The Maples Stories (2 page)

‘I think I’d best go,’ Rebecca said.

‘Please don’t,’ Joan said with an urgency Richard had not expected; clearly she was very tired. Probably the new home, the change in the weather, the good sherry, the currents of affection between herself and her husband that her sudden hug had renewed, and Rebecca’s presence had become in her mind the inextricable elements of one enchanted moment.

‘Yes, I think I’ll go because you’re so snuffly and peakèd.’

‘Can’t you just stay for one more cigarette? Dick, pass the sherry around.’

‘A teeny bit,’ Rebecca said, holding out her glass. ‘I guess I told you, Joan, about the boy I went out with who pretended to be a headwaiter.’

Joan giggled expectantly. ‘No, honestly, you never did.’ She hooked her arm over the back of the chair and wound her hand through the slats, like a child assuring herself that her bedtime has been postponed. ‘What did he do? He imitated headwaiters?’

‘Yes, he was the kind of guy who, when we get out of a taxi and there’s a grate giving off steam, crouches down’ – Rebecca lowered her head and lifted her arms – ‘and pretends he’s the Devil.’

The Maples laughed, less at the words themselves than at the way Rebecca had evoked the situation by conveying,
in her understated imitation, both her escort’s flamboyant attitude and her own undemonstrative nature. They could see her standing by the taxi door, gazing with no expression as her escort bent lower and lower, seized by his own joke, his fingers writhing demonically as he felt horns sprout through his scalp, flames lick his ankles, and his feet shrivel into hoofs. Rebecca’s gift, Richard realized, was not that of having odd things happen to her but that of representing, through the implicit contrast with her own sane calm, all things touching her as odd. This evening, too, might appear grotesque in her retelling: ‘Six policemen on horses galloped by and she cried “It’s snowing!” and hugged him. He kept telling her how sick she was and filling us full of sherry.’

‘What else did he do?’ Joan eagerly asked.

‘At the first place we went to – it was a big nightclub on the roof of somewhere – on the way out he sat down and played the piano until a woman at a harp asked him to stop.’

Richard asked, ‘Was the woman
playing
the harp?’

‘Yes, she was strumming away.’ Rebecca made circular motions with her hands.

‘Well, did he play the tune she was playing? Did he
accompany
her?’ Petulance, Richard realized without understanding why, had entered his tone.

‘No, he just sat down and played something else. I couldn’t tell what it was.’

‘Is this
really
true?’ Joan asked, egging her on.

‘And then, at the next place we went to, we had to wait at the bar for a table and I looked around and he was walking among the tables asking people if everything was all right.’

‘Wasn’t it
aw
ful?’ said Joan.

‘Yes. Later he played the piano there, too. We were sort of the main attraction. Around midnight he thought we ought to go out to Brooklyn, to his sister’s house. I was exhausted.
We got off the subway two stops too early, under the Manhattan Bridge. It was deserted, with nothing going by except black limousines. Miles above our head’ – she stared up, as though at a cloud, or the sun –‘was the Manhattan Bridge, and he kept saying it was the el. We finally found some steps and two policemen who told us to go back to the subway.’

‘What does this amazing man do for a living?’ Richard asked.

‘He teaches school. He’s quite bright.’ She stood up, extending in stretch a long, silvery-white arm. Richard got her coat and scarf and said he’d walk her home.

‘It’s only three-quarters of a block,’ Rebecca protested in a voice free of any insistent inflection.

‘You must walk her home, Dick,’ Joan said. ‘Pick up a pack of cigarettes.’ The idea of his walking in the snow seemed to please her, as if she were anticipating how he would bring back with him, in the snow on his shoulders and the coldness of his face, all the sensations of the walk she was not well enough to risk.

‘You should stop smoking for a day or two,’ he told her.

Joan waved them goodbye from the head of the stairs.

