Nobody has done more to chart American life through fiction over the last half-century than John Updike. As well as producing the acclaimed Rabbit series - Penguin published Rabbit, Run way back in 1964 - Updike is also a master of the short story. Three Trips draws together a trio of stories that reflect the excitement of adventure in fresh terrains, and show exactly why Updike is one of the great men of American letters.
Ingrid was sitting at the bar in a backwards silver dress, high in the front and buckled at the back. She invited herself to sit at his table during dinner; her white arms, pinched pink by the sun, shared in the triumphant glaze of the tablecloth, the glowing red lamp. They discussed religion. Clem had been raised as a Methodist, she as a Lutheran. In her father's house, north of Stockholm, there had been a guest room held ready against the arrival of Jesus Christ. Not quite seriously, it had been a custom, and yet . She supposed religion had bred into her a certain expectancy. Into him, he responded, groping, peering with difficulty into that glittering blank area which in other people, he imagined, was the warm cave of self - into him the Methodist religion had bred a certain compulsive neatness, a dislike of litter. It was a disappointing answer, even after he had explained the word "litter". Reckless on his third pre-dinner drink, he advanced the theory that he was a royal tomb, once crammed with treasure, that had been robbed. Her white hand moved an inch toward him on the tablecloth, intelligent as a bat, and he began to cry. The tears felt genuine to him, but she said, "Stop acting."
He told her that a distressing thing had just happened to him.
She said, "That is your flaw; you are too self-conscious. You are always in costume, acting. You must always be beautiful." She was so intent on delivering this sermon that only as an afterthought did she ask him what had been the distressing thing.
He found he couldn't tell her; it was too intimate, and his own part in provoking it had been, he felt, unspeakably shameful. The tailor's homosexual advance had been, like the child's feigning a crippled arm, evoked by his money, his torturing innocence. He said, "Nothing. I've been sleeping badly and don't make sense. Ingrid: have some more wine." His palms were sweating from the effort of producing her name.
After dinner, though fatigue was making his entire body shudder and itch, she asked him to take her into the lounge, where a three-piece band from Alexandria was playing dance music. The English couples waltzed. Gwenn, the young wife, Frugged with one of the German boys. The green-eyed Egyptian woman danced with the purser. Egon, the German boy who knew some English, came and, with a curt bow and a curious hard stare at Clem, invited Ingrid. She danced, Clem observed, very close, in the manner of one who, puritanically raised, thinks of it only as a substitute from intercourse. After many numbers, she was returned to him unmarred, still silver, cool, and faintly admonitory. Downstairs, in the corridor where the cabin doors were a few steps apart, she asked him, her expression watchful and stern, if he would sleep better tonight.
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