by John Updike
“Would you like to join us, Professor Clayton—is that terribly forward?” Jennifer’s mother asked, two questions in one, rather breathlessly. It flashed upon me that she thought I had slept with her daughter and was slyly granting me a kind of honorary son-in-law status. How could she have gotten this idea? Only from Jennifer’s sulky, embarrassed manner now, unless the girl was an outright liar, as even normal girls often are. They lie, they shoplift, they attempt suicide, all as part of their sexual development. I pictured my lonely room, my phone poised to shrill into life with the details of two unhappy women’s lives, and figured that fifteen minutes of parent-child-teacher socialization could do no harm, and might do Wayward College, which was always looking to widen its support base, some good. Also, there was about Mrs. Arthrop an elusive likeable something—a bit of blankness, like an unmarked price tag, that signifies a woman who will sleep with you. Or is it that you want to sleep with them? The one becomes the other, in the shadowland where sexual politics defies the best attempts of legislators to clean up corruption and graft.
I joined the two Arthrops in a plastic booth, adjusting my hoped-for milk to a more sociable herbal tea and for the bean-sprout sandwich substituting one of those tempting, Christmassy tangerines Mrs. Arthrop already possessed. “Well, how did the rehearsal go?” I asked, turning myself toward Jennifer, steering away from the dangerous blank next to her, the glossy forty-plus face. Jennifer didn’t have that blank; few of our students did. They were too full of ideas and uncertainties; three-fourths of their lives were ahead of them, instead of a diminishing third. “Who are you?” I asked. “Lysistrata?”
This was tactless, actually. “I’m Cinesias,” Jennifer said. “It’s a little, man’s part, but I have a big scene with this real cock-teaser.”
Mrs. Arthrop blinked her daughter’s language away and told me, “The girl playing the part is quite wonderful. As you probably remember, the plot is she keeps leaving him, in the throes of—how shall we say?—passion, to get one more thing to make it all perfect—a pillow, ointment. And of course it never happens.”
“Marjorie Weisman,” Jennifer told me, naming another student. “If you ask me, she gets too much into it. I began to feel sorry for myself. The guy.”
“You were wonderful, dear,” her mother told her. “A real man couldn’t have done it any better.”
“You get to feel like raping her,” Jennifer allowed. “Her roommate tells me she’s a sadist in other ways. Marjorie.”
I had a reprehensible itch to wink at Mrs. Arthrop, Jennifer was mulling things over so solemnly. The very air around us seemed to be winking, since the Student Center, for all its installed comforts, had the bare concrete frame of a multistory garage, with such a garage’s gloomy flicker of ailing fluorescent tubes. Jennifer’s young mind for the first time seemed to be questioning the conventional binaries of male/female, sadist/masochist, desire/anger, war/love.
“Well, it’s all in a good cause, isn’t it?” I asked, none too brightly, explaining myself: “To end war. And it comes out happily, as I recall.” I was being very much the teacher, focusing on Jennifer as a student, while being all too aware of her mother next to her as a crevasse of invitingness that might swallow my teetering eyes.
“Yeah, the women go back to being sex slaves,” Jennifer said sourly. “I guess you and old Aristophanes would think that’s a happy ending.”
“Jennifer,” Mrs. Arthrop said. “What a way to talk to your professor!” She was my age, we had passed from class to class in the same corridors of time, so I could read in her motherly rebuke the subtext of flirtation, of more warmth than the social thermostat called for, of titillation based upon the (false) premise that her daughter and I had achieved the intimacy of lovers. In fact I felt distaste for doughy Jennifer; she was stale goods, touched by the loathed Brent Mueller intellectually at least, contaminated by his anti-canon deconstructionist chic, which flattened everything eloquent, beautiful, and awesome to propaganda baled for the trashman; Brent dwelt in an ideological Flatland from which I was endeavoring to rescue Genevieve, and Jennifer was his two-dimensional minion there, ostentatiously rounded though her dull flesh was.
“No problem,” I said to my defender. “All that respect we were supposed to show our teachers was hierarchical crap. At Wayward we ask our students to be frank.”
