The Maples Stories (13 page)

‘Sure,’ Joan said. ‘The properly equipped suburban man, as you call him, has a wife, a mistress, and a red herring. The red herring may have been his mistress once, or she may become one in the future, but he’s not sleeping with her now. You can tell, because in public they act as though they do.’

Richard leaned into another depressed pillow, protesting, ‘That’s too Machiavellian to be real. That’s decadent, sweetie. Maybe it was a mistake, to bring you out here; we should have stayed on West Thirteenth Street. Remember how the policemen used to gallop by on horses in the snow?’

‘They did that once. Fifteen years ago. The schools were impossible. You couldn’t park the car.’

‘Jesus,’ he agreed, ‘remember the time I parked it in a lot and a roof-mending job on the building next to it spilled tar all over the windshield? It still makes me furious.’ But remembering it made him happy.

‘There you are,’ Joan agreed, ‘we’re stuck,’ meaning the suburbs. ‘Want a little nightcap?’

‘My God, no. How can you stand any more liquor? Do you think I should call Jim up and apologize?’

‘Don’t be silly. You might interrupt something.’

‘I might?’ His perfumed merperson, descaled, in another’s arms? The thought was chilly.

‘It’s possible. Marlene didn’t seem at all fazed when he went out, she went right on being the life of the party.’

Richard shifted back to the first pillow and changed the subject. ‘Poor Ruth,’ he said, ‘didn’t seem to have a very good time.’

Joan rose, regal in her high-waisted, floor-length, powder-blue party dress, and seized the brandy bottle on the piano; its long neck became a sceptre in her hand. She took up a dirty snifter, tossed its residue into the fireplace, listened to the sizzle, and poured herself a tawny, chortling slug. ‘Poor Ruth,’ she repeated carefully, seating herself again in the director’s chair.

‘Of course,’ Richard amplified, ‘why
should
she have a good time, with that jerk for a husband?’

‘Jerry’s not such a jerk,’ Joan said. ‘He’s a lovely dancer, for one thing. A good athlete. There’s a lot you could learn from him.’

‘No doubt.’ He thought the subject should be changed back again. ‘If Marlene’s just my red herring,’ he asked, ‘why did she dance with me so long?’

‘Maybe you’re hers. We can have red herrings too, you know. Women’s lib.’

‘Then who’s Marlene really seeing?’

‘Jerry?’

‘Impossible.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘Because he’s such a jerk. All he can do is talk stocks, throw the football, and dance.’ Every time, that fall, playing touch football, he had caught a pass thrown from Jerry’s hand, Richard had felt guilt tag him.

Joan’s smile sealed upon a swallow of brandy. ‘A jerk,’ she said, ‘can be a fish.’

‘There are fish in your game too?’

The brandy produced eloquence. ‘What are these boring messy parties for except fishing? If you’ve caught your fish, you go to see him. Or her. If you haven’t yet, you go in hopes you will. If you don’t fish at all, like the Donnelsons, you go out of fascination, to see who’s catching what. And we need them, too. Like fish need water to swim in.’

‘We? Whose fish are you? You make that brandy look awful good.’

Joan rose and brought the bottle to him, because, Richard figured, she could pour herself another splash on the way, and because she knew she looked better standing up in her queenly dress than sitting down. Sitting down, she looked pregnant. ‘First,’ she responded, having served him and reseated herself, while the front of her waist puffed up in a nostalgic simulation of childbearing, ‘let’s figure out, whose red herring am I?’

‘You
were
Mack’s,’ Richard ventured, ‘but that seems to have cooled. He was all over Eleanor tonight; do you think they’re going to get remarried?’

‘And waste all those lawyers’ fees?’

‘Jerry’s,’ he tried. ‘You danced with him twice, on and on.’ Irate, truth seeming to dawn, Richard sat up and pointed accusingly. ‘You’re that jerk’s red herring!’

‘I am not,’ Joan replied calmly. ‘Jerry and I talked a long time, but it was about you and Ruth.’

‘Oh. And what did you decide?’

‘That the two of you weren’t doing anything really.’

‘How nice.’ His relief blended with annoyance at her complacent underestimation.

‘If there
were
something going on,’ Joan continued, ‘you’d
speak to each other at least
once
at a party, for appearances’ sake. As is, you just stare. The question is, are you working up to something? I think so, he doesn’t. He’s very sure of her.’

