Memories of the Ford Administration (23 page)

We did best, in a way, out on the streets; here the racially plural energy of Manhattan, the giant ongoing recklessness of the megalopolitan venture, seemed to confirm our own recklessness and to bestow an oceanic blessing. Doormen, waiters, taxi drivers, panhandlers all smiled upon us as if we were, as indeed we
were
, one more couple in a worldwide species whose main means of perpetuation and easement of angst takes the form of couples—soigné, gray-suited couples belonging to the New York power structure; unwashed, denim-swaddled, love-beaded couples from the aging counterculture; clinging, punching, juvenile couples; black-white couples; Caucasian-Oriental couples; homosexual couples with arms looped low around each other’s waists; ancient Jewish couples blinking in the sidewalk sunshine like turtles basking on a familiar rock. Outdoors, we felt normal, accepted. Indoors, in the narrow hotel room that in three days had become softened like a cheap shoe by the confined movements of self-conscious cohabitation, we became prey to talk like this:

“Don’t you wish,” Genevieve suddenly sighed, a few minutes after lovemaking, as if its fluids were turning sour inside her, “I would just go away or get run over by a bus so you could go back to Norma?”

“My God, no. Why would I wish that? I love you.”

She gave me an absent-minded cool-lipped kiss for saying this, quick as an automatic genuflection, but pursued her thought, with an adorable knitting together of her dark,
broad, Ali McGraw–ish brows. “I know, Alf, but isn’t it a drag in a way? You had such a nice comfortable relaxed sort of life …”

“Speak for yourself.”

“… nice house, nice kids …”

“You, too.”

“… and to give it all up for a sexual passion seems …”

“What?”

“… oh, you know …”

She trailed off, expecting me to take up the slack, to reassure her for the thousandth time. “But my passion isn’t just sexual,” I obediently said. “I love the way you look dressed as well as undressed. I love the way you keep house and mother your little girls. I love everything about you. You’re perfect.”

“Nobody’s perfect. It makes me sad to hear you say that. It’s as if I’m not real to you, the way Norma is.”

“Is being real what Norma’s problem is? I must say, life out of that house is bliss of a sort. I told you how, the night I got trapped there, I couldn’t breathe.”

“That made me sad, too, hearing all about that. That you let yourself be trapped, and then felt so conflicted. We’ve been at this too long, Alf, for you to still feel conflicted.”

“Does one ever,” I began to say,
not feel conflicted?
, but thought better of it, since Genevieve appeared, in her naked porcelain elegance (a bisque glaze of tan on her shoulders and arms), a shade fragile and brittle. Her lips were thinned and tightened by thought; her big eyes, their whites as pure as chips of china, studied my face without blinking. Having waited for me to finish my sentence, she pronounced my least favorite syllable.

“Brent,” she said, “says he’s ready to do the divorce any
time, now that his parents pretty much know, and he thinks Norma is, too, now.”

“What does he know about Norma?” I asked with languid scorn, lucky fellow as I was with this naked beauty beside me on the king-sized bed.

“He sees her,” Genevieve said, looking at me with slight defiance, her upper lashes pressed against the socket’s upper curve of bone as if painted there. “Didn’t you know that? They’ve gone out together a couple of times.”

“Gone out?”
Odious
, Andrew had said. Was this the beau he had meant? “How often?”

She backed off a few inches, there in the hotel’s enormous bed, frightened of the intensity of my reaction. “I don’t know. More than once. After all, they have a lot in common. They have us in common.”

“Brent and Norma?” I said, trying to couple them in my mind, to picture it. “But she’s older than he.”

“That’s a chauvinistic remark, Alf. Just a few years, like we have between us, the other way. Anyway, nobody’s saying they have sex.”

“But”—and I suppose this remark is characteristic of the Ford era—“what else would they have?”

“They’d talk,” my exquisite mistress matter-of-factly said. “He’s impressed,” she went on. “He thinks she’s finally getting her shit together.”

I hated the phrase, its debased pop psychology. I resented his using it of my wife; I resented his thrusting it into my dear mistress’s ear. But there was no denying it, Genevieve was not a virgin, physical or mental; she was familiar with
his
shit. They shared a style, an approach. The Perfect Wife implies the Perfect Couple; once again, as when conferring hastily
under the feathery springtime elm with her in her smart checks while he approached from an unknown direction, I felt caught between them, pinched in the nutcracker they formed. Naked with me now, she had been naked with
him
night after night, his tight asshole nestled against the perfect triangle of her pussy. Pussies were triangular in the Ford era, before high-sided swim suits compelled women to shave their groins of all but a vertical strip of natural adornment.

