Short story: "The Genius of Updike"

The Genius of Updike

“He makes me want to shoot my word processor,” I said to Leo on the way to the city. It was raining, so I took the day off work and asked him to join me. I had an outside job to complete; forty sun-bleached office windows to stain. “He scares me dumb, he’s so brilliant.”

“He just raised the bar for you,” Leo, who surprised me by buying an Updike novel in a used book store in the city, said; Roger’s Version, a novel of love and sex and faith and God and the modern life as told by “the master of sheer elegance of form.”

I couldn’t dispute that. Why would I? Envy? Resentment? Anger? How small could I possibly be? And I vented to Leo, who was a much better listener than talker: “I regret not keeping up my reading of literature. I spent too damn many years reading spiritual books; and now I’m so far behind I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up.”

I had just finished reading Shirley MacLaine’s The Camino when I re-discovered John Updike in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, which Updike edited and introduced. I wanted to get back into short story writing, and the best way to do that was to saturate myself with the works of great writers, like the grand master of le mot juste himself.

“You still can,” Leo said, his voice slightly broken with an affected measure of consolation which, honestly, annoyed me. “You can’t give it all up now, can you?”

“No, I love writing too much. I may not have the talent to say what I want to say the way Updike says it, but I have something to say; and that should say something,” I said, with a mirthful, self-conscious chuckle.

“Then say it,” Leo said, totally oblivious to my dilemma.

I smiled, as I often do when Leo misses the point. “Updike reminds me of the story of Picasso’s father who put away his paint brushes when he saw his son’s painting of a pigeon; that’s how ‘the Mozart of Literature’ makes me feel.”

“Who?”

“Who else?”

“Updike?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t lost heart, have you?”

“No, but Updike makes me feel that way. What spares me the proverbial writer`s despair is my belief.”

“Belief?” Leo said, with a puzzled frown.

“Yes. I believe in myself…”

It’s all about choices, really. In the media, a storm was brewing about the homeless people in Canada’s largest city, Toronto “the Good” (how ironic); but what I’d really like to know is how those people ended up on the streets in the first place.

Choices and consequences. The gap was closing more and more each day. Karma was no longer a nebulous eastern concept; it had eyes so large that the spiritually obtuse were finally beginning to see that choices always have consequences.

Leo took out Updike’s novel from his jacket pocket. He had brought it with him to impress me, which happened rarely. Running Granma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota at the age of 57 did impress me however, being a long distance runner myself; but walking around St. Jude like an overgrown kid with his finisher’s medal dangling on its red, white, and blue ribbon around his thick Ukrainian neck (actually, his mother was Ukrainian  and his father a Russian immigrant who had a picture of Stalin hanging on his living room wall that Leo took down when his father died) over his Grandma’s Marathon T-shirt for two weeks after the race wore the shine off his proud medal.

“I see what you mean,” he said, flipping through the novel to find the passage he was looking for. “He gives you so much you feel like you’re right there with him.”

“That’s Updike. He pries open the moment with metaphor and freeze-frames life. It’s spooky, as Norman Mailer would say.”

Leo read the passage, transporting me to that “fourth dimension of writing” that Updike miraculously accessed with his imagery—

“Fuck!”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Too damn much!”

“Oh.”

“The fucker turns Hemingway’s ice-berg principle upside down, and it depresses the hell out of me. If I didn’t have so much invested, I’d park it!”

“Park what?” Leo dumbly asked.

Again, I smiled. “What do you say we pick Boris up and go to the Hoito for pancakes?”

“Good idea,” Leo said…

Boris, an unkemptly bearded little civil servant, took an early retirement at fifty-five to maximize his enjoyment of life. An atheist, who believed that this life was all we had (although it seemed to me more posture than conviction), Boris had one thing in common with Leo: they both clung to the Randian philosophy of rational self-interest that struggled, in the conflicted manner of Camus’s Sisyphus, for more and more self-consciousness; but oh so vainly, and, unlike the philosopher of the absurd, I could never imagine them happy.

With Leo, long distance running had begun to transform the density of his earth-bound ego/shadow personality (“In running, I found my salvation,” said the “guru of running,” Dr. George Sheehan); and with Boris, the constant daily exposure to life’s karmic transmutations (although with people like him, recalcitrantly) forced his false outer self to make small but discernable concessions to his inner true nature, an ongoing battle with no end in sight that piqued my curiosity and often inspired arguments between us.

