Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Never,” Janet said flatly. “Piet’s too tame. He’s too thick in the conscience. He’ll stick it out with those three, picking up whatever spare ass he can. The bad thing about a cockteaser like Angela is she turns her man loose on the world and lets a lot of other women in for trouble. Piet can be very winning.”

  “You speak as one who knows. Elle qui sait.”

  “There’ve been overtures, nothing drastic. Among his other problems, he’s shy.”

  “Poor Piet,” Harold said, uncertain why, though Janet nodded in agreement.

  That weekend, he asked Marcia, after a party, when both were drunk, “Do you love me?”

  “I love you, Harold, but please not tonight. We’re both too drunk and sleepy. Let’s have a nap instead sometime tomorrow.” Tomorrow was Sunday.

  “I didn’t mean to make love, I meant, honestly, après douze années très heureuses, aren’t you pretty bored with me? Don’t you ever think of what it would be like with other men?”

  “Oh, maybe a little. Not very consciously.” She was wearing a chiffon nightie the color of persimmon, and as she crawled into bed her dark limbs looked monkeyish. Getting into bed demanded nimbleness of her because the bed was high; also it was high and hard, because they found such a mattress best for lovemaking. The little-Smiths’ bedroom, as they had designed it, was a shrine, a severe sacred space; its furniture consisted of little more than two teak bureaus, a reading lamp built into the headboard, a mirror on a closet door, a philodendron, and for a rug the hide of a zebra that Harold’s grandfather had shot on safari with Teddy Roosevelt. When she was settled in, he turned off the light. The darkness was purple, and high in the window the marsh moon amid moving clouds seemed to swing back and forth like the bob of a pendulum.

  “Tell me,” he said. “You won’t hurt my feelings.”

  “OK. Ask me the men.”

  “Have you ever wanted to go to bed with Piet Hanema?”

  “Not really. He reminds me too much of a fatherly elf. He’s too paternal and sympathetic. Once at the Guerins we were left alone in the room with the bigger fireplace and he began to stroke my back and it felt as if he wanted to burp me. I think Piet likes bigger women. Georgene and Bea and I are too small for him.”

  “Freddy Thorne.”

  “Never, never. He’s so slippery and womanish, I think sex is all talk with him anyway. Janet responds to him better than I do; ask her.”

  “You know I can’t talk to Janet. Her vocabulary puts me off.”

  “It’s getting worse lately, isn’t it?”

  “And Frank?”

  Patterns of light—long lozenges of moonlight laid across the zebra rug and a corner of the bed; a rod of electric light coming from the hallway through the crack their door was left ajar, to comfort the children; a dim bluish smear on the ceiling from a carbon streetlight on the beach road, entering by the foyer transom—welled from the purple darkness as Harold held his breath, waiting for Marcia’s answer.

  It came very casually, in a voice half asleep. “Oh, Frank’s been a friend too long to think about that way. Besides, he has whiskey breath and an ulcer. No, thanks.” When, still studying their placid guests of light, he made no reply, she stirred and asked, “Why? Do you want Janet?”

  He laughed quite loudly and said, “Mon Dieu, no! That girl’s pure trouble.”

  “She’s very hostile to me lately.”

  “I think,” Harold said, snaking his arm around her and snuggling his genitals into the curved warmth of her backside, “we should make an effort to see less of the Applebys. Let’s have the Guerins over sometime. Maybe with some new people like the Constantines. The wife seems pretty hip.”

  Marcia made no response, and he nudged her, and she said, “The Guerins are so depressing.”

  Janet was gayer at their next lunch, and looked five years younger. The day was one of those very hot days toward the end of August when to a woman summer seems a lover leaving, to be embraced with full abandon: appearances are past mattering; love disdains nothing. Sweat mars her makeup and mats her hairdo. Her arms swim freely in air. The steaming city streets crammed with secretaries have the voluptuousness of a seraglio. Janet wore an armless cotton dress printed with upside-down herons on a turquoise ground and swung herself along as if nothing in the natural world, no thrust of sun or thunderclap, could do her harm. Her feet, naked in sandals, were dusty, and Harold wondered, walking along Federal Street beside her in the heat, what it would be like to suck each dirty one of her ten toes clean. He took off his coat and swung it over his shoulder like a tough; they ate in a cafeteria whose glass doors were open at either end like sluice gates. Noise poured through him, backfiring trucks and the clatter of cutlery and the shouting of orders and the words of the girl across from him, with her sweating round face and eroded lipstick. She said, “How was your weekend?”