The snow, invisible except around streetlights, exerted a fluttering pressure on their faces. ‘Coming down hard now,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

At the corner, where the snow gave the green light a watery blueness, her hesitancy in following him as he turned to walk with the light across Thirteenth Street led him to ask, ‘It
is
this side of the street you live on, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought I remembered from the time we drove you down from Boston.’ The Maples had been living in the
West Eighties then. ‘I remember I had an impression of big buildings.’

‘The church and the butcher’s school,’ Rebecca said. ‘Every day about ten when I’m going to work the boys learning to be butchers come out for an intermission all bloody and laughing.’

Richard looked up at the church; the steeple was fragmentarily silhouetted against the scattered lit windows of a tall apartment building on Seventh Avenue. ‘Poor church,’ he said. ‘It’s hard in this city for a steeple to be the tallest thing.’

Rebecca said nothing, not even her habitual ‘Yes.’ He felt rebuked for being preachy. In his embarrassment he directed her attention to the first next thing he saw, a poorly lettered sign above a great door. ‘Food Trades Vocational High School,’ he read aloud. ‘The people upstairs told us that the man before the man before
us
in our apartment was a wholesale-meat salesman who called himself a Purveyor of Elegant Foods. He kept a woman in the apartment.’

‘Those big windows up there,’ Rebecca said, pointing up at the top story of a brownstone, ‘face mine across the street. I can look in and feel we are neighbors. Someone’s always there; I don’t know what they do for a living.’

After a few more steps they halted, and Rebecca, in a voice that Richard imagined to be slightly louder than her ordinary one, said, ‘Do you want to come up and see where I live?’

‘Sure.’ It seemed far-fetched to refuse.

They descended four concrete steps, opened a shabby orange door, entered an overheated half-basement lobby, and began to climb flights of wooden stairs. Richard’s suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt. Few experiences
so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny. Three years ago, Joan had lived in a fourth-floor walkup, in Cambridge. Richard never took her home, even when the whole business, down to the last intimacy, had become routine, without the fear that the landlord, justifiably furious, would leap from his door and devour him as they passed.

Opening her door, Rebecca said, ‘It’s hot as hell in here,’ swearing for the first time in his hearing. She turned on a weak light. The room was small; slanting planes, the underside of the building’s roof, intersected the ceiling and walls and cut large prismatic volumes from Rebecca’s living space. As he moved farther forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right, an unexpected area created where the steeply slanting roof extended itself to the floor. Here a double bed was placed. Tightly bounded on three sides, the bed had the appearance not so much of a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it and, unable to face Rebecca at once, stared at two kitchen chairs, a metal bridge lamp around the rim of whose shade plump fish and helm wheels alternated, and a four-shelf bookcase – all of which, being slender and proximate to a tilting wall, had an air of threatened verticality.

‘Yes, here’s the stove on top of the refrigerator I told you about,’ Rebecca said. ‘Or did I?’

The top unit overhung the lower by several inches on all sides. He touched his fingers to the stove’s white side. ‘This room is quite sort of nice,’ he said.

‘Here’s the view,’ she said. He moved to stand beside her at the windows, lifting aside the curtains and peering through tiny flawed panes into the apartment across the street.

‘That guy
does
have a huge window,’ Richard said.

She made a brief agreeing noise of
n
’s.

Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. ‘Looks like a furniture store,’ he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat. ‘The snow’s keeping up.’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘Well’ – his word was too loud; he finished the sentence too softly – ‘thanks for letting me see it. I – Have you read this?’ He had noticed a copy of
Auntie Mame
lying on a hassock.

‘I haven’t had the time,’ she said.

‘I haven’t read it either. Just reviews. That’s all I ever read.’

This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unnecessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face.

‘Well –’ he said.

‘Well.’ Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless.

‘Don’t, don’t let the b-butchers get you.’ The stammer of course ruined the joke, and her laugh, which had begun as soon as she had seen by his face that he would attempt something funny, was completed ahead of his utterance.

As he went down the stairs she rested both hands on the banister and looked down toward the next landing. ‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Night.’ He looked up; she had gone into her room. Oh but they were close.

