The Maples had moved just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close. A tall, always slightly smiling girl with an absent-minded manner, she allowed Richard Maple to slip off her coat and scarf even as she stood gently greeting Joan.
This is the opening line to the story which introduces Richard and Joan Maple to readers. From this seemingly inauspicious beginning, the story of the disintegration of their marriage over a twenty-year period told in almost twenty individual standalone short stories. This introduction may seem mundane and less than insightful, but if it does that is because it was not written with the intention in mind of being the introduction to a couple which the writer was planning to spend the next two decades reconnecting with. In retrospect, however—whether by pure luck or Updike fashioning the rest of the story to suit the idea—these opening lines take on a greater resonance than it seems. Much of the focus on the Maples over the course of following stories is on the subtle psychological manipulation of the one against the other. Within that context, this becomes a story not just about Richard being attracted to his wife’s pretty friend, but whether or not Joan manipulated the other two to purposely test her husband’s fidelity.
A sudden monument, a massive white pyramid stricken with light and inscribed with Latin, loomed beside them. Soon they were pressing their faces together to the window to follow the Colosseum itself as, shaped like a shattered wedding cake, it slowly pivoted and silently floated from the harbor of their vision.
It’s been ten years since Rebecca Cune allowed Richard Maple to slip off her coat and it has not been a great decade for the marriage of the Maples. In fact, things have reached that point where it does in many marriages of upper middle class white people couples where the only thing they can think of trying in a last desperate gasp to kindle some flames in a dying fire is a trip to Europe. Typically, this means either France or Italy, the two-fold aspect of everything romantic about Europe for most Americans. The title here is a dead giveaway which the Maples opted for. Or, more specifically, which the author opted for.
It could have been France. There is certainly no overarching reason it is France and by France, of course, is really meant Paris. But instead the Maples are packed off by their creator to Rome. Why? Because at some point it either occurred to Updike himself or he attained the image second-hand from another that the crumbling ruins of the Colosseum looks something like a wedding cake. And so in Rome is discovered not just the eternal truth that Europe alone lacks the requisite romantic fuel to re-energize a stalling marriage, but that the Colosseum is the central architectural symbol of this marriage.
The day was fair. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal misery with solid sunlight – golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature.
There is much that could considered ironic in the story of the breakdown of the marriage of Richard and Joan. Not the harsh, corrosive irony which tosses acid onto already emotional fragile story so that it burns intensely, but more like a salt and pepper shake to add a little seasoning. It would be a mistake to say the dominant tone or mood of the stories is ironic, but Updike introduces just enough at just the right moments to make irony work here in a very cool way that in this modern age of irony seems almost quaint. Almost, even, as if there weren’t any irony at all. Which is not too bad a judgment because when all is said and done what Updike presents here is something perhaps not impossible to replicate by the early decades of the 21st century, but certain challenging.
The slow-motion portrayal of the failure of a marriage as a sincere tragedy without becoming either overly sentimental or too sardonic seems impossible today. The story of the Maples seems as out of place in the world of ultra-hip postmodern millennial literature as The Waltons airing between episodes Breaking Bad and Twin Peaks. The only edgily ironic aspect of the story that tears the heart-wrenching story of the day Richard and Joan tell their children they are finally separating is the uncaring heart of Mother Nature.
