Memories of the Ford Administration

by John Updike

  “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.

  “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.

  Chastened, frightened, I told Genev
ieve, “Of course you have the right. I’ve loved being loyal to you—having somebody I could be loyal to.”

  Her hands dropped, her face lifted, her eyes flared: “But you haven’t been!” As if this merely literal point bore repeating, when I had been speaking spiritually, in essence, in a large general sense, day after day: I had felt betrothed to her. She said, “I have no idea how many others there have been.”

  “Dearest, there haven’t been any others.” Not counting Norma, who was after all my legal wife, and Wendy, fucking whom I thought of as clearing up an old tension rather than creating new business, and the slim blonde woman, a guest speaker on transactional analysis here for two days, who cried out “I’m kissing my own cunt!” (which might have happened under late Nixon, to be precise), and semi-Platonic brushes with a few Wayward girls, students in their second year and soon to move on anyway. Never get involved with a first-year student; they hang around forever, becoming dependent and developing Electra complexes. I was having chronic trouble reminding myself of the seriousness of this conversation. Under our aggrieved words ran the thought of mine that even perfect couples quarrel, that like any long-established couple we were having a quarrel, that it brought us closer to being married, being able to quarrel. In the same way, it must be difficult for a man on his deathbed to take his own dying seriously; his son is asking to borrow the car, his wife downstairs is shrieking that the dishwasher is overflowing, his local sports team has lost four straight, his favorite sitcom is going to be on tonight at eight-thirty. All the time, he is truly dying, he will soon be light-years beyond all these concerns, but for now is still here, having to participate. For now, Genevieve was still before my eyes. I was in her immaculate living room, basking in the heightened sense of being alive that only she gave me, her peculiar beauty, earnestness, crispness, and composed energy bringing me to the edge of something like merriment, even as she wept, wept away our conjoined lives as if she had taken a bright wound no tourniquet could stanch.

  My hands groped in air helplessly, to heal the hole. I rose from the sofa and went to her, huddled miserably in her easy chair, and put my hands on her wide shoulders, her firm back. “Forgive me,” I said. “I love you. I want you. Norma’s lawyer is getting back from a conference in Arizona and has promised to get in touch with mine first thing after the holidays. Things are moving along, honest.”

  Without turning her head, so my lips stayed at her ear, she reached up to her shoulder and put her left hand [see this page] on mine, as if to quiet me. She got her sobbing under control. “Sit down, Alf. I have some things I must say to you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” It was as if the tiny seed of guilt inert and defiant in me was now flowering—cascadingly, its feverish soft blooms pressing into every crevice. [You know how it feels, Retrospect eds.: the slipping, the vast tilting, the panicky wish to backpedal, all mixed in with a certain irritation at being taken, by a woman’s emotional violence, away from one’s level-headed work.] I sipped my neglected beer. It tasted bitter, of arrested fermentation in Teutonic, glass-lined vats.

  “You were right,” she told me, a bit crooningly, as if the song she had sung her daughters were still in her throat, knitting her hands together between her white knees, in a gesture alarmingly gentle, as if wishing to restrain the blow she must give. Genevieve’s head, I had sometimes felt, was full of poses—templates into conformity with which she was constantly bringing her body, face, and voice. It gave her glamour but also glamour’s cruel and decisive imperviousness. “Brent did stay a long time the other night, and together we drank up almost all of the wine, as you saw. He made me a proposition, which I said I would consider, after talking to you. Now I have talked to you.”

  Though I have been a teacher for all of my adult life, I am not very good at being taught. I get restive; a certain hostility builds up during my respectful silence. I did not like her patient, instructive, motherly tone. A perfect wife should be motherly, but not so the husband notices.

  “He said,” she continued, “that Yale has made him an offer for the spring semester. There’s been both a suicide and a pregnancy in the English department. The pay wouldn’t be any better than here at first, and he would have associate status for at least three years, but he really can’t say No. It would be like saying No to the Vatican if you’re a priest. He has to go.”

  Genevieve, in bed or at cocktail parties, had a fine frontal directness—straight at you—so it was a striking deviation when she turned her head to a three-quarters view, her black hair swathed over her ear like that of a Brontë, its gleam mirrored in the framed abstract lithograph hanging behind her. She looked demure. She fluttered her eyelashes, not so much coquettishly as like a stutterer trying to blink away a laryngeal impediment. “He’s asked me to come with him,” she said. There was that ghost of a blush again. She peeked at me out of the corners of her eyes, then recovered her normal manner, gazing at me directly, even the hands on her knees perfectly symmetrical. “The girls would be so thrilled,” she said.

  “B-but”—myself battling a stammer of excitement—“you don’t love him. You love me.” Yet when I tried to picture our love I remembered an absolute darkness, and the primordial sound of her swallowing, and the malty brine of her breath afterwards. Except for our excursion to New York City, we had not been enough in the sunlight. We were underdeveloped film.

  “I loved you very much,” she said, in that same slow singsong, neither emphasizing nor avoiding the fatal “d,” “but you’ve worn me out, Alf. I’m tired of living in an unreal world. I just need to rest now, and be normal, and watch my girls grow, and grow old myself.” Is it by a trick of memory that as she said this she seemed to broaden, so her slightly wide face, with its dark brows and flat little proud chin-tip, became congruent with a housewife’s placidly solid body, calmly sitting, the acrobatically supple waist thickened, the switchy lean legs on their way to a middle-aged waddle? “I feel ridiculous sometimes,” she went on, “being romantic and passionate. It’s not as if I’m twenty. I’m thirty-three. I think the nuns did a job on me—they delayed my development. Well, if I was going to have such an episode, I’m glad it was with you, Alf. You really know how to keep a girl on her toes.”

  “But I said, Norma is moving. You and I can be married in six months, if the damn lawyers will stay in New Hampshire.”

  “Norma moves,” Genevieve said, “but, oh, so slowly. Brent saw the two of you talking at the President’s party and said you looked very cozy.”

  “Did we? I don’t remember. She had a lot of bad news about the kids she had to dump on me.” If I didn’t stop, I would come to the car dent, and Andy up on the third floor, and Daphne’s fever, and a betrayal beyond even Brent’s ken. Not that, in the Ford era, going to bed with someone was the life-and-death matter it has become. But even then—to keep the historical perspective—it wasn’t quite trivial.

  The Perfect Wife smiled sadly. “Brent said the two of you looked just right for each other.”

  “Brent, schment,” I snorted. “New Haven is a terrible city,” I told her. “Beyond the Yale campus, it’s all ghetto.” Yet even as I spoke I felt how paltry, how touchingly bush-league, were the semi-rustic charms of Wayward and its environs.

  “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 doe
s, 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 mes 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.