Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

I did, but said, “Come on , Norma. I can’t do it to her.”

“You did it to me. Are doing it.”

“After many a year. And it’s not right. I’m trying to make everything right, let’s just move on. Let me go back across the river. I’ll be back here again in time for breakfast, I promise.”

The Queen of Disorder in her artistic insouciance rarely became angry, but when she did, it frightened me. Her eyes, the color of her vermouth, suddenly developed red rims, and her lips tightened so the cracks in them doubled in number. “ No , damn it. She’s your mother, you stay here with her. I’ll go to bed alone like I always do. Your virtue, if that’s what it is, is safe with me , buster.”

In haughty silence, her cheeks mottled with rage as my mother’s hands had been mottled with age, she showed me to my room — her studio, a large space we had made of two small maid’s rooms by breaking down the wall between them, early in the years of our ownership. I had been a jolly householder back then, friend to the sledgehammer and the plasterer’s hawk. The space now was given over to Norma’s painting and paintings; the walls, loaded with canvases, supported along the baseboards additional leaning sheaves, thick as collapsed dominoes, few of the paintings finished but all of them containing some passages of feathery offhand rightness, these areas often away from the center, where she had worked less intensely. Where she concentrated, the paint got heavy and stiff. Some of the paintings were fruit-and-vegetable still lifes, their subjects overtaken by organic rot, and others showed vistas seen from the house, often with the mullions of the window included, like the bars of a cage. A few — relatively very few — were of the children, painted unsmiling, with severed feet and uncompleted arms, and two or three had taken up a new subject, Norma herself, beheld in a mirror, wearing that furtive three-quarters glance self-portraits have, whether by Van Gogh or Velázquez. It must have been hard for her, who was always looking away, to gaze steadfastly into her own evasive eyes. One canvas, painted presumably in the summer, showed her nude from the waist up — from a little below the waist, actually, though the pearly blank of her lower belly, its glow built of the most ephemerally faint blues and blue-greens and diluted ochres, was unfinished. Even if she had finished, her pubic bush would have fallen below the edge of the canvas. The whole room smelled strongly of oils and turps. Though in so many ways relaxed, Norma had been ever shy of my face between her legs, because of her smell; but this more powerful smell bloomed wherever she painted. My bed was to be an old airfoam-slab sofa left over from the Kirkland Street apartment, circa 1960. Newer acquisitions of furniture had chased it in here, where the cats and dogs used it as a bed while their mistress painted and sipped her afternoons away, into the dimness of dusk. Its rough gray fabric was covered with animal hairs, as if to weave a second cloth; for the night it had been made up in starchy lemon-colored sheets and some old blankets fragrant, I discovered when I lay down upon my narrow pallet, of mothballs.

I could not sleep. This I do remember. The sound of my estranged wife’s feet, first in shoes and then without, over my head in our old bedroom, and the nostalgic pungence of her oily paints all around me kept me awake with erotic possibilities unseized and all the more attractive for that. I must have masturbated, trying to be tidy and quiet about it, though the little screwed-in tapered legs of the sofa had a distinct wobble and squeak. The household animals, barred from a space they could usually include in their roamings, mewed and rubbed and scratched outside the closed door, and only reluctantly padded away. The radiators, responding to the melancholy tidal soughing of the furnace below, ticked and gurgled in a way to which I had become unaccustomed. Around eleven-thirty, Andrew came home, the Volvo in the driveway as loud as a gravel-crusher, and his ransacking of the kitchen for a final snack as tumultuous as the raid of an army platoon. Then, as the inhabitants of the house settled and the thermostat bid the furnace be quiet, my room with its many windows grew chilly. Like Ann Coleman, I wanted the servants to come and build a fire. There were no shades on the tall staring panes and the moonlight fell in in plangent rectangles. An owl down in the woods by the river issued its sickly interrogative call, like some luminous ectoplasm lumpily pouring. The sleep of the others in the house, three generations all tied to me and all emotionally deprived on my account, pressed down upon me as I gingerly and then furiously twisted between the rumpling sheets and sought harmony with the pillow, softer and flatter than the two back in my shabby but accustomed rooms in Adams.

After an hour or two I found that not only could I not sleep, I could not breathe. The wealth of animal hair and dander under my nose had reawakened my childhood asthma. To those allergens were added stabs of local unsilence (floor creaks, contraction in the cooling and heating system, scurries of nocturnal rodentia in the walls, not to mention the whispers and muffler-snorts of belated traffic from the winding streets of Wayward as our great honeycomb of nubile females dismissed its last drones) and a panicked sense of being in the wrong place , of being dirt as defined above [this page]. The harder I tried to suck in breath, the harder this normally unconscious feat became. My spine seemed to be closing with my sternum like the chamber walls in that horror-story of Poe’s. Absurdly, in my panic and chilly sweat, I found myself reminded, speaking of dirt in the wrong place, of Jennifer Arthrop’s visit a year before and wanted to fuck her, to finish the scene another way, a way that seemed more fitting than her awkward exit, and did so, in my head, while my hand performed wonders on my disbelieving, drowsy prick and my lungs, momentarily self-forgetful, supplied oxygen to my agitated organism.

But once the little bliss of ejaculation (and what a curious bliss it is — like turning a somersault, it seemed to me as a boy, or like meeting a giant in a narrow mountain tunnel where he has to hunch — a somehow icy sensation, in tight-knit adolescence) was the second time achieved, my respiratory distress returned, so badly I had to get out of bed, wrapping a moth-bally blanket about me, and walk around the room inspecting Norma’s paintings by cobalt-blue moonlight. Around three, exhausted and breathless to the point of insanity, I tiptoed forth and crept up the complaining stairs and down the long hall to my former bedroom. Its door was ajar, and I stood in its maw for a minute, listening to the rasp of my wife’s deep sleep, sensing the infrared blob of her body warmth, but then thought of Genevieve, similarly asleep in another de-husbanded cell of our community, and wondered really what Norma could do for me at this point, self-drained as I genitally was, and self-exempted from restful wedlock. I made my way back downstairs, snubbing with a barefoot kick the wagging, purring advances of the awakened animals, and closed my door in the hope that my ghostly excursion would have quieted my spirit enough for it to squeeze past my laboring lungs into sleep. But it had not. My breathing got worse; my bones ached in an invisible bear-hug. I began to fear I really might smother — s(Mother), to deconstruct the crisis a little. Her presence, though unconscious, beneath this roof threw onto my moral condition a starker northern light than was usually shed among the friendly obfuscations of the college environment, where we all stood pre-acquitted by the great liberations of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, who to such universal amazement and relief had shifted villainy from the individual to the society. Not that my mother, herself an exile from the cozy simplicities of Hayes, was overtly judgmental; it was her in me that was condemning me to be garrotted, the traditional Spanish penalty for robbery, for being caught in the wrong house. I later tried to transfer my sensations of suffocating moral impossibility onto Ann Coleman, in a composition already quoted, and so have perhaps included enough about them in this semi-solicited bundle of memories, impressions, and aborted history.