OH MY LOVE
. Yes. Here we sit, on warm broad floorboards, before a fire, the children between us, in a crescent, eating. The girl and I share one half-pint of French-fried potatoes; you and the boy share another; and in the center, sharing nothing, making simple reflections within himself like a jewel, the baby, mounted in an Easybaby, sucks at his bottle with frowning mastery, his selfish, contemplative eyes stealing glitter from the center of the flames. And you. You. You allow your skirt, the same black skirt in which this morning you with woman’s soft bravery mounted a bicycle and sallied forth to play hymns in difficult keys on the Sunday school’s old piano – you allow this black skirt to slide off your raised knees down your thighs, slide
up
your thighs in your body’s absolute geography, so the parallel whiteness of their undersides is exposed to the fire’s warmth and to my sight. Oh. There is a line of Joyce. I try to recover it from the legendary, imperfectly explored grottoes of
Ulysses:
a garter snapped, to please Blazes Boylan, in a deep Dublin den. What? Smackwarm. That was the crucial word. Smacked smackwarm on her smackable warm woman’s thigh. Something like that. A splendid man, to feel that. Smackwarm woman’s. Splendid also to feel the curious and potent, inexplicable and irrefutably magical life language leads within itself. What soul took thought and knew that adding
wo
to man would make a woman? The difference exactly. The wide
w
, the receptive
o
. Womb. In our crescent
the children for all their size seem to come out of you toward me, wet fingers and eyes, tinted bronze. Three children, five persons, seven years. Seven years since I wed wide warm woman, white-thighed. Wooed and wed. Wife. A knife of a word that for all its final bite did not end the wooing. To my wonderment.

We eat meat, meat I wrested warm from the raw hands of the hamburger girl in the diner a mile away, a ferocious place, slick with grease, sleek with chrome; young predators snarling dirty jokes menaced me, old men reached for me with coffee-dark paws; I wielded my wallet, and won my way back. The fat brown bag of buns was warm beside me in the cold car; the smaller bag holding the two cartons of French fries emitted an even more urgent heat. Back through the black winter air to the fire, the intimate cave, where halloos and hurrahs greeted me, the deer, mouth agape and its cotton throat gushing, stretched dead across my shoulders. And now you, beside the white
O
of the plate upon which the children discarded with squeals of disgust the rings of translucent onion that came squeezed in the hamburgers – you push your toes an inch closer to the blaze, and the ashy white of your thigh’s inner side is lazily laid bare, and the eternally elastic garter snaps smackwarm against my hidden heart.

Who would have thought, wide wife, back there in the white tremble of the ceremony (in the corner of my eye I held, despite the distracting hail of ominous vows, the vibration of the cluster of stephanotis clutched against your waist), that seven years would bring us no distance, through all those warm beds, to the same trembling point, of beginning? The cells change every seven years, and down in the atom, apparently, there is a strange discontinuity; it is as if God wills the universe anew every instant. (Ah God, dear God, tall friend of my childhood, I will never forget you,
though they say dreadful things. They say rose windows in cathedrals are vaginal symbols.) Your legs, exposed as fully as by a bathing suit, yearn deeper into the amber wash of heat. Well: begin. A green jet of flame spits out sideways from a pocket of resin in a log, crying, and the orange shadows on the ceiling sway with fresh life. Begin.

‘Remember, on our honeymoon, how the top of the kerosene heater made a great big rose window on the ceiling?’

‘Vnn.’ Your chin goes to your knees, your shins draw in, all is retracted. Not much to remember, perhaps, for you: blood badly spilled, clumsiness of all sorts. ‘It was cold for June.’

‘Mommy, what was cold? What did you say?’ the girl asks, enunciating angrily, determined not to let language slip on her tongue and tumble her so that we laugh.

‘A house where Daddy and I stayed one time.’

‘I don’t like dat,’ the boy says, and throws a half-bun painted with chartreuse mustard onto the floor.

You pick it up and with beautiful somber musing ask, ‘Isn’t that funny? Did any of the others have mustard on them?’