Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  She was one of those women who come forward for their serving; she flared her thighs and clipped her little penile homologue determinedly against my pelvic bone until, in rising tempo, she delivered herself of an orgasm and two faintly rote moans. In no hurry, I followed; a restrained, then released selfishness is the only path for love, purling downhill between narrow rocks on the way to pools of gentleness. Muted moonlight picked up gleams of dew on her temple; I stretched myself, craning my neck, to lick off the salt sweat. She mistook my motion and pressed down on my buttocks. “No,” she said with husky despair. “Don’t leave me yet.” Her firm fingers pricked me with the cool touch of rings.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, but already an enlarging guilt was gnawing at my stomach—Genevieve trying to phone with some new legal twist the nefarious Brent had developed, Norma with word that Andrew had had a terrible accident in the Volvo, my mother crying out that her Clearwater condo was burning down.… The present is Paradise, yet our brain forbids our living in it long. Past and future conspired to diminish this treasure beached beneath me, lightly panting. She, too, began to get herself together. She permitted me to slide out of her and fall to one side, and propped herself up in the bed, so her tits bobbled like flotsam above my dazed face. She was smoking that phantom cigarette again, right elbow in left palm, right wrist cocked back. “When did you give it up?” I asked.

  “Four months ago. I’ve put on weight, damn it.”

  “Very becoming. The weight.”

  She snorted and added, “The trouble is, when you stop, you’re healthier. I’m horny all the time.”

  “That’s nice, too,” I said. “Nice for me, in this instance.”

  She snorted again, a cocky noise like a half-sneeze. “Well, Professor,” Mrs. Arthrop said. “Was I better or worse than Jennifer?”

  “I’ve never slept with Jennifer, I swear it. Has she said I did?”

  “Not in so many words, just the body language.”

  “I was saving myself for you,” I said, adding, “dear Ann. Dear Ann.”

  “I’m not so dear,” she said, glancing about as if for an ashtray in which to tap her lengthening ash. “Bit of a whore, actually. But it was just too mean, to make me come back to this dreary room alone. Also, frankly, I found watching Jen rehearse tonight very painful. She’s no actress. How is she as a student?”

  “Conscientious. Tries to deconstruct everything. Makes every issue feminist. A lot of the girls do.” My answers were terse because I was fascinated by Ann Arthrop’s body, clarifying and widening under my eyes as they, adjusting, saw more and more by the moonlight that pressed at the window curtains like blue cheese wrapped in burlap. In the ripeness of her flesh every big curve sprouted little curves, qualifications of minor muscle and fat-rumple, so that an endless Rubensesque activity of mortal pucker was inscribed upon the ideal large forms of the eternal feminine. She had not affected the phony old Hayes-Code Hollywood device of post-coitally tucking the sheets over her chest, and with silent amusement she let me roll the sheet down further, to the staring darknesses of her navel and pubic bush. The smell came off her that low tide releases from wet sand.

  She kept talking. Coyly: “Are you going to want to fuck her now, now that you’ve had me?” In her Connecticut circles, they evidently called spades spades. Or was she casually trying to deconstruct my romantic, too worshipful mood? I touched her here and there, with tongue and fingertip. How nice that particular whiteness is, just above the pubic hair, where even the skimpiest bikini protects the skin. Her sweat was sweeter here than at her temple, a rarer honey.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Please. These girls aren’t paying tuition to be sexually exploited by the male faculty. It’s their minds that are given to us in trust.”

  “Good. My husband would kill you,” she said pleasantly.

  I looked up the many little crests and swales of her abdomen toward the Olmec impassivity of Mrs. Arthrop’s face. Great stone lips, naked of lipstick but the rims. Swallowing eye sockets, all shadow, in which reptilian lids moved, and lashes jerked quickly, like spiders. “Do you and Mr. have affairs?” I asked her.

  “I do. He doesn’t. He’s too busy, off in town twelve, fourteen hours every day, screwing other guys in his business. He’s in communications technology.”

  “Does he know? That you do?”

  “Of course not.” She was now ready to put out the imaginary cigarette, and made a grinding motion on the little bedside table. The table, like the headboard, was fastened to the wall. “He thinks he adores me.”

