The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,4
slightly louder than her ordinary one, said, ‘Do you want to come up and see where I live?’
‘Sure.’ It seemed far-fetched to refuse.
They descended four concrete steps, opened a shabby orange door, entered an overheated half-basement lobby, and began to climb flights of wooden stairs. Richard’s suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt. Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny. Three years ago, Joan had lived in a fourth-floor walkup, in Cambridge. Richard never took her home, even when the whole business, down to the last intimacy, had become routine, without the fear that the landlord, justifiably furious, would leap from his door and devour him as they passed.
Opening her door, Rebecca said, ‘It’s hot as hell in here,’ swearing for the first time in his hearing. She turned on a weak light. The room was small; slanting planes, the underside of the building’s roof, intersected the ceiling and walls and cut large prismatic volumes from Rebecca’s living space. As he moved farther forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right, an unexpected area created where the steeply slanting roof extended itself to the floor. Here a double bed was placed. Tightly bounded on three sides, the bed had the appearance not so much of a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it and, unable to face Rebecca at once, stared at two kitchen chairs, a metal bridge lamp around the rim of whose shade plump fish and helm wheels alternated, and a four-shelf bookcase – all of which, being slender and proximate to a tilting wall, had an air of threatened verticality.
‘Yes, here’s the stove on top of the refrigerator I told you about,’ Rebecca said. ‘Or did I?’
The top unit overhung the lower by several inches on all sides. He touched his fingers to the stove’s white side. ‘This room is quite sort of nice,’ he said.
‘Here’s the view,’ she said. He moved to stand beside her at the windows, lifting aside the curtains and peering through tiny flawed panes into the apartment across the street.
‘That guy does have a huge window,’ Richard said.
She made a brief agreeing noise of n’s.
Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. ‘Looks like a furniture store,’ he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat. ‘The snow’s keeping up.’
‘Yes. It is.’
‘Well’ – his word was too loud; he finished the sentence too softly – ‘thanks for letting me see it. I – Have you read this?’ He had noticed a copy of Auntie Mame lying on a hassock.
‘I haven’t had the time,’ she said.
‘I haven’t read it either. Just reviews. That’s all I ever read.’
This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unnecessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face.
‘Well –’ he said.
‘Well.’ Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless.
‘Don’t, don’t let the b-butchers get you.’ The stammer of course ruined the joke, and her laugh, which had begun as soon as she had seen by his face that he would attempt something funny, was completed ahead of his utterance.
As he went down the stairs she rested both hands on the banister and looked down toward the next landing. ‘Good night,’ she said.
‘Night.’ He looked up; she had gone into her room. Oh but they were close.
WIFE-WOOING
OH MY LOVE. Yes. Here we sit, on warm broad floorboards, before a fire, the children between us, in a crescent, eating. The girl and I share one half-pint of French-fried potatoes; you and the boy share another; and in the center, sharing nothing, making simple reflections within himself like a jewel, the baby, mounted in an Easybaby, sucks at his bottle with frowning mastery, his selfish, contemplative eyes stealing glitter from the center of the flames. And you. You. You allow your skirt, the same black skirt in which this morning you with woman’s soft bravery mounted a bicycle and sallied forth to play hymns in difficult keys on the Sunday school’s old