by John Updike
“I told him,” she said.
“You told him?” I repeated inanely. I could not tell if the smell of fear—electric, like that of ozone—was mine or hers. “You told him what?” I did not have to ask who the “him” was.
“About us.”
I could not stop thinking of how lovely Genevieve looked, there in the feathery sunlight underneath the elm, on an Easter morning when the whole town seemed to have been cleared, as if for shooting a movie—not another car in sight, not a bird cackling to clutter the sound track. She kept looking down the street, as if toward the director.
“You did?” Now my voice did sound sick. My whole world, disorderly or not, had been pulled out from under me.
Her focus slightly changed, shortened, to take in my face. The sunlight had that white sharp quality it has in the spring, before the leaves come out. Each pebble on the street, gritty with the past winter’s sand and salt, threw a crescent-shaped shadow. My mind crackled with irrelevant thoughts, such as what a pleasant spacious country America was, with its freedoms and single-family homes, and that I should have received this fatal news in a more dignified position than sitting here helpless in my jaunty old bathtub of a horseless carriage. Genevieve was speaking very rapidly, rather breathlessly. “Was that wrong? He’s been sensing something lately, and we got to talking last night, and he was so innocent, it seemed cruel not to tell him. Wasn’t that right?”
I loved her so much, she looked so perfect, her face just slightly wider than ideal, like a child’s, that I foolishly smiled and nodded, feeling fuzzy all through, like the elm. “And what did he say?”
“Well,” she said, and looked over me and my car down toward the street, toward the center of town. She was obviously dressed for church, and perhaps he was coming from church, with their two little girls. It was hard to picture him as a churchman, even on Easter morning, since his professional career was based upon the exposure of meaningless binaries and empty signifiers. “We said many things. We were up until three, hashing over our whole marriage. But basically he said, Fine, if that’s what I want and if you’ll marry me.”
The Perfect Wife. Mine. It was locked in. I was on my way to Paradise. I felt rushed, a bit, like the good thief on the cross. Still, it was a direction. All I had to do was dispose of my own wife and children. They had been deconstructed, but didn’t know it yet. I would have to tell them. The wife, the kids. It was a not uncommon crisis in this historical era, yet there is a difference between an event viewed statistically, as it transpired among people who are absorbed into a historical continuum, and the same event taken personally, as a unique and irreversible transformation in one’s singular life, with reverberations travelling through one’s whole identity, to the limits of personal time. Since history always posits more time, backwards and forwards, in that respect it is less serious than a single, non-extendable life.
The Perfect Wife and her imperfect husband had come to the college three years before. They were seven or eight years younger than we, and the departments, small as the college is, don’t instantly mingle. But as time went on I had opportunity enough to observe her, and to judge her a jewel beyond price. I took note of her faultless figure, the breasts and hips emphatic but every ounce under control, and her exquisite, if slightly mannish, clothes, and her crisp but tender nurture of her two little girls, one of whom was a comically exact copy of her, in her husband’s pallid coloring, while the other, with Genevieve’s black eyes, brows, and hair, had a considerable portion of Brent’s dogmatic angularity, jutting jaw, and furrowed, troubled, skeptical forehead. At the Wayward College indoor pool, during faculty-use hours, Genevieve was as neat a nymph as a trademark artist ever penned, favoring a square-cornered swimcap of white rubber and a black single-piece bathing suit more stunning in its professional severity than any belly-baring bikini. At faculty parties, she was the model of woolen-clad, single-braceleted correctitude, alertly receptive while conversing with the President in her lavender upswept hair and regal purple muu-muu (the President, not Genevieve), amiably reserved and faintly teasing with the gangling young instructors and their giggly common-law brides, and cheerfully frontal with her husband’s academic equals. Me, I usually viewed her in profile, admiring her pursed considering lips, her single flashing eye beneath the dense clot of curved lashes, and her scarcely perceptible nasal curve, which I saw as Mediterranean, a genetic trace inherited from the fabled age of matriarchal queendoms, of calmly murderous white goddesses. We at first avoided one another at these gatherings; there was a dangerous magnetism both felt from the start. Her