Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Ruth!” Angela said.

  “Retarded?” Piet asked. It was an adjective her generation applied to everything uncooperative. The retarded teacher kept us all after class. This retarded pen won’t write. Frankie is a retard.

  “Well He is,” Ruth said. “He lets little babies die and He makes cats eat birds and all that stuff. I don’t want to sing in the choir next fall.”

  “I’m sure that’ll make God shape up,” Piet said.

  “I don’t see why the child should be forced to sing in the choir every Sunday,” Angela told him, standing bent as Nancy cried into her lap. Her hair overhung the child. Mothering. Seeking the smothering she had fled from in Piet. Loves her more than me. Each to each. Symbiosis.

  “For the same fucking reason,” Piet told Angela, “that I must spend my life surrounded by complaining females.” He ate breakfast surrounded by wounded silence. He felt nevertheless he had done a good deed, had rescued Nancy from the grip of death. Better anger than fear. Better kill than be killed.

  He drove to the office, rattling down Charity, parking on Hope. A space today, lately often not. Talk of the need for a stoplight at the corner where Divinity turned. Confusing to out-of-towners. Too many cars. Too many people. Homosexuality the answer? The pill. Gallagher was talking on his phone, Irish accent emergent. “We’ve got thirty-three rooms, Sister, and removing a lone partition would give us a grand refectory.” Piet heated water on their electric coil and made instant coffee. Maxwell. Faraday. He settled at his desk to concentrate on deskwork. Lumber $769.82, total, overdue, if has escaped your previous notice please remit, since a sound credit rating, etc. His nasal passages itched and his eyes watered. Another scratchy August day. Foxy far. Hours away. Her laughter, her fur. To visit the little princess. Too pretty-pretty for you. His own phone rang.

  “Allo, dollink.” It had been a month since they had talked.

  “Hello.” He used his flat contractor’s voice.

  “Are you surrounded? Is Matt there?”

  “No. Yes.” They had recently installed in their crowded space a corrugated-glass divider (ASG mfg., 1” thickness overall) which set Gallagher apart and made him appear, subtly, the head of the office. But the partition was thin and without a client in his cubbyhole Gallagher kept the door open, to create a breeze. He needed a breeze, or his shirt would wrinkle. He had walled himself in without a window. In there with him were an electric clock, a Ford-agency calendar, a colored zoning map of Tarbox, an aerial photograph of the downtown and beach area, an overall map of Plymouth County, a Mandarin-orange street directory of Tarbox, the pale-blue annual town reports back to 1958, a thin red textbook entitled Property Valuation, a thumbed fat squat black missal. While Piet worked, when he did, at a yellow oak desk salvaged from a high school and littered with molding samples and manufacturers’ catalogs, Gallagher’s desk was military gray steel and clean except for a pen set socketed in polished serpentine, a blotter, framed photographs of Terry and Tommy, and two telephones. Behind his head hung framed his license from the Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salesmen. He had just purchased for their firm the fifty-odd acres and the thirty-odd rooms of an estate in Lacetown with iron deer on the lawn. He had intended to develop the grounds piecemeal but had since got wind of an order of nuns who were seeking to relocate a novitiate. As he exultantly told Piet, the Church doesn’t haggle. In the meantime their tiny office supported among its debts a hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage; it felt precarious. But gambling was Gallagher’s meat, and having dared the deal increased the amount of psychic space he occupied. Piet feared Georgene’s voice was coming through too strong; he huddled the receiver tight against his ear.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll hang up in a minute,” she said. “I just had a crazy impulse to call and find out how you were doing. Is that presumptuous? I still have some rights, don’t I? I mean you and me, we were something real, weren’t we?”

  “I understand you,” Piet said.

  “You can’t really talk, can you?”

  “That sounds correct.”

  “Well, if you’d call me once in a while this wouldn’t happen. We hear you had a little party last night and I felt very hurt we weren’t invited. The way Irene let it slip out was positively malicious.”

  “The orders,” Piet said uncertainly, “are slow coming through this time of year. The government’s buying up a lot of west-coast fir.”

  “Piet, I miss you so much, it’s killing me. Couldn’t you just come for coffee on your way to somewhere else sometime? Like this morning? It’s perfectly safe. Whitney’s off at camp and Irene took Martha and Judy down to the beach. I told her I had a plumber coming. It’s true, our pressure’s down to nothing. Don’t ever live on a hill. Can’t you come, please? Just to talk a little bit? I promise I won’t be pushy. I was such a bitch at the Ongs’.”

