The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,23

in galaxies.

Using her hands, Eleanor uncrossed her legs and brought herself upright in her seat. She lit a cigarette. Richard, his knees creaking, got out of the car and tried to push it free. He told Joan to come out of the back seat and get behind the wheel. Their motions were clumsy, wriggling in and out of darkness. The headlights still burned, but the beams were bent inward, toward each other. The Corvair had a hollow head, its engine being in the rear. Its face, an unimpassioned insect’s face, was inextricably curved around the pole; the bumper had become locked mandibles. When Richard pushed and Joan fed gas, the wheels whined in a vacuum. The smooth encircling night extended around them, above and beyond the snow. No window light had acknowledged their accident.

Joan, who had a social conscience, asked, ‘Why doesn’t anybody come out and help us?’

Eleanor, the voice of bitter experience, answered, ‘This pole is hit so often it’s just a nuisance to the neighborhood.’

Richard announced, ‘I’m too drunk to face the police.’ The remark hung with a neon clarity in the night.

A car came by, slowed, stopped. A window rolled down and revealed a frightened male voice. ‘Everything O.K.?’

‘Not entirely,’ Richard said. He was pleased by his powers, under stress, of exact expression.

‘I can take somebody to a telephone. I’m on my way back from a poker game.’

A lie, Richard reasoned – otherwise, why advance it? The boy’s face had the blurred pallor of the sexually drained. Taking care to give each word weight, Richard told him, ‘One of us can’t move and I better stay with her. If you could take my wife to a phone, we’d all be most grateful.’

‘Who do I call?’ Joan asked.

Richard hesitated between the party they had left, their baby-sitter at home, and Eleanor’s husband, who was living in a motel on Route 128.

The boy answered for him: ‘The police.’

Joan got into the stranger’s car, a rusty red Mercury. The car faded through the snow, which was slackening. The storm had been just a flurry, an illusion conjured to administer this one rebuke. It wouldn’t even make tomorrow’s newspapers.

Richard’s knees felt as if icicles were being pressed against the soft spot beneath the caps, where the doctor’s hammer searches for a reflex. He got in behind the wheel again, and switched off the lights. He switched off the ignition. Eleanor’s cigarette glowed. Though his system was still adrift in liquor, he could not quite forget the taste of metal in his teeth. That utterly flat No: through several dreamlike thicknesses something very hard had touched him. Once, swimming in surf, he had been sucked under by a large wave. Tons of sudden surge had enclosed him and, with an implacable downward shrug, thrust him deep into dense green bitterness and stripped him of weight; his struggling became nothing, he was nothing within the wave. There had been no hatred. The wave simply hadn’t cared.

He tried to apologize to the woman beside him in the darkness.

She said, ‘Oh, please. I’m sure nothing’s broken. At the worst I’ll be on crutches for a few days.’ She laughed and added, ‘This just isn’t my year.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘You’re probably in shock. You’ll be cold. I’ll get the heat back.’ Richard was sobering, and an infinite drabness was dawning for him. Never again, never ever, would his car be new, would he chew on his own enamel, would she kick so high with her fine long legs. He turned the ignition back on and started up the motor, for warmth. The radio softly returned, still Handel.

Moving from the hips up with surprising strength, Eleanor turned and embraced him. Her cheeks were wet; her lipstick tasted manufactured. Searching for her waist, for the smallness of her breasts, he fumbled through thicknesses of cloth. They were still in each other’s arms when the whirling blue light of the police car broke upon them.

YOUR LOVER JUST CALLED

THE TELEPHONE RANG, and Richard Maple, who had stayed home from work this Friday because of a cold, answered it: ‘Hello?’ The person at the other end of the line hung up. Richard went into the bedroom, where Joan was making the bed, and said, ‘Your lover just called.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. He hung up. He was amazed to find me home.’

‘Maybe it was your lover.’

He knew, through the phlegm beclouding his head, that there was something wrong with this, and found it. ‘If it was my lover,’ he said,