Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

If you’ll marry me . They had cut a deal. They were a team, a pair of scissors. Snip here, snip there. The second thread was mine, a sensitive loose end.

The world had changed complexion; in an instant, the intoxicating spring air had become a wet hot washrag pressed against my face — the pressure of the actual, the mortal, the numinously serious. I didn’t know what to say, there with her perfection, so black and white, so anxious and unsmiling, before me. She spoke again, her eyes wider, as if to take into accounting some new margin to me. “Did I do the wrong thing? I thought we had agreed.”

We had agreed we were in love, lovely, too lovely ever to lose each other. I just wasn’t quite ready for the agreement’s translation into practical terms, into legal action involving realtors, judges, mellifluous lawyers, abandoned children. Yet I had no heart to say so, no heart but to say comfortingly, she being the child in sight, “No, that was right. It sounds as though you were very honest and brave.”

She tensely, tersely nodded, tucking that admitted fact away. I was giving myself away by inches.

“Where is Brent now?”

“He’s at church,” Genevieve answered. “The communion line was huge, and I said I’ll walk home to get the lamb roast in. They’ll probably swing by the drugstore for the paper.”

She glanced at me for a response, but I was silently smiling with an absurd élan, the fruit of too many Hollywood movies viewed in adolescence. When in crisis, double the cool. Cary, Gary, Alan, Errol. Meanwhile my stomach seemed to be swallowing me through an enormous trapdoor.

“I was going to call you tomorrow at your office. He said he wouldn’t move out until school was over. We won’t tell the girls until then so as not to ruin their grades. So you have until June to tell Norma.”

My part was all written; I was a character in their play. “I didn’t know Brent went to church,” I said.

“Only once a year, as a favor to me and the girls.”

“He loves you.”

“He says so.” A flicker of something — in the air, on my face — brought the forward momentum of her smoothly working brain to a small halt. “Do you want to back out?” she asked, in a voice moved up a notch in volume, for clarity. “You may, Alf.” Her voice dipped into tenderness, just as a gauzy cloud overhead dimmed the white sunshine of this day that had left winter behind. “You mustn’t do what feels wrong to you.”

“ You and I feel right,” I tried weakly to explain. “It’s just that it — ”

“It’s too much,” she finished for me. “It is a lot. I think I’ll go ahead with my side in any case; he and I have gone too far.”

He and I — the phrase made my blood fizz with jealousy. And the thought of Genevieve’s freeing herself to roam the Ford era’s sexual jungle was intolerable, in the totally eclipsing way that the thought of death is. I would have this woman if it killed me, I resolved. And no matter who else it killed. “You and he are going to keep living together till June?” I asked.

She blinked; her lashes on a Sunday morning were not so long and clotted as in party makeup. Each lash was distinct, giving her a starry-eyed look. “That was his proposal,” she said.

“You two are going to keep fucking?”

“Are you and Norma?”

“I haven’t told her yet. The situations aren’t parallel. We don’t fuck that much anyway. We think about it, and drift away. You and that prick really do it. You really just upped and told him about us. I can’t believe it.” I couldn’t believe, either, that I was showing this anger; but having committed myself, just then, to die for her if necessary gave me the right.

The Perfect Wife’s chin, level with my eyes, was shaped like the tip of a valentine or slightly blunted shovel and held a small depression, too shallow to be called a dimple; now this evanescent shadow began to tremble. I had stung her, already exhausted by her session with Brent, to tears. And Easter morning wasn’t going to hold its breath forever: A back door somewhere slammed. A bird, descended from the dinosaurs, issued several clauses of a long territorial proclamation. My foot lightly raced my engine. Brent was about to turn the corner in their military-tan Peugeot, armed with two little girls in frilly dresses. Theirs, too, was a nuclear family I was smashing. I felt sick to the point of self-extinction but the day with its hard-to-believe old message kept buoying me up, in my hollowing new knowledge. I was the new man, called into being. “Sorry,” I said to Genevieve, of my outburst. The sight of her face — its pearl-like clarity of skin and faintly childish breadth — often stirred in me a paternal gravity, a Gregory Peck — like timbre of sorrowing masculinity. “Everything’s fine. I love you. I’m glad you told. Somebody had to get the ball rolling. Be brave, darling. I’d love to be your husband.” And I myself rolled off, moving homeward at half-speed through Wayward’s familiar streets, wobbly pocked salt-peppered streets like an old pair of corduroy trousers, worn to the warp and weft above the knees, that you put on morning after morning, your change and wallet already in the pockets.

With the apparition of feminine perfection out of sight behind the corner, I could imagine myself back to normal, a pleasant pagan family man carrying home to a house already littered with our culture’s bulletins this Sunday’s Manchester Union-Leader and New York Times , deliciously loaded with Nixon’s ramifying deceptions: grand jury, Judge Sirica, Leon Jaworski, House Judiciary Committee, and furthermore he owed half a million in underpaid taxes. I must tell Norma I was leaving her, Norma and the children. But when? Our life together was so full of appointments and engagements. Just this afternoon, I had promised to take Andy and Buzzy, and Daphne if she bawled loud enough when we told her it was too adult, to something sinister called Chinatown , and later that afternoon we were invited for cocktails and heavy hors d’oeuvres (meaning we could stay deep into the night, sufficiently fed) to the Wadleighs’. All the music department would be there, and some of the prize music students, exotic as alpacas with their long necks and golden brushed hair, and a smattering from the other departments, and we would all get nicely enlightened and gemütlich on Jim Beam bourbon and Gallo white wine, with semi-surreptitious intakes on a communal toke of fascistically banned pot, and big-headed Ben would begin to play one of his several pianos, as if with three or four furious hands, there in the Wadleighs’ glass-and-redwood modern domicile, built with Wendy’s money (her mother had been a Sears, or maybe a Roebuck) high above the river, and the students would shyly get out their guitars and in sweet thready voices sing the protest songs that had outlasted America’s Vietnam involvement, and who could miss such a party? Not me. I wondered if the Muellers would be there, and if Genevieve, mia promessa sposa , would give me any kind of a betrothed glance. As I imperfectly remember, they were, and she didn’t. Not a glance. The perfect pretender.

The twelve hours’ carriage ride from Philadelphia still jolted queasily in Buchanan’s bones, further stiffened by the damp chill of late November, as, darkness having already descended, he climbed the six granite steps to William Jenkins’ front door. Beneath its semi-circular fanlight, between its sidelights of leaded clear glass, the door was freshly painted black in the latest Lancaster style, setting off quite brilliantly the polished brass knocker in the shape of a mermaid suspended head down, her bare breasts doing the knocking: a fanciful conceit from which the gentleman’s hand instinctively flinched, accustomed to calling at this house though he was.