Genevieve was watching me. Her opaque, expectant, slightly defiant stare, above the peripheral gleam of her body in the tangled, sweated-up sheets, had been frozen I knew not how many seconds. “What kind of shit?” was all I at last could think to say, weakly. In my jealousy I was getting an erection.

“Oh, less hung up on you. Less dependent and hurt. Starting to take responsibility for her own life.”

“By sleeping with your creep of a husband, that’s taking responsibility?”

“Brent’s never said they sleep together. But why shouldn’t they? We set them free. Alf, it’s not very flattering to me, that you’re so upset.”

“I’m not upset. Fuck ’em all.”
Fuck you, too
, was in my mind.

“If she did go with a free man, so to speak, wouldn’t that be better than one more tumble in the hay with Ben Wadleigh after he and Wendy have reconstituted their marriage on a perfectly sick basis?”

“Who’s to say what’s a sick basis? At least the Wadleigh kids go to sleep with both their parents under the same roof with them.”

I was blaming her; she knew it. She shrugged those shoulders with their smooth bisque tan, so unlike Norma’s carelessly distributed constellations of freckles. “I’ve
told
you,” Genevieve said, “go back to her.”

“I don’t want to,” I replied in a hardened voice. “I want to fuck you, actually.”

“I see you do,” she said dryly.

But on top of her, in her, I had to blurt, “But she’s so artistic, and he’s so un-!”
Deconstruction despises art, stripping away all its pretenses
, was my point, but this didn’t seem the moment to develop it.

Her shrug this time was all internal, a subtle moist tightening that I thought of as a French trick. “Opposites attract,” she said. “Look at us.”

“Us! But we’re exactly alike, for a man and a woman.” I believed this because our lovemaking melted us into one, one with the dark, a mass of blind sensation, her dear flexible and seven times receptive body firm and graceful, like curves my mind kept drawing in the pitch-black back of some cave, perhaps Plato’s. Once, I remember, our two-backed beast with its single pounding heart and coating of perspiration twisted and crawled itself clear off the bed, so that we fell at the foot on a wad of tossed covers, and rather than rearrange herself on the mattress my perfect love partner tucked back her black hair so a gleam of face showed in the faint light from the street and found my prick with her mouth and despite my squeamish, chivalrous, insincere efforts to push her off relentlessly sucked and hand-pumped me into coming, into helplessly shooting off (like fireworks in a chaste Fifties movie as a metaphor for sex) into a warm wet dark that was her tidy little head. I could hear her smile as, having swallowed, she rested this head (was it heavier?) on my chest and murmured something about our being “all mixed up with each other.” Though her aroused skill showed that she had done this for Brent and possibly others, the act felt like a singularity, a unique trip to the edge of self-obliteration by a woman possessed, her needs and
mine fused. In retrospect it seems as though I came not in her mouth so much as in the
room
, the black space limited by eight unseen corners, my body being the only one present, Genevieve transformed for this interval into pure fierce spirit.

It wasn’t that hotel room, with its green-striped wallpaper and
faux
-antique furniture and view of an Italian-restaurant awning on West Fifty-first Street. For her to be so transported by passion, so much a maenad, she had to have had an
idea
of me, like a groupie blowing a rock star. The longer we know another, the less of an idea we have; eventually all we have are facts. By the time of our New York trip, Genevieve and I knew each other a bit too well for her to gulp me up brainlessly, at the mucky bottom of the carnivorous sea, while I at an extremity of invertebrate bliss ran a trembling tentacle around and around the crenelated waxy hole at the center of her rhythmically lifting ear. A certain cool efficiency, rather, floats to the surface of my memory of our three-day marriage. I was struck by the brusque way in which she repelled a black chambermaid who, rapping her key on the door and then turning it in the lock, had tried to enter our room one mid-morning when we were making love. Luckily, the chain was drawn across; but the girl, stupid perhaps, or stoned, kept pushing and rattling, and Genevieve left the bed naked to tell her, crouching at the opened crack, to go away and come back later. Her peremptory voice pierced me, lying love-dazed on our wide sea-bed, and I may have indicated my wound, for as she slithered back into my arms she murmured, “They’re here to serve us.”

