The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,70

days.’

‘Well, I never thought I’d wind up a grass widow while my husband runs around watching his children have children. How is Joan? As darling as ever?’

‘I only saw her a minute. They’re all in some other room timing Judy’s contractions, and I’m outside in the waiting room reading old Smithsonians.’

‘How unfair,’ Ruth said, and it sounded as though she was, at last, touched.

‘No, Joan understands. I don’t need to be in the same room with that willowy Pole.’

‘But you love Judith so.’

‘All the more reason, not to get her distracted.’

After hanging up, he went back into the cafeteria and bought an Almond Joy. He hadn’t had one for years. He had returned for less than a minute to his perusal of outdated magazines when Joan came back. ‘Where were you? Judy’s pace has picked up and she’s gone into the labor room.’ His former wife’s cheeks bore a hectic, spotty flush; with her wiggly gray hair and waistless figure she was looking like one of those art-loving Cambridge ladies Cummings had written about sardonically but who had shown up at his reading anyway, decades ago, among the hot-bodied undergraduates. ‘The doctor says Paul and I can stay with her, but not Andy. Andy hates waiting rooms, he thinks they’re full of germs, and the nurses said why not wait in Judy’s room? It has a television set. We thought maybe you’d like to go in there, too.’ Joan looked slightly alarmed at the idea, as if her two husbands hadn’t known each other for years, through thick and thin. ‘Judy’s worried about you sitting out here alone.’

‘Well, we don’t want to worry Judy, do we? Sure, why not?’ Richard said, and let her lead him down the corridor. Her hair looked less gray from behind, and bounced as it used to when she would wheel her bicycle ahead of him along the diagonal walks of Harvard Yard.

Andy was sitting in the room’s one leather chair, reading a prim little book from the Oxford University Press, with a sewn-in bookmark. He was wearing gold half-glasses and looked up like a skeptical schoolmaster. Richard told him, ‘Keep reading, Andy. I’ll just cower over here in the corner.’ Joan hovered uneasily, her hands held out from her body as if she were in a chain dance with invisible partners.

‘Dick,’ she said, pointing, ‘there’s a chair that looks at least half comfortable.’

Andy looked up over his glasses again. ‘Would you like the chair I’m sitting in, Richard? It’s all one to me.’

‘Absolutely not, Andy. Survival of the fittest. To the victor belong the spoils, or something. What’s that cute little book you’re reading? The Book of Common Prayer?’

It amused him that Joan, a clergyman’s daughter to whom the concept of God seemed not only dim but oppressive, had married such a keen churchman. Andy was an Episcopalian the way a Chinese mandarin was a Confucian, to keep his ancestors happy. He showed Richard the little anthology’s jacket: West African Explorers. ‘But astonishing,’ he said, ‘the faith some of these poor devils had. They were all walking straight into malaria, of course.’

‘You two will be all right, then?’ Joan asked.

Her husband didn’t respond, so Richard took it upon himself to reassure her. ‘Happy as clams. Let us know when the baby comes or dinner is served, whichever comes first.’

After listening to Andy turn pages and sniff for a while, and staring out the window at a paved, snow-dusted space crossed now and then by a human shadow hunched against the cold, he asked the other man, ‘Mind if I turn on the TV? We’re missing some great commercials.’

‘That football game? You watch such things?’

‘The Super Bowl, I generally do. Andy, how can you call yourself an American and not watch the Super Bowl?’

‘I don’t call myself an American,’ Andy said, and sniffed, ‘very often.’

Richard laughed. This was fun, he had decided. If he were at home, Ruth would have him watching Nature on PBS.

One team wore white helmets, and the other helmets were bronze in color. One quarterback threw passes like darts, neat and diagrammatic, and the other kept scrambling out of his crumbling pocket of protection to toss high wobbling balls, butterflies up for grabs. ‘What a catch!’ Richard cried out. ‘Did you see that, Andy? One-handed, six inches off the Astroturf !’

‘No, I didn’t see it.’

‘It was a miracle,’ Richard assured him. ‘A once-in-a-lifetime miracle. There – you can see it on replay!’

Joan kept checking on them every half-hour or so. On