Read Online The Maples Stories by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

its regularity masked holes and roughnesses that had been a kind of mirror wherein his tongue had known itself. The Friday of the final cementing, he went to a small party. As he drank a variety of liquids that tasted much the same, he moved from feeling slightly less than himself (his native teeth had been ground to stumps of dentine) to feeling slightly more. The shift in tonality that permeated his skull whenever his jaws closed corresponded, perhaps, to the heightened clarity that fills the mind after a religious conversion. He saw his companions at the party with a new brilliance – a sharpness of vision that, like a cameras, was specific and restricted in focus. He could see only one person at a time, and found himself focusing less on his wife, Joan, than on Eleanor Dennis, the long-legged wife of a municipal-bond broker.
    Eleanor’s distinctness in part had to do with the legal fact that she and her husband were ‘separated.’ It had happened recently; his absence from the party was noticeable. Eleanor, in the course of a life that she described as a series of harrowing survivals, had developed the brassy social manner that converts private catastrophe into public humorousness; buttonight her agitation was imperfectly converted. She listened for an echo that wasn’t there, and twitchily crossed and recrossed her legs. Her legs were handsome and vivid and so long that, after midnight, when parlor games began, she hitched up her brief shirt and kicked the lintel of a doorframe. The host balanced a glass of water on his forehead. Richard, demonstrating a headstand, mistakenly tumbled forward, delighted at his inebriated softness, which felt to be an ironical comment upon flesh that his new metal teeth were making. He was all mortality; all porous erosion save for these stars in his head, an impervious polar cluster at the zenith of his slow whirling.
    His wife came to him with a face as unscarred and chastening as the face of a clock. It was time to go home. And Eleanor needed a ride. The three of them, plus the hostess in her bangle earrings and coffee-stained culottes, went to the door, and discovered a snowstorm. As far as the eye could probe, flakes were falling in a jostling crowd through the whispering lavender night. ‘God bless us, every one,’ Richard said.
    The hostess suggested that Joan should drive.
    Richard kissed her on the cheek and tasted the metal of her bangle earring and got in behind the wheel. His car was a brand-new Corvair; he wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else to drive it. Joan crawled into the back seat, grunting to emphasize the physical awkwardness, and Eleanor serenely arranged her coat and pocketbook and legs in the space beside him. The motor sprang alive. Richard felt resiliently cushioned: Eleanor was beside him, Joan behind him, God above him, the road beneath him. The fast-falling snow dipped brilliant – explosive, chrysanthemumesque – into the car headlights. On a small hill the tires spun – a loose, reassuring noise, like the slither of a raincoat.
    In the knobbed darkness lit by the green speed gauge,Eleanor, showing a wealth of knee, talked at length of her separated husband. ‘You have no
idea
,’ she said, ‘you two are so sheltered you have no idea what men are capable of. I didn’t know myself. I don’t mean to sound ungracious, he gave me nine reasonable years and I wouldn’t
dream
of punishing him with the children’s visiting hours the way some women would, but that
man
! You know what he had the crust to tell me? He actually told me that when he was with another woman he’d sometimes close his eyes and pretend it was
me
.’
    ‘Sometimes,’ Richard said.
    His wife behind him said, ‘Darley, are you aware that the road is slippery?’
    ‘That’s the shine of the headlights,’ he told her.
    Eleanor crossed and recrossed her legs. Half the length of a thigh flared in the intimate green glow. She went on, ‘And his
trips
. I wondered why the same