Free Roger's Version by John Updike

elemental sort glory would have been in the air: the very width of this crass commercial avenue, and some lots where buildings had been torn down, flooded the eyes with light. Above the many intervening flat roofs and weathered chimney pots, against the backdrop of tormented clouds, the silver and emerald hems stitched at the tops of skyscrapers gleamed, marking the city’s steely heart across the river.
    A plumbing-supply store, advertising not Kohler but Crane fixtures, held in its dusty window a tree of toilet seats, padded or plain, white or pastel, and the lowest of them showing a pattern of nude Japanese women, drawn, disappointingly, without pubic hair or nipples. As the avenue gradually slanted downward toward the river, its tone worsened, its liveliness increased. Kung-Fu. Locks: Master Protection. Santo Cristo Center. Todo Para Casa. The Irish and Italians in this section had been supplanted by Portuguese and Hispanics, who now were yielding to Vietnamese, who were taking over the little food marts and had opened up several restaurants offering their spicy, insinuating cuisine. The Vietnamese women were no bigger than children, and the men had unlikable squarish heads on slender necks, and snaky wisps of mustache growing out above the corners of their mouths, and black hair of a dullness not quite Chinese or Japanese or Indian. We had dabbled overseas and in extracting ourselves had pulled up these immigrants like paint on a stirring stick. There was something about them distasteful and erotic, these remnants of an old adventure, yet something grand also in the globalmixingness, the living anthropology of so many tints of skin jostling here, on this tough thoroughfare, the world’s people partaking of and amplifying the energy of our American shopfronts and tenements, our cinder yards and body shops. Here came a couple, unmarried no doubt but indubitably matched: a tall pale black man and a Latino girl friend almost his coffee color, exactly his height, both of them in tight long-legged jeans and short black leather jackets, both with hair teased into tall oiled crests and wearing tiny earrings, kicking along in stride, one, two, arms locked, a stirring sight. Election Day was at hand and red-white-and-blue stickers were everywhere, on mailboxes and car bumpers and the plywood sheets closing off abandoned doorways and shattered windows. An old lady was trundling along a supermarket cart loaded with what seemed to be her possessions, including an ivory plastic radio; with her pink face and blue crocheted cap and raw white sneakers, she seemed a huge baby, toddling along. I was taking this walk in the steps of another and I felt his spirit invading mine, that greedy blind bliss of youth, when the world appears to be arranged by our impulses and full of convenient omens, of encouraging signs. A gaunt drunk in a Russian-style cap with fur earflaps muttered resentfully as I went by, at the alien innocence in my face and the blunt joy younger than my years.
    The blocks here were broken into narrow old-fashioned shops. A flower shop, a beauty parlor, a laundromat, and a store proclaiming B AIT & T ACKLE , the window full of lures and hooks that could not be cast into water for many miles around. In wobbly red letters a haberdasher was G OING O UT OF B USINESS . A small dress shop on the corner advertised Halloween Costumes for Playful Adults: the faces of animals—pigs, a tusked boar, a snarling wolf—lay amid lingerie and lace underwearlike slabs of meat on chips of shining ice. L ARGE E GGS— 49¢ a Dozen! With Any, $10 Purchase 1 Doz Per Customer . The poverty all about me was being appealed to with the warning that dozens and dozens of eggs could not be appropriated by this come-on scheme. M E G A B U C K S You Could Be Our Next Millionaire! And yet those that did win, I had noticed, in their newspaper interviews seemed bewildered by the sudden burden of money, and some hesitated for days before claiming the loot,