‘He would be. What a jerk.’

His tone, too vehement, seemed to offend her, in her queenly blue dress. ‘Let’s talk about
me
,’ Joan said. ‘I’m tired of talking about you.’

‘What
about
you? Are you fishing?’

‘Do I act it?’

He thought. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’re a flirt, but not a fisherwoman.’

‘You don’t think I have the guts?’

‘You have the guts,’ he said, ‘but not the – the what? The
edge
. Every time you feel an edge working up, you hit yourself with another slug of brandy and dull it. Like now. This could be a pretty sexy talk; but by the time we get upstairs you’ll be dead. Hey. It just occurred to me why Jim left. It wasn’t my dancing with Marlene at all, nobody gives a damn who their wife dances with. It was
your
dancing so long with Jerry. Jim is your fish, and you teased him with your red herring.’

‘Don’t let my theory run away with you.’

‘It makes sense. You used to be Mack’s fish, and now you’re his red herring, while he makes up to Eleanor, or is Eleanor
his
red herring, and – did you notice how much time he spent talking to Linda Donnelson?’

Joan’s face froze, for the briefest moment: the way a gust of wind will suddenly flatten choppy water. ‘Linda? Don’t be silly. They were arguing about low-income housing.’

Why was she defensive? Had she gone back to Mack? Richard doubted this; their affair had cooled as soon as Mack got divorced. It was the mention of the Donnelsons.
‘For that matter,’ he ventured, ‘you don’t seem to think Sam is as boring as you used to.’

‘He
is
boring. I talked to him because I was the hostess and nobody else would.’

‘He does have a gorgeous body,’ Richard admitted, as if she had asserted this. ‘Once you get below his wooden head.’

‘Is it so wooden?’

‘I don’t know, is it? You’re the one who’s tapping it.’

‘I’m not tapping anything. I’m sitting here looking at you and thinking I don’t like you very much.’

‘That time Sam took us sailing,’ Richard went on, ‘I was struck by what a terrific muscular back he has with his shirt off. Why did he ask us sailing? He knows I have hydrophobia. Whereas you turned out to be a regular little salt, fluttering up there with the jib sheet. How is it, in a boat? Anything like a waterbed? God, sweetie, you have your nerve, bringing up the Donnelsons and telling me what innocent
aqua pura
they were. So Sam’s your fish. Landed or not. I still can’t figure out who your red herring is, you have so many.’

Her silence frightened him; he became again a little boy begging his mother to speak to him, to rescue him from drowning in the blood-deep currents of her moods, of her secrets. ‘Tell me some more,’ he begged Joan, ‘about why you don’t like me. It’s music to my ears.’

‘You’re cruel,’ she pronounced, the brandy glass resting in her hand like a symbolic orb of power, ‘and you’re greedy.’

‘Now tell me why you like me. Tell me why we shouldn’t get a divorce.’

‘I hate your ego,’ she said, ‘and our sex is lousy, but I’ve never been lonely with you. I’ve never for an instant felt alone when you were in the room.’ Tears made her blink, and close her mouth.

He blinked also, out of weariness. ‘Well that’s a pretty weak endorsement. It won’t sell much of the product in Peoria.’

‘Is that what we’re trying to do? Sell the product in Peoria?’

‘It sure as hell isn’t selling very well here. Except to red herrings and poor fish.’

His attack flustered her, routed her from her throne. ‘You shouldn’t get angry,’ she said, standing, ‘when I try to talk. It doesn’t happen that often.’ She began to collect glasses, and to carry them toward the kitchen.

‘Thank God for that. You’re appalling.’

‘What is it that offends you? That I’m even a little bit alive?’

‘A live for other people, but not for me.’

‘You sounded just like Ruth, saying that. You’ve even caught her self-pity. Come on. Help me clean up this mess.’

‘A mess it is,’ he admitted. But clearing it away, arranging all these receptacles in the racks of the dishwasher and then shepherding them back, spotless, to their allotted spaces in the cupboard, felt like another layer of confusion, a cover-up. Richard stayed on the sofa, trying to see through the tangle to the light. Joan was on to Ruth; that space was gone. There remained one area of opportunity, one way to beat the system; its simplicity made him smile. Sleep with your red herring.

