For a week, Stan says nothing about Diane’s announcement.
He’s sly enough to know that this seeming indifference is the best revenge, the harshest way to punish her, to inflict retaliatory pain, to pretend that her infidelity isn’t important enough to merit discussion, and besides, he doesn’t know what to say, having already confessed that her kissing John turned him on, and also, the truth of it is he’s afraid to talk about it
Afraid of the confrontation igniting a conflagration that might end in his having to demand a divorce
(What if she doesn’t apologize? What if she says she’s going to do it again? With John? With other men? What if she demands an “open marriage”?) which he doesn’t want.
So Stan pretends that his silence is a punishment and Diane pretends to believe the same, although she’s pretty sure that He’s actually afraid, and it deepens her
Contempt, which tempers her shame
Not so much that she cheated on her husband, but the fact that she bestowed herself on John, who didn’t seem to think it was such a
Big deal.
They did it, and it was nice, it was good, but it was nothing special, and afterward he got up and got a beer and offered her one (she declined) and he didn’t ask “What now” or “What next” and she just went home and washed him out of herself and couldn’t avoid the truth that she betrayed Stan for nothing and then Stan decided to punish her with silence, which was so stupid because couldn’t he see that she’d done it largely to give them something to talk about?
But they settled into silence an unspoken agreement to pretend and
Diane begins to think that maybe it’s the necessity of marriage to let scar tissue form over the wounds so that you both become, literally, callous.
They settled into silence until tonight
Stan sets his Updike down, gets up, and says that he’s going to the store to take inventory.