Joycean
“Wife-Wooing” is probably without question the weirdest entry in the collection of stories about the Maple marriage. Unlike the others, it is a tale told in the first-person. Not just the first person, but a stream-of-consciousness first-person which is prompted early on by a referenced to the high priest of that literary device, James Joyce, and then proceeds to become an imitation of that style:
“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.”
Parting is Such Mundane Comfort
The end to the Maple marriage in the sense of divorce is still a long way off, but the marriage really comes to an end on a vacation trip to Rome. From that point on, the marriage is simply in name only. What it was before going to Rome and what becomes after returning from Rome are two completely different entities. And the dividing line is a single moment in time captured through imagery:
“But they had at last been parted. Both knew it. They became with each other, as in the days of courtship, courteous, gay, and reserved. Their marriage let go like an overgrown vine whose half-hidden stem has been slashed in the dawn by an ancient gardener…Her face, released from the tension of hope, had grown smooth.”
The Tennis Court
Richard muses over how the divorce announcements of friends always seem to come in conjunction with a major home redecorating or expansion or repair project. He muses over this recurring pattern as he studies the tennis court installed within the year. The prophecy holds true:
“a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers churned a grassy, daisy-dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane, this transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun. The next spring, waking each day at dawn to a sliding sensation as if the bed were being tipped, Richard found the barren tennis court – its net and tapes still rolled in the barn – an environment congruous with his mood of purposeful desolation"
The End
The end of the marriage really occurred in Rome, but it is inside a courthouse that it legally becomes severed. The imagery is purposely disjointed as a replica of the reality of the juxtaposition between how romances begin and how they end:
“They entered the courtroom two by two. The chamber was chaste and empty; the carved trim was painted forest green. The windows gave on an ancient river blackened by industry. Dead judges gazed down from above. The two lawyers conferred, leaving Richard and Joan to stand awkwardly apart. He made his ‘What now?’ face at her. She made her ‘Beats me’ face back… the judge hurried in, smiling, his robes swinging. He was a little sharp-featured man with a polished pink face; his face declared that he was altogether good, and would never die.”
