The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,18
hot skin in a slipping, weightless unreality. At a highway drugstore they bought some pills designed to detonate inside him through a twelve-hour period. They parked near her aunt’s house in Louisburg Square and took a taxi toward the headwaters of the march, a playground in Roxbury. The Irish driver’s impassive back radiated disapproval. The cab was turned aside by a policeman; the Maples got out and walked down a broad brown boulevard lined with barbershops, shoe-repair nooks, pizzerias, and friendliness associations. On stoops and stairways male Negroes loitered, blinking and muttering toward one another as if a vast, decrepit conspiracy had assigned them their positions and then collapsed.
‘Lovely architecture,’ Joan said, pointing toward a curving side street, a neo-Georgian arc suspended in the large urban sadness.
Though she pretended to know where she was, Richard doubted that they were going the right way. But then he saw ahead of them, scattered like the anomalous objects with which Dalí punctuates his perspectives, receding black groups of white clergymen. In the distance, the hot lights of police cars wheeled within a twinkling mob. As they drew nearer, colored girls made into giantesses by bouffant hairdos materialized beside them. One wore cerise stretch pants and the golden sandals of a heavenly cupbearer, and held pressed against her ear a transistor radio tuned to WMEX. On this thin stream of music they all together poured into a playground surrounded by a link fence.
A loose crowd of thousands swarmed on the crushed grass. Bobbing placards advertised churches, brotherhoods, schools, towns. Popsicle vendors lent an unexpected touch of carnival. Suddenly at home, Richard bought a bag of peanuts and looked around – as if this were the playground of his childhood – for friends.
But it was Joan who found some. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘There’s my old analyst.’ At the fringe of some Unitarians stood a plump, doughy man with the troubled squint of a baker who has looked into too many ovens. Joan turned to go the other way.
‘Don’t suppress,’ Richard told her. ‘Let’s go and be friendly and normal.’
‘It’s too embarrassing.’
‘But it’s been years since you went. You’re cured.’
‘You don’t understand. You’re never cured. You just stop going.’
‘O.K., come this way. I think I see my Harvard section man in Plato to Dante.’
But, even while arguing against it, she had been drifting them toward her psychiatrist, and now they were caught in the pull of his gaze. He scowled and came toward them, flat-footedly. Richard had never met him and, shaking hands, felt himself as a putrid heap of anecdotes, of detailed lusts and abuses. ‘I think I need a doctor,’ he madly blurted.
The other man produced, like a stiletto from his sleeve, a nimble smile. ‘How so?’ Each word seemed precious.
‘I have a fever.’
‘Ah.’ The psychiatrist turned sympathetically to Joan, and his face issued a clear commiseration: So he is still punishing you.
Joan said loyally, ‘He really does. I saw the thermometer.’
‘Would you like a peanut?’ Richard asked. The offer felt so symbolic, so transparent, that he was shocked when the other man took one, cracked it harshly, and substantially chewed.
Joan asked, ‘Are you with anybody? I feel a need for group security.’
‘Come meet my sister.’ The command sounded strange to Richard; ‘sister’ seemed a piece of psychological slang, a euphemism.
But again things were simpler than they seemed. His sister was plainly from the same batter. Rubicund and yeasty, she seemed to have been enlarged by the exercise of good will and wore a saucer-sized SCLC button in the lapel of a coarse green suit. Richard coveted the suit; it looked warm. The day was continuing overcast and chilly. Something odd, perhaps the successive explosions of the antihistamine pill, was happening inside him, making him feel queerly elongated; the illusion crossed his mind that he was destined to seduce this woman. She beamed and said, ‘My daughter Trudy and her best friend, Carol.’
They were girls of sixteen or so, one size smaller in their bones than women. Trudy had the family pastry texture and a darting frown. Carol was homely, fragile, and touching; her upper teeth were a gray blur of braces and her arms were protectively folded across her skimpy bosom. Over a white blouse she wore only a thin blue sweater, unbuttoned. Richard told her, ‘You’re freezing.’
‘I’m freezing,’ she said, and a small love was established between them on the basis of this demure repetition. She added, ‘I came along because I’m writing a term paper.’
Trudy said, ‘She’s doing a history