Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  “No way,” I said, rising from my Danish easy chair. It had a cracked teak arm I had always been regluing when I lived here. I tried to brush tenacious cat hairs from the seat of my pants. I had new loyalties: my dark-eyed mistress watched my connubial visits like a hawk, and expected minute-by-minute accountings. “I’m trying to lead an orderly life,” I explained, not unapologetically.

  “Is that what it is?” Two inches of silvery pale-green vermouth, near enough the color of her eyes, had appeared in her hand, in a smeared orange-juice glass she had fished unwashed from the dishwasher. She bent her face and voice toward me and said, “Alf, you must talk to them, they’re confused and hurt and always after me with questions—‘What didn’t he like about us?’ ‘Can she really be that great?’ ‘Won’t he ever get it out of his system and come back?’ ”

  I resented her trying to mar with female talkiness the manly silence, the smooth scar tissue, the boys and I had grown over my defection.

  “The boys, especially,” she went on. “Daphne’s the healthiest, because she’s so open and still childlike. But the boys—I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. They’re very considerate of me, tiptoeing around as if I’m sick, not blaming me for doing this stupid thing of losing you, trying to do all the jobs around the place that you used to do …”

  She would let her sentences trail off, inviting her conversational partner to be creative. Her canvases, when she found time to paint, were always left unfinished, like Cézanne’s. A blank corner or two left for Miss Manners. Her own face, too, was generally left blank, without even lipstick as makeup. When she attempted mascara, she looked like a little girl gotten up as a witch. In the silly Sixties, she went in for pigtails, and to make a special effect, for a party, she would do one half of her hair in a braid and let the other half bush out. Her hair—have I made this clear?—was not exactly curly, it was wiggly, and in tint not exactly dried-apricot orange but paler, so that her pubic hair did not so much contrast with her flesh as seem to render it in a slightly different shade. Now, with Ben’s lively juices still swimming in her, she was bringing home to me—filling in with color the dim black-and-white hollow haunted feeling with which I had watched Nixon on television—the feeling of shame, shame as a bottomless inner deepening, a palpable atmosphere slowing and thickening one’s limbs as the gravity on Saturn would, shame my new planet, since my defection, leaving my house hollow and (that Anglo-Saxon word of desolate import) blafordleas, lordless. But, as with many of her actions, Norma disdained completion. Having brought me to the point where I wanted to crawl up the stairs and awaken my children and beg their forgiveness, she glanced down at the cracked and oft-glued arm of the chair I had vacated and idly asked, “What were you reading?”

  I had left a book splayed on the arm. It was Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South, edited by Eric L. McKitrick. “An anthology of pro-slavery views before the Civil War,” I explained. “Some of the arguments are quite ingenious, and compassionate. The slaveholders weren’t all bad.”

  “Slaveholders never think so,” she said. I felt in this a feminist edge, newly sharpened by my bad and typically male behavior. She softened it with, “Is this still about Buchanan?”

  For the last ten years of our life together I had been trying in my spare time and vacations to write some kind of biographical—historical/psychological, lyrical/elegiacal, the sort of thing Jonathan Spence does with the Chinese—opus on James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States. New Hampshire’s own, Franklin Pierce, had been the fourteenth, but his Ambassador to England, and then his successor in the Presidential hot seat, had caught the corner of my eye. The only bachelor President, the most elderly up to Eisenhower, the last President to wear a stock, and the last of the doughface accommodators, before the North-South war swept accommodation away. A big fellow, six feet tall, with mismatching eyes, a tilt to his head, and a stiffish courtliness that won my heart. He projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence, where Pierce had the narrowing New England mind, gloomy as an old flint arrowhead. Buchanan’s mind, people complained he couldn’t make it up, and I liked that. There is a civilized heroism to indecision—“the best lack all conviction,” etc. He and his niece Harriet Lane ran the spiffiest White House since Dolley Madison’s, and I liked that, too. I felt lighter when I thought about him. The old gent was so gallant, there in the trembling shade of the Civil War. You know how it is, fellow historians—you look for a little patch not trod too hard by other footsteps, where maybe you can grow a few sweetpeas. My efforts, never-ending as research led to more research, and even more research led back to forgetfulness and definitive awareness that historical truth is forever elusive, had begun at about the time we had decided, after Daphne’s wide-eyed arrival on earth, that for their sake and ours we had had enough children. This was a wise decision, but also a pity, for Norma and I had a natural flair for producing children; our sperm and ova clicked even while our libidos slid right past one another, and the busywork of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and training toddlers gave us the shared sensation of being an ongoing concern.