“I am a woman, but I don’t lack sense,” Mrs. Arthrop surprisingly recited, in iambic pentameter, her eyes shut to get her started. “I’m of myself not badly off for brains, / And often listening to my father’s words / And old men’s talk, I’ve not been badly schooled.” She lifted her greasy-blue eyelids, exposing irises that indeterminate organic color called hazel, and broadly smiled, exposing those confident teeth. Her facial gloss had gone a degree higher.
“O.K., Mom,” Jennifer said, uncomfortably sensing that this was sexual display. To me she grudgingly explained, “She was Lysistrata in a school play once.” Big deal, her tone implied.
“At Miss Porter’s School, ages ago,” Mrs. Arthrop modestly amplified. “Seeing Jenny’s rehearsal brought that bit of it back. At the time, there seemed nothing wrong with her having to learn by eavesdropping on men’s talk. What did seem daring, as I remember it, and offended some of the faculty and the chaplain, was the anti-war theme—it would have been in, oh, I was seventeen, ’51, Korea was on, and though it was all right to be against war in the abstract, nobody dreamed of being against a war the United States was fighting.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “The war ended before I was eighteen, and I remember feeling slightly cheated.” There. Our ages were on the table, if we could do the figuring. “How long are you here for?” I asked the woman—a real woman. The girls of Wayward insisted on being called “women”; their boyfriends, conditioned in puberty, had no trouble with it, but we older guys kept tripping up.
“Just this one night,” Mrs. Arthrop said, with an enigmatic upturn of her face, as if toward a spotlight still shining upon her girlish performance as Lysistrata. She had been the star where her daughter had a bit part. The world can be cruel to the young. Think of all those newly hatched leatherback turtles, scrambling to get to the sea’s safety while all up and down the beach the famished gulls are swooping.
Memory fails of exact recall, but we talked, Mrs. A. and I striving to keep Jennifer at the focus, though she kept slipping away, through a short and sullen or else unduly combative answer, while her mother’s thumbs and mine dug into the soft hollow spot crowning our tangerines and undressed the furry segments, juicier than grapes, of their loose and stippled hides. I could not help but be aware of a certain mastery in Mrs. Arthrop’s scarlet-taloned hands and of the way her plump mouth—plump but the lips flat to the face, like Jimmy Carter’s—coped with the little masticatory indiscretion of ejecting the tangerine seeds as each segment was consumed, letting them find their way via her fingers to the cardboard tray. Her lips performed this awkward necessity with a fascinating air of accomplishment, of self-appreciation, that produced, along with each ejected seed, a bit of a smile.
Jennifer at last slipped away entirely, seeing a friend leave the television room—Laverne and Shirley having yielded up its last tracked laughs and surges of theme music—and rising from our booth to go outside and confer in heated whispers. Her mother and I were left alone. The thin oily sting of tangerine juice and the dull underfoot smell of many much-worn Tretorns serve in this episode as the aromatic accompaniment, the half-heard sound-track music, like the ladies’-room perfumes and smelling salts when Genevieve fainted. I asked, in Jennifer’s abrupt absence, “How are the rooms upstairs?”
“Adequate,” Jennifer’s mother enunciated, letting me know she was a woman of the world, who had seen her share of hotel accommodations and was not automatically pleased. “Rather minimal,” she said, having complacently disposed of another tangerine seed, and then added, as if not wishing to undersell her room’s charms irrevocably, “The window overlooks a pond and a strange long brown sculpture.�
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“The students call that the French Fry. It won a competition in the Sixties but keeps coming apart now. The welding was poor, it turns out.” My conversational attempts felt desperate, an idiotic waste of Jennifer’s absence. We could see her through the snack-shop plate glass, whining on and on into this other girl’s—all right, woman’s—ear. My sense of this real woman’s face across from me having attached to it a tag of inviting blankness was succumbing to a sense of her extraordinary fullness; she seemed stuffed full, like a thoroughly studied savage, of sociological data—Miss Porter’s School pieties, Northeastern-U.S. upper-middle-class courtship-and-marriage lore, marketing techniques adapted to the small gift shop, standard post-Spock parenting trials and heartbreak—parallel to my own. She, too, remembered the Korean Conflict, the advent of Elvis, the Kennedy assassinations; she, too, had sat in a darkened living room somewhere and watched Nixon blubberingly resign. Even her performance in Lysistrata (her round girlish legs exposed, in my mind’s eye, by the unhistorically short chiton with which school-level producers of my youth shamelessly beefed up interest in Aristophanes’ hoary and hieratic old farce) was more vivid to me than that of Jennifer’s generation, overlaid with such Fordisms as feminism and androgyny. Mrs. Arthrop’s little smooth feet would have been bare but for sandals like a web of gold thongs, her unbronzed hair upswept in a Claire Trevor do, her voice pushing out the speeches in a brave adolescent voice just on the edge of authority.
