Part 1 (1/2)

Toward the End of Time.

by John Updike.

familiar only with G.o.d, We yearn to be pierced by that Occasional void through which the supernatural flows.-CHARLES WRIGHT, ”Lives of the Saints”We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains.-MARTIN GARDNER, ”Wap, Sap, Pap, and Fap”

i.The Deer.

FIRST SNOW: it came this year late in November. Gloria and I awoke to see a fragile white inch on the oak branches outside the bathroom windows, and on the curving driveway below, and on the circle of lawn the driveway encloses-the leaves still unraked, the gra.s.s still green. I looked into myself for a trace of childhood exhilaration at the sight and found none, just a quickened awareness of being behind in my ch.o.r.es and an unfocused dread of time itself, time that churns the seasons and that had brought me this new offering, this heavy new radiant day like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appet.i.te.

And yet does the appet.i.te for new days ever really cease? An hour later, I was was exhilarated, clearing my porch and its single long granite step with my new orange plastic shovel, bought cheap and shaped like a scoop and much more silkily serviceable than the c.u.mbersome metal snow shovels of my childhood, with their sticky surfaces and noisy bent edges. Plastic shovels are an improvement-can you believe it? The world does not only get worse. Lightweight, the shovel hurled flakes sparkling into the still air, onto the bobbing leucothoe in the border bed. There had been bloated yews there, planted by the previous owner beneath the windowsills and over the years grown to eclipse the windows and darken the living room. My wife, the dynamic Gloria, commanded men to come and tear them out and plant little bushes that in turn are getting increasingly s.h.a.ggy. Nature refuses to rest. exhilarated, clearing my porch and its single long granite step with my new orange plastic shovel, bought cheap and shaped like a scoop and much more silkily serviceable than the c.u.mbersome metal snow shovels of my childhood, with their sticky surfaces and noisy bent edges. Plastic shovels are an improvement-can you believe it? The world does not only get worse. Lightweight, the shovel hurled flakes sparkling into the still air, onto the bobbing leucothoe in the border bed. There had been bloated yews there, planted by the previous owner beneath the windowsills and over the years grown to eclipse the windows and darken the living room. My wife, the dynamic Gloria, commanded men to come and tear them out and plant little bushes that in turn are getting increasingly s.h.a.ggy. Nature refuses to rest.

The transient sparkles seemed for a microsecond engraved upon the air. The weathervane on the garage, a copper mallard in the act of landing-wings lifted, webbed feet spread-pointed west, into a wind too faint to be felt. The snow was too early and light to summon the plowing service (our garden-and-lawn service in its winter guise), and I hadn't even planted the reflector stakes around the driveway; but that inch evidently intimidated the FedEx truck driver, for at some point in the quiet morning a stiff purple, orange, and white FedEx envelope appeared between the storm door and the front door without the truck's making its way up the driveway. How did the envelope-containing some bond slips I was in no hurry for-get there? By the time I walked, in mid-afternoon, down to the mailbox, a number of trucks and cars, including one cautiously driven by my wife, had pa.s.sed up and down. It was only when walking back up the hill that I was struck by-between the two broad grooves worn by tire treads-the footprints.

They were not mine. My boots have a distinctive sole, a mix of arcs and horizontals like the longitude and lat.i.tude lines on a globe. Nor could I match my stride to the other footprints-they were too far apart, though I am not short-legged, or unvigorous. But, stretch my legs as I would, I could not place my boots in the oblongs left by this other's pa.s.sing. Had a giant invaded my terrain? An angel dropped down from Heaven? The solution eventually came to me: the FedEx driver this morning, not wis.h.i.+ng to trust his (or her; a number are women, in their policelike uniforms of gray-blue) wide truck to the upward twists of our driveway, had dismounted and raced up and back. He-no woman could have run uphill with such a stride-had cruelly felt the pressure of time.

Yet, though I had solved the mystery, the idea of a visitation by a supernatural being stayed with me, as I clumped into the house and spread the mail, the main spiritual meal of my day, upon the kitchen table. Perhaps the word is not ”spiritual” but ”social” or ”contactual”-since my retirement from the Boston financial world I go for days without talking to anyone but my wife. I have kept a few old clients, and transactions for them and my own portfolio are frequently handled by FedEx. I once enjoyed the resources of faxing and e-mail, but when I retired I cut the wires, so to speak. I wanted to get back to nature and my own human basics before saying goodbye to everything.

