Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“It’s not, and I’m not,” she said flatly. “We live on earth. And not so very long, at that.” My tendency to poeticize, to enlarge and elevate with words, to as it were construct , and her more practical nature had come into conflict before, as when under the budding elm she had announced our leaving of our spouses. I had done it, in a scene so painful I cannot bear to recall it even for you, Retrospect . I had paid my dues; I had secured her love; I was her white knight. But a disgust, or dissatisfaction, colored her tone as she said, “I’ll get you the beer. The wine’s probably acid by now anyway.”

Returning with a round tray on which a wineglass and a beer glass stylized in silhouette a perfect heterosexual couple, Genevieve sat down not on the sofa beside me but in the matching easy chair, covered in pale beige, across the glass table. When she crossed her legs with a swift, narrow-ankled motion, the underside of her white-jeaned thigh flashed, and my mouth went dry with desire. I wanted to be there, between those clean thighs, the sweetly dirty furry moist place between them. She watched me take a golden swallow of Brent’s beer and smiled. “Beautiful Alf,” she said. “You’re so innocently greedy.”

“Thirsty,” I innocently corrected. “I want to make love to you so much my mouth suddenly dried up just then.”

Primly she uncrossed her legs and put her knees together. “Tell me about Ann Arthrop.” Her large clear eyes, the dark irises riding high in the whites, stayed with mine as she took a measured sip of the wine. She grimaced, and made a French sort of sound that might be transcribed as Yoog , pronounced rapidly.

For a second, I had thought she was referring to somebody in the Buchanan saga, whose mists rarely lifted from my brain. The wife or perhaps unmarried sister-in-law of one of his Southern Cabinet members, dangled before the old bachelor as a distraction from their treachery. “I believe,” I said carefully, “she’s the mother of Jennifer Arthrop, a pet student of Brent’s.”

“Good, darling. That’s what I believe, too. And when did you fuck her, exactly?”

“Who says I fucked her?”

“You deny that you fucked her?”

One of the innumerable things I liked about Genevieve was the way that she, once she found the word she wanted, would stick with it. She had no more use for idle, vain variation than a machine. Perfection is like that. “I don’t deny it,” I said. “I just want to know who says.”

“Who cares who says?” she said.

“Brent says,” I accused. “Bastardly old Brent says his bratty little pet cunt Jennifer says, because her mother told her because they have a sexual rivalry going. A mother-daughter combination like that should never be trusted.”

You know, Retrospect editors, in animated cartoons, how the cat starts to slip on marbles the mice have spilled, first slower, then faster, so his legs become a windmill blur, and still the marbles keep feeding under his feet, while it takes him a terrified forever to fall? Our conversation had become like that, I desperately trying to keep myself in the air.

Genevieve had become relentless. “You’re saying Mrs. Arthrop lied to her daughter? Why should she do that?”

“To annoy her. To create confusion. Why do people ever lie? Because people are perverse — to assert themselves over against totalitarian fate. Lying is a kind of vote; it’s democracy in action.”

“When did it happen, Alf?” Her tone was pointedly patient.

“Who says it happened? Winter.” No, that was when Buchanan waltzed with the Czarina of Russia. “May, maybe. I met Mrs. Arthrop in April or May, with Jennifer over in the Student Center, after a rehearsal of Lysistrata , put on before final exams started.”

Genevieve’s lovely eyes, not buried bits of watchful jelly as with most of us but sculptural forms — slightly almondine, as I may have said, as if from a dash of Oriental blood, somewhat as Senator King had a slightly Seminole look — widened; her starry lids, the lashes so thick mascara muddied them, flared in cold fury. “Then you went with her. You fucked her that night and then the two of you like a dear old married couple went the next evening to see little Jennifer perform.”

“It was an afternoon performance,” I corrected her. “In Truman Hall. And I certainly did not go to the performance, with or without Mrs. Arthrop. What a shocking idea. I never saw her the next day; the woman got back in her car and went back to Connecticut where she belonged, to her husband, who sounded awful. He called her Annie, like in ‘get your gun.’ ” The marbles had stopped rolling under me. Somehow, to my enormous relief, we had bypassed the moment of confession, and were safe on the other side. The Mrs. Arthrop episode was behind us, part of our pasts, upon which we could resume building our immaculate future.

“How do you know?” Genevieve asked, without any of the good and hopeful humor I felt within myself.

“Know what? That she got back in her car and went home to Connecticut? I assume so, because it’s six months later and I haven’t heard otherwise. A crash would have made the papers.”

“That her husband called her Annie.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It must have come up at the table in the Student Center. I had a bean-sprout sandwich, she was eating a tangerine. Jennifer kept jumping up and down to talk to her buddies, leaving us alone at the table to make awkward chitchat.” Why wouldn’t this incident go away, sink into history? I had assumed we both assumed, by now, that I had slept with Ann.

“You’re lying,” Genevieve said.

“About what? About Lysistrata ? I promise you, on a thousand Bibles I promise you, we did not go to the play together.” Although she had got me to wondering if I should have — if it had been a lapse of manners on my part. “I might have run into Brent there, coming to admire his protégée. I don’t like running into Brent.” How much of my behavior, I thought as I supplied these sentences, was indeed innocent. Most of it. As much as ninety-eight percent.

Her wonderful eyes, like painted marble eggs, suddenly brimmed pinkly with tears. I was stricken. I would rather have watched Daphne cry. In a cracked voice Genevieve blurted, “I don’t know when you’re lying and when you aren’t.”

I must straighten this out; our relationship was cracking up over irrelevant details. “Genevieve dear, please listen. I did not escort Jennifer Arthrop’s mother anywhere the next day. I have never heard boo from her since. She was a tough upper-middle-class broad. I did go to bed with her the night before. I’m sorry, it was — what did you say? — madness. It was nothing. It was like a footnote the reader can skip. It’s you I love. It’s you I adore. I want you to be my wife. I feel you’re my wife already.” Even in this moment of annealing truth-telling, I lied. It had not been nothing. It had been a magnificent regal bestowal of her plump assured body, towering with the solemnity of flesh above me like a thumb held out to eclipse the distant cool disk of the moon. Her multiple jiggles, her pendulous breasts, her minimal room with its view of the French Fry, the kitschy little dim bedside lamp that saw everything, above its sunset — I had often thought back upon it, with pleasure and pride.

“You fucked her,” dry-eyed Genevieve stated, for clarity.

“Genevieve, please . Why do women keep saying ‘fuck’? It was lovemaking, it was natural, like the tides. It happened only once.” Ann and I came twice, actually, I remembered. I hoped my face wouldn’t reveal this second thought, this scholarly qualification. The perfect woman’s red-rimmed gaze was sharp as a hawk’s; even her lips, never plump (like Sarah Coleman’s, say), had thinned.