In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
“You threatening us?” the state cop asked. “Let’s not forget, buddy, the government’s got some dynamite of its own.”
Esau shrugged. It was as when, back in Hollywood, trying to put together a package, he did his best to sell a tableful of bankers on a project, and without their saying a word he could feel resistance rising, the atmosphere congealing. He backed off a bit. “Tact,” he said. “I’m asking that you folks show some tact. What laws are we breaking?”
“There’s been a lot of talk in town about polygamy,” the social worker said.
Esau said, “Mr. Jesse Smith is married to nobody. He is a legal bachelor, as am I. The married couples here are married only once at a time. More than that, we have a Constitutional right to privacy.”
“Maybe less than you think,” the state cop said. “There’s laws protecting minors. There’s laws against perversions.”
Esau looked at the half-tolerant deputy and winked. “Yes, and there’s laws against ripping the tag off a pillow,” he said.
He sometimes remembered a night back in 1984, when one more package of which he had been a minor but salaried part had not been bought by the banks and collapsed, and he had given himself the satisfaction in parting of telling the faggy would-be director what a phony pretentious prima donna he was, and he had gone on with some geek who wanted to become his dope dealer over to some newly opened club in the Valley with a lot of these identical fascist surfer types with great tans and studded leather vests and close-cropped blond hair standing around staring like bit parts from Blade Runner, zombies invading from the super-queer cool future. Clark had had four vodka-and-oranges and done some lines in the men’s room and not only was his stomach upset and empty but his septum itched and burned hellishly and whenever he blew his nose he got blood. The Olympics were all over television that summer and a woman was running for Vice-President; cases of AIDS were adding up and so were the bodies of starved children in Ethiopia; the first black Miss America resigned because of some old nude photographs in Penthouse and Jim Fixx dropped dead while jogging; a fired security guard armed with three guns walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro and killed twenty, including a number of children. That was the ten o’clock news, which Clark watched in his room. Downstairs Mom was entertaining a portly shadowy man with his temples grayed as if air-brushed. Coming into the house, Clark was invited to sit with them, and was too stoned and spooked to resist; any company was better than facing himself alone in his room. He could tell from the smell in the air, an extra dab of perfume, a musky whiff of excitement, that Mom was putting out her heat for this guy, who looked to Clark not much younger than his grandfather.
“Dear, do say hello to Mr. Wentworth. Mr. Wentworth comes from Boston and is part of the new management team Coca-Cola is installing at Columbia.” They had got back from dinner somewhere; Mom was wearing a clingy loose crackly pajama outfit of lime-green silk, with red-strapped stiletto heels that clung to her narrow tan feet like bright little traps; she kept crossing her legs and swinging her ankles, to show how thin they were. Clark had often heard her say that, having seen her mother balloon up, she would never tolerate an extra ounce on her own body, and she had stuck to it, with diets and a treadmill and weights to keep the arm flab off; she weighed no more than she had at eighteen but the weight was brittle, and her face after her most recent lift and lid job looked pulled, as if by wires hidden under her hair, which was dyed rust-color and cut in a sleek short Isabella Rossellini–style tousle. She was telling the man in his smoke-gray suit about the old days at Columbia: “Harry was a dear to me, though I know a lot of people hated him. He could be crude and inconsiderate, it was true, but I think a lot of the dislike was simple jealousy; he was so much more clever than the studio mafia in general. They were ragpickers, most of them, or the sons of ragpickers, whereas Harry’s father had at least been a tailor. He had brought the company up from absolute Poverty Row, doing these pathetic Hall Room Boys two-reelers—one time on his yacht he regaled me with how they would save money by using short-ends of film bought from Paramount and Universal and painting both sides of the scenery and even, you won’t believe this, making up only one side of the actress’s face if she was going to be shot in profile during that scene—up from being this kind of penny-pinching sweatshop—the original name was Cohn-Brandt-Cohn or CBC and people called them Corned Beef and Cabbage and so Harry, who was a snob really and like most snobs terribly easily hurt, grandly called it Columbia—up to all those Academy awards for Capra and then of course Hayworth and Eternity and River Kwai and so on. The year after he died was the very first year the studio went into the red. This at a time when all the majors were deep in the red. After that, of course, it was the British productions, Lawrence and so on, and to give her her due Streisand that carried it, kept it alive, all through the Seventies. Oh, yes, you’re going to say Easy Rider and Bob and Carol and Ted and whoever the other one was, but these weren’t exactly the bread-and-butter kind of pictures, were they? They lost a fortune, I know, on a ridiculous musical remake of Lost Horizon, one of my very favorite pictures when I was a girl. I watched the original again on video the other week and really it was absurd, I had to admit, these tatty sets and the backdrops so obviously painted. A girl doesn’t see any of that. But Clark. You must tell us about yourself. What fun did you have this evening? How did the pitch for your little romantic comedy go?”
“It didn’t. It’s fini. I quit. I told Don what a shit he was.”
“I’m sure he was so glad to hear it. From such an expert on shits as you.”
