Trust Me by John Updike

beauty, that beauty which women have now come to regard as an enemy, a burden and cause for harassment. Carson thought of his daughter.
    Although many nurses administered to him—as he gained strength he managed to make small talk with them even at four in the morning—this particular one, her perfectly blackand symmetrical face outlined like an eclipsed sun with its corona, never came again.
    “Walk,” the surgeon urged Carson. “Get up and walk as soon as you can. Get that body moving. It turns out it wasn’t the disease used to kill a lot of people in hospitals, it was lying in bed and letting the lungs fill up with fluid.”
    Walking meant, at first, pushing the spindly, rattling I.V. pole along with him. There was a certain jaunty knack to it—easing the wheels over the raised metal sills here and there in the linoleum corridor, placing the left hand at the balance point he thought of as the pole’s waist, swinging “her” out of the way of another patient promenading with his own gangling chrome partner. From observing other patients Carson learned the trick of removing the I.V. bag and threading it through his bathrobe sleeve and rehanging it, so he could close his bathrobe neatly. His first steps, in the moss-green sponge slippers the hospital provided, were timid and brittle, but as the days passed the length of his walks increased: to the end of the corridor, where the windows of a waiting room overlooked the distant center of the city; around the corner, past a rarely open snack bar, and into an area of children’s diseases; still farther, to an elevator bank and a carpeted lounge where pregnant women and young husbands drank Tab and held hands. The attendants at various desks in the halls came to know him, and to nod as he passed, with his lengthening stride and more erect posture. His handling of the I.V. pole became so expert as to feel debonair.
    His curiosity about the city revived. What he saw from the window of his own room was merely the wall of another wing of the hospital, with gift plants on the windowsills and hereand there thoughtful bathrobed figures gazing outward toward the wall of which his own bathrobed figure was a part. From the windows of the waiting room, the heart of the city with its clump of brown and blue skyscrapers and ribbonlike swirls of highway seemed often to be in sunlight, while clouds shadowed the hospital grounds and parking lots and the snarl of taxis around the entrance. Carson was unable to spot the hotel where he had stayed, or the industrial district where he had hoped to sell his systems, or the art museum that contained, he remembered reading, some exemplary Renoirs and a priceless Hieronymus Bosch. He could see at the base of the blue-brown mass of far buildings a suspension bridge, and imagined the dirty river it must cross, and the eighteenth-century fort that had been built here to hold the river against the Indians, and the nineteenth-century barge traffic that had fed the settlement and then its industries, which attracted immigrants, who thrust the grid of city streets deep into the surrounding farmland.
    This was still a region of farmland; thick, slow, patient, pious voices drawled and twanged around Carson as he stood there gazing outward and eavesdropping. Laconic, semi-religious phrases of resignation fell into place amid the standardized furniture and slippered feet and pieces of jigsaw puzzles half assembled on card tables here. Fat women in styleless print dresses and low-heeled shoes had been called in from their kitchens, and in from the fields men with crosshatched necks and hands that had the lumpy, rounded look of used tools.
    Illness and injury are great democrats, and had achieved a colorful cross section. Carson came to know by sight a lean man with cigar-dark skin and taut Oriental features; his glossy shaved head had been split by a Y-shaped gash now held togetherby stitches. He sat in a luxurious light-brown, almost golden robe, his