Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Before Ann answers my sly little knock, a mere backhanded tap of the knuckles that chivalrously gave her the out of not hearing it, if her mind and mood had changed, let me, Retrospect editors, place the moment in a historical context. Gerald Ford, in his two years and five months of Presidency, presided over a multitude — dare we say millions? — of so-called one-night stands; a tenet of this era was that you did not need to like someone very much to fuck him or her, or know them very well. Fucking was the way in which you got to know them, these hers and hims, and to decide how much you liked them. Even so, heterosexual contacts never attained the amazing facility and number of homosexual contacts in this era, when a mere hole cut in a plywood partition in a bathhouse created access enough. Between men and women, the old courtship dances were still enacted, but in wonderfully accelerated form.

Ann answered my knock instantly, as if poised by the door; she was already in a bathrobe, in a room where but one dim bedside lamp, its parchment shade decorated with a pointing Labrador, added its beige glow to the moonlight pressing on the drawn curtains. We tightly embraced in wordless relief. The bathrobe was a sensible flannel, but I soon noticed she wore nothing beneath it. I kept saying her name — “Ann! Ann!”—until she betrayed annoyance. My absurd name lent itself to no such betranced intonations.

“I’ve never heard it said that way,” she at last protested. “My husband calls me Annie. Annie Sure-Shot. Because I always come.”

Her husband, not hitherto evoked, borrowed a phantom reality from this jocose salute — he was thoroughly familiar with this hefty body and the direct, vital, possibly coarse personality inside it. He would himself be a big man, to kid her thus fondly. He wore a fake-gold collar pin beneath the knot of his necktie and white-collared shirts with a fine blue stripe and shoes that were solid-black wingtips in an extra-wide size. He was a bit of a dude, a bit of a gangster, a solid family man with some flings on the side — a man in love with all the angles life can be approached by, with no time for books, for history, for doubt. A single impulsive tug at the flannel belt revealed his wife’s glories. Ann Arthrop had her daughter’s pneumatic impressiveness, the curves of her affected by four decades, as an old river swings ever wider, but still a swaggeringly fine figure of a woman, who bestowed herself upon me with the amused efficiency of a suburban mother laying out a big tray of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for her children and their playmates on a Saturday afternoon. Hers was an overflowing femininity; her buttocks overflowed my hands, her breasts so swamped my mouth and nostrils I gasped for breath. “Ann,” I could not help repeating, at the moment I entered her. I had turned off the bedside light — whose doggy shade was partnered with a ceramic base showing green-headed ducks taking wing at sunset — and could not see her eyes. She was matter-of-factly slick, accepting me with a certain somber swallowing motion of her shadowed eye sockets, yet revealing to my agitated, flurrying kisses upon her mouth the tension of a possible laugh.

She was one of those women who come forward for their serving; she flared her thighs and clipped her little penile homologue determinedly against my pelvic bone until, in rising tempo, she delivered herself of an orgasm and two faintly rote moans. In no hurry, I followed; a restrained, then released selfishness is the only path for love, purling downhill between narrow rocks on the way to pools of gentleness. Muted moonlight picked up gleams of dew on her temple; I stretched myself, craning my neck, to lick off the salt sweat. She mistook my motion and pressed down on my buttocks. “No,” she said with husky despair. “Don’t leave me yet.” Her firm fingers pricked me with the cool touch of rings.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, but already an enlarging guilt was gnawing at my stomach — Genevieve trying to phone with some new legal twist the nefarious Brent had developed, Norma with word that Andrew had had a terrible accident in the Volvo, my mother crying out that her Clearwater condo was burning down.… The present is Paradise, yet our brain forbids our living in it long. Past and future conspired to diminish this treasure beached beneath me, lightly panting. She, too, began to get herself together. She permitted me to slide out of her and fall to one side, and propped herself up in the bed, so her tits bobbled like flotsam above my dazed face. She was smoking that phantom cigarette again, right elbow in left palm, right wrist cocked back. “When did you give it up?” I asked.

“Four months ago. I’ve put on weight, damn it.”

“Very becoming. The weight.”

She snorted and added, “The trouble is, when you stop, you’re healthier. I’m horny all the time.”

“That’s nice, too,” I said. “Nice for me, in this instance.”

She snorted again, a cocky noise like a half-sneeze. “Well, Professor,” Mrs. Arthrop said. “Was I better or worse than Jennifer?”

“I’ve never slept with Jennifer, I swear it. Has she said I did?”

“Not in so many words, just the body language.”

“I was saving myself for you,” I said, adding, “dear Ann. Dear Ann.”

“I’m not so dear,” she said, glancing about as if for an ashtray in which to tap her lengthening ash. “Bit of a whore, actually. But it was just too mean, to make me come back to this dreary room alone. Also, frankly, I found watching Jen rehearse tonight very painful. She’s no actress. How is she as a student?”

“Conscientious. Tries to deconstruct everything. Makes every issue feminist. A lot of the girls do.” My answers were terse because I was fascinated by Ann Arthrop’s body, clarifying and widening under my eyes as they, adjusting, saw more and more by the moonlight that pressed at the window curtains like blue cheese wrapped in burlap. In the ripeness of her flesh every big curve sprouted little curves, qualifications of minor muscle and fat-rumple, so that an endless Rubensesque activity of mortal pucker was inscribed upon the ideal large forms of the eternal feminine. She had not affected the phony old Hayes-Code Hollywood device of post-coitally tucking the sheets over her chest, and with silent amusement she let me roll the sheet down further, to the staring darknesses of her navel and pubic bush. The smell came off her that low tide releases from wet sand.

She kept talking. Coyly: “Are you going to want to fuck her now, now that you’ve had me?” In her Connecticut circles, they evidently called spades spades. Or was she casually trying to deconstruct my romantic, too worshipful mood? I touched her here and there, with tongue and fingertip. How nice that particular whiteness is, just above the pubic hair, where even the skimpiest bikini protects the skin. Her sweat was sweeter here than at her temple, a rarer honey.

“Of course not,” I said. “Please. These girls aren’t paying tuition to be sexually exploited by the male faculty. It’s their minds that are given to us in trust.”

“Good. My husband would kill you,” she said pleasantly.

I looked up the many little crests and swales of her abdomen toward the Olmec impassivity of Mrs. Arthrop’s face. Great stone lips, naked of lipstick but the rims. Swallowing eye sockets, all shadow, in which reptilian lids moved, and lashes jerked quickly, like spiders. “Do you and Mr. have affairs?” I asked her.

“I do. He doesn’t. He’s too busy, off in town twelve, fourteen hours every day, screwing other guys in his business. He’s in communications technology.”

“Does he know? That you do?”

“Of course not.” She was now ready to put out the imaginary cigarette, and made a grinding motion on the little bedside table. The table, like the headboard, was fastened to the wall. “He thinks he adores me.”