The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,31

of tacked-up children’s drawings of houses, families, cars, cats, dogs, and flowers. Her husband cannot reach her: she is solid but hidden, like the World Bank; presiding yet impartial, like the federal judiciary. Some cold uncoördinated thing pushes at his hand as it hangs impotent; it is Hecuba’s nose. Obese spayed golden-eyed bitch, like him she abhors exclusion and strains to add her warmth to the tumble, in love with them all, in love with the smell of food, in love with the smell of love.

Penelope Vo gel takes care to speak without sentimentality; six years younger than Richard, she has endured a decade of amorous ordeals and, still single at twenty-nine, preserves herself by speaking dryly, in the flip phrases of a still-younger generation.

‘We had a good thing,’ she says of her Antiguan, ‘that became a bad scene.’

She handles, verbally, her old affairs like dried flowers; sitting across the restaurant table from her, Richard is made jittery by her delicacy, as if he and a grandmother are together examining an array of brittle, enigmatic mementos. ‘A very undesirable scene,’ Penelope adds. ‘The big time was too much for him. He got in with the drugs crowd. I couldn’t see it.’

‘He wanted to marry you?’ Richard asks timidly; this much is office gossip.

She shrugs, admitting, ‘There was that pitch.’

‘You must miss him.’

‘There is that. He was the most beautiful man I ever saw. His shoulders. In Dickinson’s Bay, he’d have me put my hand on his shoulder in the water and that way he’d pull me along for miles, swimming. He was a snorkel instructor.’

‘His name?’ Jittery, fearful of jarring these reminiscences, which are also negotiations, he spills the last of his Gibson, and jerkily signals to order another.

‘Hubert,’ Penelope says. She is patiently mopping with her napkin. ‘Like a girlfriend told me, Never take on a male beauty, you’ll have to fight for the mirror.’ Her face is small and very white, and her nose very long, her pink nostrils inflamed by a perpetual cold. Only a Negro, Richard thinks, could find her beautiful; the thought gives her, in the restless shadowy restaurant light, beauty. The waiter, black, comes and changes their tablecloth. Penelope continues so softly Richard must strain to hear, ‘When Hubert was eighteen he had a woman divorce her husband and leave her children for him. She was one of the old planter families. He wouldn’t marry her. He told me, If she’d do that to him, next thing she’d leave me. He was very moralistic, until he came up here. But imagine an eighteen-year-old boy having an effect like that on a mature married woman in her thirties.’

‘I better keep him away from my wife,’ Richard jokes.

‘Yeah.’ She does not smile. ‘They work at it, you know. Those boys are pros.’

Penelope has often been to the West Indies. In St Croix, it delicately emerges, there was Andrew, with his goatee and his septic-tank business and his political ambitions; in Guadeloupe, there was Ramon, a customs inspector; in Trinidad, Castlereigh, who played the alto pans in a steel band and also did the limbo. He could go down to nine inches. But Hubert was the worst, or best. He was the only one who had followed her north. ‘I was supposed to come live with him in this hotel in Jamaica Plain but I was scared to go near the place, full of cop-out types and the smell of pot in the elevator; I got two offers from guys just standing there pushing the Up button. It was not a healthy scene.’ The waiter brings them rolls; in his shadow her profile seems wan and he yearns to pluck her, pale flower, from the tangle she has conjured. ‘It got so bad,’ she says, ‘I tried going back to an old boyfriend, an awfully nice guy with a mother and a nervous stomach. He’s a computer systems analyst, very dedicated, but I don’t know, he just never impressed me. All he can talk about is his gastritis and how she keeps telling him to move out and get a wife, but he doesn’t know if she means it. His mother.’

‘He is … white?’

Penelope glances up; there is a glint off her halted butter knife. Her voice slows, goes drier. ‘No, as a matter of fact. He’s what they call an Afro-American. You mind?’

‘No, no, I was just wondering – his nervous stomach. He doesn’t sound like the others.’

‘He’s not. Like I say, he doesn’t impress me.