The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,44

and her face went stony. He could break his fist on that face. ‘Are you going to let me finish my story?’

‘Sure. Dîtes-moi, Scheherazade.’

‘– and we went to the car wash. Hecuba was hilarious, she kept barking and chasing the brushes around and around the car trying to defend us. It took her three rotations to figure out that if it went one way it would be coming back the other. Everybody absolutely howled; we had Danny Vetter in the car with us, and one of Bean’s horsy friends; it was a real orgy’ Her face was pink, recalling.

‘That is a truly disgusting story. Speaking of disgusting, I did something strange in New York.’

‘You slept with a prostitute.’

Almost. I went to a blue movie.’

‘How scary for you, darley.’

‘Well, it was. Wednesday morning I woke up early and didn’t have any appointment until eleven so I wandered over to Forty-second Street, you know, with this innocent morning light on everything, and these little narrow places were already open. So – can you stand this?’

‘Sure. All I’ve heard all week are children’s complaints.’

‘I paid three bucks and went in. It was totally dark. Like a fun house at a fairground. Except for this very bright-pink couple up on the screen. I could hear people breathing but not see anything. Every time I tried to slide into a row I kept sticking my thumb into somebody’s eye. But nobody groaned or protested. It was like those bodies frozen in whatever circle it was of Hell. Finally I found a seat and sat down and after a while I could see it was all men, asleep. At least most of them seemed to be asleep. And they were spaced so no two touched; but even at this hour, the place was half full. Of motionless men.’ He felt her disappointment; he hadn’t conveyed the fairy-tale magic of the experience: the darkness absolute as lead, the undercurrent of snoring as from a single dragon, the tidy way the men had spaced themselves, like checkers on a board. And then how he had found a blank square, had jumped himself, as it were, into it, and joined humanity in stunned witness of its own process of perpetuation.

Joan asked, ‘How was the movie?’

‘Awful. Exasperating. You begin to think entirely in technical terms: camera position, mike boom. And the poor cunts, God, how they work. Apparently to get a job in a blue movie a man has to be, A, blond, and, B, impotent.’

‘Yes,’ Joan said and turned her back, as if to conceal a train of thought. ‘We have to go to dinner tonight with the new Dennises.’ Mack Dennis had remarried, a woman much like Eleanor only slightly younger and, the Maples agreed, not nearly as nice. ‘They’ll keep us up forever. But maybe tomorrow,’ Joan was going on, as if to herself, timidly, ‘after the kids go their separate ways, if you’d like to hang around …’

‘No,’ he took pleasure in saying. ‘I’m determined to play golf. Thursday afternoon one of the accounts took me out to Long Island and even with borrowed clubs I was hitting the drives a mile. I think I’m on to something; it’s all up here.’ He showed her the top of his backswing, the stiff left wrist. ‘I must have been getting twenty extra yards.’ He swung his empty arms down and through.

‘See,’ Joan said, gamely sharing his triumph, ‘you’re sublimating.’

In the car to the Dennises’, he asked her, ‘How is it?’

‘It’s quite wonderful, in a way. It’s as if my senses are jammed permanently open. I feel all one with Nature. The jonquils are out behind the shed and I just looked at them and cried. They were so beautiful I couldn’t stand it. I can’t keep myself indoors, all I want to do is rake and prune and push little heaps of stones around.’

‘You know,’ he told her sternly, ‘the lawn isn’t just some kind of carpet to keep sweeping, you have to make some decisions. Those lilacs, for instance, are full of dead wood.’

‘Don’t,’ Joan whimpered, and cried, as darkness streamed by, torn by headlights.

In bed after the Dennises (it was nearly two; they were numb on brandy; Mack had monologued about conservation and Mrs Dennis about interior decoration, redoing ‘her’ house, which the Maples still thought of as Eleanor’s), Joan confessed to Richard, ‘I keep having this little vision – it comes to me anywhere, in the middle of sunshine – of me dead.’

‘Dead of