The Maples Stories (19 page)

‘That’s too easy.’ She was a shade resistant to his veiled compliments; he was grateful. Please resist.

He asked, ‘How do you think the kids are doing? John seemed withdrawn.’

‘That’s how he is. Stop picking at him.’

‘I just don’t want him to think he has to be your little husband. That house feels huge now.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He was; he put his hands palms up on the table.

‘Isn’t it amazing,’ Joan said, ‘how a full bottle of wine isn’t enough for two people any more?’

‘Should I order another bottle?’ He was dismayed, secretly: the waste.

She saw this, and said, ‘No. Just give me half of what’s in your glass.’

‘You can have it all.’ He poured.

She said, ‘So your fucking is really glorious?’

He was embarrassed by the remark now, and feared it set a distasteful trend. As with Ruth there was an etiquette of independent adultery, so with Joan some code of separation must be maintained. ‘It usually is,’ he told her, ‘between people who aren’t married.’

‘Is dat right, white man?’ A swallow of his wine inside her, Joan began to swell with impending hilarity. She leaned as close as the table would permit. ‘You must
promise
’ – a gesture went with ‘promise,’ a protesting little splaying of her hands – ‘never to tell this to anybody, not even Ruth.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t tell me. In fact, don’t.’ He understood why she had been laconic up to now; she had been wanting to talk about her lover, holding him warm within her like a baby. She was going to betray him. ‘Please don’t,’ Richard said.

‘Don’t be such a prig. You’re the only person I can talk to, it doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘That’s what you said about our going to bed in my apartment.’

‘Did she mind?’

‘Incredibly.’

Joan laughed, and Richard was struck, for the thousandth time, by the perfection of her teeth, even and rounded and white, bared by her lips as if in proof of a perfect skull, an immaculate soul. Her glee whirled her to a kind of heaven as she confided stories about herself and Andy – how he and a motel manageress had quarrelled over the lack of towels in a room taken for the afternoon, how he fell asleep for exactly seven minutes each time after making love. Richard had known Andy for years, a slender swarthy specialist in corporation law, himself divorced, though professionally engaged in the finicking arrangement of giant mergers. A fussy dresser, a churchman, he brought to many occasions an undue dignity and perhaps had been more attracted to Joan’s surface glaze, her New England cool, than the mischievous imps underneath. ‘My psychiatrist thinks Andy was symbiotic with you, and now that you’re gone, I can see him as absurd.’

‘He’s not absurd. He’s good, loyal, handsome, prosperous. He tithes. He has a twelve handicap. He loves you.’

‘He protects you from me, you mean. His buttons! – we have to allow a half-hour afterwards for him to do up all his buttons. If they made four-piece suits, he’d wear them. And he washes – he washes
ev
erything, every time.’

‘Stop,’ Richard begged. ‘Stop telling me all this.’

But she was giddy amid the spinning mirrors of her betrayals, her face so flushed and aquiver the waitress sympathetically giggled, pouring the Maples their coffee. Joan’s face was pink as a peony, her eyes a blue pale as ice, almost transparent. He saw through her words to what she was saying – that these lovers, however we love them, are not us, are not sacred as reality is sacred. We are reality. We have made children. We gave each other our young bodies. We promised to grow old together.

Joan described an incident in her house, once theirs, when the plumber unexpectedly arrived. Richard had to laugh with her; that house’s plumbing problems were an old joke, an ongoing saga. ‘The back-door bell rang, Mr Kelly stomped right in, you know how the kitchen echoes in the bedroom, we had
had
it.’ She looked, to see if her meaning was clear. He nodded. Her eyes sparkled. She emphasized, of the knock, ‘Just at the
very
moment,’ and, with a gesture akin to the gentle clap in the car a world ago, drew with one fingertip a
v
in the air, as if beginning to write ‘very.’ The motion was eager, shy, exquisite, diffident, trusting: he saw all its meanings and knew that she would never stop gesturing within him, never; though a decree come between them, even death, her gestures would endure, cut into glass.

RICHARD MAPLE WONDERED
, Can even dying be worse than this? His wife sat crouched on what had been their bed, telling him, between sobs, of her state of mind, which was suicidal, depressive, beaten. They had been living apart for a year and a half, and the time had achieved nothing, no scar tissue had formed, her body was a great unhealed wound crying,
Comeback
.

