Free Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike

profile, admiring her pursed considering lips, her single flashing eye beneath the dense clot of curved lashes, and her scarcely perceptible nasal curve, which I saw as Mediterranean, a genetic trace inherited from the fabled age of matriarchal queendoms, of calmly murderous white goddesses. We at first avoided one another at these gatherings; there was a dangerous magnetism both felt from the start. Her conversation, when we dared politely talk, seemed a bit flat, factual, and (with my wife’s wandering indirections as background noise) unsubtle; but I blamed this on mental contamination by her husband, with his pugnacious monosyllable of a monicker and his boyish thrust of stiff beige hair above his slanting forehead. He was contentious, dismissive, cocky, and a great hit with the students; he played to them with a televisable glibness and catered to their blank, TV-scoured brains by dismissing on their behalf the full canon of Western masterpieces, every one of them (except
Wuthering Heights
and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass) a relic of centuries of white male oppression, to be touched as gingerly as radioactive garbage. In faculty meetings he spoke, though less than half a generation younger than I, with the brash authority of the New Thinking; gray heads bowed and made way, in this quaint institution devotedto the interim care of well-bred, well-off girls en route from their fathers to their husbands, for “studies” whose ideal texts were the diaries, where they could be found, of black female slaves. He was active, dynamic, persuasive, and committed. He took teaching
too
seriously, it seemed to me—as a species of political activity, as an opportunity for the exercise of power, even while decrying the white male power of bygone generations.Never mind; I invited him to be my opponent at tennis and squash, as a way of drawing closer to his wife. (Genevieve in tennis whites! With a heartbreaking little black hem to her socklets!! Her backhand was even better than her forehand, and after we became lovers she confided to me that she had been a natural left-hander, made over into a rightie by the penmanship instructors of a regressive, nun-run private school in lower Wisconsin.) When it came to dinner at their home, I marvelled at her impeccable housewifery, her gourmet cooking, her poignantly staged presentation of her little girls, in not only clean pastel gowns but miniature satiny bed-jackets, for their good nights to the guests. She had managed to instill in her household a European sense of children as graceful adornments to the parents, as opposed to our ugly American democratic style, with even an infant given his noisy vote in all proceedings. As to decor, in my own house there was simply too much—too many pictures on the wall, too many worn-out rugs overlapping on the floor, too much carelessly inherited furniture, too many shawls and cats shedding threads and hairs on the sofa cushions, too many half-empty bottles in the pantry and half-read books piled up everywhere, even in the bathrooms—whereas here there was just enough of books, tables, vases, chairs, a cool sufficiency with poverty’s clean lines, a prosperity short of surfeit. Even the grounds around their modest home, on a street of olderhouses unevenly redeemed from Depression-era decay, some having replaced the original clapboards with shingles and some with aluminum siding, showed Genevieve’s will toward order—the flower beds weed-free, the ornamental plantings bark-mulched. And when it came at last to lovemaking, on the hard floors and rented couches that adultery utilizes
faute de mieux
, hers was quick, firm, adventurous, definitive. There was none of that female maze and endocrinal grievance I had to work through with the Queen of Disorder. I pictured my wife’s psychosexual insides as a tidal swamp where a narrow path wound past giant nodding cattails and hidden egret-nests, with a slip into indifference gaping on both sides;