Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Leon said: “That sun is brutal. I like winter myself. My wife and I thought we’d try skiing this year.”

  Noon passed, and one. The connective skin between thumb and palm, where the hammer rubbed, smarted as if to blister. Piet left Leon and drove into town, through town, on down the beach road. Dusty flowers, chicory and goldenrod, a stand of late daisies, flickered at the roadside, but he was in too much of a hurry to stop. I wanted to bring you a flower but it seemed too urgent so I just brought you myself.

  Of course. What a nice present.

  Her house was empty. No Plymouth station wagon, no workman’s truck, was in the driveway. The door was unlocked. The hall rug awry. Cotton slept in the blue sling chair. The work was nearly done, the plastering completed even to the sweeping up. A round thermostat and square light switch on the smooth wall side by side. Rough edges. Books of wallpaper samples lay face up on the sanded and sealed floor. A folder of paint shades was propped against a pine baseboard. In the kitchen all that was needed was white paint and for the dishwasher on order to arrive. Sawdust and earth smells still lived in the house. Salt air would wipe them away. She had promised to invite Piet and Angela down when the house was finished. The wallpaper books were open to samples that were not Angela’s taste. Big pastel splashes. Vulgar passion.

  Where was she? She never shopped at this hour, her nap hour. Had he only dreamed of possessing her? The tide was low and the channels seen from the kitchen windows were ribbons glittering deep between banks of velvet clay. Three red deer were bounding across the dry marsh to the uninhabited shrub island. The days to hunting season were finite. The crystalline sky showed streaks of cirrus wispy at one end, like the marks of skates braking. Miscarriage. Doctors, workmen returning. Without her here he felt the house hostile, the walls of their own will rejecting him. Too soon, too soon. He became anxious to leave and, driving back toward town, turned on an impulse up the Thornes’ long driveway.

  The Saltzes and the Constantines, maliciously called the Saltines by the other couples, had jointly bought a boat, the Applebys’ catboat, with a six-horsepower motor, and after a Saturday or Sunday of sailing would drink beer and California sauterne in their damp bathing suits and have other couples over. The Sunday night before Labor Day a crowd collected in the Constantines’ messy Victorian manse. The couples were excited and wearied by tennis; this was the weekend of the North Mather Court Club Open Tournament. Annually the North Mather men, rangy automobile salesmen and insurance claims agents who exerted themselves all winter long on two domed courts grassed with plastic fiber, easily eliminated even the best of the Tarbox men, such as Matt Gallagher; but, contrariwise, the North Mather wives wilted under the assault of their Tarbox counterparts. Invariably Georgene and Angela, Terry and Bernadette dominated the female finals, and for weeks before Labor Day their telephones jangled as the men of North Mather, centaurs in search of Amazons, beseeched the fabulous Tarbox women to be their partners in mixed doubles.

  None of the Saltines played. A delicate social line had early hardened and not been crossed. Instead, today they had taken Freddy Thorne, who played terribly, out into the Bay for skin diving. It amused him to keep his wetsuit on. His appearance in the tight shiny skin of black rubber was disturbingly androgynous: he was revealed to have hips soft as a woman’s and with the obscene delicacy of a hydra’s predatory petals his long hands flitted bare from his sleeves’ flexible carapace. This curvaceous rubber man had arisen from another element. Like a giant monocle his Cyclopean snorkeling mask jutted from his naked skull, and his spatulate foot flippers flopped grotesquely on the Constantines’ threadbare Oriental rugs. When he sat in a doilied armchair and, twiddling a cigarette, jauntily crossed his legs, the effect was so outrageous and droll, monstrous and regal that even Piet Hanema laughed, feeling in Freddy’s act life’s bad dreams subdued.

  “Read us your play,” Carol Constantine begged him. She wore a man’s shirt over an orange bikini. Something had nerved her up tonight; a week ago, she had dyed her hair orange. “Let’s all take parts.”

  All summer it had been rumored that Freddy was writing a pornographic play. Now he pretended not to understand. “What play?” he asked. Beneath the misted snorkel mask he missed his customary spectacles. His eyes were blind and furry; his lipless mouth bent in upon itself in a pleased yet baffled way.

