S. by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

trying to rape them, especially after insulting their pussy, but in a strange way it had to do with forces beyond that, with this boy’s—Yajna, his name is, we’ve made up a little since, he even tried apologizing, he said his head was in a bad space that day, and I had to tell him it was all all right, I felt very motherly toward him, and his mother, wherever she is, no doubt loves him and is worried to death about his being here with what she imagines are terrible creepy people—as I was saying, with this boy’s being a
man
and
not
being a man quite either, my brain waves or whatever they are oscillated between these two poles—his being and his not being, his maleness and his immaturity, his bully-power (I was terrified, remember) and yet his pimply shaved-headed
cal
lowness—and I just got more and more indignant. If I had had the strength, I would have torn him to bits and ground the pieces into the mat, the way you do a wasp that’s been annoying you all afternoon, you know how in the fall they come out of the windows on the sills somehow on sunny afternoons and bumble around on the bedspread and the kitchen table so stupidly and into your half-empty coffee cup—I just
hate
it!
    Of course, we can’t all go around all the time getting hit on the jaw and trying to tear somebody’s ears off, but I must say it did wake me up. That’s a phrase the group leaders andencounter therapists around here use all the time—“waking up.” “Getting rid of the garbage” is another thing they say. That oscillation I felt inside my head got me to thinking about men in general, my feelings about them. It must all go back to Daddy, who just basically on weekends and bank holidays if he didn’t go off to play golf at Brookline hid in the library reading Thorton Wilder or those dreary Metaphysicals. Maybe I’m angry, deep down, because, though I loved him and knew he loved me, he wouldn’t
come out
. But then this rapist-boy
did
in a manner of speaking come out, and I don’t seem to like that either. And then, even more confusingly, Fritz looked me over afterwards to see if I had been damaged and should go to the ashram infirmary, and on the way walking back to my trailer to get my jeans and sun hat and work shoes—this was all around nine in the morning, just beginning to get hot—we went to his A-frame and I slept with him.
    It was nice, Midge. Nice. Though with Germans there’s a distance, they have difficulty showing their feelings. His eyes are so pale they seem transparent, you can look right through them into nothing. He told me what his name means: it’s a modality of consciousness halfway between total confusion and total concentration. I
love
that part of it here, learning all these new things, and not just with your brain but your body, with your spirit and whole self—with your atman. You should have seen me, though, that afternoon: big blue swollen jaw and one eye half shut and a lot of stiffness around the neck and shoulders from when all the rage came out. I looked so dreadful they left me off from the artichokes two hours early—I think they
do
treat me with kid gloves a little, compared to some of the younger, more trampy women—and next day I was told I had been transferred from fieldwork to constructionassistant at the Hall of a Millionfold Joys—people call it Joy-Six-Oh, the Arhat likes jokes and encourages everybody to make them. The work is right at the Chakra, which makes it handier for me and Fritz to steal the odd half-hour. He’s so ef
fi
cient. I hadn’t slept with a man except Charles for so many years—that thing with Ducky Bradford you were all so curious about never got past a few stilted luncheons downstairs at the Ritz, there was something missing, I’m not sure he isn’t a bit gay, it would help explain why Gloria always seems so skittish when the girl-talk gets gutsy—for so many years, I felt a bit shaky at first, but so far, if I do say so myself, it seems to go just