The Maples stories - By John Updike Page 0,1

in the dim bedroom, somewhat poignant – as if he were with great tact delivering a disappointing message – disposal of their guest’s coat.

‘Yes, and he insisted on having his name on the mailbox. He was terribly afraid of missing a letter. When my brother was in the Navy and came to see me and saw on the mailbox’ – with three parallel movements of her fingers she set the names beneath one another –

‘Georgene Clyde,

Rebecca Cune,

Jacques Zimmerman,

he told me I had always been such a nice girl. Jacques wouldn’t even move out so my brother would have a place to sleep. He had to sleep on the floor.’ She lowered her lids and looked in her purse for a cigarette.

‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ Joan said, her smile broadening helplessly as she realized what an inane thing it had been to say. Her cold worried Richard. It had lasted seven days without improving. Her face was pale, mottled pink and yellow; this accentuated the Modiglianiesque quality established by her oval blue eyes and her habit of sitting to her full height, her head quizzically tilted and her hands palm upward in her lap.

Rebecca, too, was pale, but in the consistent way of a drawing, perhaps – the weight of her lids and a certain virtuosity about the mouth suggested it – by da Vinci.

‘Who would like some sherry?’ Richard asked in a deep voice, from a standing position.

‘We have some hard stuff if you’d rather,’ Joan said to Rebecca; from Richard’s viewpoint the remark, like those advertisements which from varying angles read differently, contained the quite legible declaration that this time he would have to mix the old-fashioneds.

‘The sherry sounds fine,’ Rebecca said. She enunciated her words distinctly, but in a faint, thin voice that disclaimed for them any consequence.

‘I think, too,’ Joan said.

‘Good.’ Richard took from the mantel the eight-dollar bottle of Tio Pepe that the second man on the Spanish-sherry account had stolen for him. So all could share in the drama of it, he uncorked the bottle in the living room. He posingly poured out three glasses, half full, passed them around, and leaned against the mantel (the Maples had never had a mantel before), swirling the liquid, as the agency’s wine expert had told him to do, thus liberating the esters and ethers, until his wife said, as she always did, it being the standard toast in her parents’ home, ‘Cheers, dears!’

Rebecca continued the story of her first apartment. Jacques had never worked. Georgene never held a job more than three weeks. The three of them contributed to a kitty, to which all enjoyed equal access. Rebecca had a separate bedroom. Jacques and Georgene sometimes worked on television scripts; they pinned the bulk of their hopes onto a serial titled The IBI – I for Intergalactic, or Interplanetary, or something – in Space and Time. One of their friends was a young Communist who never washed and always had money because his father owned half of the West Side. During the day, when the two girls were off working, Jacques flirted with a young Swede upstairs who kept dropping her mop onto the tiny balcony outside their window. ‘A real bombardier,’ Rebecca said. When Rebecca moved into a single apartment for herself and was all settled and happy, Georgene and Jacques offered to bring a mattress and sleep on her floor. Rebecca felt that the time had come for her to put her foot down. She said no. Later, Jacques married a girl other than Georgene.

‘Cashews, anybody?’ Richard said. He had bought a can at the corner delicatessen, expressly for this visit, though if Rebecca had not been coming he would have bought something else there on some other excuse, just for the pleasure of buying his first thing at the store where in the coming years he would purchase so much and become so familiar.

‘No thank you,’ Rebecca said. Richard was so far from expecting refusal that out of momentum he pressed them on her again, exclaiming, ‘Please! They’re so good for you.’ She took two and bit one in half.

He offered the dish, a silver porringer given to the Maples as a wedding present, to his wife, who took a greedy handful of cashews and looked so pale and mottled that he asked, ‘How do you feel?’, not so much forgetting the presence of their guest as parading his concern, quite genuine at that, before her.

‘Fine,’ Joan said edgily, and perhaps she did.

Though the Maples