Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “I’m all right now. I wasn’t sure I could get through it when we were at the table.”

  “It was pretty ghastly.”

  “They seemed so excited by each other.”

  “Funny people.” As if guilty, he added, “Poor Fox, sitting there yawning with her big belly.”

  “Was I too stupid? I told Bea.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “I wanted a pretend martini. Are you ashamed of my being pregnant?”

  “No, but why broadcast it? It’ll show soon enough.”

  “She won’t tell anybody.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  How little, Foxy thought, does matter to you. The trees by the roadside fell away, and rushed back in clumps, having revealed in the gaps cold stretches of moonlit marsh. The mailboxes grew fewer. Fewer houselights showed. Foxy tightened around her her coat, a fur-lined gabardine cut in imitation of a Russian general’s greatcoat. She foresaw their cold home with its flimsy walls and senile furnace. She said, “We must get a contractor. Should we ask this man Hanema to give us an estimate?”

  “Thorne says he’s a fanny-pincher.”

  “That’s called projection.”

  “Janet told me he almost bought the house himself. His wife apparently wanted the view.”

  Janet, is it?

  Foxy said, “Did you notice the antagonism between Frank and the little-Smith man?”

  “Aren’t they both in stocks somehow? Maybe they’re competing.”

  “Ken, you’re so work-oriented. I felt it had to do with s-e-x.”

  “With Janet?”

  “Well, she was certainly trying to make some point with her bosom.”

  He giggled. Stop it, she thought, it isn’t you. “Two points,” he said.

  “I knew you’d say that,” she said.

  There was a rise in the road, cratered by frost heaves, from which the sea was first visible. She saw that moonlight lived on the water, silver, steady, sliding with the motion of their car, yet holding furious myriad oscillations, like, she supposed, matter itself. Ken worked down there, where the protons swung from molecule to molecule and elements interlocked in long spiral ladders. A glimpse of dunes: bleached bones. The car sank into a dip. There were four such rises and falls between the deserted, boarded-up ice-cream stand and their driveway. They lived near the end of the road, an outpost in winter. Foxy abruptly craved the lightness, the freedom, of summer.

  Ken said, “Your friend Thorne had a very low opinion of Hanema.”

  “He is not my friend. He is an odious man and I don’t understand why everybody likes him so much.”

  “He’s a dentist. Everybody needs a dentist. Janet told me he wanted to be a psychiatrist but flunked medical school.”

  “He’s awful, all clammy and cozy and I kept feeling he wanted to get his hands inside me. I cut him short and he thought I was making a pass. He played kneesies with me.”

  “But he sat beside you.”

  “Sideways kneesies.”

  “I suppose it can be done.”

  “I think his poor opinion should be counted as a plus.”

  Ken said nothing.

  Foxy went on, “Roger Guerin said he was a good contractor. He did their house. With their money they could have afforded anybody.”

  “Let’s think about it. I’d rather get somebody nobody knows. I don’t want us to get too involved in this little nest out here.”

  “I thought one of the reasons we moved was so our friendships wouldn’t be so much at the mercy of your professional acquaintance.”

  “Say that again?”

  “You know what I said. I didn’t have any friends of my own, just chemical wives.”

  “Fox, that’s what we all are. Chemicals.” He knew she didn’t believe that, why did he say it? When would he let her out of school?

  A mailbox rammed by a snowplow leaned vacantly on the moonlight. The box belonged to summer people and would not be righted for months. Foxy wrapped her greatcoat tighter around her and in the same motion wrapped her body, her own self, around the small sour trouble brewing in her womb, this alien life furtively exploiting her own. She felt ugly and used. She said, “You really liked those women, didn’t you, with their push-me-up bras and their get-me-out-of-this giggles?” The women they had known in Cambridge had tended to be plain Quaker girls placidly wed to rising grinds, or else women armored in a repellent brilliance of their own, untouchable gypsy beauties with fiery views on Cuban sovereignty and German guilt. Foxy sighed as if in resignation. “Well, they say a man gets his first mistress when his wife becomes pregnant.”