This was a revelation. She grasped, Europeanly, the order, the hierarchy, of society. Had it been Norma and I in bed, we would have felt a confused egalitarian obligation to the African-American maid in the hall, who no doubt had her
schedule and, a hundred blocks to the north, her private problems, the products ultimately of slavery and racial prejudice, and we would have guiltily dressed ourselves and vacated the room. But Genevieve saw reality in its true fine shadings of obligation and prerogative. Among the household duties she took on in our room was the ordering of breakfast and tea; this thrilled me, for I always vaguely imagined that it was somehow rude not to patronize the hotel coffee shop with its smell of frying fat and its garble of alien tongues. Mornings, there would be a rap on the door, and she would vanish into the bathroom with a flicker of flesh like the tail of a bounding doe, and I would be left in my hastily donned trousers and last night’s button-down shirt to deal apologetically with the tinkling, ostentatiously noncommittal waiter, signing his bill with a clumsy overtip. She knew the world, how it fit together and did its business, eliciting rewards and punishments on a scale calibrated by tradition. Like all enthralled students, I tempered admiration with resentment. The order she would create in my life depended upon reifying people, reducing them to their uses. If the chambermaid was thus to be disposed of, what about me, when my mysterious use had been served?

Meanwhile, Chou En-lai was dying, and Paul Robeson and André Malraux, and Howard Hughes and Martin Heidegger, Agatha Christie and J. Paul Getty. From a sultry, sliding quality in these memories I wonder if they
are
from the summer of the tall ships after all. In which case, the movie we saw, in a cityscape decorated by fire hydrants painted red, white, and blue, was not
Tommy
but
Cousin, Cousine
, the show not
The Wiz
but
The Belle of Amherst
, and the topic of the conference to which I played truant was “The Fruits of Revolution: Colonies into Competitors, 1776–1976.”

• • •

[
Retrospect:
from this point on, my old ms. exists in a fragmentary state. Personal distractions and intrinsic difficulties derailed the project. Also, JB’s life after 1820 basks more and more in the glare of historical record—see Klein, Curtis, Auchampaugh, Nevins, Nichols, Catton, Stampp, etc., plus the
Works
, edited by John Bassett Moore, that saint, in twelve hefty volumes—whereas my tropism was toward the unlit, the underside, the region of shades where his personal demon teased our statesman, visiting embarrassment upon his dignity and violence upon his peacefulness. A few dashed notations will prick your own well-stocked historians’ memories and fill in the narrative gaps. Thus: JB takes seat as Representative in seventeenth Congress in December 1821—admires above all other members William Lowndes of South Carolina—made member of Committee on Agriculture—within three weeks has spoken on floor of House three times—writes home to Judge Franklin that it
requires great compass of voice to fill the hall. It is a very magnificent and very elegant chamber, but unless a man has stentorian lungs, he cannot be heard distinctly—
modestly allows of his own speeches,
I am told, however, that I can be distinctly heard
—within first month gives speech from notes by ill Lowndes in defense of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun which furthers his alliance with Southerners—gives speech against Bankrupt Bill (sponsored by friend and fellow Pennsylvanian John Sergeant) which shows partiality to states’ rights and property rights—re-elected in 1822 after conducting evasive campaign, staying clear of actively supporting Federalist candidate for Governor, Andrew Gregg, in view of the rising Jackson-Democratic tide in Pennsylvania—enjoys Washington society as romantically tinged (by Ann
Coleman tragedy) bachelor, keeping company with Mrs. George Blakes of Boston and (to quote Klein)
the Van Ness girls, Cora Livingston and Catherine Van Rensselaer of New York, the Crowninshield misses from Vermont, Priscilla Cooper, who became the wife of his friend Robert Tyler, the Caton sisters from Baltimore
, etc.—runs and wins unprecedented third term as Lancaster Congressman on “Federal-Republican” ticket in 1824 election, wherein Jackson sweeps Pennsylvania but whose 99 electoral votes against John Quincy Adams’s 83, William Crawford’s 41, and Henry Clay’s 37 fall short of majority, throwing Presidential election into House—apparently takes upon self, as an already prominent Pennsylvania “fixer,” the delicate task of sounding out General Jackson on the matter of his intentions if the House elects him—Washington’s rumor mill claims that Adams if elected with Clay’s help would make Clay Secretary of State, whereas Jackson would keep on Adams, who was already serving in the post, with great distinction, under President James Monroe.]