Mr. Wentworth fussily cleared his throat and said, “Young fellow, would you like a drink?” His face was round and clean and closed, with red flecks of actinic damage on the cheekbones; he knew a thing or two, his small eyes told you, in a not especially friendly fashion. They were an intense deep blue, like the glass in certain old-fashioned medicine bottles. He had a dry, squeezed-nose way of talking; Clark supposed that was a New England accent. To Clark his suit was sending out vibrations: the gray wasn’t exactly one shade or another, and a kind of ultra-violet shimmer came off it, in waves. Maybe all these qualities were in Clark’s head, like Vaseline on the lens when the picture goes misty.
“Thanks, sir, but honestly I’m afraid I might throw up.”
His mother stared at him, to see if he needed to have his stomach pumped. She hadn’t worked for a year, and he knew it drove her crazy. Her last role had been as an astronaut’s mother; they had given her big also-featuring billing but couldn’t write enough new lines to make it more than a cameo. She had been offered Eleanor Roosevelt, with fake teeth of course, in a four-part TV docudrama about the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, and she had gone into a rage at being offered a part so old. When he did the math in his head it wasn’t so far off. Among movie people Clark’s age she was a joke, a relic still walking and talking like something at Disneyland. They confused her generation with that of Myrna Loy, when in fact she was a well-preserved fifty-four, still capable of vamping as he could see. “Then perhaps you’d like to go up to your room, darling,” she said. “There are all sorts of messages Conchita and I have been writing down for you. You must be lending your friends money again, though I beg you not to. As Mr. Wentworth was very amusingly telling me, all Hollywood is going on lean-mean rations. So your friends must suffer along with the rest of us.”
As he made his way up the stairs, he heard her continuing, in that breathless accentless onrushing voice she had been taught, “Now they have these terribly high hopes for this thing called Ghostbusters but from all that I hear it’s just another brawl with those Saturday Night Live juveniles, who become utterly charmless on the big screen.”
In his room Clark looked out the window at the lights of Los Angeles receding in their checkerboard from West Hollywood south to Inglewood and the clump of lit skyscrapers downtown and beyond to a thin dissolve of oceanic blackness under a sky that didn’t look like a sky, it was so full of reflected light the stars were drowned
In the drawer of his bedside table he found a half-smoked joint and a porno video he had been watching and got bored with. He put the roach in his mouth and lit it and put the video in the VCR and clicked it to play. He turned off all the lights so there was just the red glow moving back and forth to his lips and the rectangular jiggling glow of the TV screen and the lights of Los Angeles at his side like those of a giant runway receding on a screaming takeoff. The pot began to mollify his sense of recent injury and the action on the video switched from the mistress of the mansion doing it with two African-American burglars who had bound and blindfolded her to belowstairs, where the maid and the young long-haired butler were getting it on. The brunette maid in her black-and-white mini maid’s uniform, which came off to reveal red garters, was lithe and nimble-tongued and seemed to be getting into it, her ass perched up on the hard kitchen counter, having her brunette pussy eaten out. She kept on her little lace cap and lace choker. She reminded him of someone, the quick avid elastic way she moved and flared her nostrils in supposed ecstasy and rolled her eyes back into her skull so mostly white showed. His mother. His mother when young, before he was born, when her hair was dark. This supposed French maid even had an upper lip like Mom, puffed up and like a bent pillow, so when the camera came in close on her tipped-back face while her pussy was being eaten its flesh formed two sides with the lower lip of a black triangle so full of saliva a momentary bubble formed that you could see the camera lights reflected in. Of course it wasn’t his mother but it could have been twenty-five years ago. When she was pregnant with him: the thought made him queasy.
There was an innocence flickering through the supposed French maid’s act, a down-home girl from somewhere’s simple wish to please; the sound track under its disco throb caught little words she said softly, “Nice” and “Mmm” and “Oh, yes,” less for the camera than for the other performer, encouraging him to keep up his end. When her turn came in the unvarying scenario of these films to blow the butler, she really put herself into it, her whole head thrusting down the shaft with a little extra effort, deep-throating, teasing the veined skin with her slightly buck teeth, her lips pushing all the way to his pubic hair while her hand with its long red curved whore’s nails played scratchingly with his balls. The guy’s hard-on got big enough to choke on; some of these girls can never produce the excitement, the spaces of sly tenderness that bring a man up amid the harsh lights and tight schedule and silently scoffing cameraman. Clark had been involved over in the Valley with a couple of hard-core productions and he knew the technical problems. The “wood” problems. Women on women was much more dependable. He had slipped his pants and underpants down on the bed and with his left hand matched the brunette’s mouth stroke for stroke, as she kept glancing hopefully upward to the male face, which was off the screen—his mother’s look of bright expectancy at its purest, a look he seldom saw any more, as she expected less and less of him. He’d show her, the bitch. His own eyes rolled back into his skull and his airplane lifted off with a shiver of propulsion and a set of diminishing throbs. When he looked again the butler was jerking off on the maid’s face, white gobs like Elmer’s glue which she was licking off her fingertips, still girlishly, shrewdly eager to please, and Clark had come all over himself, his hand and pubic hair and the band of his underpants. God, people are disgusting. The roach still burned in his other hand. He took one last toke deep into his lungs and resolved to get out of Los Angeles, out of reach of the fucking movies.