conversation, when we dared politely talk, seemed a bit flat, factual, and (with my wife’s wandering indirections as background noise) unsubtle; but I blamed this on mental contamination by her husband, with his pugnacious monosyllable of a monicker and his boyish thrust of stiff beige hair above his slanting forehead. He was contentious, dismissive, cocky, and a great hit with the students; he played to them with a televisable glibness and catered to their blank, TV-scoured brains by dismissing on their behalf the full canon of Western masterpieces, every one of them (except Wuthering Heights and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass) a relic of centuries of white male oppression, to be touched as gingerly as radioactive garbage. In faculty meetings he spoke, though less than half a generation younger than I, with the brash authority of the New Thinking; gray heads bowed and made way, in this quaint institution devoted to the interim care of well-bred, well-off girls en route from their fathers to their husbands, for “studies” whose ideal texts were the diaries, where they could be found, of black female slaves. He was active, dynamic, persuasive, and committed. He took teaching too seriously, it seemed to me—as a species of political activity, as an opportunity for the exercise of power, even while decrying the white male power of bygone generations. Never mind; I invited him to be my opponent at tennis and squash, as a way of drawing closer to his wife. (Genevieve in tennis whites! With a heartbreaking little black hem to her socklets!! Her backhand was even better than her forehand, and after we became lovers she confided to me that she had been a natural left-hander, made over into a rightie by the penmanship instructors of a regressive, nun-run private school in lower Wisconsin.) When it came to dinner at their home, I marvelled at her impeccable housewifery, her gourmet cooking, her poignantly staged presentation of her little girls, in not only clean pastel gowns but miniature satiny bed-jackets, for their good nights to the guests. She had managed to instill in her household a European sense of children as graceful adornments to the parents, as opposed to our ugly American democratic style, with even an infant given his noisy vote in all proceedings. As to decor, in my own house there was simply too much—too many pictures on the wall, too many worn-out rugs overlapping on the floor, too much carelessly inherited furniture, too many shawls and cats shedding threads and hairs on the sofa cushions, too many half-empty bottles in the pantry and half-read books piled up everywhere, even in the bathrooms—whereas here there was just enough of books, tables, vases, chairs, a cool sufficiency with poverty’s clean lines, a prosperity short of surfeit. Even the grounds around their modest home, on a street of older houses unevenly redeemed from Depression-era decay, some having replaced the original clapboards with shingles and some with aluminum siding, showed Genevieve’s will toward order—the flower beds weed-free, the ornamental plantings bark-mulched. And when it came at last to lovemaking, on the hard floors and rented couches that adultery utilizes faute de mieux, hers was quick, firm, adventurous, definitive. There was none of that female maze and endocrinal grievance I had to work through with the Queen of Disorder. I pictured my wife’s psychosexual insides as a tidal swamp where a narrow path wound past giant nodding cattails and hidden egret-nests, with a slip into indifference gaping on both sides; Genevieve’s entrails were in comparison city streets, straight, broad, and zippy. If she had been in the least disappointing in this regard, I might not have found myself at this pebbly elm-shadow-striped corner, facing a fait accompli.
If you’ll marry me. They had cut a deal. They were a team, a pair of scissors. Snip here, snip there. The second thread was mine, a sensitive loose end.
The world had changed complexion; in an instant, the intoxicating spring air had become a wet hot washrag pressed against my face—the pressure of the actual, the mortal, the numinously serious. I didn’t know what to say, there with her perfection, so black and white, so anxious and unsmiling, before me. She spoke again, her eyes wider, as if to take into accounting some new margin to me. “Did I do the wrong thing? I thought we had agreed.”
We had agreed we were in love, lovely, too lovely ever to lose each other. I just wasn’t quite ready for the agreement’s translation into practical terms, into legal action involving realtors, judges, mellifluous lawyers, abandoned children. Yet I had no heart to say so, no heart but to say comfortingly, she being the child in sight, “No, that was right. It sounds as though you were very honest and brave.”
She tensely, tersely nodded, tucking that admitted fact away. I was giving myself away by inches.
