The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,35
used to go out behind the Little League field. That heavenly smell of clover.’
‘But, sweetie, why?’
Smiling, she inwardly counts the seconds of this position. ‘You know why. He asked. It’s hard, when men ask. You mustn’t insult their male natures. There’s a harmony in everything.’
‘And Freddy Vetter? You lied about Freddy, didn’t you?’
‘Now, this pose is wonderful for the throat muscles. It’s called the Lion. You mustn’t laugh.’ She kneels, her buttocks on her heels, and tilts back her head, and from gaping jaws thrusts out her tongue as if to touch the ceiling. Yet she continues speaking. ‘The whole theory is, we hold our heads too high, and blood can’t get to the brain.’
His chest hurts; he forces from it the cry, ‘Tell me everybody!’
She rolls toward him and stands upright on her shoulders, her face flushed with the effort of equilibrium and the downflow of blood. Her legs slowly scissor open and shut. ‘Some men you don’t know,’ she goes on. ‘They come to the door to sell you septic tanks.’ Her voice is coming from her belly. Worse, there is a humming. Terrified, he awakes, and sits up. His chest is soaked.
He locates the humming as a noise from the transformer on the telephone pole near their windows. All night, while its residents sleep, the town murmurs to itself electrically. Richard’s terror persists, generating mass as the reality of his dream sensations is confirmed. Joan’s body asleep beside him seems small, scarcely bigger than Judith’s, and narrower with age, yet infinitely deep, an abyss of secrecy, perfidy, and acceptingness; acrophobia launches sweat from his palms. He leaves the bed as if scrambling backwards from the lip of a vortex. He again goes downstairs; his wife’s revelations have steepened the treads and left the walls slippery.
The kitchen is dark; he turns on the light. The floor is bare. The familiar objects of the kitchen seem discovered in a preservative state of staleness, wearing a look of tension, as if they are about to burst with the strain of being so faithfully themselves. Esther and Esau pad in from the living room, where they have been sleeping on the sofa, and beg to be fed, sitting like bookends, expectant and expert. The clock says four. Watchman of the night. But in searching for signs of criminal entry, for traces of his dream, Richard finds nothing but – clues mocking in their very abundance – the tacked-up drawings done by children’s fingers ardently bunched around a crayon, of houses, cars, cats, and flowers.
PLUMBING
THE OLD PLUMBER bends forward tenderly, in the dusk of the cellar of my newly acquired house, to show me a precious, antique joint. ‘They haven’t done them like this for thirty years,’ he tells me. His thin voice is like a trickle squeezed through rust. ‘Thirty, forty years. When I began with my father, we did them like this. It’s an old lead joint. You wiped it on. You poured it hot with a ladle and held a wet rag in the other hand. There were sixteen motions you had to make before it cooled. Sixteen distinct motions. Otherwise you lost it and ruined the joint. You had to chip it away and begin again. That’s how we had to do it when I started out. A boy of maybe fifteen, sixteen. This joint here could be fifty years old.’
He knows my plumbing; I merely own it. He has known it through many owners. We think we are what we think and see when in truth we are upright bags of tripe. We think we have bought living space and a view when in truth we have bought a maze, a history, an archaeology of pipes and cut-ins and traps and valves. The plumber shows me some stout dark pipe that follows a diagonal course into the foundation wall. ‘See that line along the bottom there?’ A line of white, a whisper of frosting on the dark pipe’s underside – pallid oxidation. ‘Don’t touch it. It’ll start to bleed. See, they cast this old soil pipe in two halves. They were supposed to mount them so the seams were on the sides. But sometimes they got careless and mounted them so the seam is on the bottom.’ He demonstrates with cupped hands; his hands part so the crack between them widens. I strain to see between his dark palms and become by his metaphor water seeking the light. ‘Eventually, see, it leaks.’ With his flashlight beam he