The Temple didn’t grow, but it didn’t shrink much either. Zebulun’s parents came to visit all the way from Maui, and though the shy old couple—like a pair of carved dolls that couldn’t stop nodding—didn’t stay, when they left there was more money available for defense weapons and stockpiled canned goods and frozen food in the giant humming freezers installed in the buried school bus, now that they had electricity. Jesse’s sense of foreboding and his readings of Revelation grew more dire. He asked that white robes be made for his disciples, to be worn at Bible study, in accordance with Revelation 7:9, wherein multitudes stand before the Lamb “clothed with white robes,” and with 6:11: And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled. Putting on one of the gowns the Temple women had made from bedsheets, Esau felt the slither of death’s touch. Yet he continued to drive the Ranger pickup into Lower Branch, its scattering of steep-peaked houses and its Total gas station and 7-Eleven and, below where the branching road made a triangle, Mildred’s Breakfast and Diner and J.C.’s Café and Tru-Value hardware store and a struggling unpainted non-denominational church and the two-story cement-block civic building combining town hall and police headquarters and a one-cell lockup: there he would deal with the minions of Gog—paying the tax collector, placating the social worker, striving with the sheriff’s deputy to keep the Temple within the letter of state and county law, arranging with the occasional newspaper or TV reporter an interview with Jesse and a carefully supervised tour of Temple premises. Returning then, besmirched by contact with the corrupt world, to put on his disciple’s gown and sit and listen to Jesse rant upon the most ghastly passages of Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Revelation, pounding this desert lode of old grief into a present furious sword until his hoarse voice croaked shut, was no more strange, Esau told himself, than shifting from one to another of any of the layers that make up human existence—from wakefulness to sleep, from social dress and conversation to the mute nakedness of lovemaking, from eating blessed cereal at a ceremonial table to shitting in hunched solitude on a cold bowl. Man is a mixed bag, a landscape of swamps and caves as well as sunlit slopes. Reality is a kind of movie the self projects, and the director of special effects just needs a decent budget to turn the sun as black as a sackcloth of hair, and roll back the scroll of the sky, and cast the stars down from the sky as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken in a mighty wind.
The fall of 1989 turned bare and brisk. Karen, the oldest of the three children that Mercy and Mephibosheth had brought to the Temple, brought back from the regional high school, where she had been placed in the tenth grade, word that her biology teacher, a smart-aleck young son of Ham from the Five Points section of Denver, had told them that though so-called creationism was a theory still entertained by many backward people, including state legislators, the evidence overwhelmingly rules out a Creator in favor of random cosmic events producing amid many hellishly hot or frigid planets one suitable for life, life which arose when accidental permutations of complex molecules present in the warm primeval soup or sludge fell into combinations that replicated themselves; from there on it was all the carnage of big critters eating small ones and survival of the fittest as described by the self-employed English naturalist Charles Darwin, one of the nineteenth century’s great men. When Karen had shakily asked her African-American instructor about Jesus Christ, he had said, in front of the
The next morning, in the heavy dew, Luke told the children to stay in the Temple and went out, into a swale in the lower right-hand meadow where a thicket of little gambel oaks grew, with an M-16 he had fitted with a telescopic sight. When, at seven-thirty, the orange-yellow school bus came along the macadamized road, and stopped and tooted at the end of the Temple’s dirt road, Luke from about a hundred fifty yards away shot out the two tires on his side. It was a crisp November morning, with the foretaste of winter in the wind and the sky overhead as blue as a lupine and the leaves of the little oaks turning a papery khaki color. In his telescopic sight, with the rifle steadied on a low branch, he could see beautifully. He could see the bus driver, a plump bleached blonde in an ochre suede jacket, roll down her window to look at her front tire; he could see the glint on the chrome edge of her side mirror. He could see, as he swept the rifle in a gentle arc, the little faces cramming up against the cloudy windows in curiosity. The windows made their faces look dirty. Their mouths were open making a shrill noise he couldn’t hear. When he took out the back tire and swept the sight back, the faces had all disappeared—ducked down, he guessed—so he took out a few of the windows for good measure. It made him cackle to see that safety glass vanish into a thousand crumbs. The bus driver was so foolish or noncomprehending as to lever open her door and stand there, looking first up the road and then in his direction. That woman should lose some weight. Luke rested his crosshairs on her round blond head, that painted hair pinned tight against her head, but you could bet she let it down at night, this pig-fat hussy hauling off righteous children to drink from the foul wells of Godlessness. It would be a righteous deed to put her out of her misery, but he contented himself with the elongated mirror glinting a foot above her ear. When it shattered, she ducked as fast as if the spinning lead had grazed the shining yellow hair of her harlot’s skull. There was a silent peace, an utterly still intimacy in the gunsight that he hated to leave, like a peephole drilled straight through to Paradise, but he figured he better hightail it back to the Temple walls, having made his point.