Museums and Women by John Updike Page B

that it was not going well. He had switched to filtered cigarettes but there was a new recklessness in his drinking. I watched his hands and suddenly remembered how those same hands looked squeezed around the handle of a lacrosse stick. He apologized for the night he had brought the girl to our apartment.
    I said that I had almost forgotten, but that at the time it had seemed out of character.
    “How did we look?” he asked.
    I didn’t understand. “Worried,” I said. “She seemed to us much like Marjorie.”
    He smiled and said, “That’s how it turned out. Just like Marjorie.” He had had three drinks and took off his glasses. His eyes were still a schoolboy’s, but his mouth no longer would have looked well on a bank wall; the prim cut of it had been boozed and blurred away, and a dragging cynicism had done something ineradicable to the corners. His lips groped for precision. “I wanted you to see us,” he said. “I wanted somebody to see us in love. I loved her so much,” he said, “I loved her so much it makes me sick to remember it. Whenever I come back to the city, whenever I pass any place we went together when it was beginning, I fall, I kind of drop an inch or so inside my skin. Herbie, do you know what I’m talking about, have you ever had the feeling?”
    I did not think that I was expected to answer such questions. Perhaps my silence was construed as a rebuke.
    Fred rubbed his forehead and closed his watery blue eyes and said, “I knew it was wrong. I knew it was going to end in a mess, it had nowhere else to go.” He opened his scared eyes and told me, “That’s why I brought her over that time. She hated it, she didn’t want to come. But I wanted it. I wanted somebody I knew to see us when it was good. No: I wanted somebody who knew me to see me happy.
Did
you see?”
    I nodded, lying, but he was hurrying on: “I had never known I could be that happy. God. I wanted you and Jeanne to see us together before it went bad. So it wouldn’t be totally lost.”

Solitaire
    T HE CHILDREN were asleep, and his wife had gone out to a meeting; she was like his father in caring about the community. He found the deck of cards in the back of a desk drawer and sat down at the low round table. He had reached a juncture in his life where there was nothing to do but play solitaire. It was the perfect, final retreat—beyond solitaire, he imagined, there was madness. Only solitaire utterly eased the mind; only solitaire created that blankness into which a saving decision might flow. Conviviality demanded other people, with their fretful emanations of desire; reading imposed the author’s company; and one emerged from the anesthetic of drunkenness to find that the operation had not been performed. But in the rise and collapse of the alternately colored ranks of cards, in the grateful transpositions and orderly revelations and unexpected redemptions, the circuits of the mind found an occupation exactly congruent with their own secret structure. The mind was filled without being strained. The week after he graduated from college—already married, his brain worn to the point where a page of newspaper seemed acruelly ramifying puzzle—he played solitaire night after night by the glow of a kerosene lamp on an old kitchen table in Vermont; and at the end of the week he had seen the way that his life must go in the appallingly wide world that had opened before him. He had drawn a straight line from that night to the night of his death, and began walking on it.
    During that week he had remembered how in his childhood his mother would play solitaire by the light of the stained-glass chandelier in the dining room. His father would be out somewhere, doing good for the community, and he and his mother would be alone. He was an only child, and as such obscurely felt himself to be the center of the sadness that oppressed them. Frightened of her silence and of the slithering of the cards, he would beg her to stop. Tell me