by John Updike
How can I recapture, dear colleagues of the NNEAAH, for your written symposium, the numbing wonder and dizzying strangeness of being with another man’s wife hour after hour? I had never tasted a hamburger before eating one with Genevieve in the coffee shop at the Plaza the evening we emerged, blinking in the six-o’clock sunlight, from a late-afternoon showing of loud and garish Tommy and, hand in hand, sauntered from the sexual carnival of Broadway, with its fat hookers in vinyl hotpants, over to the relative tranquillity of shopperless Fifth Avenue and on up to the edge of the Park. It cost, the hamburger, $6.50, which seemed a prodigious price back then, in that innocent era before Carter’s inflation, and was too fat with meat and lettuce and sliced onion and tomato and bulky sesame-seed roll to squeeze between my jaws, the way a boy from Hayes had always eaten a hamburger. Charbroiled on the outside, raw as steak tartare on the inside, this hypertrophied Plaza version of a fast food had to be consumed with a fork and knife, piece by piece, as Genevieve showed me, her eloquent narrow hands themselves like expensive implements, her tan fingers tipped with pink polish paler than a blush. Encapsulated with her inside a preview of our marriage, legitimately at her side in these uncaring multitudes, I felt a continuous tremble in my chest, as if a bubble might pop. With the wonder of a caveman observing his first eclipse I watched her pairs of underpants, lacy and bikini and pastel, go from clean to dirty to clean again, hung to dry on the heated bathroom towel rack; once, when she was in the shower, I snatched a pair from where she had let them drop on the carpet and buried my nose in the faintly stained crotch, as if to imprint forever her musk upon my memory cells.
It was impossible, in the course of our three days, to avoid generating excrement, and we were both shy as cats without a sandbox to scratch. As I followed her into the bathroom in the mornings, my nostrils were struck by the chthonian after-scent, spicier than Norma’s spoor, of what had just passed from one of her seven sacred orifices. (Two nostrils, two ears, and the remaining three do not include the bellybutton, a cul de sac.) There was something Platonic, like a triangle’s chalk ghost upon a scrubbed blackboard, or like the idea of war that haunts a futile peace conference, about our passage, with sometimes averted eyes, through a haze of illicit intimacy. She kept the room thrillingly neat and yet at night would subconsciously scuttle all the way across the king-size mattress to involve me in a panicked embrace, a claustrophobic tangle of sweaty limbs and tangled sheets. She slept naked, whereas I, after a near-Canadian childhood spent mostly under layers of blankets and quilts, needed some weight of cloth, of pajama tops or an undershirt at least, to make me feel safe enough to sleep. I suppose she slept naked with Brent, and this thought greatly pained me. They were just enough younger than Norma and I to have caught those Sixties liberations in their youth, instead of catching up to them retroactively, when hobbled with children and employment. In her sleep, which I had never before witnessed, Genevieve sweated, her sleek brunette skin rich in glands, and sometimes thrashed and moaned aloud, with touching infantile whimpering moans, as if her vital force, masked in daylight by a crisp bearing learned from nuns, was unmasked and tormenting her. Yet in the morning she could recall no nightmare, and when my concerned questioning persisted, she would stare at me with an intensified opacity in her coffee-dark eyes, as if I were trying to delve too deep and had offended some Gallic standard of decorum which even the penetrations and exposures of love did not suspend. Her maiden name had been Lavalliere; the notion of an ancestral Frenchness took possession of me, as I had freedom now to notice in her body the delicate traces of a Latin hairiness—the almost invisible dark wisps at the extremities of her upper lip, just above the slightly taut points where her mouth’s orifice terminated, and the distinct shadow, manlike in its bluish glaze, where her armpits were kept shaved. I expressed the infatuated hope that, when we were married, she would let her underarm hair grow out, in two pungent tufts, butterfly-shaped in my mind’s eye, and let her legs become as shaggy as a Gascogne peasant girl’s, so that there would be, by these few multiplied black millimeters, that much more of her, a surplus produced at my bidding, as a sign of my possession. But she shuddered in my arms at the proposal; not even my most delirious transports were about to overwhelm her thoroughly American standards of personal hygiene. There were a number of these tiny collisions, moments unremarked by us but not unnoticed, when my amorous fantasies, which dated back to fantasies bred amid the ethnic simplicities of Hayes, where the “Canuck” girls from the far side of the disused tracks figured as dark and dirty mysteries, met something proudly otherwise in her. In fact she didn’t come from the backwoods of northern New England but from the highly civilized town of Madison, Wisconsin, state capital and site of a university, where her father had been a professor of Romance languages.
