Toward the End of Time (45 page)
The woods between here and the beach are a solid leafless brown, a kind of giant moss. Morning engenders beneath its surface a thousand forked glints of illumined bare twigs, an electric crackle of white sunlight. The flat roof of Mrs. Lubbetts’
beach house forms the only note, a jarring one, of human habitation in the view.
Yesterday, or the day before—they do run together, the days—the air for the first time since last winter was so much colder than the sea that the water smoked: little cloudlets of vapor, in strips and vague zigzags, adhered to its surface until the sun warmed them out of existence. On such sunny dry days shrivelled leaves scrape and scutter almost deafeningly across the black asphalt of the driveway.
The world still holds leaves. Along 128, as Gloria drove me, “to get me out of myself,” on some errands of hers (sizing up the competition in the gifts trade, mostly) to the so-called North Shore Shopping Plaza—an inferno of tacky consumerism that I once visited with Deirdre, she looking like my young nurse, I looking like every other retired parasite upon the shattered economy—I noticed that among the mostly bare trees the willows still have kept lemonade-yellow tops, the lower, shaded leaves having fallen but these top leaves still sucking vitality from the ever more obliquely angled sun. I also saw along the highway that some strange trees (oaks, I think, of a special sort) have bleached almost white in turning and yet do not drop their leaves, rather like trees abruptly killed by lightning.
A strange hallucination: in walking down to pick up the
Globe
, with my gradually more vigorous stride, I made a mental note, rounding the first curve, to pick up the sizable branch that I had seen fall off the hickory tree. But no branch was there, and then I remembered that I had seen it fall in a dream, this morning before awaking. In my dream, I was looking out this window beside which I so often sit writing and saw the branch that most conspicuously hangs down slowly break away and fall. The sight made me happy, because the branch had long bothered me and now I had a
less obstructed view of the sea, and of Misery Island and, beyond it, Baker’s, with its lighthouse and Methodist summer houses. The dream had been so vivid, and yet so modestly plausible, that I caught myself trying to act upon it in the “real” world of three dimensions and Greenwich time.
As the day that had begun so cold continued, the sea became absolutely silken, the same delicately rippling blue from shore to horizon, as if in two dimensions. It had perceptible threads in it—tiny “floats,” as textile manufacturers say—in diagonal rows, as in gabardine. The blue line of the South Shore also floated, admitting beneath itself a thin pale line of air the same faintly tawny color as the sky.
Coming back up the driveway, annoyed with the lilac and the forsythia for still being green, I touched a forsythia branch, and several of the leaves, narrow and pointed, fluttered to the ground. They came off at the lightest tug, twirling down to join the gaudier leaves of the sourwood, already matted in a mulch, compounded like chipwood, of scarlet and gold. I withdrew my hand in distaste. I had no wish to take Nature’s place, to usurp her lethal, cyclical prerogatives.
The Kegel exercises are coming well. I stand above the toilet bowl and think of all the oval toilet bowls I have gazed into since first learning to go pee-pee in that narrow country house shaken by the traffic on the road heading down into the chimneyed brick heart of Hammond Falls. Imagining myself a child again, I try to remind my puzzled, wounded body how to release the urethral sphincter and make a golden arc. There is a ghost in my machine that controls the valves. Ever more, I seem to locate him, somehow. Mind over matter: I feel such triumph, to be regaining this bit of my animal self. But I can brag about it only to Gloria, and not too often; her face shows impatience with my body.
Christmas looms a month away, and she spends more time at her gift shop, leaving me to roam, cautiously, in the house.
One day I went looking for the dahlia. The ugly white tubers, the black dirt slowly drying and crumbling off their wrinkled skins, lay for a week on a green garbage bag spread on the laundry-room counter, and then vanished. I knew she was going to pack them in plastic peanuts, in a ten-inch square cardboard box she had brought from the shop, and store them in either the cellar for coolness or the attic for dryness, but I did not know which. I dared the sinister dank cellar, where in my absence the spiders have been free to multiply their webs, and checked all the closets on the third floor, yet could not find the cardboard cube. I wanted simply to gaze at it for a few seconds, even if it was taped shut, and to hoist its weight in my hands. It would be lighter, I imagined, than I expected. It would be Egyptian only in its severe shape and sealed pledge.