She was growing older; the skin of her face, as she bowed her head to cry, puckered and dripped in little dry points below her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. He was moved, as by beauty. Unthinkingly, she had clasped her hands in her lap, her hands white against the black flannel skirt; with that yoga-performing flexibility of hers, that age had not yet taken from her, she had made herself compact, into a grieving ball, as if about to be shot from a cannon. ‘I’m sorry’ she was apologizing, ‘I don’t
want
to feel this way, I want to be cheerful and gutsy and flip about it, this is ridiculous. Even the children –’

‘Especially the children,’ he said. ‘They’re good sports.’

‘And I’m not, huh?’ Joan said, in a voice a shade less hopeless, brightened by her aptitude for fair appraisal. ‘I am in some ways. It’s just, just’ – the points of skin, the tears of flesh, sharpened – ‘I wake up every morning reciting reasons to myself why I shouldn’t jump in the river. You don’t know what it’s like.’

She was, as always, right: he didn’t. He imagined nothing,
thinking of her jumping in the river, but how cold the water would be, and how heavy her black flannel skirt would become. She was a strong smooth swimmer and the river was not deep. ‘Well do you know what
I
felt like,’ he said, ‘lying beside you all those years waiting for something to happen.’

‘I know, I know, you’ve said it a thousand times, I thought some things did happen, once in a while, but look, I don’t want to argue. I’m not complaining about the
facts
, it’s just, just –’

‘Just you want to die,’ he finished for her.

She nodded, with a sob. ‘Then I think how insulting that is to everybody. To the children.’

Studying her, admiring her compact, symmetrical pose, he wanted to die with her; he felt she was crouching at the foot of a wall that was utterly blank, and the wall was within him. He wished to be out of this, this life and health he had achieved since leaving her, this vain and petty effort to be happy. His happiness and health seemed negligible, compared to the consecrated unhappiness they had shared. Yet there was no way out, no way but a numb marching forward, like a soldier in a discredited cause, with tired mottoes to move him. ‘You were depressed when you were living with me,’ he told Joan. That was one of the mottoes.

‘I know, I know, I’m not
blam
ing you, I’m not telling you to
do
anything, just –’

‘Just what?’ He shifted weight. His legs were aching; he glanced at his wristwatch. He had a date to keep.

‘Under
stand
.’

‘If I understood any more,’ he confessed, ‘I’d be totally paralyzed.’ He asked her, ‘How can I help you, short of coming back?’

‘That
would
n’t help, I’m not asking that.’

He didn’t believe this; but the possibility that it was true lifted his heart, a little greedy lift, like a fish engulfing a falling flake in an aquarium. The flake tasted bitter. ‘What are you asking, sweetie?’ He regretted calling her ‘sweetie.’ He had tried to amalgamate and align all his betrayals but they still multiplied and branched.

‘That you know what it feels like.’

He said, ‘If I’d been better at knowing what you feel like, we might not have come to this. But we
have
come to it. Now let go. You’re just tormenting everyone this way, yourself foremost. You’re healthy, you have the children, money, the house, friends; you have everything you had except me. Instead of me you have a freedom and dignity you didn’t have before. Tell me what I’m doing wrong,’ he begged.

She had to laugh at that, a little cluck; it occurred to him that her pose was a hatching one, her immobility a nesting hen’s.

He was getting later. Joan knew it. He had to get out, to move on. ‘You have a lot of life ahead of you,’ he tried. ‘It’s a
sin
, to talk about death the way you do. Why must this go on and on? I hate it. I feel glued fast. I come out here to see the children, not to have you make me feel guilty.’

She looked up at last. ‘You feel about as guilty as a –’ They waited together for what the simile would be. ‘Bedpost,’ she finished, taking the nearest thing to her, and they both had to laugh.

THEY HAD ALWAYS
been a lucky couple, and it was just their luck that, as they at last decided to part, the Puritan Commonwealth in which they lived passed a no-fault amendment to its creaking, overworked body of divorce law. By its provisions a joint affidavit had to be filed. It went, ‘Now come Richard F. and Joan R. Maple and swear under the penalties of perjury that an irretrievable breakdown of the marriage exists.’ For Richard, reading a copy of the document in his Boston apartment, the wording conjured up a vision of himself and Joan breezing into a party hand in hand while a liveried doorman trumpeted their names and a snow of confetti and champagne bubbles exploded in the room. In the many years of their marriage, they had gone together to a lot of parties, and always with a touch of excitement, a little hope, a little expectation of something lucky happening.

