Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Freddy,” Piet said, tenderly, wanting to save something of himself, for he felt Freddy as a vortex sucking them all down with him, “I think you’re professionally obsessed with decay. Things grow as well as rot. Life isn’t downhill; it has ups and downs. Maybe the last second is up. Imagine being inside the womb—you couldn’t imagine this world. Isn’t anything’s existing wonderfully strange? What impresses me isn’t so much human self-deception as human ingenuity in creating unhappiness. We believe in it. Unhappiness is us. From Eden on, we’ve voted for it. We manufacture misery, and feed ourselves on poison. That doesn’t mean the world isn’t wonderful.”

  Freddy said, “Stop fighting it, Piet baby. We’re losers. To live is to lose.” He passed the sheet of paper over. “Here it is. Here is your wonderful world.” The list read:

  Baby’s fingernails

  woman (zzzz)

  Bach

  Euch.

  capac. for self-decep.

  Foxy said sharply, “I won’t believe it. Everything people have ever built up, Freddy, you’d let slide and fall apart.”

  “I do my job,” he answered. “It’s not the job I would have chosen, but every day I put on that white coat and do it.”

  White coat. The antiseptic truth. He has learned to live in it. I have not. Better man than I. Piet felt himself falling in a frozen ridged abyss, Freddy’s mind. Foxy silently held out her hand toward him; Terry turned to him and recited, “Hope isn’t something you reason yourself into. It’s a virtue, like obedience. It’s given. We’re free only to accept or reject.”

  Angela stood and said, “I think we’re all pretty much alike, no matter what we think we believe. Husband, I’m drunk. Take me home.”

  In the hall, with its elephantine scent of umbrellas, Piet playfully poked Freddy in the stomach and said, “Tell Georgene we missed her.”

  Freddy’s response was not playful; his blurred face menacingly bloated beneath the glare of his subaqueous mask. “She chose not to come. You have any message for her?” The cold fact of his knowing seemed to flow across Piet’s face.

  “No, just give her all our loves,” Piet said nimbly, able to skim and dodge at this level, where actions counted, and no submission to death was asked. He doubted that Freddy knew anything. Georgene had wept after sleeping with him again after her long hiatus of innocence, but Piet had tested her strength before and knew she could withstand all pressure of grief, all temptation to confess. Freddy’s tone of menace was a bluff, a typical groping gesture in the murk. His element. Piet jabbed again: “Shouldn’t you be going home to her now?” Freddy was making no show of leaving with the four others.

  “She’s asleep,” he said. A woman asleep. As ominous as wonderful. Rather than come to a gathering where her lover might be, she had chosen to sleep. Nursing her misery. Piet felt her captive within the murk of this man, her husband, and regretted having visited her again.

  Carol had fallen silent, listening for Eddie’s return. Now she roused herself to say good night. She and Freddy, both dressed to swim, waved together from the sallowly lit side porch. Down the side street the Saltzes’ narrow house was dark but for a bulb left burning at the rear of the downstairs. Tarbox was settled to sleep. The waterfall by the toy factory faintly roared. A car screeched its tires by the rocks at the base of the green. A jet rattled invisibly among the stars. Its sound was a scratch on glass. A final flurry of good nights. Terry and Foxy, limping shadows on the blue September street, went to the Gallaghers’ Mercedes. Without glancing backward she twiddled the fingers of her left hand: farewell until I touch you. Angela said softly, “Poor Foxy, why didn’t Terry have the sense to take her home hours ago?”

  Insulted, Piet asked, “You thought she wanted to go?”

  “Of course, she was exhausted. Isn’t she due next month?”

  “Don’t ask me. How should I know?”

  “Once in the middle of that endless game—and by the way you and Freddy should not work out your private difficulties in front of us ladies; it’s not that fascinating or delightful—I happened to glance over at her and she looked completely desolated.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “She was so beautiful when she came to this town and we’re turning her into a hag.”

  The shade of the brick pavement under the streetlamps was the purple of wine dregs. Piet noticed a small round bug scurrying along in a crevice: a citizen out late, seen from a steeple. No voice to call him home. Motherless, fatherless. Onvoldaan. Too much wine had unfocused the camera of Piet’s head; he lifted his eyes and saw beyond the backstop screen his church bulking great, broad and featureless from the rear, a stately hollow blur.

