The Maples Stories by John Updike Page B

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.

WAITING 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