With the affidavit were enclosed various frightening financial forms and a request for a copy of their marriage license. Though they had lived in New York and London, on islands and farms and for one summer even in a log cabin, they had been married a few subway stops from where Richard now stood, reading his mail. He had not been in the Cambridge City Hall since the morning he had been granted the license, the morning of their wedding. His parents had driven him up from the Connecticut motel where they had all spent the night, on their way from West
Virginia; they had risen at six, to get there on time, and for much of the journey he had had his coat over his head, hoping to get back to sleep. He seemed in memory now a sea creature, boneless beneath the jellyfish bell of his own coat, rising helplessly along the coast as the air grew hotter and hotter. It was June, and steamy. When, toward noon, they got to Cambridge, and dragged their bodies and boxes of wedding clothes up the four flights to Joan’s apartment, on Avon Street, the bride was taking a bath. Who else was in the apartment Richard could not remember; his recollection of the day was spotty – legible patches on a damp gray blotter. The day had no sky and no clouds, just a fog of shadowless sunlight enveloping the bricks on Brattle Street, and the white spires of Harvard, and the fat cars baking in the tarry streets. He was twenty-one, and Eisenhower was President, and the bride was behind the door, shouting that he mustn’t come in, it would be bad luck for him to see her. Someone was in there with her, giggling and splashing. Who? Her sister? Her mother? Richard leaned against the bathroom door, and heard his parents heaving themselves up the stairs behind him, panting but still chattering, and pictured Joan as she was when in the bath, her toes pink, her neck tendrils flattened, her breasts floating and soapy and slick. Then the memory dried up, and the next blot showed her and him side by side, driving together into the shimmering noontime traffic jam of Central Square. She wore a summer dress of sun-faded cotton; he kept his eyes on the traffic, to minimize the bad luck of seeing her before the ceremony. Other couples, he thought at the time, must have arranged to have their papers in order more than two hours before the wedding. But then, no doubt, other grooms didn’t travel to the ceremony with their coats over their heads like children hiding from a thunderstorm. Hand in
hand, smaller than Hansel and Gretel in his mind’s eye, they ran up the long flight of stairs into a gingerbread-brown archway and disappeared.

Cambridge City Hall, in a changed world, was unchanged. The rounded Richardsonian castle, red sandstone and pink granite, loomed as a gentle giant in its crass neighborhood. Its interior was varnished oak, pale and gleaming. Richard seemed to remember receiving the license downstairs at a grated window with a brass plate, but an arrow on cardboard directed him upward. His knees trembled and his stomach churned at the enormity of what he was doing. He turned a corner. A grandmotherly woman reigned within a spacious, idle territory of green-topped desks and great ledgers in steel racks. ‘Could I get a c-copy of a marriage license?’ he asked her.

‘Year?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘What is the year of the marriage license, sir?’

‘1954.’ Enunciated, the year seemed distant as a star, yet here he was again, feeling not a minute older, and sweating in the same summer heat. Nevertheless, the lady, having taken down the names and the date, had to leave him and go to another chamber of the archives, so far away in truth was the event he wished to undo.

She returned with a limp he hadn’t noticed before. The ledger she carried was three feet wide when opened, a sorcerer’s tome. She turned the vast pages carefully, as if the chasm of lost life and forsaken time they represented might at a slip leap up and swallow them both. She must once have been a flaming redhead, but her hair had dulled to apricot and had stiffened to permanent curls, lifeless as dried paper. She smiled, a crimpy little smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Here we are.’
And Richard could read, upside down, on a single long red line, Joan’s maiden name and his own. Her profession was listed as ‘Teacher’ (she had been an apprentice art teacher; he had forgotten her spattered blue smock, the clayey smell of her fingers, the way she would bicycle to work on even the coldest days) and his own, inferiorly, as ‘Student.’ And their given addresses surprised him, in being different – the foyer on Avon Street, the entryway in Lowell House, forgotten doors opening on the corridor of shared addresses that stretched from then to now. Their signatures – He could not bear to study their signatures, even upside down. At a glance, Joan’s seemed firmer, and bluer. ‘You want one or more copies?’