Odd Jobs by John Updike Read Free Book Online

photographs of city streets. To think that Manhattan, and Bangor, and Kansas City were all once webbed with their inflexible, glinting paths! He was moved by glimpses of them in fiction, such as Augie March’s recalling “those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont” or, in
Ulysses
, the onomatopoetic sentence “Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel” or Bellow’s description, in “The Silver Dish,” of “an old red Chicago streetcar, one of those trams the color of a stockyard steer” as it heroically battered north against a blizzard on the Western Avenue line. Glimpses of first wives, in fiction, moved him also: often discarded before the author found his full voice, they figure as shadows in those first, awkwardly tactful and conventional novels; as marginal obstacles to the narrator’s slowly unfolding, obscurely magnificent quest; as tremulous rainbows cast by the prism of his ego, bound at a cloud’s passing to pale and wink out. Yet they return, vividly. In John Barth’s
Sabbatical
, the first wife returns in malevolent triumph as a CIA operative and withers with a few stern words the ingenious hero’s eager foliage of invention and lovableness. And Hemingway’s Hadley, seen so wispily in those early short stories, returns in
A Moveable Feast
to dominate his dying imagination.
    In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. First wives grow in power and size, just as the children we have had by them do. They knew you when, and never let that knowledge go. Their very ability to survive the divorce makes them huge, as judges and public monuments are huge. Tall and silent, they turn at the head of the stairs, carrying a basket of first-family laundry, and their face is that of Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring, of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, of all the women who look at us over their shoulders in endless thoughtful farewell.
    They were so young. They were daughters. Captured from their still vigorous and menacing parents, carried off trailing ribands and torn threads of family connection, some clasped teddy bears and dance cards with all but the tangos filled in. Some still smelled faintly of their fathers’ shaving lotion. Their bodies were so fresh and smooth, it was hard to make a dent in them. Tomboyish, they stuck out their chins and kept their legs under them; later wives by comparison crumple like wastepaper, and bruise easy as peaches. Of course, a first husband is young too, and perhaps his wallop lacks substance. They looked at us level, our firm-bodied Eves, and demanded, “O.K., show me this apple.”
    A quality first wives bestow, of dismissability, turns out to be precious, as the aging world needs us more and more and lets our traces deepen, like initials carved in the expanding bark of a beech tree. We sat light on the world once; the keys to this lightness first wives have taken with them, along with the collected art books so thriftily budgeted for, the lithographs carefully selected at the gallery together, the
objets
nested in the excelsior of remembered lovemaking, the slide projector, the ground-glass screen that unfurled, the card table the projector sat upon, and the happy pink infants cradled in their Kodak Carousels. With a switchy swiftness, in bikinis daring at the time, with narrow tan hands and feet, they move as fledgling mothers through home movies taken at poolside or by the back lawn swings, movies we will never see again, movies they will show their second husbands, who will be polite but bored.
    The night of the day when Farnham’s first wife remarried, he had a vivid dream. She was crouched by a wall naked, and he, fully dressed, was trying to extend a measure of protection. There was, out in the center of the street or room, a crowd that