We did best, in a way, out on the streets; here the racially plural energy of Manhattan, the giant ongoing recklessness of the megalopolitan venture, seemed to confirm our own recklessness and to bestow an oceanic blessing. Doormen, waiters, taxi drivers, panhandlers all smiled upon us as if we were, as indeed we were, one more couple in a worldwide species whose main means of perpetuation and easement of angst takes the form of couples—soigné, gray-suited couples belonging to the New York power structure; unwashed, denim-swaddled, love-beaded couples from the aging counterculture; clinging, punching, juvenile couples; black-white couples; Caucasian-Oriental couples; homosexual couples with arms looped low around each other’s waists; ancient Jewish couples blinking in the sidewalk sunshine like turtles basking on a familiar rock. Outdoors, we felt normal, accepted. Indoors, in the narrow hotel room that in three days had become softened like a cheap shoe by the confined movements of self-conscious cohabitation, we became prey to talk like this:
“Don’t you wish,” Genevieve suddenly sighed, a few minutes after lovemaking, as if its fluids were turning sour inside her, “I would just go away or get run over by a bus so you could go back to Norma?”
“My God, no. Why would I wish that? I love you.”
She gave me an absent-minded cool-lipped kiss for saying this, quick as an automatic genuflection, but pursued her thought, with an adorable knitting together of her dark, broad, Ali McGraw–ish brows. “I know, Alf, but isn’t it a drag in a way? You had such a nice comfortable relaxed sort of life …”
“Speak for yourself.”
“… nice house, nice kids …”
“You, too.”
“… and to give it all up for a sexual passion seems …”
“What?”
“… oh, you know …”
She trailed off, expecting me to take up the slack, to reassure her for the thousandth time. “But my passion isn’t just sexual,” I obediently said. “I love the way you look dressed as well as undressed. I love the way you keep house and mother your little girls. I love everything about you. You’re perfect.”
“Nobody’s perfect. It makes me sad to hear you say that. It’s as if I’m not real to you, the way Norma is.”
“Is being real what Norma’s problem is? I must say, life out of that house is bliss of a sort. I told you how, the night I got trapped there, I couldn’t breathe.”
“That made me sad, too, hearing all about that. That you let yourself be trapped, and then felt so conflicted. We’ve been at this too long, Alf, for you to still feel conflicted.”
“Does one ever,” I began to say, not feel conflicted?, but thought better of it, since Genevieve appeared, in her naked porcelain elegance (a bisque glaze of tan on her shoulders and arms), a shade fragile and brittle. Her lips were thinned and tightened by thought; her big eyes, their whites as pure as chips of china, studied my face without blinking. Having waited for me to finish my sentence, she pronounced my least favorite syllable.
“Brent,” she said, “says he’s ready to do the divorce any time, now that his parents pretty much know, and he thinks Norma is, too, now.”
“What does he know about Norma?” I asked with languid scorn, lucky fellow as I was w
ith this naked beauty beside me on the king-sized bed.
“He sees her,” Genevieve said, looking at me with slight defiance, her upper lashes pressed against the socket’s upper curve of bone as if painted there. “Didn’t you know that? They’ve gone out together a couple of times.”
“Gone out?” Odious, Andrew had said. Was this the beau he had meant? “How often?”
She backed off a few inches, there in the hotel’s enormous bed, frightened of the intensity of my reaction. “I don’t know. More than once. After all, they have a lot in common. They have us in common.”
“Brent and Norma?” I said, trying to couple them in my mind, to picture it. “But she’s older than he.”
“That’s a chauvinistic remark, Alf. Just a few years, like we have between us, the other way. Anyway, nobody’s saying they have sex.”
“But”—and I suppose this remark is characteristic of the Ford era—“what else would they have?”
“They’d talk,” my exquisite mistress matter-of-factly said. “He’s impressed,” she went on. “He thinks she’s finally getting her shit together.”
I hated the phrase, its debased pop psychology. I resented his using it of my wife; I resented his thrusting it into my dear mistress’s ear. But there was no denying it, Genevieve was not a virgin, physical or mental; she was familiar with his shit. They shared a style, an approach. The Perfect Wife implies the Perfect Couple; once again, as when conferring hastily under the feathery springtime elm with her in her smart checks while he approached from an unknown direction, I felt caught between them, pinched in the nutcracker they formed. Naked with me now, she had been naked with him night after night, his tight asshole nestled against the perfect triangle of her pussy. Pussies were triangular in the Ford era, before high-sided swim suits compelled women to shave their groins of all but a vertical strip of natural adornment.
