The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,26

you see blue movies nowadays?’ Joan asked.

‘Tush, Dick,’ Mack said sheepishly, rubbing his thighs with a brisk ironing motion. ‘A mere fraternal kiss. A brotherly hug. A disinterested tribute to your wife’s charm.’

‘Really, Dick,’ Joan said. ‘I think it’s shockingly sneaky of you to be standing around spying into your own windows.’

‘Standing around! I was transfixed with horror. It was a real trauma. My first primal scene.’ A profound happiness was stretching him from within; the reach of his tongue and wit felt immense, and the other two seemed dolls, homunculi, in his playful grasp.

‘We were hardly doing anything,’ Joan said, lifting her head as if to rise above it all, the lovely line of her jaw defined by tension, her lips stung by a pout.

‘Oh, I’m sure, by your standards, you had hardly begun. You’d hardly sampled the possible wealth of coital positions. Did you think I’d never return? Have you poisoned my drink and I’m too vigorous to die, like Rasputin?’

‘Dick,’ Mack said; ‘Joan loves you. And if I love any man, it’s you. Joan and I had this out years ago, and decided to be merely friends.’

‘Don’t go Gaelic on me, Mack Dennis. “If I love any mon, ‘tis thee.” Don’t give me a thought, laddie. Just think of poor Eleanor out there, sweating out your divorce, bouncing up and down on those horses day after day, playing Pounce till she’s black and blue –’

‘Let’s eat,’ Joan said. ‘You’ve made me so nervous I’ve probably overdone the roast beef. Really, Dick, I don’t think you can excuse yourself by trying to make it funny.’

Next day, the Maples awoke soured and dazed by hangovers; Mack had stayed until two, to make sure there were no hard feelings. Joan usually played ladies’ tennis Saturday mornings, while Richard amused the children; now, dressed in white shorts and sneakers, she delayed at home in order to quarrel. ‘It’s desperate of you,’ she told Richard, ‘to try to make something of Mack and me. What are you trying to cover up?’

‘My dear Mrs Maple, I saw,’ he said, ‘I saw through my own windows you doing a very credible impersonation of a female spider having her abdomen tickled. Where did you learn to flirt your head like that? It was better than finger puppets.’

‘Mack always kisses me in the kitchen. It’s a habit, it means nothing. You know for yourself how in love with Eleanor he is.’

‘So much he’s divorcing her. His devotion verges on the quixotic.’

‘The divorce is her idea, obviously. He’s a lost soul. I feel sorry for him.’

‘Yes, I saw that you do. You were like the Red Cross at Verdun.’

‘What I’d like to know is, why are you so pleased?’

‘Pleased? I’m annihilated.’

‘You’re delighted. Look at your smile in the mirror.’

‘You’re so incredibly unapologetic, I guess I think you must be being ironical.’

The telephone rang. Joan picked it up and said, ‘Hello,’ and Richard heard the click across the room. Joan replaced the receiver and said to him, ‘So. She thought I’d be playing tennis by now.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘You tell me. Your lover. Your loveress.’

‘It was clearly yours, and something in your voice warned him off.’

‘Go to her!’ Joan suddenly cried, with a burst of the same defiant energy that made her, on other hungover mornings, rush through a mountain of housework. ‘Go to her like a man and stop trying to maneuver me into something I don’t understand! I have no lover! I let Mack kiss me because he’s lonely and drunk! Stop trying to make me more interesting than I am! All I am is a beat-up housewife who wants to go play tennis with some other exhausted ladies!’

Mutely Richard fetched from their sports closet her tennis racket, which had recently been restrung with gut. Carrying it in his mouth like a dog retrieving a stick, he got down on all fours and laid it at the toe of her sneaker. Richard Jr, their older son, a wiry nine-year-old presently obsessed by the accumulation of Batman cards, came into the living room, witnessed this pantomime, and laughed to hide his fright. ‘Dad, can I have my dime for emptying the wastebaskets?’

‘Mommy’s going to go out to play, Dickie,’ Richard said, licking from his lips the salty taste of the racket handle. ‘Let’s all go to the five-and-ten and buy a Batmobile.’

‘Yippee,’ the small boy said limply, glancing wide-eyed from one of his parents to the other, as if the space between them had gone treacherous.

Richard took the children