The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,32
Don’t you find, once you have something that works, it’s hard to back up?’ More seems meant than is stated; her level gaze, as she munches her thickly buttered bun, feels like one tangent in a complicated geometrical problem: find the point at which she had switched from white to black lovers.
The subject is changed for him; his heart jars, and he leans forward hastily to say, ‘See that woman who just came in? Leather suit, gypsy earrings, sitting down now? Her name is Eleanor Dennis. She lives down our street from us. She’s divorced.’
‘Who’s the man?’
‘I have no idea. Eleanor’s moved out of our circle. He looks like a real thug.’ Along the far wall, Eleanor adjusts the great loop of her earring; her sideways glance, in the shuffle of shadows, flicks past his table. He doubts that she saw him.
Penelope says, ‘From the look on your face, that was more than a circle she was in with you.’
He pretends to be disarmed by her guess, but in truth considers it providential that one of his own old loves should appear, to countervail the dark torrent of hers. For the rest of the meal they talk about him, him and Eleanor and Marlene Brossman and Joan and the little girl who used to steal his hunter’s cap. In the lobby of Penelope’s apartment house, the elevator summoned, he offers to go up with her.
She says carefully, ‘I don’t think you want to.’
‘But I do.’ The building is Back Bay modern; the lobby is garishly lit and furnished with plastic plants that need never be watered, Naugahyde chairs that were never sat upon, and tessellated plaques no one ever looks at. The light is an absolute presence, as even and clean as the light inside a freezer, as ubiquitous as ether or as the libido that, Freud says, permeates us all from infancy on.
‘No,’ Penelope repeats. ‘I’ve developed a good ear for sincerity in these things, I think you’re too wrapped up back home.’
‘The dog likes me,’ he confesses, and kisses her good night there, encased in brightness. Dry voice to the contrary, her lips are shockingly soft, wide, warm, and sorrowing.
‘So,’ Joan says to him. ‘You slept with that little office mouse.’ It is Saturday; the formless erotic suspense of the afternoon – the tennis games, the cartoon matinees – has passed. The Maples are in their room dressing for a party, by the ashen light of dusk, and the watery blue of a distant street lamp.
‘I never have,’ he says, thereby admitting, however, that he knows who she means.
‘Well, you took her to dinner.’
‘Who says?’
‘Mack Dennis. Eleanor saw the two of you in a restaurant.’
‘When do the Dennises converse? I thought they were divorced.’
‘They talk all the time. He’s still in love with her. Everybody knows that.’
‘O.K. When do he and you converse?’
Oddly, she has not prepared an answer. ‘Oh’ – his heart falls through her silence – ‘maybe I saw him in the hardware store this afternoon.’
‘And maybe you didn’t. Why would he blurt this out anyway? You and he must be on cozy terms.’
He says this to trigger her denial; but she mutely considers and, sauntering toward her closet, admits, ‘We understand each other.’
How unlike her, to bluff this way. ‘When was I supposedly seen?’
‘You mean it happens often? Last Wednesday, around eight-thirty. You must have slept with her.’
‘I couldn’t have. I was home by ten, you may remember. You had just gotten back yourself from the museum.’
‘What went wrong, darley? Did you offend her with your horrible pro-Vietnam stand?’
In the dim light he hardly knows this woman, her broken gestures, her hasty voice. Her silver slip glows and crackles as she wriggles into a black knit cocktail dress; with a kind of determined agitation she paces around the bed, to the bureau and back. As she moves, her body seems to be gathering bulk from the shadows, bulk and a dynamic elasticity. He tries to placate her with a token offering of truth. ‘No, it turns out Penelope only goes with Negroes. I’m too pale for her.’
‘You admit you tried?’
He nods.
‘Well,’ Joan says, and takes a half-step toward him, so that he flinches in anticipation of being hit, ‘do you want to know who I was sleeping with Wednesday?’
He nods again, but the two nods feel different, as if a continent had hurtled by between them, at this terrific unfelt speed.
She names a man he knows only slightly, an assistant director in the museum, who