Updike John - Of the Farm

“At what?”

“That you would need a stupid woman to give you confidence.”

“You don’t know anything about her. You don’t want to know.”

“I know what I can’t help knowing. I look at my son and see a man his father wouldn’t recognize.”

“You let him see for himself. You listen to me.” I was whispering, hissing; I stood up, and the rocker, released, returned forward and struck the backs of my legs. “You poisoned one marriage for me and I want you to leave this one alone. You be polite to my wife. She didn’t have to come here. She was frightened of coming. You asked us to come. Well, we’re here.”

She laughed—I had forgotten that quick noise of gaiety, produced on the intake of breath, with which she greeted the unexpected. “All I was saying,” she said, “was that the boy’s brains must come from the father.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve met the father only once.”

She sighed.

“Don’t mind me, Joey. I’m just an old crazy woman who’s gone too long without talking to anybody except her dogs. I thought I could talk to my son but apparently I’ve presumed.”

This tactic, of self-accusation, though familiar, was still formidable; my indignation dissolved in that inky mixture of bathos and clownishness and, to keep myself from conspiring with her, I left. “I must say good night.”

“Sleep tight, Joey.”

“Pleasant dreams, as Grandpa used to say.”

“Pleasant dreams.”

I left the living room, where the moonlight had begun to pick up as if in theft trinkets and silver edges, and groped my way up the steep cool country staircase. Richard was breathing smoothly. I dragged my fingertips across the side of his head. Back in New York I must get him a haircut. Entering our bedroom, I felt its darkness as the reverse side of an acute visibility; virtually blind, I felt myself viewed through the two sets of blue panes giving on the moonstruck meadow. In the far window, distorted by a wobble in the glass, there was suspended, like something shining in a recess of the sea, the red toplight of the television transmitting antenna recently erected, braced by wire stays, near the Turnpike. Under the faint pressure of remote light the room resolved into its components: windows, mantel, bureau, mirror, bed. The bedposts showed as silhouettes whose pineapple knobs crescentally bubbled into a third dimension, but the space of the bed was totally obscure: a rich hiatus, a velvet lake, between pale indications of deep windowsills. I touched a chair and undressed beside it. “Where are my pajamas?”

The mysterious space of the bed creaked and Peggy asked, “Do you want to bother with them?”

“Will we be warm enough?”

“Let’s try it.”

When I got into bed, she asked me, “What happened?”

“Nothing much.”

“You’re trembling like a puppy. Are you putting it on?”

I found and seized and pinned her wrists, as if she might try to roll away from what I had to say, and, my body half upon hers, our faces so close I felt her mouth as moist breath and saw by the glinting whites that her eyes were staring, said down into her, “I’m thirty-five and I’ve been through hell and I don’t see why that old lady has to have such a hold over me. It’s ridiculous. It’s degrading.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“No.”

“She did.”

“Let’s go to sleep.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Aren’t you too tired?”

She made no verbal answer. There is a merciful end to words.

MY WIFE IS WIDE, wide-hipped and long-waisted, and, surveyed from above, gives an impression of terrain, of a wealth whose ownership imposes upon my own body a sweet strain of extension; entered, she yields a variety of landscapes, seeming now a snowy rolling perspective of bursting cotton bolls seen through the black arabesques of a fancywork wroughtiron balcony; now a taut vista of mesas dreaming in the midst of sere and painterly ochre; now a gray French castle complexly fitted to a steep green hill whose terraces imitate turrets; now something like Antarctica; and then a receding valley-land of blacks and purples where an unrippled river flows unseen between shadowy banks of grapes that are never eaten. Over all, like a sky, withdrawn and cool, hangs—hovers, stands, is —is the sense of her consciousness, of her composure, of a non-committal witnessing that preserves me from claustrophobia through any descent however deep. I never felt this in Joan, this sky. I felt in danger of smothering in her. She seemed, like me, an adventurer helpless in dark realms upon which light, congested, could burst only with a convulsion. The tortuous trip could be undertaken only after much preparation, and then there was a mystic crawling by no means certain of issue. Whereas with Peggy I skim, I glide, I am free, and this freedom, once tasted, lightly, illicitly, became as indispensable as oxygen to me, the fuel of a pull more serious than that of gravity.

“Can we sleep?”

“The silence is so loud.”

“There’s an Indian blanket in the bureau. Shall I get it?”

“Do you need it?”

“Not if you don’t leave me.”

“Hey. I just thought of why I said you were like a puppy. You have a funny little doggy smell from feeding them. I like you as a country boy.”

“Aren’t you beautiful? I love your cunt.”

“Love my cunt, love me.”

“If you insist.” I was drifting asleep.

My mother had wished me pleasant dreams. That night I redreamed for the tenth or so remembered time a small vision which had first broken upon my sleeping mind in the days when the possibility of divorce and remarriage was dawning upon my waking thoughts. I was home, on the farm. I stood at the front of the house looking up over the grape arbor, where the grapes were as green as the leaves, at the bedroom windows like a small boy, too shy to knock at the door, come to call on a playmate. Her face appeared in the window, misted by the screen. Peggy was wearing, the straps a little awry on her shoulders, a loose orange nightie I liked, and as she bent forward to call to me through the screen her smile was wonderful; she was so happy here, so full of delight in the strangeness of this place, so in love with the farm and so eager to redeem, with the sun of her presence, the years of dismal hours I had spent here. Her smile told me to come up; its high bright note assumed and summed up our history of fear and sorrow and considered ruthlessness; it knowingly conveyed, through itself from elsewhere, forgiveness—and it was so gay. Never had the farm been so gay.

I awoke and, as can be the case, the difference between dream and reality was a minor one of transposition. I was in the bedroom and Peggy’s voice was below. Brightness came from outside; morning sunshine, muted by the mesh of the screen, lay at an angle on the broad sills. Unseen hands had placed the Indian blanket over me. The picture of myself as a boy smiled dimly on the wall, my limp collar melted, by oncefashionable darkroom trickery, into the utter white of the photographic stock. The voices downstairs circled unintelligibly around spots of laughter. I found in an empty closet a pair of my father’s dungarees that were big on me. By turning the cuffs up and bunching the waist under a belt of my own I made them fit. In one pocket I found a tenpenny nail my father had bent to form some sort of a tool.

After years of what my father had called “primitive living,” we had, under the necessity of my grandfather’s final illness, created a bathroom upstairs out of the old sewing-room. The fixtures seemed smaller than fife-size and the toilets flushed with a languor remote from the harsh gush of urban plumbing. On the room’s one windowsill, which did for a cabinet, there remained, among my mother’s gaudy array of pill vials and the rather embarrassing variety of hygienic items Peggy had unpacked, my father’s razor. Made heavier than they are made now, it had a turquoise patina of verdigris. Its top unscrewed into sandwichlike components, the blade being the meat. I inserted a blade of my own and shaved with it; its angle scraped and burned and, just as my father had always done, I nicked the curve of my jawbone. The cut and blood and sting were satisfying, and I remembered the queer sheep’s smile my father would wear coming downstairs with bits of shaving soap still attached to his ears, like tags. Shaving himself clumsily was one of the many small self-neglectful acts with which my father placated the spectre of poverty: I had not understood this before. I had never advanced so far into his skin as now. I always experience, on the first morning when I awake at home, a tonic, light-hearted uncertainty as to exactly who I am.