The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,16

his ribs, had armed itself with a knife and now began to slash the walls in hope of escape. They reached the Via Nazionale, blocks below the hotel. The shops were unshuttered, the distant fountain was dry. He felt as if he were leaning backward, and his mind seemed a kind of twig, a twig that had deviated from the trunk and chosen to be this branch instead of that one, and chosen again and again, becoming finer with each choice, until, finally, there was nothing left for it but to vanish into air. In the hotel room he lay down on his twin bed, settled his overcoat over him, curled up, and fell asleep.

When he awoke an hour later, everything was different. The pain was gone. Joan was lying in her bed reading the Hachette guide. He saw her, as he rolled over, as if freshly, in the kind of cool library light in which he had first seen her; only he knew, calmly, that since then she had come to share his room. ‘It’s gone,’ he told her.

‘You’re kidding. I was all set to call up a doctor and have you taken to a hospital.’

‘No, it wasn’t anything like that. I knew it wasn’t. It was nervous.’

‘You were dead white.’

‘It was too many different things focusing on the same spot. I think the Forum must have depressed me. The past here is so … much. So complicated. Also, my shoes hurting bothered me.’

‘Darley, it’s Rome. You’re supposed to be happy.’

‘I am now. Come on. You must be starving. Let’s get some lunch.’

‘Really? You feel up to it?’

‘Quite. It’s gone.’ And, except for a comfortable reminiscent soreness that the first swallow of Milanese salami healed, it was. The Maples embarked again upon Rome, and, in this city of steps, of sliding, unfolding perspectives, of many-windowed surfaces of sepia and rose ochre, of buildings so vast one seemed to be outdoors in them, the couple parted. Not physically – they rarely left each other’s sight. But they had at last been parted. Both knew it. They became with each other, as in the days of courtship, courteous, gay, and reserved. Their marriage let go like an overgrown vine whose half-hidden stem has been slashed in the dawn by an ancient gardener. They walked arm in arm through seemingly solid blocks of buildings that separated, under examination, into widely different slices of style and time. At one point she turned to him and said, ‘Darley, I know what was wrong with us. I’m classic, and you’re baroque.’ They shopped, and saw, and slept, and ate. Sitting across from her in the last of the restaurants that like oases of linen and wine had sustained these level elegiac days, Richard saw that Joan was happy. Her face, released from the tension of hope, had grown smooth; her gestures had taken on the flirting irony of the young; she had become ecstatically attentive to everything about her; and her voice, as she bent forward to whisper a remark about a woman and a handsome man at another table, was rapid, as if the very air of her breathing had turned thin and free. She was happy, and, jealous of her happiness, he again grew reluctant to leave her.

MARCHING THROUGH BOSTON

THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT had a salubrious effect on Joan Maple. A suburban mother of four, she would return late at night from a non-violence class in Roxbury with rosy cheeks and shining eyes, eager to describe, while sipping Benedictine, her indoctrination. ‘This huge man in overalls –’

A Negro?’ her husband asked.

Of course. This huge man, with a very refined vocabulary, told us if we march anywhere, especially in the South, to let the Negro men march on the outside, because it’s important for their self-esteem to be able to protect us. He told us about a New York fashion designer who went down to Selma and said she could take care of herself. Furthermore, she flirted with the state troopers. They finally told her to go home.’

‘I thought you were supposed to love the troopers,’ Richard said.

Only abstractly. Not on your own. You mustn’t do anything within the movement as an individual. By flirting, she gave the trooper an opportunity to feel contempt.’

‘She blocked his transference, as it were.’

‘Don’t laugh. It’s all very psychological. The man told us, those who want to march, to face our ego-gratificational motives no matter how irrelevant they are and then put them behind us. Once you’re in a