The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,9
purpling finger in vain. The tiny glass capillary tube remained transparent.
‘He doesn’t like to bleed, does he?’ the intern asked Joan. As relaxed as a nurse, she sat in a chair next to a table of scintillating equipment.
‘I don’t think his blood moves much,’ she said, ‘until after midnight.’
This stab at a joke made Richard in his extremity of fright laugh loudly, and the laugh at last seemed to jar the panicked coagulant. Red seeped upward in the thirsty little tube, as in a sudden thermometer.
The intern grunted in relief. As he smeared the samples on the analysis box, he explained idly, ‘What we ought to have down here is a pan of warm water. You just came in out of the cold. If you put your hand in hot water for a minute, the blood just pops out.’
‘A pretty thought,’ Richard said.
But the intern had already written him off as a clown and continued calmly to Joan, ‘All we’d need would be a baby hot plate for about six dollars, then we could make our own coffee, too. This way, when we get a donor who needs the coffee afterward, we have to send up for it while we keep her head between her knees. Do you think you’ll be needing coffee?’
‘No,’ Richard interrupted, jealous of their rapport.
The intern told Joan, ‘You’re O.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘And he’s A positive.’
‘Why, that’s very good, Dick!’ she called to him.
‘Am I rare?’ he asked.
The boy turned and explained, ‘O positive and A positive are the most common types. Who wants to be first?’
‘Let me,’ Joan said. ‘He’s never done it before.’
‘Her full name is Joan of Arc,’ Richard explained, angered at this betrayal, so unimpeachably selfless and smug.
The intern, threatened in his element, fixed his puzzled eyes on the floor between them and said, ‘Take off your shoes and each get on a bed.’ He added, ‘Please,’ and all three laughed, one after the other, the intern last.
The beds were at right angles to one another along two walls. Joan lay down and from her husband’s angle of vision was novelly foreshortened. He had never before seen her quite this way, the combed crown of her hair so poignant, her bared arm so pale and long, her stocking feet toed in so childishly and helplessly. There were no pillows on the beds, and lying flat made him feel tipped head down; the illusion of floating encouraged his hope that this unreal adventure would soon dissolve, as dreams do. ‘You O.K.?’
‘Are you?’ Her voice came softly from the tucked-under wealth of her hair. Her parting was so straight it seemed a mother had brushed it. He watched a long needle sink into the flat of her arm and a piece of moist cotton clumsily swab the spot. He had imagined their blood would be drained into cans or bottles, but the intern, whose breathing was now the only sound within the room, brought to Joan’s side what looked like a miniature plastic knapsack, all coiled and tied. His body cloaked his actions. When he stepped away, a plastic cord had been grafted, a transparent vine, to the flattened crook of Joan’s extended arm, where the skin was translucent and the veins were faint blue tributaries shallowly buried. It was a tender, vulnerable place where in courting days she had liked being stroked. Now, without visible transition, the pale tendril planted here went dark red. Richard wanted to cry out.
The instant readiness of her blood to leave her body pierced him like a physical pang. Though he had not so much as blinked, its initial leap had been too quick for his eye. He had expected some visible sign of flow, but from the mere appearance of it the tiny looped hose might be pouring blood into her body or might be a curved line added, like an impudent mustache, to a painting. The fixed position of his head gave what he saw a certain flatness.
And now the intern turned to him, and there was the tiny felt prick of the Novocain needle, and then the coarse, half-felt intrusion of something resembling a medium-weight nail. Twice the boy mistakenly probed for the vein and the third time taped the successful graft fast with adhesive tape. All the while, Richard’s mind moved aloofly among the constellations of the stained, cracked ceiling. What was being done to him did not bear contemplating. When the intern moved away to hum and tinkle among his instruments, Joan craned