Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

“to purify yourself by giving rein to impossibility.”
    “Oh, God—I can’t—I don’t—”
    “Go on.”
    “When I first saw you, you were new—a sort of weak bent splinter of a sort of nibbled thing. How loathsome, thought I. I think even then I was protecting myself from the truth. I believe even then I deeply knew you were cheese. You began to grow. Mare Serenitatis showed, and one bluish blind mad eye, and the side of your lopsided leprous smile. At first I loved you in spite of your leprosity. Then I loved it because it was part of
you
. Then I loved the leprosity itself, and you because you were the vehicle whereby it was boldly imposed upon the cold night sky. I have never known pain so ungainsayable. I beg you, What—?”
    “Jump.”
    “Jump?”
    “Jump.”
    “Jump—”
    “ JUMP !”
    “Imagine the moon,” advised a little dog who had been eavesdropping, “as only slightly higher than the Albert Memorial. Or consider the Albert Hall. It is round and deep and vast and many-entranced, like a woman’s love. Oppositely, the Memorial is phallic. Between them there is only the Kensington Road.”
    The cow was jumping. Splendidly. Galaxies concentrically counter-vaulted.Sphere upon diamantine sphere chimed the diatonic music that mesmerized Jerusalem the Golden. Time and space were fooled at their own game.
Ab ovo
, lactogalactic. He was near, Him, ashy, awful, barren, lunar, luminous, Him.
He was Him
. They grazed. The hint of a ghost of a breath of a touch. The cow was descending. The cow was reëntering Earth’s orbit. The atmosphere sizzled. The cat’s eyes dilated as the shadow gathered. She felt the ponderous loved thing close and warm above her.
    “Is it to be—?”
    “Can’t stop. Gravity.”
    “Oh—how
right!
” Black ecstasy flattened the cat. Her ego was, if not eliminated, expanded beyond the bounds of dissatisfaction. She was ever so utterly content. The little dog laughed to see such sport.
    The fiddle cleared his long narrow throat. “Er—when you laughed like that—I, er,
twanged
. Strange to say, I love you insanely.”
    “Too bad,” said the little dog. “I love the cow. This fact was asleep in me until I saw her jump. Christ, what an august uncanny leap that was!” He was a beagleish dog. A history of bitches had lengthened his ears and bloodied his eyes. His forepaws however had an engaging outward twist. He yapped amorously at the cow. She stepped backward into the fiddle. Her glossy hoof fragmented the ruddy wood.
    “Thank you—thank you—” sobbed the fiddle. He had been excessively pampered heretofore. It was bliss to be hurt. “Of course I love
you
.” He of course meant the cow. She became haughty. Her high hot sides made a mist like fog off the Greenwich Reach. She indicated distinctly that she had consecrated herself to the memory of the cat. Or rather the cat had become the angel of death whose abiding iron presence it is the destiny of all life to worship. What else is love? Nothing else.
    The little dog yowled. “I discover I was confused. It is the moon I adore, for having permitted itself to be so splendidly jumped.” He yowled and yowled.
    The moon beamed. “I love everyone. I shine on just and unjust alike. I give to all the gift of madness. That is my charm. That is my
truth
.”
    The fiddle lived with his wound for a fortnight, as one would live with the shifting shades and fluorescent evanescences of an unduly prolongedsunset. Then he found he could sing. He had once sung. He was again singing. He sang,
    “A questo seno, deh! vieni, idolo mio,
Quanti timori, quante lacrime …”
  
    And the dish ran away with the spoon.

CEMETERIES
    “P ERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS must have been very strange,” the tall young State Department man said to me. We were speaking of Russia in the 1930’s; we had just turned from the tomb of Stalin’s wife, a square stone column the height of a woman, capped by a sculptured female head with something touchingly