The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,48
Then, the next second, glancing down, he saw himself to be less than sublimely alone, for dozens of busy coppery bodies, ticks, were crawling up through the hair of his legs, as happy in his giant warmth as he was in the warmth of the sun.
The sky was an even gray now, weathered silver like the shingles on this island. As he went into the house to reward himself with a drink, he remembered, from an old sociology text, a nineteenth-century American farmer’s boasting that though he had sired eleven children he had never seen his wife’s body naked. And from another book, perhaps by John Gunther, the assertion, of some port in West Africa, that this was the last city on the coast where a young woman could walk naked down the main street without attracting attention. And from an old Time review, years ago, revolutions ago, of the Brigitte Bardot picture that for a few frames displayed her, from behind, bare from head to toe: Time had quipped that, though the movie had a naked woman in it, so did most American homes around eleven o’clock at night.
Eleven o’clock. The Maples have been out to dinner; Bean is spending the night with a friend. Their bedroom within this house is white and breezy, white even to the bureaus and chairs, and the ceiling so low their shadows seem to rest upon their heads.
Joan stands at the foot of the bed and kicks off her shoes. Her face, foreshortened in the act of looking down, appears to pout as she undoes the snaps on her skirt and lets the zipper fling into view a white V of slip. She lets her skirt drop, retrieves it with a foot, places it in a drawer. Then the jersey lifts, decapitating her and gathering her hair into a cloud, a fist, that collapses when her face is again revealed, preoccupied. A head-toss, profiled. Auto lights from the road caress the house and then forget. An unexpected sequence: Joan pulls down her underpants in a quick shimmy before – with two hands, arms crossed – pulling up her slip. Above her waist, the bunched nylon snags; she halts in the pose of Michelangelo’s slave, of Munch’s madonna, of Ingres’s urn-bearer, seen from the front, unbarbered. The slip unsnags, the snakeskin slides, the process continues. With a squint of effort she uncouples the snaps at her back and flips the bra toward the hamper in the hall. Her half-brown breasts bounce. Toward the bed she says, in her voice of displeasure, ‘Don’t you have something better to do? Than watch me?’
Richard has been lying on the bed half dressed, a strip-show audience of one, holding his applause. He answers truthfully, ‘No.’
He jumps up and finishes undressing, his shadow whirling about his head. The two of them stand close, as close as at the beach when she had returned from being rejected by the young persons, a girl and two boys, one boy’s heavy penis hanging inches from her hand. Like I was a nincompoop. Her husband had not been sympathetic. They are back on the beach; she is remembering. Again he feels her heart in the fatty casing of her body plump up. She looks at him, her eyes blue as a morning sea, and smiles. ‘No,’ Joan says, in complacent firm denial. Richard feels thrilled, invaded. This nakedness is new to them.
SEPARATING
THE DAY WAS FAIR. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal misery with solid sunlight – golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature. Usually by this time of the year they had acquired tans; but when they met their elder daughter’s plane on her return from a year in England they were almost as pale as she, though Judith was too dazzled by the sunny opulent jumble of her native land to notice. They did not spoil her homecoming by telling her immediately. Wait a few days, let her recover from jet lag, had been one of their formulations, in that string of gray dialogues - over coffee, over cocktails, over Cointreau – that had shaped the strategy of their dissolution, while the earth performed its annual stunt of renewal unnoticed beyond their closed windows. Richard had thought to leave at Easter; Joan had insisted they wait until the four children were at last assembled, with all exams passed and ceremonies attended, and