Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Roger Guerin said to Foxy, “It is true, the rates in town are the highest in Plymouth County. But we have so many old wooden houses.”

  “Yours is beautifully restored,” Foxy told him.

  “We find it inhibiting as far as furniture goes. Actually, Piet Hanema was the contractor.”

  Seated between Ken and little-Smith, Janet Appleby, a powdered plump vexed face with charcoal lids and valentine lips, cried, “And that alarm!” Leaning toward Foxy in explanation, she dipped the tops of her breasts creamily into the light. “You can’t hear it down on the marsh, but we live just across the river and it’s the absolutely worst noise I ever heard anything civic make. The children in town call it the Dying Cow.”

  “We’ve become slaves to auctions,” Roger Guerin was continuing. From the square shape of his head Foxy guessed he was Swiss rather than French in ancestry.

  Her side was nudged and Freddy Thorne told her, “Roger thinks auctions are like Monopoly games. All over New Hampshire and Rhode Island they know him as the Mad Bidder from Tarbox. Highboys, lowboys, bus boys. He’s crazy for commodes.”

  “Freddy exaggerates,” Roger said.

  “He’s very discriminating,” Bea called from her end of the table.

  “That’s not what I’m told they call it,” Harold little-Smith was saying to Janet.

  “What are you told, dear?” Janet responded.

  Harold dipped his fingers into his water goblet and flicked them at her face; three or four drops, each holding a spark of reflection, appeared on her naked shoulders. “Femme méchante,” he said.

  Frank Appleby intervened, telling Ken and Foxy, “The phrase the children use when the alarm goes would translate into decent language as, ‘The Deity is releasing gas.’ ”

  Marcia said, “The children bring home scandalous jokes from school. The other day Jonathan came and told me, ‘Mother, the governor has two cities in Massachusetts named after him. One is Peabody. What’s the other?’ ”

  “Marblehead,” Janet said. “Frankie thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.”

  Bea Guerin and the silent wife of Freddy Thorne rose and took the soup plates away. Foxy had only half-finished. Mrs. Thorne politely hesitated. Foxy rested her spoon and put her hands in her lap. The soup vanished. Oh thank you. Circling the table, Bea said singingly, “My favorite townsperson is the old lady with the National Geographics.”

  Little-Smith, aware that Ken had not spoken a word, turned to him politely; fierily illuminated, the tip of his nose suggested something diabolical, a cleft foot. “Did Frank tell me you were a geographer, or was it geologist?”

  “Biochemist,” Ken said.

  “He should meet Ben Saltz,” Janet said.

  “The fate worse than death,” Freddy said, “if you don’t mind my being anti-Semitic.”

  Foxy asked the candlelit air, “National Geographics?”

  “She has them all,” the little-Smith woman said, leaning not toward Foxy but toward Ken across the table. From Foxy’s angle she was in profile, her lower lip saucily retracted and her earring twittering beside her jaw like a tiny machine. Ken abruptly laughed. His laugh was a boy’s, sudden and high and disproportionate. In private with her, he rarely laughed.

  Encouraged, the others went on. The old lady was the very last of the actual Tarboxes, and she lived in one or two rooms of a big Victorian shell on Divinity Street toward the fire station, crammed in among the shops, diagonally across from the post office and Freddy’s office, and her father, who had owned the hosiery mill that now makes plastic ducks for bath tubs, and teething rings, had been a charter subscriber. They were neatly stacked along the walls, twelve issues every year, since 1888.

  “The town engineer,” Frank Appleby pronounced, “calculates that with the arrival of the issue of November 1984, she will be crushed to death.”

  “Like a character in Poe,” little-Smith said, and determinedly addressed his wife. “Marcia, which? Not ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ ”

  “Harold, you’re confused by ‘The House of Usher,’ ” she told him.

  “Non, non, tu es confuse,” he said, and Foxy felt that but for the table between them they would have clawed each other. “There is a story, of walls squeezing in.”

  Janet said, “It happens on television all the time,” and went on in general, “What can we do about our children watching? Frankie’s becoming an absolute zombie.”

  Frank Appleby said, “It’s called ‘The Day the Walls Squeezed In.’ As told to Jim Bishop.”

  Ken added, “By I. M. Flat, a survivor in two dimensions,” and laughed so hard a candle flame wavered.

