Dear John Updike,The other week, I was looking at a photograph of you. It was on the back of a book you wrote called The Centaur, which I've, to be honest, never read. In the picture1, you are smiling very widely and covering your eyes with your fingers, which are spread wide into fans. Your wrinkled eyes can be seen between the third and fourth digits of each hand. It's the sort of photo that comes with sound; when you catch it out of the corner of your eye, you can almost hear a quick bit of laughter. Perhaps the photographer made a joke you liked.
I looked at this particular noisy picture while on break2. Then there was harsh, warm rain. I ducked into the breakroom, which was crowded as usual but even more so because of the miserable rain. All of us stuck inside. It has been raining for days now since. One of my female co-workers3, with whom I had never spoken and with whom I have not spoken since, thinks you are a very attractive man. She said, pointing to your author photo, "Oh, look at him! What a cutie!" I don't believe she was being facetious.
I still haven't read The Centaur but will soon.
She asked who you were, which might slightly cheapen the compliment she previously gave you through me. I always find it inappropriate when compliments are imparted so haphazardly and in this way.
You probably don't remember me, John Updike, but we met once. We even shook hands. An electronic billboard displayed your name outside the library, and a long line stretched past the first corner of the block. Doors were opening in an hour, and I was waiting on some friends and friends of friends of friends, who were all late. They never showed up, but I waited in another line inside to have you sign a book, which you had also written though it was not The Centaur4. You sat at a table, which was a modest folding kind, and you had sunk into the matching chair very comfortably as though the hall of the library was your study and not a cold, sterile, vaulted room. We shook hands over my signed book; it was all nice and formal as though I was meeting an astronaut or foreign diplomat. And when you laughed at someone's joke, it filled the room.
I read somewhere that everyone in heaven5 is thirty-three6, even babies and old women, and everyone has nice hair and teeth, which no one needs to upkeep or brush or style and whiten. And their nails don't grow any longer or get dirty. And if you lose a daughter in the grocery store, she will appear in your arms when you yell her name, and, despite being thirty-three just like you, she isn't heavy in your arms; in fact, she weighs nothing. But you being thirty-three again seems to fall, in my eyes, within your ideals; you are young, virile, fit, and willing. You nod meaningfully toward dead women. How is that going for you? I can picture you and your friends cracking up over innappropraite jokes there now because some things never really get old. Perhaps you have drunk the others under the table, and their thin, young (thirty-three year old) wives disapprove (though more of the others and not you; you have a way about you...); they love you: the women and your friends. But no one is really drunk; they only roll around on the cloud-strewn floor, laughing because you told a good one. And all the women, by looking over their shoulders as they walk slowly across the heavenly dance floor, forgive you for whatever it is they said you did wrong with your writing down here.
Take care of yourself,
1 The other night, I was dreaming of a man who resembled you, at least in the way a much younger brother resembles the elder, and this man who resembled you and I stood on the edge of a very low and long valley, green with trees forever and a blue veiny river trekking through the middle. I looked at this man: white-hairs, smiling, peering at me through the fingers he had covering his eyes. It was that photograph of you, from that back of that book. That's how I knew it was you. And this man told me in my dream about the most painful torture device he had ever imagined, once, while lying in bed, up too late at night and thinking, when he said his mind most often wandered to such things. Then the man expanded and filled and became my boss, a fat man in fat man's clothes, and the dream was then over.
2 I work in a cubicle, which is attached to other cubicles on three sides. The fourth side lets out onto a hall, which is narrow. On the other side of the hall, there are more cubicles. If I walk slowly enough down this hall, it's like visiting a wax museum; everyone is very still and staring at you, not very much alive.
3 She works in accounting as far as I can tell.
4 It was an old copy of Couples.
5 I've been told that heaven is real since I was little, but it seems to me that it is only something I will believe in when I'm older, when I need a place to put things that I've lost more often.
6 They say this is the age at which Jesus Christ was murdered. That is their reasoning.
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