Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  No, of course not, no. Youth must be served.

  Don’t tease. I’m shy enough with you as is.

  With me, your lover? Shy?

  Just am.

  It’s so touching, how hard women must work.

  Touch my nipples.

  Gladly.

  More gently. I’m almost there.

  Come. His thigh was beginning to ache and tingle, the circulation hampered. Oh come. Good. Terrific. Wow.

  On top of the refrigerator was a wooden salad bowl brimming with Halloween candy that Ruth and Nancy had begged. To celebrate, to lend substance to, his happiness Piet took down the bowl and gobbled a handful of imitation corn; he rarely ate candy, out of fear for his teeth.

  Though Foxy had made the appointment three weeks ago, while still in the hospital, for this Friday at one, Freddy Thorne seemed startled by her appearance in his office. Until now she had kept her Cambridge dentist, but toward the end of her pregnancy her teeth had begun to twinge, and with the baby nursing her mobility was lessened. No one, not even Piet, denied that Freddy was a competent dentist. Yet she could not escape the feeling, entering his inner office, that by coming to him, in his absurd cottage tucked beside the post office on Divinity Street, when there were other competent dentists in town, she was, emboldened by motherhood, playing the game that Tarbox had taught her, the game of tempting her fate.

  He wore a white jacket and, an inch or more in front of his regular glasses, a pair of rectangular magnifying lenses. The sanctum was fanatically clean, from the circular napkin on the swinging tool tray to the scrubbed blush of Freddy’s palms, uplifted in surprise or blessing, in front of his backwards white jacket. A square black clock said twelve after one. His first appointment after lunch. She had nibbled around ten; the baby had scattered her habits of sleep and eating. It reassured her that like all normal dentists Freddy ran behind schedule. “Well look who’s here!” he said when she entered. “Lovely day,” he murmured while he adjusted her into the chair. Now he asked, as her mouth obediently opened, “Which is the area of discomfort?” Three persons had spoken: the first a frivolous prying man she knew, the second a polite bored acquaintance, the third a wholly alien technician.

  “Here,” she said. She pointed with her finger from outside her cheek and with her tongue from within. Freddy held the pick and mirror crossed at his chest as she explained. “The upper, molar I suppose it is. I get a twinge when I eat candy. And over here, on the other side, I can feel a hole where a filling used to be. Also all the books say, and my mother insisted, my teeth would fall out because the calcium went into the baby.”

  “Did you take calcium pills?”

  “Iron, I know. I took whatever Doc Allen gave me.”

  Freddy said, “With a modern diet calcium displacement isn’t usually a problem. Primitive women do tend to lose their smiles. Shall we have us a look?” His touch with the exploratory picks was delicate. A steel point touched a nerve once, and tactfully feathered off. Mint on his breath masked the odor of whatever he had eaten for lunch, perhaps veal. His perfumed fingers were in her mouth, and, like many things she had abstractly dreaded, like childbirth, like adultery, the reality was more mixed than she had imagined, and not so bad.

  “You have strong teeth,” he said. He made precise pencil marks on one of those dental charts that to Foxy as a child had seemed a wide-open scream. Curious, his choice of “strong” over “nice” or “good.”

  She counted the marks and said, “Four cavities!” Always in dental chairs she wanted to talk too much, to fend the drill away from her mouth.

  “You’re in respectable shape,” he told her. “Let’s begin with the upper right, the one you’ve been feeling.”

  He removed an injecting needle from a tray of blue sterilizer. She told him, “I don’t usually bother with Novocain.”

  “I want you to today.” His manner was mild and irresistible; where was that sloppy troll she knew from parties? With the secondary lenses in place, his eyes were totally elusive. Freddy became a voice and a touch. He said, “This is a new gadget,” and his fingers exposed a spot on her upper gum where, with a tiny hiss, something icy was sprayed. Thus numbed, she did not feel the stab of the needle.

