Roger's Version by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

yet when she sang became a great, joyous hole. She had been filling the house, in my absence, with the sound of Luciano Pavarotti mooing and sobbing his way through some unintelligible chestnut of an aria. I pictured his tuxedo, his floppy white handkerchief, his loathsome little beard flecking the immensity of his trembling jowls. My parents, back in South Euclid, had every Saturday afternoon tuned in, on station WHK, the broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and I had found this depressing. The voices had filled the big house with their pleading and protesting and even pursued me upstairs into my mystery novel, or down into the cellar, where my model airplane waited to be delicately assembled; the third-act climax shook the floor and pipes overhead so that dust drifted down into the wet airplane glue as, emitting that unforgettable ethereal smell, it tried to harden at the join of two balsa-wood ribs. My own musical taste runs towardmuted string quartets, dainty Renaissance ensembles, almost inaudible oboe concertos, and small Mozartian orchestras with the old, brittle instruments. “ A te, O cara ,” Pavarotti bellowed, so the panes in my glass-fronted bookcases vibrated.
    “Darling,” said Esther dryly, offering her face for a kiss. Though I am far from tall, she is shorter. This was not true of my first wife, though Lillian always wore flat shoes and even developed a little stoop for my sake. My sense of towering above Esther, in the dizzying days when we illicitly courted, had been reinforced by the shape of her face—her broad pure forehead and large green eyes dwindling to a short freckled bump of a nose, wryly pursed mouth, and small underslung jaw, so she seems to be, even when seen level, foreshortened. She is intelligent; a pressure of acuity bulges her eyes outward, with a look almost of alarm, which her sardonic mouth seeks to disown. Her upper lip looks puffy; her lower recedes beneath it. Her mouth is complex beyond words; at times a blur passes across it, a pressure of gladness or grief like mist on a mirror, and I feel, even now, late in our marriage as it is, that she is about to express something quite wonderful. “You’re so late.” The burgundy was a bit sour on her breath, mixed with cigarette smoke; I wondered how many glasses she had had, she and Pavarotti and his cara .
    “A conference,” I told her. “ Damn Corliss Henderson and her heroinic saints! She was trying to tell me today that Monica would be famous even if she hadn’t been Augustine’s mother. Now that she’s too deep into this thesis to back out it’s hit her, both these women’s claim to fame is that they had these sons and otherwise there isn’t much to know about them.”
    “ ’Tis ever the way,” said the mother of my son.
    “How’s Richie’s cold?”
    “He thinks it’s settling into his chest. I don’t wonder, the way they make them run around after school on the soccer field.”
    “Couldn’t he be excused?”
    “He doesn’t want to be excused. He’d rather be sick. I think,” she went on, on a mocking, singing note, “he thinks he’s rather good at soccer.”
    “And you’re saying he’s not?” Her distrust of men was extending to her son, now that he was nearing manhood.
    She looked up at me, my dear feminist manqué, and there was a glaze: a big-eyed white fish had swum up close to the green aquarium glass and let escape a flash of her furious tedium at going around and around in this tank every day. “No, my dear Roger, I’m not saying that,” she pronounced in her lovely, lustrous woman’s voice, only slightly roughened by time and cigarettes. “I hope he is good at soccer. But I don’t know why he would be. I was always awful at games and I haven’t heard, my darling, that you were such great shakes either.”
    “They didn’t have soccer when I was in school,” I said. “All they had was football, for the brutes. My father despised me for not playing, even