Museums and Women by John Updike Page A

static energy imposed on the space between her body and Fred’s, as in that visual fooler which now seems two black profiles and now a single white vase, so that the arm of the settee, the mahogany end table inlaid with satinwood, the unlit lamp with the base of beaten copper, the ceramic ashtray full of unfiltered butts shaped like commas, the very shadows and blurs of refraction were charged with a mysterious content, the “relationship” of these two nervous and unwelcome visitors.
    I want to believe that Jeanne, however half-heartedly, invited them to dine with us; of course Fred refused, saying they must go, suddenly rising, apologetic, his big hands dangling, his lady looking up at him for leadership. They left before eight, and my embarrassed deafness lifts. I can hear Jeanne complaining distinctly, “Well, that was strange!”
    “Very strange behavior, from Fred.”
    “Was he showing her that he has respectable friends, or what?”
    “Surely that’s a deduction she didn’t need to have proved.”
    “She may have a mistrustful nature.”
    “What did you make of her?”
    “I’m afraid I must say she struck me as very ordinary.”
    I said, “It’s hilarious, how much of a copy she is of his wife.”
    “Yes, and not as finished as Marjorie. A poor copy.”
    “How far,” I said, “people go out of their way to mess up their lives.” I was trying to agree with some unstated assertion of hers.
    “Yes,” said Jeanne, straightening the bent cushions on the settee, “that was very dismal. Tell me. Are we going to have to see them again? Are we some sort of furniture so they can play house, or what?”
    “No, I’m sure not. I’ll tell Fred not, if I must.”
    “I don’t care what people do, but I don’t like being used.”
    I felt she expected me, though innocent, to apologize. I said, “I can’t imagine what got into Fred. He’s usually nothing if not correct.”
    For a moment, Jeanne may have considered letting me have the last word. Then she said firmly, “I found the whole thing extremely dreary.”
    The next day, or the day after, Fred called me at the office, and thanked me. He said, with an off-putting trace of the stammering earnestness his clients must have found endearing, that it had meant more to him than I could know, and some day he would tell me why. I may have been incurious and cool. He did not call again. Then I heard he was divorced, and had left Madison Avenue for a public relations outfit starting up in Chicago. His new wife, I was told, came originallyfrom Indianapolis. I tried to remember if Priscilla Evans had had a Midwestern accent and could not.
    Years later, but some time ago, when Kennedy Airport was still called Idlewild, Fred and I accidentally met in the main terminal—those acres of white floor where the islands of white waiting chairs cast no shadows. He was on his way back to Los Angeles. He was doing publicity work for one of the studios that can television series. Although he did not tell me, he was on the verge of his second divorce. He seemed heavier, and his hands were puffy. His hair was thinning now on the back of his skull; there were a few freckles in the bald spot. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, which did not make him look youthful. He kept taking them off, as if bothered by their fit, exposing, on the bridge of his nose, the red moccasin-shaped dents left by the pads of his old silver frames. He had somehow gone pasty, sheltered from the California sun, and I wondered if I looked equally tired and corrupt to him. Little in my life had changed. We had had one child, a daughter. We had moved uptown, to a bigger, higher, bleaker apartment. Kennedy’s bear market had given me a dull spring.
    Fred and I sought shelter in the curtained bar a world removed from the sun-stricken airfield and the glinting planes whose rows of rivets and portholes seemed to be spelling a message in punched code. He told me about his life without complaint and let me guess