  “The estimate looks discouraging.”

  “I’m miserable, Piet. I can’t stand living with that man much longer. He gets worse and worse. I’m losing all sense of myself as a woman.”

  “I thought he did good work.”

  Georgene laughed, a brisk, slightly formal noise. “I’m sure Matt isn’t fooled at all. The games you two play down there. No, if you must know, he does lousy work. Freddy’s lousy in bed, that’s what you want to hear, isn’t it? That’s what you always wanted to hear. I lied to you. I protected him. He can’t manage anything until he’s drunk and then he’s sloppy and falls asleep. He wilts. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “We’re speaking of upright supports.”

  “It’s so sad. It makes me so ashamed. I have no self-confidence at anything any more, Terry and I lost six-two, six-three to Bernadette and Angela yesterday, I suppose she told you, crowing about it.”

  “No.”

  “Please come over. I’m so blue, so blue. I won’t pry, I promise. I know you have somebody else but I don’t care any more. Was I ever that demanding? Was I? Didn’t I just take you as you came?”

  “Yes.” Gallagher loudly rustled papers and tapped shut a steel desk drawer.

  “God, I hate the sound of my voice. I hate it, Piet. I hate to beg. It’s taken me weeks to bring myself to make this call. You don’t have to go to bed with me, I promise. I just need to have you to myself for half an hour. For fifteen minutes.”

  “We’re behind schedule now, I’m afraid.”

  “Come, or I’ll tell Freddy about us. I’ll tell Freddy and Angela everything. No. Forget Angela. I’ll tell Foxy. I’ll waltz right down there and plump myself down and tell her the kind of bastard she’s mixed herself up with.”

  “Let me call you back. I’ll look at my schedule again.”

  She began to cry; Georgene’s crying, rare, was an unlovely and unintelligent sound, and Piet feared it would fill the little office as it filled his skull. “I didn’t know,” she sobbed, “I’d miss you this much, I didn’t know … you were into me … so deep. You knew. You knew just what you were doing to me, you bastard, you marvelous poor bastard. You’re making me suffer because your parents were killed. Piet, I didn’t kill your parents. I was in Philadelphia when it happened, I didn’t know them, I didn’t know you … oh, forgive me, I have no idea what I’m saying …”

  “In the meantime,” Piet said, “watch out for seepage,” and hung up.

  There was an inquisitive silence behind him. He responded, “Bea Guerin. She thinks her house might be settling. She doesn’t trust those cedar posts I put in because we used metal in the Whitman renovation. I think she’s hysterical. It’s too bad, all she needs is a baby. Which reminds me, Matt, something I wanted your opinion on. Angela thinks she needs to go to a psychiatrist.”

  As Piet had hoped, the second statement caught Matt’s attention; the truth is always more interesting than the lie. “Angela’s the sanest woman I know,” Matt said.

  “Ah, Matt,” Piet answered, “in this fallen world, being sane and being well aren’t the same thing.” Gallagher uncomfortably f
rowned; it was part of his Catholicism to believe that all theological references in private conversation must be facetious. Piet had developed with Gallagher a kidding pose, a blarneyish tone, useful in both acknowledging and somewhat bridging the widening gap between them. Gradually they were finding each other impossible. Without an act, a routine, Piet would hardly have been able to talk to Gallagher at all. “And surely she’s no saner than Terry,” he said.

  “Terry. She’s gone gaga over the lute. She’s in Norwell twice a week and now she wants to take pottery lessons from the woman’s husband.”

  “Terry is very creative.”

  “I suppose. She won’t play for me. I don’t know how to treat Terry these days.”

  Piet abruptly volunteered, “Actually, what Angela needs is a lover, not a psychiatrist.”

  Matt’s brittle face, his jaw so smooth-shaven it seemed burnished, hardened at this; his mouth tightened. He felt in Piet’s train of association possible news for himself. Yet he was curious; he was human, Freddy Thorne would have pointed out. He asked, “You’d let her?”

  “Well, I’d expect her out of decency to try to conceal it. I’d simply not pry. If it came into the open, I’d of course have to be sore.”