  This was unpleasant, I felt, to both of us—the “thinks” to him, and to me the rubbing of my nose in the success of her marriage.

  “This interest in your daughter’s sexual conquests,” I said. “Do you think it’s quite normal? I wouldn’t know, my own daughter’s just barely adolescent, but I don’t think my wife—”

  “Probably not,” she interrupted. “But healthy to admit it, don’t you think? I’m phasing out, she’s phasing in, I need to live vicariously. You know, Al, what I sometimes fantasize?”

  I hope I suppressed an expression of disgust. Nobody called me “Al.” This woman was getting to be too much. But out of elementary courtesy I had to ask, “What?”

  “She and me,” she said, “sharing a man, or a boy, I guess he’d be a boy if she brought him home, I’d rather do a boy than see her worked over by a grown man.” Noticing my silent abashment, she added quickly, “I just think about it, I’d never do it.”

  “You must have a lot of free time, for fantasizing, on your hands,” I ventured.

  “The shop is slow some days,” she admitted. “Summer afternoons, when everybody is at the beach. And that dull stretch before Thanksgiving, when the weddings are over and the Christmas lights aren’t up yet. You get maybe half a dozen people coming in. I’d love to rent at the other end of the mall, where the pizza places generate more traffic.”

  I’ve been used, I thought to myself, perceiving that my value to her had lain largely in her mistaken faith that I had seduced her daughter. But, then, what had been her value to me, the igniting impetus? Her name. A chance to rescue lonely Ann from the Hemphills’ cold bedroom.

  In the Ford era, one didn’t hold a grudge long, in sexual matters. Nor was performance judged perfectionistically, as in the Eisenhower years, when the sleeping beauty was so hemmed about with thorn-bushes that only a peerless prince would do, wielding Excalibur. Under Ford, if one lay didn’t work out, another would be along soon. “I got to run,” I announced.

  This rippling giantess, so confidently reclining within the largesse of her flesh, dismissed the threat lightly. “Why, Professor? It’s not even midnight. I thought you were separated from your wife.”

  “I am, but …” Picturing the Perfect Wife, my mistress in transit, and her Gallic purity and intensity over against this sloppy, chatty piece of middle Americana, I felt an inner burning as if a handful of pepper had reached my stomach. Yet I remained crouched above the globe of Ann Arthrop’s belly, with its high albedo and its umbilicus cut in careless Roosevelt-era style, a fold of flesh left like an eyelid.

  “We could raid the refreshment bar,” she said, “if this room wasn’t too crummy to have one.”

  I tried to defend the Wayward College Student Center, saying, “Students rent these rooms sometimes—if they had refreshment bars the kids might empty them and not fill out the little honor-system tab.”

  “You got to run, I got to go pee,” she said, with an unnecessary emphasis, “and mop up a little,” swaggering toward the bathroom with rippling buttocks and a touching two-handed tug on her mussed-up hairdo, pulling it back into a Psyche knot. She was determined, it seemed, to remind me at every turn that this was a carnal encounter, with the usual overflow of slime into the plumbing. She didn’t bother to close the door. I heard her pee and rattle the toilet-paper roll ruthlessly. When, after a tumult of splashing and flushing, she re-emerged, her face and inner thighs shining wet from
the washrag, she smiled to see me still present, waiting naked on the bed. “I thought you had to run.”

  “How would you define dirt?” I asked her.

  She blinked, but nothing stopped her for long. “As matter in the wrong place,” she said. Jennifer had been right.

  “That’s how I feel,” I confessed, with my peppery stomach.

  “My daughter doesn’t understand,” she told me bouncily in turn, “how I can know what shits men are, and love them anyway.”