  “Still,” I had to admit. My attempt at extending our family to include a bouncing book had proved painfully slow and thus far futile. Perhaps Buchanan was the cause of our breakup: I hoped that a change of life might shake free the dilatory, feebly kicking old fetus I had been carrying within me for a decade.

  “Maybe you should give up and try somebody else,” the Queen of Disorder wickedly, if diffidently, suggested. “He’s too dreary.”

  “He’s not dreary,” I monogamously insisted. “I love him.”

  Somehow—I knew it would—this stung her; her cheeks showed some pink in the room’s sickly, tasselled lamplight. Her blush made her eyes seem greener. In her hurt she sipped the glinting vermouth. I wondered if she had been kidding about her and Ben. She exuded that faint hayey smell women have in summer.

  “You missed Nixon’s resigning,” I told her.

  “We heard some of it on the car radio.”

  On the way to the woods, or wherever. Ben was living in one of the Wayward girls’ dormitories, where guests were forbidden after ten. “We all watched it together,” I said, conjuring up a domestic unity that hadn’t quite existed. “It was sad.”

  “Why?” Norma was a down-the-line liberal. “The only sad thing is it puts that idiot Ford in office.”

  “Ben says he’s an idiot?”

  “I say.”

  “You know,” I said, “darling, you ought to be careful in the woods. There’s poison ivy, not to mention snakes.”

  She pushed back from her forehead a piece of her untidy wiggly hair and blew upward, as if that would keep it in place. She glanced at the corners of the ceiling again but with a different, less searching quality now; I knew her well enough to see her mind deciding that this homecoming had nothing more in it for her. She was tired and ready for bed. She tossed off the last of the vermouth and said, “You be careful, too. There’s lots of mancatchers out there.”

  Nothing she said was ever not somewhat true. One of my memories of the Ford years—indeed, the one that has next priority in this accounting, elbowing its way to the head of the line—is of a wet cunt nipping, as it were, at the small of my back as a naked woman settled herself astride my waist to give me an allegedly relaxing shoulder rub. The rub was some kind of reward, a therapeutic interlude in our two-person orgy, yet I have never really liked massages, not really believing in the chiropractic theory behind them, and the sensation, as if of a large French kiss, down toward where my ass divided, made me internally shudder. The fault is mine, my squeamish generation’s. Men born later than the Truman Administration and subjected since early adolescence to open beaver shots in national magazines and to childbirth documentaries that spare the TV viewer nary a contraction will scarcely credit our innocence, inherited from our fathers and their fathers before them, concerning female genitalia. The two sets of lips, major and minor. The frilly
look of it, climaxing in a little puckering wave of flesh around the clitoris. Its livid, oysterish, scarcely endurable complexity, which all but gynecologists used to spare themselves, along with the visual ordeal of parturition. Close your eyes and take the plunge, was the philosophy in olden days, and vacate the site as quickly as possible. Nine months later, responsible fatherhood would begin. You have a son. Those were dark ages, when everything was done in the dark, like spermatozoa blindly snaking up the Fallopian tube to the egg. No more: the cunt is no mere fur-rimmed absence in binary opposition to the phallic presence, it is itself a presence, a signified, with an aggressive anatomy of its own. If it is good enough to mop up the ache of an erection, it is good enough to lay down an icy bit of slime on the seducer’s love-flushed skin.

