Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Freddy dear—

  I am grateful for your caring. Truly. But my future, I am more than ever convinced, lies with Frank. So your phone calls must stop. After today I will hang up on your voice. May we continue to be pleasant, and friends? Please, I don’t want to change dentists, you have all my records.

  Fondly,

  J.

  She mailed it to his cottagelike office on Divinity Street. He received it Monday, read it smiling, was not disappointed, considered burning it on the gas flame in his lab but, the amorous keepsakes of his life having been few, instead crumpled the envelope into the wastebasket and tucked the letter into his coat pocket, where Georgene found it that evening, while he was at Lions. The next day she confessed her terror to Piet, and irrevocably offended him.

  So Foxy was both right and wrong about Janet. She overestimated Janet’s freedom, and had mistaken the quality of Freddy Thorne’s sexuality. Though he seemed aggressive toward women, he really sought to make alliance with them. But then summer overwhelmed Foxy’s speculations about the love life of others, and swept her as if out to sea, to a vantage where the couples on the shore of Tarbox looked like a string of colored beads.

  Piet Hanema was sent out of the room and they decided he was Ho Chi Minh. Frank Appleby wanted him to be Casanova but Irene said the person couldn’t be fictional. Frank told Irene that Casanova had been as real as you and I but everyone agreed they had no feeling for him. Irene suggested Vice-President Johnson. Everyone protested that he was much too dreary. Terry Gallagher came up with Ho Chi Minh and it seemed perfect. Good for Terry: ever since getting her lute, she was much more with it. More human. All spring she had been taking lute lessons from an old woman in Norwell. She had let her long black hair down; her wide lips were tucked up at the corners as if she were holding a coin or candy in her mouth. Looking at Terry, Eddie Constantine suggested that Piet be Joan Baez, but the rest voted to stick with Ho Chi Minh, and Georgene went to the foot of the Saltzes’ stairs to call Piet down.

  It was the last Sunday night in June. The tight wine-colored cones of the lilacs that Piet had noticed as he hesitated by Foxy Whitman’s gate had loosened and expanded with the first hot week of May into papal miters of bloom, first the lavender and then the taller, holier, more ascetic white, ensconced amid heartshaped leaves whose green was suddenly cheap. The lilacs faded and dried, and bridal wreath drooped, gathering dust, by every garage door and drive. Sagitta, most exquisite of constellations, flew unmoving between the Swan and Eagle, giant jeweled airplanes whose pilots are Deneb and Altair; the Milky Way wandered like a line of wash in the heat-bleached sky. Desultory parties, hardly organized, social weeds, sprang up to fill the pale nights bloated by Daylight Saving, parties mixed of tennis leftovers and sunburned half-couples and cold salami and fetched pizza and Bitter Lemon and sandy stray forgotten children lulled asleep by television’s blue flicker. President Kennedy’s triumphal tour of Western Europe today subsided to quiet talks in Sussex, England …

