-ridden, after the storm. As the leaves thin, the sky lowers again upon our awareness. Making my slow way down the damp asphalt, where flowing water has left drifts and eskers of pine needles, acorns, hickory nuts, dead twigs, and gravel from the edges, I seem to see, in broken arcs beyond the scudding, thinning rain clouds, the heavenly circle, the torus. Has it, in spite of the public indifference that attended its departure, returned, or is it a trick merely of refracted sunlight in a high mist of crystals-a white rainbow?