Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  The party had been given by the Applebys in honor of the new couple, the what, the Whitmans. Frank had known Ted, or Dan, at Exeter, or Harvard. Exeter, Harvard: it was to Piet like looking up at the greenhouse panes spattered with whitewash to dull the sun. He shut out the greenhouse. He did not wish to remember the greenhouse. It was a cliff.

  Stiffly his fingers tired of trying to give his wife a dream: a baby on the river of herself, Moses in the Nile morning found snagged in the rustling papyrus, Egyptian handmaids, willowy flanks, single lotus, easy access. Sex part of nature before Christ. Bully. Bitch. Taking up three-quarters of the bed as if duty done. Mouthbreathing with slack lips. Words in and out. Virgins pregnant through the ear. Talk to me psychologee. He touched in preference again himself. Waxen. Wilted camellia petals. In his youth an ivory rod at will. At the thought of a cleft or in class a shaft of sun laid on his thigh: stand to recite: breathes there a man with soul so dead. The whole class tittering at him bent over. The girl at the desk next wore lineny blouses so sheer her bra straps peeped and so short-sleeved that her armpits. Showed, shaved. Vojt. Annabelle Vojt. One man, one Vojt. Easy Dutch ways. Married a poultry farmer from outside Grand Rapids. Wonderful tip of her tongue, agile, squarish. Once after a dance French-kissed him parked by the quarry and he shot off behind his fly. Intenser then, the duct narrower, greater velocity. Not his girl but her underpants satiny, distant peaty odor, rustle of crinoline, formal dance. Quick as a wink, her dark tongue saucy under his. His body flashed the news nerve to nerve. Stiff in an instant. Touch. A waxworks petal laid out pillowed in sensitive frizz: wake up. Liquor. Evil dulling stuff. Lazes the blood, saps muscle tone. He turned over, bunched the pillow, lay flat and straight, trying to align himself with an invisible grain, the grain of the world, fate. Relax. Picture the party.

  Twisting. Bald Freddy Thorne with a glinting moist smirk put on the record. Chubby. Huooff: cummawn naioh evvribuddi less Twist! Therapy, to make them look awful. They were growing old and awful in each other’s homes. Only Carol had it of the women, the points of her pelvis making tidy figure eights, hands aloof like gentle knives, weight switching foot to foot, a silent clicking, stocking feet, narrow, hungry, her scrawny kind of high-school beauty, more his social level, the motion, coolly neat, feet forgotten, eyelids elegantly all but shuttered, making a presumed mist of Frank Appleby bouncing opposite, no logic in his hips, teeth outcurved braying, gums bared, brown breath, unpleasant spray. Everybody twisted. Little-Smith’s black snickering feet. Georgene’s chin set determinedly as if on second serve. Angela, too soft, rather swayed. Gallagher a jerking marionette. John Ong watched sober, silent, smiling, smoking. Turning to Piet he made high friendly noises that seemed in the din all vowels; Piet knew the Korean was worth more than them all together in a jiggling jouncing bunch but he could never understand what he said: Who never to himself has said. Bernadette came up, broad flat lady in two dimensions, half-Japanese, the other half Catholic, from Baltimore, and asked Piet, Twist? In the crowded shaking room, the Applebys’ children’s playroom, muraled in pink ducks, Bernadette kept bumping him, whacking him with her silken flatnesses, crucifix hopping in the shallow space between her breasts, thighs, wrists, bumping him, the yellow peril. Whoofwheeieu. Wow. Better a foxtrot. Making fools of themselves, working off steam, it’s getting too suburban in here. The windows had been painted shut. Walls of books.

  Piet felt, brave small Dutch boy, a danger hanging tidal above his friends, in this town where he had been taken in because Angela had been a Hamilton. The men had stopped having careers and the women had stopped having babies. Liquor and love were left. Bea Guerin, as they danced to Connie Francis, her drunken limpness dragging on his side so his leg and neck ached, her steamy breasts smearing his shirt, seemed to have asked why he didn’t want to fuck her. He wasn’t sure she had said it, it sounded like something in Dutch, fokker, in de fuik lopen, drifting to him from his parents as they talked between themselves in the back room of the greenhouse. Little Piet, Amerikander, couldn’t understand. But he loved being there with them, in the overheated warmth, watching his father’s broad stained thumbs packing moss, his mother’s pallid needling fingers wrapping pots in foil and stabbing in the green price spindles. Once more with the eyes of a child Piet saw the spools of paper ribbon, the boxes holding colored grits and pebbles for the tiny potted tableaux of cactuses and violets and china houses and animal figurines with spots of reflection on their noses, the drawerful of stacked gift cards saying in raised silver HANEMA, his name, himself, restraining constellated in its letters all his fate, me, a man, amen ah. Beside the backroom office where Mama did up pots and Papa paid his bills were the icy dewy doors where cut roses and carnations being dyed and lovely iris and gladioli leaned, refrigerated, dead. Piet tensed and changed position and erased the greenhouse with the party.