“Where is Brent now?”
“He’s at church,” Genevieve answered. “The communion line was huge, and I said I’ll walk home to get the lamb roast in. They’ll probably swing by the drugstore for the paper.”
She glanced at me for a response, but I was silently smiling with an absurd élan, the fruit of too many Hollywood movies viewed in adolescence. When in crisis, double the cool. Cary, Gary, Alan, Errol. Meanwhile my stomach seemed to be swallowing me through an enormous trapdoor.
“I was going to call you tomorrow at your office. He said he wouldn’t move out until school was over. We won’t tell the girls until then so as not to ruin their grades. So you have until June to tell Norma.”
My part was all written; I was a character in their play. “I didn’t know Brent went to church,” I said.
“Only once a year, as a favor to me and the girls.”
“He loves you.”
“He says so.” A flicker of something—in the air, on my face—brought the forward momentum of her smoothly working brain to a small halt. “Do you want to back out?” she asked, in a voice moved up a notch in volume, for clarity. “You may, Alf.” Her voice dipped into tenderness, just as a gauzy cloud overhead dimmed the white sunshine of this day that had left winter behind. “You mustn’t do what feels wrong to you.”
“You and I feel right,” I tried weakly to explain. “It’s just that it—”
“It’s too much,” she finished for me. “It is a lot. I think I’ll go ahead with my side in any case; he and I have gone too far.”
He and I—the phrase made my blood fizz with jealousy. And the thought of Genevieve’s freeing herself to roam the Ford era’s sexual jungle was intolerable, in the totally eclipsing way that the thought of death is. I would have this woman if it killed me, I resolved. And no matter who else it killed. “You and he are going to keep living together till June?” I asked.
She blinked; her lashes on a Sunday morning were not so long and clotted as in party makeup. Each lash was distinct, giving her a starry-eyed look. “That was his proposal,” she said.
“You two are going to keep fucking?”
“Are you and Norma?”
“I haven’t told her yet. The situations aren’t parallel. We don’t fuck that much anyway. We think about it, and drift away. You and that prick really do it. You really just upped and told him about us. I can’t believe it.” I couldn’t believe, either, that I was showing this anger; but having committed myself, just then, to die for her if necessary gave me the right.
The Perfect Wife’s chin, level with my eyes, was shaped like the tip of a valentine or slightly blunted shovel and held a small depression, too shallow to be called a dimple; now this evanescent shadow began to tremble. I had stung her, already exhausted by her session with Brent, to tears. And Easter morning wasn’t going to hold its breath forever: A back door somewhere slammed. A bird, descended from the dinosaurs, issued several clauses of a long territorial proclamation. My foot lightly raced my engine. Brent was about to turn the corner in their military-tan Peugeot, armed with two little girls in frilly dresses. Theirs, too, was a nuclear family I was smashing. I felt sick to the point of self-extinction but the day with its hard-to-believe old message kept buoying me up, in my hollowing new knowledge. I was the new man, called into being. “Sorry,” I said to Genevieve, of my outburst. The sight of her face—its pearl-like clarity of skin and faintly childish breadth—often stirred in me a paternal gravity, a Gregory Peck–like timbre of sorrowing masculinity. “Everything’s fine. I love you. I’m glad you told. Somebody had to get the ball rolling. Be brave, darling. I’d love to be your husband.” And I myself rolled off, moving homeward at half-speed through Wayward’s familiar streets, wobbly pocked salt-peppered streets like an old pair of corduroy trousers, worn to the warp and weft above the knees, that you put on morning after morning, your change and wallet already in the pockets.