But that was nature’s way, as Mr. G used to say—the mystic philosopher whose Sufi-inspired teaching serendipity had introduced me to in my second year of philosophy studies at Lakehead University shifted my center of gravity from the false to the real in me, a distinction that Leo and Boris were both loath to make whenever logic pressed them.

“Nature only take you so far,” said George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, to his inner circle of students; “then must take evolution into own hands,” he added, in his thickly accented pidgin English. “First roses, roses; then thorns, thorns,” he told his students, when he set them out on their journey of self-discovery, which I knew from personal experience to be nothing less than the secret way of what Christianity blithely referred to as being born again in spirit.

“I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t read enough Updike to draw any conclusions,” I said to Leo on the way to the city; “but from the stories I’ve read so far, I’d say he’s taken up literary residence in the despairing kingdom of ephemerality and finitude.”

“What does that mean?” Leo asked, with another puzzled frown.

“The human condition, Leo!” I exclaimed, to wake him up. “That’s my impression of Updike’s short stories that I’ve read so far. Writing about the human condition makes you conscious of life, and John Updike is acutely conscious of life, especially life in the American suburbs; that’s what I mean. But there’s something missing. Despite his literary brilliance—which is more alluring to me than having sex with a bride of Jesus—he doesn’t penetrate the mystery that beckons most creative writers. He comes close, but he doesn’t quite get it.”

“Get what?” Leo asked, more puzzled than ever.

Again, I smiled to myself, because waking Leo up was hopeless. “Updike—it’s not fair yet, I know,” I said, trying to explain the mystery of creative writing; “but that’s what I suspect from all the stories I’ve read so far. Updike dissects the human condition piece by piece to see where the soul resides, and story after story, perhaps novel after novel—I’ll just have to wait and see until I read them—he finds nothing but the same tired old vanities. Man, cries Mr. New Yorker short story writer, with exquisite anguish, is an obsessive passion condemned to repeat himself over and over again; and that, mon cher ami, is his cursed rock.”

“Rock?” Leo, an LU philosophy grad, dumbly asked.

“Dilemma,” I explained.

“Oh,” Leo said, with a blank stare. “But Updike’s just writing about life, isn’t he?”

“Sadly, yes…”

Boris was home. Often when Leo and I dropped in, he was out. Usually at Lakehead University taking courses—Spanish, French, and History (not religion or philosophy, which might have threatened his belief system) to get a working knowledge of Spanish and French, because when his wife, who was also a civil servant, retired when she turned sixty, they planned to do the Camino de Santiago in Spain that Shirley MacLaine had made famous in her New York Times bestseller The Camino, but which they refused to read because they both thought she was a world-class flake.

“Sounds good,” Boris said, when we asked him to join us for breakfast.

At the Hoito restaurant, Boris and I ordered Finnish pancakes (mine with pork sausages and Boris’s with strawberry sauce) and Leo a large bowl of porridge because it was cheaper, and within minutes we were talking politics which often began our conversations.

“What do you say we go to a used book store? I’m looking for some Updike books,” I said, after we had thoroughly masticated the virtues of the new Alliance Party born whole out the right rib of the Reform Party of Canada.

“Sure,” Leo said.

“Sure,” Boris agreed. “I’ve got no classes today.”

Chapters, where I usually bought my books (apart from my two book clubs, QPB and Doubleday) didn’t have any more Updike. I had already purchased three collections of his short stories there the last time Leo and I were in the city—The Afterlife, Trust Me, and Pigeon Feathers, and I already had his novels The Centaur and Rabbit, Run, which I remember attempting to read in grade nine but which I had put aside in favor of Hemingway’s beguiling “cablese” style of writing that seduced me from exploring my own style.

Boris and Leo liked to frequent Chapters (they used it like their personal library), but in strict adherence to their more-for-less philosophy of life, they bought most of their books from used book stores, so they knew where to go; and I followed their directions.

I’m curious to know what you think of this guy,” Leo said, as we drove over to Westfort, which was known as the rough part of town. “He’s pretty gruff.”

Boris laughed, and said, “He’s different, that’s for sure.”

When we walked into the used book store, an old red brick building that stubbornly resisted the march of time, it felt like walking into the dingy past. It was crowded with wire bookshelves cloying with musty paperbacks, the air was close, and the ceiling and walls (what we could see of them), a dirty yellow from cigarette smoke, were blistered and cracked. The whole place smelt of being stuck in time.

