Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“Well, it’s all in a good cause, isn’t it?” I asked, none too brightly, explaining myself: “To end war. And it comes out happily, as I recall.” I was being very much the teacher, focusing on Jennifer as a student, while being all too aware of her mother next to her as a crevasse of invitingness that might swallow my teetering eyes.

“Yeah, the women go back to being sex slaves,” Jennifer said sourly. “I guess you and old Aristophanes would think that’s a happy ending.”

“ Jen nifer,” Mrs. Arthrop said. “What a way to talk to your professor!” She was my age, we had passed from class to class in the same corridors of time, so I could read in her motherly rebuke the subtext of flirtation, of more warmth than the social thermostat called for, of titillation based upon the (false) premise that her daughter and I had achieved the intimacy of lovers. In fact I felt distaste for doughy Jennifer; she was stale goods, touched by the loathed Brent Mueller intellectually at least, contaminated by his anti-canon deconstructionist chic, which flattened everything eloquent, beautiful, and awesome to propaganda baled for the trashman; Brent dwelt in an ideological Flatland from which I was endeavoring to rescue Genevieve, and Jennifer was his two-dimensional minion there, ostentatiously rounded though her dull flesh was.

“No problem,” I said to my defender. “All that respect we were supposed to show our teachers was hierarchical crap. At Wayward we ask our students to be frank.”

“ I am a woman, but I don’t lack sense ,” Mrs. Arthrop surprisingly recited, in iambic pentameter, her eyes shut to get her started. “I’m of myself not badly off for brains, / And often listening to my father’s words / And old men’s talk, I’ve not been badly schooled.” She lifted her greasy-blue eyelids, exposing irises that indeterminate organic color called hazel, and broadly smiled, exposing those confident teeth. Her facial gloss had gone a degree higher.

“O .K. , Mom,” Jennifer said, uncomfortably sensing that this was sexual display. To me she grudgingly explained, “ She was Lysistrata in a school play once.” Big deal , her tone implied.

“At Miss Porter’s School, ages ago,” Mrs. Arthrop modestly amplified. “Seeing Jenny’s rehearsal brought that bit of it back. At the time, there seemed nothing wrong with her having to learn by eavesdropping on men’s talk. What did seem daring, as I remember it, and offended some of the faculty and the chaplain, was the anti-war theme — it would have been in, oh, I was seventeen, ’51, Korea was on, and though it was all right to be against war in the abstract, nobody dreamed of being against a war the United States was fighting.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “The war ended before I was eighteen, and I remember feeling slightly cheated.” There. Our ages were on the table, if we could do the figuring. “How long are you here for?” I asked the woman — a real woman. The girls of Wayward insisted on being called “women”; their boyfriends, conditioned in puberty, had no trouble with it, but we older guys kept tripping up.

“Just this one night,” Mrs. Arthrop said, with an enigmatic upturn of her face, as if toward a spotlight still shining upon her girlish performance as Lysistrata. She had been the star where her daughter had a bit part. The world can be cruel to the young. Think of all those newly hatched leatherback turtles, scrambling to get to the sea’s safety while all up and down the beach the famished gulls are swooping.

Memory fails of exact recall, but we talked, Mrs. A. and I striving to keep Jennifer at the focus, though she kept slipping away, through a short and sullen or else unduly combative answer, while her mother’s thumbs and mine dug into the soft hollow spot crowning our tangerines and undressed the furry segments, juicier than grapes, of their loose and stippled hides. I could not help but be aware of a certain mastery in Mrs. Arthrop’s scarlet-taloned hands and of the way her plump mouth — plump but the lips flat to the face, like Jimmy Carter’s — coped with the little masticatory indiscretion of ejecting the tangerine seeds as each segment was consumed, letting them find their way via her fingers to the cardboard tray. Her lips performed this awkward necessity with a fascinating air of accomplishment , of self-appreciation, that produced, along with each ejected seed, a bit of a smile.

Jennifer at last slipped away entirely, seeing a friend leave the television room — Laverne and Shirley having yielded up its last tracked laughs and surges of theme music — and rising from our booth to go outside and confer in heated whispers. Her mother and I were left alone. The thin oily sting of tangerine juice and the dull underfoot smell of many much-worn Tretorns serve in this episode as the aromatic accompaniment, the half-heard sound-track music, like the ladies’-room perfumes and smelling salts when Genevieve fainted. I asked, in Jennifer’s abrupt absence, “How are the rooms upstairs?”

“Adequate,” Jennifer’s mother enunciated, letting me know she was a woman of the world, who had seen her share of hotel accommodations and was not automatically pleased. “Rather minimal,” she said, having complacently disposed of another tangerine seed, and then added, as if not wishing to undersell her room’s charms irrevocably, “The window overlooks a pond and a strange long brown sculpture.”

“The students call that the French Fry. It won a competition in the Sixties but keeps coming apart now. The welding was poor, it turns out.” My conversational attempts felt desperate, an idiotic waste of Jennifer’s absence. We could see her through the snack-shop plate glass, whining on and on into this other girl’s — all right, woman’s — ear. My sense of this real woman’s face across from me having attached to it a tag of inviting blankness was succumbing to a sense of her extraordinary fullness; she seemed stuffed full , like a thoroughly studied savage, of sociological data — Miss Porter’s School pieties, Northeastern-U.S. upper-middle-class courtship-and-marriage lore, marketing techniques adapted to the small gift shop, standard post-Spock parenting trials and heartbreak — parallel to my own. She, too, remembered the Korean Conflict, the advent of Elvis, the Kennedy assassinations; she, too, had sat in a darkened living room somewhere and watched Nixon blubberingly resign. Even her performance in Lysistrata (her round girlish legs exposed, in my mind’s eye, by the unhistorically short chiton with which school-level producers of my youth shamelessly beefed up interest in Aristophanes’ hoary and hieratic old farce) was more vivid to me than that of Jennifer’s generation, overlaid with such Fordisms as feminism and androgyny. Mrs. Arthrop’s little smooth feet would have been bare but for sandals like a web of gold thongs, her unbronzed hair upswept in a Claire Trevor do, her voice pushing out the speeches in a brave adolescent voice just on the edge of authority.

She was reading my mind. Cocking back her hand as if it held a cigarette, she asked me, “The students — do you do a lot of, how shall we say, mingling with them, Professor?”

“Not as much as people think,” I told her, somewhat curtly. Her absurd conviction that I had slept with her daughter was making her eyes sparkle as if loaded with belladonna. She was back on stage, legs swinging, voice rising. Her hands were flirting in mid-air with an invisible cigarette. I said, “But you’re not a student, Mrs. Arthrop. You don’t have to keep calling me Professor.”

“What shall I call you?”

“Alf. My parents called me Alfred, for political reasons. And you?”