  Piet heard about Ben’s losing his job from three directions. Angela was told after nursery school, where she had agreed to teach Tuesdays and Fridays, though Nancy now went to the public first grade. Irene herself told her; it came out flat, handed to Angela in a voice like a printed card. “I suppose you’ve already heard. Ben’s changing jobs.”

  “No! I hadn’t heard at all. How exciting! Where is his new job? I hope it won’t mean you’re leaving Tarbox.”

  “Well, that part of it is still a bit up in the air. But he has definitely given them his resignation.”

  “Good for him,” Angela said, having been forced into inanity by the constraint of Irene’s manner; the impulse of condolence had to be forcefully suppressed. Angela told Piet, “She looked ghastly. Ravished. All of a sudden, you know how pretty she’s been looking this summer, she was a weighed-down Jewish middle-aged woman. Her eyes were absolutely black telling me and, you know, too steady. Quite hard. I felt she was bargaining with me.”

  “I never knew,” Piet said, unable to feign much surprise, for he had already been told the news, “exactly what Ben did anyway.”

  “He miniaturized, sweetie. For the space program. It was secret exactly what.” She was setting out the places for the girls’ supper; she was at her most companionable while making meals. They themselves were to have dinner at the Guerins tonight.

  “I meant,” Piet said, “how good was he at it? Was he just a technician, or was his work more theoretical?”

  “He loves theory in conversation.”

  “Which makes me wonder. From what Irene used to imply, the whole Mariner Venus probe belonged to Ben. At the least he was in the same league with John Ong. Now it turns out his company can can him virtually the minute the poor bastard wanders from the straight and narrow.”

  “Oh, you think the Saltine business had something to do with it?”

  “Obviously. Everything to do with it. The Constantines ran him ragged. Neither one of them ever sleeps and Eddie only flies forty hours a month, by regulation. Even Irene was letting slip that Ben was missing the early train.” Piet was putting forward as conjecture what Georgene had passed on to him as fact, as reported by Freddy.

  “I can’t believe it was that bad.”

  “You’re so goddam innocent, Angel. You can’t believe that anybody has more sexual energy than you. These four would stay up all night swapping off. Carol loves having two men at the same time; before Ben she was sleeping with that kid Eddie used to bring to basketball.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  He said quickly, “Everybody knows it.”

  Angela thought, pausing in ladling chicken soup into two chaste bowls. “But would she take both at once?—I mean, is there room? And where would it happen? In her studio, with all those messy tubes of paint? What would Irene do while this acrobatic act was going on?” Her blue eyes flickered with the attempted vision; Piet was pleased to see her interested. But he could not locate, among all the males they knew, the man with whom he would share her. Thorne was too awful, and Whitman too pure.

  The next Tuesday, Angela came back from nursery school late, the sky of her eyes scintillating, and said, “You were right. It was the Constantines. Irene took me home for a cup of tea, only it turned out to be bourbon, and told me everything. She’s extr
emely bitter about it. She refuses to see the Constantines at all, though Carol keeps coming over and wants to talk it out. Irene admits it was partly her fault, and Ben should have known enough to control it himself, but she says it was just terribly exciting for them, they had always been so serious about everything, and had never really been close friends with another couple before. She and Ben just thought it was wonderful, the way the Constantines lived by a wholly different philosophy, and were always so relaxed and game for everything, and ate whenever it occurred to them, and would stay up all night if they felt like it. She says, to give them credit, that Carol and Eddie can be terribly charming, and in a way they’re not to blame, it’s how they are, amoral. In a way, she says, she’s even grateful for the summer, it was an experience she’s glad she’s had, even though it nearly wrecked her marriage and they apparently are really strapped for money now. She admitted she lied to me about changing jobs. Ben has no other job.”

  “Of course not. Did she go into the mechanics of it at all? I mean, what was the effect on Ben so bad they had to fire him?”