  They were talking through the doorway; Matt was framed by corrugated glass. The office was so small there was no need to raise their voices. Matt said, “Piet, if I may say so—”

  “You may, my good fellow. An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”

  “You seem quite jealous of her. Terry and I have always been struck by you two as a couple, how protective and fond you are of each other, while pretending the opposite.”

  “Do we pretend the opposite?” Piet was offended, but Matt was too intent to notice.

  “Terry and I,” he said, “don’t have your room for maneuver. Fidelity can’t be a question. Do you know that, in the view of the Church, marriage is a sacrament administered by the couple themselves?”

  “Maybe some of the sacrament should be giving the other some freedom. Why all this fuss about bodies?” Piet asked. “In fifty years we’ll all be grass. You know what would seem like a sacrament to me? Angela and another man screwing and me standing above them sprinkling rose petals on his back.” Piet held up his hand and rubbed thumb and forefinger. “Sprinkling blessings on his hairy back.”

  Gallagher said, “Mother and father.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours. As you described that I pictured a child beside his parents’ bed. He loves his mother but knows he can’t handle her so he lets the old man do the banging while he does the blessing.”

  Again offended, Piet said, “Everybody’s so damn psychoanalytical all of a sudden. Let me ask you something. Suppose you discovered Terry wasn’t going off for music lessons.”

  “I’d refuse to discover it,” Gallagher answered with catechetical swiftness, and smiled. The smiles of the Irish never fail to strike a spark; they have the bite in their eyes of the long oppressed. The flint of irony. He told Piet, “You have a kind of freedom I don’t have. You can be an adventurer where I can’t. I have to have my adventures here.” He laid his hand flat on the steel desk. His hand was hair-backed. Big pores. Coarse dogma.

  Piet said, “And they make me damn nervous. What the hell are we going to do with that rotten old castle in Lacetown? That partition you were telling the sister about can’t just be knocked out. It’s weight-bearing.”

  Matt told him, “You shouldn’t be in this business, you’re too conservative. You don’t have the nerves for it. What you got to realize, Piet, is that land can’t lose. There’s only so much of it, and there are more and more people.”

  “Thanks to the Pope.”

  “You have more children than I do.”

  “I don’t know how you do it, it’s a miracle.”

  “Self-control. Try it.”

  This was Piet’s day to fight. That Gallagher, with his wife off with some old potter, felt able to deliver instruction so angered Piet that he rose from his creaky swivel chair and said, “Which reminds me, I better get over to the hill and see if they’re using wood on the houses or cardboard like you tell them to.”

  Matt’s face was a crystal widening toward the points of the jaws, his shaved cheeks and flat temples facets. He said, “And check on Mrs. Whitman while you’re at it.”

  “Thanks for reminding me. I will.”

  Stepping outdoors onto treeless Hope Street, Piet was struck by the summer light so hard that his eyes winced and the world looked liquid. It was all, he saw, television aerials and curbstone grits, abortive—friendships, marriages, conversations, all aborted, all blasted by seeking the light too soon.

  On Indian Hill the three ranch houses had reached a dismal state of incompletion. The frames, sheathed in four-by-eight sheets of plywood, were complete but the rooms within were waiting for electricians and plumbers and plasterers. Cedar shingles lay on the damp earth in costly unbroken stacks. Jazinski was watching two trade-school boys nail shingles and Piet was annoyed by his idle supervision. He told him, “Get a hammer,” and spent the morning beside him, aligning and nailing cedar shingles over insulating foil. The cedar had an ancient fragrance; the method of aligning the shingles, by snapping a string rubbed with chalk, was agreeably primitive. Sun baked Piet’s shoulders and steamed worry from him. It was good to work, to make weatherproof, to fashion overlapping fishscales. He was Noah; the skinny-armed young Polack swinging his hammer in unison beside him perhaps was a son. Piet tried to converse with Leon, but between hammer blows the boy responded with pronouncements that, sullen yet definite, were complete in themselves, and led nowhere.

  On the death of the Kennedy baby: “That crowd has everything but luck. Old Joe can’t buy them luck.” On the Catholic religion: “I believe in some kind of Supreme Being but none of the rest of it. My wife agrees, I was surprised.” On the progress of the job: “It’s waiting on the plumbers now. I guess two have been already sold. The families want to move in by the start of school. Do you want to give the plumbers a ring, or shall I?” On the colored Construction King operator, whom Piet remembered fondly, for having shown him cheerfulness on a day of death: “I feel this way about it. If they measure up they should be treated like everybody else. That don’t mean I want to live next door to them.” On the future: “I may not be here next summer. I’m looking around. I have responsibilities to myself.”