  The Saltzes, great birdwatchers and walkers, as if Nature were a course they were cramming, had gone down late to the beach, to see the sandpipers and to swim. Irene suffered from sun poisoning and ventured out at midday protected in floppy hats and long-sleeved jerseys, and went swimming only toward evening. Up by the far rocks she and Ben had found the Hanemas, all four of them, with the Whitmans, the two of them. Ken liked to snorkel, and the Hanema children had been fascinated by his equipment. The beach here by the rocks dropped off steeply enough for diving. Piet was giving Ruth, in face mask and foot fins, a lesson while Nancy, anxious for her sister and envious, cried. Ken and Angela stood together, an almost godlike couple, untroubled, invulnerable, gazing at the horizon, where a sailboat race was suspended, gaudy spinnakers bellied. Foxy, in a skirted lemon-yellow maternity swimsuit, lay supine on a smooth rock, eyes shut, smiling. Irene was envious of everyone’s happiness and ease beneath the same sun that gave her a painful rash. They had all been here since noon. Impulsively, yet with some small hope of inducing the Whitman woman, so complacently uncommitted, to work on one of her causes (pre-primary education, fair housing, soil conservation), she invited them back for a drink. The Saltzes lived near the green, in a narrow asbestos-shingled house visible from the Constantines’. The Constantines saw the cars and came over. They brought Terry Gallagher with them. Carol, who had taken ballet and who sewed and wove and painted, also played the guitar, and that summer the two women sometimes met for duets. At Eddie’s prompting, Ben Saltz phoned the Applebys, who were having the little-Smiths and Thornes over for a pick-up meal, and half of this party showed up—Frank, Marcia, and Georgene. By now it was after eight. Before the light died, Eddie took Angela, of all people, on his Vespa to the Italian place on Route 123 and they brought back five pizzas. Reëntering the Saltzes’ narrow living room, Angela looked glorious, flushed from the wind and the fear and the effort of balancing the cardboard boxes. She wore a damp towel tucked around the waist of a wet black bathing suit, and when she bent forward to bite a point of pizza slice Piet could see her nipples. His wife. Where he had sucked. Not thinking it would be so long a party, they had brought their children along. Ruth, her wide eyes watering, watched streams of television with the older Saltz boy Bernard, and Nancy fell asleep in little Jeremiah’s room. Irene loved word games. By eleven-thirty, when Ken Whitman was studying the laces of his sneakers and Frank Appleby’s eyes had rolled inward upon his digestion and Janet had phoned twice to make sure that he and Marcia had not gone off alone somewhere and to ask him how ever were they supposed to get Freddy Thorne out of the house, the crowd at the Saltzes’ had played four games of Ghosts, two of Truth, and three of Botticelli. This left Impressions. Eddie Constantine had gone out first and with only one wrong guess, Burl Ives, identified himself as the late Pope John. It took Georgene somewhat longer to discover that she was Althea Gibson. Then Piet volunteered because he wanted to go to the john and to check on Nancy (I will never grow up and I will never ever in my whole life die. Her hair was tangled and stiff; her aqua bathing suit, riding up in sleep, had exposed of her bottom half-moons sparkling with sand. Piet mourned the child’s body but the tug of bright life downstairs held him helpless here. Sleep. Forgive us in your sleep.) and they made him Ho Chi Minh.

  At the foot of the stairs he tapped Georgene’s flank with the side of his hand for old time’s sake while gazing straight ahead. He came into the living room; he wore a sweater and plaid bathing trunks; his bare feet looked knobbed and splayed on the floor and in Foxy’s eyes his naked legs wore a pale fur halo. “What kind of landscape am I?” he asked.

  “Jungle,” Georgene said.

  “Rice paddies,” said Marcia little-Smith.

  Terry Gallagher said, “Torn.”

  Piet asked, “A torn landscape?”

  “Maybe I mean pacified.”

  Angela closed her eyes. “I see a temple, with reddish pillars, and an idol with its head knocked off, overgrown with vines, and someone has been doing mathematical calculations with chalk on the broad part of one thigh.”

  “Sexy,” Eddie Constantine said.

  Georgene said, her chin hardening, “No fair couples using ESP.”

  Piet asked, “Anybody else? Foxy? Ken?”

  Ken said, “I get Indiana, I don’t know why.”

  Everyone laughed, except Foxy, who nodded. “He’s right. Something quiet and gray and ordinary,” she said. “Oregon? South Dakota?”

  Frank Appleby said, “You mean North Dakota.”

  “No hints,” Carol Constantine protested. She was sitting on the floor in the position of one weaving, or praying, or playing Monopoly. Her legs were folded under a green lily pad of a ballerina’s skirt from which her torso rose like a stem. Her waist was remarkably thin and pliant and her nostrils, long slits, seemed always to be inhaling.

  Piet asked, “What flower?”

  “Poppy.”

  “Poppy.”

  “Nodding pogonia,” Irene Saltz said. “Or maybe
a fringed orchis.”

  “A fringed orchis in the shade of an enormous Chinese tulip tree,” Frank Appleby said.

