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Sleeping with John Updike
“I thought that went very well,”
Jane said, patting her handbag as the train doors closed with a pneumatic thump. Their carriage was nearly empty, its air warm and stale.
Alice knew to treat the remark as a question seeking reassurance. “You were certainly on good form.”
“Oh, I had a nice room for a change. It always helps.”
“They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.”
“They usually do,” Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.
“I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?”
“You know, I never worry about that anymore. It fi lls a slot.”
When had they first met? Neither could quite remember. It must have been nearly forty years ago, during that time of interchangeable parties: the same white wine, the same hysterical noise level, the same publishers’ speeches. Perhaps it had been at a PEN do, or when they’d been shortlisted for the same literary prize. Or maybe during that long, drunken summer when Alice had been sleeping with Jane’s agent, for reasons she could no longer recall or, even at the time, justify.
“In a way, it’s a relief we’re not famous.”
“Is it?” Jane looked puzzled, and a little dismayed, as if she thought they were.
“Well, I imagine we’d have readers coming to see us time and again. They’d expect some new anecdotes. I don’t think either of
us has told a new story in years.”
“Actually, we do have people coming to see us again and again. Just fewer than . . . if we were famous. Anyway, I think they like hearing the same stories. When we’re onstage we’re not literature, we’re sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.”
“Like your Graham Greene story.”
“I think of that as a bit more than a . . . catchphrase, Alice.”
“Don’t prickle, dear. It doesn’t suit.” Alice couldn’t help noticing the sheen of sweat on her friend’s face. All from the effort of getting from taxi to platform, then platform to train. And why did women carrying rather more poundage than was wise think floral prints were the answer? Bravado rarely worked with clothes, in Alice’s opinion—at least, after a certain age.
When they had become friends, both were freshly married and freshly published. They had watched over each other’s children,
sympathised through divorces, recommended each other’s books as Christmas reading. Each privately liked the other’s work a little less than they said, but then, they also liked everyone else’s work a little less than they said, so hypocrisy didn’t come into it.
Jane was embarrassed when Alice referred to herself as an artist rather than a writer, and thought her books strove to appear more highbrow than they were; Alice found Jane’s work rather formless, and at times bleatingly autobiographical. Each had had a little more success than they had anticipated, but less, looking back, than they thought they deserved. Mike Nichols had taken an option on Alice’s Triple Sec, but eventually pulled out; some journey man from telly had come in and made it crassly sexual. Not that Alice put it like this; she would say, with a faint smile, that the adaptation had “skimped on the book’s withholdingness,” a phrase some found baffling. Jane, for her part, had been second favourite for the Booker with The Primrose Path, had spent a fortune on a frock, rehearsed her speech with Alice, and then lost out to some fashionable Antipodean.
“Who did you hear it from, just out of interest?”
“What?”
“The Graham Greene story.”
“Oh, that chap . . . you know, that chap who used to publish us both.”
“Jim?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Jane, how can you possibly forget Jim’s name?”
“Well, I just did.” The train blasted through some village halt, too fast to catch the signboard. Why did Alice need to be so stern?
She wasn’t exactly spotless herself. “By the way, did you ever sleep with him?”
Alice frowned slightly. “You know, to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember. Did you?”
“I can’t either. But I suppose if you did, then I probably did as well.”
“Doesn’t that make me sound a bit of a tart?”
“I don’t know. I thought it made me sound more of a tart.”
Jane laughed, to cover the uncertainty.
“Do you think it’s good or bad—the fact that we can’t remember?”
Jane felt back onstage, facing a question she was unprepared for. So she reacted as she usually did there, and referred the matter back to Alice: the team leader, head girl, moral authority.
“What do you think?”
“Good, definitely.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I think it’s best to have a Zen approach to that sort of thing.”
Sometimes, Alice’s poise could make her rather too oblique for ordinary mortals. “Are you saying it’s Buddhist to forget who you slept with?”
“It could be.”
“I thought Buddhism was about things coming round again in different lives?”
