[After Updike discovers he'll have to have a surgery postponed.]
"How frustrating. You must be..."
"Yes, I'm very sad," he said, and looked - as he would continue to look for the next two hours - like a man barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. This generalized twinkliness has been much remarked. It is almost the demure expression a child has when gratified to the point of outright embarrassment--but with an extra positive charge, flowing from hyperactive senses.
I had coffee, while Updike bemusedly dithered over the half-dozen kinds of tea on offer.
"The ordeal of choice," I said. "Have you read Saul Bellow's new novel?" I went on (The novel was MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK.)"He says that in the East the ordeal is one of privation, in the west one of choice."
"Yes, I keep meaning to get it. There's just something about forking out the twenty bucks. Why don't I carry that?" He said, and smoothly commandeered the trembling tray. The gesture was protective, courteous, very able, above all. "So the OBSERVER is paying for my tea. How nice."
In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascinations with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity.
