Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

I forget what happened next. Brent must have slunk off, muttering Iagoesque asides. I and the deeply familiar Norma were left alone, shyly islanded in the party like a man and woman just met. She looked tousled, with a silk scarf the size of a baby blanket arranged over her shoulders, but not unhappy — adjusting, my eye was eager to conclude, to the life single, the pink flush on her cheeks a sign of thriving, a sign that soon she could stand alone at last. I must have asked her how she and her lawyer were coming, now that his summer vacation was over, for I can see her in the mists of dim recall gazing into the distance beyond my shoulder, toward the Presidential mansion’s egg-and-dart ceiling molding, and saying something like, “He keeps asking me to provide all these financial facts and figures, and I have no idea where they are, and I keep meaning to call you at your apartment, but you’re never there when I do try, and then I keep forgetting.”

I said, rather sternly, “Everything that’s not in the safe-deposit box is in the middle right-hand drawer of my old desk on the third floor. There may be a savings-bank book in one of the pigeonholes up top.”

“I think I’ve looked, and all the bank statements frightened me. Some of them should be thrown away, but which? It would be just like the tax people to want just the ones that aren’t there. And it makes me too sad, to go up there and see your old desk, that you used to be at all weekend. I don’t like the safe-deposit box, either. The last time I went into it, it actually made me cry — the children’s three birth certificates and ours all together. We both have those old-fashioned kind of birth certificates hospitals used to give you, with the little baby footprints in ink, they don’t do that any more. And our marriage license, and those life-insurance policies our parents took out for us, for a thousand dollars each, it seems like such a pathetic amount now, but I guess it wasn’t then. And stacks of the slides you used to take of my paintings, in case the house burned down. The box even smells of our place in Hanover — remember that mousy smell when we came in the front door?”

“Norma, for God’s sake, you must get organized. It’s been two fucking years since I left, and you’re mooning about baby footprints.”

“You sound just like my lawyer. Except for him it’s all time he can chalk up on his expense log. Speaking of sexual harassment, he’s invited me out to dinner.”

My stomach reclaimed its hollow spot, as if I were walking planks across high steel and had inadvertently glanced down.

“Did you accept?”

She passed the back of the hand not holding her drink across one especially stray piece of hair, with no visible effect. “Why not? He’s young and pushy and married, but those people have to eat, too.”

“You’d actually go ? Out to dinner with your married lawyer? Doesn’t the invitation strike you as a bit unethical? He’s taking ad van tage of you.”

“Oh well,” she said, “if you’re a woman, you get used to that. Maybe, on the financial stuff, if you came back now you could show me the drawer and get me started.”

“For God’s sake, it’ll produce just the same figures my lawyer already has. All your lawyer has to do to move this thing along is get on the phone to mine. He shouldn’t be ex pect ing you to know anything.”

“Also,” the Queen of Disorder said in her gentle, unhurried voice, “Daphne has been running a fever.”

“For how long? How high?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Two or three days. Over a hundred, depending on how you hold the thermometer in the light. I can’t get her to keep her lips closed when it’s in her mouth.”

“You must get her to the doctor!”

“I thought she was too sick to go out, and they never come to the house any more.”

“I can’t believe you’re being so neglectful!”

“And Andy put a scratch on the Volvo maybe you should look at sometime. He says ever since the accident happened the car pulls to the left. Doesn’t that mean the tires will wear unevenly?”

“When did this happen? Whose fault was it?”

“You don’t have to yell, sweetie. At that corner where the river road meets 1A and there’s a lot of traffic from the new mall. He says some blind old lady pulled out of the supermarket lot right in front of him, but I suspect he was going too fast. He drives very angrily now, now that he’s confident.”

I was nearly speechless, yet not entirely unhappy, still floating on the vodka and that cozy airport feeling the party was giving me. Her casual sideways approach to disaster felt familiar. A fresh drink, transparent and cold, had appeared in my hand. The lime slice was clinging to the rim by a clever effort, it seemed. “How long a scratch?”

Norma’s eyes, the pale green of beach glass, flicked past my face. “Not exactly a scratch,” she said. “More of a gouge. But the headlights still work, more or less. Alf, I don’t understand why you’re never in your apartment, the way you were at first, working on that book about that President whose name I keep forgetting.”

“Buchanan. I’m stuck, momentarily. I’m in the library a lot, doing more research. The first half of the nineteenth century, the bastard was all over the lot. He virtually ran the country.”

“Or at least you should be there at night, shacking up with your little bijou . Or do you two use the woods now? It’s nice, isn’t it? Like nymphs and satyrs.”

“She has her little girls to take care of,” said I stiffly. “She just can’t wander off at night like you evidently do. We’re fine. Don’t you worry about us. Genevieve is still fantastic.”

She didn’t seem to hear, and said, after a pause, “I’m sorry you’re stuck. You can have your old desk back if you want it.”

Now the Wadleighs came up to us, Ben allowing his pupil to tinkle away on automatic pilot. Wendy had cut her hair short, just like the other athletic coaches, and in her frilly yellow frock looked like a pixie in a buttercup. Couples who stay together in spite of all have a curious merriment about them, as of daredevils shooting the rapids, or of defiantly healthy alcoholics. “You two shouldn’t be talking,” Wendy said gaily, adding with shining eyes, “Alfred et ux .”

“This entire gathering is scandalized,” Ben assured us in his fruity choirmaster tones. I looked at him through Norma’s eyes and saw that he was lovable — pompous but clever, fruity but massive, artistic as was she, and light, like her an adept of the unsaid and the ignored. The waterbug approach to life, merely dimpling the surface tension as you move along. Me, I had been naïve, perhaps, and coarse, to attempt to penetrate, to sink, to pearl-dive into the past. It was cheerful, standing here with the Wadleighs as if we were two couples, Ben taller than I and Wendy shorter than Norma. The Claytons, bracketed. The Wadleighs were pulling, plainly, for us to get back together again, and thus again be accessible. Their dyad loved our dyad. We mischievously buzzed together a bit, and noticed that the party was thinning around us, to the point that Madame President’s husband came up and attached himself to us with suckers of small talk. We thanked the host and hostess and went our ways. Not quite our separate ways, for the Wadleighs had a shared home of glass and redwood, high above the river, and Norma and I moved together through the dark and the rustle of the first soft fallen leaves on the dried-out small-town grass (so different in quality from over-trodden city grass, or the untrodden grass of the country). Norma’s body beside mine felt like a gentle revenant. I muttered to her that I’d like to see the Volvo’s scratch and, sensing beneath her insouciance that this already rusting injury to her automobile brought her as close to tears as the inky baby’s feet, offered to come home with her a minute, to check on Daphne’s fever and search through my old desk. I might find some notes in it (ran my secret agenda) that would definitively unlock the mystery of James Buchanan. My practice of history was superstitious as well as unsystematic.