The Maples Stories (9 page)

Richard scuffled loudly down the cement steps and kicked the kitchen door open, giving them time to break apart before he entered. From the far end of the kitchen, smaller than children, they looked at him with blurred, blank expressions. Joan turned off the steaming kettle and Mack shambled forward to pay for the cigarettes. After the third round of martinis, the constraints loosened and Richard said, taking pleasure in the plaintive huskiness of his voice, ‘Imagine my discomfort. Sick as I am, I go out into this bitter night to get my wife and my guest some cigarettes, so they can pollute the air and aggravate my already grievous bronchial condition, and, coming down through the back yard, what do I see? The two of them doing the Kama Sutra in my own kitchen. It was like seeing a blue movie and knowing the people in it.’

‘Where do you see blue movies nowadays?’ Joan asked.

‘Tush, Dick,’ Mack said sheepishly, rubbing his thighs with a brisk ironing motion. ‘A mere fraternal kiss. A brotherly hug. A disinterested tribute to your wife’s charm.’

‘Really, Dick,’ Joan said. ‘I think it’s shockingly sneaky of you to be standing around spying into your own windows.’

‘Standing around! I was transfixed with horror. It was a real trauma. My first primal scene.’ A profound happiness was stretching him from within; the reach of his tongue and wit felt immense, and the other two seemed dolls, homunculi, in his playful grasp.

‘We were hardly doing anything,’ Joan said, lifting her head as if to rise above it all, the lovely line of her jaw defined by tension, her lips stung by a pout.

‘Oh, I’m sure, by your standards, you had hardly begun. You’d hardly sampled the possible wealth of coital positions. Did you think I’d never return? Have you poisoned my drink and I’m too vigorous to die, like Rasputin?’

‘Dick,’ Mack said; ‘Joan loves you. And if I love any man, it’s you. Joan and I had this out years ago, and decided to be merely friends.’

‘Don’t go Gaelic on me, Mack Dennis. “If I love any mon, ‘tis thee.” Don’t give me a thought, laddie. Just think of poor Eleanor out there, sweating out your divorce, bouncing up and down on those horses day after day, playing Pounce till she’s black and blue –’

‘Let’s eat,’ Joan said. ‘You’ve made me so nervous I’ve probably overdone the roast beef. Really, Dick, I don’t think you can excuse yourself by trying to make it funny.’

Next day, the Maples awoke soured and dazed by hangovers; Mack had stayed until two, to make sure there were no hard feelings. Joan usually played ladies’ tennis Saturday mornings, while Richard amused the children; now, dressed in white shorts and sneakers, she delayed at home in order to quarrel. ‘It’s desperate of you,’ she told Richard, ‘to try to make something of Mack and me. What are you trying to cover up?’

‘My dear Mrs Maple, I
saw
,’ he said, ‘I
saw
through my own windows you doing a very credible impersonation of a female spider having her abdomen tickled. Where did you learn to flirt your head like that? It was better than finger puppets.’

‘Mack always kisses me in the kitchen. It’s a habit, it means nothing. You know for yourself how in love with Eleanor he is.’

‘So much he’s divorcing her. His devotion verges on the quixotic.’

‘The divorce is her idea, obviously. He’s a lost soul. I feel sorry for him.’

‘Yes, I saw that you do. You were like the Red Cross at Verdun.’

‘What I’d like to know is, why are you so pleased?’

‘Pleased? I’m annihilated.’

‘You’re delighted. Look at your smile in the mirror.’

‘You’re so incredibly unapologetic, I guess I think you must be being ironical.’

The telephone rang. Joan picked it up and said, ‘Hello,’ and Richard heard the click across the room. Joan replaced the receiver and said to him, ‘So. She thought I’d be playing tennis by now.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘You tell me. Your lover. Your loveress.’

‘It was clearly yours, and something in your voice warned him off.’

‘Go to her!’ Joan suddenly cried, with a burst of the same defiant energy that made her, on other hungover mornings, rush through a mountain of housework. ‘Go to her like a man and stop trying to maneuver me into something I don’t understand! I have no lover! I let Mack kiss me because he’s lonely and drunk! Stop trying to make me more interesting than I am! All I am is a beat-up housewife who wants to go play tennis with some other exhausted ladies!’

