The Maples Stories Read Free Page A

sort of nice,’ he said.
    ‘Here’s the view,’ she said. He moved to stand beside her at the windows, lifting aside the curtains and peering through tiny flawed panes into the apartment across the street.
    ‘That guy
does
have a huge window,’ Richard said.
    She made a brief agreeing noise of
n
’s.
    Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. ‘Looks like a furniture store,’ he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat. ‘The snow’s keeping up.’
    ‘Yes. It is.’
    ‘Well’ – his word was too loud; he finished the sentence too softly – ‘thanks for letting me see it. I – Have you read this?’ He had noticed a copy of
Auntie Mame
lying on a hassock.
    ‘I haven’t had the time,’ she said.
    ‘I haven’t read it either. Just reviews. That’s all I ever read.’
    This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unnecessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face.
    ‘Well –’ he said.
    ‘Well.’ Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless.
    ‘Don’t, don’t let the b-butchers get you.’ The stammer of course ruined the joke, and her laugh, which had begun as soon as she had seen by his face that he would attempt something funny, was completed ahead of his utterance.
    As he went down the stairs she rested both hands on the banister and looked down toward the next landing. ‘Good night,’ she said.
    ‘Night.’ He looked up; she had gone into her room. Oh but they were close.

WIFE-WOOING
    OH MY LOVE . Yes. Here we sit, on warm broad floorboards, before a fire, the children between us, in a crescent, eating. The girl and I share one half-pint of French-fried potatoes; you and the boy share another; and in the center, sharing nothing, making simple reflections within himself like a jewel, the baby, mounted in an Easybaby, sucks at his bottle with frowning mastery, his selfish, contemplative eyes stealing glitter from the center of the flames. And you. You. You allow your skirt, the same black skirt in which this morning you with woman’s soft bravery mounted a bicycle and sallied forth to play hymns in difficult keys on the Sunday school’s old piano – you allow this black skirt to slide off your raised knees down your thighs, slide
up
your thighs in your body’s absolute geography, so the parallel whiteness of their undersides is exposed to the fire’s warmth and to my sight. Oh. There is a line of Joyce. I try to recover it from the legendary, imperfectly explored grottoes of
Ulysses:
a garter snapped, to please Blazes Boylan, in a deep Dublin den. What? Smackwarm. That was the crucial word. Smacked smackwarm on her smackable warm woman’s thigh. Something like that. A splendid man, to feel that. Smackwarm woman’s. Splendid also to feel the curious and potent, inexplicable and irrefutably magical life language leads within itself. What soul took thought and knew that adding
wo
to man would make a woman? The difference exactly. The wide
w
, the receptive
o
. Womb. In our crescentthe children for all their size seem to come out of you toward me, wet fingers and eyes, tinted bronze. Three children, five persons, seven years. Seven years since I wed wide warm woman, white-thighed. Wooed and wed. Wife. A knife of a word that for all its final bite did not end the wooing. To my wonderment.
    We eat meat, meat I wrested warm from the raw hands of the hamburger girl in the diner a mile away, a ferocious place, slick with grease, sleek with chrome; young predators snarling dirty jokes menaced me, old men reached for me with coffee-dark paws; I wielded my wallet, and won my way back. The fat brown bag of buns was warm beside