The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,3

gift, Richard realized, was not that of having odd things happen to her but that of representing, through the implicit contrast with her own sane calm, all things touching her as odd. This evening, too, might appear grotesque in her retelling: ‘Six policemen on horses galloped by and she cried “It’s snowing!” and hugged him. He kept telling her how sick she was and filling us full of sherry.’

‘What else did he do?’ Joan eagerly asked.

‘At the first place we went to – it was a big nightclub on the roof of somewhere – on the way out he sat down and played the piano until a woman at a harp asked him to stop.’

Richard asked, ‘Was the woman playing the harp?’

‘Yes, she was strumming away.’ Rebecca made circular motions with her hands.

‘Well, did he play the tune she was playing? Did he accompany her?’ Petulance, Richard realized without understanding why, had entered his tone.

‘No, he just sat down and played something else. I couldn’t tell what it was.’

‘Is this really true?’ Joan asked, egging her on.

‘And then, at the next place we went to, we had to wait at the bar for a table and I looked around and he was walking among the tables asking people if everything was all right.’

‘Wasn’t it awful?’ said Joan.

‘Yes. Later he played the piano there, too. We were sort of the main attraction. Around midnight he thought we ought to go out to Brooklyn, to his sister’s house. I was exhausted. We got off the subway two stops too early, under the Manhattan Bridge. It was deserted, with nothing going by except black limousines. Miles above our head’ – she stared up, as though at a cloud, or the sun –‘was the Manhattan Bridge, and he kept saying it was the el. We finally found some steps and two policemen who told us to go back to the subway.’

‘What does this amazing man do for a living?’ Richard asked.

‘He teaches school. He’s quite bright.’ She stood up, extending in stretch a long, silvery-white arm. Richard got her coat and scarf and said he’d walk her home.

‘It’s only three-quarters of a block,’ Rebecca protested in a voice free of any insistent inflection.

‘You must walk her home, Dick,’ Joan said. ‘Pick up a pack of cigarettes.’ The idea of his walking in the snow seemed to please her, as if she were anticipating how he would bring back with him, in the snow on his shoulders and the coldness of his face, all the sensations of the walk she was not well enough to risk.

‘You should stop smoking for a day or two,’ he told her.

Joan waved them goodbye from the head of the stairs.

The snow, invisible except around streetlights, exerted a fluttering pressure on their faces. ‘Coming down hard now,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

At the corner, where the snow gave the green light a watery blueness, her hesitancy in following him as he turned to walk with the light across Thirteenth Street led him to ask, ‘It is this side of the street you live on, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought I remembered from the time we drove you down from Boston.’ The Maples had been living in the West Eighties then. ‘I remember I had an impression of big buildings.’

‘The church and the butcher’s school,’ Rebecca said. ‘Every day about ten when I’m going to work the boys learning to be butchers come out for an intermission all bloody and laughing.’

Richard looked up at the church; the steeple was fragmentarily silhouetted against the scattered lit windows of a tall apartment building on Seventh Avenue. ‘Poor church,’ he said. ‘It’s hard in this city for a steeple to be the tallest thing.’

Rebecca said nothing, not even her habitual ‘Yes.’ He felt rebuked for being preachy. In his embarrassment he directed her attention to the first next thing he saw, a poorly lettered sign above a great door. ‘Food Trades Vocational High School,’ he read aloud. ‘The people upstairs told us that the man before the man before us in our apartment was a wholesale-meat salesman who called himself a Purveyor of Elegant Foods. He kept a woman in the apartment.’

‘Those big windows up there,’ Rebecca said, pointing up at the top story of a brownstone, ‘face mine across the street. I can look in and feel we are neighbors. Someone’s always there; I don’t know what they do for a living.’

After a few more steps they halted, and Rebecca, in a voice that Richard imagined to be

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