The Muellers’ front lawn looked not merely raked but scrubbed, and their azalea bushes were each wrapped in burlap. Standards were being upheld. The great old elm wore a blue plastic box on its side, dropping some kind of palliative into its poisoned capillaries, and its dead branches blended with its living in the seasonal leaflessness. The day persists in feeling like spring in my mind, one of those unnumbered dull days that carry us to our deaths, spring the least satisfactory of our New England seasons, the air suffused with the gray hopelessness of nature sluggishly rousing itself and endeavoring yet again to replace one generation of weeds with another, while winter’s winds continue to blow in from the Atlantic.
Yet, once inside her house, having knocked and opened the front door in a single motion, I was heartened by the Perfect Wife’s arrangements, her ubiquitous clarifying touch. The glass table with its ice-green edges on its sturdy chrome X. The Aubusson rug with its distinctly Seventies harmonies of salmon and washed-out lime green. The abstract prints on the walls, trying spottily to mirror my head, on the surface of their slashing blacks and whites. The clean panes of the living-room windows.f The ricochet of earth-tones off the square edges, with rolled seams, of her sofa and easy chairs. The dining room, where eight rush-seated chairs of stained beech waited on tiptoe for the next dinner party, around a polished table in whose center a turquoise glass vase with spiralled ribbing held a dainty spray of brown-and-yellow asters, the year’s brittle last blooms. Everywhere, the glisten of cleanliness, the absence of clutter. Not a dog hair or dust mouse to be glimpsed; it was all as purely intentional as an architectural sketch, with human figures stylishly scribbled in to indicate the scale—ovals for heads, stick legs for men and triangular skirts for women, coded signs the lines of perspective pass right through.
Genevieve was wearing snug white Calvin Klein slacks, the hip pockets like tattoos stitched onto buttocks of bright cloth, and a black cashmere turtleneck in which her hair remained caught, as if she had just put the sweater on and not yet taken the moment to free and flip out from the elastic neck her silky black tresses. It gave her an electric androgynous look, as of a page in a modernist production of Shakespeare. Her feet—I don’t think I misremember this—were bare, as if, again, she had rushed into this costume a second before making her appearance on stage. Perhaps my letting myself in immediately after knocking had rushed her. As I say, I was rarely invited to her home, as our affair wore itself into grooves. She came to me in Adams, or we took little trips, and found a motel not too close to the highway, or too painfully seedy. Roadside cabins were not bad, with their quick electric heat and back view of laurel or lilac in the shelter of the pines; in Ramada Inns, the halls were too full of boozy salesmen’s banter. My mistress seemed, in her Rosalindish costume, so perfect, so svelte and compact, I hesitated to embrace her; it seems an illusion—as if up-to-date computer trickery has enhanced my clumsy old memory-tape—that we did embrace. Her dear sturdy, wide-shouldered body, given a yearning athletic thrust by the tiptoe stretch of her bare feet, came tight against mine and clung with an ominous finality.
She had summoned me, by telephone at my office. Her voice had sounded especially humorless and direct. She was calling from work. She had taken a job, finding her academic husband’s grudging dole inadequate, in a Portsmouth boutique founded by the sister of another faculty wife—the leaning professor of biology’s tennis-burnished second bride. The shop was in Portsmouth’s renovated wharf section, old brick warehouses refitted to hold the new commercial wine, in this case the post-counterculture tweeds, jumpers, and smart suits. Sensible, subdued clothes were back in style. Genevieve acted not merely as a saleswoman but, as the weeks elicited her flair and sense of fashion, an assistant manageress and advisory buyer. She was succeeding, but it meant she was gone most days, and in returning had to rush about, retrieving the girls from the neighbor or babysitter that had taken them in after school, and laying out a supper, and catching up on the tasks which when a mere housewife she had stretched to fill the day.
So it was not a gloomy afternoon after all, it must have been evening. Her cleaned windowpanes were black, but for the bleaching sweep of occasional headlights sweeping past. By the ebb and flow of those passing beams we had more than once made love, she lying belly-up on the down-filled sofa, my face bent to her black triangle or her round breasts with their hard dark tips, the lights coming and going on our bodies as if taking a series of photographs for a sentimental album of our love.
