The Violet Hour (19 page)

A couple of days later, Elizabeth visited her father at home. He told her that even though he was happy Obama had won, he couldn't enjoy the inauguration speech. He felt outside it.

He returned a portable desk with a cushion that Elizabeth had given him to write in bed. He told her he wouldn't be needing it anymore. Elizabeth asked him if he would like to find a collaborator, someone who could help him finish the novel on Saint Paul. He said no.

Updike wrote a short note to Chris Carduff about the Library of America edition of his work saying that he was too sick to go on, and that Martha would help him.

His old friend Dick Purinton, a retired manufacturing sales rep, came over to stay with him while Martha dipped into town to see the lawyers. He was one of the few friends Updike saw by this stage. Dick was an old golf buddy whom Updike had known since the early sixties; the Purintons lived in a town near Ipswich and had been to some of the complicated parties and volleyball games Updike fictionalized in novels like
Couples
. Dick and his wife were among the few couples who'd stayed together.

While Dick was there, Updike dozed off every fifteen minutes or so, but they talked in between. Dick had brought along a photo album of the trips their golf club, Myopia Hunt Club, took to Scotland and Ireland, and they reminisced. Once a year, Updike went with “eleven other elderly gallants of the North Shore” on a vacation without wives. They played golf and stayed in inns and had long boozy dinners, though Updike in later years didn't drink. Updike's childhood sweet tooth was awakened on those trips, and he bought candy and licorice.

One of the photographs shows Updike on a cobblestone street, in caramel corduroys, a hound's tooth jacket, and a royal-blue turtleneck, his thick eyebrows half concealed by a cap. He looks happy, relaxed, with the slightest hint of slyness, as if he has gotten away with something minor but thrilling. Updike told Dick this was his favorite picture of himself.

What did they talk about on those endless emerald golf courses, familiar and new, over the decades? Sports, sex, nothing. What they didn't talk about was writing. Dick says, “We kind of made a point not to talk about his writing.” One of the reasons Updike had left the jostling seductions of New York and the literary world was so he could have golf buddies like Dick Purinton and live a life he could write about and not have to talk about writing.

But now he said to Dick, “I am really angry. I just can't bring myself to write.”

In golf, Updike loved to win and hated to lose. They would play for two, maybe five dollars. He liked the ambience of the game. He didn't like caddies and would carry his own bag. He would let out a terrible theatrical moan when he hit a bad shot.

Updike had written whole novels in pencil on yellow legal paper and on the backs of scrap paper, in barely legible scrawl, sentences crossed out and inserted with elaborate trees. He had written poems with drawings and doodles on them, faces and bubbles and shadings and little men, an endless flow of words. Now the writing was over, but the urge was not.

Writing was solace, escape, shelter. Another golf buddy, Dick Harte, remembers one of those trips, walking to lunch with Updike on a raw, drizzly day in Scotland. Updike suddenly turned to him and said, “I just wish I could go somewhere and write something.”

It's hard to conceive of Updike as straightforwardly religious, since he was known for rhapsodic philandering, for his risqué explorations. His son Michael said, “It's hard to understand how anyone so intelligent could believe in God.” Or maybe it's hard to understand how someone so attuned to irony, and alert to absurdity and fascinated by baseness, could be religious. But in his troubled, intense, intelligent relation to religion, perhaps none of these things were contradictions. In fact, Updike said, “I plotted
Couples
almost entirely in a church—little shivers and urgencies I would jot down on the program.” In a way this act, noting down the plot of the story of
Couples
, the prototype for his most famous ode to adulterous adventure, in church, on the program, seems to capture the essence: a faith coexisting with a very American search for self-fulfillment, a kind of rapturous merging of the two. His affairs are tinged with guilt, his sex scenes with heaven, his love with rapture; it's all jumbled together.

About Piet in
Couples
, he wrote, “Prayer was an unsteady state of mind for him. When it worked, he seemed, for intermittent moments, to be in the farthest corner of a deep burrow….In this condition he felt close to a massive warm secret.” This unsteadiness of faith recurs throughout his fiction. He narrates terrifying moments of doubt and then moments of return, of flooding grace. In “Pigeon Feathers,” the boy begins to doubt: “If when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and whatnot are all, ah,
horror
?”