  “Freddy, I’ve seen it,” Janet Appleby said. “I’ve seen the cast of characters.”

  With the dignity of a senile monarch Freddy slowly stared toward her. “Who are you? Oh, I know. You’re Jan-Jan Applesauce. I didn’t recognize you out of context. Where are your little friends?”

  “They’re in Maine, thank God.”

  “Don’t be your usual shitty self, Freddy,” Carol said, sitting on the arm of the chair and draping her gaunt arms around his rubber shoulders. The action tugged open her shirt. Piet, sitting cross-legged on the floor, saw her navel: a thick-lidded eye. Carol caressed Freddy’s air hose, hung loose around his neck. “We want to do your play,” she insisted.

  “We can make a movie of it,” Eddie Constantine said. He flew in spells; he had been home three days. His growth of beard suggested a commando, cruel and sleepless. He held a beer can in each hand. Seeing his wife draped across Freddy, he had forgotten who he was fetching them for, his vacant eyes the tone of the same aluminum. Abruptly, as if tossing a grenade, he handed a can to Ben Saltz, who sat in the corner.

  “I want to be the one who answers the door,” Carol said. “Don’t all dirty movies begin with a woman answering the door?”

  Ben sat staring, his dark eyes moist with disquiet. He had recently shaved, and looked enfeebled, slack-chinned, mockingly costumed in sailing clothes—a boat-neck jersey, a windbreaker, a white officer’s cap, and suntans cut down to make shorts, fringed with loose threads. Ben’s calves were heavily, mournfully hairy. Piet glimpsed himself in that old-fashioned male shagginess but his own body hair was reddish, lighter, gayer, springy. Ben’s lank hairs ran together to make black seams, like sores downrunning into the tops of his comically new topsiders, cup-soled, spandy-bright. Except for his sunburned nose, Ben’s skin was pasty and nauseated. He had pockmarks. His wounded love of Carol weighed on the air of the room and gave the couples an agitated importance, like children in safe from a thunderstorm.

  “What’s a dirty movie?” Freddy asked, blinking, pretending to be confused.

  “Tom Jones,” Terry Gallagher said.

  Angela rose up unexpectedly and said, “Come on Carol, let’s undress him. I know he has the play in his pocket.”

  “You think he takes it underwater with him?” Piet asked mildly, exchanging with Foxy a quizzical look over Angela’s uncharacteristic display of flirtatious energy. They had become, these two, the parents of their spouses, whose faults they forgave and whose helplessness they cherished from the omniscient height of their adultery.

  Foxy had come to the party without Ken, but with Terry Gallagher. Ken and Matt, having been easily beaten in North Mather, had played consolation singles together all afternoon on the Ongs’ court. The two men, uncomfortable among the couples, were comfortable with each other. Foxy and Terry shared tallness and an elusive quality of reluctance, of faintly forbidding enchantment, reflected, perhaps, from their similar husbands. But Foxy was Snow White and Terry Rose Red—something Celtic strummed her full lips, her musical hands, the big muscles knitting her hips to her thighs. She stood tall and joined in the rape, asking Janet, “Where are his pants? You told me he always carries it in his pants.”

  “Upstairs,” Carol said brokenly, wrestling with Freddy’s flailing arms, struggling to undo his jacket’s rusty snaps. “In Kevin’s room. Don’t wake him up.”

  Janet, who had been in therapy two months now, watched the struggle and pronounced, “This is childish.”

  Angela tried to pin Freddy’s ankles as he slid from the chair. One of his flippers kicked over a tabouret holding a crammed ashtray and a small vase of asters. Angela brushed up the
ashes and butts with two copies of Art News, Eddie carefully poured beer over Freddy’s head, and Ben Saltz sat dazed by the sight of Carol, her hair a color no hair in nature ever was, writhing nearly nude in the man’s black embrace. The rubber of his suit squeaked as her bare skin slid across his lap. Her shirt had ridden up to her armpits; her orange top twisted, and a slim breast flipped free. Crouching on the carpet, Carol quickly readjusted herself, but kneeled a while panting, daring to look nowhere. All these people had seen her nipple. It had been orangish.

