The Maples Stories (17 page)

In bed she explained, ‘I couldn’t cry I guess because I cried so much all spring. It really wasn’t fair. It’s your idea, and you made it look as though I was kicking you out.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stop. I wanted to but couldn’t.’

‘You
didn’t
want to. You loved it. You were having your way, making a general announcement.’

‘I love having it over,’ he admitted. ‘God, those kids were great. So brave and funny.’ John, returned to the house, had settled to a model airplane in his room, and kept shouting down to them, ‘I’m O.K. No sweat.’

‘And the way,’ Richard went on, cozy in his relief, ‘they never questioned the reasons we gave. No thought of a third person. Not even Judith.’

‘That
was
touching,’ Joan said.

He gave her a hug. ‘You were great too. Very reassuring to everybody. Thank you.’ Guiltily, he realized he did not feel separated.

‘You still have Dickie to do,’ she told him. These words set before him a black mountain in the darkness; its cold breath, its near weight affected his chest. Of the four children, his elder son was closest to his conscience. Joan did not need to add, ‘That’s one piece of your dirty work I won’t do for you.’

‘I know. I’ll do it. You go to sleep.’

Within minutes, her breathing slowed, became oblivious and deep. It was quarter to midnight. Dickie’s train from the concert would come in at one-fourteen. Richard set the alarm for one. He had slept atrociously for weeks. But whenever he closed his lids some glimpse of the last hours scorched them – Judith exhaling toward the ceiling in a kind of aversion, Bean’s mute staring, the sunstruck growth in the field where he and John had rested. The mountain before him moved closer, moved within him; he was huge, momentous. The ache at the back of his throat felt stale. His wife slept as if slain beside him. When, exasperated by his hot lids, his crowded heart, he rose from bed and dressed,
she awoke enough to turn over. He told her then, ‘Joan, if I could undo it all, I would.’

‘Where would you begin?’ she asked. There was no place. Giving him courage, she was always giving him courage. He put on shoes without socks in the dark. The children were breathing in their rooms, the downstairs was hollow. In their confusion they had left lights burning. He turned off all but one, the kitchen overhead. The car started. He had hoped it wouldn’t. He met only moonlight on the road; it seemed a diaphanous companion, flickering in the leaves along the roadside, haunting his rear-view mirror like a pursuer, melting under his headlights. The center of town, not quite deserted, was eerie at this hour. A young cop in uniform kept company with a gang of T-shirted kids on the steps of the bank. Across from the railroad station, several bars kept open. Customers, mostly young, passed in and out of the warm night, savoring summer’s novelty. Vo ices shouted from cars as they passed; an immense conversation seemed in progress. Richard parked and in his weariness put his head on the passenger seat, out of the commotion and wheeling lights. It was as when, in the movies, an assassin grimly carries his mission through the jostle of a carnival – except the movies cannot show the precipitous, palpable slope you cling to within. You cannot climb back down; you can only fall. The synthetic fabric of the car seat, warmed by his cheek, confided to him an ancient, distant scent of vanilla.

A train whistle caused him to lift his head. It was on time; he had hoped it would be late. The slender drawgates descended. The bell of approach tingled happily. The great metal body, horizontally fluted, rocked to a stop, and sleepy teen-agers disembarked, his son among them. Dickie did not show surprise that his father was meeting him at this terrible
hour. He sauntered to the car with two friends, both taller than he. He said ‘Hi’ to his father and took the passenger’s seat with an exhausted promptness that expressed gratitude. The friends got in the back, and Richard was grateful; a few more minutes’ postponement would be won by driving them home.

He asked, ‘How was the concert?’

‘Groovy,’ one boy said from the back seat.

‘It bit,’ the other said.

‘It was O.K.,’ Dickie said, moderate by nature, so reasonable that in his childhood the unreason of the world had given him headaches, stomach aches, nausea. When the second friend had been dropped off at his dark house, the boy blurted, ‘Dad, my eyes are killing me with hay fever! I’m out there cutting that mothering grass all day!’

‘Do we still have those drops?’

‘They didn’t do any good last summer.’

‘They might this.’ Richard swung a U-turn on the empty street. The drive home took a few minutes. The mountain was here, in his throat. ‘Richard,’ he said, and felt the boy, slumped and rubbing his eyes, go tense at his tone, ‘I didn’t come to meet you just to make your life easier. I came because your mother and I have some news for you, and you’re a hard man to get a hold of these days. It’s sad news.’