  “Fine. You should know. We saw you every minute of it, except when somebody had to go to the bathroom.”

  “I know, isn’t it boring? Frank and Marcia mooning at each other and exchanging ever so teeny-tiny little tender glances.”

  “You do exaggerate that.”

  “Balls, Harold. Frank absolutely gets choleric when he can’t have Marcia as his tennis partner. And when they’re across the net from each other, all those cute little pat shots, I could puke. He’s always ‘swinging by.’ ‘I’ll swing by the Smith’s to pick up Frankie.’ ‘I just swung by Smitty’s to drop off the variorum Shakespeare, and they had me in for a drink.’ It turns out ‘they’ was Marcia and you were off at a town Republican meeting. Harold, why are you a conservative?—it’s such a pose.”

  He endured this tirade pleasurably, as if it were a massage or a shower. “But you still have nothing definite.”

  “How definite must definite be? Harold, he knows too much. He knew you were going to Symphony with the Gallaghers Saturday night. He knew Julia sprained her shoulder diving off the dock Thursday. When I talk to Marcia and tell him what she said he doesn’t bother to listen because he’s heard it all already. He knows you and she go skinny-dipping down by your dock and then fuck.”

  “Doesn’t everybody know that? The dock part of it. The other doesn’t invariably follow.”

  “How would everybody know? You think your friends have nothing better to do than splosh around the marshes with binoculars?”

  “Marcia might tell Bea, or Georgene, or even Irene, in passing.”

  “Well she doesn’t tell me and I’m her best friend supposedly. Frank tells me. Frank.”

  “I asked her the other night if she was having an affair with Frank.”

  Janet bit into her pastrami-on-a-roll and stared above the bun. “And she said?”

  “I forget exactly what she said. We were both sleepy. She said he was too old a friend and had an ulcer.”

  “Two good reasons for it. Every woman has a nurse complex. And why not sleep with a friend? It’s better than sleeping with an enemy. I’ve never understood why people are so shocked when somebody sleeps with his best friend’s wife. Obviously, his best friend’s wife is the one he sees most of.”

  “Well, she convinced me.” He tried to state his heart’s case. “We’re not that unhappy, for her to do me dirt.”

  “Very well. She’s as pure as Snow White and the stains in Frank’s underpants are accidents of nature. Let’s forget them. Let’s talk about us. Why don’t you like me, Harold? I like you. I like the way your nose comes to two points, like a very pale strawberry. Why don’t you take the afternoon off and walk me through the Common over to Newbury Street and look at pictures? You understand pictures. What’s this new gimmick of making things look like comic strips?”

  She put her hand palm up on the tabletop; it was moist, a creased pink saucer of moisture on the silver-flecked formica. When he put his hand in hers, the gesture, amid the clatter and breeze of the cafeteria, felt hugely inflated: two immense white hands, like the mock-up of a beefburger, advertising love. With the other hand she wa
s mopping up bits of pastrami with the final bite of the roll. “That’s a delectable idea,” he said, “but I can’t. We’re taking off Friday for Maine over Labor Day, so I have only one day left at the office. I need this afternoon. It’s called Pop Art. It’s also called hard-edge.”

  “So you’ll be gone all weekend?” She withdrew her hand to wipe her fingertips, one by one, on a paper napkin. Her face seemed forlorn; her eye shadow had run, making her look theatrically tired.

  Harold said, “Yes, and we’re staying a few days past the holiday, so I’ll miss next week’s lunch with you. Je regrette.”

