Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

The abovesigned is not entirely sure, at this distance of time (but far less time, I may point out, than elapsed between the ministry of Jesus and the composition of the earliest Gospels), that he spoke quite so wittily, with so quick a command of New World geopolitics, but the fending feeling is authentic, and the reality of this child’s sexual aggression, and the momentous way in which her presence transformed my paltry apartment, turning it into a moral arena, a theater of combat in which the door lock and window shade and fake-leather modernist chair all acquired tactical significance. The enemy of my new life had sent this spy to undermine the purity of my position. I was sacrificing my imperfect, though well-settled, marriage for a perfect, though as yet undeveloped, one. Letting this teen-ager (or twenty-year-old, at best) undress and be pierced by my aroused flesh would be a severe and distinct mistake, even if messing with students were not generally poor policy. How can you give a bad grade to a good lay? How can you take respectful lecture notes when the old guy is only so-so in bed?

Yet these my perceptions did not make it easier to evict this feminine intruder from my quarters. She seemed to gain corporeality with every passing minute. The possibility that she was the robotic sex-slave of Brent Mueller, with his taut, aerobically exercised body and brain stocked with the latest academic chic, and had come to me from this cunning cuckold’s couch with duplicitous intent gave her blobby budding womanhood, as it were, some anatomy. Danger added its sharp musk to her bland aroma of willingness, of openness to what the situation might bring. I broke into a fine sweat of wanting. To see those bulky breasts, firm as muscle on her stocky body in its ski togs, with ruddy nipples and rosy areolae, and to touch those mute haunches and buttocks, with fingers curled to scrape my nails in a torturer’s exquisite refinement of epidermal delight … Only feverish pedantic prattle staved off my desire to leap forward into the heavily baited trap. “I myself have always been struck,” I said, trying to keep my breathing under control (I get asthmatic in tight situations), “by the rather sweetly hysterical quality of what McKinley revealed of himself to that delegation of Methodists. He had a nurturing, vulnerable side, McKinley, and I don’t say that just because he was assassinated, which is a cheap way to get sympathy. His wife, Ida, was a dreadful trial to him — she fell apart after her mother and two daughters died within a few years of each other. She became an epileptic; she would throw a fit in the middle of a state dinner. When he saw one coming on, dear President McKinley would jump up, drop a napkin over her face to hide its hideous contortions, and carry her out of the room. Furthermore, she was a possessive, querulous bitch. When he was Governor of Ohio she made him wave to her from his office window with a handkerchief every day at three o’clock. A man who stuck it out with Ida can’t be all evil and phallic, do you think? As to Roosevelt — well, he was compensating. He had been asthmatic and puny as a child — like me, as a matter of fact — and spoke in a rather high, effeminate voice. What I’d love some student to do for me some day is write about effeminacy in the Presidency — the President as national mother. Like LBJ — he loved us all in sorrow, protest though we did. The most motherly, of course, was the one who sent the most American boys to their deaths — Lincoln.”

Jennifer’s pale roundish face had gone as fuzzy as her sweater; the fading light of this winter afternoon was making me, too, feel nearsighted. “Phallic isn’t all bad,” she said, making one more stab at being seductive, at carrying out that child-exploiting fiend Brent Mueller’s perfidious errand.

“Like dirt,” I said, “in the right place.”

“Beg your pardon, Professor Clayton?”

“A saying you’re too young to know,” I said. “Dirt is just matter in the wrong place.”

“My mother is always saying that,” she said. “I just couldn’t hear you exactly — ”

“—with the light fading the way it is,” I finished for her. “Tell me about your mother. She runs a gift shop. Do you want to live her life?”

“Not exactly, I guess.” These young unformed minds, they hit on a word, in this case “exactly,” and can’t stop using it, until another theme word comes along. “She got married when she was twenty.”

“Don’t you make that mistake, Jennifer. What I want you to do when you graduate from Wayward is take your credits and get a BA at a good four-year college, preferably co-ed. A single-sex school like this is an anachronism — women don’t need to banish men out to another planet to achieve personhood. A cruel anachronism — it puts too much stress on the opposite-sex faculty members.”

It was cruel of God, had He existed, to put unformed minds in such formed bodies. Jennifer preened, seeming to pour herself upward, so that her breasts within her sweater strained to rise, as if full of helium. “Don’t you want I should stay and have a drinky-poo?” In the Ford era, scandalously, the legal drinking age in all six New England states was a mere eighteen. “Or maybe cookies and milk?” she added, in kittenish parody of any thought of mine that she was too young for all this and alcohol, too.

“Good heavens, my dear girl, no,” I responded, becoming in counter-parody dithery and elderly. “People might talk. You don’t want your reputation ruined. Can’t that still happen? Isn’t there still a marriage market out there, at least a black market? These digs are grown-up territory, I have no idea how you found them.”

“Professor Mueller — ” she began, and then saw her mistake.

“He did, did he? Aha. Tell your buddy Brent for me to keep his little aporias over on his side of the river, please.”

“What’s an aporia?”

“A dead end. Not you, Jennifer, but this particular maneuver of your mentor’s. The bastard’s trying to steal his wife back.” Her face, sinking out of sight as winter lowered the lid on the narrow space between my windows and the factory, was clean of any expression. “I look forward to reading your paper — we’ll consider Sunday Friday, so you’ll get full credit. Think about what I said about Presidents as mothers. When all this fuss about sexism is over, we’ll be able to sit down together and see that men and women are just like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. With what Jacques Derrida calls a différance . Not to be confused with what Nietzsche calls ressentiment .”

Impossibly literary, you say? Remember, Retrospect eds., I was hyperstimulated; my skin was tingling, my pulse was well over a hundred. I wanted to put myself into right relation with this girl, to take up her two-breasted challenge, to peel her bulky sweater up over her head, tousling her curly locks and exposing to what was left of daylight the secretly supportive stitching of her bra, and to let myself be, in the time-honored fashion, de-phallusized. We are, each man and woman, doors that open to disclose an Oz, an alternate universe of emerald forests and ruby reception rooms.

Jennifer Arthrop did seem baffled. Our encounter had reached its aporia. My sexually stimulated skittishness must have looked to her like kidding, a professor’s supercilious dismissal when in all good faith she had volunteered to be my blue angel, egg yolk running down my face while I crowed like a rooster. Yet, too, there was a stir of relief in her brutish blurred features as I gingerly worked her toward the door. I hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her, as the phrase goes. I slipped the chain and bolt and exposed a widening slice of uncarpeted hall landing and rickety wooden railing. I ached all over, as another goes. More phrases: Last chance. Money in the bank. In for a penny, in for a pound. The public be damned. An opportunity missed is worth a stitch in the bush. My guest stepped onto the landing quickly, as if ducking into cold water, clutching her blue parka, retrieved from my brown doughnut chair, in her arms, against her flattened breasts. She had been let off the hook, the sexual hook. I said, in a fatherly burr, rubbing my rejection in, “Take care, Miss Arthrop. There’s ice on the outside steps. My landlord is a crippled miser who lives in Massachusetts.”