  Marcia said, “Speaking of television, you know what I just read? By the year 1990 they’re going to have one in every room, so everybody can be watched. The article said”—she faltered, then swiftly proceeded—“nobody could commit adultery.” An angel passed overhead.

  “My God,” Frank said. “They’ll undermine the institution of marriage.”

  The laughter, Foxy supposed, was cathartic.

  Freddy Thorne murmured to her, “Your husband is quite witty. He’s not such a stick as I thought. I. M. Flat in two dimensions. I like it.”

  Harold little-Smith was not amused. He turned the conversation outward, saying, “Say. Wasn’t that a shocker about the Thresher?”

  “What shocked you about it?” Freddy asked, with that slippery thrusting undertone. So it wasn’t just women he used it on.

  “I think it’s shocking,” little-Smith iterated, “that in so-called peacetime we send a hundred young men to be crushed at the bottom of the sea.”

  Freddy said, “They enlisted. We’ve all been through it, Harry boy. We took our chances honeymooning with Uncle, and so did they. Che sarà sarà, as Dodo Day so shrewdly puts it.”

  Janet asked Harold, “Why ‘so-called’?”

  Harold snapped, “We’ll be at war with China in five years. We’re at war with her now. Kennedy’ll up the stakes in Laos just enough to keep the economy humming. What we need in Laos is another Diem.”

  Janet said, “Harold, that’s reactionary shit. I get enough of that from Frank.”

  Roger Guerin said to Foxy, “Don’t take them too seriously. There’s nothing romantic or eccentric about Tarbox. The Puritans tried to make it a port but they got silted in. Like everything in New England, it’s passé, only more so.”

  “Roger,” Janet protested, “that’s a rotten thing for you to be telling this child, what with our lovely churches and old houses and marshes and absolutely grand beach. I think we’re the prettiest unselfconscious town in America.” She did not acknowledge that, as she was speaking, Harold little-Smith was blotting, with the tip of his index finger, each of the water drops he had flicked onto her shoulders.

  Frank Appleby bellowed, “Do you two want a towel?”

  A leg of lamb and a bowl of vegetables were brought in. The host stood and carved. His hands with their long polished nails could have posed for a cookbook diagram: the opening wedge, the lateral cut along the lurking bone, the vertical slices precise as petals, two to a plate. The plates were passed the length of the table to Bea, who added spring peas and baby potatoes and mint jelly. Plain country fare, Foxy thought; she and Ken had lived six years in Cambridge, a region of complicated casseroles and Hungarian goulashes and garlicky salads and mock duck and sautéed sweetbreads. Among these less sophisticated eaters Foxy felt she could be, herself, a delicacy, a princess. Frank Appleby was given two bottles to uncork, local-liquor-store Bordeaux, and went around the table twice, pouring once for the ladies, and then for the men. In Cambridge the Chianti was passed from hand to hand without ceremony.

  Freddy Thorne proposed a toast. “For our gallant boys in the Thresher.”

  “Freddy, that’s ghoulish!” Marcia little-Smith cried.

  “Freddy, really,” Janet said.

  Freddy shrugged and said, “It came from the heart. Take it or leave it. Mea culpa, mea culpa.”


  Foxy saw that he was used to rejection; he savored it, as if a dark diagnosis had been confirmed. Further she sensed that his being despised served as a unifying purpose for the others, gave them a common identity, as the couples that tolerated Freddy Thorne. Foxy glanced curiously at Thorne’s wife. Sensing Foxy’s perusal, she glanced up. Her eyes were a startling pale green, slightly protruding, drilled with pupils like the eyes of Roman portrait busts. Foxy thought she must be made of something very hard, not to show a scar from her marriage.

  “Freddy, I don’t think you meant it at all,” Janet went on, “not at all. You’re delighted it was them and not you.”

  “You bet. You too. We’re all survivors. A dwindling band of survivors. I took my chances. I did my time for God and Uncle.”

  “You sat at a steel desk reading Japanese pornography,” Harold told him.

  Freddy looked astonished, his shapeless mouth inbent. “Didn’t everybody? We’ve all heard often enough about you and your geishas. Poor little underfed girls, for a pack of cigarettes and half of a Hershey bar.”