Mutely Richard fetched from their sports closet her tennis racket, which had recently been restrung with gut. Carrying it in his mouth like a dog retrieving a stick, he got down on all fours and laid it at the toe of her sneaker. Richard Jr, their older son, a wiry nine-year-old presently obsessed by the accumulation of Batman cards, came into the living room, witnessed this pantomime, and laughed to hide his fright. ‘Dad, can I have my dime for emptying the wastebaskets?’

‘Mommy’s going to go out to play, Dickie,’ Richard said, licking from his lips the salty taste of the racket handle. ‘Let’s all go to the five-and-ten and buy a Batmobile.’

‘Yippee,’ the small boy said limply, glancing wide-eyed from one of his parents to the other, as if the space between them had gone treacherous.

Richard took the children to the five-and-ten, to the playground, and to a hamburger stand for lunch. These blameless activities transmuted the residue of alcohol and phlegm into a woolly fatigue as pure as the sleep of infants. His sore throat was fading. Obligingly he nodded while his son described an endless plot: ‘… and then, see, Dad, the Penguin had an umbrella smoke came out of, it was neat, and there were these two other guys with funny masks in the bank vault, filling it with water, I don’t know why, to make it bust or something, and Robin was climbing up these slippery stacks of like half-dollars to get away from the water, and then, see, Dad …’

Back home, the children dispersed into the neighborhood on the same mysterious tide that on other days packed their back yard with unfamiliar urchins. Joan returned from tennis glazed with sweat, her ankles coated with clay-court dust. Her body was swimming in the afterglow of exertion. He suggested they take a nap.

‘Just a nap,’ she warned.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I met my mistress at the playground and we satisfied each other on the jungle gym.’

‘Maureen and I beat Alice and Judy. It can’t be any of those three, they were waiting for me half an hour.’

In bed, the shades strangely drawn against the bright afternoon, and a glass of stale water standing bubbled with secret light, he asked her, ‘You think I want to make you more interesting than you are?’

‘Of course. You’re bored. You left me and Mack alone deliberately. It was very uncharacteristic of you, to go out with a cold.’

‘It’s sad, to think of you without a lover.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re pretty interesting anyway. Here, and here, and here.’

‘I said really a nap.’

In the upstairs hall, on the other side of the closed bedroom door, the telephone rang. After four peals – icy spears hurled from afar – the ringing stopped, unanswered. There was a puzzled pause. Then a tentative, questioning
pring
, as if someone in passing had bumped the table, followed by a determined series, strides of sound, imperative and plaintive, that did not stop until twelve had been counted; then the lover hung up.

AFTER
9:30,
WHEN
the last child, Judith, had been tucked into bed with a kiss that, now that she was twelve and as broad-faced as an adult, was frightening in the dark – the baby she had once been suspended at an immense height above the warm-mouthed woman she was becoming – Richard went downstairs and began to wait up for his wife. His mother had always waited up for him and for his father, keeping the house lit against their return from the basketball game, the swimming meet, the midnight adventure with the broken-down car. Entering the house on those nights, in from the cold, the boy had felt his mother as the dazzling center of a stationary, preferable world, and been jealous of her evening alone, in the warmth, with the radio. Now, taking up her old role, he made toast for himself, and drank a glass of milk, and flicked on television, and flicked it off, and poured some bourbon, and found his eyes unable to hold steady upon even a newspaper. He walked to the window and stared out at the street, where an elm not yet dead broke into nervous lace the light of a street lamp. Then he went into the kitchen and stared at the darkness of the back yard where, after a splash of headlights and the sob of a motor being cut, Joan would appear.

When the invitation came, they had agreed she might be out till eleven. But by 10:30 his heart was jarring, the bourbon began to go down as easily as water, and he discovered
himself standing in a room with no memory of walking through the doorway. That Picasso plate chosen together in Vallauris. Those college anthologies mingled on the shelves. The battlefield litter of children’s schoolbooks and playthings, abandoned in the after-supper rout. At 11:05 he strode to the phone and put his hand on the receiver but was unable to dial the number that lived in his fingers like a musical phrase. Her number. Their number, the Masons’. The house that had swallowed his wife was one where he had always felt comfortable and welcome, a house much like his own, yet different enough in every detail to be exciting, and one whose mistress, waiting in it alone, for him, had stood naked at the head of the stairs. A dazzling welcome, her shoulders caped in morning sun coming through the window, the very filaments of her flesh on fire.