As Miranda put it, Updike loved “the concrete stuff” of the church, the rituals, the Sunday mornings, the church pews. He said the Lord's Prayer with the children in their rooms before they fell asleep. In later years, he and Martha attended services regularly at an Episcopal church, St. John's, minutes away from their home in Beverly Farms. He would go to the eight o'clock service on his own, because it was too early for Martha and she liked the ten o'clock service. When he was too sick to go to church, the Episcopal priest came to his house two or three times a week to talk to him and give him communion.

But even in the months of his dying, his religious feeling was not without irony. He wrote in
Endpoint
, “a clergyman—those comical purveyors / of what makes sense to just the terrified— / has phoned me, and I loved him, bless his hide.” One might take this as an expression of skepticism—what makes sense to just the terrified?
Exactly
, a million atheists might agree—and yet Updike approached everything under the sun with irony, including his deeper passions, his beliefs, his sources of marvel and awe. Irony exhilarated him; it breathed life into those passions, invigorated them.

How did he feel about Martha, the vivid blond woman he had left his family for in the seventies? She was by all accounts vibrant, forceful, chic. She did not quietly recede, as Mary might have at times. She was fun and charming. She was staggeringly efficient. She was strenuously protective of his time, vigilant
toward encroachers. She had taken an English course with Nabokov as an undergraduate at Cornell, and he had called her a “genius.” She hungered for travel and warm places.

There is a black-and-white photograph of the two of them, shortly after he left Mary, taken in East Hampton. It is dusk and they are standing in the beach grass, she in bangs, a gypsy dress, a chunky cream cardigan, he in a flamboyantly striped sports jacket; they are holding paper cups, leaning in for a kiss, and there is a great enchantment in the photograph being duly recorded. In fact, I can't think of a single other photograph on earth in which one can so palpably, undeniably, see love.

From his letters, Updike seemed devoted to Martha; he seemed to revel in uxoriousness, take to the role. But it's hard to know what the marriage was like. He was a highly autobiographical writer, stealing liberally from life, so one wonders about his portrait of the marriage of an aging successful man, Ben Turnbull, and his wife, Gloria, living in a mansion on a hill in
Toward the End of Time:
“After a certain age marriage is mostly, its bitter and tender moments both, a mental game of thrust and parry played on the edge of the grave.” Gloria is not Martha, and Martha is not Gloria, but they may share certain qualities, or certain qualities of Martha's may be amplified in Gloria. He wrote: “To Gloria I am a kind of garden, where she must weed, clip, tie, deadhead, and poison aphids.” Gloria criticizes the way Ben showers, shaves, dances, chooses pajamas, and eats soup. Gloria takes—or, maybe more accurately, vibrantly seizes—what she needs out of life, which is something her husband both admires and is daunted by; he joyously submits
to her. Ben Turnbull feels that his fantastically, energetically, zealously organized wife is waiting for him to die, and yet even this is sort of dear to him.

Updike wrote a late poem about a birthday dinner he had with his wife at an inn in Arizona, for “only two.” He wrote that they had decided to give up wine and cigarettes to prolong their marriage. He wrote about his “imitation of a proper man” fitting him not like skin but like a “store-bought suit” and working well enough, until she corrects him for not using the finger bowl properly. The scene is suffused with a kind of modest happiness, a peaceful, domesticated warmth, but there is also a tinge of regret, of wistfulness toward another fuller time, other more vivid, crowded celebrations, wineglasses catching the candlelight, other birthdays, maybe happier or more desperate ones. Is it just the closing down of possibilities of getting older he is gently pointing out? Is there something petty or controlling in his second wife, hinted at in the finger bowl? John Cheever once wrote to him: “I thought Martha lovely and I greatly admired her manners. I do like people who know the forks.”

After Updike married Martha, the drama shifted from the flashy distractions of adultery to mortality; there was in his later years a fascination with death, which almost eclipsed the fascination with sex. He wrote in a late poem, “How not to think of death? Its ghastly blank lies underneath your dreams, that once gave rise to horn-hard, conscienceless erections.”

The mystery is what happened during his relationship with Martha. If these great, blustering fears of mortality were managed
and combated with affairs, with myriad free-floating seductions, flirtations, trysts, how did he manage them in the long, faithful decades of his second marriage? “The older I get,” he told an interviewer, “I'd say I am more monogamous. Monogamy is very energy-conserving.” Looking through his emails after his death, his children found no smoking guns, no tangible evidence of any affairs. If he did have a fling far from home, which he most likely did not, this infidelity did not occupy or transport or intrigue him the way it did when he was younger. So what happened to all that energy, the sexualized urge for flight?