OMG, I so love Updike... in These titles mean nothing.

… the new book I bought at the Rochester library’s half price book sale is called The Afterlife and it’s a collection of short stores. This is probably the third or maybe even fourth time I read them. They would have been in The New Yorker which was my religion from eighth grade until a couple years ago when Jim said we were spending all our attention on the internet and the magazines were just cluttering up the kitchen table. So I let my subscription go.

I probably read the again when the book was at a local library and I might have bought the book when it came up for sale in years past. I might even already own the book. Most of my Updikes went upstairs when I was still trying to keep my hoarding in control by alphabetizing ‘the collection’.

The story I opened the book to this morning in bed and finished in the bathtub full of warm water and dish soap bubbles, was one of two he wrote about traveling. It’s set in southwest Ireland in the slightly off season. He’s there with his third wife.

Let me type a paragraph.

’Are we going to be walking in traffic?’ She sounded alarmed. For all her assertiveness, Vivian had irritating pockets of timidity. Claire, Allenson remembered, drove on a motor scooter all over Bermuda with him, clinging to his midriff trustfully, twenty years ago, and would race with the children on bicycles all over Nantucket. Jeaneanne and he had owned a Ford Thunderbird convertible when they lived in Texas, and would commonly hit a hundred miles an hour in the stretch between Lubbock and Abilene, the top down and the dips in Route 84 full of watery mirages. He remembered how her hair, bleached blond in Fifties-style streaks, would whip back from her sweaty temples, and how she would hike her skirt up to her waist to give her crotch air, there under the steering wheel. Jeaneanne had been tough, but her exudations had been nectar, until her recklessness and love of speed had carried her right out of Allenson’s life. The loss had hardened him.

And then a paragraph with few words.

He should have let her have a baby. Now it was too late. Still, he wasn’t sorry. Life was complicated enough.

And then how the story ends.

(pretend this part is italics) *Vivian asked, “Would Jeanneanne have enjoyed Ireland?”

What an effort it now seemed, to cast his mind so far back! “Jeaneanne,” he answered, “enjoyed everything, for the first seven minutes. Then she got bored. What made you think of Jeaneanne?”

“You. Your face when we started out had it Jeaneanne look. Which is different from its Claire look. Your Claire look is sort of woebegone. Your Jeaneanne look is fierce.”

“Darling, ” he told her. “You’re fantasizing.”

“Jeanneanne and you were so young,” she pursued. “At the age I was just entering graduate school, you and she was married with a child.”

“We had that Fifties greed. We thought we could have it all,” he said, rather absently, trying to agree. His own feet in their much-used cordovans, were beginning to protest; walking downhill, surprisingly, was the most difficult.

“You still do. You haven’t asked me if I like Ireland. The Becketty nothingness of it.”

“Do you?” he asked.

“I do,” she said.

They were back where they had started.* (pretend the italics are over)

My friend who is more of a feminist than I am, or at least a different kind of feminist, will read those paragraphs and think he treats women casually, as inferiors, as something he must deal with. I can see that too. But I look at Updike differently. I look through his eyes. I am him when I read his writing.

When I was a tiny girl I wanted to be like my dad. I wanted to grow up and wear bib overalls and work shoes with hooks at the ankles to wrap laces around. I wanted a pocket watch to wear in my chest pocket, tied with a brown shoelace through the eyelet in the top of the overall’s bib.

A good part of my life is spent seeing myself through the eyes of men.

I’m smiling as I type that. I’m not even sure of what I mean by it, but it’s a truth I live by.

=================

One of my phrases to live by is ‘Perfect is the enemy of good’ and today’s entry is an example.

I carefully typed in the quotes from the story and then put asterisks to italicize the quotes. And it worked. That was the Good part.

Then I sought to be Perfect.

In the last quote fourth paragraph up from the end the ‘I’ is in italics in the book. So I thought maybe I could un-italicize it. So I put asterisks at the end of the last word before the ‘I’ and at the beginning of the first word after the ‘I’.

And....

The whole passage came out of italics and refused to go back in. I tried half a dozen times. I used the editing button I made sure I had no extra spaces. I even copied the passage to a new entry and worked on it there to no positive result.

So I just put training wheels on the last quote and said pretend it’s italic.

I’ve been fooling around with computers since the late 1980s and I am not stupid but .....

Hell, put that on my tombstone too, why don’t you? In italics, if you’d like.

===

The story’s title is ‘Bluebeard in Ireland’. It follows another story about the same couple visiting Italy called ‘Aperto, Chiuso’ and they were both originally in Playboy in 1991, the short stories were collected in book form in 1994. Actually that copy of Playboy might be upstairs too.

I google imaged Aperto, Chiuso and found this, which may or may not show up.

Last updated December 03, 2016