Read Online Toward the End of Time by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

walked.
    The Globe delivery man always prudently stops at the mailbox. As I, having squeezed my feet into my L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, walked down to retrieve the morning paper, I observed in addition to my own tracks (which imitate chains laid closely parallel) others: the clustered four paws of the hopping rabbit; the stately punctures, almost in a line, of the deer; the dainty marks, shaped like pansies, of the Kellys’ cat, who comes over here to stalk the Y-footed birds that feed on our purple pokeberries; and a troubling set of prints, as widely spaced as the deer’s but larger and multiply padded. In trying to picture the animal I could only imagine a lion. A smallish lion. One reads that, as the woods of the Northeast encroach more and more upon cleared fields, bears and coyotes and mountain lions are spreading south. As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, move in. Think of those days when the hominids were just a two-footed furry footnote lost amid the thundering herds of horned perissodactyls. Why does the thought make us happy?

    Deirdre is becoming a little too familiar. Instead of submitting to my sexual whims, she prefers to give me the benefit of her feminist rage. “Why are men so cruel?” she asks soul-fully, with a little-girl rustle of her head on my shoulder.
    “Natural selection,” I tell her. “The killers survive, the killed drop out of the genetic pool. Same reason,” I go on, “women are masochistic. The submissive ones get fuckedand make the babies and the scrappers don’t. The meek inherit the earth.”
    I’m not sure she has been listening. “Jesus, I hate men,” she says, off in her own world of memories and strictly localized intellectual reference.
    I permit myself to get angry. “You keep telling me that. Where would you be without them? A lazy ignorant cokehead like you, what are you fit for except turning tricks? And you’re damn lucky to have found an old sweetheart like me, instead of some crazy young buck who’d beat the crap out of you.”
    “You’re not so uncrazy, Ben. You’re crazy about being Frenched, I notice.” Toying with my white chest hair, curling it around one index finger, while her headful of wiry oily wool tickles my shoulder and the side of my neck.
    It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace.
    “And horsing around with my asshole.”
    Yes, that, too. Her vagina, Deirdre’s unspoken accusation ran, was less favored by me than these two orifices designed for other purposes, for ingestion and excretion, and to this extent I was a pervert. My own sense of it is that, at age sixty-six, I am still working up to the vagina—that Medusa whose sight turned ancient men to stone, that sacred several-lipped gateway to the terrifying procreative darkness. I was not yet, at three score and six, quite mature enough to face its blood-empurpled folds, its musty exudations. I was still a boy shutting his eyes when the vaccination needle went in. My working-class doxy sensed this ant disliked me for it, even as she wearily roused herself from my side and prepared to nurse me into arousal.
    “You rich leech,” she told me. “You’ve never had to get down into it, have you?”
    “What do you mean, ‘into it’?”
    “Into the dirt where the rest of us grub. You called me a money-grubbing cunt last week. Thanks a lot. Just because I didn’t get born a fat cat and can clip coupons all my life—”
    “Nobody clips them any more. It’s all in computers. Anyway, I was born poor. Out in the west of the state. We lived in a town north of Pittsfield called Hammond Falls. There was a river downtown and a bunch of brick mills, mostly empty by the time I came along. Our house, which had belonged to my mother’s parents, was up the hill, out on the outskirts, an old farmhouse. Except it was narrow and dark,