The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,59

‘She’s lovely, and loves me, you know’ – he felt embarrassed, like a son suddenly aware that his mother, though politely attentive, is indifferent to the urgency of an athletic contest being described – ‘but she does spell everything out, and wants everything spelled out to her. It’s like being back in the second grade. And the worst thing is, for all this explaining, for all this glorious fucking, she’s still not real to me, the way – you are.’ His voice did break; he had gone too far.

Joan put her left hand, still bearing their wedding ring, flat on the tablecloth in a sensible, level gesture. ‘She will be,’ she promised. ‘It’s a matter of time.’

The old pattern was still the one visible to the world. The waitress, who had taught their children in Sunday school, greeted them as if their marriage were unbroken; they ate in this restaurant three or four times a year, and were on schedule. They had known the ginger-haired contractor who had built it, this mock-antique wing, a dozen years ago, and then left town, bankrupt but oddly cheerful. His memory hovered between the beams. Another couple, older than the Maples – the husband had once worked with Richard on a town committee – came up to their booth beaming, jollying, in that obligatory American way. Did they know? It didn’t much matter, in this nation of temporary arrangements. The Maples jollied back as one, and tumbled loose only when the older couple moved away. Joan gazed after their backs. ‘I wonder what they have,’ she asked, ‘that we didn’t.’

‘Maybe they had less,’ Richard said, ‘so they didn’t expect more.’

‘That’s too easy.’ She was a shade resistant to his veiled compliments; he was grateful. Please resist.

He asked, ‘How do you think the kids are doing? John seemed withdrawn.’

‘That’s how he is. Stop picking at him.’

‘I just don’t want him to think he has to be your little husband. That house feels huge now.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He was; he put his hands palms up on the table.

‘Isn’t it amazing,’ Joan said, ‘how a full bottle of wine isn’t enough for two people any more?’

‘Should I order another bottle?’ He was dismayed, secretly: the waste.

She saw this, and said, ‘No. Just give me half of what’s in your glass.’

‘You can have it all.’ He poured.

She said, ‘So your fucking is really glorious?’

He was embarrassed by the remark now, and feared it set a distasteful trend. As with Ruth there was an etiquette of independent adultery, so with Joan some code of separation must be maintained. ‘It usually is,’ he told her, ‘between people who aren’t married.’

‘Is dat right, white man?’ A swallow of his wine inside her, Joan began to swell with impending hilarity. She leaned as close as the table would permit. ‘You must promise’ – a gesture went with ‘promise,’ a protesting little splaying of her hands – ‘never to tell this to anybody, not even Ruth.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t tell me. In fact, don’t.’ He understood why she had been laconic up to now; she had been wanting to talk about her lover, holding him warm within her like a baby. She was going to betray him. ‘Please don’t,’ Richard said.

‘Don’t be such a prig. You’re the only person I can talk to, it doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘That’s what you said about our going to bed in my apartment.’

‘Did she mind?’

‘Incredibly.’

Joan laughed, and Richard was struck, for the thousandth time, by the perfection of her teeth, even and rounded and white, bared by her lips as if in proof of a perfect skull, an immaculate soul. Her glee whirled her to a kind of heaven as she confided stories about herself and Andy – how he and a motel manageress had quarrelled over the lack of towels in a room taken for the afternoon, how he fell asleep for exactly seven minutes each time after making love. Richard had known Andy for years, a slender swarthy specialist in corporation law, himself divorced, though professionally engaged in the finicking arrangement of giant mergers. A fussy dresser, a churchman, he brought to many occasions an undue dignity and perhaps had been more attracted to Joan’s surface glaze, her New England cool, than the mischievous imps underneath. ‘My psychiatrist thinks Andy was symbiotic with you, and now that you’re gone, I can see him as absurd.’

‘He’s not absurd. He’s good, loyal, handsome, prosperous. He tithes. He has a twelve handicap. He loves you.’

‘He protects you from