The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,45
what?’
‘I don’t know that, all I know is that I’m dead and it doesn’t much matter.’
‘Not even to the children?’
‘For a day or two. But everybody manages.’
‘Sweetie.’ He repressed his strong impulse to turn and touch her. He explained, ‘It’s part of being one with Nature.’
‘I suppose.’
‘I have it very differently. I keep having this funeral fantasy. How full the church will be, what Spence will say about me in his sermon, who’ll be there.’ Specifically, whether the women he has loved will come and weep with Joan; in the image of this, their combined grief at his eternal denial of himself to them, he glimpsed a satisfaction for which the transient satisfactions of the living flesh were a flawed and feeble prelude – merely the backswing. In death, he felt, as he floated on his back in bed, he would grow to his true size.
Joan with their third eye may have sensed his thoughts; where usually she would roll over and turn her sumptuous back, whether as provocation or withdrawal it was up to him to decide, now she lay paralyzed, parallel to him. ‘I suppose,’ she offered, ‘in a way, it’s cleansing. I mean, you think of all that energy that went into the Crusades.’
‘Yes, I dare say,’ Richard agreed, unconvinced, ‘we may be on to something.’
NAKEDNESS
‘OH, LOOK,’ Joan Maple said, in her voice of delight. ‘We’re being invaded!’
Richard Maple lifted his head from the sand.
Another couple, younger, was walking down the beach like a pair of creatures, tawny, maned, their movements made stately by their invisible effort to control self-consciousness. One had to look hard to see that they were naked. A summer’s frequentation of the nudist section up the beach, around the point from the bourgeois, bathing-suited section where the Maples lay with their children and their books and their towels and tubes of lotion, had bestowed upon the bodies of this other couple the smooth pelt of an even tan. The sexual signs so large in our interior mythology, the breasts and pubic patches, melted to almost nothing in the middle distance, in the sun. Even the young man’s penis seemed incidental. And the young woman appeared a lesser version of the male – the same taut, magnetic stride, the same disturbingly generic arrangement of limbs, abdomen, torso, and skull.
Richard suppressed a grunt. Silence attended the two nudes, pushing out from their advance like wavelets up the packed sand into the costumed people, away from the unnoticing commotion and self-absorbed sparkle of the sea.
‘Well!’: a woman’s exclamation, from underneath an umbrella, blew down the beach like a sandwich wrapper. One old man, his dwindled legs linked to a barrel chest by boyish trunks of plaid nylon, stood up militantly, helplessly, drowning in this assault, making an uplifted gesture between that of hailing a taxi and shaking a fist. Richard’s own feelings, he noticed, were hysterically turbulent: a certain political admiration grappled with an immediate sense of social threat; pleasure in the sight of the female was swept under by hatred for the male, whose ally she was publicly declaring herself to be; pleasure in the sight of the male fought specific focus on that superadded, boneless bit of him, that monkeyish footnote to the godlike thorax; and envy of their youth and boldness and beauty lost itself in an awareness of his own body that washed over him so vividly he involuntarily glanced about for concealment.
His wife, buxom and pleased and liberal, said, ‘They must be stoned.’
Abruptly, having paraded several hundred yards, the naked couple turned and ran. The girl, especially, became ridiculous, her buttocks outthrust in the ungainly effort of retreat, her flesh jouncing heavily as she raced to keep up with her mate. He was putting space between them; his hair lifted in a slow spume against the sea’s electric blue.
Heads turned as at a tennis match; the spectators saw what had made them run – a policeman walking crabwise off the end of the boardwalk. His uniform made him, too, representative of a species. But as he passed, his black shoes treading the sand in measured pursuit, he was seen as also young, his mustache golden beneath the sad-shaped mirrors of his sunglasses, his arms swinging athletic and brown from his short blue sleeves. Beneath his uniform, for all they knew, his skin wore another uninterrupted tan.
‘My God,’ Richard said softly. ‘He’s one of them.’
‘He is a pretty young pig,’ Joan stated with complacent quickness.
Her finding a phrase she so much liked