The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,27

to the five-and-ten, to the playground, and to a hamburger stand for lunch. These blameless activities transmuted the residue of alcohol and phlegm into a woolly fatigue as pure as the sleep of infants. His sore throat was fading. Obligingly he nodded while his son described an endless plot: ‘… and then, see, Dad, the Penguin had an umbrella smoke came out of, it was neat, and there were these two other guys with funny masks in the bank vault, filling it with water, I don’t know why, to make it bust or something, and Robin was climbing up these slippery stacks of like half-dollars to get away from the water, and then, see, Dad …’

Back home, the children dispersed into the neighborhood on the same mysterious tide that on other days packed their back yard with unfamiliar urchins. Joan returned from tennis glazed with sweat, her ankles coated with clay-court dust. Her body was swimming in the afterglow of exertion. He suggested they take a nap.

‘Just a nap,’ she warned.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I met my mistress at the playground and we satisfied each other on the jungle gym.’

‘Maureen and I beat Alice and Judy. It can’t be any of those three, they were waiting for me half an hour.’

In bed, the shades strangely drawn against the bright afternoon, and a glass of stale water standing bubbled with secret light, he asked her, ‘You think I want to make you more interesting than you are?’

‘Of course. You’re bored. You left me and Mack alone deliberately. It was very uncharacteristic of you, to go out with a cold.’

‘It’s sad, to think of you without a lover.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re pretty interesting anyway. Here, and here, and here.’

‘I said really a nap.’

In the upstairs hall, on the other side of the closed bedroom door, the telephone rang. After four peals – icy spears hurled from afar – the ringing stopped, unanswered. There was a puzzled pause. Then a tentative, questioning pring, as if someone in passing had bumped the table, followed by a determined series, strides of sound, imperative and plaintive, that did not stop until twelve had been counted; then the lover hung up.

WAITING UP

AFTER 9:30, WHEN the last child, Judith, had been tucked into bed with a kiss that, now that she was twelve and as broad-faced as an adult, was frightening in the dark – the baby she had once been suspended at an immense height above the warm-mouthed woman she was becoming – Richard went downstairs and began to wait up for his wife. His mother had always waited up for him and for his father, keeping the house lit against their return from the basketball game, the swimming meet, the midnight adventure with the broken-down car. Entering the house on those nights, in from the cold, the boy had felt his mother as the dazzling center of a stationary, preferable world, and been jealous of her evening alone, in the warmth, with the radio. Now, taking up her old role, he made toast for himself, and drank a glass of milk, and flicked on television, and flicked it off, and poured some bourbon, and found his eyes unable to hold steady upon even a newspaper. He walked to the window and stared out at the street, where an elm not yet dead broke into nervous lace the light of a street lamp. Then he went into the kitchen and stared at the darkness of the back yard where, after a splash of headlights and the sob of a motor being cut, Joan would appear.

When the invitation came, they had agreed she might be out till eleven. But by 10:30 his heart was jarring, the bourbon began to go down as easily as water, and he discovered himself standing in a room with no memory of walking through the doorway. That Picasso plate chosen together in Vallauris. Those college anthologies mingled on the shelves. The battlefield litter of children’s schoolbooks and playthings, abandoned in the after-supper rout. At 11:05 he strode to the phone and put his hand on the receiver but was unable to dial the number that lived in his fingers like a musical phrase. Her number. Their number, the Masons’. The house that had swallowed his wife was one where he had always felt comfortable and welcome, a house much like his own, yet different enough in every detail to be exciting, and one whose mistress, waiting in it alone, for him, had stood naked at