Editor’s Note: Roger Warner is the author of four nonfiction books, including Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos. He is currently at work on a nonfiction book called Otherworld: How a CIA Man and a Tribe of Shamans Changed Each Other’s Destinies.

My friend Kim, a bearded writer-turned-carpenter and a regular in [the late] John Updike’s poker group, went with me to Updike’s funeral. "I wonder how many of his women will be there," he remarked, as we walked up the steps of the church. "You know, the ones who will be thinking to themselves, ‘John was on top of my all-time lovers list,’ or ‘He really wasn’t that good in the sack,’ or …"

"Shhh! Be polite!"

The Episcopal church in Beverly Farms, MA, has a stolid stone exterior; stained-glass windows; and a dark, high-vaulted wood ceiling supported by scissor beams. The pews were filled with well-dressed upper crustaceans, of the local and imported varieties. Of Updike’s women, wife No. 1, the painter, who is lovely and well liked in the community, sat a few rows back, while wife No. 2, every hair in place, sat in the front, presiding.

"Kind of hard to tell, actually," muttered Kim, craning his head around. He exchanged introductions with the bearded man next to him in the pew. The organist struck the opening chord, and the service began. The pace was brisk, the hymns familiar. No eulogy. It could have been anybody’s funeral.

North of Boston, on Massachusetts’s North Shore, where John Updike lived for more than 50 years, he will be remembered not so much for his books — we couldn’t read them as fast as he could write them — as for his social effect. He was an undercover man — a spy, as he sometimes called himself. A world-class writer and a sexual adventurer who chose to camouflage himself among bland bourgeois suburban WASPs, perhaps because it was so easy to get away with. His breakthrough book, Couples, about marriage and infidelity, was published decades ago but there are still people talking about who did what to whom. In Essex County, MA, some women in their 70s pretend they weren’t part of the Couples scene, while others who weren’t part of it wished they had been, because their lives have been so uneventful.

The reception after the service offered slightly better clues to Updike’s enormous range. Here was David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker; and there was "Charlie Tutu," the cobbler from Ipswich, MA, another member of the poker group — who was wearing a pair of the leather clogs he sells at his shoe store. Updike seems to have liked everybody equally, and if he didn’t, it was hard to tell, because his genial bonhomie was nearly impossible to X-ray. A former neighbor of Updike’s was at the reception, a part of the old Couples scene. He agreed to talk freely so long as his real name wasn’t used, to protect the guilty, a category in which he put himself.