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FORGIVE ME MY denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American. I write these pages at some point in the time of Richard Nixon’s unravelling. Though the yielding is mine, the temptation belongs to others: my keepers have set before me a sheaf of blank sheets—a month’s worth, in their estimation. Sullying them is to be my sole therapy.
My bishop, bless his miter, has ordered (or, rather, offered as the alternative to the frolicsome rite of defrocking) me brought here to the desert, far from the green and crowded land where my parish, as the French so nicely put it, finds itself. The month is to be one of recuperation—as I think of it, “retraction,” my condition being officially diagnosed as one of “distraction.” Perhaps the opposite of “dis” is not “re” but the absence of any prefix, by which construal I am spiritual brother to those broken-boned athletes who must spend a blank month, amid white dunes and midnight dosages, in “traction.” I doubt (verily, my name is Thomas) it will work. In my diagnosis I suffer from nothing less virulent than the human condition, and so would preach it. Though the malady is magnificent, I should in honest modesty add that my own case is scarcely feverish, and pustular only if we cross-examine the bed linen. Masturbation! Thou saving grace-note upon the baffled chord of self! Paeans to St. Onan, later.
I feel myself warming to this, which is not my intent. Let my distraction remain intractable. No old prestidigitator amid the tilted mirrors of sympathetic counselling will let himself be pulled squeaking from this glossy, last-resort, false-bottomed topper.
Particulars! The motel—I resist calling it a sanatorium, or halfway house, or detention center—has the shape of an O, or, more exactly, an omega. The ring of rooms encircling the pool is fronted by two straight corridors, containing to the left the reception desk, offices, rest rooms sexually distinguished by bovine silhouettes, and a tiny commissary heavy on plastic beadwork and postcards of dinosaur bones but devoid of any magazines or journals that might overexcite the patients—oops, the guests—with topical realities. The other way, along the other foot of the , lie the restaurant and bar. The glass wall of the bar is tinted a chemical purple through which filters a desert vista of diminishing sagebrush and distant, pale, fossiliferous mountains. The restaurant wall, at least at breakfast, wears heavy vanilla curtains out of whose gaps knives of light fall upon the grapefruit and glass of the set tables with an almost audible splintering of brightness. The place seems, if not deserted, less than half full. All middle-aged men, we sit each at our table clearing dry throughts* and suppressing nervous gossip among the silverware. I feel we are a “batch,” more or less recently arrived. We are pale. We are stolid. We are dazed. The staff, who peek and move about as if preparatory to an ambush, appear part twanging, leathery Caucasians, their blue eyes bleached to match the alkaline sky and the seat of their jeans, and the rest nubile aborigines whose silent tread and stiff black hair uneasily consort with the frilled pistachio uniforms the waitresses perforce wear. I felt, being served this morning, dealt with reverentially, or dreadfully, as if in avoidance of contamination. A potential topic: touch and the sacred. God as Supreme Disease. Noli me tangere. Germs and the altar. The shared chalice versus the disposable paper cuplet: how many hours of my professional life have been chewed to bitter shreds (the apocalyptic antisepticist among the deacons versus the holisticer-than-thou holdouts for the big Grail) by this liturgical debate. Never mind. I am free of that, for a month or forever. Good criddence.
What can I tell you? I arrived at midnight, disoriented. The airport hellishly clean, a fine dry wind blowing. Little green bus manned by pseudo-cowpoke took us into an enormous hour of swallowing desert dark. Met at the glass doors by a large lady, undeformed but unattractive, no doubt chosen for that very quality in this sensitive post. Seemed to be manageress. Named, if my ears, still plugged with jet-hum, deceived me not, Ms. Prynne. Face of a large, white, inexplicably self-congratulating turtle. White neck extended as if to preen or ease a chafing. Snapped rules at us. Us: beefy Irish priest and a third initiate, a slurring shy Tennessean, little hunched man with the hopeful quick smile of a backslider, probably some derelict revivalist who doubled as a duping insurance agent. Rules (as passed on to our hostess by the sponsoring bishoprics and conference boards): meals at eight, twelve-thirty, and seven. Bar open from noon. Commissary closed between two and five. Mornings: write, ad libitum. Afternoons: physical exercise, preferably golf, though riding, swimming, tennis facilities do exist. Evenings: board or card games, preferably poker. Many no-nos. No serious discussions, doctrinal or intrapersonal. No reading except escapist: a stock of English detective and humorous fiction from between the two world wars available in the commissary lending library. The Bible above all is banned. No religion, no visitors, no letters in or out. No trips to town (nearest town 40 m. off, named Sandstone) though some field trips would be bussed later in the month.
