Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

It was impossible, in the course of our three days, to avoid generating excrement, and we were both shy as cats without a sandbox to scratch. As I followed her into the bathroom in the mornings, my nostrils were struck by the chthonian after-scent, spicier than Norma’s spoor, of what had just passed from one of her seven sacred orifices. (Two nostrils, two ears, and the remaining three do not include the bellybutton, a cul de sac.) There was something Platonic, like a triangle’s chalk ghost upon a scrubbed blackboard, or like the idea of war that haunts a futile peace conference, about our passage, with sometimes averted eyes, through a haze of illicit intimacy. She kept the room thrillingly neat and yet at night would subconsciously scuttle all the way across the king-size mattress to involve me in a panicked embrace, a claustrophobic tangle of sweaty limbs and tangled sheets. She slept naked, whereas I, after a near-Canadian childhood spent mostly under layers of blankets and quilts, needed some weight of cloth, of pajama tops or an undershirt at least, to make me feel safe enough to sleep. I suppose she slept naked with Brent, and this thought greatly pained me. They were just enough younger than Norma and I to have caught those Sixties liberations in their youth, instead of catching up to them retroactively, when hobbled with children and employment. In her sleep, which I had never before witnessed, Genevieve sweated, her sleek brunette skin rich in glands, and sometimes thrashed and moaned aloud, with touching infantile whimpering moans, as if her vital force, masked in daylight by a crisp bearing learned from nuns, was unmasked and tormenting her. Yet in the morning she could recall no nightmare, and when my concerned questioning persisted, she would stare at me with an intensified opacity in her coffee-dark eyes, as if I were trying to delve too deep and had offended some Gallic standard of decorum which even the penetrations and exposures of love did not suspend. Her maiden name had been Lavalliere; the notion of an ancestral Frenchness took possession of me, as I had freedom now to notice in her body the delicate traces of a Latin hairiness — the almost invisible dark wisps at the extremities of her upper lip, just above the slightly taut points where her mouth’s orifice terminated, and the distinct shadow, manlike in its bluish glaze, where her armpits were kept shaved. I expressed the infatuated hope that, when we were married, she would let her underarm hair grow out, in two pungent tufts, butterfly-shaped in my mind’s eye, and let her legs become as shaggy as a Gascogne peasant girl’s, so that there would be, by these few multiplied black millimeters, that much more of her, a surplus produced at my bidding, as a sign of my possession. But she shuddered in my arms at the proposal; not even my most delirious transports were about to overwhelm her thoroughly American standards of personal hygiene. There were a number of these tiny collisions, moments unremarked by us but not unnoticed, when my amorous fantasies, which dated back to fantasies bred amid the ethnic simplicities of Hayes, where the “Canuck” girls from the far side of the disused tracks figured as dark and dirty mysteries, met something proudly otherwise in her. In fact she didn’t come from the backwoods of northern New England but from the highly civilized town of Madison, Wisconsin, state capital and site of a university, where her father had been a professor of Romance languages.

We did best, in a way, out on the streets; here the racially plural energy of Manhattan, the giant ongoing recklessness of the megalopolitan venture, seemed to confirm our own recklessness and to bestow an oceanic blessing. Doormen, waiters, taxi drivers, panhandlers all smiled upon us as if we were, as indeed we were , one more couple in a worldwide species whose main means of perpetuation and easement of angst takes the form of couples — soigné, gray-suited couples belonging to the New York power structure; unwashed, denim-swaddled, love-beaded couples from the aging counterculture; clinging, punching, juvenile couples; black-white couples; Caucasian-Oriental couples; homosexual couples with arms looped low around each other’s waists; ancient Jewish couples blinking in the sidewalk sunshine like turtles basking on a familiar rock. Outdoors, we felt normal, accepted. Indoors, in the narrow hotel room that in three days had become softened like a cheap shoe by the confined movements of self-conscious cohabitation, we became prey to talk like this:

“Don’t you wish,” Genevieve suddenly sighed, a few minutes after lovemaking, as if its fluids were turning sour inside her, “I would just go away or get run over by a bus so you could go back to Norma?”

“My God, no. Why would I wish that? I love you.”

She gave me an absent-minded cool-lipped kiss for saying this, quick as an automatic genuflection, but pursued her thought, with an adorable knitting together of her dark, broad, Ali McGraw — ish brows. “I know, Alf, but isn’t it a drag in a way? You had such a nice comfortable relaxed sort of life …”

“Speak for yourself.”

“… nice house, nice kids …”

“You, too.”

“… and to give it all up for a sexual passion seems …”

“What?”

“… oh, you know …”

She trailed off, expecting me to take up the slack, to reassure her for the thousandth time. “But my passion isn’t just sexual,” I obediently said. “I love the way you look dressed as well as undressed. I love the way you keep house and mother your little girls. I love everything about you. You’re perfect.”

“Nobody’s perfect. It makes me sad to hear you say that. It’s as if I’m not real to you, the way Norma is.”

“Is being real what Norma’s problem is? I must say, life out of that house is bliss of a sort. I told you how, the night I got trapped there, I couldn’t breathe.”

“That made me sad, too, hearing all about that. That you let yourself be trapped, and then felt so conflicted. We’ve been at this too long, Alf, for you to still feel conflicted.”

“Does one ever,” I began to say, not feel conflicted? , but thought better of it, since Genevieve appeared, in her naked porcelain elegance (a bisque glaze of tan on her shoulders and arms), a shade fragile and brittle. Her lips were thinned and tightened by thought; her big eyes, their whites as pure as chips of china, studied my face without blinking. Having waited for me to finish my sentence, she pronounced my least favorite syllable.

“Brent,” she said, “says he’s ready to do the divorce any time, now that his parents pretty much know, and he thinks Norma is, too, now.”

“What does he know about Norma?” I asked with languid scorn, lucky fellow as I was with this naked beauty beside me on the king-sized bed.

“He sees her,” Genevieve said, looking at me with slight defiance, her upper lashes pressed against the socket’s upper curve of bone as if painted there. “Didn’t you know that? They’ve gone out together a couple of times.”

“Gone out?” Odious , Andrew had said. Was this the beau he had meant? “How often?”

She backed off a few inches, there in the hotel’s enormous bed, frightened of the intensity of my reaction. “I don’t know. More than once. After all, they have a lot in common. They have us in common.”

“Brent and Norma?” I said, trying to couple them in my mind, to picture it. “But she’s older than he.”

“That’s a chauvinistic remark, Alf. Just a few years, like we have between us, the other way. Anyway, nobody’s saying they have sex.”

“But”—and I suppose this remark is characteristic of the Ford era — “what else would they have?”

“They’d talk,” my exquisite mistress matter-of-factly said. “He’s impressed,” she went on. “He thinks she’s finally getting her shit together.”