The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,10
her neck to show her husband her face and, upside down in his vision, grotesquely smiled, her mouth where her eyes should have been, her eyes a broken, blinking mouth.
It was not many minutes that they lay there at right angles together, but the time passed as something beyond the walls, as something mixed with the faraway clatter of pans and the approach and retreat of footsteps and the opening and closing of unseen doors. Here, conscious of a pointed painless pulse in the inner hinge of his arm but incurious as to what it looked like, he floated and imagined how his soul would float free when all his blood was underneath the bed. His blood and Joan’s merged on the floor, and together their spirits glided from crack to crack, from star to star on the ceiling. Once she cleared her throat, and the sound was like the rasp of a pebble loosened by a cliff-climber’s boot.
The door opened. Richard turned his head and saw an old man, bald and sallow, enter and settle in a chair. He was one of those old men who hold within an institution an ill-defined but secure place. The young doctor seemed to know him, and the two talked, quietly, as if not to disturb the mystical union of the couple sacrificially bedded together. They talked of persons and events that meant nothing – of Iris, of Dr Greenstein, of Ward D, again of Iris, who had given the old man an undeserved scolding, of the shameful lack of a hot plate to make coffee on, of the rumored black bodyguards who kept watch with scimitars by the bed of the glaucomatous king. Through Richard’s tranced ignorance these topics passed as clouds of impression, iridescent, massy – Dr Greenstein with a pointed nose and almond eyes the color of ivy, Iris eighty feet tall and hurling sterilized thunderbolts of wrath. As in some theologies the proliferating deities are said to exist as ripples upon the featureless ground of Godhead, so these inconstant images lightly overlay his continuous awareness of Joan’s blood, like his own, ebbing. Linked to a common loss, they were chastely conjoined; the thesis developed upon him that the hoses attached to them met somewhere out of sight. Testing this belief, he glanced down and saw that indeed the plastic vine taped to the flattened crook of his arm was the same dark red as hers. He stared at the ceiling to disperse a sensation of faintness.
Abruptly the young intern left off his desultory conversation and moved to Joan’s side. There was a chirp of clips. When he moved away, she was revealed holding her naked arm upright, pressing a piece of cotton against it with the other hand. Without pausing, the intern came to Richard’s side, and the birdsong of clips repeated, nearer. ‘Look at that,’ he said to his elderly friend. ‘I started him two minutes later than her and he’s finished at the same time.’
‘Was it a race?’ Richard asked.
Clumsily firm, the boy fitted Richard’s fingers to a pad and lifted his arm for him. ‘Hold it there for five minutes,’ he said.
‘What’ll happen if I don’t?’
‘You’ll mess up your shirt.’ To the old man he said, ‘I had a woman in here the other day, she was all set to leave when, all of a sudden – pow! – all over the front of this beautiful linen dress. She was going to Symphony.’
‘Then they try to sue the hospital for the cleaning bill,’ the old man muttered.
‘Why was I slower than him?’ Joan asked. Her upright arm wavered, as if vexed or weakened.
‘The woman generally is,’ the boy told her. ‘Nine times out of ten, the man is faster. Their hearts are so much stronger.’
‘Is that really so?’
‘Sure it’s so,’ Richard told her. ‘Don’t argue with medical science.’
‘Woman up in Ward C,’ the old man said, ‘they saved her life for her out of an auto accident and now I hear she’s suing because they didn’t find her dental plate.’
Under such patter, the five minutes eroded. Richard’s upheld arm began to ache. It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a classroom where they would never be recognized, or in a charade that would never be guessed, the correct answer being Two Silver Birches in a Meadow.
‘You can sit up now if you want,’ the intern told them. ‘But don’t let go of the venipuncture.’
They sat up on their beds, legs dangling heavily. Joan