The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,12

with its signals and buildings and cars and bricks, continued like a pedalled note.

Boston behind them, he asked, ‘Where should we eat?’

‘Should we eat?’

‘Please, yes. Let me take you to lunch. Just like a secretary’

‘I do feel sort of illicit. As if I’ve stolen something.’

‘You, too? But what did we steal?’

‘I don’t know. The morning? Do you think Eve knows enough to feed them?’ Eve was their sitter, a little bony girl from down the street who would, in exactly a year, Richard calculated, be painfully lovely. They lasted three years on the average, sitters; you got them in the tenth grade and escorted them into their bloom and then, with graduation, like commuters who had reached their stop, they dropped out of sight, into college or marriage. And the train went on, and took on other passengers, and itself became older and longer.

‘She’ll manage,’ he told her. ‘What would you like? All that talk about coffee has made me frantic for some.’

At the Pancake House beyond 128 they give you coffee before you even ask.’

‘Pancakes? Now? Aren’t you jolly? Do you think we’ll throw up?’

‘Do you feel like throwing up?’

‘No, not really. I feel sort of insubstantial and gentle, but it’s probably psychosomatic. I don’t really understand this business of giving something away and still somehow having it. What is it – the spleen?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Are the splenetic man and the sanguine man the same?’

‘God. I’ve totally forgotten the humors. What are the others – phlegm and choler?’

‘Bile and black bile are in there somewhere.’

‘One thing about you, Joan. You’re educated. New England women are educated.’

‘Sexless as we are.’

‘That’s right; drain me dry and then put me on the rack.’ But there was no wrath in his words; indeed, he had reminded her of their earlier conversation so that, in much this way, his words might be revived, diluted, and erased. It seemed to work. The restaurant where they served only pancakes was empty and quiet this early. A bashfulness possessed them both, and a silence while they ate. Touched by the stain her blueberry pancakes left on her teeth, he held a match to her cigarette and said, ‘Gee, I loved you back in the blood room.’

‘I wonder why.’

‘You were so brave.’

‘So were you.’

‘But I’m supposed to be. I’m paid to be. It’s the price of having a penis.’

‘Shh.’

‘Hey. I didn’t mean that about your being sexless.’

The waitress refilled their coffee cups and gave them the check.

‘And I promise never never to do the Twist, the cha-cha, or the schottische with Marlene Brossman.’

‘Don’t be silly. I don’t care.’

This amounted to permission, but perversely irritated him. That above-it-all quality; why didn’t she fight? Trying to regain their peace, scrambling uphill, he picked up their check and with an effort of acting, the pretense being that they were out on a date and he was a raw dumb suitor, said handsomely, ‘I’ll pay.’

But on looking into his wallet he saw only a single worn dollar there. He didn’t know why this should make him so angry, except the fact somehow that it was only one. ‘Goddamn it,’ he said. ‘Look at that.’ He waved it in her face. ‘I work like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats and at the end of it what do I have? One goddamn crummy wrinkled dollar.’

Her hands dropped to the pocketbook beside her on the seat, but her gaze stayed with him, her face having retreated, or advanced, into that porcelain shell of uncanny composure. ‘We’ll both pay,’ Joan said.

TWIN BEDS IN ROME

THE MAPLES HAD talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy. And their lovemaking, like a perversely healthy child whose growth defies every deficiency of nutrition, continued; when their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.

They arrived at night. The plane was late, the airport grand. They had left hastily, without plans; and yet, as if forewarned of their arrival, nimble Italians, speaking perfect English, took