Free Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike Page A

Genevieve’s entrails were in comparison city streets, straight, broad, and zippy. If she had been in the least disappointing in this regard, I might not have found myself at this pebbly elm-shadow-striped corner, facing a fait accompli.
    If you’ll marry me
. They had cut a deal. They were a team, a pair of scissors. Snip here, snip there. The second thread was mine, a sensitive loose end.
    The world had changed complexion; in an instant, the intoxicating spring air had become a wet hot washrag pressed against my face—the pressure of the actual, the mortal, the numinously serious. I didn’t know what to say, there with her perfection, so black and white, so anxious and unsmiling, before me. She spoke again, her eyes wider, as if to take into accounting some new margin to me. “Did I do the wrong thing? I thought we had agreed.”
    We had agreed we were in love, lovely, too lovely ever to lose each other. I just wasn’t quite ready for the agreement’s translation into practical terms, into legal action involving realtors, judges, mellifluous lawyers, abandoned children. Yet I had no heart to say so, no heart but to say comfortingly, shebeing the child in sight, “No, that was right. It sounds as though you were very honest and brave.”
    She tensely, tersely nodded, tucking that admitted fact away. I was giving myself away by inches.
    “Where is Brent now?”
    “He’s at church,” Genevieve answered. “The communion line was huge, and I said I’ll walk home to get the lamb roast in. They’ll probably swing by the drugstore for the paper.”
    She glanced at me for a response, but I was silently smiling with an absurd élan, the fruit of too many Hollywood movies viewed in adolescence. When in crisis, double the cool. Cary, Gary, Alan, Errol. Meanwhile my stomach seemed to be swallowing me through an enormous trapdoor.
    “I was going to call you tomorrow at your office. He said he wouldn’t move out until school was over. We won’t tell the girls until then so as not to ruin their grades. So you have until June to tell Norma.”
    My part was all written; I was a character in their play. “I didn’t know Brent went to church,” I said.
    “Only once a year, as a favor to me and the girls.”
    “He loves you.”
    “He says so.” A flicker of something—in the air, on my face—brought the forward momentum of her smoothly working brain to a small halt. “Do you want to back out?” she asked, in a voice moved up a notch in volume, for clarity. “You may, Alf.” Her voice dipped into tenderness, just as a gauzy cloud overhead dimmed the white sunshine of this day that had left winter behind. “You mustn’t do what feels wrong to you.”
    “
You
and
I
feel right,” I tried weakly to explain. “It’s just that
it—
”
    “It’s too much,” she finished for me. “It
is
a lot. I think I’llgo ahead with my side in any case; he and I have gone too far.”
    He and I
—the phrase made my blood fizz with jealousy. And the thought of Genevieve’s freeing herself to roam the Ford era’s sexual jungle was intolerable, in the totally eclipsing way that the thought of death is. I would have this woman if it killed me, I resolved. And no matter who else it killed. “You and he are going to keep living together till June?” I asked.
    She blinked; her lashes on a Sunday morning were not so long and clotted as in party makeup. Each lash was distinct, giving her a starry-eyed look. “That was his proposal,” she said.
    “You two are going to keep fucking?”
    “Are you and Norma?”
    “I haven’t told her yet. The situations aren’t parallel. We don’t fuck that much anyway. We think about it, and drift away. You and that prick really do it. You really just upped and told him about us. I can’t believe it.” I couldn’t believe, either, that I was showing this anger; but having committed myself, just then, to die for her if necessary gave me the right.
    The Perfect Wife’s chin, level with my