Role Models -

I closed my eyes, and I waited for morning. End of text.

The room was dark. The house was silent. My wife was breathing softly beside me. And I lay there, listening to the sound of her breath, and I thought about the dream. I thought about the field of wildflowers, and the sun, and the woman with her hand outstretched. And I knew that I would never see her again. I knew that she was gone, that she had never been there at all, that she was just a story I had told myself in the dark. And I knew that this was the truth. This was the only truth there was.

“I asked her what she meant by ‘innocence.’ She looked at me for a long time, and then she said, ‘Innocence is the belief that something is true because you want it to be true. It is the belief that the world is good because you are good. It is the belief that the people you love will never hurt you, and that the people you hate will never win. It is a beautiful belief, and it is always wrong.’” Role Models

And then I went inside, and I went to bed, and I fell asleep. And I dreamed that I was young again, and that I was standing in a field of wildflowers, and that the sun was warm on my face, and that a woman was walking toward me, a woman I had never seen before, and she was smiling, and she was holding out her hand. And I reached out to take it, and then I woke up.

“She was a large woman,” he said, “with a large head and large hands. She wore a brown corduroy suit and a brown felt hat, and she sat in a large armchair, and she talked. She talked about the war, the First World War, which she had lived through, and about the way the young men had come back from it, changed. She said they had lost their innocence, and that this loss was the only thing that mattered, the only thing worth writing about. She said that Hemingway had lost his innocence, but that he had found a way to write about it that was like a clean, white line on a blank page. She said that Fitzgerald had lost his innocence, but that he had found a way to write about it that was like a beautiful, sad party that went on too long. She said that she herself had never lost her innocence, because she had never had any to lose. She said that innocence was a luxury of the young, and that she had never been young.” I closed my eyes, and I waited for morning

The poet stopped again, and this time he did not go on. He looked into his glass, as if the wine held a vision, and then he looked up and said, “I have spent my entire life trying to get that innocence back. And I have failed.”

“That was a wonderful story,” I said. The house was silent

The poet paused, and took a sip of his wine. He looked around the room, and his eyes met mine. I smiled, and he smiled back, a small, tired smile. Then he went on.

“What’s that?”

Here is the full text of the short story by the American author John Updike (first published in The Atlantic Monthly , 1994, and later included in his collection The Afterlife and Other Stories ). Role Models By John Updike

He looked at me, and his eyes were cold. “It wasn’t a story,” he said. “It was the truth.”