The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,24

‘why would she hang up, since I answered?’

Joan shook the sheet so it made a clapping noise. ‘Maybe she doesn’t love you any more.’

‘This is a ridiculous conversation.’

‘You started it.’

‘Well, what would you think, if you answered the phone on a weekday and the person hung up? He clearly expected you to be home alone.’

‘Well, if you’ll get under these covers I’ll call him back and explain the situation.’

‘You think I’ll think you’re kidding but I know that’s really what would happen.’

‘Oh, come on, Dick. Who would it be? Freddie Vetter?’

‘Or Harry Saxon. Or somebody I don’t know at all. Some old college friend who’s moved to New England. Or maybe the milkman. I can hear you and him talking while I’m shaving sometimes.’

‘We’re surrounded by hungry children. He’s fifty years old and has hair coming out of his ears.’

‘Like your father. You’re not averse to older men. There was that humanities section man when we first met. Anyway, you’ve been acting awfully happy lately. There’s a little smile comes into your face when you’re doing the housework. See, there it is!’

‘I’m smiling,’ Joan said, ‘because you’re so absurd. I have no lover. I have nowhere to put him. My days are consumed by devotion to the needs of my husband and his many children.’

‘Oh, so I’m the one who made you have all the children? While you were hankering after a career in fashion or in the exciting world of business. Aeronautics, perhaps. You could have been the first woman to design a nose cone. Or to crack the wheat-futures cycle. Joan Maple, girl agronomist. Joan Maple, lady geopolitician. But for that fornicating brute she mistakenly married, this clear-eyed female citizen of our ever-needful republic –’

‘Dick, have you taken your temperature? I haven’t heard you rave like this for years.’

‘I haven’t been betrayed like this for years. I hated that click. That nasty little I-know-your-wife-better-than-you-do click.’

‘It was some child. If we’re going to have Mack for dinner tonight, you better convalesce now.’

‘It is Mack, isn’t it? That son of a bitch. The divorce isn’t even finalized and he’s calling my wife on the phone. And then proposes to gorge himself at my groaning board.’

‘I’ll be groaning myself. You’re giving me a headache.’

‘Sure. First I foist off children on you in my mad desire for progeny, then I give you a menstrual headache.’

‘Get into bed and I’ll bring you orange juice and toast cut into strips the way your mother used to make it.’

‘You’re lovely’

As he was settling himself under the blankets, the phone rang again, and Joan answered it in the upstairs hall. ‘Yes … no … no … good,’ she said, and hung up.

‘Who was it?’ he called.

‘Somebody wanting to sell us the World Book Encyclopedia,’ she called back.

A very likely story’ he said, with self-pleasing irony leaning back onto the pillows confident that he was being unjust, that there was no lover.

Mack Dennis was a homely, agreeable, sheepish man their age, whose wife, Eleanor, was in Wyoming suing for divorce. He spoke of her with a cloying tenderness, as if of a favorite daughter away for the first time at camp, or as a departed angel nevertheless keeping in close touch with the abandoned earth. ‘She says they’ve had some wonderful thunderstorms. The children go horseback riding every morning, and they play Pounce at night and are in bed by ten. Everybody’s health has never been better. Ellie’s asthma has cleared up and she thinks now she must have been allergic to me.’

‘You should have cut all your hair off and dressed in cellophane,’ Richard told him.

Joan asked him, ‘And how’s your health? Are you feeding yourself enough? Mack, you look thin.’

‘The nights I don’t stay in Boston,’ Mack said, tapping himself all over for a pack of cigarettes, ‘I’ve taken to eating at the motel on Route 33. It’s the best food in town now, and you can watch the kids in the swimming pool.’ He studied his empty upturned hands as if they had recently held a surprise. He missed his own kids, was perhaps the surprise.

‘I’m out of cigarettes too,’ Joan said.

‘I’ll go get some,’ Richard said.

‘And a thing of club soda if they have it.’

‘I’ll make a pitcher of martinis,’ Mack said. ‘Doesn’t it feel great, to have martini weather again?’

It was that season which is late summer in the days and early autumn at night. Evening descended on the downtown, lifting the neon tubing into brilliance, as Richard ran his errand. His