Read Online Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Updike
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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 binariesand 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-corneredswimcap 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 thePresident 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
“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 binariesand 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-corneredswimcap 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 thePresident 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
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