Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“Just in the ‘Robber Barons and Trust Busters’ seminar,” I told him. Somehow, out of some craven kink in my psychology, I was grateful to have the victim of my own sexual aggression seek me out. As her husband still of sorts, he had for me the fetishistic magic of Genevieve’s used underpants. Recklessly, even though he was my mortal foe and would have deconstructed me without a pang, I confided in him: “She struck me as asexual.”

He squinted at me through a veil; always between us hung Genevieve, her body torn into its parts, sorrowful and obscene, a carcass we hyenas were snarlingly subdividing. “Nobody’s asexual,” he told me. “If Alvarez is nailed for this, it means a whole new ball game. These kids have us all over a barrel — the possibilities for blackmail! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

I took up his tough-guy locutions. “I’ve never thought screwing these babies was a good idea. It fucks up your teaching — it has to. Stick to your own generation, that’s where the resonance is.” This was tactless, even for me, I realized — praising his own wife’s resonance to him. Not that she or he were exactly my generation, as an occasional flatness in their emanations reminded me. The paddle wheel of ongoing history hadn’t spilled us at quite the same angle: certain national moments, like Pearl Harbor, were legend to them and memory to me; certain prophets sacred to them, like Eugene McCarthy, had met in me a sensibility already jaded; and they took for granted certain freedoms that still excited me [see this page]. I hastily backtracked. “These kids, they could be Martians, from the crap that’s in their heads.”

As I dizzily rattled on, impelled by my kink, which made me love my enemy, Brent studied me with an alert and fishy eye. “Jennifer Arthrop,” he said. “She was a Martian?”

“Never laid a finger on her,” I boasted. “As she must have told you. Unless she’s a more pathological liar than I think.”

“A very responsible and sincere girl,” he said, still watching my face with an alertness that made me wonder if my jaws were smeared with cheese-puff crumbs. “Her mother’s her only problem,” he ventured. His slant smile revealed his teeth one by one, like computer bytes emerging from the depths of an arduous number-crunching.

“Her mother?” I echoed. A pit opened up in the spot where, seconds before, my stomach had been innocently digesting a few of Madame President’s piping-hot cheese puffs, on platelets of Melba toast. Ann Arthrop: her big naked body as pale and serviceable as a thumb, her slangy careless way of speaking about her life. Not a great keeper of secrets. Truly, our lives are like the universe: nothing is lost, only transformed, in the slide toward disorder.

“You’ve met her mother, I think,” Brent insisted, his smile revealing in its left-hand corner a molar blackened by old fillings. There was a strange shiny knob of muscle at the hinge of his jaw, under his ear, like a nut that had been fleshed over.

“Briefly.”

“But affectingly, perhaps.”

That room of hers, 508, with its view of the French Fry. Its furniture, including that dim lamp with scattering ducks on its base, and the thunderously flushing john, and an oatmeal-colored wallpaper of vaguely “historical” design, arose from their tiny place of neural storage to swamp me, like a giant pair of earmuffs. He was saying things I could not hear. The muscle at the angle of his jaw, where it turns up toward the ear, kept bulging, I could see. It seemed as though his fluctuating smile was a small gray headline that one of those compulsive obligations in nightmares forced me to keep trying and trying to read. He knows , I thought, and my brain, accepting a belt of adrenaline, ran a series of lightning-fast estimates of possible damage. Great. Moderate. Non-existent. I still, aided by another vodka-and-tonic scooped from a passing silver tray, enjoyed a warm sensation of pervasive love in which Brent and I were immersed all rosily, all bloodily, like twins slithering down the birth canal.

“She seemed a pleasant enough woman,” I fended. “She was with Jennifer, fresh from a Lysistrata rehearsal last spring. We sat at a table in the SC for a second. She conveyed, Mrs., the information that at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut she had had a more major role, in fact the major role, in the same play and suggested that she played it better.” Women against war. Women at war. “What do you think Lysistrata is signifying really?” I asked him, hoping to deflect him into his specialty. “What values is Aristophanes really endorsing, showing these women bargaining with their cunts like that? My feeling is Aristophanes was a terrible misogynist. And loved the pants off of war.”

