The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,22
– explosive, chrysanthemumesque – into the car headlights. On a small hill the tires spun – a loose, reassuring noise, like the slither of a raincoat.
In the knobbed darkness lit by the green speed gauge, Eleanor, showing a wealth of knee, talked at length of her separated husband. ‘You have no idea,’ she said, ‘you two are so sheltered you have no idea what men are capable of. I didn’t know myself. I don’t mean to sound ungracious, he gave me nine reasonable years and I wouldn’t dream of punishing him with the children’s visiting hours the way some women would, but that man! You know what he had the crust to tell me? He actually told me that when he was with another woman he’d sometimes close his eyes and pretend it was me.’
‘Sometimes,’ Richard said.
His wife behind him said, ‘Darley, are you aware that the road is slippery?’
‘That’s the shine of the headlights,’ he told her.
Eleanor crossed and recrossed her legs. Half the length of a thigh flared in the intimate green glow. She went on, ‘And his trips. I wondered why the same city was always putting out bond issues. I began to feel sorry for the mayor, I thought they were going bankrupt. Looking back at myself, I was so good, so wrapped up in the children and the house, always on the phone to the contractor or the plumber or the gas company trying to get the new kitchen done in time for Thanksgiving, when his silly, silly mother was coming to visit. About once a day I’d sharpen the carving knife. Thank God that phase of my life is over. I went to his mother – for sympathy, I suppose – and very indignantly she asked me, what had I done to her boy? The children and I had tunafish sandwiches by ourselves and it was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever enjoyed, frankly.’
‘I always have trouble,’ Richard told her, ‘finding the second joint.’
Joan said, ‘Darley, you know you’re coming to that terrible curve?’
‘You should see my father-in-law carve. Snick, snap, snap, snick. Your blood runs cold.’
‘On my birthday, my birthday,’ Eleanor said, accidentally kicking the heater, ‘the bastard was with his little dolly in a restaurant, and he told me, he solemnly told me – men are incredible – he told me he ordered cake for dessert. That was his tribute to me. The night he confessed all this, it was the end of the world, but I had to laugh. I asked him if he’d had the restaurant put a candle on the cake. He told me he’d thought of it but hadn’t had the guts.’
Richard’s responsive laugh was held in suspense as the car skidded on the curve. A dark upright shape had appeared in the center of the windshield, and he tried to remove it, but the automobile proved impervious to the steering wheel and instead drew closer, as if magnetized, to a telephone pole that rigidly insisted on its position in the center of the windshield. The pole enlarged. The little splinters pricked by the linemen’s cleats leaped forward in the headlights, and there was a flat whack surprisingly unambiguous, considering how casually it had happened. Richard felt the sudden refusal of motion, the No, and knew, though his mind was deeply cushioned in a cottony indifference, that an event had occurred which in another incarnation he would regret.
‘You jerk,’ Joan said. Her voice was against his ear. ‘Your pretty new car.’ She asked, ‘Eleanor, are you all right?’ With a rising inflection she repeated, ‘Are you all right?’ It sounded like scolding.
Eleanor giggled softly, embarrassed. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘except that I can’t seem to move my legs.’ The windshield near her head had become a web of light, an exploded star.
Either the radio had been on or had turned itself on, for mellow, meditating music flowed from a realm behind time. Richard identified it as one of Handel’s oboe sonatas. He noticed that his knees distantly hurt. Eleanor had slid forward and seemed unable to uncross her legs. Shockingly, she whimpered. Joan asked, ‘Sweetheart, didn’t you know you were going too fast?’
‘I am very stupid,’ he said. Music and snow poured down upon them, and he imagined that, if only the oboe sonata were played backwards, they would leap backwards from the telephone pole and be on their way home again. The little distances to their houses, once measured in minutes, had frozen and become immense, like those