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

though they would have killed me. If I had played soccer, I might have been good. Who knows?”
    “Who knows anything?” Esther said.
    “You seem depressed.”
    “Fall,” she admitted. “I was out there today thinking we need some pine boughs to keep the oak leaves in place over the beds along the fence for the winter. Where in this city can you buy pine boughs? We go through this every year.”
    “If you could wait until after Christmas we could chop up the tree.”
    “You say that every year. And then what do I say?”
    I pondered, and looked at my shelves, and remembered that I had wanted to look up something in Barth. “You say that’d be too late. The leaves will have blown all around the yard again.”
    “That’s right. That’s very good, Rog.”
    “And what do we do about the pine boughs every year? That I have forgotten.”
    “We drive out into the country, and steal them from the evergreens in the woods around a truck stop. Except every year more and more of the lower ones are gone; we ought to take that long-handled pruning saw that sits gathering rust up above the garage rafters.”
    “I think Richie broke it, trying to make a tree house.”
    “You’re always blaming Richie.”
    But in truth I blamed Richie for nothing; it was clear to me that without the boy Esther and I would have almost nothing to talk about, and the coldness between us would increase. I sought for something to mention, some sop to toss her as she looked up at me out of her bestial boredom. “I had another conference,” I told her. “Earlier. A really crazy kid, quite repulsive somehow, though he looked more or less normal physically, one of these computer types from the science end of the university. God only knows what brought him over to the Divinity School. I do know, actually. Apparently he’s good friends with awful Edna’s awful daughter Verna, remember, who had the illegitimate black child and lives over in some project in the slums—”
    “Keep talking,” Esther said. “I have to run see if the broccoli’s boiling over.”
    She darted down the hall, angling right through the dining-room arch, then on into the kitchen, and I watched, enjoying my favorite view of her, the rear view: erect small head, tautround butt, flicking ankles. It had not changed since I would longingly observe her swishing away from me down the church aisle after choir practice, shaking the dust of my church from her feet. In those days, the days of miniskirts and flower power, she wore her vivacious pale-red hair long and bouncing loose down her back; it seemed to equal the mass of her entire body. In the years since, some white strands have appeared, most thickly at the temples, and she twists and clips and pins her skull’s frizzy adornment in an illimitable variety of buns and tucked wings and more or less strict, prim, Frau-Professorish coils. At night, her hair let down is an even bolder sight than her still-effective nudity. Esther keeps her figure trim by a very simple procedure: she weighs herself on the scales every morning, and if she weighs more than a hundred pounds she eats only carrots and celery and water until the scales are brought into line with ideality. She is good at mathematics. She used to help that tax lawyer rig his figures.
    Rather than follow her, I seized the moment to look up the Barth quote. It involved, I remembered, a series of vias , each discounted as a path to God. It was almost certainly from The Word of God and the Word of Man; I took down my old copy, a paperbound Torchbook read almost to pieces, its binding glue dried out and its margins marked again and again by the pencil of a young man who thought that here, definitively and forever, he had found the path, the voice, the style, and the method to save within himself and to present to others the Christian faith. Just glancing through the pages, I felt the superb iron of Barth’s paragraphs, his magnificent seamless integrity and energy in this