  His wife’s bottle-green eyes gazed at the man as if he belonged to someone else.

  “You wonder what they think,” Freddy went on, swimming, trying not to drown in their contempt, his black mouth lifted. “The goddam gauges start spinning, the fucking pipes begin to break, and—what? Mother? The flag? Jesu Cristo? The last piece of ass you had?”

  A contemptuous silence welled from the men.

  “What I found so touching,” Bea Guerin haltingly sang, “was the way the tender—is that what it is?—”

  “Submarine tender, yes,” her husband said.

  “—the way the tender was called Skylark. And how all morning it called and circled, in the sea that from underneath must look like a sky, circling and calling, and nobody answered. Poor Skylark.”

  Frank Appleby stood. “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia. I propose a toast, to the new couple, the Whitmans.”

  “Hear,” Roger Guerin said, scowling.

  “May you long support our tax rolls, whose rate is high and whose benefits are nil.”

  “Hear, hear.” It was little-Smith. “Ecoutez.”

  “Thank you,” Foxy said, blushing and feeling a fresh wave of rebuke rising within her. She quickly put down her fork. The lamb was underdone.

  Little-Smith tried again with Ken. “What do you do, as a biochemist?”

  “I do different things. I think about photosynthesis. I used to slice up starfish extremely thin, to study their metabolism.”

  Janet Appleby leaned forward again, tipping the creamy tops of her breasts into the warm light, and asked, “And then do they survive, in two dimensions?” Through a lucid curling wave of nausea Foxy saw that her husband was being flirted with.

  Ken laughed eagerly. “No, they die. That’s the trouble with my field. Life hates being analyzed.”

  Bea asked, “Is the chemistry very complex?”

  “Very. Incredibly. If a clever theologian ever got hold of how complex it is, they’d make us all believe in God again.”

  Ousted by Bea, Janet turned to them all. “Speaking of that,” she said, “what does this old Pope John keep bothering us about? He acts as if we all voted him in.”

  “I like him,” Harold said. “Je l’adore.”

  Marcia told him, “But you like Khrushchev too.”

  “I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.”

  “Well,” Janet said, “I tried to read this Pacem in Terris and it’s as dull as something from the UN.”

  “Hey Roger,” Freddy called across Foxy, his breath meaty, “how do you like the way U Whosie has bopped Tshombe in the Congo? Takes a nigger to beat a nigger.”

  “I think it’s lovely,” Bea said emphatically to Ken, touching his sleeve, “that it’s so complex. I don’t want to be understood.”

  Ken said, “Luckily, the processes are pretty much the same throughout the kingdom of life. A piece of yeast and you, for example, break down glucose into pyruvic acid by exactly the same eight transformations.” This was an aspect of him that Foxy rarely saw any more, the young man who could say “the kingdom of life.” Who did he think was king?

  Bea said, “Oh dear. Some days I do feel moldy.”

  Freddy persisted, though Roger’s tiny mouth had tightened in response. “The trouble with Hammarskjöld,” he said, “he was too much like you and me, Roger. Nice guys.”

  Marcia little-Smith called to her husband, “Darling, who isn’t letting you be a wonderful old bastard? Terrible me?”

  “Actually, Hass,” Frank Appleby said, “I see you as our local Bertrand Russell.”

  “I put him more as a Schweitzer type,” Freddy Thorne said.

  “You bastards, I mean it.” The tip of his nose lifted under persecution like the flowery nose of a mole. “Look at Kennedy. There’s somebody inside that robot trying to get out, but it doesn’t dare because he’s too young. He’d be crucified.”

  Janet Appleby said, “Let’s talk news. We always talk people. I’ve been reading the newspaper while Frank reads Shakespeare. Why is Egypt merging with those other Arabs? Don’t they know they have Israel in between? It’s as bad as us and Alaska.”

  “I love you, Janet,” Bea called, across Ken. “You think like I do.”

  “Those countries aren’t countries,” Harold said. “They’re just branches of Standard Oil. L’huile étendarde.”

  “Tell us some more Shakespeare, Frank,” Freddy said.

  “We have laughed,” Frank said, “to see the sails conceive, and grow big-bellied with the wanton wind. Midsummer Night’s Dream. Isn’t that a grand image? I’ve been holding it in my mind for days. Grow big-bellied with the wanton wind.” He stood and poured more wine around. Foxy put her hand over the mouth of her glass.