My premonition of the FedEx driver as a supernatural creature was not merely an aging man's mirage: creatures other than ourselves do exist, some of them quite large. Whales, elephants, rhinoceri, Bengal tigers, not quite extinct, though the last Siberian tigers perished in the recent war. Giraffes and moose, those towering creations, even flourish. Deer haunt our property here. Walking on our driveway, I sometimes see an especially bold doe in the woods-a big haunchy animal the dull dun color of a rabbit, holding motionless as if to blend into the shadows of the trees. The doe stares at me with a directness I might think was insolence instead of an alert wariness. Her heart must be racing. Mine is. When I say a word or make as if to fling a stone, she wheels and flees. The amount of white tail she shows is startling. Startling also are the white edges of her large round ears, which swivel like dish antennae, above the black, globular, wet eyes.

Gloria does not share my enchantment, so I do not tell her of these surrept.i.tious encounters. She rants against these poor deer, who ate her tulip shoots in the spring and trimmed her rosebush of blooms in September. Who would imagine that deer would eat roses? My wife wants the deer killed. She gets on the telephone, searching for men with rifles or bows and arrows and an atavistic hunger for venison and the patience to stand for hours on a platform they will build in the trees; she has heard rumors of such men. So much projected effort makes me weary. My wife is a killer. She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams. By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams' truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.

More snow, in early December. This morning, as I dressed to the s.h.i.+mmering, straining (what are they aspiring to? what Heaven awaits at the edge of their resolved harmonies?) violins of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Four Seasons, I saw a deer, looking like a large dark dog, curled up on the flagpole platform at the front of the lawn, toward the sea, with its snow-dusted islands. We have a majestic view, south and southwest across Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and the sight of the reposing deer was also majestic. I must have thought I was married to some other wife, to judge from the innocent enthusiasm with which I called the deer to the attention of my own. She became galvanized, rapidly dressing and urging me to follow her downstairs while still in my pajamas. ”Just Put on boots and a coat,” she commanded.

Obedient, I yet thought of my years, my heart. Gloria makes my heart race, once with appet.i.te, now with fear.

She raced to the closet under the stairs and from its hiding place there she brought her basket of my old golf b.a.l.l.s. She keeps them to throw at the deer. When I had first protested against this waste she cited an article she had read, to the effect that golf b.a.l.l.s lose compression within a few months of being unsealed, and b.a.l.l.s over a year old are basically worthless. Outside we went, she in her righteous fury and s.h.i.+mmering mink coat, me in my pajamas and boots and old parka spouting goose down through its broken seams; but by the time we had trudged through the crusty snow around the side porch the deer, hearing us close the front door, had disappeared. ”Look!” said my wife, the basket under her arm giving her the burdened, innocent air of a primitive gatherer. ”Its tracks go everywhere!”

And it was true, one could see how the hungry animal, its innocence burdened only by the needs of its own sizable body, had gone from the yew bush by the rose bed to the box bush on the other side, from the box to the privet ball by the birdbath, and from the birdbath to the euonymus over by the driveway, not so far from our front door.

Among my minor conflicts with Gloria is an inability to agree which is the front of the house and which is the back: she thinks the side facing the sea should be considered the front, and I the other side, where the people park their cars and enter from the driveway. Perhaps die house has no back, but two fronts. It does not turn its back upon either visitors or the ocean breezes.

The poor graceful, bulky creature had nibbled only the merest bit from each bush, like a dieting banqueter sampling each course. I must have smiled slightly to myself-a mistake. ”You don't give a d.a.m.n” d.a.m.n” my wife told me, ”but each bush would cost my wife told me, ”but each bush would cost hundreds hundreds of dollars to replace.” Like many of us past a certain age, she says ”dollars” when she means ”welders,” the Ma.s.sachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. ”This deer will do fifty of dollars to replace.” Like many of us past a certain age, she says ”dollars” when she means ”welders,” the Ma.s.sachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. ”This deer will do fifty thousand thousand welders' worth of damage-then see how funny you think it all is.” Whenever Gloria feels me balking, she pulls out the whip of money, knowing me to have been a poor boy, and in my well-padded retirement still tender with financial anxiety. welders' worth of damage-then see how funny you think it all is.” Whenever Gloria feels me balking, she pulls out the whip of money, knowing me to have been a poor boy, and in my well-padded retirement still tender with financial anxiety.

