Read Online Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: John Updike
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Cantonese tea, sailed to them through three oceans, with a side glass of peach brandy, brewed by North Carolina Moravians, for the gentleman.
• • •
I also remember, not exactly from the Ford years but from Nixon’s last Presidential April [
Retrospect
eds.: CK but Easter ’74 April 14th by my perpetual calendar], stamped as sharply on my memory as a tin weathervane, the silhouette of the Perfect Wife,Genevieve Mueller, as she stood, in a smart spring outfit consisting of a boxy hound’s-tooth-checked jacket and pleated white wool skirt, on the street in front of her house in Wayward under the giant surviving elm there on the corner. She was poised to cross over to her own front door, we had made no plans to meet, I just happened to have run in the car to the town’s three-store (gas station, grocery
cum
minimal hardware, and drugstore also stocking newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, plastic toys, and tennis balls) downtown for the Sunday paper and circled back toward my house by way of her house, an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim, and set back from the road by a breadth of front lawn and some struggling azaleas, a modest symmetrical house made majestic for me by the extravagant extent of my longing and covetousness. Many the night, swinging out of my most direct path home after dropping off a babysitter, I had thought of Genevieve lying in there asleep in the arms of that methodical Midwestern deconstructionist and nearly wept with envy at the imagined bliss concealed by their darkened upstairs windows. Since those nights of barren yearning—my arc of automotive divagation described in snow and spring rain, under summer’s thick canopy of leafiness and then the recklessly spilled salt of stars glimpsed through nets of disencumbered twigs—she and I had suddenly, recently managed, under cover of thebustle of an academic community, to make contact, to confess our mutual discontents, to make love, to fall in love, to exchange feverish pledges whose exact meaning and circumstantial redemption remained cloudy in my mind. This cloudiness was to be rapidly dispersed. I braked to a stop, exhilarated not only by the sight of my beloved’s perfect figure, so trim and compact and smartly stamped, in its black-and-white checks, on the tender surface of the sacred morning, beneath the persistent elm’s great vase-shape mistily brimming with pale-chartreuse buds, but by the resinous eager tang of spring in the air, inviting me to be, late-thirtysomething though I was, eternally young. I was full of the sap of recent sexual conquest. Life felt sweet. Genevieve was wearing high heels, in two sharply contrasting tones, and all around her Nature, too, was standing on tiptoe. With one of her unsmiling stares—her eyes were the deep brown of black coffee, in a face of luminous unblemished pallor, with a slight bony arch to her long-nostrilled nose—she came around to the driver’s side of my car, my [see this page ] piratical, debonairly unsafe, gallantly rusted Corvair. My top was down. [I would write, “She stepped off the curb and came around to the, etc.” except that the informal town of Wayward, like the Lancaster of my imagining, was short on curbs and sidewalks, and had none here, where the elm tree’s roots would in any case have posed a problem for the pavers.]
“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
• • •
I also remember, not exactly from the Ford years but from Nixon’s last Presidential April [
Retrospect
eds.: CK but Easter ’74 April 14th by my perpetual calendar], stamped as sharply on my memory as a tin weathervane, the silhouette of the Perfect Wife,Genevieve Mueller, as she stood, in a smart spring outfit consisting of a boxy hound’s-tooth-checked jacket and pleated white wool skirt, on the street in front of her house in Wayward under the giant surviving elm there on the corner. She was poised to cross over to her own front door, we had made no plans to meet, I just happened to have run in the car to the town’s three-store (gas station, grocery
cum
minimal hardware, and drugstore also stocking newspapers, magazines, paperbacks, plastic toys, and tennis balls) downtown for the Sunday paper and circled back toward my house by way of her house, an early-nineteenth-century former farmhouse, clapboarded and painted pumpkin yellow, with rust-brown shutters and trim, and set back from the road by a breadth of front lawn and some struggling azaleas, a modest symmetrical house made majestic for me by the extravagant extent of my longing and covetousness. Many the night, swinging out of my most direct path home after dropping off a babysitter, I had thought of Genevieve lying in there asleep in the arms of that methodical Midwestern deconstructionist and nearly wept with envy at the imagined bliss concealed by their darkened upstairs windows. Since those nights of barren yearning—my arc of automotive divagation described in snow and spring rain, under summer’s thick canopy of leafiness and then the recklessly spilled salt of stars glimpsed through nets of disencumbered twigs—she and I had suddenly, recently managed, under cover of thebustle of an academic community, to make contact, to confess our mutual discontents, to make love, to fall in love, to exchange feverish pledges whose exact meaning and circumstantial redemption remained cloudy in my mind. This cloudiness was to be rapidly dispersed. I braked to a stop, exhilarated not only by the sight of my beloved’s perfect figure, so trim and compact and smartly stamped, in its black-and-white checks, on the tender surface of the sacred morning, beneath the persistent elm’s great vase-shape mistily brimming with pale-chartreuse buds, but by the resinous eager tang of spring in the air, inviting me to be, late-thirtysomething though I was, eternally young. I was full of the sap of recent sexual conquest. Life felt sweet. Genevieve was wearing high heels, in two sharply contrasting tones, and all around her Nature, too, was standing on tiptoe. With one of her unsmiling stares—her eyes were the deep brown of black coffee, in a face of luminous unblemished pallor, with a slight bony arch to her long-nostrilled nose—she came around to the driver’s side of my car, my [see this page ] piratical, debonairly unsafe, gallantly rusted Corvair. My top was down. [I would write, “She stepped off the curb and came around to the, etc.” except that the informal town of Wayward, like the Lancaster of my imagining, was short on curbs and sidewalks, and had none here, where the elm tree’s roots would in any case have posed a problem for the pavers.]
“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
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