The coup by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Modern fiction, Fiction, Political, General
ISBN: 9780141188959
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2006-07-15T03:15:15.083000+00:00

V

Esmeralda Miller was an interesting color, a gray as of iron filings so fine the eye could not detect the individual grains. In Hakim's fancy the tint, which savored of manufacture, was a by-product of her beliefs, her economic determinism. At the same time she was an attractive, ecto-morphic young woman, with a lean prognathous face, almond-shaped eyes framed in pink plastic spectacles, and a bewitching way of thoughtfully swaying her jaw, as if testing molar crowns her father had made for her. "What are you trying to achieve?" she would ask the young deserter from Noire, across the table in the Off-Campus Luncheonette, or later in the Pure Dairy Products Ice Cream Parlor, or later still in the Badger Cafe, with its beer-soaked sawdust on the floor, and its bubbling, phosphorescent advertisements. "Messing around with this deluded bitch Candy." "Achieve? That's a rather other-directed way of putting it. What did Freud say? Pleasure is the removal of tension. There is a tension that screwing her relieves. No doubt the sex has a component of vengeance, of tasting evil, of stealing Charlie's prize, et cetera. From her side, kindred craziness. Still, we get along." "She's no prize, is what you can't see. She put the move on you in the first place. You just took it. You've been taking it for years, now, and she's got marriage in her eye. What happens when you graduate?" "I have told her, more than once, that I am married." "To some old black cow in the heart of nowhere? This white girl no more cares about that woman than a bug under a rock. She doesn't believe she exists, and neither do I. Anyway, who says you're ever going back? Let's face it, Haps, you're American as apple pandowdy. I try to talk sense to you friend to friend, and you give me back David Riesman and overheard Freud. I love you." This last was said as lightly as these words can be said, as Bob Hope or Clark Gable says them, but Felix took them in, and understood her advice now as propaganda. He began to play with her. "As a Muslim, I am entitled to four wives." "Shit. You're about as Muslim as I am Daddy Warbucks. I hope that stuff hasn't taken you in; it's just our usual native storefront I'm-comin'-home-Jesus routine, with a few funny phrases thrown in. Inshallah, Walla-Walla." "I don't mock your faith," he said stiffly. "Anyway, you're wrong about my never going back. You don't follow the African news in the back pages. The British have given in to Nkrumah, and de Gaulle has been brought to power to end the Algerian war. Only de Gaulle can face down the military." "God, you're impossible when you get on your great men kick. De Gaulle is just Ike with a bigger nose; they are balloons. History is happening underneath. When the op- pressed peoples rise up, they will just take. Meanwhile, nobody is giving them anything. France can bleed all it wants, international capital won't let it let go.

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