The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,55

had lived here most of their married life.

Richard found reverse, backed up, and completed the turn. The car, so new and stiff, in motion felt high and light, as if it too had just been vaporized in her little playful clap. ‘Things are stagnant,’ she explained, ‘stuck; we’re not going anywhere.’

‘I will not give her up,’ he interposed.

‘Don’t tell me, you’ve told me.’

‘Nor do I see you giving him up.’

‘I would if you asked. Are you asking?’

‘No. Horrors. He’s all I’ve got.’

‘Well, then. Go where you want; I think Boston would be most fun for the kids to visit. And the least boring for you.’

‘I agree. When do you see this happening?’ Her profile, in the side of her vision, felt brittle, about to break if he said a wrong word, too rough a word. He was holding his breath, trying to stay up, high and light, like the car. They went over the bump this side of the old stone bridge; cigarette smoke jarred loose from Joan’s face.

‘As soon as you can find a place,’ she said. ‘Next week. Is that too soon?’

‘Probably.’

‘Is this too sad? Do I seem brutal to you?’

‘No, you seem wonderful, very gentle and just, as always. It’s right. It’s just something I couldn’t do myself. How can you possibly live without me in town?’

In the edge of his vision her face turned; he turned to see, and her expression was mischievous, brave, flushed. They must have had wine at lunch. ‘Easy,’ Joan said. He knew it was a bluff, a brave gesture; she was begging for reprieve. But he held silent, he refused to argue. This way, he had her pride on his side.

The curves of the road poured by, mailboxes, trees some of which were already scorched by the turn of the year. He asked, ‘Is this your idea, or his?’

‘Mine. It came to me on the train. All Andy said was, I seemed to be feeding you all the time.’ In the weeks since their summer of separated vacations, Richard had been sleeping in a borrowed seaside shack two miles from their home; he tried to cook there, but each evening, as the nights grew shorter, it seemed easier, and kinder to the children, to eat the dinner Joan had cooked. He was used to her cooking; indeed, his body, every cell, was composed of her cooking. Dinner would lead to a post-dinner drink, while the children (two were off at school, two were still homebound) plodded through their homework or stared at television, and drinking would lead to talking, confidences, harsh words, maudlin tears, and an occasional uxorious collapse upward, into bed. She was right; it was not healthy, or progressive. The twenty years were by, when it would have been convenient to love one another.

He found the apartment in Boston on the second day of hunting. The real-estate agent had red hair, a round bottom, and a mask of makeup worn as if to conceal her youth. Richard felt happy and scared, going up and down stairs behind her. Wearier of him than he was of her, she fidgeted the key into this lock, bucked the door open with her shoulder, and made her little open-handed gesture of helpless display.

The floor was not the usual wall-to-wall shag or splintered wood, but black and white tile, like the floor in a Vermeer; he glanced to the window, saw the skyscraper, and knew that this would do. The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster, famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from it) and disastrous because it was beautiful: the architect had had a vision. He had dreamed of an invisible building, though immense; the glass was meant to reflect the sky and the old low brick skyline of Boston, and to melt into the sky. Instead, the windows of mirroring glass kept falling to the street, and were replaced by ugly opacities of black plywood. Yet enough reflecting surface remained to give an impression, through the wavery old window of this sudden apartment, of huge blueness, a vertical cousin to the horizontal huge blueness of the sea that Richard awoke to each morning, in the now bone-deep morning chill of his unheated shack. He said to the redhead, ‘Fine,’ and her charcoal eyebrows lifted. His hands trembled as he signed the lease, having written ‘Sep’ in the space for marital status. From a drugstore he phoned the news, not to his