Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“How was Ben?” Benjamin Wadleigh had been her date. Chairman of the music department, head of the Choral Society, a tall topheavy man with big puffy white hands that plunged into a piano’s keys as if into mud, squeezing, kneading. He was recently separated from his tiny wife, Wendy, and a long-time admirer of my bushy, milky-skinned, big-breasted mate. “Where do you two do it, at eleven at night?”

“We use the woods,” she said, in such a way I couldn’t tell if she were joking. “Or the back of his station wagon. Necessity is the mother, et cetera. Want a drink?” She was drifting toward the pantry with all its nearly empty bottles. The two cats, hearing her voice, had come out of where they had been hiding during my stay, and rubbed around her legs in a purring braid, a furry double helix, of affection. I was allergic to cat dander and tended to kick at the creatures when they sidled close. Their purrs made me aware again of the throbbing background of cicada song — a sound like no other, which the brain in radio fashion can tune in and out.

“No way,” I said, rising from my Danish easy chair. It had a cracked teak arm I had always been regluing when I lived here. I tried to brush tenacious cat hairs from the seat of my pants. I had new loyalties: my dark-eyed mistress watched my connubial visits like a hawk, and expected minute-by-minute accountings. “I’m trying to lead an orderly life,” I explained, not unapologetically.

“Is that what it is?” Two inches of silvery pale-green vermouth, near enough the color of her eyes, had appeared in her hand, in a smeared orange-juice glass she had fished unwashed from the dishwasher. She bent her face and voice toward me and said, “Alf, you must talk to them, they’re confused and hurt and always after me with questions — ‘What didn’t he like about us?’ ‘Can she really be that great?’ ‘Won’t he ever get it out of his system and come back?’ ”

I resented her trying to mar with female talkiness the manly silence, the smooth scar tissue, the boys and I had grown over my defection.

“The boys, especially,” she went on. “Daphne’s the healthiest, because she’s so open and still childlike. But the boys — I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. They’re very considerate of me, tiptoeing around as if I’m sick, not blaming me for doing this stupid thing of losing you, trying to do all the jobs around the place that you used to do …”

She would let her sentences trail off, inviting her conversational partner to be creative. Her canvases, when she found time to paint, were always left unfinished, like Cézanne’s. A blank corner or two left for Miss Manners. Her own face, too, was generally left blank, without even lipstick as makeup. When she attempted mascara, she looked like a little girl gotten up as a witch. In the silly Sixties, she went in for pigtails, and to make a special effect, for a party, she would do one half of her hair in a braid and let the other half bush out. Her hair — have I made this clear? — was not exactly curly, it was wiggly , and in tint not exactly dried-apricot orange but paler, so that her pubic hair did not so much contrast with her flesh as seem to render it in a slightly different shade. Now, with Ben’s lively juices still swimming in her, she was bringing home to me — filling in with color the dim black-and-white hollow haunted feeling with which I had watched Nixon on television — the feeling of shame , shame as a bottomless inner deepening, a palpable atmosphere slowing and thickening one’s limbs as the gravity on Saturn would, shame my new planet, since my defection, leaving my house hollow and (that Anglo-Saxon word of desolate import) blafordleas , lordless. But, as with many of her actions, Norma disdained completion. Having brought me to the point where I wanted to crawl up the stairs and awaken my children and beg their forgiveness, she glanced down at the cracked and oft-glued arm of the chair I had vacated and idly asked, “What were you reading?”

I had left a book splayed on the arm. It was Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South , edited by Eric L. McKitrick. “An anthology of pro-slavery views before the Civil War,” I explained. “Some of the arguments are quite ingenious, and compassionate. The slaveholders weren’t all bad.”

“Slaveholders never think so,” she said. I felt in this a feminist edge, newly sharpened by my bad and typically male behavior. She softened it with, “Is this still about Buchanan?”

For the last ten years of our life together I had been trying in my spare time and vacations to write some kind of biographical — historical/psychological, lyrical/elegiacal, the sort of thing Jonathan Spence does with the Chinese — opus on James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States. New Hampshire’s own, Franklin Pierce, had been the fourteenth, but his Ambassador to England, and then his successor in the Presidential hot seat, had caught the corner of my eye. The only bachelor President, the most elderly up to Eisenhower, the last President to wear a stock, and the last of the doughface accommodators, before the North-South war swept accommodation away. A big fellow, six feet tall, with mismatching eyes, a tilt to his head, and a stiffish courtliness that won my heart. He projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence, where Pierce had the narrowing New England mind, gloomy as an old flint arrowhead. Buchanan’s mind, people complained he couldn’t make it up, and I liked that. There is a civilized heroism to indecision — “the best lack all conviction,” etc. He and his niece Harriet Lane ran the spiffiest White House since Dolley Madison’s, and I liked that, too. I felt lighter when I thought about him. The old gent was so gallant , there in the trembling shade of the Civil War. You know how it is, fellow historians — you look for a little patch not trod too hard by other footsteps, where maybe you can grow a few sweetpeas. My efforts, never-ending as research led to more research, and even more research led back to forgetfulness and definitive awareness that historical truth is forever elusive, had begun at about the time we had decided, after Daphne’s wide-eyed arrival on earth, that for their sake and ours we had had enough children. This was a wise decision, but also a pity, for Norma and I had a natural flair for producing children; our sperm and ova clicked even while our libidos slid right past one another, and the busywork of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and training toddlers gave us the shared sensation of being an ongoing concern.

“Still,” I had to admit. My attempt at extending our family to include a bouncing book had proved painfully slow and thus far futile. Perhaps Buchanan was the cause of our breakup: I hoped that a change of life might shake free the dilatory, feebly kicking old fetus I had been carrying within me for a decade.

“Maybe you should give up and try somebody else,” the Queen of Disorder wickedly, if diffidently, suggested. “He’s too dreary.”

“He’s not dreary,” I monogamously insisted. “I love him.”

Somehow — I knew it would — this stung her; her cheeks showed some pink in the room’s sickly, tasselled lamplight. Her blush made her eyes seem greener. In her hurt she sipped the glinting vermouth. I wondered if she had been kidding about her and Ben. She exuded that faint hayey smell women have in summer.

“You missed Nixon’s resigning,” I told her.

“We heard some of it on the car radio.”

On the way to the woods, or wherever. Ben was living in one of the Wayward girls’ dormitories, where guests were forbidden after ten. “We all watched it together,” I said, conjuring up a domestic unity that hadn’t quite existed. “It was sad.”