The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,11
asked him, ‘Do you feel dizzy?’
‘With my powerful heart? Don’t be presumptuous.’
‘Do you think he’ll need coffee?’ the intern asked her. ‘I’ll have to send up for it now.’
The old man shifted forward in his chair, preparing to heave to his feet.
‘I do not want any coffee’ – Richard said it so loud he saw himself transposed, a lesser Iris, into the firmament of the old man’s aggrieved gossip. Some dizzy bastard down in the blood room, I get up to get him some coffee and he damn near bit my head off. To demonstrate simultaneously his essential good humor and his total presence of mind, Richard gestured toward the blood they had given – two square plastic sacks filled solidly fat – and declared, ‘Back where I come from in West Virginia sometimes you pick a tick off a dog that looks like that.’ The men looked at him amazed. Had he not quite said what he meant to say? Or had they never seen anybody from West Virginia before?
Joan pointed at the blood, too. ‘Is that us? Those little doll pillows?’
‘Maybe we should take one home to Bean,’ Richard suggested.
The intern did not seem convinced that this was a joke. ‘Your blood will be credited to Mrs Henryson’s account,’ he stated stiffly.
Joan asked him, ‘Do you know anything about her? When is she – when is her operation scheduled?’
‘I think for tomorrow. The only thing on the tab this after is an open heart at two; that’ll take about sixteen pints.’
‘Oh …’ Joan was shaken. ‘Sixteen … that’s a full person, isn’t it?’
‘More,’ the intern answered, with the regal handwave that bestows largesse and dismisses compliments.
‘Could we visit her?’ Richard asked, for Joan’s benefit. (‘Really ashamed,’ she had said; it had cut.) He was confident of the refusal.
‘Well, you can ask at the desk, but usually before a major one like this it’s just the nearest of kin. I guess you’re safe now.’ He meant their punctures. Richard’s arm bore a small raised bruise; the intern covered it with one of those ample salmon, unhesitatingly adhesive bandages that only hospitals have. That was their specialty, Richard thought – packaging. They wrap the human mess for final delivery. Sixteen doll’s pillows, uniformly dark and snug, marching into an open heart: the vision momentarily satisfied his hunger for order.
He rolled down his sleeve and slid off the bed. It startled him to realize, in the instant before his feet touched the floor, that three pairs of eyes were fixed upon him, fascinated and apprehensive and eager for scandal. He stood and towered above them. He hopped on one foot to slip into one loafer, and then on this foot to slip into the other loafer. Then he did the little shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap step that was all that remained to him of dancing lessons he had taken at the age of seven, driving twelve miles each Saturday into Clarksburg. He made a small bow toward his wife, smiled at the old man, and said to the intern, ‘All my life people have been expecting me to faint. I have no idea why. I haven’t fainted yet.’
His coat and overcoat felt a shade queer, a bit slithery and light, but as he walked down the length of the corridor, space seemed to adjust snugly around him. At his side, Joan kept an inquisitive and chastened silence. They pushed through the great glass doors. A famished sun was nibbling through the overcast. Above and behind them, the King of Arabia lay in a drugged dream of dunes and Mrs Henryson upon her sickbed received, like the comatose mother of twins, their identical packets of blood. Richard hugged his wife’s shoulders and as they walked along leaning on each other whispered, ‘Hey, I love you. Love love love you.’
* * *
Romance is, simply, the strange, the untried. It was unusual for the Maples to be driving together at eleven in the morning. Almost always it was dark when they shared a car. The oval of her face clung in the corner of his eye. She was watching him, alert to take the wheel if he suddenly lost consciousness. He felt tender toward her in the eggshell light, and curious toward himself, wondering how far beneath his brain the black pit did lie. He felt no different; but, then, the quality of consciousness perhaps did not bear introspection. Something surely had been taken from him; he was less himself by a pint. Yet the earth,