He went upstairs and checked on each sleeping child in the hope that thus a half-hour of waiting would be consumed. Down in the kitchen again he found that only five minutes had passed and, balked from more bourbon by the certainty that he would become drunk, tried to become angry. He thought of smashing the glass, realized that only he was here to clean it up, and set it down empty on the counter. Anger had never been easy for him; even as a child he had seen there was nobody to be angry at, only tired people anxious to please, good hearts asleep and awake, wrapped in the limits of a universe that itself, from the beauty of its details and its contagious air of freedom, seemed to have been well-intentioned. He tried, instead, to pass the time, to cry – but produced only the ridiculous dry snarling tears of a man alone. He might wake the children. He went outdoors, into the back yard. Through bushes that had shed their leaves he watched headlights hurrying home from meetings, from movies, from trysts.
He imagined that tonight he would know the lights of her car even before they turned up the alley and flooded the yard in returning. The yard remained dark. The traffic was diminishing. He went back inside. The kitchen clock said 11:35. He went to the telephone and stared at it, puzzled by the problem it presented, of an invisible lock his fingers could not break. Thus he missed Joan’s headlights turning into the yard. By the time he looked she was walking toward him, beneath the maple tree, from the deadened car. She was wearing a white coat. He opened the kitchen door to greet her, but his impulse of embrace, to socket her into his chest like a heart that had orbited and returned, was abruptly obsolete, rendered showy and false by his wife’s total, disarming familiarity.

He asked, ‘How was it?’

She groaned. ‘They were both having terrible times finishing their sentences. It was agony’

‘Poor souls. Poor Joan.’ He remembered his own agony. ‘You promised to be home by eleven.’

In the kitchen she took off her coat and threw it over a chair. ‘I know, but it would have been too rude to leave, they were both so full of goodness and love. It was
terribly
frustrating; they wouldn’t let me be angry’ Her face looked flushed, her eyes bright, flying past his toward the counter, where the bourbon waited.

‘You can be angry at
me,’
he offered.

‘I’m too tired. I’m too confused. They were so sweet. He’s not angry at you, and she can’t imagine why I should be angry at her. Maybe I’m crazy. Could you make me a drink?’

She sat down on the kitchen chair, on top of her coat. ‘They’re like my parents,’ she said. ‘They believe in the perfectibility of man.’

He gave her the drink, and prompted, ‘She wouldn’t let you be angry.’

Joan sipped and sighed; she was like an actress just off the stage, her gestures still imbued with theatrical exaggeration. ‘I asked her how
she’d
feel and she said she’d have been
pleased
if I’d slept with him, that there isn’t any woman she’d rather he slept with, that I would have been a gift she’d have given out of
love
. She kept calling me her best friend, on and on in that soothing steady voice; I’d never thought of her as
that
much my best friend. All year I’d felt this constraint between us and of course now I know why. All year she’s been dancing up to me with this little impish arrogance I couldn’t understand.’

‘She likes you very much and we talked a lot about your reaction. She dreaded it.’

‘She kept
tell
ing me to be angry with her and of course her telling made it impossible. That soothing steady voice. I don’t think she heard a thing I said. I could see her concentrating, you know, really concentrating, on my lips, but all the time she was framing what she was going to say next. She’s been working on those speeches for a year. I’m looped.
Don’t
give me any more bourbon.’

‘And he?’

‘Oh, he. He was crazy. He kept talking of it as a
revelation
. Apparently they’ve been having great sex ever since she told him. He kept using words like understanding and compassion and how we must all
help
each other. It was like church, and you know how agitated I get in church, how I begin to cry. Every time I’d try to cry he’d kiss me, then he’d kiss her: absolutely impartial. Peck, peck. We’re the same person! She’s stolen my identity!’ She held up her glass of ice cubes and raised her eyebrows in indignation. Her hair, too, seemed to be lifting from her scalp; she had once described
to him how at golf, when she flubbed a shot, she could hear her hair rustle as it rose in fury.