  The woman was not, strange to tell, the lady of my dreams, the woman for whom I had left my wife; it was little Wendy Wadleigh, having appeared at my dusty apartment in Adams on I forget what excuse, possibly some kind of reverse-twist consultation about Norma’s relationship with her own estranged spouse, big-headed Ben. I had never quite warmed to Wendy; her legs were too short, her center of gravity was too low, her Debbie Reynolds–style energy was too indiscriminate, the cornflower blue of her eyes too eager and bright. She jogged, she cooked macrobiotic, she played the viola, she tutored dyslexics, she coached the Wayward girls in hockey and lacrosse, she swam at the school pool every day, she wore her pale hair in a shiny little athletic “flip.” But in those far-off Ford days it was assumed that any man and woman alone in a room with a lock on the door were duty-bound to fuck. Hardly half an hour into her visit had come the quick drawing of the khaki shades, the latching of the door’s burglar chain for double security, the knocking of the phone off the hook and the smothering of its automatic squawk beneath a pillow stolen from the suddenly pivotal bed. My rooms in Adams, as stated above [see this page] numbered two, plus a kitchen the size of a bathroom and a bathroom the size of a closet. The two windows’ view was of the back of a factory where a few bluish lights kept watch over long, empty floors still bearing the ghostly footprints of machinery gone south. By pressing one’s face against a pane one could see past the side of a projecting neon restaurant sign two doors away toward a street corner where pre-Japanese autos dragged their rusty lengths through a stoplight. On this main street, tiny people flickered past the mirror-framed entrance to a shoe store that was always threatening final closure. To minimize distraction, I turned off WADM, where somebody’s symphony was repetitively working up to a thunderous dismissal of that particular movement’s themes. Am I alone in thinking of classical music as very slow in saying what it’s getting at? All that passionate searching, and it ends by discovering the tonic where it began. I never listen to it, except when between worlds—driving in the car, or during those transitional Ford years.

  In the sudden shades-down gloom, Wendy, suppressing her natural tendency to chatter, rapidly undressed down to her white underwear, which glowed like the soft strips of daylight below the canvas shades’ brown hems. I did the same, mirroring her semi-abandon, keeping on my underpants for now, as if hesitating to unbandage a flaming wound. The ornate etiquette of screwing a woman for the first time! Does the lady expect a condom? Should one offer the use of the bathroom, and use it oneself, as before an extended auto trip? Are there any surface blemishes or peculiarities to be explained, lest they give alarm, or should we let the flesh speak for itself? The awkwardness takes us back to childhood, when one knows no accepted forms. In this abrupt closeness a subtle but immensely actual novelty—in odor, in texture, in erotic slant, and in estimated experience and expectation—looms like an intimidating cliff. Though I had held Wendy in my arms at many a college dance, and in the groping latter stages of many a faculty get-together, when the host, to prolong the already distended evening, fishes out a forgotten Billy Eckstine LP, her body was basically strange to me. Her skin, the broad patch of it between her bra and panties, felt cooler than I had expected, and harder in its curves, especially the adjacent two of her prominent rump. I allowed myself the unprecedented liberty of caressing these, through the silken sheath of her underpants, more bikini than I was accustomed to. It was considerate and perhaps cunning of Wendy to keep her underwear on; as a woman of my generation, she understood, as an undergraduate would not have, my need to be sheltered from too blindingly sudden an exposure to the glories of the female body, and the stimulus that underwear would be for me, with my long gradualist history of forbidden glimpses, up a skirt or through a blouse armhole, and of backseat grapplings with resistant elastics and snaps. Or—why make a maneuver of it?—she herself felt shy, and her sense of etiquette dictated reserving to a later stage of our session removal, by trembling hands working in partnership, of these last garments. For though this was 1974, we had not been born to its freedoms but brought to them through the timidity and tabus of earlier eras. Even the late Sixties had an innocence, an oh-boy Barbarella forced cheer, counting off orgasms like the petals of a daisy, which the thoroughly experienced Ford epoch lacked. Each era simultaneously holds, in the personalities of its citizens, an absorption into mainstream life of previous social frontiers and an exhaustion of the energy that propelled recent breakthroughs and defiances. College kids had already pulled back from revolution and dharma, afraid of finding no place within the slumping economy and of getting shot in futile protest as at Kent State. The late-Fifties hippies were now leathery old carpenters and shepherdesses, child-ridden and LSD-addled, holed up in corners of a factitious rural America. We lay a while kissing, Wendy Wadleigh and I—heavy-petting, as they quaintly used to call it—warming each other up, her mouth getting looser and moister, her body in the warps of erotic space seeming to become a kind of tilted vessel funnelling saliva and spiritual energy through her mouth into mine, right down to my toes as they curled up into the arches of her feet. I began to float in love’s hyperspace; my fingers spelunked their way past the elastic panty-band to the parabolic curves of her aluminum-smooth buttocks and the velvety dimple high between; she arched her back to increase the angle of provocation and our white and gleaming underthings fell from our bodies with a few pokes of her thumbs, like tangerine peels.