  He looked over at her too surprised to speak, and she realized that he was incapable of betraying her, and marveled at her own disappointment. She puzzled herself; she had never been in their marriage more dependent upon him, or with more cause for gratitude. Yet a chemistry of unrest had arisen within her body, and she resented his separation from it. For she had always felt and felt now in him a fastidious, unlapsing accountability that shirked the guilt she obscurely felt belonged to life; and thus he left her with a double share.

  He said at last, “What are you suggesting? We were invited. We went. We might as well enjoy it. I have nothing against mediocre people, provided I don’t have to teach them anything.”

  Ken was thirty-two. They had met when he was a graduate student instructing in Biology 10 and she was a Radcliffe senior in need of a science credit. Since her sophomore year Foxy had been in love with a fine-arts major, a bearish Jewish boy from Detroit. He had since become a sculptor whose large welded assemblages of junk metal were occasionally pictured in magazines. There had been a clangor about him even then, a snuffly explosive air of self-parody, with his wiglike mop of hair, combed straight forward, and a nose so hooked its tip appeared to point at his lower lip. The curves of his face had been compressed around a certain contemptuousness. His tongue could quickly uncoil. Eat me up, little shiksa, I’m a dirty old man. I sneeze black snot. I pop my piles with a prophylactic toothbrush. He scorned any sign of fear from her. He taught her to blow. His prick enormous in her mouth, she felt her love of him as a billowing and gentle tearing of veils inside her. Before he took her up she had felt pale, tall, stiff, cold, unusable. His back was hairy and humpily muscular across the shoulder blades and thickly sown, as if by a curse, with moles.

  With a tact more crushing than brute forbidding her parents gradually made her love grotesque and untenable. She did not know how they did it: it was as if her parents and Peter communicated through her, without her knowing what was being said, until the No came from both sides, and met beneath her ribs. That schoolgirl ache, and all those cigarettes. Her senior year at Radcliffe, it had snowed and snowed; she remembered the twittering of the bicycles pushed on the paths, the song of unbuckled galoshes, the damp scarf around her neck, the fluttering of crystals, meek as thoughts, at the tall serene windows of the Fogg. She remembered the bleached light that had filled her room each morning before she awoke to the soreness in her chest.

  Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and was accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humor of her Jew. Ken looked like a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford lawyer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns but no mysteries. After her own degrading miscalculation—for this was what her first romance must have been, it ended in such a flurry of misery—Foxy sought shelter in Ken’s weatherproof rightness. She accepted gratefully his simple superiority to other people. He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine. He was fallible only if he took her, on the basis of the cool poise her tallness had demanded, f
or another of the same breed.

  She was, Elizabeth Fox from Bethesda, known to herself in terms of suppressed warmth. Applaudingly her adolescent heart had watched itself tug toward stray animals, lost children, forsaken heroines, and toward the bandaged wounded perambulating around the newly built hospital, with its ugly tall rows of windows like zipped zippers. They had moved from east Washington in the spring of 1941, as the hospital was being built. Her father was a career navy man, a lieutenant commander with some knowledge of engineering and an exaggerated sense of lineage. One of his grandfathers had been a Virginia soldier; the other, a New Jersey parson. He felt himself to be a gentleman and told Foxy, when she came to him at the age of twelve inspired to be a nurse, that she was too intelligent, that she would someday go to college. At Radcliffe, looking back, she supposed that her sense of deflected tenderness dated from her father’s long absences during World War II; the accident of global war had deprived her of the filial transition to heterosexual relationships free of slavishness, of the expiatory humiliations she goaded Peter to inflict. Now, herself married, milder and less mathematical in her self-analyses, she wondered if the sadness, the something broken and uncompleted in her upbringing, was not older than the war and belonged to the Depression, whose shadowy air of magnificent impotence, of trolley cars and sinusitis, still haunted the official mausoleums of Washington when she visited her mother. Perhaps the trouble had merely been that her mother, though shrewd and once pretty, had not been a gentlewoman, but a Maryland grocer’s daughter.

