The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,47
bed the first time, he glanced to his right and was startled to see them both, reflected naked. His legs and hers looked prodigiously long, parallel. She must have felt his attention leave her, for she turned her head; duplicated in the mirror, her face appeared beneath the duplicate of his. The mirror was an arm’s length from the bed. What fascinated him in it was not her body but his own – its length, its glow, its hair, its parallel toes so marvellously removed from his small, startled, sheepish head.
There had been, he remembered, a noise downstairs. Their eyes had widened into one another’s, the mirror forgotten. He whispered, ‘What is it?’ Milkmen, mailmen, the dog, the furnace.
She offered, ‘The wind?’
‘It sounded like a door opening.’
As they listened again, her breath fanned his mouth. A footstep distinctly betrayed itself beneath them. At the same moment as he tugged to pull the sheets over their heads, she sharply flung them aside. She disengaged herself from him, lifting her leg like the near figure in Renoir’s Bathers. He was alone in the mirror; the mirror had become a screaming witness to the fact that he was where he should not be (‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place,’ his mother used to say) and that he was in no condition for fight or flight. He was jutting out, ‘sticking up at you like a hatrack,’ as the phrase went through Molly Bloom’s mind. He had hidden on the sunporch with his bunched clothes clutched to his aching front.
He squatted now to cut the stubborn tufts by the boat shed with the hand clippers, and imperfectly remembered a quotation from one of the Japanese masters of shungā, to the effect that the phallus in these pictures was exaggerated because if it were drawn in its natural size it would be negligible.
She had returned, his lover, still naked, saying, ‘Nothing.’ She had walked naked through her own downstairs, a trespasser from Eden, past chairs and prints and lamps, eclipsing them, unafraid to encounter a burglar, a milkman, a husband; and her nakedness, returning, had been as calm and broad as that of Titian’s Venus, flooding him from within like a swallowed sun.
He thought of Titian’s Venus, wringing her hair with two firm hands. He thought of Manet’s Olympia, of Goya’s Maja. Of shamelessness. He thought of Edna Pontellier, Kate Chopin’s heroine, walking in the last year of that most buttoned-up of centuries down to the Gulf and, before swimming to her death, casting off all her clothes. How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! How delicious!
He remembered himself a month ago, coming alone to this same house, this house into whose lightless, damp cellar he was easing, step by step, the balky mower, its duty done. He had volunteered to come alone and open up the house, to test it; it was a new rental for them. Joan had assented easily; there was something in her, these days, that also wanted to be alone. Half the stores on the island were not yet open for the summer. He had bought some days’ worth of meals, and lived in rooms of a profound chastity and silence. One morning he had walked through a mile of huckleberry and wild grape to a pond. Its rim of beach was scarcely a stride wide; only the turds and shed feathers of wild swans testified to other presences. The swans, suspended in the sun-irradiated mist upon the pond’s surface, seemed gods to him, perfect and infinitely removed. Not a house, not a car looked down from the hills of sand and scrub that enclosed the pond. Such pure emptiness under the sky seemed an opportunity it would be sacrilegious to waste. Richard took off his clothes, all; he sat on a rough warm rock, in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. He stood and at the water’s edge became a prophet, a baptist. Ripples of light reflected from the water onto his legs. He yearned to do something transcendent, something obscene; he stretched his arms and could not touch the sky. The sun intensified. As mist burned from the surface of the pond, the swans stirred, flapping their wings in aloof, Olympian tumult. For a second, sex dropped from him and he seemed indeed the divinely shaped center of a concentric Creation; his very skin felt beautiful – no, he felt beauty rippling upon it, as if the Creation were loving him, licking him.