  Carol said to Marcia, “I don’t think Frank understands the game. He hints.”

  Foxy Whitman said, “I see something gray. Mistletoe.”

  “I keep getting gray out of you,” Piet said to her, with strange edge, and asked Angela, “Flower? Ken?”

  “Daisy fleabane,” Ken said, perhaps antagonistically, staring at his feet. Did he mean it?

  Angela said, “No flower or any flower. A single lily presented by a child to the major’s wife on a fête day.”

  “A wilted gardenia in a busboy’s lapel,” Terry Gallagher said, and smiled broadly when they all burst into compliments. They felt her developing, coming to bloom.

  Georgene said, “A thistle. From an official point of view.”

  Piet complained, “I can’t even tell if you like this person or not.”

  “What sex are you getting?” Carol asked him. Her face, though composed and smooth, held contentious points of shadow—at the nostril wings, at the corners of her mouth, beneath her pouting lower lip, where there seemed to be a smudge. Piet saw that she lengthened the line of her lids with eye shadow, and realized that her eyes were small and rather close together, so close together that in certain flitting lights her stilted dignity of stance appeared that of a cross-eyed person. He felt better about her, less fascinated. Her hair was a dull brown nothing color done up in a pony tail she was too old for.

  “Male,” he answered. “But it doesn’t seem to matter. His maleness isn’t his claim to fame.”

  “Unlike who?” Carol coolly asked.

  Piet obligingly blushed. “What—what period of painting?”

  “Art Nouveau,” Angela said promptly.

  “Spanish cave,” Foxy said, also prompt.

  Frank Appleby rolled his eyes inward and groaned. “All I get is what Carol doesn’t want me to get.”

  “What’s that?” Carol asked.

  “Soviet posters.”

  “No,” Carol said, “I don’t mind that. It’s not very good, but I don’t mind it.”

  Irene Saltz asked her, “Who appointed you referee?”

  “Medical-textbook illustrations,” Ken Whitman said firmly, “with a rice-paper overlay leaf.”

  “Good,” someone said politely, after a pause.

  “Terry and the Pirates,” Eddie Constantine said.

  Carol said, “I’m sorry, I think you’re all horrible. He’s definitely Yves Tanguy. And maybe Arshile Gorky.”

  “He’s a playwright,” Frank told her.

  “That’s Maxim,” she told him.

  Ken, remembering the success of some of his other puns, asked innocently, “Who was Maxim Ize?”

  Foxy winced.

  “A Jewish expansionist,” Eddie said. “Whoops, no offense intended, Ben.”

  Patiently Piet asked, “Any other painters or periods of painting?”

  “I don’t think,” Marcia said, “they ever work out very well. They’re too literal. Stretch our minds, Piet.”

  Into this Piet read Frank’s becoming bored, and asked him, “Frank, what play by Shakespeare am I?”

  Frank revolved the question uncomfortably inside him, and after a swallow of brandy pronounced, “Anthony and Cleopatra, from the viewpoint of Octavius.”

  Marcia in a helpful wifely way prompted, “What about Titus Andronicus?”

  “Too messy,” Frank said. “This man is efficient.”

  Foxy Whitman—she had stopped off at her house to change from her tentlike maternity bathing suit into a more flattering shift, a canary-yellow muu-muu that tapped and hugged her hidden shape—was fighting for attention. “What about an Othello in which Iago is right?”

  Frank said, “He’s always right,” and brayed.

  Ben Saltz, looking tired, got to his feet and asked, “Who wants some more beer? Brandy? We have lots of gin but we’re out of Bitter Lemon.”

  Georgene said, “Piet, you’re taking much too long. We’ve given you beautiful answers and you spurn us.”

  “You’ve confused me, you’re all so beautiful. I keep thinking about Ken’s medical textbook.”

  “Ignore it,” Foxy said.

  “All right: what beverage?”

  “Tea.”

  “Tea.”

  “Souchong more than orange pekoe.”

  “Tea with nutmeg,” Angela said.

