Issues → January/February 2009 → Features →
John Updike's 'The Wallet'
(page 3 of 5)
The cash was the least of it; it was the other things -- the irreplaceable mementos, the credit cards that were infinitely tedious to replace -- whose disappearance he could not endure, could not encompass. He methodically, yet with that frantic undercurrent which defeats method searched the large house, checking the bathroom floors, the creases behind sofa cushions, the drawers of his desk, the spaces above the books in the library. Fulham knew that on rare occasions, semi-consciously, he would find the wallet's bulk bothersome and take it from his pocket to set it on a convenient surface. He went over the quiet events of the evening before as best he could fish them from his memory's gray depths: dinner, a walk out into the garden to admire the asters and the first turning leaves, a little time spent in the library leafing through the latest issue of Barron's, a half hour watching with Diane a rerun of an old movie, itself a remake, Red Shoes, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.The production numbers lacked grandeur on the little screen and the plot spun painfully between them. He had forgotten how high Astaire's voice was, how slight. And Charisse, whom he had also once loved, looked stiff and uneasy under the burden of her fake Russian accent. Fulham had gone to bed ahead of his wife, undressing, as best he could remember, in his usual pattern, and reading himself into nodding with an Agatha Christie he may have read decades before; faint sensations deja vu teased the edges of his dissolving consciousness as Poirot paced off precise distances in the murder-stricken drawing room.
In the morning he recalled that there had been, between the times in the library and the television room, a call from his daughter, saying they were bringing the children over early in the morning so she and Rob could drive to New Haven for a football game and an overnight at another couple's. Fulham went to the spot where he had answered the call, a nook of many small shelves just off the kitchen. Suddenly inspired, he deduced that here, amid the leaning cookbooks and rarely used hors d'oeuvre plates was where his wallet had to be; he saw it -- fat, brown, with corners rubbed pale and the shape of a credit card denting the leather as sometimes a woman's underpants show in shallow relief through a very tight dress -- and emitted a small crow of triumph before realizing that what he took for the wallet was an old out-of-date address book that Diane had not bothered to throwaway. His hallucination rattled him and doubled the fury with which he searched the house room by room, corner by corner. The wallet had ceased to exist.
"It's been stolen," he told his wife at lunch.
Diane had had a lovely patrician face, and when she lifted her chin and thus pulled smooth the loose flesh beneath, it was still handsome, her abundant hair so utterly white as to seem an expensively sought-after effect. "How could it have been?"
"Easy. The house is big enough, anybody could slip in and out in a minute without our knowing. Anyway, it's not up to me to figure out how to do it, it's up to them. And they've done it. The bastards have done it, and I'm going to have to cancel every goddam credit card."
She looked at him coolly, giving him her full attention for once, and said, "I've never seen you like this."
"How am I?"
"You're wild."
"It was my wallet. Everything is in it. Everything. Without that wallet, I'm nothing." His tongue had outraced his brain, but once he said it he realized this to be true: without the wallet he was a phantom, living in a house without walls, worse than a caveman open to the wind and saber-toothed tigers. "And I know why they took it," he went on. "To get the bank card. With that bank card they can now deposit and draw on that check they stole earlier."
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