Memories of the Ford Administration by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64594-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Between the two acts of The Belle of Amherst, I seem to remember, Genevieve fainted: returning from the lobby where we had chugged down two three-dollar plastic cups of so-called champagne, she murmured to me, “Darling, I’m going to throw up.” As I recoiled from her, she leaned all the more heavily upon me, so heavily that her body tilted like a motorcycle going around a curve and I had to hold her with both arms to keep her from falling beneath the trampling feet of the intermission crowd, anxious to resume its seats and see Julie Harris emote some more. I managed to drag her—she had become remarkably dense and inert, though petite; when we made love she felt as weightless as an acrobat or one of those newly idolized child gymnasts from behind the Iron Curtain—toward the ladies’ room, against the exiting surge of perfumed, “freshened” women there. The painted eyes of these women flared with horror as I barged in with my burden, but then, like a swarm of ants adjusting itself to the sudden fall of a breadcrumb in its midst, they took over. Genevieve was laid upon a rose-colored couch in their facility’s silken anteroom; I discreetly retreated to the doorway, where I could observe, over the shoulders of her multiplying caretakers, that the Perfect Wife looked magnificent—she had become her own effigy in glossy, colorless wax. Her precise, decisively marked features had been transposed to a plane of perfect peace. She was wearing a high-necked brocaded gray dress in the Chinese style, and she later claimed that it was the dress, and the claustrophobia-inducing qualities of Emily Dickinson’s world, that made her faint. But in fact a medical exam, a week later, revealed that she was harboring a duodenal ulcer which had, under the accumulating stress of leaving Brent and waiting for me to disentangle myself from Norma, begun to bleed. No more champagne for her—Maalox and skimmed milk, rather. I felt guilty, of course. But at the moment I was struck by the grandeur of her sudden unconsciousness, so much purer than her restless, grabby sleep. Smelling salts were produced. In memory I lean forward, the more deeply to inhale their bitter ethereal scent amid the compressed perfumes of the other women, there in that silken foyer faintly redolent of female urine and fair bodies overheated by the excitements of the theatre. I am proud, I remember, proud of Genevieve, proud to be her escort. Frighteningly, I seem, bending forward, to dip beneath the anesthesia of daily events into the divine and dreadful gravity of life—this lovely woman laid low, and both of us far from home, matter in the wrong place, here in New York, if that’s where we were.

Speaking of theatre, Wayward had a Drama Society that put on plays in the fall and spring. Let me, patient Retrospect editors, set the scene. Time: Spring in New England, with cleansing winds, and nodding jonquils and asphalt roads still whitened by winter’s salt.

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