Free Roger's Version by John Updike Page B

three-deckers painted in bohemian colors such as lavender and lemon housed a boutique, a health-food store, and, most venturesomely, a shop called A DULT P ASTRIES , which advertised in the window Erotic Cakes and Droll Candies . What shapes this drollery might take I felt Dale’s mind but lightly play with. The shape and mucilaginous infolded structure of our wrinkly human genitals did not, evidently, amid many phenomena that did, strike him as an argument for God’s existence. I pictured his waxy face, breaking out in a masturbator’s pimples. I felt superior to him, being sexually healthy ever since Esther took over from ungainly, barren Lillian. My second wife when unmarried had been a flexible marvel in bed, her underparts in the sunlight of our illicit afternoons fed to my eyes like tidbits of rosy marzipan.
    After its jocular grab at prosperity, Sumner Boulevardslumped downhill and its pedestrians took on a refugee desperation of appearance. On one curb paused an addled man so fat he looked like clothes hung out to air, swollen on the line by wind. In passing close to him I saw the skin of his enormous and preoccupied face to be afflicted with some foul eczema, layered like peeling wallpaper. On this same corner a building, its lower floor reshingled in stylishly irregular shades, had survived a fire in its top floors, which had left charred window frames empty of sashes; but the bar downstairs continued open, and sounds from within—the synthetic concussions of a video game, a muted, mixed-sex laughter—indicated a thriving business, well before the Happy Hour though it was. The view down the thoroughfare now included steel girders blotchily painted in anti-rust orange: a lead-in ramp to one of the bridges that cross the river, in whose polluted eddies, I now had reason to suspect, fish awaited local fishermen.
    Prospect Street. Named for a view long since eclipsed. Here I turned, for Verna’s telephone-book address was on this prospectless street, a few blocks farther along. Some of the houses still had pretensions to being homes, with mowed little front lawns and painted religious statuary (the Virgin’s robe skyey blue, the Baby’s face clayey beige) and flower beds still bright with the round hot button-heads of red and yellow mums. Most of the houses had given up pretensions: the yards were weedy to the height of a man’s knees, and bottles and cans had been tossed into them as if into a repository. The façades were unpainted even where curtains or a tended flower box at an upstairs window indicated habitation. The owners had slipped away, whether through misfortune or an accountant’s unscrupulous calculations, leaving the buildings on their own, like mumbling mental patients turned out on the street. Some had progressed deeper into dilapidation, andwere plainly abandoned and no doubt trashed within, their doors and windows plywooded over though there must be back doors and basement windows whereby drug addicts and the homeless could force access. Even the trees here, weed ailanthus between the houses and a few spindly locusts staked along the curb, looked frightened, their lower branches broken and their bark aimlessly slashed.
    I walked along, and in five minutes came to the project where Verna lived. I had driven past here perhaps a dozen times in the ten years we have lived in this city. Four blocks of run-down working-class neighborhood had been demolished in the JFK era to make a yellow-brick Camelot of low-cost housing. The architectural rigor of the interlocked complexes—U-shapes set back to back, each U enclosing a parking lot or a playground for the young or a small green space with benches for the elderly—had remained, but the sanitary vision of the planners had in many details surrendered to human erosion. Rude paths had been worn in shortcuts across sweeps of grass; hedges had been battered and benches hacked; some basketball stanchions had been bent to the ground as if by malicious