John Updike, in 2 acts

February 22, 2009

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

Life’s a shabby subterfuge
And death is real, and dark, and huge.

Those are lines from one of the last poems from John Updike.

The man is cold in his grave—he died, in case you’ve been under a particularly large boulder, nearly a month ago now. But damnit, I have two Updike sitings to recount, and I’m going to recount them no matter how long ago he was buried.

Siting the first—1994, Beverly Depot, Beverly, Mass.: After months of negotiations that T and I imagined to be hard-hitting, but we now realize were merely niggling, we’d finally signed a purchase and sale on our first-ever house, a tiny little center-entrance three-bedroom, brick-and-siding Dutch Colonial ("Dutch," we discovered, is a realtor word that means “ugly"), and we’d just moved in.

I was dropping T off at the main train station downtown, not the smaller one right near the house, with C strapped into his car seat in the back. For whatever reason, I very clearly remember what a beautiful early summer morning it was.

As we sat there waiting for the train, we saw a woman in front of our car talking very animatedly to a guy whose back was to us. She was literally in his face, and the poor guy was slowly backing up in response to her exuberance. When he turned—and put his hand on our car to steady himself—we saw it was the great man himself.

That’s right, Mr. John Updike, the “kaleidoscopically gifted writer” “in the first rank of American authors” (Times), he who was “among the best writers in the world” (Remnick, New Yorker), put his gifted, literary paw on the hood of our Honda.

I seriously could not have been more tickled, even though A) it wasn’t that much of a coincidence, given that he lived about 5 miles away, so this was likely his regular train station and B) he’d been annoying the heck out of me as a reader at that point. This was in that period when he was publishing essays that would wind up in that book about Golf. (And, as loyal readers will recall, lyrical writing about guy sports is on my permanent list of things not to read.)

T and I were thrilled that we’d moved to the kind of town where English majors like us could afford housing but where you might also bump into Great Men like Updike just out and about, doing your errands.

Of course—and I’m sure you all saw this coming—we lived there another six years and he never again had an occasion to put his hallowed palm on our car or on any other thing we owned, or on our person. We never saw him there again. Occasionally, and I mean very occasionally, like once a year, I’d see his name in the local paper, always connected to a reading for some charity or other, and I’d always think, oh, I want to go! But then I’d look at the $250 ticket price and think, or maybe not. (Not that I blame him for the prices—why do a charity reading for $10 when you can get $250?)

Siting the second—Swellville pharmacy, maybe 2005?: Flash forward a decade. We’ve made the leap to Swellville, and I’m in CVS on an early winter night where the lines are long and everyone’s damp coat seems to smell of dog.

Looking across the sea of slack faces, each person studying the items in his little shopping basket so as not to recognize anyone else on such a gray night, I spot the famous hooked nose. He’s in a far line, holding a white paper bag stapled shut that indicates a prescription item, along with various other accoutrements needed to fight a viral infection—tissues, lozenges (love that word) etc.

My thoughts, in order:

1) OMG it’s Updike!

2) He looks sick as a dog, doesn’t he have an assistant or a wife or some loved one to stand in line for him?

3) Freaking Swellville. There’s 20 people in line, and I guarantee you not one of them has any clue who he is. (Swellvillians read only things that help them improve their assets—financial, domestic or physical. If it doesn’t increase your bottom line, decrease your waist or pretty up your living space, they ain’t interested.)

Our eyes met for a moment. He gave me a look that said, “Yes, it’s me, John Updike, and yes I have a nasty upper-respiratory thing. Please don’t chat me up.”

I gave him a look back that said—well, who can be sure what it said? I’ve never been good at the Meaningful Glance. My look could have said any of several things:

* I loved your early work, but why did you have to go write about golf?

* Mr. Updike, you are the foremost chronicler of 20th century New England suburban discontent, and here I am, a writer living in the 21st century version of that exact same suburbia. Do I have a chance of ever becoming my generation’s suburban chronicler—via fiction, non-fiction, blog post, travel narrative, or silent look across a crowded pharmacy? What—no? I have little talent and even less time? Jeeze.

Or maybe this:

* The Kleenex and Vicks aren’t fooling me, John. You randy, over-thinking, badly aging, mid-century white guy writers are all the same. Isn’t that Viagra in your little pharmy bag?

But, especially in light of his death last month, what I really hope my nanosecond look to John Updike said was this:

* Thank you for writing “The A & P.” In that weird way that a certain sentence or a single minor character will stick in your mind for decades after you first read it, I will never forget Queenie from that story, which I read in a High School English class, or the way you described that little layer of fat that rolled up over the top of her bathing suit bottom. Thank you for that detail, and all the other ones.