‘That’s O.K.’ The reassurance came out soft, but quick, as if released from the tip of a spring.

Richard had feared that his tears would return and choke him, but the boy’s manliness set an example, and his voice issued forth steady and dry. ‘It’s sad news, but it needn’t be tragic news, at least for you. It should have no practical effect on your life, though it’s bound to have an emotional effect. You’ll work at your job, and go back to school in September. Your mother and I are really proud of
what you’re making of your life; we don’t want that to change at all.’

‘Yeah,’ the boy said lightly, on the intake of his breath, holding himself up. They turned the corner; the church they erratically attended loomed like a gutted fort. The home of the woman Richard hoped to marry stood across the green. Her bedroom light burned.

‘Your mother and I,’ he said, ‘have decided to separate. For the summer. Nothing legal, no divorce yet. We want to see how it feels. For some years now, we haven’t been doing enough for each other, making each other as happy as we should be. Have you sensed that?’

‘No,’ the boy said. It was an honest, unemotional answer: true or false in a quiz.

Glad for the factual basis, Richard pursued, even garrulously, the details. His apartment across town, his utter accessibility, the split vacation arrangements, the advantages to the children, the added mobility and variety of the summer. Dickie listened, absorbing. ‘Do the others know?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did they take it?’

‘The girls pretty calmly. John flipped out; he shouted and ate a cigarette and made a salad out of his napkin and told us how much he hated school.’

His brother chuckled. ‘He did?’

‘Yeah. The school issue was more upsetting for him than Mom and me. He seemed to feel better for having exploded.’

‘He did?’ The repetition was the first sign that he was stunned.

‘Yes. Dickie, I want to tell you something. This last hour, waiting for your train to get in, has been about the worst of my life. I hate this.
Hate
it. My father would have died before doing it to me.’ He felt immensely lighter, saying
this. He had dumped the mountain on the boy. They were home. Moving swiftly as a shadow, Dickie was out of the car, through the bright kitchen. Richard called after him, ‘Want a glass of milk or anything?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Want us to call the course tomorrow and say you’re too sick to work?’

‘No, that’s all right.’ The answer was faint, delivered at the door to his room; Richard listened for the slam that went with a tantrum. The door closed normally, gently. The sound was sickening.

Joan had sunk into that first deep trough of sleep and was slow to awake. Richard had to repeat, ‘I told him.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing much. Could you go say good night to him? Please.’

She left their room, without putting on a bathrobe. He sluggishly changed back into his pajamas and walked down the hall. Dickie was already in bed, Joan was sitting beside him, and the boy’s bedside clock radio was murmuring music. When she stood to go, an inexplicable light – the moon? – outlined her body through the nightie. Richard sat on the warm place she had indented on the boy’s narrow mattress. He asked him, ‘Do you want the radio on like that?’

‘It always is.’

‘Doesn’t it keep you awake? It would me.’

‘No.’

‘Are you sleepy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. Sure you want to get up and go to work? You’ve had a big night.’

‘I want to. They expect me.’

Away at school this winter he had learned for the first time that you can go short of sleep and live. As an infant he had slept with an immobile, sweating intensity that had alarmed his baby-sitters. In adolescence he had often been the first of the four children to go to bed. Even now, he would go slack in the middle of a television show, his sprawled legs hairy and brown. ‘O.K. Good boy. Dickie, listen. I love you so much, I never knew how much until now. No matter how this works out, I’ll always be with you. Really.’

Richard bent to kiss an averted face but his son, sinewy, turned and with wet cheeks embraced him and gave him a kiss, on the lips, passionate as a woman’s. In his father’s ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word: ‘
Why?
’

Why
. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness. The waiting white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why.

SHE TOLD HIM
with a little gesture he had never seen her use before. Joan had called from the station, having lunched with her lover, Richard guessed. He had been spending the Saturday baby-sitting for his own children, in the house the Maples had once shared. Her new Volvo was handier in the driveway, but for several minutes it refused to go into first gear for him. By the time he had reached the center of town, she had walked down the main street and up the hill to the green. It was September, leafy and warm, yet with a crystal chill on things, an uncanny clarity. Even from a distance they smiled to see one another. She opened the door and seated herself, fastening the safety belt to silence its chastening buzz. Her face was rosy from her walk; her city clothes looked like a costume; she carried a small package or two, token of her ‘shopping.’ Richard tried to pull a U-turn on the narrow street, and in the long moment of his halting and groping for reverse gear she told him. ‘Darley,’ she said, and, oddly, tentatively, soundlessly, tapped the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, a gesture between a child’s clap of glee and an adult’s signal for attention, ‘I’ve decided to kick you out. I’m going to ask you to leave town.’