  “Do you?” In parting she told him, this blowzy stacked woman in upside-down herons, with a wave of her shapely swimmer’s arm, “Have a good time with Marcia,” the emphasis insolent. Then they went out of opposite ends of the cafeteria, she toward her maroon car in the Underground Garage, he toward his office on Post Office Square, glad to be released.

  The family place in Maine overlooked a mottled blue harbor choked with glinting sails, swinging buoys, and surprising rocks that all jutted from the water at the same angle, testifying to a geological upheaval aeons ago. The largest rocks supported grass and shrubs and were therefore islands. The water was icy-cold and the beaches, far from the endless dunes of Tarbox, were niggardly arcs of shingle and brownish grit strewn with rack. Yet Harold, who visited Tarbox Beach only once or twice a summer, here swam before every breakfast. He was always happy in Maine. He ate the lobster and potato salad his mother set before him and read brittle paperback mysteries and old explorer’s accounts in splotched bindings and sailed through the slapping spray and needled his sisters and brothers-in-law and slept soundly, having made love to Marcia like a sailor in from months at sea. She seemed his whore. She crouched and whimpered above him, her nipples teasing his lips. She went down on him purring; she was a minx. This was new, this quality of prostitution, of her frankly servicing him, and taking her own pleasure as a subdivision of his. Her slick firm body was shameless yet did not reveal, as her more virginal intercourse once had done, the inner petals drenched in helpless nectar. She remained slightly tight and dry. He did not wonder from whence this change in her chemistry had been derived, since he found it an improvement: less tact was demanded of him, and less self-control. Perhaps he abused her, for in the second half of their vacation, abruptly beginning on Labor Day night, she refused him. Afterwards she told Frank that suddenly she couldn’t stand the confident touch of Harold’s all-too-knowing hands. “He seemed a lewd little stranger who acted as if he had bought me.” To have him inside her was distasteful: “like food in my mouth I couldn’t swallow.” Perhaps, in Maine, Marcia had experimented with corruption too successfully. Carrying within her like a contraceptive loop her knowledge of her lover, she had inflicted a stark sensuality upon her husband and then been dismayed by his eager submission to it. She realized she could serve several men in one bed, many men in one night—that this possibility was part of her nature; and she fled into an exclusive love for Frank. Making love to Harold suddenly lost seriousness. What they did with each other’s bodies became as trivial as defecation, and it was not until months later, when his form was charged with the tense threat of his leaving her, that the curse of squeamishness was removed from their physical relations.

  The little-Smiths returned to Tarbox Thursday night. Harold was conscious of having broken the string of appointments with Janet and doubted, without conscious regret, that there would be any more. Her theory had been wrong and may have never been more than a pretext. Growing up with three sisters had left him with little reverence for female minds. He had seen his sisters turn from comfortably shouting slugging animals into deceptive creatures condemned to assure their survival without overt aggression; their sensibilities were necessarily morbid. Janet was at best a poor reasoner and at worst a paranoid. About to go fat and lose her looks, stuck with a bilious and boring husband, she had turned desperately to a man in no way desperate. Brokers reaped in fair and foul weather, and Marcia had demonstrated a new versatility and violence in her love of him.

  He did expect Janet to call him at his office Friday and, when no call came, was annoyed at the extent to which he permitted himself to listen for it. All day, as he rooted through the earthbound stack of waiting mail and obsolete stock fluctuations, a signal from outer space kept tickling his inner ear. He remembered her strange way of wearing cloth, so that it came loose from her body and fluttered in the mind’s eye. Perhaps they would see them this weekend. He hoped she wouldn’t attempt a scene. Her indignation was so—fluffy. His secretary asked him why he was smiling.

  Saturday morning, Marcia drove up to the center of Tarbox to talk to Irene Saltz about the Fair Housing group; Marcia had agreed to be on the education committee, whose chief accomplishment so far had been to give the high-school library a subscription to Ebony. “It might take hours, you know how she talks. Can you feed yourself and the children if I don’t make it back by noon? There’s some pastrami in the freezer you can heat up. The directions are on the package. The important thing is to boil it with the cellophane on.”