She was reading my mind. Cocking back her hand as if it held a cigarette, she asked me, “The students—do you do a lot of, how shall we say, mingling with them, Professor?”
“Not as much as people think,” I told her, somewhat curtly. Her absurd conviction that I had slept with her daughter was making her eyes sparkle as if loaded with belladonna. She was back on stage, legs swinging, voice rising. Her hands were flirting in mid-air with an invisible cigarette. I said, “But you’re not a student, Mrs. Arthrop. You don’t have to keep calling me Professor.”
“What shall I call you?”
“Alf. My parents called me Alfred, for political reasons. And you?”
She leaned forward slightly above the table in the booth, here in the steamy late-night student eatery. The high gloss of her face, the fetching little space between her large front teeth, the visible gamble in her bulging hazel eyes seemed to express some numbing animal truth, that my rudimentary brain stem had no word for.
“Ann,” she said. She lowered the hand holding the imaginary cigarette to the silver-starred Formica tabletop, the same motion carrying her eyelids down as if she were fighting a blush.
Oh. Ah. “Ann,” I repeated. That tore it.
Buchanan was waltzing with the Czarina of Russia. Pleasantly plump in his arms she was, the back of her gown of dove-gray silk moist with imperial sweat beneath his hand, here amid the thousand mirrored and refracted candles of the Winter Palace, above the intricately parqueted ballroom floor, while the inflexible Russian winter immobilized, in white chains of snow, the world beyond the tall windows, which were steamed by the hard-breathing gaiety within. Since the days at Dickinson when he notoriously danced on tavern tables, Buchanan enjoyed the self-forgetful methodical whirl of dancing, whether in the stately strides of the polonaise or the looping interlocked triangulations of the waltz. “Vous dansez très bien, monsieur l’envoyé extraordinaire,” the empress confided to him, as the orchestra of Parisian musicians, bored and weary, pale and unhappy, with frazzled jabots and blue noses, here in this frostbitten extremity of civilization, lifted the melody to yet a higher plane of irresistibly urging rhythm, thrusting on every third beat. “Peu d’hommes aussi grands que vous le feraient avec une telle grâce.”
Forgetful, in the ecstasy of the music, of the sacred dignity of the majestic person so plump and responsive in his arms, he ventured a small joke: “J’ai appris à danser avec Andrew Jackson. Mon président fait ceux qui le suivent très agiles. Après l’avoir suivi, les pieds sont pleins de la grâce.”
She perhaps did not understand so political a jest, though her life had been lived in palaces. Her father was King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, an uninspired monarch who, after the crushing defeat at Jena (1806) and the humiliating Treaty of Tilsit (1807), ruled, like royalty all across Europe, in terror of the shades of Napoleon and Jacobinism. Her husband at the time of their marriage, on July 1 (Old Style), 1817, was the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, and had no prospects of being czar, since, though his oldest brother, reigning as Alexander I, was childless, another older brother, Constantine, stood next in the line of succession. Nicholas, anticipating a life of luxuriant aristocracy, with a smattering of military duty (for which he possessed a certain grim aptitude), threw himself into the joys of family life and, to assuage his wife’s homesickness, imported the Prussian paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, amassing an unsurpassed collection of this exemplary Romantic. The future holds strange treasures; Constantine, having married a Polish wife and taken up residence in Poland, secretly renounced the throne in 1823, so that when Alexander died on December 1 (New Style), 1825, Nicholas became emperor without the fact’s being widely known, Constantine having not deigned to make a public announcement. Army officers professedly loyal to Constantine, but in truth concerned to bring about the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of representative government, staged the Decembrist mutiny, which Nicholas, known as a military martinet, stoutly faced down and quelled. The new czar’s regime thus got off to a reactionary start, and continued by forbidding foreign travel, founding the secret police (the notorious “third section”), and promoting the ideas of nationality (narodnost), autocracy, and Orthodox Christianity. Nicholas was not blind to the evils of Russian society, one source tells us, but he feared that changes would be worse yet.