“Well, that would explain why we slept with so many pigs.”
They looked at one another companionably. They made a good team. When they were first asked to literary festivals, they soon realised it would be more fun to appear as a double act. Together they had played Hay and Edinburgh, Charleston and King’s Lynn, Dartington and Dublin; even Adelaide and Toronto. They traveled together, saving their publishers the cost of minders.Onstage, they finished one another’s sentences, covered up each other’s gaffes, were satirically punitive with male interviewers who tried to patronise them, and urged signing queues to buy the other one’s books. The British Council had sent them abroad a few times until Jane, less than entirely sober, had made some unambassadorial remarks in Munich.
“What’s the worst thing anyone’s done to you?”
“Are we still talking bed?”
“Mmm.”
“Jane, what a question.”
“Well, we’re bound to be asked it sooner or later. The way everything’s going.”
“I’ve never been raped, if that’s what you’re asking. At least,”
Alice went on reflectively, “not what the courts would call rape.”
“So?”
When Alice didn’t answer, Jane said, “I’ll look at the landscape while you’re thinking.” She gazed, with vague benignity, at trees, fields, hedgerows, livestock. She had always been a town person, and her interest in the countryside was largely pragmatic, a flock of sheep only signifying roast lamb.
“It’s not something . . . obvious. But I’d say it was Simon.”
“Simon as in the novelist or as in the publisher or as in Simon but you don’t know him?”
“Simon the novelist. It was not long after I was divorced. He phoned up and suggested coming round. Said he’d bring a bottle of wine. Which he did. When it became pretty clear that he wasn’t going to get what he’d come for, he corked up the rest of it and took the bottle home.”
“What was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, was it champagne?”
Alice thought for a moment. “It can’t have been champagne because you can’t get the cork back into the bottle. Do you mean was it French or Italian or white or red?”
Jane could tell from the tone that Alice was riled. “I don’t know what I meant actually. That’s bad.”
“What’s bad? Not remembering what you meant?”
“No, putting the cork back in the bottle. Really bad.” She left an ex-actress’s pause. “I suppose it might have been symbolic.”
Alice giggled, and Jane could tell the moment had only been a hiccup. Encouraged, she put on her sitcom voice. “Got to laugh after a bit, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so,” replied Alice. “It’s either that or get religion.”
Jane might have let the moment pass. But Alice’s reference to Buddhism had given her courage, and besides, what are friends for? Even so, she looked out of the window to confess. “Actually, I’ve got it, if you want to know. A little, anyway.”
“Really? Since when? Or rather, why?”
“A year or two. It sort of makes sense of things. Makes it all feel less . . . hopeless.” Jane stroked her handbag, as if it too needed consolation.
Alice was surprised. In her worldview, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn’t much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game.
She considered whether to answer seriously or lightly, and decided on the latter.
“As long as your god allows drinking and smoking and fornication.”
“Oh, he’s very keen on all of those.”
“How about blasphemy? I always think that’s the key test when it comes to a god.”
“He’s indifferent. He sort of rises above it.”
“Then I approve.”
“That’s what he does. Approves.”
“Makes a change. For a god, I mean. Mostly they disapprove.”
“I don’t think I’d want a god who disapproved. Get enough of that in life anyway. Mercy and forgiveness and understanding, that’s what we need. Plus the notion of some overall plan.”
“Did he find you or you find him, if that makes sense as a question?”
“Perfect sense,” replied Jane. “I suppose you could say it was mutual.”
“That sounds . . . comfy.”
“Yes, most people don’t think a god ought to be comfy.”
“What’s that line? Something like: ‘God will forgive me, it’s his job’?”
“Quite right too. I think we’ve overcomplicated God down the ages.”
The sandwich trolley came past, and Jane ordered tea. From her handbag she took a slice of lemon in a plastic box, and a miniature of cognac from the hotel minibar. She liked to play a little unacknowledged game with her publishers: the better her room, the less she pillaged. Last night she had slept well, so contented herself with only the cognac and whisky. But once, in Cheltenham, after a poor audience and a lumpy mattress, she was in such a rage that she’d taken everything: the alcohol, the peanuts, the chocolate, the bottle opener, even the ice tray.