THE MAPLES AGREED
that, since sex was the only sore point in their marriage, they should give it up: sex, not the marriage, which was eighteen years old and stretched back to a horizon where even their birth pangs, with a pang, seemed to merge. A week went by. On Saturday, Richard brought home in a little paper bag a large raw round cabbage. Joan asked, ‘What is
that
?’

‘It’s just a cabbage.’

‘What am I supposed to
do
with it?’ Her irritability gratified him.

‘You don’t have to do
anything
with it. I saw Mack Dennis go into the A & P and went in to talk to him about the new environment commission, whether they weren’t muscling in on the conservation committee, and then I had to buy something to get out through the checkout counter, so I bought this cabbage. It was an impulse. You know what an impulse is.’ Rubbing it in. ‘When I was a kid,’ he went on, ‘we always used to have a head of cabbage around; you could cut a piece off to nibble instead of a candy. The hearts were best. They really burned your mouth.’

‘O.K.,
O.K.’
Joan turned her back and resumed washing dishes. ‘Well, I don’t know where you’re going to put it; since Judith turned vegetarian the refrigerator’s already so full of vegetables I could cry’

Her turning her back aroused him; it usually did. He went closer and thrust the cabbage between her face and the sink.
‘
Look
at it, darley. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s so perfect.’ He was only partly teasing; he had found himself, in the A & P, ravished by the glory of the pyramided cabbages, the mute and glossy beauty that had waited ages for him to rediscover it. Not since preadolescence had his senses opened so innocently wide: the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter, where the girl, with a flicker of surprise, dressed it in a paper bag and charged him thirty-three cents. As he drove the mile home, the secret sphere beside him in the seat seemed a hole he had drilled back into reality. And now, cutting a slice from one pale cheek, he marvelled across the years at the miracle of the wound, at the tender compaction of the leaves, each tuned to its curve as tightly as a guitar string. The taste was blander than his childhood memory of it, but the texture was delicious in his mouth.

Bean, their baby, ten, came into the kitchen. ‘What is Daddy eating?’ she asked, looking into the empty bag for cookies. She knew Daddy as a snack-sneaker.

‘Daddy bought himself a cabbage,’ Joan told her.

The child looked at her father with eyes in which amusement had been prepared. There was a serious warmth that Mommy and animals, especially horses, gave off, and everything else had the coolness of comedy. ‘That was silly,’ she said.

‘Nothing silly about it,’ Richard said. ‘Have a bite.’ He offered her the cabbage as if it were an apple. He envisioned inside her round head leaves and leaves of female psychology, packed so snugly the wrinkles dovetailed.

Bean made a spitting face and harshly laughed. ‘That’s nasty,’ she said. Bolder, brighter-eyed, flirting: ‘
You’re
nasty.’ Trying it out.

Hurt, Richard said to her, ‘I don’t like you either. I just like my cabbage.’ And he kissed the cool pale dense vegetable once, twice, on the cheek; Bean gurgled in astonishment.

Her back still turned, Joan continued from the sink, ‘If you
had
to buy something, I wish you’d remembered Calgonite. I’ve been doing the dishes by hand for days.’

‘Remember it yourself,’ he said airily. ‘Where’s the Saran Wrap for my cabbage?’ But as the week wore on, the cabbage withered; the crisp planar wound of each slice by the next day had browned and loosened. Stubbornly loyal, Richard cut and nibbled his slow way to the heart, which burned on his tongue so sharply that his taste buds even in their adult dullness were not disappointed; he remembered how it had been, the oilcloth-covered table where his grandmother used to ‘snitz’ cabbage into strings for sauerkraut and give him the leftover raw hearts for a snack. How they used to burn his tender mouth! His eyes would water with the delicious pain.

He did not buy another cabbage, once the first was eaten; analogously, he never returned to a mistress, once Joan had discovered and mocked her. Their eyes, that is, had married and merged to three, and in the middle, shared one, her dry female-to-female clarity would always oust his romantic mists.

Her lovers, on the other hand, he never discovered while she had them. Months or even years later she would present an affair to him complete, self-packaged as nicely as a cabbage, the man remarried or moved to Seattle, her own wounds licked in secrecy and long healed. So he knew, coming home one evening and detecting a roseate afterglow in her face, that he would discover only some new layer of innocence. Nevertheless he asked, ‘What have
you
been up to today?’

‘Same old grind. After school I drove Judith to her dance lesson, Bean to the riding stable, Dickie to the driving range.’