  The new couple. They looked precious to themselves, self-cherished, like gladioli. Cambridge transplants, tall and choice. Newcomers annoyed Piet. Soil here not that rich, crowding. Ted? Ken. Quick grin yet a sullen languor, a less than ironical interest in being right. Something in science, not mathematics like Ong or miniaturization like Saltz. Biochemistry. Papa had distrusted inorganic fertilizer, trucked chicken dung from poultry farms: this is my own, my native land. She was called oddly Foxy, a maiden name? Fairfox, Virginia? A southern flavor to her. Tall, oak and honey hair, a constant blush like windburn or fever. She seemed internally distressed and had spent two long intervals in the bathroom upstairs. Descending the second time she had revealed her stocking-tops to Piet, reclining acrobatically below. Tawny ashy rims in an upward bell of shadow. She had seen him peek and stared him down. Such amber eyes. Eyes the brown of brushed fur backed by gold.

  Bea. What did you say? I must be deaf.

  Sweet Piet, you heard. I must be very drunk. Forgive me.

  You’re dancing divinely.

  Don’t poke fun. I know I can’t matter to you, you have Georgene, and I can’t compare. She’s marvelous. She plays such marvelous tennis.

  That’s very flattering. You really think I’m seeing Georgene?

  It’s all right, singingly, gazing into a blurred distance, don’t bother to deny it, but Piet—Piet?

  Yes? I’m here. You haven’t changed partners.

  You poke fun of me. That’s mean, that’s not worthy of you, Piet. Piet?

  Hello again.

  I’d be kind to you. And someday you’re going to need somebody to be kind to you because—now don’t get cross—you’re surrounded by unkind people.

  For instance who? Poor Angela?

  You’re cross. I feel it in your body you’re cross.

  No, he said, and stood apart from her, so her dragging was no longer upon his body, and she sagged, then pulled herself erect, blinking, injured, as he went on, it happens every time I try to be nice to a drunk. I wind up getting insulted.

  Oh!—it was a breathless cry as if she had been struck. And I meant to be so kind.

  Whitewash wore away after two or three rains, but after the war the chemical companies came up with a compound that lasted pretty well until winter. In winter there could not be too much light. The Michigan snows piled in strata around the glass walls and within the greenhouse there was a lullaby sound of dripping and a rasping purring in the pipes rusted to the color of dirt as they snaked along the dirt floor flecked with tiny clover. A child cried out in her sleep. As if being strangled in a dream. From the voice he guessed it had been Nancy. She, who could tie her shoes at the age of three, had lately, now five, begun to suck her thumb and talk about dying. I will never grow up and I will never ever in my whole life die. Ruth, her sister, nine last November, hated to hear her. Yes you will die everybody will die including trees. Piet wondered if he should go to Nancy’s room but the cry was not repeated. Into the vacuum of his listening flowed a rhythmic squeaking insistent as breathing. A needle working in the night. For her birthday he had given Ruth a hamster; the little animal, sack-shaped and russet, slept a
ll day and ran in its exercise wheel all night. Piet vowed to oil the wheel but meanwhile tried to time his breathing with its beat. Too fast; his heart raced, seemed to bulge like a knapsack as into it was abruptly stuffed two thoughts that in the perspective of the night loomed as dreadful: soon he must begin building ranch houses on Indian Hill, and Angela wanted no more children. He would never have a son. Eek, ik, eeik, ik, eeek. Relax. Tomorrow is Sunday.