  I was dealing, it seemed, with some kind of masochist, or bully, or combination, but her long-range psychological problems belonged to the lady’s husband, daughter, gift-shop customers, pets, neighbors, and shrink, if she had one. To me belonged, as big as a thumb held up to the eye, her pallid moistened body with its thousand jiggles and many membranous apertures. Just the mental gloating, as she noisily pursued her ablutions, had reinvited nature’s magic back into my loins. It was noticing this, perhaps, that had prompted her fond generic insult. Almost meekly she lay down beside me and let me pull up the wrinkled sheet. This time, I would endlessly gentle her. We had drifted into a zone beyond the reach of phone calls; we were passingly free. The campus noises below our windows had shrunk to a lone good night called out girl to girl, and to the lessening whisper of traffic on the riverside road and the bridge to Adams, where my bed was staring blankly at the ceiling. I hoped this time to lure her into a little fellatio, or at least to get her up on top of me. [Retrospect: trim this passage if space considerations dictate.] I love the passive position, the silken heavy sway above me of pendulous breasts, the tent of female hair formed when her Olmec face lowered majestically to mine, the earnest and increasingly self-absorbed grind of an ass too big for my hands. Being our second time, it took longer, giving me ample opportunity to keep moaning her name. “Ann. Ann! God, Ann. Oh Ann, Ann. Annnn”—the “n”s, the “a.” She took it in stride by now, making no comment; she had slept with enough men to know we’re all, one way or another, kinky.

  [JB returns from Russia in 1833 by way of European tour—Lübeck, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin—hobnobs with Talleyrand, Esterhazy, Bülow, Palmerston—visits home of ancestors at Ramelton, in County Donegal—There I sinned much in the article of hot whiskey toddy which they term punch—back in Lancaster, takes possession of old Coleman house on East King Street, purchased for him in his absence by John Reynolds and Nathaniel Sample—hires as housekeeper White Swan Hotel owner’s niece, twenty-eight-year-old Esther Parker, who as “Miss Hetty” will keep house for him to the day of his death—buys, frees, and retains as servants two slaves, Daphne Cook, twenty-two, and Ann Cook, five, from Virginia family of brother-in-law Reverend Robert Henry, to save political embarrassment—pays court to unknown woman in Philadelphia household of Judge Thomas Kittera (this page, this page), jesting in letter to Kittera, be particular in giving my love to my intended—elected by Pennsylvania legislature to seat in U.S. Senate vacated by William Wilkins, whom President Jackson appointed to replace Buchanan in Russian Mission—in 1836 re-elected to Senate, despite usual divisions among Pennsylvania Democrats—takes up lodgings in Washington with Senator William Rufus DeVane King of Alabama, the two of them referred to in gossip as “the Siamese Twins”—as chairman of Foreign Relations Committee quarrels with Van Buren’s Secretary of State John Forsyth—on June 3, 1837, writes Mrs. Francis Preston Blair that before the next year I expect to be married & have the cares of a family resting upon my shoulders—in September delivers in favor of the Subtreasury Bill a speech that former President Jackson avers must become a lasting monument of the talents that made [it], yet is instructed by Pennsylvania state legislature to vote against bill, which he does, construing his alternatives as to obey or to resign—in 1839 Van Buren offers him the post of Attorney-General, which he declines—expecting Van Buren to run again for President in 1840, hopes to get roommate King nominated as Vice-Presidential candidate, placing self in position to run for President in 1844—but Whig candidate General William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison defeats Van Buren, then dies a month after inaugural, placing unpopular Southerner John Tyler, the first Vice-President to become President, in the office, where “Tyler, too” becomes “Old Veto”—Buchanan re-elected to Senate in 1842—by this time deaths of sisters Jane Lane and Harriet Henry have placed five more orphaned children in his care, including future White House hostess Harriet Lane—breaks off romantic relationship with Dolley Madison’s young niece Anna Payne with poem explaining in part Blooming nineteen can never well agree / With the dull age of half a century.… Meantime, where’ere you go, what e’re your lot / By me you’ll never, never be forgot—1844 Democratic convention settles after eight ballots upon dark horse and Jackson protégé James K. Polk—victorious Polk invites Buchanan early in 1845 to become his Secretary of State—JB serves full four years, though frequently differing with Polk in Cabinet meetings—Polk maintains diary in part to keep track of Buchanan’s shifts and changes of opinion, writing, If I would yield up the government into his hands and suffer him to be in effect President,… I have no doubt he would be cheerful and satisfied. This I cannot do—yet Buchanan’s divide-the-difference views influence the ultimate dispositions of the Oregon and Mexican questions, the last great enlargements of the contiguous continental American territory—in 1845 asks Polk for Supreme Court seat, then declines it—in 1846 concludes treaty with New Grenada for right of transit across Isthmus of Panama, basis for later canal—toward end of term as Secretary of State develops nervous tic in leg and a painful nasal tumor which requires a series of operations—in March of 1848 writes correspondent, I have wished 1,000 times that I had never entered this Dept. as Secretary. I have had to do the important drudging of the administration without the power of obtaining offices for my friends. I have no power. I feel it deeply—loses out at 1848 convention to Lewis Cass, who loses to Whig candidate, Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor—Buchanan expresses wish to return to private life and do some writing—declines to run for Governorship of Pennsylvania, vacated by resignation of tubercular Governor Francis Shunk—in December of 1848 acquires estate of Wheatland, a mile west of Lancaster—has become by now “rich uncle” to twenty-two nephews and nieces and thirteen grandnephews and grandnieces—renovates, gardens, entertains, advises Harriet Lane, Never allow your affections to become interested or engage yourself to any person without my previous advice—in 1851 negotiates peace treaty between students of Dickinson College and faculty after mass dismissal of junior class—becomes president of board of trustees of merged Franklin and Marshall Colleges and donates one thousand dollars—has leisure to read Jared’s five-volume life of Washington and works of Byron, Scott, Dickens—according to Klein, these days of temporary political retirement at Wheatland were to be the happiest and most carefree of his life—Presidency still beckons—at convention of 1852, having positioned self against popular sovereignty provision of Compromise of 1850, which was endorsed by Cass, and strongly supported new Fugitive Slave Law provision and repeatedly decried abolitionist agitation, JB leads ballot for a time but due to refusal of New York’s William Marcy to yield up his votes fails to secure nomination, as also do, in turn, Marcy and Stephen Douglas—Buchaneers (so-called), with votes of Pennsylvania and Virginia delegations, engineer selection of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce on the forty-ninth ballot and collect their reward: the nomination for Vice-President of Senator William R. D. King, Buchanan’s long-time roommate, even though King is so ill with tuberculosis that he has to be sworn in in Havana, Cuba, and dies back in Alabama one month after inauguration.]