  They had been up drinking with the Thornes and the Hanemas the night before, and Harold was content to putter about gingerly, tucking away the props of high summer, folding the collapsed and torn plastic wading pool, coiling hose and detaching the sprinkler. Jonathan rummaged the football from a closet and he and Harold tossed it back and forth until a playmate, pudgy Frankie Appleby, arrived, with his mother. Janet was wearing snug blue denim slacks, an orange-striped boating jersey, and an unbuttoned peach-colored cashmere sweater, hung on her shoulders like a cape. “Where’s Marcia?” she asked, when the boys were out of earshot on the lawn.

  “In town conferring with Irene. Where’s Frank?”

  “He told me he was getting a haircut. But he didn’t want to take Franklin because he might go to the drugstore and have to talk politics.” She snorted, a sardonic equine noise, and stamped her foot. She was caught beneath a bell of radiance; the mistless sharp light of September was spread around them for miles, to the rim of the marshes, to the bungalow-crowded peninsula of East Mather and the ghostly radar dish, cocked toward the north. Janet was hollow-eyed and pale and ripe with nervous agitation, a soft-skinned ripeness careless of itself.

  Harold said, “You think he’s lying.”

  “Of course he’s lying. Must we stand out here? The sun hurts.”

  “I thought you were a sun lover. Une amoureuse du soleil.”

  “Not today. I’m sick at what I have to do.”

  “To whom?”

  “To youm.”

  Harold opened for her the door that entered from the lawn the lower level of the house, where the children slept and the laundry was done. The laundry room smelled of cement and soap and, this morning, sourly, of unwashed clothes heaped around the dryer. The gardening and carpentry tools and shelves of paint and grass seed and lime were ranged along the other wall, which reeked of gasoline from the power mower. Amid these fragrances Janet took a stance and said, “While you were away in Maine my car broke down, the transmission, so I had to go shopping in Frank’s Corvair. I like the Lacetown IGA and on the way back that officious old Lacetown cop, the one with the gold teeth, stopped me for gliding through the stop sign, you know, just this side of the lace-making museum. What made me so mad, I was almost in Tarbox, where they never arrest you. Anyway, in looking through the glove compartment for the registration, underneath all the maps, I found this.” She brought from her purse a piece of smudged white paper folded quarto. Harold recognized the indigo rim of Marcia’s stationery. The notepaper had been given her as a wedding present, embossed with a monogram of her new initials, by a Southampton aunt, boxes of it; Marcia had laughed, thinking it hideously pretentious, the essence of everything she had married Harold to escape, and used it so seldom, once the thank-you notes were written, that after twelve years it was not used up. Indeed, he wondered if Janet had not somehow stolen a piece, it was so unlike
Marcia to write on it. He reached and Janet held the folded paper back from him. “Are you sure you want to read it?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s awfully conclusive.”

  “Damn you, give it to me.”

  She yielded it, saying, “You’ll hate it.”

  The handwriting was Marcia’s.

  Dear Frank, whom I want to call dearest but can’t—

  Back from the beach, a quick note, for you to have while I’m in Maine. I drove home from our view of Nahant and took the children to the beach and as I lay there the sun baked a smell of you out of my skin and I thought, That’s him. I smelled my palms and there you were again and I closed my eyes and pressed myself up against the sun while Irene and Bernadette chattered on and on and the children called from the ocean—there was extraordinary surf today. I feel today left you sad. I’m sorry the phone rang—like icy water being poured over us—and that I teased you to stay longer. I do tease. Forgive me, and believe that I cherish our times together however unsatisfactorily abbreviated, and that you must take me as you can, without worry or self-blame. Love satisfies not only technically. Think of me in Maine, wishing you beside me and happy even in this wish, my “wanton’s bird.”

  In love and haste,

  M.

  The signature was hers, the angular “M” of three strokes emphatically overstruck; but the body of the letter was written with a flowing smoothness not quite familiar, as if she had been drunk or tranced—it had been years since he had examined her handwriting. He lifted his eyes from the paper, and Janet’s face held all the dismay he was still waiting to feel.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve often wondered what women think about while they’re sunbathing.”