The book seller sat behind an old wooden counter leaning back on his chair, his feet propped up on the inside shelf and a paperback in his hands. He had black thick-lensed glasses as dense as the bottom of the old female-shaped Coca-Cola bottles, and he wore a black Greek sailor’s cap and had on wide yellow tape-measure suspenders over a well-worn frayed shirt. There was an ashtray half full of the day’s butts on the counter, and directly above his head a piece of plaster hung loose and ready to fall like the sword of Damocles.

The man waited until he finished reading his page, and then he looked up at us. “Where the hell you been hiding?” he said, recognizing Leo.

“I’ve been around,” Leo, who hadn’t seen him in four or five years, replied.

“Me too. Right here,” the man said, cracking wise.

“It looks like you haven’t gone anywhere for the past thirty years” I chimed in.

“Twenty-nine years,” he corrected, dead pan.

“What did you do before that?” I asked.

“I worked on construction. What do you do?”

“I’m a contractor. Drywall and painting.”

“How do you price a job?” he asked.

“It depends. By the hour or square foot.”

“How much a square foot?”

“Taping or painting?”

“Taping.”

“Anywhere from twenty-five to thirty cents.”

“How about windows and doors?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s the room dimensions.”

“But you don’t tape windows and doors.”

“It’s a working formula. If I charge by the hour, it comes out to about the same thing.”

“How do you know how many hours to charge?”

“Experience.”

“How long you been contracting?”

“Twenty-some years.”

“You like it?”

“I like being my own boss.”

“Me too. I couldn’t work with the bricklayers anymore. Those wops treated me like I was stupid. Too thick, too thin, too dry, too wet; the gymento was never right for them. You know what I did? I took the fucking gymento back and did nothing to it. And when I brought it back to them, they said it was just right. Fucking dummies. They just wanted to let me know who was boss, that’s all. And they worked you like a fucking horse.”

“So, you bought this place and told them to go and fuck themselves,” I said.

Startled, he just stared at me. “Exactly. You Italian?”

“Canadian,” I replied.

“Italian Canadian,” he said.

“Canadian. You want to see my papers?”

“Bullshit. Curly hair, brown skin; you’re a wop.”

“Brown skin? My skin’s no browner than yours. What are you, Polish?”

“Ukrainian.”

“I was born in Italy, but I was young when we came to Canada. How about you?”

“I was born here.”

“No kidding?”

“No.”

“You’ve got a Slavic accent.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Just like I’ve got brown skin.”

Struck dumb again, he just stared at me with his large Coca-Cola eyes. “So, how’s business?” I asked.

“Who cares. I got my pension now.”

“And you’re just putting in time?”

“I’ve got nothing else to do.”

“You just sit here and read?”

“So what?”

“Do you have any Updike?”

He stared at me again. Boris and Leo were transfixed by our verbal sparring; but the silence extended beyond its conversational pause, and nervousness set in.

“John Updike,” I said, breaking the tension.

“I know that,” he snapped back.

“Then what the hell took you so long to reply?”

He didn’t say anything. He got up and walked over to an aisle of books and started thumbing through. “No Updike.”

“Any Philip Roth?” I asked, curious about another American author who had also mined his own life of its precious ore and was still mining for more.

The bookseller dug through the Rs but found no Roth, and I asked for another seasoned miner of literary gold, but he had no Saul Bellow either.

 “Well, you’re no good to me,” I said.

“Fuck off then!” he snapped back.

Leo and Boris winced. They still hadn’t caught on to the bookseller’s sardonic wit and wondered how I was going to respond.

“Is this how you treat all your potential customers?” I replied.

“Why not?” he said. “I don’t need you.”

“Because you get your old age pension, right?”

“You got that right.”

My friends laughed. “Life’s good now, eh?” I said, with a snicker.

“Good enough for me.”

“Don’t you get bored here all day?”

“Sure, I do. Who wouldn’t?”

“You keep a journal?”

“What for?”

“Something to do.”

“Who the fuck cares?”

“So, you’re just putting in time?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“That’s all life means to you, then?”

“What else is there?” he said, with the most cynical stare.

A grey-haired lady with gold-framed glasses and a tired purple port stain the size of a deformed baby’s hand clinging to her right cheek like an alien insect and dressed in a matching lavender pant suit walked into the musty store.

