Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“You could deconstruct them,” she suggested, my backrub warming her voice, making it more languid.

I resented her reference to her husband’s dark art. “I don’t know how,” I said. “As I understand it, if you deconstruct history you take away its reality, its guilt, and for me its guilt is the most important thing about it — guilt and shame, I mean, as a final substratum of human reality.”

“Is that what I mean to you?” she asked, smiling, lulled by my hand, which was now two hands, the left nestling itself into the split lap her yoga posture made. “Guilt and shame? That’s so sad, Alf. That’s not at all what you’re taught when you’re raised Catholic. God came down and died to save us. The world is His gift, given twice. Enjoy it.”

“I do, I do. How is our friend Brent?” I asked, a bit cruelly, as if she had mentioned him.

“The same. Very matter-of-fact. A little cold since I turned down his last offer.” He kept making her offers; the last one, that if she would return to him he would give up his teaching post and take her away from Wayward. He had said, Genevieve had reported, that this was what I wanted also, her going away, though it was impossible for me to say so. She had asked me, over the phone, sounding frightened, if this was true. It was true, a certain relief had touched me at the thought of him whirling her off, but I said No, it certainly was not, and this was true also. The thought of her vanishing from my life hit me with a thud that obliterated all else: let the world crash and burn instead, with all our children in it.

“What’s with him and the Wadleighs?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t dare ask,” she said, rather dryly. She stiffened her back and lifted my left hand from her lap, where it had found its way up a silken length of thigh to the crotch of her underpants, which felt damp. “Nothing, I’m sure. Brent is very straight. Don’t forget, we’re both from the square old Midwest. Once we were married, it never occurred to him to be unfaithful. It made him terribly easy to fool,” she went on to confess. “I felt so guilty .”

I liked that: I wanted her to share my guilt. It disturbed me that she saw us as engaged, step by step, in a reasonable transition, with Brent and Norma as obstacles not insurmountable. It made for a certain lack of resonance in her perfection. Perhaps perfection does not resonate. I had never told her of my experience with Jennifer Arthrop and of my sensation that the girl was Brent’s doxy and delegate, sent to entrap me.

She had removed my hand for a reason. “Let me check if the girls are asleep,” she said, reverting to a conspiratorial whisper. She left the bed and I luxuriated in the certainty of her return. I could see her shadow bending low over the girls; I heard her making efficient noises in the kitchen, improving on my tidying up, and then the bathroom toilet flushed. The bathroom was reached through the kitchen, an arrangement that concentrated the plumbing and left the rest of the apartment free for the higher human functions. I nearly dozed in my contentment, wound around with the audible strands of our temporary cohabitation. Laura or Susan stirred in her sleep, moaning distinctly the words, “Bad dog,” and somewhere far off in Adams a police siren soothingly ululated. Not our problem. Somebody else’s mess.

My temporary wife startled me by returning to our bed-filled bedroom electrically naked, her immaculate whiteness slashed by shadows cast by windowlight. She carried against her breasts the folded clothes she had shed; her pubic triangle pierced her pallor as if die-punched. She was sturdy, Genevieve, with shoulders a shade squarer and wider than on most women, and breasts like a Greek statue’s, wide-spaced and firm, neither big nor small, with nipples that stiffened and puckered in erotic response so amusingly she sometimes caressed them herself, to get the effect, teasing them with her fingertips in and out of my lips as they hardened. In the room’s cubist shuffle of dark and light her shoulder blades and pelvis crests showed edges, so her nudity had a structure, a knit, a poignance of anatomy like that of a clumsily carved Eve huddling forward clutching a giant fig leaf on a medieval portal. But to my touch she was all silky and ferny, a branching tree of yielding surprises, queenly in her skin’s broad gleam, girlish in her compliant acrobatics, a perfect blend of attentive nerve and rounded muscle, with this something solid to her, almost as of a man more finely made, so that I had the sense, always, of being met . Fully met, somehow, though here in this shadowy chamber, while we suppressed our noises lest we wake her girls, what I saw were bright pieces — the curve of a buttock, the teeth of her open mouth, the glint of her ring on her hand on my erect prick.

