Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

[ Retrospect eds.: All this strictly should be in the pluperfect, since the narrative begins post-coitally: “… and our white and gleaming underthings had fallen from our bodies with a few pokes, etc.” Adjust if you think crucial. Also, an alternative image for the last might be “… popped from our bodies like the pods of impatiens seeds.” If our readers can be trusted to know how impatiens seeds act.]

I don’t think Wendy had a climax, though her breathing apparatus expressed a lot of ravishment, and her eyes changed color wonderfully, their blue becoming inky at the moment of my entry, and she moved her hips with a great deal of energetic purpose. Not used to her brand of wetness, amazed to be inside her, I no doubt came too soon. That was another elementary fact it took me time to learn: cunts are as individual as faces, and seating oneself inside a new one is a violent chemical event. Her wetness had become so extreme I kept slipping, like a man in smooth-soled boots on a mud-bank, and even before my last throb of ejaculation I was starting to resent this whole act of intercourse, which had been less than half, I felt, my idea.

So, when after some friendly chatter two inches from my face there in my bed she got up on her knees and gave me a backrub like some therapeutic Amazon, I was in no loving mood, and my ooze of resentment like frozen amber has preserved the sensation for nigh onto seventeen years. She was presuming to expand our acquaintanceship into uxorial physical services, when I was still married to one wife and had another — the Perfect Wife — lined up waiting. I itched to buck, to toss off this witchy incubus moistly riding my back, and yet, though sullenly, sank into submission beneath her health-club ministrations, distracted no doubt by a dozen worries — that my perfect and future wife was trying to reach me through the phone that was off the hook, or that one of my abandoned children had drowned in the river or fallen through the ice (the season of this incident is unclear; some bias in my recollecting machinery wants to make it winter, with icicles on the fire escape and boots and mittens among Wendy’s castoffs), or that I have forgotten an appointment over at Wayward with one of my feather-headed tutees, or that I should be correcting term papers or working at my book, my precious nagging hopeless book. For we forget, as we tote up our lives in terms of copulations, how framed and squeezed the act is by less exalted realities — by appointments and anxieties, by the cooking smells arising from the floor below and the rumbling of one’s hungry stomach, by the changes of light and obscure pressures of the day as the afternoon ebbs on the yellowing wallpaper into the gray fuzz of lost time. The day is shot, we say, as of a lackadaisical execution. And all the while behind the sun-dried brown shade near one’s head (subdivided like a graham cracker by the sash rails and mullions) the great sky brims with its unnoticed towers of luminous, boiling cloud. No, only in retrospect, Retrospect , are our amorous encounters ideal, freed of inconvenience. Yet, when all sides concede that fucking Wendy Wadleigh was the last thing I should have been doing, given my carefully worked-out life plan, it remains to extol the marvellous change her eyes would undergo upon what the legal experts call penetration, not just this first time but every time thereafter. I have written cornflower blue but like all color attributions it is a linguistic confection, by which perhaps I, no botanist, mean merely to evoke their petalled quality, the foliation of blue within their irises, that at the moment of nether entry would become religious, supernaturally fond — three-dimensional, you could say [2] Think: if we were members of a two-dimensional world, creatures pencilled onto a universal paper, how would we conceive of the third dimension? By strained metaphoric conjurations, like these of mine above. If we were dogs, how would we imagine mathematics? Yet there would be a few inklings — the hazy awareness, for instance, that the two paws we usually see are not all the paws we have, and that two and two might make something like four. It is important, for modern man especially, as we reach the limits of physics and astronomy, to be aware that there truly may be phenomena beyond the borders of his ability to make mental pictures — to conceive of the inconceivable as a valid enough category. —the widened pupils drillholes into infinity while tawny flecks were hoisted up from their matrix of shining gel like sparks in a hologram. This carnal union pleased her, her eyes declared, and, however distracted and pussy-whipped one felt, one could not but swoon a little.

“Your muscles are so tense,” she said of my back. “Relax, Alfred.” She spoke my full name as if there were a joke in it.

“I’m trying. But I keep wondering what the hell we’re doing. You and I.”

“We’re being loving,” Wendy said, shyly, sensing that I was full of complaints and rebukes, which only post-coital politeness was keeping in. “People need loving , and if their spouses don’t give it to them they seek it elsewhere.”

“Yeah, but, sweet Wendy — ”

“You have Genevieve as well as Norma?” she finished for me, supplying the names of the two poles of my not untypical (in the bedevilled Ford era) dilemma.

“Something like that,” I admitted, my face sinking deeper into the pillow. Her thumbs and finger-pads were really going after my trapezii, especially up at the creaky corner where the triangle of muscle ties into the acromial end of the clavicle. Whenever she lifted up to put her little plump weight into it, the wet kiss lower on my back went away, returning when her hands moved lower down, to the latissimae dorsi. I was beginning to like it. “Nice,” I grudgingly admitted.

“See,” she said, reading my mind, that aggravating way women do. “Just accept, Alfred. No complications. No commitments. Seize the day, as Saul Bellow says. Let me give you the gift of me. What else would you like me to do? You have some things you’d like me to do?”

“Don’t you have to go home, Wendy? Aren’t your kids coming back from school soon?”

“Ben’s covering. He wanted to do some work around the house. He’s going stir crazy in that dorm. I told him I was going shopping in Portsmouth. There are some new dress shops.”

“Norma says he and she make love in the woods,” I complained.

“That bother you?” Push. Pinch. “Why should it?” Lift. Kiss. She was a seesaw.

“It seems uncivilized,” I said.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which question?” She was lulling me, ratcheting me down into my reptile brain. I was so relaxed I had drooled on the pillow, darkening the cotton case in the shape of South America. Bodily fluids had no deadly viral dimension in the dear old Ford days; one dabbled and frolicked in them without trying to picture the microscopic galaxies within, the squadrons of spherical space ships knobby with keys for fatally unlocking our cell walls. The rhythm of Wendy’s ass, dribbling my own sperm, squeezing up and down on top of mine, was proving contagious; I felt desire trickling back, against the gravity of my better judgment.

“What else you’d like me to do,” she answered.

Deciding to counterattack, lest my manhood be rocked entirely away, I twisted over, forcing wider the triangle between her round white thighs. Smooth moon-colored thighs, with a fringe of small platinum hairs where her shaving stopped, and the oval gleam of a vaccination scar. Her eyes again changed, observing the restart of my erection. The phallic entity emitted a sour saline smell. “There is something,” I confided to my uninvited drop-in from the moon.