I had grabbed a bite to eat at some joint or other in Adams or else in the gynocentric Student Center, after hours spent at a desk somewhere with the by now quite baffling Buchanan. His life from the inside was a deal with God, like everyone’s, but the outside kept complicating, the characters in his story kept multiplying, old backstage manipulators like John Forney fell away and new ones like John Slidell arrived, women continued to haunt his fringes, his letters and memoranda piled up, his career drifted toward its clamorous yet cluttered climax in the White House, his life had become an incubus stealing strength from mine. My life had at some unnoticed point peaked and passed into decline. My fortieth birthday had come and gone, scarcely celebrated. Everybody had been too busy, including Norma. I lay on the sofa wearily. Genevieve was upstairs again, singing her daughters to sleep. She had a touching voice when she sang, quavering but true, more childlike than her speaking voice. The songs were ones I didn’t know; my mother for all her good qualities had not been a singer, and in our white Congregational church would stand with firmly clamped lips while the rest of us bumbled and whined through the hymn. To me it seemed Genevieve was always singing one song, that went up and down, and returned upon itself as music does, repeating, repeating more urgently, looking for that thing it never does quite find. In my bachelor digs, to banish silence and street-noise, I reflexively turned on my little radio as soon as I entered, and over two years of WADM had bred in me a certain contempt for music: it strives, it shouts, it whispers, it tries again, a half-octave higher, but it doesn’t get anywhere, it doesn’t escape, it eventually ends. The best you can say for it is that it’s not silence.
Genevieve came downstairs looking as I have described. Perhaps by now she had put white clogs on her feet, or mules, thick-heeled and open-toed, so her painted toenails showed their black dabs, their punctuation spelling finis to the thrilling chapter of her body; but no, I think not, her feet were naked after a long day standing in tight shoes at the Portsmouth boutique. The boutique had a name, which I have just remembered: Fancies.
“Anything?” she asked, trying to kick her own weariness. “A beer?”
“What kind?”
“Löwenbrau, I think.”
“Brent left some in the fridge again,” I deduced. Löwenbrau was his brand. French ideas, German brew, anything imported. He aped Derrida and drove a Peugeot. No wonder we were becoming a debtor nation.
Bristling at my implied resentment, she said, “Why shouldn’t he be here? He was filling in for me with the girls Friday, when the shop’s open to nine. The Christmas season’s begun.”
“You poor thing. We got to get you out of that store.”
She looked at me as if trying to gauge how much I meant that. In fact I had meant nothing, except sympathy. I saw us as fellow sufferers. That I was the cause of her suffering did not really occur to me. “Why?” she asked. “I like it. I like the human contact, I don’t have much around here, everybody at Wayward cuts me dead. It distracts me from the mess I’ve made of my life.”
“A Löwenbrau wouldn’t be so bad,” I admitted.
“Shall I have a glass of wine?”
“What about your ulcer?”
Was that a blush? She never blushed. But now, like Buchanan, she did. “I’ve been cheating on it a little.”
“Wine sounds good. Make that two.”
“There’s only a little bit left in the bottle.” She hesitated, then decided to say it, still blushing. “Brent drank most of it when he was here.”
One mention of Brent I didn’t mind, but two was too many. I sat up. “You and he seem to do a lot of drinking together. Come here. I’ll give you the sofa and get you the wine.”
“You want the wine.”
“Not the last glass, when you want it.”
“Oh, take it. You’ve taken everything else.”
“What do you mean?” The electricity she exuded wasn’t just my imagination. It touched me, made me slightly breathless. It puffed out her hair, caught in her black sweater’s turtleneck.
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she cried. “Everything. My respectability, my comfort. My self-respect. My girls still love me but in five years when they work out what happened they won’t. I’m like a whore with you. I’ll do anything to please you. I’ve never been like this with a man before.”
“It’s nice,” I said, flattered.
“For you it is,” she said.
“Not for you?”
“For me it’s more than nice. It’s madness, Alf.”
“I meant of course more than nice for me, too. It’s Heaven. You’re Heaven, Genevieve.” I spoke her name rarely. It was too long, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to shorten it to “Gen,” as Brent coarsely, jocosely did.
“It’s not, and I’m not,” she said flatly. “We live on earth. And not so very long, at that.” My tendency to poeticize, to enlarge and elevate with words, to as it were construct, and her more practical nature had come into conflict before, as when under the budding elm she had announced our leaving of our spouses. I had done it, in a scene so painful I cannot bear to recall it even for you, Retrospect. I had paid my dues; I had secured her love; I was her white knight. But a disgust, or dissatisfaction, colored her tone as she said, “I’ll get you the beer. The wine’s probably acid by now anyway.”
Returning with a round tray on which a wineglass and a beer glass stylized in silhouette a perfect heterosexual couple, Genevieve sat down not on the sofa beside me but in the matching easy chair, covered in pale beige, across the glass table. When she crossed her legs with a swift, narrow-ankled motion, the underside of her white-jeaned thigh flashed, and my mouth went dry with desire. I wanted to be there, between those clean thighs, the sweetly dirty furry moist place between them. She watched me take a golden swallow of Brent’s beer and smiled. “Beautiful Alf,” she said. “You’re so innocently greedy.”
“Thirsty,” I innocently corrected. “I want to make love to you so much my mouth suddenly dried up just then.”
Primly she uncrossed her legs and put her knees together. “Tell me about Ann Arthrop.” Her large clear eyes, the dark irises riding high in the whites, stayed with mine as she took a measured sip of the wine. She grimaced, and made a French sort of sound that might be transcribed as Yoog, pronounced rapidly.