  In the front parlor, reached through a doorway hung with a beaded curtain, Irene Saltz’s voice was saying, “I can’t believe you know what you’re saying. Frank, I know you, and I know that you’re a human being.” She was drunk.

  His voice responded, heated and pained. “It’s you who want to keep them down, to give them on a platter everything everybody else in this country has had to work for.”

  “Work! What honest work have you ever done?”

  Janet Appleby shouted toward them, “He’s worked himself into an ulcer, Irene. Come on in here and take your husband home, he looks sick.”

  The Constantines’ house was large, but much of its space was consumed by magniloquent oak stairways and wide halls and cavernous closets, so that no single room was big enough to hold a party, which then overflowed into several, creating problems of traffic and acoustics. Janet was not heard, but Frank’s voice came to them from the parlor clearly. “The federal government was never meant to be a big mama every crybaby could run to. Minimal government was the founders’ ideal. States’ rights. Individual rights.”

  Irene’s voice in argument was slurred and even affectionate. “Frank, suppose you were Mrs. Medgar Evers. Would you want to cry or not?”

  “Ask any intelligent Negro what the welfare check has done to his race. They hate it. It castrates. I agree with Malcolm X.”

  “You’re not answering me, Frank. What about Medgar Evers? What about the six Birmingham Sunday-school children?”

  “They should have the protection of the law like everybody else, like everybody else,” Frank said, “no more and no less. I don’t approve of discriminatory legislation and that’s what the Massachusetts Fair Housing Bill is. It deprives the homeowner of his right to chose. The constitution, my dear Irene, tries to guarantee equality of opportunity, not equality of status.”

  Irene said, “Status and opportunity are inseparable.”

  “Can’t we shut them up?” Eddie Constantine asked.

  “It’s sex for Irene,” Carol told him, standing and buttoning her shirt. “Irene loves arguing with right-wing men. She thinks they have bigger pricks.”

  Janet’s lips opened but, eyes flicking from Carol to Freddy to Ben, she said nothing. Self-knowledge was turning her into a watcher, a hesitater.

  Terry Gallagher came down the Constantines’ grand staircase holding a single often-folded sheet of paper. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not even begun. It’s a cast of characters. Freddy, you’re a fake.”

  Freddy protested, “But they’re beautiful characters.”

  Amid laughter and beer and white wine, through the odors of brine and tennis sweat, the play was passed around. It bore no title. The writing, beginning at the top as a careful ornamental print, degenerated into Freddy’s formless hand, with no decided slant and a tendency for the terminal strokes to swing down depressively.

  DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

  Eric Shun, hero

  Ora Fiss, heroine

  Cunny Lingus, a tricksome Irish lass

  Testy Cull, a cranky old discard

  THIN ICE

  Anna L. Violation }

  nymphs

  Ona Nism

  Labia Minoris

  Auntie Climax, a rich and meaningful relation

  ACT I

  Eric (entering):!

  Ora (entered): O!

  “That’s not fair,” Janet said. “Nobody is really called Ora or Ona.”

  “Maybe the problem,” Piet said, “is that Eric enters too soon.”

  “I was saving Auntie Climax for the third act,” Freddy said.

  Terry said, “I’m so glad Matt isn’t here.”

  Foxy said, “Ken loves word games.”

  “Good job, Freddy,” Eddie Constantine said. “I’ll buy it.” He clapped Ben Saltz on the back and held the paper in front of Ben’s eyes. Ben’s face had become white, whiter than his wife’s sun-sensitive skin. Foxy went and, awkwardly pregnant, knelt beside him, tent-shaped, whispering.

  Piet was busy improvising. The crude energy the others loved in him had been summoned. “We need more plot,” he said. “Maybe Ora Fiss should have a half-brother, P. Niss. Peter Niss. They did filthy things in the cradle together, and now he’s returned from overseas.”

  “From Titty City,” Eddie said. He was of all the men the least educated, the least removed in mentality from elementary school. Yet he had lifted and hurled thousands of lives safely across the continent. They accepted him.