  They waited for the Novocain to take effect. Freddy busied himself behind her back. She yawned; Toby had been fed at two and awakened again at five. Her feet on the raised metal tread looked big and flat and pale in ballet slippers. Above her feet a large window curtained in dun sacking framed an abstract view: the slate roof of the Tarbox post office descended in courses of smaller to greater from a ridge of copper flashing set smack, it seemed, against the sky. The day was balmy for this late in November. Small tugging clouds darkened Tarbox with incongruous intensity when they crossed the sun. She wondered why Piet had sent no flowers. Freddy shuffled tinkling metal and his receptionist, a pug-nosed girl with skunk-striped bangs, passed back and forth between the anteroom and a nether room in which Foxy could glimpse a table, a Bunsen burner, a tattered chart dramatizing dental hygiene for children, and the end of a cot. Nearer, on a chest of enameled drawers, a small blond radio played colorless music interrupted now and then by a characterless male voice, a voice without a trace of an accent or an emotion. Foxy wondered where such music originated, whether in men or machines, and who supplied it so inexhaustibly to dentists’ offices, hotel lobbies, and landing airplanes. Ken called it toothpaste music.

  Freddy cleared his throat and asked, “Is your mother still here? Will she be coming tonight?” The Thornes were giving a black-tie party tonight. To Foxy it meant that after weeks of seclusion she would at last again see Piet.

  “No, we put her on a plane Tuesday. At last.”

  “Did Ken not enjoy having his mother-in-law in the house?”

  “He minded it less than I did. I’m used to being a hermit.”

  “She seemed jolly.”

  “She is. But I haven’t really had much to do with her since college. I’m too old to have a mother.”

  “She enjoyed the baby.” It was not quite a question.

  “She made the noises. But people that age, I discover, aren’t very flexible, and it took a lot of my energy to keep the baby off of her nerves. She kept changing clothes and trying to reminisce while I wobbled up and down stairs.” As the moment for Freddy to use the drill neared, Foxy’s mouth watered, fairly bubbled with the wish to tell him everything—the musical first pains, the narrowing intermittences, the dreamlike unconcern of the doctors and nurses, the anesthesia like a rustling roaring wing enfolding her, the newborn infant’s astonishingly searching gaze, her wild drugged thought that he more resembled Piet than Ken, and the miraculous present fact that she, slim Foxy, was a good nurser, a tall tree of food.

  Freddy said, “She seemed in no hurry to go back to her husband.”

  “Yes, I wondered about that. She spoke very loyally of ‘Roth,’ when she thought of him. I think she sees her life as a kind of Cinderella story, rescued at the end, and now that she’s living happily ever after, she’s bored.”

  “She found Ken congenial.” Again, it was not quite interrogative.

  “Very.”

  Freddy had not expected so curt a response; delicately balked, he licked his lips and volunteered, “She also seemed attracted to me.”

  “Oh, Freddy, we all are.”

  The receptionist, who had been tinkling in the corner with the sterilizer, flashed a naughty smile behind Freddy’s back. Sensing teasing, he became dryer in manner. “We discussed fertility; did she tell you?” The receptionist left the room.

  “Breathlessly. All about myths.”

  “In part. We concluded, as I remember, that women could as easily be fertilized by the wind as by men, if they believed in it. That all conception is immaculate, on the handiest excuse.” That blurred smirk: what was she supposed to imagine it implied?

  Foxy said, “How silly. We’re obviously helpless.”

  “Are you?”

  “Otherwise why w
ould there be so many only children? I hated being an only child. My father just wasn’t there. We had plenty of electric fans.”

  “Did you?” He had lost track of the joke, the wind.

  “One in every room. I know I certainly don’t intend my child to be only.” There it was: just when Foxy had decided for the hundredth time that Freddy was contemptible, she found she had been drawn out.

  He asked, “Numb yet?”

  She said, “Almost. What’s that cot for?” She gestured toward the nether room, to fling the conversation from herself. A small cloud crossed the sun and dipped them into momentary shadow as if into intimacy. The music was mechanically doing “Tea for Two.” She was suddenly hungry for English muffins.

  “Not what you think,” Freddy said.

  “I don’t think anything. I’m just asking.”

  “Instead of lunch sometimes I take a nap.”

  “I’ve wondered how you keep going with all those parties. But what did you think I thought?” She made silent motions indicating the young receptionist, doing her doll stare and touching her forehead for the skunk bangs, and, folding her hands beside her face, sleep. She formed a kissing mouth to cement her meaning.