  W. R. D. King [I wrote] is one of those eminences whose strong impression on their own times has suffered a gradual erasure upon the tablets of history. Five years older than Buchanan, he was born into the planter class of Sampson County, North Carolina; he graduated from his state’s university in 1803 and won admission to the bar in 1806. He served in the state legislature and was elected to C
ongress in 1810, at the age of twenty-four; he was one of the young “War Hawks” who voted, in 1812, the fledgling nation into another war with Britain. Presumably [Retrospect: unable to locate facts of military career and rank; will do further research if this section is used in your Ford issue (unlikely)], it was amid the scattered and unsatisfactory engagements of little Madison’s little war that King earned the title of “Colonel” with which Buchanan in his letters and public addresses invariably honored him. In 1816, King was appointed secretary to the legation, headed by William Pinkney, to the Kingdom of Naples and then to the Court of St. Petersburg—those chilly parqueted halls constantly reverberant, it seems, with the tread of the thick boots of American politicians. In 1818 King moved to Dallas County, in Alabama, and in 1819 was elected Senator from that state. Thus he, thanks to faithful re-election by the sufficiently pleased voters of his adopted state, for fifteen years figured near the forefront of a golden age of the Senate, when the inexorably rising tensions of a growing nation divided by the slavery issue incited an epic eloquence from such giants of oratory as Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton; King, like Buchanan, Silas Wright, and John Crittenden, must be counted in the second rank of these noble arguers of the nation’s complicating case, but contemporary vision did not perceive a striking difference in stature. History buries most men, and then exaggerates the height of those left standing. King was president pro tempore of the Senate from 1836 to 1841, an office made unusually important by the erratic temper and rare attendance of Van Buren’s Vice-President, Richard Mentor Johnson, a profligate Kentuckian whose hammerlock on celebrity was his slaying of the Indian chief Tecumseh (“Rumpsey, dumpsey,” went his campaign chant, “Colonel Johnson shot Tecumseh”) and whose fathering of two daughters by his mulatto mistress was so flagrant an indiscretion that even Jackson, who had pushed Johnson upon Van Buren, by 1840 admitted him to be a dead wait [sic] on the Democratic ticket. When, in 1850, Vice-President Fillmore became President upon Zachary Taylor’s abrupt death, King was elected to preside over the Senate.