Hesitant to walk up to the counter where Leo, Boris, and I stood, the lady waited hesitantly. No one spoke. Finally, she said, “Bill, do you still trade books?”

“Maybe. How many you got?”

“I’ve got a shopping bag full.”

“Let’s see them.”

“You remember me, don’t you Bill? I used to come in here all the time before I moved to British Columbia three years ago. I always traded my books here.”

“Sure, I remember you.”

The nervous lady was expecting more; but the bookseller, whose name I had just learned was Bill, didn’t amplify. “Okay, I’ll go and get them,” she said.

“I guess there’s no point hanging around here,” I said, and turned to leave. “See you in four or five years, Bill.”

“If I’m not six feet under,” he replied.

Smiling, Boris and Leo said goodbye and followed me out the door. We passed the lady carrying her bag full of paperbacks. Looking at me, she said, “Bill hasn’t changed much, has he?”

“I just met the man today,” I said.

“Oh, well; that’s the way he was twenty years ago. He’s still wearing the same hat, I see. But he’s a nice man once you get to know him,” she said, apologetically.

“A little rough around the edges,” I replied. “Have a nice day, mam.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “You too.”

At Chapters, we gravitated to different aisles and browsed for an hour or so and I bought Gary Zukav’s Soul Stories and Dr. Brian Weiss’s latest installment in his past-life regression series, Messages from the Masters (old habits die hard), and later we went to the Scandinavian House which Boris and Leo chose because, like the Hoito, it served good food cheaper than most restaurants, and we talked about Bill, the used books dealer.

And this led to a discussion about life’s purpose. “So, what’s the problem?” Boris replied, to my Socrates-inspired comment that the squandered life wasn’t worth living. “I know it’s his choice, but he’s like a dried-up old prune just putting in time. But that’s okay, I guess. He’ll just keep coming back until he gets it right,” I added, and laughed.

“Get what right?” Leo asked.

“Life,” I replied.

“I don’t follow you,” Leo said.

“He’s talking about reincarnation,” Boris said.

“Oh,” Leo said, popping his head up like a gopher coming up for air. “You don’t believe in reincarnation, do you?” he said, addressing Boris.

“Leo, Boris is an atheist,” I said, with a chuckle.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot,” Leo said.

“You didn’t go for your run today, did you?”

“No. Why?” Leo asked, puzzled.

“Consciousness, Leo. That’s what getting life right is all about—more and more and more self-consciousness. Incidentally, Updike wrote a book of memoirs called Self-Consciousness. I forgot I had it in my library until I re-discovered him.”

“Have you read it?” Leo asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did. After I finished his Afterlife stories.”

“What did you think of it?” he asked.

“His memoirs, or Afterlife stories?”

“His memoirs.”

“Disappointing,” I said.

“Oh? I thought you liked Updike,” Leo said, surprised.

“I do. Updike makes my old high school hero and literary mentor Papa Hemingway read like he was verbally challenged, but he doesn’t tell us much about who he really is in his memoirs. But judging from the short stories I’ve read so far, I’d say that the flame of Updike’s imagination consumes his life in his fiction. Just as Saul Bellow’s son said about his father, ‘If you want to know anything about my father, read his novels.’ So, I guess I’ll just have to keep reading Updike’s fiction to see what he’s all about.”

“Really? You think he writes about himself in his novels?” Leo asked.

“‘Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life,’ said Alice Munro. I’m going to see if anyone has written a biography on Updike to find out for sure, but I’ll bet my bottom dollar that he mined his own life for all the literary gold he could get.”

“Have you read Updike?” Leo asked Boris.

“No,” Boris replied.

“You should. He’s really good,” Leo, who had only read the first two chapters of one Updike novel, said. I wanted to laugh, but couldn’t.

“I don’t read novels anymore,” Boris said.

“Why not?” Leo asked.

“I’ve got no time,” Boris replied.

“You should make time. He’s really good,” Leo repeated.

I did laugh. “He’s right, Leo. Why read Updike to confirm what he already knows.”

“Knows what?” Leo asked.

“Life is what you make of it. Unlike Bill the bookseller, Boris lives his life. But, I suspect,” I added, the thought forcing me to smile at Boris, then chuckle, “as different as you may be from crusty Bill, I think you’ve both staked out your own cynical ground.”

“I agree. So what?” Boris said, mimicking Bill.