  “Angela, you really like this person, don’t you?” It was Terry asking.

  “I have to, he’s my husband.”

  “I hate tea,” Piet said. “I hate tea with nutmeg.”

  “You’ve never had it,” Angela told him.

  “Don’t be too sure.” The others hushed, to give them space to quarrel. Piet hastily moved on: “What kind of food?”

  “Rice.”

  “Rice, but you want more,” Ben said, returning with beer in two brown nonreturnable bottles.

  Piet asked, “Boiled or fried?”

  Angela said, “Boiled. It’s purer.”

  Marcia said, “Delicately fried.”

  Terry closed her eyes and said, “A BLT on burnt toast.”

  Frank Appleby said, “To hell with you all. I’ll say what comes to me. A monk barbecue.”

  Carol cried, all her lithe lines electric, her feet thrusting from under her skirt, “Frank, you’re a pig! You’ve given it to him!”

  Piet said in great relief, “I’m No-go Diem.”

  The voices of the others flocked: “Ngo, you’re not.” “Close, but no sitar.” “Close? He couldn’t be wronger.” “Right church, wrong side of the aisle.” This last was Georgene, reaching out to him; her help was accepted while she was spurned.

  Piet arrived: “Ho Chi Minh.” In a glad clatter the game collapsed. The beer went around. Terry Gallagher and Ken Whitman stood with one motion and looked at each other, surprised by unison.

  “It’s treasonous,” Piet was saying, “how affectionate your impressions were. This enemy of our democracy, all those flowers and delicate grays.” His complaint was directed, Georgene felt, toward Angela and Foxy.

  “You asked flowers.”

  “You never asked animals. A whiskery weasel.”

  “A very thin panda.”

  “Why hate him? He’s what they want.” This was Irene, who had been uncharacteristically silent.

  “Chacun à son goût, as Harold would say if he were here,” Marcia said with quaint loyalty.

  “I thought that was good of me to remember him being a busboy in Paris,” Terry said. “Thanks, people, but I must go. We went to early mass this morning and poor Matt’s been showing houses all afternoon.”

  “I second that,” Ken said. “Fox, come.”

  But the momentary impression, of Terry and Ken standing together as a handsome couple, tall and dark-haired and grave, led the others to tease Foxy.

  “Oh please,” Carol begged. “Stay for one more.”

  “We’ll let Foxy be it.”

  “Foxy’s it. It, Foxy.”

  “All pregnant women leave the room.”

  Foxy looked toward Ken; he read on her face a touching indecision. This boozy catty crowd tempted her; their own house was full of mosquitoes and uncompleted carpentry. Yet she was tired, and his wife, and faithful. She said, “No, I’d just be stupid. I don’t really understand the game.”

  “Oh, but you do, you do.”

  “The game is to be yourself.”

  “Your impressions are lovely.”

  “We’ll pick somebody simple. Margaret Truman. Not Jackie. It’ll take ten minutes.”

  She wavered, and Ken spoke to her across the calling heads with perfect kindness, yet his voice frightened her; his appearance had no roundness. An immaculate cutout seemed wired for sound. “I’m dead, Fox, but you stay and play. Marcia can drop you off.”

  “Oh,” she said, “but that’s not right. Marcia has Harold to worry about. I’ll go with you.”


  They all said, “You can’t. You’re it. Stay.”

  “Stay,” Ken told her, and turned to leave, and she felt herself cut off, her roundness rejected; her shape offended him. She had asked him to rescue her from indecision and he had petulantly set her adrift. Angered, she agreed to stay, and went upstairs, where Piet had been. He had left no clues.

  It did not take them long to decide, June having been so fertile of news: Pope John had died, Quang Duc had immolated himself, Valentina Tereshkova had become the first woman in space, John Profumo had resigned, the Lord’s Prayer had been banned in the American public schools. Soon Georgene was at the foot of the stairs, calling, “E-liz-a-beth! Elizabeth Fox Whitman, come right down here!” It was the voice of her Wilmington aunt.