The trolley clattered away. Alice found herself regretting the days of proper restaurant cars with silver service and whitejacketed waiters skilled at delivering vegetables with clasped fork and spoon while outside the landscape lurched. Life, she thought, was mostly about the gradual loss of pleasure. She and Jane had given up sex at about the same time. She was no longer interested in drink; Jane had stopped caring about food—or at least, its quality. Alice gardened; Jane did crosswords, occasionally saving time by filling in answers which couldn’t possibly be right.
Jane was glad Alice never rebuked her for taking a drink earlier than some. She felt a rush of affection for this poised, unmessy friend who always made sure that they caught their train.
“That was a nice young man who interviewed us,” said Alice.
“Properly respectful.”
“He was to you. But he did that thing to me.”
“What thing?”
&n...
Revue de presse :
“I thought that went very well,”
Jane said, patting her handbag as the train doors closed with a pneumatic thump. Their carriage was nearly empty, its air warm and stale.
Alice knew to treat the remark as a question seeking reassurance. “You were certainly on good form.”
“Oh, I had a nice room for a change. It always helps.”
“They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.”
“They usually do,” Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.
“I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?”
“You know, I never worry about that anymore. It fi lls a slot.”
When had they first met? Neither could quite remember. It must have been nearly forty years ago, during that time of interchangeable parties: the same white wine, the same hysterical noise level, the same publishers’ speeches. Perhaps it had been at a PEN do, or when they’d been shortlisted for the same literary prize. Or maybe during that long, drunken summer when Alice had been sleeping with Jane’s agent, for reasons she could no longer recall or, even at the time, justify.
“In a way, it’s a relief we’re not famous.”
“Is it?” Jane looked puzzled, and a little dismayed, as if she thought they were.
“Well, I imagine we’d have readers coming to see us time and again. They’d expect some new anecdotes. I don’t think either of
us has told a new story in years.”
“Actually, we do have people coming to see us again and again. Just fewer than . . . if we were famous. Anyway, I think they like hearing the same stories. When we’re onstage we’re not literature, we’re sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.”
“Like your Graham Greene story.”
“I think of that as a bit more than a . . . catchphrase, Alice.”
“Don’t prickle, dear. It doesn’t suit.” Alice couldn’t help noticing the sheen of sweat on her friend’s face. All from the effort of getting from taxi to platform, then platform to train. And why did women carrying rather more poundage than was wise think floral prints were the answer? Bravado rarely worked with clothes, in Alice’s opinion—at least, after a certain age.
When they had become friends, both were freshly married and freshly published. They had watched over each other’s children,
sympathised through divorces, recommended each other’s books as Christmas reading. Each privately liked the other’s work a little less than they said, but then, they also liked everyone else’s work a little less than they said, so hypocrisy didn’t come into it.
Jane was embarrassed when Alice referred to herself as an artist rather than a writer, and thought her books strove to appear more highbrow than they were; Alice found Jane’s work rather formless, and at times bleatingly autobiographical. Each had had a little more success than they had anticipated, but less, looking back, than they thought they deserved. Mike Nichols had taken an option on Alice’s Triple Sec, but eventually pulled out; some journey man from telly had come in and made it crassly sexual. Not that Alice put it like this; she would say, with a faint smile, that the adaptation had “skimped on the book’s withholdingness,” a phrase some found baffling. Jane, for her part, had been second favourite for the Booker with The Primrose Path, had spent a fortune on a frock, rehearsed her speech with Alice, and then lost out to some fashionable Antipodean.
“Who did you hear it from, just out of interest?”
“What?”
“The Graham Greene story.”
“Oh, that chap . . . you know, that chap who used to publish us both.”
“Jim?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Jane, how can you possibly forget Jim’s name?”
“Well, I just did.” The train blasted through some village halt, too fast to catch the signboard. Why did Alice need to be so stern?