I laughed. “Good one, Boris,” I said.

“What?” Leo asked, again like a gopher popping his head up for air.

“I respect skepticism, Boris,” I said, ignoring Leo; “but I can’t condone the ostrich syndrome when I see it. You can’t pass judgment on something if you don’t know anything about it. For example, Shirley MacLaine had past-life visions on her Camino pilgrimage, and she gave us information about the androgynous inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria that taxed my credulity; but I can’t dismiss her experience simply because I find it hard to believe. The only thing I can do is neither believe nor disbelieve until I get more information, or have a personal experience that confirms what she experienced.”

“It’s all moot. I don’t believe in reincarnation,” Boris said.

“You choose not to believe,” I corrected.

“What do you mean, choose? I don’t believe in it period,” Boris insisted.

“I’d love to see what you would say if someone like Doctor Weiss hypnotized and regressed you to a some of your own past lives,” I said, with a snicker.

“I wouldn’t let him. I don’t agree with the idea of letting someone control my mind.”

“Is that why you don’t believe in God?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Boris asked, squinting.

“Belief in God is more nurture than nature. You’re rebelling, is that it?”

“No. I just don’t believe in God.”

“And no soul either?”

“No soul.”

“And no afterlife?”

“No.”

“No spiritual phenomena of any kind?”

“Nope.”

“Boris, I’ve been reading the literature of the Way for over thirty years now—” I stopped in mid-sentence. I saw the puzzled look on his face. “Literature of the Way is any writing that has to do with man’s spiritual quest,” I explained. “And whether you want to accept it or not, there’s something there. Literary history confirms it.”

“Not for me, there isn’t.” he insisted.

“You just don’t believe, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you explain all those near-death experiences that Doctor Raymond Moody has written about? And the past-life regressions that Doctor Brian Weiss explored in his books? And communicating with the Other Side, like the psychic James Van Praagh demonstrated on the Larry King show? How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know if I can explain it. All I know is that I just don’t believe in that stuff.”

“Don’t you think you’re being intellectually dishonest?” I said, knowing this would bristle my head-strong friend.

“Just because I don’t believe in this stuff doesn’t make me intellectually dishonest.”

“Sartre wouldn’t agree with you. He would call this mauvaise foi. Bad faith,” I replied, giving it to him between the eyes. This was an old argument with us, but I couldn’t let it go. It had taken two years for Boris to wander back to the topic, and I wasn’t about to let him off; so, I persisted. His atheism got under my skin. “Belief is a matter of faith, Boris. But what about experience? Suppose you had an out-of-body or near-death experience; would you explain that away as some kind of mental phenomenon too?”

“Of course. What else would it be?” he said.

“It would be what it is, an experience of your inner self leaving your physical body.
Believe it or not, Boris; we have two selves: an inner self, and an outer self. Our inner self is our true self that we’re born with and lives on after our body dies, and our outer self is the self that we create with every new incarnation. You can choose not to believe this, but you can’t dismiss all the anecdotal evidence that’s out there. And believe me, there’s plenty. I’ve also had experiences that fall into this category, and I know it wasn’t my imagination. This makes your belief hollow, Boris; that’s why I said that you choose not to believe—”

“Who are you to say my belief is hollow?” Boris snapped at me, like an angry dog that had just been rudely awakened. “You don’t know a damn thing about my life.”

Updike popped into my mind. “It’s the writer’s curse, Boris.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he barked.

“The mote in your own eye, and all of that,” I replied.

“Are you saying I don’t know myself?” he snapped back.

“Ironically, yes. Just like Updike’s memoirs Self-Consciousness. It’s not about his essential inner self; it’s all about his psoriasis-afflicted existential life that he called his ‘lode of ore’ and ‘massive datum.’ I distinctly remember him saying in his forward that his aim in writing his memoirs was to achieve a ‘mode of impersonal egoism.’ But the damn thing about the ego self is that it’s dual in nature, and making conscious our unconscious inner self is what life is supposed to be about. Christ called it making the two into one, which is what Gurdjieff’s teaching was all about too; and Jung’s psychology of individuation, I might add. But that, I’m afraid, scares the hell out of most people; especially you, Boris.”

Livid, Boris just glared at me; and my agnostic friend Leo, who graduated with an Honors BA in Philosophy from Lakehead University but still didn’t know what the word agnostic meant, had to break the silence. “Why would it scare him,” he nervously asked.