  Janet said, “You’re all fantastically disgusting. What infuriates me, I’m going to have to waste a whole twenty-dollar session on this grotesque evening.”

  “Leave,” Carol told her.

  Piet was continuing, gesturing expansively, red hair spinning from his broad arms. “Ora is frightened by his return. Will the old magic still be there? Dear God, pray not! She takes one look. Alas! It is. ‘Ora!’ he ejaculates. ‘Mrs. Nism now,’ she responds coldly, yet trembling within.”

  “You’re mixing up my beautiful characters,” Freddy complained.

  “Let’s play some new game,” Carol said; she squatted down to gather the residue of the spilled ashes. Her slim breasts swung loose in Piet’s eyes. Welcome to Titty, somber city of unmockable suckableness: his heart surged forward and swamped Carol as she squatted. Love for her licked the serial bumps of her diapered crotch. Her bare feet, long-toed, stank like razor clams. Her painted hair downhung sticking drifting to her mouth. She stood, ashes and aster petals in her lily palm, and glared toward the corner where, beneath a Miró print, Foxy was ministering with words to the immobilized Ben Saltz.

  “Let’s not,” Freddy Thorne said to her. “It’s good. It’s good for people to act out their fantasies.”

  Angela leaped up, warm with wine, calling Freddy’s bluff, and announced, “I want to take off all my clothes!”

  “Good, good,” Freddy said, nodding calmly. He stubbed out his cigarette on his own forehead, on the Cyclopean glass mask. It sizzled. His wise old woman’s face with its inbent lips streamed with sweat.

  Piet asked him, “Shouldn’t you take that outfit off? Don’t you eventually die if the skin can’t breathe?”

  “It’s me. Piet baby, this suit is my skin. I’m a monster from the deep.”

  Angela’s hand had halted halfway down the zipper at the back of her pleated white tennis dress. “No one is watching,” she said. Piet touched her hand and redid the zipper, which made a quick kissing sound.

  “Let her go, it’s good,” Freddy said. “She wants to share the glory. I’ve always wanted to see Angela undressed.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Piet told him.

  “Jesu, I don’t doubt it for a sec. Let her strip. She wants to, you don’t understand your own wife. She’s an exhibitionist. She’s not this shy violet you think you’re stuck with.”

  “He’s sick,” Foxy told Carol, of Ben, in self-defense.

  “Maybe,” Carol said, “he’d like to be left alone.”

  “He says you all gave him lobster and rum for supper.”

  Ben groaned. “Don’t mention.” Piet recognized a maneuvering for attention, an economical use of misery. But Ben would play the game, Piet saw, too hard in his desire to succeed, and the game would end by playing him. The Jew’s fierce face was waxen: dead Esau. Where his beard had been it was doubly pale.

  “Shellfish,” Eddie explained to all of them. “Not kosher.”

  Carol said sharply, “Foxy, let him sit it out. He
can go upstairs to a bed if he has to.”

  “Does he know where the beds are?” Freddy asked.

  “Freddy, why don’t you put that mask over your mouth?” Carol’s skin was shivering as if each nerve were irritated. The holiday eve was turning chilly and the furnace had been shut off for the summer. Her lips were forced apart over clenched teeth like a child’s after swimming and, touched and needing to touch her, Piet asked, “Why are you being such a bitch tonight?”

  “Because Braque just died.” Her walls were full of paintings, classic prints and her own humorless mediocre canvases, coarse in their coloring, modishly broad in their brushwork, showing her children on chairs, the Tarbox wharf and boatyard, Eddie in a turtleneck shirt, the graceless back view of the Congregational Church, houses, and trees seen from her studio windows and made garish, unreal, petulant. Cézanne and John Marin, Utrillo and Ben Shahn—her styles muddled theirs, and Piet thought how provincial, how mediocre and lost we all are.

  Carol sensed that he thought this and turned on him. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time, Piet, and now I’ve had just enough wine to do it. Why do you build such ugly houses? You’re clever enough, you wouldn’t have to.”