She wasn’t exactly spotless herself. “By the way, did you ever sleep with him?”
Alice frowned slightly. “You know, to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember. Did you?”
“I can’t either. But I suppose if you did, then I probably did as well.”
“Doesn’t that make me sound a bit of a tart?”
“I don’t know. I thought it made me sound more of a tart.”
Jane laughed, to cover the uncertainty.
“Do you think it’s good or bad—the fact that we can’t remember?”
Jane felt back onstage, facing a question she was unprepared for. So she reacted as she usually did there, and referred the matter back to Alice: the team leader, head girl, moral authority.
“What do you think?”
“Good, definitely.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I think it’s best to have a Zen approach to that sort of thing.”
Sometimes, Alice’s poise could make her rather too oblique for ordinary mortals. “Are you saying it’s Buddhist to forget who you slept with?”
“It could be.”
“I thought Buddhism was about things coming round again in different lives?”
“Well, that would explain why we slept with so many pigs.”
They looked at one another companionably. They made a good team. When they were first asked to literary festivals, they soon realised it would be more fun to appear as a double act. Together they had played Hay and Edinburgh, Charleston and King’s Lynn, Dartington and Dublin; even Adelaide and Toronto. They traveled together, saving their publishers the cost of minders.Onstage, they finished one another’s sentences, covered up each other’s gaffes, were satirically punitive with male interviewers who tried to patronise them, and urged signing queues to buy the other one’s books. The British Council had sent them abroad a few times until Jane, less than entirely sober, had made some unambassadorial remarks in Munich.
“What’s the worst thing anyone’s done to you?”
“Are we still talking bed?”
“Mmm.”
“Jane, what a question.”
“Well, we’re bound to be asked it sooner or later. The way everything’s going.”
“I’ve never been raped, if that’s what you’re asking. At least,”
Alice went on reflectively, “not what the courts would call rape.”
“So?”
When Alice didn’t answer, Jane said, “I’ll look at the landscape while you’re thinking.” She gazed, with vague benignity, at trees, fields, hedgerows, livestock. She had always been a town person, and her interest in the countryside was largely pragmatic, a flock of sheep only signifying roast lamb.
“It’s not something . . . obvious. But I’d say it was Simon.”
“Simon as in the novelist or as in the publisher or as in Simon but you don’t know him?”
“Simon the novelist. It was not long after I was divorced. He phoned up and suggested coming round. Said he’d bring a bottle of wine. Which he did. When it became pretty clear that he wasn’t going to get what he’d come for, he corked up the rest of it and took the bottle home.”
“What was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, was it champagne?”
Alice thought for a moment. “It can’t have been champagne because you can’t get the cork back into the bottle. Do you mean was it French or Italian or white or red?”
Jane could tell from the tone that Alice was riled. “I don’t know what I meant actually. That’s bad.”
“What’s bad? Not remembering what you meant?”
“No, putting the cork back in the bottle. Really bad.” She left an ex-actress’s pause. “I suppose it might have been symbolic.”
Alice giggled, and Jane could tell the moment had only been a hiccup. Encouraged, she put on her sitcom voice. “Got to laugh after a bit, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so,” replied Alice. “It’s either that or get religion.”
Jane might have let the moment pass. But Alice’s reference to Buddhism had given her courage, and besides, what are friends for? Even so, she looked out of the window to confess. “Actually, I’ve got it, if you want to know. A little, anyway.”
“Really? Since when? Or rather, why?”
“A year or two. It sort of makes sense of things. Makes it all feel less . . . hopeless.” Jane stroked her handbag, as if it too needed consolation.
Alice was surprised. In her worldview, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn’t much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game.
She considered whether to answer seriously or lightly, and decided on the latter.
“As long as your god allows drinking and smoking and fornication.”
“Oh, he’s very keen on all of those.”
“How about blasphemy? I always think that’s the key test when it comes to a god.”
“He’s indifferent. He sort of rises above it.”
“Then I approve.”
