Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

The ground-floor mall was darkened and locked after nine. I climbed the wide Mussolini-style steps toward a bank of glowing glass doors where the silhouettes of hyperactive girls flickered in a frieze of shadowplay, and entered the young-hearted hubbub. Often I stopped at the third-floor snack shop for a tuna-salad sandwich or honey-and-raisin roll to tide me through the night in Adams. One night, inside the steamy door to this mini-eatery, next to a darkened chamber wherein slumped rows of frizzy-haired students were hooting at the Milwaukee imbroglios of Laverne and Shirley, I bumped into Jennifer Arthrop. Not literally, luckily, for she was balancing a frail cardboard tray on which a scalding paper cup of coffee loomed above a jumbo-size chocolate-chip cookie. In the months, or was it years, since I had eased her from my digs and the vicinity of my bed, I had seen her in class and in the halls of our intimate institution, but encountering her at this nocturnal hour, when the juices of human contact flow thickest, set off a spark; I could see the shock in her near-sighted eyes and feel it, like the kick of an electric resuscitator, in my heart. Again luckily, she had eaten more than one chocolate-chip cookie since our parting, and her doughy overweight somewhat neutralized my nostalgic pang of appetite.

But I had underestimated the complexity of our encounter. “Professor Clayton,” she mouthed, getting her social bearings, “I’d like you to meet my mother.” Indeed there was, behind her, her cardboard tray holding a dainty can of apple juice and a healthful tangerine, an older version of herself. The two women’s heads were at the same height, but Mrs. Arthrop’s curls were artfully tinged a metallic bronze, to hide filaments of silver no doubt, and had a firmer, more settled look on her scalp. Her toothy smile, springing forward even before we were introduced, seemed too ready until I remembered, She runs a gift shop . “My mother’s come up from Connecticut to see me in Lysistrata ,” Jennifer explained, with a touch of nasal petulance. “We’ve just come from dress rehearsal. She’s staying upstairs.”

The two top floors of the Student Center, I neglected to explain, were a campus hotel, with rooms for visiting parents, speakers, overseers, and salesmen of newly revised textbooks boasting a simplified and corrected canon.

“Jennifer has told me all about the course she took from you last year, Professor Clayton,” Jennifer’s mother gushed at me. “She loved it, the way you bring the Presidents to life.”

“Well, Presidents are people, too,” I snapped, my intense little vision of a bean-sprouts-on-rye sandwich and a cottage-shaped half-pint carton of milk in a take-out bag slowly fragmenting under the impact of this encounter.

Jennifer’s mother laughed as if I had said something rather naughty. Her teeth were remarkably large, and square, without being at all buck or false-looking; when her lips closed over them, it was an act of containment that gave her mouth a composed presence I found exciting. Her lips were full, and at the end of a long day away from home had lost lipstick on all but their edges, like a drawing of lips in red ink. Her round yet not fat face had the gloss and glow of youth, with an albedo higher than Jennifer’s, who for all her youthful amplitude and thrustingness of figure had something unripened about her, something sullen and light-absorptive, whereas her mother’s mature face gleamed with decades of moisturizer and anti-wrinkle cream. I calculated that Mrs. Arthrop, whose twenty-year-old daughter might have been born when she was herself twenty, need not be much older than I, who had celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday (falling in October — see this page) by passing from a twilight supper catered by Norma and attended by the children in my old house, the cake arriving from the kitchen wearing a crown of candle-flame that three breaths by me, suddenly asthmatic, could not extinguish, so that dismay was kindled on the faces of Andy, Buzzy, and Daphne, who knew this meant bad luck and cancelled everybody’s wishes — by passing, I say, with singed eyebrows from this ex-domestic feast of melting ice cream to a nocturnal celebration at Genevieve’s, sneaking in the back door and accepting toilet-paper-wrapped presents (a Bic pen, a Magic Rub eraser) from the two little girls before my perfect almost-wife tucked them in and came back downstairs in a filmy black nightie to serve up, in deference to her ulcer, two champagne glasses filled with white milk — a rather stunning visual effect — and two ambrosial macaroons, a feast for dieting gods, consumed by the light of a single tall candle whose phallic hint was soon taken by living flesh. My mistress lay on her modernist, goosedown-filled sofa and let the folds of black film drift up her white waist so I could eat my fill of her musky slit; a few macaroon crumbs from the corners of my mouth were suspended like stars in her tingling pubic cloudlet. My prick kept tapping my belly like a doorknocker, it was so hard.

“Would you like to join us, Professor Clayton — is that terribly forward?” Jennifer’s mother asked, two questions in one, rather breathlessly. It flashed upon me that she thought I had slept with her daughter and was slyly granting me a kind of honorary son-in-law status. How could she have gotten this idea? Only from Jennifer’s sulky, embarrassed manner now, unless the girl was an outright liar, as even normal girls often are. They lie, they shoplift, they attempt suicide, all as part of their sexual development. I pictured my lonely room, my phone poised to shrill into life with the details of two unhappy women’s lives, and figured that fifteen minutes of parent-child-teacher socialization could do no harm, and might do Wayward College, which was always looking to widen its support base, some good. Also, there was about Mrs. Arthrop an elusive likeable something — a bit of blankness, like an unmarked price tag, that signifies a woman who will sleep with you. Or is it that you want to sleep with them? The one becomes the other, in the shadowland where sexual politics defies the best attempts of legislators to clean up corruption and graft.

I joined the two Arthrops in a plastic booth, adjusting my hoped-for milk to a more sociable herbal tea and for the bean-sprout sandwich substituting one of those tempting, Christmassy tangerines Mrs. Arthrop already possessed. “Well, how did the rehearsal go?” I asked, turning myself toward Jennifer, steering away from the dangerous blank next to her, the glossy forty-plus face. Jennifer didn’t have that blank; few of our students did. They were too full of ideas and uncertainties; three-fourths of their lives were ahead of them, instead of a diminishing third. “Who are you?” I asked. “Lysistrata?”

This was tactless, actually. “I’m Cinesias,” Jennifer said. “It’s a little, man’s part, but I have a big scene with this real cock-teaser.”

Mrs. Arthrop blinked her daughter’s language away and told me, “The girl playing the part is quite wonderful. As you probably remember, the plot is she keeps leaving him, in the throes of — how shall we say? — passion, to get one more thing to make it all perfect — a pillow, ointment. And of course it never happens.”

“Marjorie Weisman,” Jennifer told me, naming another student. “If you ask me, she gets too much into it. I began to feel sorry for myself. The guy.”

“You were won derful, dear,” her mother told her. “A real man couldn’t have done it any better.”

“You get to feel like raping her,” Jennifer allowed. “Her roommate tells me she’s a sadist in other ways. Marjorie.”

I had a reprehensible itch to wink at Mrs. Arthrop, Jennifer was mulling things over so solemnly. The very air around us seemed to be winking, since the Student Center, for all its installed comforts, had the bare concrete frame of a multistory garage, with such a garage’s gloomy flicker of ailing fluorescent tubes. Jennifer’s young mind for the first time seemed to be questioning the conventional binaries of male/female, sadist/masochist, desire/anger, war/love.