  Freddy Thorne leaned close to her and said, “You don’t have much of an appetite. Tummy trouble?”

  “Seriously,” Roger Guerin said on her other side, “I’d have no hesitation about calling Hanema and at least getting an estimate. He does very solid work. He’s one of the few contractors left, for instance, who puts up honest plaster walls. And his job for us, though it took forever, was really very loving. Restoration is probably his forte.”

  Bea added, “He’s a dear little old-fashioned kind of man.”

  “You’ll be so-orry,” Freddy Thorne said.

  Frank Appleby called, “And you can get him to build a dike for you so Ken can farm the marsh. There’s a fortune to be made in salt hay. It’s used to mulch artichokes.”

  Foxy turned to her tormentor. “Why don’t you like him?” She had abruptly remembered who Hanema was. At Frank’s party, a short red-haired man clownishly lying at the foot of the stairs had looked up her dress.

  “I do like him,” Freddy Thorne told her. “I love him. I love him like a brother.”

  “And he you,” little-Smith said quickly.

  Thorne said, “To tell the truth, I feel homosexually attracted to him.”

  “Freddy,” Thorne’s wife said in a level voice hardly intended to be heard.

  “He has a lovely wife,” Roger said.

  “She is lovely,” Bea Guerin called. “So serene. I envy the wonderful way she moves. Don’t you, Georgene?”

  “Angela’s really a robot,” Frank Appleby said, “with Jack Kennedy inside her, trying to get out.”

  “I don’t know,” Georgene Thorne said, “that she’s so perfect. I don’t think she gives Piet very much.”

  “She gives him social aplomb,” Harold said.

  Freddy said, “I bet she even gives him a bang now and then. She’s human. Hell, everybody’s human. That’s my theory.”

  Foxy asked him, “What does he do neurotic?”

  “You heard Roger describe the way he builds. He’s anally neat. Also, he goes to church.”

  “But I go to church. I wouldn’t be without it.”


  “Frank,” Freddy called, “I think I’ve found the fourth.” Foxy guessed he meant that she was the fourth most neurotic person in town, behind the fire chief, the Dutch contractor, and the lady doomed to be crushed by magazines.

  Foxy came from Maryland and partook of the aggressiveness of southern women. “You must tell me what you mean by ‘neurotic.’ ”

  Thorne smiled. His sickly mouth by candlelight invited her to come in. “You haven’t told me what you mean by ‘character.’ ”

  “Perhaps,” Foxy said, scornfully bright, “we mean the same thing.” She disliked this man, she had never in her memory met a man she disliked more, and she tried to elicit, from the confusion within her body, a clear expression of this.

  He leaned against her and whispered, “Eat some of Bea’s lamb, just to be polite, even if it is raw.” Then he turned from her, as if snubbing a petitioner, and lit Marcia’s cigarette. As he did so, his thigh deliberately slid against Foxy’s. She was startled, amused, disgusted. This fool imagined he had made a conquest. She felt in him, and then dreaded, a desire to intrude upon, to figure in, her fate. His thigh increased its pressure and in the lulling dull light she experienced an escapist craving for sleep. She glanced about for rescue. Her host, his eyebrows knitted tyrannically above the bridge of his nose, was concentrating on carving more lamb. Across the table her husband, the father of her need for sleep, was laughing between Bea Guerin and Janet Appleby. The daggery shadow in the cleft between Janet’s lush breasts changed shape as her hands darted in emphasis of unheard sentences. More wine was poured. Foxy nodded, in assent to a question she thought had been asked her, and snapped her head upright in fear of having dropped asleep. Her thigh was nudged again. No one would speak to her. Roger Guerin was murmuring, administering some sort of consolation, to Georgene Thorne. Ken’s high hard laugh rang out, and his face, usually so ascetic, looked pasty and unreal, as if struck by a searchlight. He was having a good time; she was hours from bed.

  As they drove home, the night revived her. The fresh air was cool and the sky like a great wave collapsing was crested with stars. Their headlights picked up mailboxes, hedgerows, crusts of dry snow in a ditch. Ken’s MG swayed with each turn of the winding beach road. He asked her, “Are you dead?”