Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Walking nervously about a little, to keep my distance and to conceal and stifle the involuntary beginnings of an erection, I riffled through her paper’s pages. McKinley a fervent Ohio Methodist. Mother hoped he would become a minister. His famous description to a delegation of Methodists in 1898 of going down on his knees to the Almighty and coming to the decision to possess the Philippines. Sexual significance of going down on one’s knees. Contemporary cartoons portraying Philippines as lightly clad maiden being taken from senile Spanish king by virile U.S. figure. McKinley’s confessing, And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly , as if after coitus. Vaginal innuendo of Dewey Bay. Feminine images of Samoa (divided with Germany in 1899) and Hawaii, whose annexation was pushed by McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Zoftig Queen Liliuokalani. Blatant phallocentrism of Roosevelt’s Big Stick. Insistent binaries of his public discourse: hard/soft, strong/weak, bold/timid, square/round. Be like the soldier and the hunter . Sexist characterization of Latin (soft-weak-round) country of Colombia, reluctant to cede canal rights (virginity): You could no more make an agreement with the Colombian rulers than you could nail currant jelly to the wall . Evident sexual symbols of nailing jelly and dredging canal. Miss Arthrop’s deconstruction was getting me excited. TR’s desire to de-phallusize (Miss Arthrop’s word) William Howard Taft, his former protégé turned ingrate and foe, with the homoerotic announcement I am stripped to the buff . His seeing the U.S. itself (Colombia by another name) as a woman, to be “controlled,” like his celebrated liberated daughter, Alice: I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both .

I had perused many such papers before, but never with the solemnly watchful authoress and I a few strides from my unmade bed. The trouble with systematic feminism is that it heightens rather than dampens one’s phallocentricity. It makes more difficult the sexual forgetting we depend upon for decent everyday social intercourse. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her breasts, the rounded shelf of them within the fuzzy sweater, and the curve of her hip, which we shall dress for this remembrance in elasticized ski pants. There was something unkempt and doughy about late-adolescent girls that usually, mercifully, kept them from being attractive to me; against the age-old abstract ideal of the jeune fille stood the disconcerting particularity of every instance, the unique female individual with a chin too sharp, some baby fat still to lose, a dreadful vulgar near-childish voice, or an unairbrushed pimple beside her slightly bulbous nose. Their minds, probed, revealed ungainly abysses that sent me scurrying back from the edge.

In that far-off Ford era — a benighted, innocent time — the college had, believe it or not, no announced policy on fornication between faculty and students. In the Sixties, indeed, gentle and knowing defloration had been understood by some of the younger, less married faculty gallants as an extracurricular service they were being salaried to perform. By barbaric standards derived from a rural or tribal world of numb animality, females of eighteen had reached consensual age, and good luck to them. The social experiment that had begun in bohemia and continued in communes and culminated in co-ed dormitories had discovered what pre-Gutenbergian societies already knew: sex, like eating, has a limit; a point of saturation can be reached, and all the screwing in the world will not rattle bank foundations or bring down the walls of the Pentagon. The earth only seems to move. Puritanism had overstated the gravity of the matter. The United States of the Ford era had absorbed the punch of widespread fornication and found itself still walking and talking, disappointingly enough. So there was no consolidated prohibition, nor likelihood of a subsequent rape or sexual-harassment suit, to prevent me from elaborating on Miss Arthrop’s nudge. There were only the scattered contraindications of my formal vows to the Queen of Disorder, given in a very low Congregational church service, and my informal vows of deathless fealty to the Perfect Wife, given in many a heated darkness, and the nagging aftertaste of several incidental nibbles at Wendy Wadleigh, plus my inkling that this dogged, slightly pasty girl with the weekend submission was not quite what she seemed. She was, speaking of unideal jeunes filles , ten or fifteen pounds on the heavy side — not that the Ford era, as I remember it, had anything like the horror of overweight evinced in the anti-inflationary Reagan years or in the Coolidge-Hoover period of ascetic Prohibition.

Stalling, sorely tempted for all of the above reservations to launch myself on this little chubby uncharted sea, I asked her, “Why do you think, Miss Arthrop, Cuba was never annexed, either in the wake of the Spanish-American War or earlier, prior to the Civil War, when filibusters were all over Central America and the Ostend Manifesto, in 1854, urged that Cuba be either purchased from Spain or, that failing, taken by force?”

She moved a step away from the icicle-fringed window, so that her entire side — thigh, haunch, thick waist, and soft shoulder — took a long lick of light, and her eyes, now in bars of icicle-shadow, had a melting look. These nearsighted, un-bespectacled eyes, in her plump face, seemed watery and small yet held an appeal, the call of uncharted salt waters, taken with a breeze of willingness emanating from her shaggy striped sweater, her tight forest-green ski pants, her dingy Tretorn tennis shoes, which the Wayward girls wore summer and winter, in sunshine or slush. “Who was Ostend?” she asked, in a soft, croaky voice, as if her vocal cords were dried out by the heat of my room. The radiator valve had broken and could not be turned off; on all but the coldest nights I left the bedroom window open a few inches.

“It was a port in Belgium,” I said professorially, matching her step with a backwards one of my own, edging my pelvis behind the curved edge of my reading chair, that giant brown doughnut of airfoam and Naugahyde [see this page], “where the three United States Ministers to France, Spain, and Great Britain met to discuss the matter of Cuba. The Minister to Great Britain at that time was James Buchanan.”

“Who was James Buchanan?” Miss Arthrop asked.

That tore it. Even though, to be fair, the course of mine she was enrolled in (winter term, three credits) was “The Long Post-Bellum: 1865 to 1914,” this revelation of ignorance so abysmal quite quelled her siren’s song. Further, the revelation was accompanied by a flicker of weird possibility: she had been sent. She hadn’t learned all her post-structuralist cant in any class of mine. She was Brent Mueller’s — what? Pupil, disciple, conquest, cat’s-paw. She had been sent by him to tempt me into betraying his wife, my perfect love. Cold-blooded wickedness! While my mind was spinning, I told her, “The fifteenth President of the United States, just before Lincoln. Born 1791, also in a log cabin. But you haven’t answered my question. In your own terms of phallic aggression, and given that the American South wanted Cuba both as an extension of slave territory and to prevent its becoming another black republic like Haiti, why didn’t Manifest Destiny — a phrase first used, as you know, in 1845, by the journalist John L. O’Sullivan — gobble it up?”

“I don’t know” was all she could say, all I wanted her to say. I had unwomaned her — clapped her into the chastity belt of student inferiority.

“Look at Cuba’s shape,” I instructed her. “Talk about phal lic. And what are its main product? Ci gars . TR already had his Big Stick, and if there’s one thing one big stick hates, it’s another. We could have spared ourselves Castro, if Cuba had just been shaped like the Virgin Islands.”