  A truck passed on the road and his ears followed it, focused on its vanishing point. As a child he had soothed himself with the sensation of things passing in the night, automobiles and trains, their furry growling sounds approaching and holding fast on a momentary plateau and then receding, leaving him ignored and untouched, passing on to Chicago or Detroit, Kalamazoo or Battle Creek or the other way to the snow, stitched with animal tracks, of the northern peninsula that only boats could reach. A bridge had since been built. He had pictured himself as Superman, with a chest of steel the flanged wheels of the engines could not dent, passing over him. The retreating whistles of those flatland trains had seemed drawn with a pencil sharpened so fine that in reality it broke. No such thing in nature as a point, or a perfect circle, or infinitude, or a hereafter. The truck had vanished. But must be, must. Must. Is somewhere.

  Traffic this late in this corner of New England, between Plymouth and Quincy, between Nun’s Bay and Lacetown, was sparse, and he waited a long stretch for the next truck to come lull him. Angela stirred, sluggishly avoiding some obstacle to the onflow of her sleep, a dream wanting to be born, and he remembered the last time they had made love, over a week ago, in another season, winter. Though he had skated patiently waiting for her skin to quicken from beneath she had finally despaired of having a climax and asked him simply to take her and be done. Released, she had turned away, and in looping his arm around her chest his fingers brushed an unexpected sad solidity.

  Angel, your nipples are hard.

  So?

  You’re excited and could have come too.

  I don’t think so. It just means I’m chilly.

  Let me make you come. With my mouth.

  No. I’m all wet down there.

  But it’s me, it’s my wetness.

  I want to go to sleep.

  But it’s so sad, that you liked my making love to you after all.

  I don’t see that it’s that sad. We’ll all be here another night.

  He lay on his back like a town suspended from a steeple. He felt delicate on his face a draft from somewhere in his snug house, a loose storm window, a tear in the attic foil, a murderer easing open a door. He rolled over on his stomach and the greenhouse washed over him. The tables like great wooden trays, the flowers budding and blooming and dropping their petals and not being bought. As a child he had mourned the unbought flowers, beseeching the even gray greenhouse light with their hopeful corollas and tepid perfume. He surveyed the party for a woman to bring home and picked Bea Guerin. Dear Bea, of course I want to fuck you, how could I not, with your steamy little body so tired and small and kind. Just about all lilies, aren’t you? Now spread your legs. Easy does it. Ah. The moisture and light within the greenhouse had been so constant and strong that even weeds grew; even when bright snow was heaped against the glass walls like a sliced cross section in a school book, clover from nowhere flourished around the legs of the tables and by the rusty pipes, and the dirt floor bore a mossy patina and was steeped in an odor incomparably quiet and settled and profound. He saw them, his father and mother, vader en moeder, moving gently in this receding polyhedral heart of light carved from dank nature, their bodies transparent, and his mind came to a cliff—a slip, then a skidding downward plunge. Left fist clenched upon himself, he groped in his mind for the party, but it was no longer there.

  God help me, help me, get me out of this. Eek ik, eeik ik. Dear God put me to sleep. Amen.

  A golden rooster turned high above Tarbox. The Congregational Church, a Greek temple with a cupola and spire, shared a ledgy rise, once common pasturage, with a baseball backstop and a cast-iron band pavilion used only on Memorial Day, when it sheltered shouted prayers, and in the Christmas season, when it became a crèche. Three edifices had succeeded the first meetinghouse, a thatched fort, and the last, renovated in 1896 and 1939, lifted well over one hundred feet into the air a gilded weathercock that had been salvaged from the previous church and thus dated from colonial times. Its eye was a copper English penny. Deposed once each generation by hurricanes, lightning, or repairs, it was always, much bent and welded, restored. It turned in the wind and flashed in the sun and served as a landmark to fishermen in Massachusetts Bay. Children in the town grew up with the sense that the bird was God. That is, if God were physically present in Tarbox, it was in the form of this unreachable weathercock visible from everywhere. And if its penny could see, it saw everything, spread below it like a living map. The central square mile of Tarbox contained a hosiery mill converted to the manufacture of plastic toys, three dozen stores, several acres of parking lot, and hundreds of small-yarded homes. The homes were mixed: the surviving seventeenth-century saltboxes the original Kimballs and Sewells and Tarboxes and Cogswells had set along the wobbly pasture lanes, quaintly named for the virtues, that radiated from the green; the peeling Federalist cubes with widow’s-walks; the gingerbread mansions attesting to the decades of textile prosperity; the tight brick alleys plotted to house the millworkers imported from Poland; the middle-class pre-Depression domiciles with stubby porches and narrow chimneys and composition sidings the colors of mustard and parsley and graphite and wine; the new developments like even pastel teeth eating the woods of faraway Indian Hill. Beyond, there was a veiny weave of roads, an arrowing disused railroad track, a river whose water was fresh above the yellow waterfall at the factory and saline below it, a golf course studded with bean-shapes of sand, some stubborn farms and checkerboard orchards, a glinting dairy barn on the Nun’s Bay Road, a field containing slowly moving specks that were galloping horses, level breadths of salt marsh broken by islands and inlets, and, its curved horizon marred, on days as clear as today, by the violet smudge that was the tip of Cape Cod, the eastward sea. Casting the penny of its gaze straight down, the cock could have observed, in dizzying perspective, the dotlike heads of church-goers congregating and, hurrying up the gray path, the red head of Piet Hanema, a latecomer.