Genevieve was watching me. Her opaque, expectant, slightly defiant stare, above the peripheral gleam of her body in the tangled, sweated-up sheets, had been frozen I knew not how many seconds. “What kind of shit?” was all I at last could think to say, weakly. In my jealousy I was getting an erection.
“Oh, less hung up on you. Less dependent and hurt. Starting to take responsibility for her own life.”
“By sleeping with your creep of a husband, that’s taking responsibility?”
“Brent’s never said they sleep together. But why shouldn’t they? We set them free. Alf, it’s not very flattering to me, that you’re so upset.”
“I’m not upset. Fuck ’em all.” Fuck you, too, was in my mind.
“If she did go with a free man, so to speak, wouldn’t that be better than one more tumble in the hay with Ben Wadleigh after he and Wendy have reconstituted their marriage on a perfectly sick basis?”
“Who’s to say what’s a sick basis? At least the Wadleigh kids go to sleep with both their parents under the same roof with them.”
I was blaming her; she knew it. She shrugged those shoulders with their smooth bisque tan, so unlike Norma’s carelessly distributed constellations of freckles. “I’ve told you,” Genevieve said, “go back to her.”
“I don’t want to,” I replied in a hardened voice. “I want to fuck you, actually.”
“I see you do,” she said dryly.
But on top of her, in her, I had to blurt, “But she’s so artistic, and he’s so un-!” Deconstruction despises art, stripping away all its pretenses, was my point, but this didn’t seem the moment to develop it.
Her shrug this time was all internal, a subtle moist tightening that I thought of as a French trick. “Opposites attract,” she said. “Look at us.”
“Us! But we’re exactly alike, for a man and a woman.” I believed this because our lovemaking melted us into one, one with the dark, a mass of blind sensation, her dear flexible and seven times receptive body firm and graceful, like curves my mind kept drawing in the pitch-black back of some cave, perhaps Plato’s. Once, I remember, our two-backed beast with its single pounding heart and coating of perspiration twisted and crawled itself clear off the bed, so that we fell at the foot on a wad of tossed covers, and rather than rearrange herself on the mattress my perfect love partner tucked back her black hair so a gleam of face showed in the faint light from the street and found my prick with her mouth and despite my squeamish, chivalrous, insincere efforts to push her off relentlessly sucked and hand-pumped me into coming, into helplessly shooting off (like fireworks in a chaste Fifties movie as a metaphor for sex) into a warm wet dark that was her tidy little head. I could hear her smile as, having swallowed, she rested this head (was it heavier?) on my chest and murmured something about our being “all mixed up with each other.” Though her aroused skill showed that she had done this for Brent and possibly others, the act felt like a singularity, a unique trip to the edge of self-obliteration by a woman possessed, her needs and mine fused. In retrospect it seems as though I came not in her mouth so much as in the room, the black space limited by eight unseen corners, my body being the only one present, Genevieve transformed for this interval into pure fierce spirit.
It wasn’t that hotel room, with its green-striped wallpaper and faux-antique furniture and view of an Italian-restaurant awning on West Fifty-first Street. For her to be so transported by passion, so much a maenad, she had to have had an idea of me, like a groupie blowing a rock star. The longer we know another, the less of an idea we have; eventually all we have are facts. By the time of our New York trip, Genevieve and I knew each other a bit too well for her to gulp me up brainlessly, at the mucky bottom of the carnivorous sea, while I at an extremity of invertebrate bliss ran a trembling tentacle around and around the crenelated waxy hole at the center of her rhythmically lifting ear. A certain cool efficiency, rather, floats to the surface of my memory of our three-day marriage. I was struck by the brusque way in which she repelled a black chambermaid who, rapping her key on the door and then turning it in the lock, had tried to enter our room one mid-morning when we were making love. Luckily, the chain was drawn across; but the girl, stupid perhaps, or stoned, kept pushing and rattling, and Genevieve left the bed naked to tell her, crouching at the opened crack, to go away and come back later. Her peremptory voice pierced me, lying love-dazed on our wide sea-bed, and I may have indicated my wound, for as she slithered back into my arms she murmured, “They’re here to serve us.”
