Roger's Version by John Updike Read Free Book Online

very surface where his mother was trying to arrange place mats and dinner plates, while a ten-inch Sony crackled and chattered not a foot from his face, I couldn’t imagine. Or so I said, in repeated admonition. Of course I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is—its irresistible charm—a fire. Entering an empty room, we turn it on, and a talking face flares into being: better than the burning bush. Compared to the warmth and bustle of the kitchen, the rest of the house would seem a wilderness to a twelve-year-old, and possibly haunted, if not by half-piously believed-in ghosts as in my benighted childhood then by those real-enough burglars, assailants, and doped-up home invaders against whom everyone in this respectable, inviting neighborhood carried a leather booklet of keys, crucial as a priest’s missal. For no part of the city was more than an hour’s bus or subway ride from any other, and the ideals of a democracy, and an actual, pragmatic democracy of costume, made access impossible to limit. In this era a preppy and a criminal dress very much alike, and on these tree-shaded streets a polyglot and idealistic African exchange student and a crazed avenger from the ghetto werecats of the very same shade. The thirty-year-old daughter, indeed, of Mrs. Ellicott had ten years ago been dragged from the sidewalk into a small and pretty park not two blocks away, where the rhododendrons were prodigiously in bloom, and had been raped and strangled while the neighbors confused her cries with traffic noise, or screams on television. Though the park has been renamed after her, her attacker has never been found.
    I let myself into a hall foyer. The built-in benches meant to receive wraps and packages were laden with magazines and books. Since the commercial success of some rabbi’s recent querying of why good things happen to bad people (or was it the other way around?), clergymen seem to be cranking out books as rapidly as Southerners, and many are sent to me, as well as the latest gilt-edged, grant-underwritten treatise on Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers. I hung my scarf and bog hat (looks pompous, I know, but has saved me many a head cold since I impulsively snapped it up at the Shannon airport, a day after a disappointing squint at the Book of Kells) on a swarthy oaken coat rack and carried my pipe in my teeth and my briefcase in my hand into my library, on my left. I have been happy in my library.
    As I had known she would, Esther heard the door slam and came down the hall looking for me. Why do women’s footsteps always sound more aggressive than men’s? It can’t be just the high heels; it must be an energy, a pouncingness, in the gender. She came in to me, a hundred pounds of well-known woman, and all sense of her being another man’s precious wife instantly dissipated. Boredom wafted from her like the scent of stale sweat, boredom so intense as to be the cause of boredom in others; the hinges of my jaws ached as I sought to suppress a yawn of sympathy.
    Esther, thirty-eight, is fourteen years younger than I—an age difference that has grown, not shrunk, in the fourteen years since we met and coupled and, after my divorce, wed. Though I was a parish minister at the time, she was not among my parishioners; indeed, one of her charms for me was her tranquil indifference, an indifference beyond scorn, to the things of religion. Being with her in her crisp disbelief was like a long drink of pure tonic water after too much sour wine. A friend of her aunt’s had brought her along to swell our Christmas choir. Esther, then a mere twenty-four and secretary to a tax lawyer, loved song, that opening of oneself to wind, that unnatural transformation of the body into a hollow pipe, a mechanism with muscular valves. Her own voice was a startlingly strong mezzo-soprano, a voice bigger than her tiny body and warmer than the expression on her face. Her mouth in repose looked pursed and wry and