  The interior of the church was white. Alabaster effects had been skillfully mimicked in wood. Graceful round vaults culminated in a hung plaster ceiling. A balcony with Doric fluting vertically scoring the parapet jutted as if weightless along the sides of the sanctuary and from under the painted Victorian organ in the rear. The joinery of the old box pews was still admirable. Piet seldom entered the church without reflecting that the carpenters who had built it were dead and that none of their quality had been born to replace them. He took his accustomed place in a left back pew, and latched the paneled door, and was alone with a frayed grape-colored pew cushion—a fund drive to replace these worn-out cushions had only half succeeded—and a pair of powder-blue Pilgrim hymnals and a hideous walnut communion-glass rack screwed to the old pine in obedience to a bequest. Piet always sat alone. His friends did not go to church. He adjusted the cushion and selected the less tattered of the two hymnals. The organist, a mauve-haired spinster from Lacetown, rummaged through a Bach prelude. The first hymn was number 195: “All Hail the Power.” Piet stood and sang. His voice, timid and off-key, now and then touched his own ears. “… on this terrestrial ball … let angels prostrate fall … and crown him, Lorhord of all …” On command, Piet sat and prayed. Prayer was an unsteady state of mind for him. When it worked, he seemed, for intermittent moments, to be in the farthest corner of a deep burrow, a small endearing hairy animal curled up as if to hibernate. In this condition he felt close to a massive warm secret, like the heart of lava at the earth’s core. His existence for a second seemed to evade decay. But church was too exciting, too full of light and music, for prayer to take place, and his mind sli
d from the words being intoned, and skimmed across several pieces of property that concerned him, and grazed the faces and limbs of women he knew, and darted from the image of his daughters to the memory of his parents, so unjustly and continuingly dead.

  They had died together, his mother within minutes and his father at the hospital three hours later, in a highway accident the week before the Christmas of 1949, at dusk. They had been driving home to Grand Rapids from a Grange meeting. There was an almost straight stretch of Route 21 that was often icy. The river flowed near it. It had begun to snow. A Lincoln skidded head-on into them; the driver, a boy from Ionia, survived with lacerations. From the position of the automobiles it was not clear who had skidded, but Piet, who knew how his father drove, as ploddingly as he potted geraniums, one mile after the other, did not doubt that it had been the boy’s fault. And yet—the dusk was confusing, his father was aging; perhaps, in an instant without perspective on that deceptive flat land, at the apparition of onrushing headlights, the wheels for a moment slithering, the old man had panicked. Could there have been, in that placid good gardener, with his even false teeth and heavy step and pallid stubby lashes, a fatal reserve of unreason that had burst forth and destroyed two blameless lives? All those accumulated budgets, and hoarded hopes, and seeds patiently brought to fruition? Piet pictured shattered glass strewn across the road and saw snow continue to descend, sparkling in the policemen’s whirling lights. He had been a sophomore at Michigan State, studying toward an architect’s certificate, and felt unable to continue, on borrowed money and the world’s sufferance. There was a shuddering in his head he could not eliminate. He let his brother Johan—Joop—cheaply buy his share of the greenhouses and let himself be drafted. Since this accident, the world wore a slippery surface for Piet; he stood on the skin of things in the posture of a man testing newly formed ice, his head cocked for the warning crack, his spine curved to make himself light.