For a second, I had thought she was referring to somebody in the Buchanan saga, whose mists rarely lifted from my brain. The wife or perhaps unmarried sister-in-law of one of his Southern Cabinet members, dangled before the old bachelor as a distraction from their treachery. “I believe,” I said carefully, “she’s the mother of Jennifer Arthrop, a pet student of Brent’s.”
“Good, darling. That’s what I believe, too. And when did you fuck her, exactly?”
“Who says I fucked her?”
“You deny that you fucked her?”
One of the innumerable things I liked about Genevieve was the way that she, once she found the word she wanted, would stick with it. She had no more use for idle, vain variation than a machine. Perfection is like that. “I don’t deny it,” I said. “I just want to know who says.”
“Who cares who says?” she said.
“Brent says,” I accused. “Bastardly old Brent says his bratty little pet cunt Jennifer says, because her mother told her because they have a sexual rivalry going. A mother-daughter combination like that should never be trusted.”
You know, Retrospect editors, in animated cartoons, how the cat starts to slip on marbles the mice have spilled, first slower, then faster, so his legs become a windmill blur, and still the marbles keep feeding under his feet, while it takes him a terrified forever to fall? Our conversation had become like that, I desperately trying to keep myself in the air.
Genevieve had become relentless. “You’re saying Mrs. Arthrop lied to her daughter? Why should she do that?”
“To annoy her. To create confusion. Why do people ever lie? Because people are perverse—to assert themselves over against totalitarian fate. Lying is a kind of vote; it’s democracy in action.”
“When did it happen, Alf?” Her tone was pointedly patient.
“Who says it happened? Winter.” No, that was when Buchanan waltzed with the Czarina of Russia. “May, maybe. I met Mrs. Arthrop in April or May, with Jennifer over in the Student Center, after a rehearsal of Lysistrata, put on before final exams started.”
Genevieve’s lovely eyes, not buried bits of watchful jelly as with most of us but sculptural forms—slightly almondine, as I may have said, as if from a dash of Oriental blood, somewhat as Senator King had a slightly Seminole look—widened; her starry lids, the lashes so thick mascara muddied them, flared in cold fury. “Then you went with her. You fucked her that night and then the two of you like a dear old married couple went the next evening to see little Jennifer perform.”
“It was an afternoon performance,” I corrected her. “In Truman Hall. And I certainly did not go to the performance, with or without Mrs. Arthrop. What a shocking idea. I never saw her the next day; the woman got back in her car and went back to Connecticut where she belonged, to her husband, who sounded awful. He called her Annie, like in ‘get your gun.’ ” The marbles had stopped rolling under me. Somehow, to my enormous relief, we had bypassed the moment of confession, and were safe on the other side. The Mrs. Arthrop episode was behind us, part of our pasts, upon which we could resume building our immaculate future.
“How do you know?” Genevieve asked, without any of the good and hopeful humor I felt within myself.
“Know what? That she got back in her car and went home to Connecticut? I assume so, because it’s six months later and I haven’t heard otherwise. A crash would have made the papers.”
“That her husband called her Annie.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It must have come up at the table in the Student Center. I had a bean-sprout sandwich, she was eating a tangerine. Jennifer kept jumping up and down to talk to her buddies, leaving us alone at the table to make awkward chitchat.” Why wouldn’t this incident go away, sink into history? I had assumed we both assumed, by now, that I had slept with Ann.
“You’re lying,” Genevieve said.
“About what? About Lysistrata? I promise you, on a thousand Bibles I promise you, we did not go to the play together.” Although she had got me to wondering if I should have—if it had been a lapse of manners on my part. “I might have run into Brent there, coming to admire his protégée. I don’t like running into Brent.” How much of my behavior, I thought as I supplied these sentences, was indeed innocent. Most of it. As much as ninety-eight percent.
Her wonderful eyes, like painted marble eggs, suddenly brimmed pinkly with tears. I was stricken. I would rather have watched Daphne cry. In a cracked voice Genevieve blurted, “I don’t know when you’re lying and when you aren’t.”
I must straighten this out; our relationship was cracking up over irrelevant details. “Genevieve dear, please listen. I did not escort Jennifer Arthrop’s mother anywhere the next day. I have never heard boo from her since. She was a tough upper-middle-class broad. I did go to bed with her the night before. I’m sorry, it was—what did you say?—madness. It was nothing. It was like a footnote the reader can skip. It’s you I love. It’s you I adore. I want you to be my wife. I feel you’re my wife already.” Even in this moment of annealing truth-telling, I lied. It had not been nothing. It had been a magnificent regal bestowal of her plump assured body, towering with the solemnity of flesh above me like a thumb held out to eclipse
the distant cool disk of the moon. Her multiple jiggles, her pendulous breasts, her minimal room with its view of the French Fry, the kitschy little dim bedside lamp that saw everything, above its sunset—I had often thought back upon it, with pleasure and pride.