  Foxy had no sooner married than her parents had gotten divorced. Her father, his thirty years of service expired, far from retiring, took a lucrative advisory job to the shipbuilding industry, and moved to San Diego. Her mother, as if defiantly showing that she too could navigate in the waters of prosperity, remarried: a wealthy Georgetown widower, a Mr. Roth, who owned a chain of coin-operated laundromats, mostly in Negro neighborhoods. Foxy’s mother now made herself up carefully, put on a girdle even to go shopping, kept a poodle, smoked red-tipped filtered cigarettes, was known to their friends as “Connie,” and always spoke of her husband as “Roth.”

  The couple Foxy’s parents had been had vanished. The narrow shuttered frame house on Rosedale Street. The unused front porch. The tan shades always drawn against the heat. The electric fan in the kitchen swinging its slow head back and forth like an imbecile scolding in monotone. The staticky Philco conveying Lowell Thomas. The V-mail spurting through the thrilled slot. The once-a-week Negro woman, called Gracelyn, whose apron pockets smelled of orange peels and Tootsie Rolls. Veronica their jittery spayed terrier who was succeeded by Merle, a slavering black-tongued Chow. The parched flowerless shrubbery where Elizabeth would grub for bottlecaps and “clues,” the long newspaper-colored ice-cream evenings, the red-checked oilcloth on the kitchen table worn bare at two settings, the way her mother would sit nights at this table, after the news, before putting her daughter to bed, smoking a Chesterfield and smoothing with a jerky automatic motion the skin beneath her staring eyes: these images had vanished everywhere but in Foxy’s heart. She went to church to salvage something. Episcopalianism—its rolling baritone hymns to the sea, its pews sparkling with the officers’ shoulder-braid—had belonged to the gallant club of Daddy’s friends, headed by caped Mr. Roosevelt, that fought and won the war.

  She was graduated and married in June of 1956.

  Every marriage is a hedged bet. Foxy entered hers expecting that, whatever fate held for them, there were certain kinds of abuse it would never occur to her husband to inflict. He was beyond them, as most American men are beyond eye-gouging and evisceration. She had been right. He had proved not so much gentle as too fastidious to be cruel. She had no just complaints: only the unjust one that the delay while she waited barren for Ken to complete his doctorate had been long. Four intended years of post-graduate work had been stretched into five by the agonies of his dissertation; two more were spent in a post-doctoral fellowship granted by the U.S. Public Health Service; and then Ken squandered another as an instructor in the vicinity of the same magnetic Harvard gods, whose very names Foxy had come to hate. For her, there had been jobs, little research assistantships amid Flemish prints or Mesozoic fern fossils in comfortable dusty Harvard basements, a receptionist’s desk at University Hall, an involvement in a tutoring project for mentally disturbed children that had led her to consider and then to run from a career in social work, some random graduate courses, a stab at a master’s degree, two terms of life-drawing in Boston, vacations, even flirtations: but nothing fruitful. Seven years is long, counted in months paid for with a punctual tax of blood, in weeks whose pleasure is never free of the belittling apparatus of contraception, longer than a war. She had wanted to bear Ken a child, to brew his excellence in her warmth. This seemed the best gift she could offer him, since she grew to know that there was something of herself she withheld. A child, a binding of their chemistries, would be an honest pledge of her admiration and trust and would remove them for good from the plane where the sufficiency of these feelings could be doubted. Now this gift was permitted. Ken was an assistant professor at the university across the river, where the department of biochemistry was more permeable to rapid advancement. Their reasons for happiness were as sweeping as the view from their new house.

