The Maples Stories by John Updike

wait up for his wife. His mother had always waited up for him and for his father, keeping the house lit against their return from the basketball game, the swimming meet, the midnight adventure with the broken-down car. Entering the house on those nights, in from the cold, the boy had felt his mother as the dazzling center of a stationary, preferable world, and been jealous of her evening alone, in the warmth, with the radio. Now, taking up her old role, he made toast for himself, and drank a glass of milk, and flicked on television, and flicked it off, and poured some bourbon, and found his eyes unable to hold steady upon even a newspaper. He walked to the window and stared out at the street, where an elm not yet dead broke into nervous lace the light of a street lamp. Then he went into the kitchen and stared at the darkness of the back yard where, after a splash of headlights and the sob of a motor being cut, Joan would appear.
    When the invitation came, they had agreed she might be out till eleven. But by 10:30 his heart was jarring, the bourbon began to go down as easily as water, and he discoveredhimself standing in a room with no memory of walking through the doorway. That Picasso plate chosen together in Vallauris. Those college anthologies mingled on the shelves. The battlefield litter of children’s schoolbooks and playthings, abandoned in the after-supper rout. At 11:05 he strode to the phone and put his hand on the receiver but was unable to dial the number that lived in his fingers like a musical phrase. Her number. Their number, the Masons’. The house that had swallowed his wife was one where he had always felt comfortable and welcome, a house much like his own, yet different enough in every detail to be exciting, and one whose mistress, waiting in it alone, for him, had stood naked at the head of the stairs. A dazzling welcome, her shoulders caped in morning sun coming through the window, the very filaments of her flesh on fire.
    He went upstairs and checked on each sleeping child in the hope that thus a half-hour of waiting would be consumed. Down in the kitchen again he found that only five minutes had passed and, balked from more bourbon by the certainty that he would become drunk, tried to become angry. He thought of smashing the glass, realized that only he was here to clean it up, and set it down empty on the counter. Anger had never been easy for him; even as a child he had seen there was nobody to be angry at, only tired people anxious to please, good hearts asleep and awake, wrapped in the limits of a universe that itself, from the beauty of its details and its contagious air of freedom, seemed to have been well-intentioned. He tried, instead, to pass the time, to cry – but produced only the ridiculous dry snarling tears of a man alone. He might wake the children. He went outdoors, into the back yard. Through bushes that had shed their leaves he watched headlights hurrying home from meetings, from movies, from trysts.He imagined that tonight he would know the lights of her car even before they turned up the alley and flooded the yard in returning. The yard remained dark. The traffic was diminishing. He went back inside. The kitchen clock said 11:35. He went to the telephone and stared at it, puzzled by the problem it presented, of an invisible lock his fingers could not break. Thus he missed Joan’s headlights turning into the yard. By the time he looked she was walking toward him, beneath the maple tree, from the deadened car. She was wearing a white coat. He opened the kitchen door to greet her, but his impulse of embrace, to socket her into his chest like a heart that had orbited and returned, was abruptly obsolete, rendered showy and false by his wife’s total, disarming familiarity.
    He asked, ‘How was it?’
    She groaned. ‘They were both having terrible times finishing their sentences. It was agony’
    ‘Poor souls. Poor Joan.’ He remembered his own agony. ‘You promised to be home by