The Two Janets
I’M NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who thinks you have to read a book to get something out of it. You can learn a lot about a book by picking it up, turning it over, rubbing the cover, riffling the pages open and shut. Especially if it’s been read enough times before, it’ll speak to you.
This is why I like to hang around used bookstores on my lunch hour. I was at the outdoor bookstall on the west side of Union Square, the one that opens out of huge crates, when my mother called. It is tempting here to claim to remember that I was looking at an old paperback of, say, Rabbit Run, but actually it was Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod, the cover telling the whole story through the hairdos.
The pay phone on the corner nearest Sixteenth Street was ringing and wouldn’t stop. Finally, I picked it up and said, “Hello? Mother?”
“Janet? Is that you?” My mother has this uncanny, really, ability to call on pay phones and get me. She does it about once a month.
Well, of course it was me: Otherwise, would I have answered, “Mother”? “Did you have trouble finding me?” I asked.
“If you only knew. I called three phones, and the last two you wouldn’t believe.” It doesn’t always work.
“So how’s everything?” I asked. It came out “everthang.” My accent, which I have managed to moderate, always reemerges when I talk with anybody from home.
“Fine.” She told me about Alan, my ex-fiancé, and Janet, my best friend. They used to call us the Two Janets. Mother keeps up with my old high school friends, most of whom are, of course, still in Owensboro. Then she said, “Guess what. John Updike just moved to Owensboro.”
“John Updike?”
“The writer. Rabbit Run? It was about a week ago. He bought a house out on Maple Drive, across from the hospital there.”
“This was in the paper?”
“No, of course not. I’m sure he wants his privacy. I heard it from Elizabeth Dorsey, your old music teacher. Her oldest daughter, Mary Beth, is married to Sweeney Kost Junior who sells real estate with that new group out on Leitchfield Road. She called to tell me because she thought you might be interested.”
It is well-known that I have an interest in literature. I came to New York to get a job in publishing. My roommate already has one at S&S (Simon and Schuster) and I called her before I went back to work. She doesn’t go to lunch until two. She hadn’t heard anything about John Updike moving to Owensboro, but she checked PW (Publishers Weekly) and found an item saying that John Updike had sold his house in Massachusetts and moved to a small Midwestern city.
That bothered me. Owensboro sits right across the river from Indiana, but it’s still the South, not the Midwest. The northernmost statue to Confederate heroes sits on the courthouse lawn. I’m not touchy about that stuff but some people are. Then I thought that if you just looked at a map, as they might have done fact-checking at the PW office, or as Updike himself might have done, looking for a new place to live, you might think Owensboro was in the Midwest since it’s much closer to St. Louis than to Atlanta. Then I thought, maybe Updike was just saying “Midwest” to throw people off. Maybe he was, like Salinger, trying to get away from the world. Then I thought, maybe he didn’t move to Owensboro at all, and the whole thing was just a mistake, a coincidence, a wild flight of fancy. The more I thought about this theory, the better I liked it. “Small city in the Midwest” could mean Iowa City, where a well-known writer’s workshop is held; or any one of a hundred college towns like Crawfordsville, Indiana (Wabash); Gambier, Ohio (Kenyon); or Yellow Springs, Ohio (Antioch). Or even Indianapolis or Cincinnati. To a New Yorker, and all writers, even when they live in Massachusetts, are New Yorkers (in a way) Indianapolis and Cincinnati are small cities. Or if you wanted to get really close to home there is Evansville, Indiana, at 130,500 definitely a “small city” (Owensboro at 52,000 is only barely a city) and one that might even attract a writer like John Updike.
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END OF SAMPLE
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