The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,34
violence not on TV, and Hecuba leaps upon the bed with rolling golden eyes, and Judith gives Dickie an impudent and unrepentant sideways glance, and he, gagging on a surfeit of emotion, bolts from the room. Soon there arises from the other end of the upstairs an anguished squawk as Dickie invades John’s room and punctures his communion with his dinosaurs. Downstairs, a woman, neglected and alone, locked in a box, sings about amore. Bean hugs Joan’s legs so she cannot move.
Judith asks with parental sharpness, ‘What were you two talking about?’
‘Nothing,’ Richard says. ‘We were getting dressed.’
‘Why were all the lights out?’
‘We were saving electricity,’ her father tells her.
‘Why is Mommy crying?’ He looks, disbelieving, and discovers that, indeed, her cheeks coated with silver, she is.
At the party, amid clouds of friends and smoke, Richard resists being parted from his wife’s side. She has dried her tears, and faintly swaggers, as when, on the beach, she dares wear a bikini. But her nakedness is only in his eyes. Her head beside his shoulder, her grave polite pleasantries, the plump unrepentant cleft between her breasts, all seem newly treasurable and intrinsic to his own identity. As a cuckold, he has grown taller, attenuated, more elegant and humane in his opinions, airier and more mobile. When the usual argument about Vietnam commences, he hears himself sounding like a dove. He concedes that Johnson is unlovable. He allows that Asia is infinitely complex, devious, ungrateful, feminine: but must we abandon her therefore? When Mack Dennis, grown burly in bachelorhood, comes and asks Joan to dance, Richard feels unmanned and sits on the sofa with such an air of weariness that Marlene Brossman sits down beside him and, for the first time in years, flirts. He tries to tell her with his voice, beneath the meaningless words he is speaking, that he loved her, and could love her again, but that at the moment he is terribly distracted and must be excused. He goes and asks Joan if it isn’t time to go. She resists: ‘It’s too rude.’ She is safe here among social proprieties and foresees that his exploitation of the territory she has surrendered will be thorough. Love is pitiless. They drive home at midnight under a slim moon nothing like its photographs – shadow-caped canyons, gimlet mountain ranges, gritty circular depressions around the metal feet of the mechanical intruder sent from the blue ball in the sky.
They do not rest until he has elicited from her a world of details: dates, sites, motel interiors, precisely mixed emotions. They make love, self-critically. He exacts the new wantonness she owes him, and in compensation tries to be, like a battered old roué, skillful. He satisfies himself that in some elemental way he has never been displaced; that for months she has been struggling in her lover’s grasp, in the gauze net of love, her wings pinioned by tact. She assures him that she seized on the first opportunity for confession; she confides to him that Otto spray-sets his hair and uses a scent. She, weeping, vows that nowhere, never, has she encountered his, Richard’s, passion, his pleasant bodily proportions and backwards-reeling grace, his invigorating sadism, his male richness. Then why …? She is asleep. Her breathing has become oblivious. He clasps her limp body to his, wasting forgiveness upon her ghostly form. A receding truck pulls the night’s silence taut. She has left him a hair short of satiety; her confession feels still a fraction unplumbed. The lunar face of the electric clock says three. He turns, flips his pillow, restlessly adjusts his arms, turns again, and seems to go downstairs for a glass of milk.
To his surprise, the kitchen is brightly lit, and Joan is on the linoleum floor, in her leotard. He stands amazed while she serenely twists her legs into the lotus position. He asks her again about the yoga instructor.
‘Well, I didn’t think it counted if it was part of the exercise. The whole point, darley, is to make mind and body one. This is pranayama – breath control.’ Stately, she pinches shut one nostril and slowly inhales, then pinches shut the other and exhales. Her hands return, palm up, to her knees. And she smiles. ‘This one is fun. It’s called the Twist.’ She assumes a new position, her muscles elastic under the black cloth tormented into runs. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’ve slept with Harry Saxon.’
‘Joan, no. How often?’
‘When we felt like it. We