This was a revelation. She grasped, Europeanly, the order, the hierarchy, of society. Had it been Norma and I in bed, we would have felt a confused egalitarian obligation to the African-American maid in the hall, who no doubt had her schedule and, a hundred blocks to the north, her private problems, the products ultimately of slavery and racial prejudice, and we would have guiltily dressed ourselves and vacated the room. But Genevieve saw reality in its true fine shadings of obligation and prerogative. Among the household duties she took on in our room was the ordering of breakfast and tea; this thrilled me, for I always vaguely imagined that it was somehow rude not to patronize the hotel coffee shop with its smell of frying fat and its garble of alien tongues. Mornings, there would be a rap on the door, and she would vanish into the bathroom with a flicker of flesh like the tail of a bounding doe, and I would be left in my hastily donned trousers and last night’s button-down shirt to deal apologetically with the tinkling, ostentatiously noncommittal waiter, signing his bill with a clumsy overtip. She knew the world, how it fit together and did its business, eliciting rewards and punishments on a scale calibrated by tradition. Like all enthralled students, I tempered admiration with resentment. The order she would create in my life depended upon reifying people, reducing them to their uses. If the chambermaid was thus to be disposed of, what about me, when my mysterious use had been served?
Meanwhile, Chou En-lai was dying, and Paul Robeson and André Malraux, and Howard Hughes and Martin Heidegger, Agatha Christie and J. Paul Getty. From a sultry, sliding quality in these memories I wonder if they are from the summer of the tall ships after all. In whi
ch case, the movie we saw, in a cityscape decorated by fire hydrants painted red, white, and blue, was not Tommy but Cousin, Cousine, the show not The Wiz but The Belle of Amherst, and the topic of the conference to which I played truant was “The Fruits of Revolution: Colonies into Competitors, 1776–1976.”
• • •
[Retrospect: from this point on, my old ms. exists in a fragmentary state. Personal distractions and intrinsic difficulties derailed the project. Also, JB’s life after 1820 basks more and more in the glare of historical record—see Klein, Curtis, Auchampaugh, Nevins, Nichols, Catton, Stampp, etc., plus the Works, edited by John Bassett Moore, that saint, in twelve hefty volumes—whereas my tropism was toward the unlit, the underside, the region of shades where his personal demon teased our statesman, visiting embarrassment upon his dignity and violence upon his peacefulness. A few dashed notations will prick your own well-stocked historians’ memories and fill in the narrative gaps. Thus: JB takes seat as Representative in seventeenth Congress in December 1821—admires above all other members William Lowndes of South Carolina—made member of Committee on Agriculture—within three weeks has spoken on floor of House three times—writes home to Judge Franklin that it requires great compass of voice to fill the hall. It is a very magnificent and very elegant chamber, but unless a man has stentorian lungs, he cannot be heard distinctly—modestly allows of his own speeches, I am told, however, that I can be distinctly heard—within first month gives speech from notes by ill Lowndes in defense of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun which furthers his alliance with Southerners—gives speech against Bankrupt Bill (sponsored by friend and fellow Pennsylvanian John Sergeant) which shows partiality to states’ rights and property rights—re-elected in 1822 after conducting evasive campaign, staying clear of actively supporting Federalist candidate for Governor, Andrew Gregg, in view of the rising Jackson-Democratic tide in Pennsylvania—enjoys Washington society as romantically tinged (by Ann Coleman tragedy) bachelor, keeping company with Mrs. George Blakes of Boston and (to quote Klein) the Van Ness girls, Cora Livingston and Catherine Van Rensselaer of New York, the Crowninshield misses from Vermont, Priscilla Cooper, who became the wife of his friend Robert Tyler, the Caton sisters from Baltimore, etc.—runs and wins unprecedented third term as Lancaster Congressman on “Federal-Republican” ticket in 1824 election, wherein Jackson sweeps Pennsylvania but whose 99 electoral votes against John Quincy Adams’s 83, William Crawford’s 41, and Henry Clay’s 37 fall short of majority, throwing Presidential election into House—apparently takes upon self, as an already prominent Pennsylvania “fixer,” the delicate task of sounding out General Jackson on the matter of his intentions if the House elects him—Washington’s rumor mill claims that Adams if elected with Clay’s help would make Clay Secretary of State, whereas Jackson would keep on Adams, who was already serving in the post, with great distinction, under President James Monroe.]
