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John Updike's 'The Wallet'

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(page 5 of 5)

He awoke Saturday morning with a soreness in his stomach, a chafing hairball of vague anxiety that clarified into the conscious thought, I am a man without a wallet. The arrival of the check had lessened his fears of criminal conspiracy but isolated the wallet's loss upon a higher plane, where it merged with landscapes and faces that had once belonged to his life and would never be seen again, melted into the void like the sad, sticky, oddly plausible stuff of dreams. Shame had replaced rage as his prime sensation; he had no wish to leave the house or go to his makeshift office or face the grandchildren who, downstairs in the hall, were noisily arriving. His daughter's and his wife's voices twined in a brief music ended by the slam of the front door and high heels briskly retreating down the walk. The children, an eleven-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl, spent the morning gorging on television, and at lunchtime little Tad handed Fulham his wallet. He said. "Did you want this, Grandpa? It was all folded up in the blanket."

His fat, worn wallet. His own. "Oh, dear," Diane said, putting her hand to her cheek in a choreographic gesture that seemed to Fulham to parody dismay. "When Red Shoes ended I tidied up and must have folded your wallet in without realizing it. Remember, we put the blanket over our laps because of the draft?"

That made sense. The nights were getting cooler. Now Fulham recovered a dim memory of being annoyed, on the hard Windsor settee, by the lump in his back pocket. He must have removed it while gazing at Cyd Charisse. As if in another scene from the movie he saw himself, close up, hold the wallet in his hand, where it evaporated like a snowflake.

"Grandpa has lots of wallets," Ted's little sister, Dorothea , chimed in. "He doesn't care."

"Oh now, that's not quite true," Fulham told her, squeezing the beloved bent book of leather between his two palms and feeling very grandpaternal, fragile and wise and ready to die.