I could ask her where she had stored it, but fear she would take this as an intrusion. Since I can no longer insert myself into her flesh, any other form of intrusion has become offensive to her. She does not know this herself, but her face and voice tell me, and the impatient quickness with which she moves around me. The dahlia was the unforeseen triumph of her summer. She loves it; it is hers; any attempt of mine to draw consolation from it would be an affront. She is afraid, perhaps, that I will open the box before it is ready, before spring is here. She sees me, it dawningly becomes clear, as a brute, clumsy and impulsive and unpredictable, apt to tear open everything sealed and to crush everything fragile.
Another hallucination: walking down to pick up the
Globe
, I distinctly heard the gurgle of a mountain stream, purling and twisting unseen through a narrow rock-lined gorge. But my little hill is no mountain, and though the November day
was misty, no rain had fallen for days. Yet the sound was unignorable, arising from the swampy valley between the driveway and the beach, yet close to my ear—a huge invisible angel murmuring.
There had to be a rational explanation, and bit by bit, like a coded message assembling itself in mid-air, it came to me. Dark birds were flicking, I saw, from branch to branch in the veil of trees on the slope toward the sea; I realized that a great flock of migrating starlings had settled momentarily in my woods, and that the birds’ massed chirping, their merry-sounding signals one to another, had uncannily imitated the sound of a gurgling stream, even to its tinny and pulsating undertones. As if flushed by my reasoning, percipient mind from their camouflage, hundreds of birds arose with a soft thunder of wings and roosted, still twittering, in the great solitary oak on the boundary between our property and the Kellys’ Thick as leaves, the starlings blackened the bare branches so that there was only a shuffle of sparks of daylight between them.
What do the little black-and-white birds that stay with us all winter live on? Plump, uncomplaining, they hop from twig to twig of the thickets visible from the driveway and yet one never sees them peck a berry from the goosefoot maple or a seed from beneath the euonymus.
The lilac has quite lost its leaves suddenly; but next year’s buds are already in place. When I pinch them, they yield, as living matter does.
There are voices downstairs. Gloria’s children have come for the holiday. I should be down there with them, answering to the name of “Pop.” Since they will be joining their real father in Mexico for Christmas, they are giving thanks with us tomorrow. Divorce and remarriage impose fair-mindedness, with its strict mathematics, upon the children.
They have added a voice—a baby’s squawk and much-tended-to cry. Roger and Marcia in the year past have produced a male child, named Adam. He is brick-red. Marcia talks to him incessantly in that baby voice of hers, while the tiny person, three months old, still stunned by the world, stares unfocusedly up into the outpour of what is to be had on this planet—light, milk, voices, danger, love. Beatrice will be having her child, my eleventh grandchild, in January of 2021.
Gloria has expanded thrillingly into the role of grand-motherhood; it gives her yet another dimension, with, impotent though I am, a stirring element of perverse fantasy. My mental apparatus of lust, constructed mainly of images from popular culture, remains inconveniently intact. In her grandmotherhood she is like an actress in a blue movie whom we discover, before her preordained nudity, dressed in the habit of a nun, or as a little girl, with rouged cheeks, sucking on a lollipop.
She says the weathermen are talking snow tomorrow. Last year this time we were wallowing in the stuff, but today, under an indeterminate sky, is unseasonably warm. She cannot mound up the roses until the ground freezes; otherwise, mice burrow and nest in the tilth beneath the mulch and eat the rose roots. The weather is so warm a multitude of small pale moths have mistakenly hatched. In the early dark they flip and flutter a foot or two above the asphalt, as if trapped in a narrow wedge of space-time beneath the obliterating imminence of winter.
A Note about the Author
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of
The New Yorker
, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of some forty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1997 by John Updike
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harvard University Press for permission to reprint poem #812 from
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright 1951, © 1955,1979,1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The account of the contracting universe in Chapter 5 is based on that of Paul Davies in
The Last Three Minutes
, Chapter 9. The poem approximated on page 85 is by Emily Dickinson, “A Light Exists in Spring.”
Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96345
eISBN: 978-0-307-42468-6
This edition published by arrangement with
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
First Ballantine Books Edition: September 1998
v3.0