But you know all this. Who are you, gentle reader?
Who am I?
I go to the mirror. The room still nudges me with its many corners of strangeness, though one night’s sleep here has ironed a few rumples smooth. I know where the bathroom is. O, that immaculate, invisibly renewed sanitas of rented bathrooms, inviting us to strip off not merely our clothes and excrement and the particles of overspiced flank steak between our teeth but our skin with the dirt and our circumstances with the skin and then to flush every bit down the toilet the loud voracity of whose flushing action so rebukingly contrasts with the clogged languor of the toilets we have left behind at home, already so full of us they can scarcely ebb! The mirror holds a face. I do not recognize it as mine. It no more fits my inner light than the shade of a bridge lamp fits its bulb.
This lampshade. This lopsided lampshade. This lampshade knocked askew. This sallow sack that time has laundered to the tint of recycled paper, inexpungibly speckled and discolored, paper with nevertheless the droop of melting rubber and the erosion of an aerial view, each of its myriad wrinkles a canyon deep enough to hold all the corpses of the last four decades. Not mine. But it winks when I will, wink; it occupies, I see by the mirror, the same volume of space wherein the perspectives at which I perceive various projecting edges of the room would intersect, given an ethereal draughtsman. These teeth are mine. Every filling and inlay is a mournful story I could sing. These eyes—holes of a mask. Through which the blue of the sky shows as in one of Magritte’s eerily outdoor paintings. God’s eyes, my lids.
The Reverend Mr. Thomas Marshfield, 41 this April last, 5′ 10″, 158 pounds, pale and neural, yet with unexpected whirlpools of muscularity here and there—the knees, the padding of the palms, a hard collar of something bullish and taut about the base of the neck and the flaring out of the shoulders. Once a shortstop, once a prancing pony of a halfback. Balding now. Pink on top if I tilt for the light, otherwise a gibbonesque halo of bronze fuzz. Mouse tufts above dead white ears. Something ruddy about the tufts; field mice? Little in the way of eyebrows. Little in the way of lips: my mouth, its two wiggles fitted with a wary set as if ready to dart into an ambiguous flurry of expressions, has never pleased me, though it has allegedly pleased others. Chin a touch too long. Nose also, yet thin enough and sufficiently unsteady in its line of descent to avoid any forceful Hebraism of character. A face still uneasily inhabited, by a tenant waiting for his credit ratings to be checked. In this interregnum neither handsome nor commanding, yet at least with nothing plump about it and, lamplike, a latently incandescent willingness to resist what is current. I have never knowingly failed to honor the supreme, the hidden commandment, which is, Take the Natural World, O Creature Fashioned in Parody of My Own, and Reconvert its Stuff to Spirit; Take Pleasure and Make of it Pain; Chastise Innocence though it Reside within the Gaps of the Atom; Suspect Each Moment, for it is a Thief, Tiptoeing Away with More than it Brings; Question all Questions; Doubt all Doubts; Despise all Precepts which Take their Measure from Man; Remember Me.
I am a conservative dresser. Black, gray, brown let the wearer shine. Though I take care with the knot of my tie, I neglect to polish my shoes.
I believe my penis to be of average size. This belief has not been won through to effortlessly.
My digestion is perversely good, and my other internal units function with the smoothness of subversive cell meetings in a country without a government. A translucent wart on my right buttock should some day be removed, and some nights sleep is forestalled by a neuralgic pain in my left arm, just below the shoulder, that I blame upon a bone bruise suffered in a high-school scrimmage. My appendix is unexcised. I feel it, and my heart, as time bombs.
I love myself and loathe myself more than other men. One of these excesses attracts women, but which?
My voice is really a half-octave too high for the ministry, though in praying aloud I have developed a way of murmuring to the lectern mike that answers to my amplified sense of the soliloquizing ego. My slight stammer keeps, they tell me, the pews from nodding.
What else? My wrists ache.
The state I am in is large and square and holds one refugee asthmatic and three drunken Indians in a Ford pickup per square mile. The state I late inhabited, and where I committed my distracted derelictions and underwent my stubborn pangs, has been nibbled by the windings of rivers and deformed by the pull of conflicting territorial claims into an un-specifiable shape, rendered further amorphous by lakes and islands and shelves of urban renewal landfill. A key, Chesterton somewhere says, has no logic to its shape: its only logic is, it turns the lock.
My Lord, this depletes the inner man! Thank Heaven for noon.
Copyright © 2012 by John Updike. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