  “She didn’t really, except to admit he wasn’t merely late, some days evidently he wouldn’t go in at all, especially after they got the boat, when they’d go for these long all-day cruises. Once they actually made it to Provincetown, can you imagine, in this old catboat made for playing around the marshes in. Irene said she was terrified half the time, but Eddie apparently is a very clever sailor. I love the picture—Irene in that huge floppy purple hat and long-sleeved blouse, and Ben fighting seasickness all the way. Like two owls and two pussycats in a beautiful pea-green boat. To Provincetown! My father and uncle used to take a crew of six, and even then the children weren’t allowed along. And of course Ben doesn’t really have any stomach for alcohol either, so even when he did go in to work he’d be too sick to work often, and he doesn’t have a private office, just a glass cubicle, so there was no hiding it.”

  “What about the sex? Did she go into that?”

  “She got very cagey, and I didn’t want to press her; I felt so flattered and bewildered by it all, just sitting there and getting this torrent. I wonder why she decided to tell me?”

  “You’re our town conscience. Everybody must placate you.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. She did imply it wasn’t what I may have heard from other sources. She said that Eddie could be very appealing—as if she had felt this appeal but hadn’t of course succumbed. If you’ve succumbed, it’s no longer an appeal, is it?”

  “You’re the expert,” Piet told her. He was offended by how fully vicarious experience seemed to satisfy her.

  “The evenings they all spent together she described as being all talk. Freddy Thorne and sometimes Terry were there. She went out of her way, I thought, to let me know that the night she and Eddie put Ben to bed and all the lights in their house looked out she and Eddie were really in the kitchen talking about Ben’s job; even by then he had gotten a pretty drastic warning.”

  “But no sex. Booze and boats undid him.”

  “Irene didn’t precisely say, but the suggestion was certainly not. She even—I was dumbfounded, it coming from Irene—called Carol a cockteaser. As if she should have gone to bed with Ben, and didn’t, or didn’t often enough, I don’t know. It’s pretty messy and sad. When you think of the children especially. Most of it apparently happened at the Constantines’ house because it was easier for the Saltzes to leave Bernard, who stays up forever reading anyway, to sit for his brother, but after midnight Irene would sometimes feel guilty enough to go home, leaving Ben talking with Eddie. They would talk everything—space, computers, public versus private schools, religion. Eddie is so lapsed he begins to scream whenever he thinks at all about the Church.”

  “And then Carol would lay them both.”

  “Piet, I don’t want to diminish your high estimate of Carol but I really think that’s unlikely. Maybe in Okinawa whorehouses, but in somebody’s home who we know … it’s grotesque.”

  “Love, she’s human. She could take one in her mouth.”

  The sky of Angela’s eyes flashed. “That’s what you want me to do, isn’t it?”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Good heavens, no. That’s sodomy.”

  Foxy had a rather different story, Carol’s as confided to Terry Gallagher. Terry and Carol shared music; Foxy and Carol once in a while drew together, with one of the exquisite Constantine girls, Laura or Patrice, posing in leotards. “She says,” she said, “that the Saltzes just moved in on them. That they were outcasts in the town, and terribly lonely, and when they saw that she and Eddie would accept them, there was just no moderation. That Ben had had a very sheltered and old-fashioned upbringing, in a Hebrew ghetto in Brooklyn—”

  Piet laughed. “I can just see Carol saying ‘Hebrew.’ ” Foxy was a fair mimic and unconsciously colored her retellings with something of the lilt of the telling. Piet’s head lay on her lap, and the heartbeat of her unborn infant was next to his ear.

  “—a Hebrew ghetto, and was just starved for, well, a little swinging. Carol’s point, and she’s very convinced about this, is that until the Constantines came to town the Saltzes had been excluded by the ‘nice’ couples, the Guerins who live just a block away on Prudence Street, and the darling Thornes, and the extremely lovely Applesmiths, and the ever-fashionable Hanemas, not to mention the delightfully up-and-coming Gall—”

  “Not true. We always asked Ben to basketball. They don’t ski or play tennis, whose fault is that? They were always at large parties. The Dutch are more of a minority in this town than Jews.”

