Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“It can’t be worse than your apartment in Adams,” she said.

“We’ll run away,” I promised. “Now. We’ll take the girls and stay in a New York hotel.”

The sad smile persisted. The template was fixed. “New York hotels cost sixty dollars a night. What happens after the first week?”

“I’ll get a job in advertising. I’ll teach English to Japanese businessmen.”

She shook her head, with a delicate metronomic precision, back and forth and back and forth, that gave her the terrifying relentlessness of the inanimate. “Sometimes things we want,” she told me, “arrive too late. Two years ago, even a year ago, we could have forced the issue like that, and let the world pick up the pieces. It would have. It would have made allowances for us. It does, for lovers. But now — our case has grown stale, Alf. Mrs. Arthrop was no accident. There would be others, probably there were others — ”

“ No ,” I lied, with a passion hollow but still expectant, still hopeful of being justified. Modern fiction — for surely this reconstruction, fifteen years later, is fiction — thrives only in showing what is not there: God is not there, nor damnation and redemption, nor solemn vows and the sense of one’s life as a matter to be judged and refigured in a later accounting, a trial held on the brightest, farthest quasar. The sense of eternal scale is quite gone, and the empowerment, possessed by Adam and Eve and their early descendants, to dispose of one’s life by a single defiant decision. Of course, these old fabulations are there, as ghosts that bedevil our thinking.

“Brent is willing to forgive me everything,” Genevieve was saying.

“Big deal,” I said. “What’s to forgive? A post-structuralist bastard like that has no right to talk about forgiveness as if it has meaning. I’m the one who should forgive him , for marrying you first. But I don’t. I don’t forgive that smug ass-kissing shit, rushing down to Yale to find bigger asses to kiss.”

Her smile had become less sad; a twinkle brimmed in her eyes like a new kind of tear. “Don’t be so competitive. Brent’s much more of a traditionalist than you think. He believes in family. I’ll tell you a secret. His own true parents got a divorce when he was three, then his mother married her lover and they became ardent Lutherans. He swore he’d never do it to his own children. Get a divorce. He said if I’d come back he’d even let me have lovers, if he wasn’t adequate for me sexually.”

This was an agonizing prospect, his most fiendish ploy yet: a chain of licit lovers, of other me s enjoying her exquisite sex, her moist breathing, her sighs of satisfaction, while her beauty broadened and her sensuality deepened. The vision made me dizzy; I left the sofa and went down on my knees. As it happened, a nailhead in the dry early-nineteenth-century floorboards had lifted up in the area near her chair; I felt the stab and heard the gray flannel of my trouser knee rip.

My recollection snags on this irritating mishap; I forget what all I said; I had pretty well run out of promises. The ragged, burning tear in my knee may have impaired my eloquence. She was firmly in control now. She pooh-poohed as one would a child’s fear my fear that she would with Brent’s connivance take many other lovers. After me, after us , she assured me, they would be anti-climactic. No, fidelity to her husband would be her passion, her penance, her nunnery. How stunning, in my mind’s eye, she would be in her habit, her wimple and winged headdress! She had been a nun all along, perhaps — that was the secret of her immaculate poise. The more extravagant my pleas became, the more gently adamant she grew; at last, trying to salvage something from this wreck of a tryst, I tugged at the zipper on her snug white Calvin Klein jeans and reached up under her black sweater — “ Ouf , Alf!” she cried involuntarily, “your hands are icy !”—and proposed that we make love one last time. This, too, was refused, as too sad-making, the two of us knowing it would be the last time. There were things one shouldn’t know. She was a realist, my perfect mistress, and I, I was that dying man I have described, unable to believe a blank white abyss drops off from the foot of his bed, that the film is within a few feet of running out and clattering in the empty projector, that there will be no tomorrow. We have trouble believing in yesterday, but believe absolutely in tomorrow. I could not believe this was the end. I was with her; I felt terribly alive, with that life she alone created in me; still in her presence, for these few more seconds, I was happy.

[Returns to U.S. April 24, 1856, one day after sixty-fifth birthday — avoids public dinner in New York and in general avoids statements likely to offend one or another faction of agitated Democracy — says in Baltimore, Disunion is a word which ought not to be breathed amongst us even in a whisper.… There is nothing stable but Heaven and the Constitution — on May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina invades Senate and beats Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, leading Abolitionist, insensible with gutta-percha cane — two days later, John Brown and sons slaughter five Southerners at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas — in Cincinnati in June Democratic-party convention picks Buchanan on seventeenth ballot, over Pierce and Douglas, the South’s favored candidate — platform asks for end to agitation of slavery question and recognition of the right of the people of all the Territories … to form a constitution with or without domestic slavery — in Pittsburgh the Republican party nominates its first Presidential candidate, the explorer John C. Frémont, and puts forth a platform prohibiting from the territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery and promising to bring all those responsible for the atrocious outrages in Kansas, including President Pierce, to a sure and condign punishment — Republican leaders in subsequent campaign speeches hope to bring the parties of the country into an aggressive war upon slavery (New York Governor William H. Seward) and look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South; when the black man [shall] wage a war of extermination against his master (Ohio Representative Joshua R. Giddings) — Buchanan makes no speeches during campaign, but stays at Wheatland copiously writing letters decrying the possibility of disunion, proclaiming, We have so often cried “ wolf ,” that now, when the wolf is at the door, it is difficult to make people believe it —

[On October 15th, Democrats win Pennsylvania by narrow margin, assuring election for Buchanan — final tally shows 1,832,955 votes for Buchanan, 1,339,932 for Frémont (fewer than eight thousand below the Mason-Dixon Line), and 871,731 for American (Know-Nothing) candidate Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth President of the United States — electoral tally a comfortable 174 to 114 to 8—Buchanan’s inaugural speech, delivered during debilitating siege of so-called National Hotel disease, while wearing a coat, tailor-made in Lancaster, lined with a magnificent design of thirty-one stars representing the states of the Union, with Pennsylvania dominating the center , in its one unexpected passage asserts that territorial issue is happily a matter of but little practical importance, and besides, it is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is now understood, be speedily and finally settled — the Dred Scott decision, announced two days later, ruling that any law excluding slavery from a territory is unconstitutional, unleashes storm of protest in the North — office-seeker-harried Buchanan’s disposition of patronage alienates former faithful political friends John Forney, David Lynch, and Dr. Jonathan Foltz — financial panic of 1857 leaves the relatively untouched South cocksure and crowing that Cotton is King , whereas in the depressed North hungry workmen chant Bread or blood , and industrialists and Republicans demand higher tariffs —