Roger's Version by Updike John

Author:Updike, John [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9780679645917
Amazon: B006L7RBH6
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

ii

Tentatively I knocked on the blank green door; I had never been here in this kind of daylight before. The morning sun stood at the end of the stripped, scarred hall, and there was a chaste silence to the project—children off at school, adults off at work or still in bed with their sins. Verna opened the door in a prim charcoal skirt and lilac-colored cable-knit sweater. Of course: she had been up and out, walking little Paula to the day-care center on this crisp morning in Epiphany. She had opened the door quickly, as if expecting someone else. When she saw me instead, her wide sallow face—her pieface—underwent a transformation that erased its dimple, and she pulled me into her apartment and collapsed in my arms. Through my several coats I felt the smearing pressure of her breasts, the heat and pulse captured in her young-woman’s fragile cage of ribs. She was sobbing, her breath and tears hot on the side of my neck. “Oh Nunc,” she was gasping, in her reedy immature voice. “I wondered where you’d got to.”

“I’ve been in town,” I said, stunned. “You could have telephoned if you wanted to see us. Me.” My pronouns reflected, first, a pretense that it was Esther and I together, as surrogate mother and father, whom she might have needed, and then a reflection that she and Esther must see each other at the day-care center and a glad acceptance that it was I myself alone the child wanted to turn to.

She seemed loath to let go. For the first time in fourteen years I knew what it was like to embrace a female who weighed more than a hundred pounds. But my grip was light, confused, apparently avuncular. “Oh Christ,” the girl bawled and sniffled. “It’s been horrible.”

“What’s been?”

“Everything.”

“I hear you’ve passed part of your tests,” I said. “And don’t you like having Paula off your hands every morning?” We had disentangled, though a kind of heat shadow of her body lingered on the front of mine, mussing my shirt, my trousers.

Her sniffling became a snort. “Poopsie,” she said scornfully. “She’s the least of it.” Verna looked at me with her amber eyes. They had the lashless squinting shape of a disgruntled cat’s. She was putting a bold face on the words to come. “I’m making another, Nunc.”

“Another … baby?”

Verna nodded. Her stringy bleached curls bobbed deeper over her low forehead. Her voice came out squeezed as if by apology. “I don’t know what there is about me; it’s as if these guys just have to wink.”

“Guys?”

“Well, come on, Nunc.” Brightly, as if quoting from Cosmopolitan or some breezy advice column: “Today’s young woman plays the field.”

The repeated “Nunc” felt like a jeering; but she had been relieved and grateful to see me at her door.

“Didn’t Dale tell you?” she surprisingly asked.

“Not exactly. He thought I should check on you, though.”

“So that’s why you’re here. Thanks.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

She shrugged, and the abstracted

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