“Darling,” I breathed. “Do me a favor.”

“What, darling?”

“Take off your wedding ring.”

She hesitated. “Why?”

I gripped her skull to put my lips tight against her ear. Her fine black hair brushed stickily against my mouth, the underside of my nose. “So you’ll be totally naked. So you’ll be totally mine. This way you’re half his.”

She shook her head like a dog, to free her ear from my lips, her skull from my hands. She stared at me and said, in an indolent, neutral voice, “Well, as long as you let Norma keep stalling the divorce you’re half hers.”

“She’s a greed . She’s get ting it. She’s just slow. Jesus, let her be.” Anger had risen in me, curdling the love-juice. Even in the midst of our lovemaking Genevieve was pressing our bargain. I tried to pull off her ring. She bent her face to our hands and bit my finger, hard. I pulled my fist away and swung it into her side, below the ribs, where the body is soft and undefended and liquid, a collection of squids, snails, and jellyfish. She rolled away with a muffled grunt but then spread her legs and without words bid me to get on top of her and fuck. She came quickly, one beat ahead of me, as if to put me in my place. I poured what felt like a river into her hot insides. No condoms then, no fear of the microscopic. The dangers were all macrocosmic, vague and huge; Brent’s psychological presence felt to me like a mountain. At his base we lay spent, and slippery with little rivers of complex molecules. Her wedding ring was still on. I wondered if I didn’t like her best that way, gold-shackled to another man while I pumped her perfect cunt full. As stated above [this page], in the Ford era, bodily fluids were still sacred and pure. I drowsily wanted to drink all of Genevieve — the dew on her upper lip and along the hairline, the bitter swamp of her armpits, the slick lake of her belly, the sweat of her feet. I suppose I wanted to drink my own sperm out of her, where she was goopy, in Wendy’s word. I recall another woman, somewhere in the tangle under Ford, crying out, as I uncoiled and kissed her mouth after muff-diving for a goodly while, “I’m kissing my own cunt!” These are deep waters, where we meet ourselves coming at us wearing scuba-gear.

Sorry, Retrospect . I didn’t mean to rattle on in this unprintable way. I meant to end the passage with the word “met,” italicized. My mistress, Brent Mueller’s wife, squarely met me in those spottily lit sexual catacombs celebrated (see Romeo and Juliet ) for missed appointments.

Ann Coleman — gone to Philadelphia! Overwrought, red-nostrilled with the beginnings of a cold, she boarded the stagecoach for the arduous day-long journey along the turnpike early on the morning of Saturday, December 4th. The coming day was yet only an unhealthy blush low in the eastward sky, a crack of sallow light beneath a great dome of darkness to which stars still clung, like specks of frozen dew, though the moon had fled. Raw damp cold snatched at her hands, her ankles. Her skin felt hypersensitive; she possibly had a fever, to go with the sniffles. Her head felt peculiar — its sharp perceptions detached from herself, like a spectator from a show. The earth was hard with frost, and at the landing stage outside the White Swan Hotel, phenomena — the creaking undercarriage of the coach caked in frozen mud; the slamming doors decorated with the images of English racehorses within oval frames; the nervous scraping shoes of the real, harness-scarred horses; even the angry shouts in German of the coachman to the baggage-handlers, mere boys prodded from their warm beds by hope of a few pennies — sounded loud and cumbersome and out of control. Her younger sister, Sarah, was with Ann: this is history, as is the scarcely believable fact that Sarah, six years in the future, was to meet her death in Philadelphia at Ann’s present age of twenty-three, under circumstances uncannily similar. Whatever Robert Coleman’s proportional part, in relation to his wife’s Berks County prejudices and the flighty moods of his high-strung daughter, in the breaking of Ann’s engagement to the handsome, industrious young lawyer from Mercersburg, it was Coleman alone who, six years later, banished from Sarah’s life the Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg, for no greater sin than the young clergyman’s insisting, as early as 1822, upon holding evening services at St. James Episcopal Church. In those days prosperous men, white, Protestant, and landowning, rolled across lesser lives like barrels loaded to the bursting of their staves with a self-righteousness thick as molasses.