Til We Meet Again

When our most significant relationships fail or end, we revisit the accumulated details of a shared life.  Such is our second acquaintance, as a measure of loss.

II.

The marriage of Richard and Joan Maples, in John Updike's "Separating", has been failing for some time.  Updike speaks of that failure when he alludes to Richard having an affair.  The moment has come to inform the Maples children, that their parents have decided on a formal separation.  "All spring he had been morbidly conscious of insides and outsides, of barriers and partitions. He and Joan stood as a thin barrier between the children and the truth." <1> 

Joan decides that their four children should hear the news separately, as individuals.  Note the associations to splitting, cutting - separating.  "Her plan turned one hurdle for him into four--four knife-sharp walls".  Poor Richard.  Updike will later have him dismantle a lobster at a family meal.  "Tears dropped from his nose as he broke the lobster's back". 

When the news is revealed to them, the daughters Judith and Margaret have a muted reaction.  It's their son, John, that speaks up.  "'Why didn't you tell us?' he asked, in a large round voice quite unlike his own. 'You should have told us you weren't getting along.'"  But Updike also observes Richard and Joan's realization, that "the child was drunk, on Judith's homecoming champagne."

There remains the other son, Richard Jr.  His immediate response to the separation is subdued.  Later, he has a question for Richard. "In his father's ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word: 'Why?'. Why. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness."

III.

The possibility of separation details the things, the routines, the emotions at their permeable joints, in the Maples marriage and family.  There is much elegance in John Updike's prose, as he relates "Separating" with irony comic, and melancholy.
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<1>Updike, John. "Separating". The Norton Anthology of American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.