  The house had been Ken’s choice. She had thought they should live closer to Boston, in Lexington perhaps, among people like themselves. Tarbox was an outer limit, an hour’s drive, and yet he, who must do the commuting, seized the house as if all his life he had been waiting for a prospect as vacant and pure as these marshes, those bony far dunes, that rim of sea. Perhaps, Foxy guessed, it was a matter of scale: his microscopic work needed the relief of such a vastness. And it had helped that he and the real-estate man Gallagher had liked each other. Though she had raised all the reasonable objections, Foxy had been pleased to see him, after the long tame stasis of student existence, emerge to want something new, physical, real. That he had within him even the mild strangeness needed to insist on an out-of-the-way impractical house seemed (as if there had been a question of despair) hopeful.

  The house tonight was cold, stored with stale chill. Cotton, their cat, padded loudly toward them from the dark living room and, stiff from sleep, stretched. He was a heavy-footed caramel tom that in years of being their only pet had acquired something of a dog’s companionableness and something of a baby’s conceit. Courteously he bowed before them, his tail an interrogation mark, his front claws planted in the braided rag rug the Robinsons had abandoned in the hall. Cotton pulled his claws free with a dainty unsticking noise and purred in anticipation of Foxy’s picking him up. She held him, his throaty motor running, beneath her chin and like a child wished herself magically inside his pelt.

  Ken switched on a light in the living room. The bare walls leaped into being, the exposed studs, the intervals of varnish, the crumbling gypsum wallboard, the framed souvenirs of old summers—fan-shaped shell collections and dried arrays of littoral botany—that the Robinsons had left. They had never met them but Foxy saw them as a large sloppy family, full of pranks and nicknames for each other and hobbies, the mother watercoloring (her work was tacked all around upstairs), the older boys sailing in the marsh, the girl moonily collecting records and being teased, the younger boy and the father systematically combing the shore for classifiable examples of life. The room smelled as if summer had been sealed in and yet had leaked out. The French windows giving onto a side garden of roses and peonies were boarded. The shutters were locked over the windows that would have looked onto the porch and the marsh. The sharp-edged Cambridge furniture, half Door Store and half Design Research, looked scattered and sparse; the room was a good size and of a good square shape. It had possibilities. It needed white paint and walls and light and love and style. She said, “We must start doing things.”

  Ken felt the floor register with his hand. “The furnace is dead again.”

  “Leave it to morning. No warmth gets u
pstairs anyway.”

  “I don’t like being outsmarted. I’m going to learn how to bank this bastard.”

  “I’m more worried about dying in my sleep of coal gas.”

  “No chance of that in this sieve.”

  “Ken, please call Hanema.”

  “You call him.”

  “You’re the man of the house.”

  “I’m not sure he’s the right man.”

  “You like Gallagher.”

  “They’re not twins, they’re partners.”

  “Then find somebody else.”

  “If you want him, you call him.”

  “Well I just might.”

  “Go ahead. Fine.” He went to the door that led down into the narrow hole that did for a basement. The register began to clank and release a poisonous smell. Foxy carried Cotton into the kitchen, plugged in the electric heater, and poured two bowls of milk. One she set on the floor for the cat; the other she broke Saltines into, for herself. Cotton sniffed, disdained the offering, and interrogatively mewed. Foxy ignored him and ate greedily with a soup spoon. Crackers and milk had been a childhood treat between news and bedtime; her craving for it had come over her like a sudden release from fever, a gust of health. While the glow of the heater and the begging friction of fur alternated on her legs, she spread butter thickly on spongy white bread, tearing it, overweighting it, three pieces one after the other, too ravenous to bother with toast, compulsive as a drunk. Her fingertips gleamed with butter.

  Washing them, she leaned on her slate sink and gazed from the window. The tide was high; moonlight displayed a silver saturation overflowing the linear grid of ditches. Against the sheen was silhouetted a little houseless island of brambles. In the distance, along the far arm of Tarbox Bay, the lights of another town, whose name she had not yet learned, spangled the horizon. A revolving searchlight rhythmically stroked the plane of ocean. Its beam struck her face at uneven intervals. She counted: five, two, five, two. A double beam. Seconds slipping, gone; five, two. She hastily turned and rolled up the cellophane breadwrapper; a voluminous sadness had been carved for her out of the night. It was after midnight. Today was Easter. She must get up for church.