”Do I think it's funny?” I asked. I doubted it. Rapacity, compet.i.tion, desperation, death to other living things: the forces that make the world go around. The euonymus bush once had some powder-blue irises beneath it, but its spreading green growth, insufficiently pruned, had smothered them, even as their roots crept forward, damaging the lawn.

”Look how he kept s.h.i.+tting everywhere! Little puddles of s.h.i.+t!”

”Can't you say something other than 's.h.i.+t'?” In our courting days I had been attracted to her way of saying ”f.u.c.k” instead of a softer expression. ”With deer, I think you can say 'scat,'” I suggested. ”Or 'spoor.'”

Scornfully Gloria stared at me, not even granting me a moment's incredulous amus.e.m.e.nt. Her face was pink in the morning cold, her ice-blue eyes vibrant beneath a bushy wool hat that, set square on her head like the hat of a wooden soldier, is oddly flattering. Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence upon her own concept of order mark her impress upon the world. Hunting and tracking and plotting an enemy's death become her, like fur at her throat. Before we were married I, still married to another, bought her a black cashmere coat trimmed in bushy gray fox at the collar. The middle-aged saleswoman exclaimed, ”How great that looks on her!”-sublimating her hope of making the sale into the simple rapture of a shared vision. It was a blessing of sorts; she connived in our adultery. I yielded up fifteen hundred dollars as painlessly as emitting a sigh.

Gloria asked sharply, ”Can you tell by the tracks which way he went?”

The deer had seemed to me clearly a large doe, but to my wife, in her animus, the creature was a ”he.”

For my own sanity I had to resist this inexorable, deer-pitched tilt the universe was taking on. ”What does it matter? Into the woods one way or another,” I said. Some of the woods were ours, and some belonged to our neighbors.

”It's important to know,” know,” Gloria said. Her pale, nearly white eyes narrowed; her killer instincts widened like nostrils to include me in her suspicions of a pervasive evil. ”If he had been still there, s.h.i.+tting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf b.a.l.l.s?” Gloria said. Her pale, nearly white eyes narrowed; her killer instincts widened like nostrils to include me in her suspicions of a pervasive evil. ”If he had been still there, s.h.i.+tting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf b.a.l.l.s?”

”Probably not,” I admitted. My time on Earth is getting too short, gradually, for lies.

”Oh!” Her disgust couldn't have been more physical if I had held one of my t.u.r.ds-a sample of my own scat-up to her fair pink face. ”You Her disgust couldn't have been more physical if I had held one of my t.u.r.ds-a sample of my own scat-up to her fair pink face. ”You want want him to destroy everything. Just to get at him to destroy everything. Just to get at me.” me.”

”Not at all,” I protested, yet so feebly the possible truth of her a.s.sertion would continue to gall her.

”If we got a gun, would you shoot it then?”

The cold air was sifting through my pajamas. The morning Globe Globe was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. ”Probably not.” Yet I wasn't sure. In my youth in the Berks.h.i.+res, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills, I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it-the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect. was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. ”Probably not.” Yet I wasn't sure. In my youth in the Berks.h.i.+res, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills, I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it-the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect.

She sensed this uncertainty, and pried into it the wedge of her voice. ”The homeowner can can, you know. Out of season or anything, as long as it's on his property. Shoot any pest. That's the law.”

”I'd be scared,” I told her, knowing it would sting, ”to shoot a neighbor. Talk about money, honey-what a lawsuit!”

That night, we planned to go to bed de bonne heure de bonne heure, to make love. In our old age we had to carefully schedule copulations that once had occurred spontaneously, without forethought or foreboding. Before heading upstairs, she said, ”Let's look out the window, to see if the deer has come back.”

The yard was dark, with the thinnest kind of cloud-veiled moonlight. My wife saw nothing and turned to go up to bed. Once I would have given all my a.s.sets, including my body's health and my children's happiness, to go to bed with her, and even now it was a pleasant prospect. But, d.a.m.n my eyes, I saw a black hump sticking up from the curved euonymus hedge, whose top was crusted with hardened snow. The black shadow moved-changed shape like an amoeba in the dirty water of the dark, or like some ectoplasmic visitation from a former inhabitant of our venerable house. ”Honey, he's eating the hedge,” I said softly.

My wife screamed, ”He is! Do is! Do something! something! d.a.m.n d.a.m.n you, don't just stand there smiling!” you, don't just stand there smiling!”