  “Well, this is what Carol’s impression was, presumably from Irene.” Absent-mindedly as she talked Foxy was stroking Piet’s hair. “Your hair is quite unsmoothable.”

  “Is it thinning out? Will I get bald like Freddy? Red-haired men do. It’s Jehovah’s rebuke to our vigor. Don’t stop. I am very hurt that Irene, whom I’ve always adored, thought we were all anti-Semitic.”

  “Well evidently she did. Does. She was furious when the elementary school put Bernard in a Christmas pageant. As Joseph yet. According to Terry, Carol is positive that Irene was the real moving spirit behind the couples’ getting together. The Saltzes’ marriage has been on the rocks for years. They were staying together because of Bernard, and then Jeremiah was a mistake. Irene had a kind of nervous breakdown over it.”

  “I remember her as so lovely, pregnant. I do love pregnant women.”

  “So I see.”

  “According to Carol according to Terry, what is or was Irene’s complaint about Ben?”

  “She feels he has no ambition, no drive. Her father came up the hard way in the garment business. Anyway, Piet, who knows why women like some men and don’t like others? Chemistry? Carol’s story is that Irene took a fancy to Eddie and lit out after him the way she lights into everything—Fair Housing, or the nursery school, or conservation. He became a cause.”

  “I love the way you say ‘cozz.’ Honeh chile, ah loves it.”

  “How do you say it? Cawss. Like the way you say ‘haas’ for ‘house.’ ”

  “OK, I’m an immigrant. Anyway, your description sounds more like Terry than Carol. Carol would say ‘She wanted him’ or something with the same awesome simplicity and then look daggers. ‘She vowed to have him.’ ‘She thenceforth consecrated herself to sharing his pallet.’ ”

  “She wouldn’t at all. She’d say, ‘The bitch went into heat and got herself screwed.’ ”

  “Oh, my mistress. Your language. Skeerooed.”

  “Don’t jiggle your head like that. You’ll induce me.”

  “It’s true, Irene has been promoted by all this to full-fledged bitch status. She used to be somebody you talked to early at cocktail parties to get her out of the way.”

  “Carol says she and Eddie used to sit after the Saltzes had left and laugh, Irene was being so blatant.”

  “Then he’d go down the street and laugh out of the other side of his mouth. I love the idea of Eddie Cons
tantine being a worthy project like school integration or the whooping crane. The most worthless man I know. To think we all entrust our lives to him. What did Carol say she and Ben did to combat this assault on the young aviator’s virtue?”

  “She says she pitied Ben but, frankly, never found him attractive.”

  “She excluded him. One more Wasp.”

  “Yes,” Foxy said, “she did mention that, that she was the only Wasp in the ménage. Eddie apparently hates Wasps, and is always testing her. Scaring her when he drives the car, and things like that.”

  “I thought she was a lapsed R.C.”

  “He is. She was a Presbyterian.” Her fingers had trespassed from his hair to the sensitive terrain of his face, taut planes she explored as if blind. “Furthermore,” she said, in a voice whose musical shadows and steeps had become, like the flowing sight of her and her perfumed weight, a body his love inhabited, “furthermore, and stop looking at me like that, she doesn’t think what he did with them has anything to do with Ben’s losing his job. Carol thinks he was just poor at it, which in a way I can believe, since the times he’s talked to Ken—”

  “Ken and Ben, they don’t know when,” Piet said.

  “—the times he talked to Ken, after expressing all this interest in biochemistry, and the secret of life and whatnot, Ken says he shows no real comprehension or much interest beyond the superficial sort of thing that appears in Newsweek. He’s really looking for religious significance, and nothing could bore Ken more. What was his word?—eclectic. Ben has a thoroughly eclectic mind.”

  “My theory is,” Piet said, closing his eyes the more keenly to sense Foxy’s circumambient presence, her belly beside his ear, her fingers on his brow, her thighs pillowing his skull, “that the Saltzes went into it so Ben could learn about aviation from Eddie and improve his job in the aerospace complex. That once they got into that smelly old house, Carol being a nymphomaniac, she had to get laid, and rather than stand around watching, Eddie gave Irene a bang, and she said to herself, ‘What the hell! This is fun!’ ”