The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,60

me, you mean. His buttons! – we have to allow a half-hour afterwards for him to do up all his buttons. If they made four-piece suits, he’d wear them. And he washes – he washes everything, every time.’

‘Stop,’ Richard begged. ‘Stop telling me all this.’

But she was giddy amid the spinning mirrors of her betrayals, her face so flushed and aquiver the waitress sympathetically giggled, pouring the Maples their coffee. Joan’s face was pink as a peony, her eyes a blue pale as ice, almost transparent. He saw through her words to what she was saying – that these lovers, however we love them, are not us, are not sacred as reality is sacred. We are reality. We have made children. We gave each other our young bodies. We promised to grow old together.

Joan described an incident in her house, once theirs, when the plumber unexpectedly arrived. Richard had to laugh with her; that house’s plumbing problems were an old joke, an ongoing saga. ‘The back-door bell rang, Mr Kelly stomped right in, you know how the kitchen echoes in the bedroom, we had had it.’ She looked, to see if her meaning was clear. He nodded. Her eyes sparkled. She emphasized, of the knock, ‘Just at the very moment,’ and, with a gesture akin to the gentle clap in the car a world ago, drew with one fingertip a v in the air, as if beginning to write ‘very.’ The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: he saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass.

DIVORCING: A FRAGMENT

RICHARD MAPLE WONDERED, Can even dying be worse than this? His wife sat crouched on what had been their bed, telling him, between sobs, of her state of mind, which was suicidal, depressive, beaten. They had been living apart for a year and a half, and the time had achieved nothing, no scar tissue had formed, her body was a great unhealed wound crying, Comeback.

She was growing older; the skin of her face, as she bowed her head to cry, puckered and dripped in little dry points below her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. He was moved, as by beauty. Unthinkingly, she had clasped her hands in her lap, her hands white against the black flannel skirt; with that yoga-performing flexibility of hers, that age had not yet taken from her, she had made herself compact, into a grieving ball, as if about to be shot from a cannon. ‘I’m sorry’ she was apologizing, ‘I don’t want to feel this way, I want to be cheerful and gutsy and flip about it, this is ridiculous. Even the children –’

‘Especially the children,’ he said. ‘They’re good sports.’

‘And I’m not, huh?’ Joan said, in a voice a shade less hopeless, brightened by her aptitude for fair appraisal. ‘I am in some ways. It’s just, just’ – the points of skin, the tears of flesh, sharpened – ‘I wake up every morning reciting reasons to myself why I shouldn’t jump in the river. You don’t know what it’s like.’

She was, as always, right: he didn’t. He imagined nothing, thinking of her jumping in the river, but how cold the water would be, and how heavy her black flannel skirt would become. She was a strong smooth swimmer and the river was not deep. ‘Well do you know what I felt like,’ he said, ‘lying beside you all those years waiting for something to happen.’

‘I know, I know, you’ve said it a thousand times, I thought some things did happen, once in a while, but look, I don’t want to argue. I’m not complaining about the facts, it’s just, just –’

‘Just you want to die,’ he finished for her.

She nodded, with a sob. ‘Then I think how insulting that is to everybody. To the children.’

Studying her, admiring her compact, symmetrical pose, he wanted to die with her; he felt she was crouching at the foot of a wall that was utterly blank, and the wall was within him. He wished to be out of this, this life and health he had achieved since leaving her, this vain and petty effort to be happy. His happiness and health seemed negligible, compared to the consecrated unhappiness they had shared. Yet there was no way out, no way but a numb marching forward, like a soldier in a discredited cause, with tired mottoes to move