The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,61
him. ‘You were depressed when you were living with me,’ he told Joan. That was one of the mottoes.
‘I know, I know, I’m not blaming you, I’m not telling you to do anything, just –’
‘Just what?’ He shifted weight. His legs were aching; he glanced at his wristwatch. He had a date to keep.
‘Understand.’
‘If I understood any more,’ he confessed, ‘I’d be totally paralyzed.’ He asked her, ‘How can I help you, short of coming back?’
‘That wouldn’t help, I’m not asking that.’
He didn’t believe this; but the possibility that it was true lifted his heart, a little greedy lift, like a fish engulfing a falling flake in an aquarium. The flake tasted bitter. ‘What are you asking, sweetie?’ He regretted calling her ‘sweetie.’ He had tried to amalgamate and align all his betrayals but they still multiplied and branched.
‘That you know what it feels like.’
He said, ‘If I’d been better at knowing what you feel like, we might not have come to this. But we have come to it. Now let go. You’re just tormenting everyone this way, yourself foremost. You’re healthy, you have the children, money, the house, friends; you have everything you had except me. Instead of me you have a freedom and dignity you didn’t have before. Tell me what I’m doing wrong,’ he begged.
She had to laugh at that, a little cluck; it occurred to him that her pose was a hatching one, her immobility a nesting hen’s.
He was getting later. Joan knew it. He had to get out, to move on. ‘You have a lot of life ahead of you,’ he tried. ‘It’s a sin, to talk about death the way you do. Why must this go on and on? I hate it. I feel glued fast. I come out here to see the children, not to have you make me feel guilty.’
She looked up at last. ‘You feel about as guilty as a –’ They waited together for what the simile would be. ‘Bedpost,’ she finished, taking the nearest thing to her, and they both had to laugh.
HERE COME THE MAPLES
THEY HAD ALWAYS been a lucky couple, and it was just their luck that, as they at last decided to part, the Puritan Commonwealth in which they lived passed a no-fault amendment to its creaking, overworked body of divorce law. By its provisions a joint affidavit had to be filed. It went, ‘Now come Richard F. and Joan R. Maple and swear under the penalties of perjury that an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage exists.’ For Richard, reading a copy of the document in his Boston apartment, the wording conjured up a vision of himself and Joan breezing into a party hand in hand while a liveried doorman trumpeted their names and a snow of confetti and champagne bubbles exploded in the room. In the many years of their marriage, they had gone together to a lot of parties, and always with a touch of excitement, a little hope, a little expectation of something lucky happening.
With the affidavit were enclosed various frightening financial forms and a request for a copy of their marriage license. Though they had lived in New York and London, on islands and farms and for one summer even in a log cabin, they had been married a few subway stops from where Richard now stood, reading his mail. He had not been in the Cambridge City Hall since the morning he had been granted the license, the morning of their wedding. His parents had driven him up from the Connecticut motel where they had all spent the night, on their way from West Virginia; they had risen at six, to get there on time, and for much of the journey he had had his coat over his head, hoping to get back to sleep. He seemed in memory now a sea creature, boneless beneath the jellyfish bell of his own coat, rising helplessly along the coast as the air grew hotter and hotter. It was June, and steamy. When, toward noon, they got to Cambridge, and dragged their bodies and boxes of wedding clothes up the four flights to Joan’s apartment, on Avon Street, the bride was taking a bath. Who else was in the apartment Richard could not remember; his recollection of the day was spotty – legible patches on a damp gray blotter. The day had no sky and no clouds, just a fog of shadowless sunlight enveloping the bricks on Brattle Street, and the white spires of