“That’s what he does. Approves.”
“Makes a change. For a god, I mean. Mostly they disapprove.”
“I don’t think I’d want a god who disapproved. Get enough of that in life anyway. Mercy and forgiveness and understanding, that’s what we need. Plus the notion of some overall plan.”
“Did he find you or you find him, if that makes sense as a question?”
“Perfect sense,” replied Jane. “I suppose you could say it was mutual.”
“That sounds . . . comfy.”
“Yes, most people don’t think a god ought to be comfy.”
“What’s that line? Something like: ‘God will forgive me, it’s his job’?”
“Quite right too. I think we’ve overcomplicated God down the ages.”
The sandwich trolley came past, and Jane ordered tea. From her handbag she took a slice of lemon in a plastic box, and a miniature of cognac from the hotel minibar. She liked to play a little unacknowledged game with her publishers: the better her room, the less she pillaged. Last night she had slept well, so contented herself with only the cognac and whisky. But once, in Cheltenham, after a poor audience and a lumpy mattress, she was in such a rage that she’d taken everything: the alcohol, the peanuts, the chocolate, the bottle opener, even the ice tray.
The trolley clattered away. Alice found herself regretting the days of proper restaurant cars with silver service and whitejacketed waiters skilled at delivering vegetables with clasped fork and spoon while outside the landscape lurched. Life, she thought, was mostly about the gradual loss of pleasure. She and Jane had given up sex at about the same time. She was no longer interested in drink; Jane had stopped caring about food—or at least, its quality. Alice gardened; Jane did crosswords, occasionally saving time by filling in answers which couldn’t possibly be right.
Jane was glad Alice never rebuked her for taking a drink earlier than some. She felt a rush of affection for this poised, unmessy friend who always made sure that they caught their train.
“That was a nice young man who interviewed us,” said Alice.
“Properly respectful.”
“He was to you. But he did that thing to me.”
“What thing?”
&n...
“Marvelously inventive . . . Pulse sneaks up on you, and by the end, you cannot help but be moved. These are stories that illuminate characters not through dramatic epiphanies but real, small turns in the road and moments of change. [Barnes’s] prose is rich without being showy; he has a precision and economy of language that at times recalls William Trevor. Above all, Pulse shows a contemporary master working at the height of his ability.” —Jill Owens, The Oregonian
“Of our leading novelists, Julian Barnes has one of the richest historical imaginations . . . His main business here is the present, particularly that portion of it that includes bright, relentlessly articulate people encountering the first pangs of aging and its discontents . . . His characters are never tragic. They are inhabitants of a gray-scale world, plugging on through life chastened by the experiences Barnes recounts, but not devastated by them. That may be why we identify with them so easily, so instructively.” —Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times
“Sharply elegant, piercing investigations of relationships.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“Filled with gems . . . beautiful, elegiac tales about how marriages endure or change over time . . . A testament to Mr. Barnes’s full panoply of talents . . . [He’s a] confident literary decathlete, proficient at old-fashioned storytelling, dialogue-driven portraiture, postmodern collage, political allegory and farce, [and the] ability to create narratives with both surface brio and finely calibrated philosophical subtexts.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Graceful . . . Keenly funny . . . Barnes’ tales are shrewd, piquant, and moving [and] his gift for deft, acerbic dialogue is finely honed.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Companionship—the search for, the basking in, and the loss of—binds Barnes’s first-rate collection . . . Dryly witty [and] poignant.” —Publishers Weekly, starred
“Elegance and versatility—familiar Barnes strengths [that] define this latest story collection . . . . Another impressive addition to an already impressive oeuvre.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred
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- ÉditeurRandom House Canada
- Date d'édition2011
- ISBN 10 0307359603
- ISBN 13 9780307359605
- ReliureRelié
- Nombre de pages256
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Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : Fine. Etat de la jaquette : Fine. First Canadian Edition. | Very fine in VF dustjacket; REVIEW COPY with slip and publicity sheet laid in. N° de réf. du vendeur 008707
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