The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,7
with cigarettes. I circle the room aimlessly.
So I am taken by surprise at a turning when at the meaningful hour of ten you come with a kiss of toothpaste to me moist and girlish and quick; an expected gift is not worth giving.
GIVING BLOOD
THE MAPLES HAD been married now nine years, which is almost too long. ‘Goddamn it, goddamn it,’ Richard said to Joan, as they drove into Boston to give blood, ‘I drive this road five days a week and now I’m driving it again. It’s like a nightmare. I’m exhausted. I’m emotionally, mentally physically exhausted, and she isn’t even an aunt of mine. She isn’t even an aunt of yours.’
‘She’s a sort of cousin,’ Joan said.
‘Well, hell, every goddamn body in New England is some sort of cousin of yours; must I spend the rest of my life trying to save them all?’
‘Hush,’ Joan said. ‘She might die. I’m ashamed of you. Really ashamed.’
It cut. His voice for the moment took on an apologetic pallor. ‘Well, I’d be my usual goddamn saintly self if I’d had any sort of sleep last night. Five days a week I bump out of bed and stagger out the door past the milkman, and on the one day of the week when I don’t even have to truck the brats to Sunday school you make an appointment to have me drained dry thirty miles away’
‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ Joan said, ‘who had to stay till two o’clock doing the Twist with Marlene Brossman.’
‘We weren’t doing the Twist. We were gliding around very chastely to Hits of the Forties. And don’t think I was so oblivious I didn’t see you snoogling behind the piano with Harry Saxon.’
‘We weren’t behind the piano, we were on the bench. And he was just talking to me because he felt sorry for me. Everybody there felt sorry for me; you could have at least let somebody else dance once with Marlene, if only for show.’
‘Show, show,’ Richard said. ‘That’s your mentality exactly.’
‘Why, the poor Matthews or whatever they are looked absolutely horrified.’
‘Matthiessons,’ he said. ‘And that’s another thing. Why are idiots like that being invited these days? If there’s anything I hate, it’s women who keep putting one hand on their pearls and taking a deep breath. I thought she had something stuck in her throat.’
‘They’re a perfectly pleasant, decent young couple. The thing you resent about their being there is that their relative innocence shows us what we’ve become.’
‘If you’re so attracted,’ he said, ‘to little fat men like Harry Saxon, why didn’t you marry one?’
‘My,’ Joan said calmly, and gazed out the window away from him, at the scudding gasoline stations. ‘You honestly are hateful. It’s not just a pose.’
‘Pose, show, my Lord, who are you performing for? If it isn’t Harry Saxon, it’s Freddie Vetter – all these dwarfs. Every time I looked over at you last night it was like some pale Queen of the Dew surrounded by a ring of mushrooms.’
‘You’re too absurd,’ she said. Her hand, distinctly thirtyish, dry and green-veined and rasped by detergents, stubbed out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. ‘You’re not subtle. You think you can match me up with another man so you can swirl off with Marlene with a free conscience.’
Her reading his strategy so correctly made his face burn; he felt again the tingle of Mrs Brossman’s hair as he pressed his cheek against hers and in this damp privacy inhaled the perfume behind her ear. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But I want to get you a man your own size; I’m very loyal that way’
‘Let’s not talk,’ she said.
His hope, of turning the truth into a joke, was rebuked. Any implication of permission was blocked. ‘It’s that smugness,’ he explained, speaking levelly, as if about a phenomenon of which they were both disinterested students. ‘It’s your smugness that is really intolerable. Your knee-jerk liberalism I don’t mind. Your sexlessness I’ve learned to live with. But that wonderfully smug, New England – I suppose we needed it to get the country founded, but in the Age of Anxiety it really does gall.’
He had been looking over at her, and unexpectedly she turned and looked at him, with a startled but uncannily crystalline expression, as if her face had been in an instant rendered in tinted porcelain, even to the eyelashes.
‘I asked you not to talk,’ Joan said. ‘Now you’ve said things that I’ll never forget.’
Plunged fathoms deep into the wrong, feeling suffocated by his