Free Museums and Women by John Updike Page B

didn’t matter, because he had the license-plate numbers.
    It was a strange story, but he pulled from a pocket the little pad upon which he had firmly written down two long numbers.Ray wondered how the man had focused his eyes on those speeding, shuttling vehicles, and why in Ray’s own memory the bus had been ahead of the sedan, and why he had not seen the third car, the yellow convertible. The rest of the corner, too, distrusted the driver’s story, and, amid polite comments and expressions of interest, slowly closed against him, isolating him again. Undiscouraged, like an encyclopedia salesman turned from the door, the driver walked briskly away, toward his crippled car and, farther down the street, an approaching blue twinkle.
    The police car pulled up. They all knew the cops that emerged; one was a wife-beater, and the other had been a high-school quarterback. The baby’s mother came out of her house and stood so close that Ray, looking down, saw cerise satin slippers, with bunny-tail pompoms, next to his own knobby bare feet. The erotic short-circuit nearly knocked him over.
    It was as when bombs fall, baring swaths of wallpaper and plaster, unexpected bathroom tiles, dangling fixtures. The two policemen softly interviewed the driver, the people at the corner watched from a safe distance and kept their versions to themselves, the gentle event of the rain ceased, the law closed its notebook, the elm sighed, the little crowd reluctantly broke up and returned to their houses. Later, some heard, but only the streetlamp saw, the tow truck come and take the sedan away. Overhead, the clouds paled and pulled apart, revealing stars. The driver’s story had been strange, but no stranger, to the people who live here, than the truth that the corner is one among many on the map of the town, and the town is a dot on the map of the state, and the state a mere patch on the globe, and the globe invisible from any of the stars overhead.

The Witnesses
    F RED P ROUTY , I was told yesterday, is dead—dead, as I imagine it, of cigarettes, confusion, and conscience, though none of these was the
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my informant named. He died on the West Coast, thousands of miles from both his ex-wives and all his sad expensive children. I pictured him lying in a highly clean hospital bed, smothering in debt, interlaced with tubular machinery, overlooking a sprawling colorless spireless landscape worlds removed from the green and pointed East that had formed him. Though we had come from the same town (New Haven) and the same schools (Hotchkiss, Yale) and the same background (our grandfathers had been ministers and our fathers lawyers), Fred and I never were very close. We belonged to a generation that expressed affection through shades of reserve. The war, perhaps, had made us conservative and cautious; our task had been to bring a society across a chasm and set it down safely on the other side, unchanged. That it changed later was not our affair. After the war Fred had gone into advertising, and I into securities. For a decade, we sharedManhattan and intermittent meals. The last time I had him in my home, there had been a strangeness and, worse, a tactlessness for which I suppose I never quite forgave him. It was the high noon of the Eisenhower era, just before Fred’s first divorce. He called me at work and invited himself to our apartment for a drink, and asked, surprisingly, if he might bring a friend.
    Jeanne and I had the West Thirteenth Street place then. Of our many apartments, I remember it most fondly. The front windows looked across the street into an elementary school, and the back windows, across some untended yards crammed with trees of heaven, into a mysterious factory. Whatever the factory made, the process entailed great shimmering ribbons and spinning reels of color being manipulated like giant harps by Negro men and Puerto Rican women. Rising in the morning, we could see them at work, and, eating breakfast in the front room, we looked