Museums and Women by John Updike Page A

Frug (or was it Monkey?) to the plangent anthems of a younger generation. Then the rock music yielded, as their host dug deeper into his strata of accumulated records, to the reeds and muted brass and foggy sighing that had voiced the furtive allegiances of their own, strange, in-between generation—too young to be warriors, too old to be rebels.Too tired to talk, Tom danced. The men with whom he had shared hundreds of athletic Sunday afternoons had become hollow-voiced ghosts inhabiting an infinite recession of weekends when he would not be here. His field was computer software; theirs was advertising or securities or the law, and though they all helped uphold the Manhattan tent pole of a nationwide canopy of rockets and promises, they spoke different languages when there was no score to shout. “If I was John Lindsay,” a man began, and rather than listen Tom seized a woman, who whirled him around. These women: he had seen their beauty pass from the smooth bodily complacence of young motherhood to the angular self-possession, slightly gray and wry, of veteran wives. To have witnessed this, to have seen in the sides of his vision so many pregnancies and births and quarrels and near-divorces and divorces and affairs and near-affairs and arrivals in vans and departures in vans, loomed, in retrospect, as the one accomplishment of his tenancy here—a heap of organic incident that in a village of old would have moldered into wisdom. But he was not wise, merely older. The thought of Texas frightened him: a desert of strangers; barbecues on parched lawns, in the gaunt shade of oil rigs and radar dishes.
    “We’ll miss you,” Linda Cotteral dutifully said. Mouselike, she nestled when dancing; all men must look alike to her—a wall of damp shirt.
    “I doubt it,” he responded, stumbling. It surprised him that he didn’t dance very well. He had danced a lot in Connecticut, rather than make conversation, yet his finesse had flattened along one of those hyperbolic curves that computers delight in projecting. Men had been wrong ever to imagine the universe as a set of circles; in reality, nothing closes, everything approaches, but never quite touches, its asymptote.
    “Have you danced with Maggie?”
    “Not for years. As you know.”
    “Don’t you think you should?”
    “She’d refuse.”
    “Ask her,” Linda said, and left him for the arms of a man who would be here next weekend, who was real.
    Maggie liked living rooms; they flattered her sense of courtesy and display. She had spread herself with her sleeves on the big curved white sofa, white on white. Lou’s voice tinkled from the kitchen. Lou always gravitated, at parties, to the kitchen, just as others, along personal magnetic lines, drifted outside to the screened porch, or sought safety in the bathroom. Picturing his wife perched on a kitchen stool, comfortably tapping her cigarette ashes into the sink, Tom approached Maggie and, numb as a moth, asked her to dance.
    She looked up. Her eyes had been painted to look startled. “Really?” she asked, and added, “I’m terribly tired.”
    “Me too.”
    She looked down to where her hands were folded in her white lap. Her contemplative posture appeared to express the hope that he, like an unharmonious thought, would melt away.
    Tom told her, “I’ll never ask you again.”
    With a sigh, then sniffing as if to erase the sigh, Maggie rose and went with him into the darkened playroom, where other adults were dancing, folding each other into the old remembered music. She lifted her arms to accept him; her wide sleeves made her difficult to grasp. Her body in his arms, unexpectedly, felt wrong: something had unbalanced her—her third drink, or time. Her hand in his felt overheated.
    “You’re taller,” she said.
    “I am?”
    “I believe you’ve grown, Tom.”
    “No, it’s just that your memory of me has shrunk.”
    “Please, let’s not talk memories. You asked me to dance.”
    “I’ve discovered I