The czarina, realizing that she was being, albeit in full propriety, flirted with, by this tall American in a well-cut but, among the ubiquitous military uniforms glistening with brass and braid, somber black suit, responded, “Assez de grâce, peut-être, pour vous porter jusqu’à la présidence de votre grand pays, dans la manière du Général Jackson?”
Seven years younger than Buchanan, the czarina was to die seven years before him. She had the Germanic, faintly sallow and low-albedo complexion of the better-kept women of Lancaster County, though separated from these females by five thousand miles and twenty degrees of latitude; to this extent Buchanan felt familiar with her. And she with him, for at their very first encounter, upon his presentation, she talked very freely, as his dispatch to President Jackson declared: She spoke on several subjects, and with great rapidity. Amongst other things she observed we were wise in America not to involve ourselves in the foolish troubles of Europe; but she added that we had troubles enough among ourselves at home, and alluded to our difficulties with some of the Southern States. Her observations on this score must have struck Buchanan as reckless or unduly ominous, for he endeavored in a few words to explain this subject to her; but she still persisted in expressing the same opinion, and, of course, [he] would not argue the point. He was disposed to argue, for he goes on in his dispatch, with some feeling, The truth is, that the people of Europe and more especially those of this Country, cannot be made to understand the operations of our Government. Upon hearing of any severe conflicts of opinion in the United States, they believe what they wish, that a revolution may be the consequence. God forbid that the Union should be in any danger! Evidently, she foresaw another American revolution, and he did not; and she was right.
Her face, broad and smooth-skinned, was marked by distinct patches of rouge and a narrow, sharply tipped nose, un peu retroussé. The value of the diamonds at her throat and in her small tiara would have purchased, at a guess, a thousand serfs.
The miserable, snuffling, ill-clad band of imported French musicians changed from a Viennese to a Königsberg tempo—brisker, more military—and the alleged grace within Buchanan’s feet was laggard, momentarily, as he framed a suitably modest yet sufficiently h
igh-spirited response to the empress’s probe in regard to his ambitions. A reflexive “Mais non, non” gained him time to offer her the explanation, “La grâce seule ne suffit pas: il faut aussi—” His brain, weary of groping in a second language, hesitated among “good fortune,” “suitable friends,” and “the people.” None made quite enough sense, in French. He thought of General Jackson—met in many encounters from all of which Buchanan emerged feeling, as from an interview with his father, diminished if not rebuked—and finished simply, “la force.”
“La force? La force de la personnalité? La force des alliances politiques?”
She was trying genuinely to understand, he saw, the workings of a system in which birth and inheritance are—inscrutably; blasphemously, even—not the crucial factor. The strange confluences of self-interest and moralism that foment events in a democracy were beyond her but not, as the Decembrists made vivid, beneath royal notice any more; her husband’s personal inquisitions and the hanging of Colonel Pestel and the poet Kondrati Ryleyev would not rid this despotic frozen empire of the warm breath, from the west, of freedom. The pert-nosed empress’s intelligent curiosity for a moment formed, for her partner, here amid the stifling heat and the dizzying whirl of braided uniforms, a small fogged window into the vast dungeon in which all women—Queen Victoria excepted—were condemned to political impotence in this century, constrained to move the levers of power only by moving their men, with charms and beguilements. Poor dear Ann had chafed at this, this natural powerlessness of her sex, save to command men’s feelings and to order the domestic realm.