Abruptly full, his heart thumped; it was what he wanted. ‘O.K.,’ he said carefully. ‘If you think you can manage.’ He glanced sideways at her face to see if she meant it; he could not believe she did. A red, white, and blue mail truck that had braked to a stop behind them tapped its horn, more
reminder than rebuke; the Maples were known in the town. They had lived here most of their married life.

Richard found reverse, backed up, and completed the turn. The car, so new and stiff, in motion felt high and light, as if it too had just been vaporized in her little playful clap. ‘Things are stagnant,’ she explained, ‘stuck; we’re not going anywhere.’

‘I will not give her up,’ he interposed.

‘Don’t tell me, you’ve told me.’

‘Nor do I see you giving him up.’

‘I would if you asked. Are you asking?’

‘No. Horrors. He’s all I’ve got.’

‘Well, then. Go where you want; I think Boston would be most fun for the kids to visit. And the least boring for you.’

‘I agree. When do you see this happening?’ Her profile, in the side of her vision, felt brittle, about to break if he said a wrong word, too rough a word. He was holding his breath, trying to stay up, high and light, like the car. They went over the bump this side of the old stone bridge; cigarette smoke jarred loose from Joan’s face.

‘As soon as you can find a place,’ she said. ‘Next week. Is that too soon?’

‘Probably.’

‘Is this too sad? Do I seem brutal to you?’

‘No, you seem wonderful, very gentle and just, as always. It’s right. It’s just something I couldn’t do myself. How can you possibly live without me in town?’

In the edge of his vision her face turned; he turned to see, and her expression was mischievous, brave, flushed. They must have had wine at lunch. ‘Easy,’ Joan said. He knew it was a bluff, a brave gesture; she was begging for reprieve. But he held silent, he refused to argue. This way, he had her pride on his side.

The curves of the road poured by, mailboxes, trees some of which were already scorched by the turn of the year. He asked, ‘Is this your idea, or his?’

‘Mine. It came to me on the train. All Andy said was, I seemed to be feeding you all the time.’ In the weeks since their summer of separated vacations, Richard had been sleeping in a borrowed seaside shack two miles from their home; he tried to cook there, but each evening, as the nights grew shorter, it seemed easier, and kinder to the children, to eat the dinner Joan had cooked. He was used to her cooking; indeed, his body, every cell, was composed of her cooking. Dinner would lead to a post-dinner drink, while the children (two were off at school, two were still homebound) plodded through their homework or stared at television, and drinking would lead to talking, confidences, harsh words, maudlin tears, and an occasional uxorious collapse upward, into bed. She was right; it was not healthy, or progressive. The twenty years were by, when it would have been convenient to love one another.

He found the apartment in Boston on the second day of hunting. The real-estate agent had red hair, a round bottom, and a mask of makeup worn as if to conceal her youth. Richard felt happy and scared, going up and down stairs behind her. Wearier of him than he was of her, she fidgeted the key into this lock, bucked the door open with her shoulder, and made her little open-handed gesture of helpless display.

The floor was not the usual wall-to-wall shag or splintered wood, but black and white tile, like the floor in a Vermeer; he glanced to the window, saw the skyscraper, and knew that this would do. The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,
famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from it) and disastrous because it was beautiful: the architect had had a vision. He had dreamed of an invisible building, though immense; the glass was meant to reflect the sky and the old low brick skyline of Boston, and to melt into the sky. Instead, the windows of mirroring glass kept falling to the street, and were replaced by ugly opacities of black plywood. Yet enough reflecting surface remained to give an impression, through the wavery old window of this sudden apartment, of huge blueness, a vertical cousin to the horizontal huge blueness of the sea that Richard awoke to each morning, in the now bone-deep morning chill of his unheated shack. He said to the redhead, ‘Fine,’ and her charcoal eyebrows lifted. His hands trembled as he signed the lease, having written ‘Sep’ in the space for marital status. From a drugstore he phoned the news, not to his wife, whom it would sadden, but to his mistress, equally far away. ‘Well,’ he told her in an accusing voice, ‘I found one. I signed the lease. Incredible. In the middle of all this fine print there was the one simple sentence, “There shall be no waterbeds.”’