The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,73

brick building housing a muffled roaring of heat, and again Richard had to laugh. Joan did, too.

Andy whined, ‘Let me go back to the hospital and have them phone for a cab.’

‘Don’t be such a sissy. Think of yourself as a West African explorer,’ Richard said. His face was blazing in the cold and his thumbs in his thin gloves were quite numb. ‘It has to be around here somewhere. A gray Taurus, with three bridge stickers on the windshield. I remember noticing a row of boarded-up shops and wondering if kids looking for drugs were going to smash my windows.’

‘Great,’ Andy said. ‘Come on, Joan, let’s head back. This is a mugger’s paradise.’

‘Nonsense,’ Joan pronounced. ‘Everybody’s too cold to mug.’ She was still a liberal at heart. She turned and said, ‘Richard, think. What kind of shops? Did you cross any big streets? From what angle did you approach the hospital?’

Her hopeful voice, which he had first heard in a seminar on English-language epics – a dozen callow male faces around an oaken conference table, and hers, shining – summoned up in him a younger, student self. Ruth was so much more decisive and clear-headed than he that he rarely had to think. A grid began to build in his mind. ‘One street over,’ he said, pointing, ‘and then, I think, left.’ Joan led the way, he and Andy numbly following; she was the friskiest of the three, perhaps because she had the warmest coat. They had not walked ten minutes before he recognized his car – its three stickers, its pattern of road-salt stains. It had not been broken into. The shops he vaguely remembered were on the other side of the street, oddly. He was pleased to hear the door lock click; he had known it to freeze in weather warmer than this.

Joan got into the back, letting Andy have the seat by the heater. The engine started, and as the car rolled along the silent, glazed streets, she put her face up between the two men’s shoulders, talking to Richard. ‘The baby. When they come out – I’ve never seen this described – they have an expression on their faces, a funny little bunchy look of distaste. He looked just like Judith when we’d try to give her prunes. Then there’s a gush of water, and the rest of the baby slips out like nothing, trailing this enormous spiralled umbilical cord, all purply and yellow.’

‘Joanie, please,’ Andy said, readjusting his muffler.

She went on, inspired, to Richard, ‘I mean, the apparatus. You think of the womb as a kind of place for transients, but it’s a whole other life in there. It’s a lot to give up.’ He understood what she meant; as always, she was groping for the big picture, searching for the hidden secret, in keeping with all those sermons she had had to sit through as a child. Life is a lesson, a text with a moral.

Whereas Andy listened to her as one does to second wives, in confidence that the search is over. Or that there is no search. He patted her hand, where it rested in its mink sleeve next to his shoulders. ‘I shouldn’t have let you watch,’ he said. ‘It’s going to give you bad dreams.’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ she said, a bit indignantly, Richard felt.

‘Tell me one more thing,’ he begged. ‘Who the hell is Leo?’

‘His father – didn’t you know? They’re not like we were – this may be their only child, or male child at least, and they had to load him up.’

Andy told Richard, ‘Go right up there, and then you have to go left – it’s a one-way street. You can let us off at the corner and we’ll walk up to the entrance.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll circle the block and let you off right under the marquee. Right under the damn doorman’s nose.’

Joan’s hand touched his shoulder. ‘When you see Judith tomorrow morning, give my love. We ‘re going to hurry right back in the morning, Andy has a meeting at ten.’

Richard thought of kissing her good night, but their faces were probably still icy, and his neck didn’t turn as easily as it used to.

His room at the Best Inn was on the ground floor, its wall-to-wall shag carpeting laid over concrete poured right on grade. The walls seemed subterranean, breathing out a deep freeze, their surface cold to the touch. The baseboard heating was ticking but