Leo had witnessed this before, and he loved it when Boris and I got into it.

“And you too, Leo,” I said, looking straight at him. “It would scare the hell out of you too, because with more self-consciousness comes moral accountability; that’s why. The more conscious you are of your inner self, the more accountable you have to be; and I know you’re just going to love this, Boris—because fundamentally, it’s a moral universe.”

“Bullshit!” my moral relativist friend exclaimed.

“Then you’ll just keep coming back until you get it right,” I repeated.

“No, I won’t. And neither will you. This is the only life there is, and you can’t prove different,” Boris insisted, and flung himself back into his chair.

“You’re right, I can’t prove it. And would you like to know why?”

Boris didn’t reply. He just glared at me, and good old dozy Leo had to break the silence once more, “Why can’t you prove it?” he asked.

“Because there is only self-initiation into the mysteries of life, that’s why,” I replied, quoting my mentor Gurdjieff. “To some it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, and to others it is not, as Jesus would say. But if you choose not to believe, you can’t expect to be initiated into the mysteries of life; can you? It’s that simple, Boris.”

“Bullshit!” he snapped back again.

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “What a small world you live in, Boris. But that’s your choice, isn’t it? Now, what about this other used bookstore; are we going or not?”

“Sure,” Leo said. “You want to go now?”

“I’d like to see if they have any Updike.”

“They do. When I bought Roger’s Version, they had a lot of his other books there.”

“Good. Let’s go, then,” I said. I could feel Boris fuming, but I knew he would get over it eventually. He had before. I left a tip, and we left; but Boris and Leo didn’t bother. True to their philosophy of thrift, they never tipped…

Coincidentally, I knew the young man who worked at the Book Shelf next door to Fanny’s Fabric; a twenty-four-year-old baby giant with a friendly smile whose abusive alcoholic father kicked him out of the house when he was sixteen.

“Tommy!” I exclaimed, surprised to see him. “So, this is where you work?”

“Yeah. I’ve been here for three years now,” he replied, with a big happy smile.

“And how’s it going, Tommy?” I asked.

“Good. I like it here. It’s not Chapters, but hey; it keeps me out of trouble.”

“Good for you. I see your mom finally moved out of the house.”

“Yeah. She’s renting aunt Carol`s apartment. She should have moved out long ago. My dad’s not too happy about it. He thinks she’s going to go back, but she won’t.”

“I doubt it too. Your brother and sister are happy. Your mom was telling me they can bring friends home to visit now.”

“Yeah. They really like it at aunt Carol`s.”

“I’m glad. Maybe they can have a normal life now.”

“Yeah. What a waste, eh? That’s why I don’t booze it. I can’t afford it on what I make, here anyway. But I’d never drink even if I could afford it. It’s stupid.”

“Good for you. So, Tommy; are you familiar with John Updike?”

“The Witches of Eastwick!” he burst out, as if it were a quiz show.

“Yes,” I said, smiling. I always liked Tommy, and I was happy he was doing okay. “Do you have any of his books?”

“Sure. I’ve got a whole bunch of his novels,” he replied, brimming with pride.

He showed me where they were, and I ended up buying six new Updikes for under twenty dollars, which sweetly validated my friends’ pecuniary philosophy and elicited the comment from Leo, “You would have paid ten times that at Chapters.”

“For sure,” Boris, who bought a paperback on naturopathy, complied.

I didn’t reply. I understood my friends’ frugality; but something about second-handing life really bothered me. As prudent as my friends were, they made it feel like a sin.

I couldn’t quite pin it down, but the image that popped into my mind (no doubt, from my days of working in bush camps; both cutting, and skidding) was that of a moss-covered powder-dry tree trunk that was once green and vibrant with élan vital, and I chuckled to myself at the spiritual aridity of my friends’ parsimony.

The image made my head spin. Holding my new Updikes in my hand, I looked at my friends and exclaimed: “The right image! That’s it! It’s even better than le mot juste! That’s the genius of Updike!” I couldn’t contain myself, and Leo, Boris, and Tommy looked at me.

          “I really like his writing too,” Tommy said, breaking the awkward silence.

We dropped Boris off, and Leo and I headed back to St. Jude; and I couldn’t wait to get into one of my new Updike novels. Probably, Couples; the novel that broke up his New Yorker suburban marriage and set his literary career on fire.

——