The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,58

apartment; when he told her Joan had been there, too, and, just for ‘fun,’ had slept with him, her husband, Ruth wailed into the telephone. ‘In our bed?’

‘In my bed,’ he said, with uncharacteristic firmness.

‘In your bed,’ she conceded, her voice husky as a sleepy child’s. When the conversation finally ended, his mistress sufficiently soothed, he had to go lean his vision against his inanimate, giant friend, dimming to mauve on one side, still cerulean on the other, faintly streaked with reflections of high cirrus. It spoke to him, as the gaze of a dumb beast speaks, of beauty and suffering, of a simplicity that must perish, of time. Evening would soften its shade to slate; night would envelop its sides. Richard’s focus shortened, and he read, with irritation, for the hundredth time, that impudent, pious marring, that bit of litany, etched bright by the sun’s fading fire.

With this ring

I thee wed

Ruth, months ago, had removed her wedding ring. Coming here to embark with him upon an overnight trip, she wore on that naked finger, as a reluctant concession to imposture, an inherited diamond ring. When she held her hand in the sunlight by the window, a planetary system of rainbows wheeled about the room and signalled, he imagined, to the skyscraper. In the hotel in New York, she confided again her indignation at losing her name in the false assumption of his.

‘It’s just a convenience,’ he told her. ‘A gesture.’

‘But I like who I am now,’ she protested. That was, indeed, her central jewel, infrangible and bright: she liked who she was.

In Manhattan they had gone separate ways and, returning before him, she had asked at the hotel desk for the room key by number. The clerk asked her her name. It was a policy. He would not give the key to a number.

‘And what did you tell him your name was?’ Richard asked, in this pause of her story.

In her pause and opaque blue stare, he saw re-created her hesitation when challenged by the clerk. Also, she had been, before her marriage, a second-grade teacher, and Richard saw now the manner – prim, wide-eyed, and commanding – with which she must have stood before the blackboard and confronted those roomfuls of children. ‘I told him Maple.’

Richard had smiled. ‘That sounds right.’

Taking Joan out to dinner felt illicit. She suggested it, for ‘fun,’ at the end of one of the children’s Sundays. He had been two months in Boston, new habits had replaced old, and it was tempting to leave their children, who were bored and found it easier to be bored by television than by this bossy visitor. ‘Stop telling me you’re bored,’ he had scolded John, the most docile of his children, and the one he felt guiltiest about. ‘Fourteen is supposed to be a boring age. When I was fourteen, I lay around reading science fiction. You lie around looking at Kung Fu. At least I was learning to read.’

‘It’s good,’ John protested, his adolescent voice cracking in fear of being distracted from an especially vivid piece of slow-motion tai chi. Richard, when living here, had watched the program with him often enough to know that it was, in a sense, good; the hero’s Oriental passivity, relieved by spurts of mystical violence, was insinuating into the child a system of ethics, just as Richard had taken ideals of behavior from dime movies and comic books – coolness from Bogart, debonair recklessness from Errol Flynn, duality and deceit from Superman.

He dropped to one knee beside the sofa where the boy, his upper lip fuzzy and his eyebrows manly dark, stoically gazed into the transcendent flickering; Richard’s own voice nearly cracked, asking, ‘Would it be less boring if Dad still lived here?’

‘No-oh‘: the answer was instantaneous and impatient, as if the question had been anticipated. Did the boy mean it? His eyes did not for an instant glance sideways, perhaps out of fear of betraying himself, perhaps out of genuine boredom with grownups and their gestures. On television, satisfyingly, gestures killed. Richard rose from his supplicant position, relieved to hear Joan coming down the stairs. She was dressed to go out, in the snug black dress with the scalloped neckline, and a collar of Mexican silver. He was wary. He must be wary. They had had it. They must have had it.

Yet the cocktails, and the seafood, and the wine displaced his wariness; he heard himself saying, to the so familiar and so strange face across the table,