  “Well, Leon, maybe next summer I won’t be here, and you can be me.”

  The boy said nothing, and Piet, glancing over, wondered how his arms could remain so stringy and pale, like those of a desk-worker, though he worked all summer in the sun.

  In the rhythmic silence Piet began to talk with Foxy in his head. He would take her a flower from the roadside—a stalk of chicory, with flowers as blue as the eyes of a nymphomaniac. For me?

  Who else?

  You’re so tender. When you’re not with me I remember the passion but I forget the affection.

  He would laugh. How could I not be affectionate?

  Other men could. I guess. I’ve not had much experience.

  You’ve had enough, I’d say.

  What can you see in me? I’m getting huge, and I never come for you, and I’m not good, or witty, like Angela.

  I find you quite witty.

  Should we go up to bed?

  Just for a moment. To rest.

  Yes. To rest.

  I love your maternity clothes. The way they billow and float. I love the way your belly is so hard and pushes at me. In another month it’ll start kicking.

  Do you really like me this way? Look, I’m getting veins in my legs.

  Beautiful blue. Blue blond furry rosy Foxy.

  Oh Piet. Take these awful Paisley things off. I want to kiss you.

  As you like.

  Leonine he would lie back. Eyelids lowered, her dusty-rose cheek dented by the forcing apart of her jaws, her sleeping face would eclipse that gnarled choked part of him a Calvinist whisper by his c
radle had taught him to consider vile. Touch of teeth like glints of light. Her fluttered tongue and lips’ encirclement. Her hair spun air between his lifted thighs, nipples and fingernails, muddled echoes of blood. He would seek the light with one thrust and she would gag; penitent he would beg Come up and her tranced drained face swim to his and her cold limp lips as he kissed them wear a moony melted stale smell whose vileness she had taken into herself. All innocent they would lock loins, her belly gleaming great upon his, and though short of breath and self-forsaken she would not quite come; this had happened and would happen again that summer of the solar eclipse.

  Three weeks ago, it had been ninety per cent at their latitude. An invisible eater moved through the sun’s disc amid a struggle of witnessing clouds. The dapples of light beneath the elm became crescent-shaped; the birds sang as in the evening. Seen through smoked glass the sun was a shaving, a sideways eyebrow, a kindergarten boat riding a tumult of contorted cumulus. The false dusk reversed; the horns of the crescents beneath the trees pointed in the opposite direction; the birds sang to greet the day. Not a month before, he had first slept with Foxy.

  Only one other time had been so ominous: the Wednesday in October of 1962 when Kennedy had faced Khrushchev over Cuba. Piet had had a golf date with Roger Guerin. They agreed not to cancel. “As good a way to go as any,” Roger had said over the phone. Stern occasions suited him. As Piet drove north to the course, the Bay View, he heard on the radio that the first Russian ship was approaching the blockade. They teed off into an utterly clear afternoon and between shots glanced at the sky for the Russian bombers. Chicago and Detroit would go first and probably there would be shouts from the clubhouse when the bulletins began coming in. There was almost nobody else on the course. It felt like the great rolling green deck of a ship, sunshine glinting on the turning foliage. As Americans they had enjoyed their nation’s luxurious ride and now they shared the privilege of going down with her. Roger, with his tight angry swing, concentrating with knit brows on every shot, finished the day under ninety. Piet had played less well. He had been too happy. He played best, swung easiest, with a hangover or a cold. He had been distracted by the heavensent glisten of things—of fairway grass and fallen leaves and leaning flags—seen against the onyx immanence of death, against the vivid transparence of the sky in which planes might materialize. Swinging, he gave thanks that, a month earlier, he had ceased to be faithful to Angela and had slept with Georgene. It had been a going from indoors to outdoors; they met at beaches, on porches, beneath translucent trees. Happy remembering her, picturing her straight limbs, Piet sprayed shots, three-putted, played each hole on the edge of an imaginary cliff. Driving home, he heard on the car radio that the Russians had submitted to inspection and been allowed to pass. He had felt dismay, knowing that they must go on, all of them, Georgene and Angela and Freddy and himself, toward an untangling less involuntary and fateful. He had been fresh in love then.