Roger's Version by John Updike Page A

was wearing only a terrycloth bathrobe. The skin of her throat and upper chest looked pink and damp. “I should have called,” I said, in recognition of the obvious fact that she had been taking a bath. “But this was rather on an impulse,” I lied. “I found myself walking this way.”
    “Sure,” she said. “Come in. Don’t mind the mess.”
    The room was pathetically furnished, with a hideous purple shag carpet that must have come with the place, but it did have a view toward the center of the city: in order of recession, an opposite corner of the project, some asbestos-shingled three-deckers with many television aerials, a billboard advertisingsuntan lotion, a dome of the university’s riverside campus, the summit of a skyscraper with its glassed-in observation deck and rotating skyview restaurant, and the day’s hurrying clouds, their leaden centers and luminous unravelling edges. Beneath this view, on a plastic milk crate, a television set performed silently, the distressed actors of a daytime soap opera reduced to mime. Elsewhere, a few mismatched chairs stood around a card table: here someone, to judge from the many colors of stain on its cardboardy dark surface, painted.
    “I was in the tub having a toke,” the girl was saying in her small, rather endearingly reedy voice, “and I thought you were probably somebody else.” This to explain the immodesty of her robe, which came only to the center of her thighs. Her legs, from which any summer tan had faded, seemed shapelier than I remembered Edna’s as being, with smaller, pinker feet and tighter ankles. “Shut up, Poops,” she said indolently to her little girl, who was pointing at me and crowing an almost-word that was “Baa” or “Daa.” The child was topless, dressed in paper diapers. The apartment felt overheated, the radiators sizzling with steam. Perhaps the gentle stench of wasting food came from the room behind a drab maroon curtain hung with big plastic rings from a mock-gold bar. I was fastidiously conscious of my gray suede gloves, my Harris-tweed coat with leather-patched elbows, my gray cashmere muffler.
    “As I say,” I said, and had to clear my throat again, “somewhat on an impulse, I thought I’d drop by and rather belatedly, I confess, see how my little niece is doing.”
    Music, turned up loud, came from the other room: “ She bop—he bop—a—we bop .”
    “Cyndi Lauper,” I said.
    This impressed her. “How’djou know?”
    “My son. He’s twelve, and just plugging into pop culture. I would think, at your age, Verna, you’d be un plugging.”
    She saw me looking around the dismal room and made an affecting little shapeless gesture, her small pink hands lifting out as if to smooth, like a sheet on a bed, her environment. “Maybe so. If I didn’t have Bozo here, I could get out and maybe get a job or an education or something. As it is, here is where I do my non-thing, except when we get our snowsuits on and go out and trade food stamps for all this carcinogenic garbage and stuff.”
    Like the young generally now, she had a vocabulary that already incorporates and neutralizes all possible discipline. When Esther found a copy of Club , borrowed from a classmate at Pilgrim, under Richie’s bed, he told her disarmingly, “Mom, it’s just a phase .”
    “Da. Da-da.” The tiny girl was plump, and a pretty color even paler than mocha or milky coffee, a honey tint. Her face was destined to be the site of a delicate war between Negroid and Caucasian features; at the moment, one was most struck by the great inky eyes, not brown as one might expect but a deep navy blue—fathomless life, pure globules of a dark distillate. Their shine showed she had been crying not long ago. Tear-trails darkened the skin of her cheeks.
    “What is the baby’s name? I should know but can’t remember.”
    “Paula. My crummy dad’s name is Paul and when the old fart kicked me out I called the baby after him to serve him right.” Her