Brent would not be deflected. “A very overpowering woman,” he prissily went on, having been acculturated to a concept of personal fields of power that to my old-fashioned sense had too tactical and schematic a sound. “Flaunts her infidelities in front of the daughter, to keep the father in his place. Even sleeps with Jennifer’s boy friends, to keep her in her place. The girl gets back the best way she can. She steals.”

“Steals?”

“Shoplifts, you know. Not from her mother’s store, that would be too directly hostile. But from other stores. Little things. And then throws them away.”

“How do you know so much?”

“She tells me. I’m her faculty adviser. She tells me whatever I need to know to clear away her garbage.” His unpleasant slant smile stretched to include one more molar. “That’s my shtik, Alf. To cut through the garbage. Not you. You roll around in the garbage. Speaking of Jennifer, how’s my Gen doing? How’s her ulcer?”

I stiffened with something like nineteenth-century hauteur. “Genevieve is lovely, as always. A perfect woman, as you know.”

“Nobody’s perfect.” Who else had I heard this from, within memory? “If she were perfect, she wouldn’t have let you give her an ulcer.” Brent nudged closer. “Aren’t you curious, to know what Jennifer told me lately about her mom? There was this boy — ”

“No,” I told him, at last beginning to feel, through the cozy mist of metabolizing vodka, the clammy touch of true enmity. War happens. Forces compete. Death, so abstract in the graveyard and demographic charts, will truly come for you. “I’m not interested in her mom, or in Jennifer, either. Little Jen, let’s call her. First you had Big Gen, now you have Little Jen. Why ask me about Genevieve?” I asked him. “You see her. You visit the girls.”

“We don’t talk,” he told me. “We’re separated. We’re not like you and Norma, pretending nothing has happened. But maybe we should . Talk. Maybe it’s time. Yeah, I’d like to talk to Gen.”

He was trying to scare me, only this was clear. “Go ahead,” I said.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“She’s your wife. Go ahead. Chat her up.”

“What are you two talking about?” It was Norma, come up to the two of us out of the buzzing blur of the party. She looked a little pink beneath her freckles, flushed with alcohol. Her hair in its natural kinkiness was escaping her party coiffure and giving her a bushy youthful look, even if she was my generation. She glanced from one to the other of us. “I thought I heard my name mentioned. Good evening, Brent. Hello, you.”

We chatted. How strangely charming it was to be standing with one’s estranged wife and one’s mistress’s estranged husband, all very civilized in our party clothes, in this provincial pocket of Western civilization, Northeast American branch, in a gracious brick mansion in the twilight of a lovely early-fall day, the sugar maples turning, the swamp maples turned, the oaks still holding their chlorophyll. The days and nights now were of equal length. Brent and Norma were the same height, their eyes — vermouth green, dead-fish blue — at the level of my worried, busy mouth. The pit within my stomach began to seal shut, and the work of digestion rumblingly to resume, now that Norma made our duo a trio. The effect of massing — in an airline terminal, say — is to give an illusion of safety. Surely so many casually, even clownishly, dressed prospective passengers, fussing with their baby slings and chewing on their newspapers, will not crash. Surely at a party like this the bottom cannot fall out of one’s newly renovated life. The buried escapade with ample and appetitive Ann Arthrop — it seemed quite possible, as nonchalant, know-nothing Norma joined us, that it had never happened. After all, doesn’t history demonstrate over and over how hard it is to say what actually did happen, so that even the Nazis’ fanatically documented extermination of six million Jews and Lee Harvey Oswald’s broad-daylight shooting of John F. Kennedy and (let’s not forget) Patrolman J. D. Tippitt are still seriously debated?