  [Retrospect eds.: All this strictly should be in the pluperfect, since the narrative begins post-coitally: “… and our white and gleaming underthings had fallen from our bodies with a few pokes, etc.” Adjust if you think crucial. Also, an alternative image for the last might be “… popped from our bodies like the pods of impatiens seeds.” If our readers can be trusted to know how impatiens seeds act.]

  I don’t think Wendy had a climax, though her breathing apparatus expressed a lot of ravishment, and her eyes changed color wonderfully, their blue becoming inky at the moment of my entry, and she moved her hips with a great deal of energetic purpose. Not used to her brand of wetness, amazed to be inside her, I no doubt came too soon. That was another elementary fact it took me time to learn: cunts are as individual as faces, and seating oneself inside a new one is a violent chemical event. Her wetness had become so extreme I kept slipping, like a man in smooth-soled boots on a mud-bank, and even before my last throb of ejaculation I was starting to resent this whole act of intercourse, which had been less than half, I felt, my idea.

  So, when after some friendly chatter two inches from my face there in my bed she got up on her knees and gave me a backrub like some therapeutic Amazon, I was in no loving mood, and my ooze of resentment like frozen amber has preserved the sensation for nigh onto seventeen years. She was presuming to expand our acquaintanceship into uxorial physical services, when I was still married to one wife and had another—the Perfect Wife—lined up waiting. I itched to buck, to toss off this witchy incubus moistly riding my back, and yet, though sullenly, sank into submission beneath her health-club ministrations, distracted no doubt by a dozen worries—that my perfect and future wife was trying to reach me through the phone that was off the hook, or that one of my abandoned children had drowned in the river o
r fallen through the ice (the season of this incident is unclear; some bias in my recollecting machinery wants to make it winter, with icicles on the fire escape and boots and mittens among Wendy’s castoffs), or that I have forgotten an appointment over at Wayward with one of my feather-headed tutees, or that I should be correcting term papers or working at my book, my precious nagging hopeless book. For we forget, as we tote up our lives in terms of copulations, how framed and squeezed the act is by less exalted realities—by appointments and anxieties, by the cooking smells arising from the floor below and the rumbling of one’s hungry stomach, by the changes of light and obscure pressures of the day as the afternoon ebbs on the yellowing wallpaper into the gray fuzz of lost time. The day is shot, we say, as of a lackadaisical execution. And all the while behind the sun-dried brown shade near one’s head (subdivided like a graham cracker by the sash rails and mullions) the great sky brims with its unnoticed towers of luminous, boiling cloud. No, only in retrospect, Retrospect, are our amorous encounters ideal, freed of inconvenience. Yet, when all sides concede that fucking Wendy Wadleigh was the last thing I should have been doing, given my carefully worked-out life plan, it remains to extol the marvellous change her eyes would undergo upon what the legal experts call penetration, not just this first time but every time thereafter. I have written cornflower blue but like all color attributions it is a linguistic confection, by which perhaps I, no botanist, mean merely to evoke their petalled quality, the foliation of blue within their irises, that at the moment of nether entry would become religious, supernaturally fond—three-dimensional, you could say*—the widened pupils drillholes into infinity while tawny flecks were hoisted up from their matrix of shining gel like sparks in a hologram. This carnal union pleased her, her eyes declared, and, however distracted and pussy-whipped one felt, one could not but swoon a little.