Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“Who else says ‘fuck’? Who else have you been screwing, while I’ve been standing on my feet all day and telling everybody below the knee is what’s in now and rushing back to feed Susan and Laura and tuck them into bed and tell them that Mommy loves them and Daddy loves them even though he’s not here and God loves them even though their prayers aren’t always answered right away? I don’t ask them what their prayers are, I know what their prayers are, I’m the one who’s denying them, not God. Then I go around and lock up and lie there and pray you’ll call and try not to be too frightened and stop listening to the creaks and cracks and the way the refrigerator downstairs sounds like a man walking around and get some sleep so I can be fresh and charming in the shop tomorrow.” I had never heard her talk so much, with so little self-censorship; I was at last getting the unabridged edition. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman alone,” she went on, “you’re a man, you’re like a stupid bear, you just go off into some cave and if a warm body wanders in you jump on her. While I’m humiliated and scared, not just for my selfish self but for my poor dear little girls, you’re preening in front of these adoring brainless Wayward brats and fucking anybody you please because it’s cute to be perverse against totalitarian fate. Who’s the totalitarian? Me, I suppose. Not sweet old Norma, she’s too disorganized. She’s just a big woozy maternal cloud of, of”—and with an impatient flick of her fingers she slipped into a language native to her marriage, her husband’s Derridian — “ la dissémination .”

For a slip-sliding heart-stopping second I thought she also had been told of my lapse with Norma after the President’s party. Who would have told her? My nemesis Brent saw us talk together and maybe leave together. That bastard. He was all around me, cutting off my air supply. Like the smell of Norma’s paints that night.

As I dipped into my chest for breath to defend myself, Genevieve asked, “What was the attraction?”

“With whom?”

“My God, Alf, how many floozies are there? With this Arthrop woman! Brent says she’s fat and sloppy.”

“How could he know?”

“Don’t try to sidetrack me. He saw her somewhere the time she was up here, maybe at the rehearsal, maybe at the play. I don’t pry into his life. She sounds awful. What attracted you to her?”

I resisted telling her; it was too intimate.

“What did she have that I didn’t have? Bigger boobs? Dirtier tricks in bed? How did you know until you got there? Or can men tell ahead of time? Can men smell it? Did she want it up the ass?”

She was bringing out my prim side. I shuddered and said, “Don’t be vulgar. She had nothing you don’t have. You’re perfect. For me, at least.”

“Sure as hell sounds it.” She was getting slangy, with her loosened tongue. I didn’t like this. I had liked the rather formal way she had talked, as I had her old-fashioned, erect posture and correct, faintly severe clothes.

“Her name,” I confessed. “Her name was Ann. Like Ann Coleman, the love of Buchanan’s life.”

“That’s a laugh,” she said. I hated the phrase. It sounded like Brent, in faculty meetings, the voice of today’s thinking, debunking in a false demotic accent.

“It’s the truth. What else is the truth?” I wondered aloud, using a trick I had developed with inattentive or unruly classes, of retreating into monologue, of delving into myself with an arresting honesty. “She was a woman. A different woman, a new woman, I don’t know. Not to have responded at all would have shown a total lack of intellectual curiosity. The same thing for her, I’m sure. Human beings are intellectually curious. I’ve said I’m sorry, Gen, come on . It happened six months ago, it’s over, it’s gone. If it wasn’t for goddamn Brent — ”

She was crying again, more freely now, as if her precise, beautifully modelled face were getting the hang of it. Her lower lids overflowed; her lips trembled like a slapped child’s; the faint shadow of a depression in the center of her shovel-tip-shaped chin flickered off and on like a defective light bulb. “It — it just makes everything so meaningless,” she got out.

“Why meaningless? What do you mean by meaning? What meaning does any of this have, in the long run, when everybody is dead, and our children are dead, and their children’s children?” I heard myself sounding like a taunting professor; it was the ghost of Brent I was combatting; he was possessing her, prompting her, whispering into her tender ear with that tightly hinged jaw of his, its masseters overdeveloped by years of clenching a pipe between his teeth. He was in the room, like smoke from a fire the campers thought they had extinguished, but that has been smoldering beneath the pine needles. For the first time, it came to me that the sofa I was sitting on would not likely be used for lovemaking tonight; we had gone too far off course; a transit in my stomach measured the widening angle of unlikelihood. Up to now, we had slowly but steadily plowed the waves of the society that upheld and tossed us; now our great white love boat was sliding more and more to leeward. To offer another metaphor, the cliff face I had been climbing was tilting outward at me. “I cannot believe,” I pleaded, rather frantically but neglecting to shed my pontifical voice, “that this one utterly trivial incident should matter so much to you. Brent’s been balling little Jennifer right along, it seems obvious, and then as you were kind enough to tell me he’s been taking out Norma and God knows who else.”

“I kicked Brent out.” Her voice had recovered distinctness, though her tears still flowed, giving her face there in the dim-lit living room a shine, an albedo, that reminded me of somebody else — who? Perhaps Sarah Coleman, the night she so youthfully went off to the theatre, where they had freshly installed gaslight. “I have no right to restrict or judge what he does. With you I thought I did have some right. I kicked him out for you.”

“You kicked him out on your own — you told him without warning me. Our five children up in smoke — poof! ”

“Oh, that again.” With one of her incisive white hands she waved away my old resentment, which in spite of good intentions I had more than once failed to conceal. “If you’re so obsessed with children, you should have stayed faithful to Norma.”

“I didn’t know how.” The words came out of me a bit enigmatically. Did I mean I couldn’t nail her to the wall, like Teddy Roosevelt and the currant jelly? Or that the Gerald Ford Zeitgeist precluded such knowledge? “Anyway, you weren’t exactly a Barbie doll just sitting there on the shelf. Remember that time at one of the Wadleighs’ parties, I was in the kitchen all innocent, looking at the notes and New Yorker cartoons they’d put up on the refrigerator door with magnets, and you came in helping Wendy clear away glasses or something and gave me this flat-out big French kiss and said to me, ‘Don’t be such a chicken.’ ”

“No,” the Perfect Wife answered. “I don’t remember that at all.”

I was thrilled by this totalitarian ability to alter history; how much more creative and human it is, after all, than the attempt to recover the exact quiddity of events.

“I do remember,” she went on, “the time you came to the house to return some book by Lacan or Paul de Man that Brent had lent you and begging you to stop, begging you right there on that sofa, it was in the middle of the morning and I remember there was snow on the ground, everything so bright, I felt so naked, I felt so used, such an adulteress — ” She broke off, the tears overcoming her again, her lovely, slightly wide face hidden in her hands, her hair by now half-freed from her cashmere turtleneck and falling in forlorn hanks down past her huddled, convulsing shoulders.