Memories of the Ford Administration Read Free Page B

my back as a naked woman settled herself astride my waist to give me an allegedly relaxing shoulder rub. The rub was some kind of reward, a therapeutic interlude in our two-person orgy, yet I have never really liked massages, not really believing in the chiropractic theory behind them, and the sensation, as if of a large French kiss, down toward where my ass divided, made me internally shudder. The fault is mine, my squeamish generation’s. Men born later than the Truman Administration and subjected since early adolescence to open beaver shots in national magazines and to childbirth documentaries that spare the TV viewer nary a contraction will scarcely credit our innocence, inherited from our fathers and their fathers before them, concerning female genitalia. The two sets of lips, major and minor. The
frilly
look of it, climaxing in a little puckering wave of flesh around the clitoris. Its livid, oysterish, scarcely endurable complexity, which all but gynecologists used to spare themselves, along with the visual ordeal of parturition. Close your eyes and take the plunge, was the philosophy in olden days, and vacate the site as quicklyas possible. Nine months later, responsible fatherhood would begin.
You have a son
. Those were dark ages, when everything was done in the dark, like spermatozoa blindly snaking up the Fallopian tube to the egg. No more: the cunt is no mere fur-rimmed absence in binary opposition to the phallic presence, it is itself a presence, a signified, with an aggressive anatomy of its own. If it is good enough to mop up the ache of an erection, it is good enough to lay down an icy bit of slime on the seducer’s love-flushed skin.
    The woman was not, strange to tell, the lady of my dreams, the woman for whom I had left my wife; it was little Wendy Wadleigh, having appeared at my dusty apartment in Adams on I forget what excuse, possibly some kind of reverse-twist consultation about Norma’s relationship with her own estranged spouse, big-headed Ben. I had never quite warmed to Wendy; her legs were too short, her center of gravity was too low, her Debbie Reynolds–style energy was too indiscriminate, the cornflower blue of her eyes too eager and bright. She jogged, she cooked macrobiotic, she played the viola, she tutored dyslexics, she coached the Wayward girls in hockey and lacrosse, she swam at the school pool every day, she wore her pale hair in a shiny little athletic “flip.” But in those far-off Ford days it was assumed that any man and woman alone in a room with a lock on the door were duty-bound to fuck. Hardly half an hour into her visit had come the quick drawing of the khaki shades, the latching of the door’s burglar chain for double security, the knocking of the phone off the hook and the smothering of its automatic squawk beneath a pillow stolen from the suddenly pivotal bed. My rooms in Adams, as stated above [see this page ] numbered two, plus a kitchen the size of a bathroom and a bathroom the size of a closet. The two windows’ view was of the back of a factory where a fewbluish lights kept watch over long, empty floors still bearing the ghostly footprints of machinery gone south. By pressing one’s face against a pane one could see past the side of a projecting neon restaurant sign two doors away toward a street corner where pre-Japanese autos dragged their rusty lengths through a stoplight. On this main street, tiny people flickered past the mirror-framed entrance to a shoe store that was always threatening final closure. To minimize distraction, I turned off WADM, where somebody’s symphony was repetitively working up to a thunderous dismissal of that particular movement’s themes. Am I alone in thinking of classical music as very slow in saying what it’s getting at? All that passionate searching, and it ends by discovering the tonic where it began. I never listen to it, except when between worlds—driving in the car, or during those transitional Ford years.
    In the