Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“Why?” Norma was a down-the-line liberal. “The only sad thing is it puts that idiot Ford in office.”

“Ben says he’s an idiot?”

“ I say.”

“You know,” I said, “darling, you ought to be careful in the woods. There’s poison ivy, not to mention snakes.”

She pushed back from her forehead a piece of her untidy wiggly hair and blew upward, as if that would keep it in place. She glanced at the corners of the ceiling again but with a different, less searching quality now; I knew her well enough to see her mind deciding that this homecoming had nothing more in it for her. She was tired and ready for bed. She tossed off the last of the vermouth and said, “You be careful, too. There’s lots of mancatchers out there.”

Nothing she said was ever not somewhat true. One of my memories of the Ford years — indeed, the one that has next priority in this accounting, elbowing its way to the head of the line — is of a wet cunt nipping, as it were, at the small of my back as a naked woman settled herself astride my waist to give me an allegedly relaxing shoulder rub. The rub was some kind of reward, a therapeutic interlude in our two-person orgy, yet I have never really liked massages, not really believing in the chiropractic theory behind them, and the sensation, as if of a large French kiss, down toward where my ass divided, made me internally shudder. The fault is mine, my squeamish generation’s. Men born later than the Truman Administration and subjected since early adolescence to open beaver shots in national magazines and to childbirth documentaries that spare the TV viewer nary a contraction will scarcely credit our innocence, inherited from our fathers and their fathers before them, concerning female genitalia. The two sets of lips, major and minor. The frilly look of it, climaxing in a little puckering wave of flesh around the clitoris. Its livid, oysterish, scarcely endurable complexity, which all but gynecologists used to spare themselves, along with the visual ordeal of parturition. Close your eyes and take the plunge, was the philosophy in olden days, and vacate the site as quickly as possible. Nine months later, responsible fatherhood would begin. You have a son . Those were dark ages, when everything was done in the dark, like spermatozoa blindly snaking up the Fallopian tube to the egg. No more: the cunt is no mere fur-rimmed absence in binary opposition to the phallic presence, it is itself a presence, a signified, with an aggressive anatomy of its own. If it is good enough to mop up the ache of an erection, it is good enough to lay down an icy bit of slime on the seducer’s love-flushed skin.

The woman was not, strange to tell, the lady of my dreams, the woman for whom I had left my wife; it was little Wendy Wadleigh, having appeared at my dusty apartment in Adams on I forget what excuse, possibly some kind of reverse-twist consultation about Norma’s relationship with her own estranged spouse, big-headed Ben. I had never quite warmed to Wendy; her legs were too short, her center of gravity was too low, her Debbie Reynolds — style energy was too indiscriminate, the cornflower blue of her eyes too eager and bright. She jogged, she cooked macrobiotic, she played the viola, she tutored dyslexics, she coached the Wayward girls in hockey and lacrosse, she swam at the school pool every day, she wore her pale hair in a shiny little athletic “flip.” But in those far-off Ford days it was assumed that any man and woman alone in a room with a lock on the door were duty-bound to fuck. Hardly half an hour into her visit had come the quick drawing of the khaki shades, the latching of the door’s burglar chain for double security, the knocking of the phone off the hook and the smothering of its automatic squawk beneath a pillow stolen from the suddenly pivotal bed. My rooms in Adams, as stated above [see this page] numbered two, plus a kitchen the size of a bathroom and a bathroom the size of a closet. The two windows’ view was of the back of a factory where a few bluish lights kept watch over long, empty floors still bearing the ghostly footprints of machinery gone south. By pressing one’s face against a pane one could see past the side of a projecting neon restaurant sign two doors away toward a street corner where pre-Japanese autos dragged their rusty lengths through a stoplight. On this main street, tiny people flickered past the mirror-framed entrance to a shoe store that was always threatening final closure. To minimize distraction, I turned off WADM, where somebody’s symphony was repetitively working up to a thunderous dismissal of that particular movement’s themes. Am I alone in thinking of classical music as very slow in saying what it’s getting at? All that passionate searching, and it ends by discovering the tonic where it began. I never listen to it, except when between worlds — driving in the car, or during those transitional Ford years.

In the sudden shades-down gloom, Wendy, suppressing her natural tendency to chatter, rapidly undressed down to her white underwear, which glowed like the soft strips of daylight below the canvas shades’ brown hems. I did the same, mirroring her semi-abandon, keeping on my underpants for now, as if hesitating to unbandage a flaming wound. The ornate etiquette of screwing a woman for the first time! Does the lady expect a condom? Should one offer the use of the bathroom, and use it oneself, as before an extended auto trip? Are there any surface blemishes or peculiarities to be explained, lest they give alarm, or should we let the flesh speak for itself? The awkwardness takes us back to childhood, when one knows no accepted forms. In this abrupt closeness a subtle but immensely actual novelty — in odor, in texture, in erotic slant, and in estimated experience and expectation — looms like an intimidating cliff. Though I had held Wendy in my arms at many a college dance, and in the groping latter stages of many a faculty get-together, when the host, to prolong the already distended evening, fishes out a forgotten Billy Eckstine LP, her body was basically strange to me. Her skin, the broad patch of it between her bra and panties, felt cooler than I had expected, and harder in its curves, especially the adjacent two of her prominent rump. I allowed myself the unprecedented liberty of caressing these, through the silken sheath of her underpants, more bikini than I was accustomed to. It was considerate and perhaps cunning of Wendy to keep her underwear on; as a woman of my generation, she understood, as an undergraduate would not have, my need to be sheltered from too blindingly sudden an exposure to the glories of the female body, and the stimulus that underwear would be for me, with my long gradualist history of forbidden glimpses, up a skirt or through a blouse armhole, and of backseat grapplings with resistant elastics and snaps. Or — why make a maneuver of it? — she herself felt shy, and her sense of etiquette dictated reserving to a later stage of our session removal, by trembling hands working in partnership, of these last garments. For though this was 1974, we had not been born to its freedoms but brought to them through the timidity and tabus of earlier eras. Even the late Sixties had an innocence, an oh-boy Barbarella forced cheer, counting off orgasms like the petals of a daisy, which the thoroughly experienced Ford epoch lacked. Each era simultaneously holds, in the personalities of its citizens, an absorption into mainstream life of previous social frontiers and an exhaustion of the energy that propelled recent breakthroughs and defiances. College kids had already pulled back from revolution and dharma, afraid of finding no place within the slumping economy and of getting shot in futile protest as at Kent State. The late-Fifties hippies were now leathery old carpenters and shepherdesses, child-ridden and LSD-addled, holed up in corners of a factitious rural America. We lay a while kissing, Wendy Wadleigh and I — heavy-petting, as they quaintly used to call it — warming each other up, her mouth getting looser and moister, her body in the warps of erotic space seeming to become a kind of tilted vessel funnelling saliva and spiritual energy through her mouth into mine, right down to my toes as they curled up into the arches of her feet. I began to float in love’s hyperspace; my fingers spelunked their way past the elastic panty-band to the parabolic curves of her aluminum-smooth buttocks and the velvety dimple high between; she arched her back to increase the angle of provocation and our white and gleaming underthings fell from our bodies with a few pokes of her thumbs, like tangerine peels.