Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Genevieve was wearing snug white Calvin Klein slacks, the hip pockets like tattoos stitched onto buttocks of bright cloth, and a black cashmere turtleneck in which her hair remained caught, as if she had just put the sweater on and not yet taken the moment to free and flip out from the elastic neck her silky black tresses. It gave her an electric androgynous look, as of a page in a modernist production of Shakespeare. Her feet — I don’t think I misremember this — were bare, as if, again, she had rushed into this costume a second before making her appearance on stage. Perhaps my letting myself in immediately after knocking had rushed her. As I say, I was rarely invited to her home, as our affair wore itself into grooves. She came to me in Adams, or we took little trips, and found a motel not too close to the highway, or too painfully seedy. Roadside cabins were not bad, with their quick electric heat and back view of laurel or lilac in the shelter of the pines; in Ramada Inns, the halls were too full of boozy salesmen’s banter. My mistress seemed, in her Rosalindish costume, so perfect, so svelte and compact, I hesitated to embrace her; it seems an illusion — as if up-to-date computer trickery has enhanced my clumsy old memory-tape — that we did embrace. Her dear sturdy, wide-shouldered body, given a yearning athletic thrust by the tiptoe stretch of her bare feet, came tight against mine and clung with an ominous finality.

She had summoned me, by telephone at my office. Her voice had sounded especially humorless and direct. She was calling from work. She had taken a job, finding her academic husband’s grudging dole inadequate, in a Portsmouth boutique founded by the sister of another faculty wife — the leaning professor of biology’s tennis-burnished second bride. The shop was in Portsmouth’s renovated wharf section, old brick warehouses refitted to hold the new commercial wine, in this case the post-counterculture tweeds, jumpers, and smart suits. Sensible, subdued clothes were back in style. Genevieve acted not merely as a saleswoman but, as the weeks elicited her flair and sense of fashion, an assistant manageress and advisory buyer. She was succeeding, but it meant she was gone most days, and in returning had to rush about, retrieving the girls from the neighbor or babysitter that had taken them in after school, and laying out a supper, and catching up on the tasks which when a mere housewife she had stretched to fill the day.

So it was not a gloomy afternoon after all, it must have been evening. Her cleaned windowpanes were black, but for the bleaching sweep of occasional headlights sweeping past. By the ebb and flow of those passing beams we had more than once made love, she lying belly-up on the down-filled sofa, my face bent to her black triangle or her round breasts with their hard dark tips, the lights coming and going on our bodies as if taking a series of photographs for a sentimental album of our love.

I had grabbed a bite to eat at some joint or other in Adams or else in the gynocentric Student Center, after hours spent at a desk somewhere with the by now quite baffling Buchanan. His life from the inside was a deal with God, like everyone’s, but the outside kept complicating, the characters in his story kept multiplying, old backstage manipulators like John Forney fell away and new ones like John Slidell arrived, women continued to haunt his fringes, his letters and memoranda piled up, his career drifted toward its clamorous yet cluttered climax in the White House, his life had become an incubus stealing strength from mine. My life had at some unnoticed point peaked and passed into decline. My fortieth birthday had come and gone, scarcely celebrated. Everybody had been too busy, including Norma. I lay on the sofa wearily. Genevieve was upstairs again, singing her daughters to sleep. She had a touching voice when she sang, quavering but true, more childlike than her speaking voice. The songs were ones I didn’t know; my mother for all her good qualities had not been a singer, and in our white Congregational church would stand with firmly clamped lips while the rest of us bumbled and whined through the hymn. To me it seemed Genevieve was always singing one song, that went up and down, and returned upon itself as music does, repeating, repeating more urgently, looking for that thing it never does quite find. In my bachelor digs, to banish silence and street-noise, I reflexively turned on my little radio as soon as I entered, and over two years of WADM had bred in me a certain contempt for music: it strives, it shouts, it whispers, it tries again, a half-octave higher, but it doesn’t get anywhere, it doesn’t escape, it eventually ends. The best you can say for it is that it’s not silence.

Genevieve came downstairs looking as I have described. Perhaps by now she had put white clogs on her feet, or mules, thick-heeled and open-toed, so her painted toenails showed their black dabs, their punctuation spelling finis to the thrilling chapter of her body; but no, I think not, her feet were naked after a long day standing in tight shoes at the Portsmouth boutique. The boutique had a name, which I have just remembered: Fancies.

“Anything?” she asked, trying to kick her own weariness. “A beer?”

“What kind?”

“Löwenbrau, I think.”

“Brent left some in the fridge again,” I deduced. Löwenbrau was his brand. French ideas, German brew, anything imported. He aped Derrida and drove a Peugeot. No wonder we were becoming a debtor nation.

Bristling at my implied resentment, she said, “Why shouldn’t he be here? He was filling in for me with the girls Friday, when the shop’s open to nine. The Christmas season’s begun.”

“You poor thing. We got to get you out of that store.”

She looked at me as if trying to gauge how much I meant that. In fact I had meant nothing, except sympathy. I saw us as fellow sufferers. That I was the cause of her suffering did not really occur to me. “Why?” she asked. “I like it. I like the human contact, I don’t have much around here, everybody at Wayward cuts me dead. It distracts me from the mess I’ve made of my life.”

“A Löwenbrau wouldn’t be so bad,” I admitted.

“Shall I have a glass of wine?”

“What about your ulcer?”

Was that a blush? She never blushed. But now, like Buchanan, she did. “I’ve been cheating on it a little.”

“Wine sounds good. Make that two.”

“There’s only a little bit left in the bottle.” She hesitated, then decided to say it, still blushing. “Brent drank most of it when he was here.”

One mention of Brent I didn’t mind, but two was too many. I sat up. “You and he seem to do a lot of drinking together. Come here. I’ll give you the sofa and get you the wine.”

“You want the wine.”

“Not the last glass, when you want it.”

“Oh, take it. You’ve taken everything else.”

“What do you mean?” The electricity she exuded wasn’t just my imagination. It touched me, made me slightly breathless. It puffed out her hair, caught in her black sweater’s turtleneck.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she cried. “ Ev erything. My respectability, my comfort. My self-respect. My girls still love me but in five years when they work out what happened they won’t. I’m like a whore with you. I’ll do anything to please you. I’ve never been like this with a man before.”

“It’s nice,” I said, flattered.

“For you it is,” she said.

“Not for you?”

“For me it’s more than nice. It’s madness, Alf.”

“I meant of course more than nice for me, too. It’s Heaven. You’re Heaven, Genevieve.” I spoke her name rarely. It was too long, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to shorten it to “Gen,” as Brent coarsely, jocosely did.