How could she know I was smiling? The living room was as dark as the front lawn with its ghostly herbivore.

”I'm calling the Pientas! It's not too late! It's not even eight-thirty! I'm going to borrow Charlie's gun! We've got to do something, and you won't do anything!”

The Pientas live fifteen minutes away. Louise is a Garden Club friend of Gloria's; Charlie has that Old World-peasant mentality which loves the American right to bear arms. He owns several shotguns, for ducks mostly, and my wife, having hurled herself and her teal-blue j.a.panese station wagon into the dark, brought one of Charlie's guns back with her, with a cardboard box half full of ammunition. The church bell down in the village was tolling nine. ”I'll prop it right here behind the armchair,” she said, ”and we'll keep the bullets-”

”Sh.e.l.ls.”

”-sh.e.l.ls on the bench in the upstairs hall. Charlie does that to keep children from putting them together.”

We were in too jangled a mood to attempt love; we read instead, and then kept waking each other up, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Though she is younger, her bladder is graciously weakening along with mine. It was still dark when she woke me in a voice between a tender s.e.xual whisper and the whimper of a terrified child. ”Ben! ”Ben! He's eating the euonymus again! He's eating the euonymus again! Hurry! Hurry! I've a.s.sembled your socks and boots and overcoat.” I've a.s.sembled your socks and boots and overcoat.”

I had been dreaming of photographs, of life-moments that were photographs and had been placed in a marketing brochure for a mutual fund that called for them to be reduced to the size of postage stamps, though they were in full color. I couldn't quite make them out. My children by my former marriage? Their Their children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, the one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise given to such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in my stomach, that I was retired and this brochure was not my problem. I said, hoping to smuggle out my truth-telling wrapped in a blanket of sleepiness, ”I don't want to shoot any f.u.c.king deer.” children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, the one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise given to such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in my stomach, that I was retired and this brochure was not my problem. I said, hoping to smuggle out my truth-telling wrapped in a blanket of sleepiness, ”I don't want to shoot any f.u.c.king deer.”

”Not shoot shoot him,” she pleaded, ”shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. him,” she pleaded, ”shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. Oh please Oh please, darling, hurry!” hurry!”

She rarely asked anything so heartfelt of me, not since we had managed, twenty years ago, amid many social impedimenta, to marry. With much of me still immersed in my warm, puzzling dream, I found myself outdoors in the predawn murk, holding the shotgun, which I had with difficulty, drawing upon ancient boyhood memories, broken open and loaded with a Remington sh.e.l.l.

But by the time I got around the house, the front (or back) door opening noisily and the snow crunching at every step, the deer had vanished. A pile of fresh scat made a dark round spot on the snow by the euonymus hedge. Inside the house, her voice pathetically m.u.f.fled and dwindled by the double gla.s.s of window and storm window, my wife was rapping the gla.s.s and shouting, ”Shoot! Shoot!” It was like the voice of a cartoon mouse in a bell jar. Involuntarily a smile of s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure creased my face. The peace of the gray morning- dawn just a sliver of salmon color above the lefthand, eastward side of the sea's horizon, beneath a leaning moon-was something sacred I didn't want to mar. And I didn't want to shock my sleeping neighbors. We own eleven acres but from the house the land stretches in only two directions. The Kellys live just a wedge shot away, on the other side of a wide-branching beech, and the Dunhams a solid three-iron down through the woods toward the railroad tracks, and Mrs. Lubbetts in the other direction, a good drive and then perhaps a five-iron drilled straight toward the sea. I trudged around, willing to shoot over her head if the doe showed herself; but the 360-degree panorama was virginally quiet, except for the pathetic racket my wife was making inside the house, trapped and m.u.f.fled in her fury of frustration. If I by some mad quantum leap of impulse wheeled and fired at the living-room window, there would have been a mess of broken gla.s.s and splintered sash but likely no clean fatality.

”You b.a.s.t.a.r.dly coward,” she said when I went back inside. ”You didn't do anything.”

”I didn't want to wake up the neighbors.”

I noticed, uttering this remark, a certain oddity within myself, a displacement of empathy: I could empathize with the sleeping neighbors and die starving deer but not with my frantic wife and her helpless hedge. ”That euonymus hedge,” she amplified when I voiced this perception by way of apology, ”can't run or hide; it can only stand there and be eaten.”