The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,29

like understanding and compassion and how we must all help each other. It was like church, and you know how agitated I get in church, how I begin to cry. Every time I’d try to cry he’d kiss me, then he’d kiss her: absolutely impartial. Peck, peck. We’re the same person! She’s stolen my identity!’ She held up her glass of ice cubes and raised her eyebrows in indignation. Her hair, too, seemed to be lifting from her scalp; she had once described to him how at golf, when she flubbed a shot, she could hear her hair rustle as it rose in fury.

‘You have bushier hair,’ he said.

‘Thanks. You’re the one to know. He kept wanting to call you up. He kept saying things like, “Let’s get good old Richard down here, the son of a bitch. I miss the old seducer.” I had to keep telling him we needed you to baby-sit.’

‘Pretty unmanning.’

‘I think you’ve had enough manning for a while.’

‘You should have seen me waiting up. I kept running to all the windows like a hen with a lost chick. I was frantic for you, sweet. I never should have sent you down to those awful people to be lectured at.’

‘They’re not awful people. You’re the awful person. You’re just lucky they don’t believe in war. They think indignation is silly. Childish. They’re so explanatory, is all. He kept talking about some greater good coming out of this.’

‘And you? You believe in war, or a greater good?’

‘I don’t know. I could believe in a little more bourbon.’

His next question was hot, so full of remembered light it scorched his tongue. ‘Did she also want me there?’

‘She didn’t say. She’s not that tactless.’

‘I never found her tactless,’ he dared say.

Joan’s hair appeared to puff out from her head; she gestured like a soprano. ‘Why didn’t you run off with her? Why don’t you run off with her now? Do something. I can’t stand another one of these love-ins, or teach-ins, or whatever they are. They kept saying, we must all get together, we must all keep in touch. I don’t want to get together with anybody.’

‘But it’s you –’ he began.

She interrupted: ‘Don’t spare the ice.’

‘– I seem to want most. I hated your being out of the house tonight. I hated it more than I would have supposed.’ He spoke very carefully, gazing downward at the counter as he refilled their glasses, which seemed balanced on the edge of a precipice; Joan’s safe return had uncovered within him the abysmal loss of, with her soothing steady voice, the other.

EROS RAMPANT

THE MAPLES’ HOUSE is full of love. Bean, the six-year-old baby, loves Hecuba, the dog. John, who is eight, an angel-faced mystic serenely unable to ride a bicycle or read a clock, is in love with his Creepy Crawlers, his monster cards, his dinosaurs, and his carved rhinoceros from Kenya. He spends hours in his room after school drifting among these things, rearranging, gloating, humming. He experiences pain only when his older brother, Richard Jr, sardonically enters his room and pierces his placenta of contentment. Richard is in love with life, with all outdoors, with Carl Yastrzemski, Babe Parilli, the Boston Bruins, the Beatles, and with that shifty apparition who, comb in hand, peeps back shiny-eyed at him out of the mirror in the mornings, wearing a mustache of toothpaste. He receives strange challenging notes from girls – Dickie Maple you stop looking at me – which he brings home from school carelessly crumpled along with his spelling papers and hectographed notices about eye, tooth, and lung inspection. His feelings about young Mrs Brice, who confronts his section of the fifth grade with the enamelled poise and studio diction of an airline hostess, are so guarded as to be suspicious. He almost certainly loves, has always deeply loved, his older sister, Judith. Verging on thirteen, she has become difficult to contain, even within an incestuous passion. Large and bumptious, she eclipses his view of the television screen, loudly Frugs while he would listen to the Beatles, teases, thrashes, is bombarded and jogged by powerful rays from outer space. She hangs for hours by the corner where Mr Lunt, her history teacher, lives; she pastes effigies of the Monkees on her walls, French-kisses her mother good night, experiences the panic of sleeplessness, engages in long languorous tussles on the sofa with the dog. Hecuba, a spayed golden retriever, races from room to room, tormented as if by fleas by