The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,39

he was so mad it made him sick.’

‘Was he mad at me?’

‘Well,’ Joan said, ‘you did keep dancing with her, even after he put on his overcoat.’

‘Surely a suburban man,’ was the languid reply of her husband, who in his adolescence had seen a number of Mr and Mrs North movies, ‘has the right to dance with his mistress.’

Joan’s reply was enviably firm: ‘Marlene is not your mistress. She’s your red herring.’

‘My red herring?’ The unforeseen phrase tinted Marlene’s skin exotically; again, she was in his arms, but slipperier, a mermaid, a scaly smelly merperson. She had been loaded to the gills with perfume.

‘Sure,’ Joan said. ‘The properly equipped suburban man, as you call him, has a wife, a mistress, and a red herring. The red herring may have been his mistress once, or she may become one in the future, but he’s not sleeping with her now. You can tell, because in public they act as though they do.’

Richard leaned into another depressed pillow, protesting, ‘That’s too Machiavellian to be real. That’s decadent, sweetie. Maybe it was a mistake, to bring you out here; we should have stayed on West Thirteenth Street. Remember how the policemen used to gallop by on horses in the snow?’

‘They did that once. Fifteen years ago. The schools were impossible. You couldn’t park the car.’

‘Jesus,’ he agreed, ‘remember the time I parked it in a lot and a roof-mending job on the building next to it spilled tar all over the windshield? It still makes me furious.’ But remembering it made him happy.

‘There you are,’ Joan agreed, ‘we’re stuck,’ meaning the suburbs. ‘Want a little nightcap?’

‘My God, no. How can you stand any more liquor? Do you think I should call Jim up and apologize?’

‘Don’t be silly. You might interrupt something.’

‘I might?’ His perfumed merperson, descaled, in another’s arms? The thought was chilly.

‘It’s possible. Marlene didn’t seem at all fazed when he went out, she went right on being the life of the party.’

Richard shifted back to the first pillow and changed the subject. ‘Poor Ruth,’ he said, ‘didn’t seem to have a very good time.’

Joan rose, regal in her high-waisted, floor-length, powder-blue party dress, and seized the brandy bottle on the piano; its long neck became a sceptre in her hand. She took up a dirty snifter, tossed its residue into the fireplace, listened to the sizzle, and poured herself a tawny, chortling slug. ‘Poor Ruth,’ she repeated carefully, seating herself again in the director’s chair.

‘Of course,’ Richard amplified, ‘why should she have a good time, with that jerk for a husband?’

‘Jerry’s not such a jerk,’ Joan said. ‘He’s a lovely dancer, for one thing. A good athlete. There’s a lot you could learn from him.’

‘No doubt.’ He thought the subject should be changed back again. ‘If Marlene’s just my red herring,’ he asked, ‘why did she dance with me so long?’

‘Maybe you’re hers. We can have red herrings too, you know. Women’s lib.’

‘Then who’s Marlene really seeing?’

‘Jerry?’

‘Impossible.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘Because he’s such a jerk. All he can do is talk stocks, throw the football, and dance.’ Every time, that fall, playing touch football, he had caught a pass thrown from Jerry’s hand, Richard had felt guilt tag him.

Joan’s smile sealed upon a swallow of brandy. ‘A jerk,’ she said, ‘can be a fish.’

‘There are fish in your game too?’

The brandy produced eloquence. ‘What are these boring messy parties for except fishing? If you’ve caught your fish, you go to see him. Or her. If you haven’t yet, you go in hopes you will. If you don’t fish at all, like the Donnelsons, you go out of fascination, to see who’s catching what. And we need them, too. Like fish need water to swim in.’

‘We? Whose fish are you? You make that brandy look awful good.’

Joan rose and brought the bottle to him, because, Richard figured, she could pour herself another splash on the way, and because she knew she looked better standing up in her queenly dress than sitting down. Sitting down, she looked pregnant. ‘First,’ she responded, having served him and reseated herself, while the front of her waist puffed up in a nostalgic simulation of childbearing, ‘let’s figure out, whose red herring am I?’

‘You were Mack’s,’ Richard ventured, ‘but that seems to have cooled. He was all over Eleanor tonight; do you think they’re going to get remarried?’

‘And waste all those lawyers’ fees?’

‘Jerry’s,’ he tried. ‘You danced with him twice, on and on.’ Irate, truth seeming to dawn, Richard