The Maples Stories Read Free

risk.
    ‘You should stop smoking for a day or two,’ he told her.
    Joan waved them goodbye from the head of the stairs.
    The snow, invisible except around streetlights, exerted a fluttering pressure on their faces. ‘Coming down hard now,’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’
    At the corner, where the snow gave the green light a watery blueness, her hesitancy in following him as he turned to walk with the light across Thirteenth Street led him to ask, ‘It
is
this side of the street you live on, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I thought I remembered from the time we drove you down from Boston.’ The Maples had been living in theWest Eighties then. ‘I remember I had an impression of big buildings.’
    ‘The church and the butcher’s school,’ Rebecca said. ‘Every day about ten when I’m going to work the boys learning to be butchers come out for an intermission all bloody and laughing.’
    Richard looked up at the church; the steeple was fragmentarily silhouetted against the scattered lit windows of a tall apartment building on Seventh Avenue. ‘Poor church,’ he said. ‘It’s hard in this city for a steeple to be the tallest thing.’
    Rebecca said nothing, not even her habitual ‘Yes.’ He felt rebuked for being preachy. In his embarrassment he directed her attention to the first next thing he saw, a poorly lettered sign above a great door. ‘Food Trades Vocational High School,’ he read aloud. ‘The people upstairs told us that the man before the man before
us
in our apartment was a wholesale-meat salesman who called himself a Purveyor of Elegant Foods. He kept a woman in the apartment.’
    ‘Those big windows up there,’ Rebecca said, pointing up at the top story of a brownstone, ‘face mine across the street. I can look in and feel we are neighbors. Someone’s always there; I don’t know what they do for a living.’
    After a few more steps they halted, and Rebecca, in a voice that Richard imagined to be slightly louder than her ordinary one, said, ‘Do you want to come up and see where I live?’
    ‘Sure.’ It seemed far-fetched to refuse.
    They descended four concrete steps, opened a shabby orange door, entered an overheated half-basement lobby, and began to climb flights of wooden stairs. Richard’s suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt. Few experiencesso savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny. Three years ago, Joan had lived in a fourth-floor walkup, in Cambridge. Richard never took her home, even when the whole business, down to the last intimacy, had become routine, without the fear that the landlord, justifiably furious, would leap from his door and devour him as they passed.
    Opening her door, Rebecca said, ‘It’s hot as hell in here,’ swearing for the first time in his hearing. She turned on a weak light. The room was small; slanting planes, the underside of the building’s roof, intersected the ceiling and walls and cut large prismatic volumes from Rebecca’s living space. As he moved farther forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right, an unexpected area created where the steeply slanting roof extended itself to the floor. Here a double bed was placed. Tightly bounded on three sides, the bed had the appearance not so much of a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it and, unable to face Rebecca at once, stared at two kitchen chairs, a metal bridge lamp around the rim of whose shade plump fish and helm wheels alternated, and a four-shelf bookcase – all of which, being slender and proximate to a tilting wall, had an air of threatened verticality.
    ‘Yes, here’s the stove on top of the refrigerator I told you about,’ Rebecca said. ‘Or did I?’
    The top unit overhung the lower by several inches on all sides. He touched his fingers to the stove’s white side. ‘This room is quite