With the apparition of feminine perfection out of sight behind the corner, I could imagine myself back to normal, a pleasant pagan family man carrying home to a house already littered with our culture’s bulletins this Sunday’s Manchester Union-Leader and New York Times, deliciously loaded with Nixon’s ramifying deceptions: grand jury, Judge Sirica, Leon Jaworski, House Judiciary Committee, and furthermore he owed half a million in underpaid taxes. I must tell Norma I was leaving her, Norma and the children. But when? Our life together was so full of appointments and engagements. Just this afternoon, I had promised to take Andy and Buzzy, and Daphne if she bawled loud enough when we told her it was too adult, to something sinister called Chinatown, and later that afternoon we were invited for cocktails and heavy hors d’oeuvres (meaning we could stay deep into the night, sufficiently fed) to the Wadleighs’. All the music department would be there, and some of the prize music students, exotic as alpacas with their long necks and golden brushed hair, and a smattering from the other departments, and we would all get nicely enlightened and gemütlich on Jim Beam bourbon and Gallo white wine, with semi-surreptitious intakes on a communal toke of fascistically banned pot, and big-headed Ben would begin to play one of his several pianos, as if with three or four furious hands, there in the Wadleighs’ glass-and-redwood modern domicile, built with Wendy’s money (her mother had been a Sears, or maybe a Roebuck) high above the river, and the students would shyly get out their guitars and in sweet thready voices sing the protest songs that had outlasted America’s Vietnam involvement, and who could miss such a party? Not me. I wondered if the Muellers would be there, and if Genevieve, mia promessa sposa, would give me any kind of a betrothed glance. As I imperfectly remember, they were, and she didn’t. Not a glance. The perfect pretender.
The twelve hours’ carriage ride from Philadelphia still jolted queasily in Buchanan’s bones, further stiffened by the damp chill of late November, as, darkness having already descended, he climbed the six granite steps to William Jenkins’ front door. Beneath its semi-circular fanlight, between its sidelights of leaded clear glass, the door was freshly painted black in the latest Lancaster style, setting off quite brilliantly the polished brass knocker in the shape of a mermaid suspended head down, her bare breasts doing the knocking: a fanciful conceit from which the gentleman’s hand instinctively flinched, accustomed to calling at this house though he was.
The Jenkinses’ house stood on South Duke Street, halfway between the Colemans’ mansion and Buchanan’s bachelor rooms, and it seemed convenient and wise, weary as he was in his jolted bones and his overused eyes and throat from four days of legal investigation and disputation in the pestilentially congested City of Brotherly Love, to give his client hopeful news before betaking himself to East King Street, the comfort of a solitary glass of Madeira, and, after a quick and simple supper fetched up to his quarters by the serving girl, to the Colemans’ for a politic evening call. There were some emotional fences to mend, Buchanan realized. The fall of 1819 had been
trying for his fiancée as well as for the nation; his repeated absences upon matters of business had worn upon Ann’s nervous and—an unsympathetic observer might have said—much-indulged disposition. He did not, himself, mind her need for indulgence, any more than a man minds a skittish temper and rolling eye in a finely bred trotter; it savored, to him, of luxury—a luxurious self-regard encouraged by society, as confirmation of her high position, which would merge, once they were married, with his own.
Yet anticipation of the company of Ann’s falsely welcoming parents, along with that of Sarah, her seventeen-year-old sister, who would be unduly and persistently curious about the glamorous details of the metropolis—which the lawyer had been too professionally occupied to sample, but for a bolted meal at a crowded inn and, to clear his head, an evening stroll along Market Street, past the Presidential mansion from which it had been Washington’s wont to set out in a cream-colored French coach, ornamented with cupids and flowers—and perhaps that of brother Edward, saturnine and inflexibly correct, suppressing his cough and any words of overt disapproval while his gaze smoldered in the corner within the leaping shadows cast by the Colemans’ fish-oil lamps, did not, this anticipation, relieve his inner chill: better to warm himself a moment at the Jenkinses’, where his welcome was sincere, forged of long acquaintance, and his attendance carried a clear pecuniary value. A brownish light still figured in the westward sky. Low clouds spit a few dry flakes of early snow. From the semi-circular stone porch that formed the sixth step he saw that it was bright within; though the Jenkinses’ fortunes were presently shaky, they burned the best quality of candles, spermaceti, and had lately acquired an Argand lamp, an ingenious Swiss device, impossible to surpass for illumination, with a glass chimney and a clockwork pump for steadily supplying oil to the circular wick.