  “No,” Freddy whispered. “That I give abortions.”

  Shocked, stifled by shock, Foxy wanted to flee the chair. “I never thought that.”

  “Oh, but dentists do. It’s a perfect set-up. They have everything, the chair, anesthetic, instruments …”

  She judged he was saying these things to enlarge himself in her eyes, to inflame with innuendo her idea of him. If he had gone to medical school, he had aspired to power over life and death; having failed, having settled for dentistry, a gingerly meddling at the mouth of life, he still aspired. She put him down: “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  He answered, “You must be numb now,” and began to drill. Upside down, his warm cheek close against her head, Freddy resolved into a pair of hairy nostrils, a dance of probing fingers, and glinting crescents of curved glass. His aura was maternal, soapy. Foxy relaxed. Her breasts began to sting and she anticipated release, leaving this office, collecting the baby in his vanilla Carry-Cot at Bea Guerin’s, driving down the winding beach road to her empty house, undoing her upper clothes, and giving her accumulated richness over to that tiny blind mouth so avid to suck. He had begun on the right breast this morning, so it would be the left this noon. Twenty minutes, and the Novocain would be wearing off, and she could make a lunch of leftover salad and a tuna sandwich. How innocently life ate the days. How silly she was, how Christianly neurotic, to feel beneath the mild mixed surface of aging and growing, of nursing and eating and sleeping, of love feigned and stolen and actual, a terror, a tipping wrongness, a guilt gathering toward discharge. Poor Freddy, their ringleader, was revealed as a competent dentist. “Lady Be Good” was played. Beneath the red blanket of her closed eyelids Foxy saw that she must soon break with Piet, and felt no pain.

  In mid-melody the radio music stopped.

  The characterless male voice, winded, hurried, as if called back to the microphone from a distance, pronounced, “A special bulletin. Shots have been heard in Dallas in the vicinity of the Presidential motorcade. We repeat. Gunshots have been reported in Dallas in the vicinity of President Kennedy’s motorcade.”

  There was a second of sharp silence. Then the needle was returned to the groove and the toothpaste music smoothly resumed “Lady Be Good.” The black clock said 1:36.

  Freddy held the drill away from her mouth. “You hear that?”

  She asked him, “What does it mean?”

  “Some crazy Texan.” He resumed drilling. The pitch of speed lifted impatiently. The star of heat pricked its cloud of spray, and hurt. Freddy sighed mint. “You may spit.”

  The receptionist, wide-eyed from having overheard the radio, came in from the anteroom to whip the silver and to listen. “Do you think it was Communists?” the girl asked. The music halted again. She signed herself with the cross. On the slates opposite, a small flock of pigeons, having settled near the post office chimney for warmth, clumsily swirled and lifted. The bulletin was repeated, with the additional information that the motorcade had definitely been fired at. Three shots had been counted. The pigeons gripped flight in their dirty wings and beat away, out of Foxy’s sight. The girl brought a pellet of silver in a chamois pad and set it on the impeccable circular napkin of Freddy’s tool tray. Freddy rolled it tighter with his fingertips. The blunder of resuming the music was not repeated. Words spaced by silence filled in the solid truth. The President had been shot at, the President had been hit, he had been hit in the head, his condition was critical, a priest had been summoned, the President was dead. By two o’clock, all of this was known. Amid medicinal whiffs, Freddy had swabbed Foxy’s cavity and flanked the tooth with cotton and clamps and pressed the silver filling tight. Foxy had waited in the chair ten additional minutes to hear the worst. Kennedy dead, she left. The nurse was crying, her eyes still held wide, as if like a doll’s unable to close unless she lay down. Foxy, grateful to her for showing emotion, patted her hand, a cool tap in passing. Living skin seeks skin. The girl blurted, “We didn’t even vote for him, my family, but would have the next time.”

  Freddy seemed distended and titillated by this confirmation of chaos. Escorting Foxy out through the anteroom, he said in the hall, “This fucks up our party, doesn’t it?”

  “You must cancel,” Foxy told him. She would not see Piet tonight.

  “But I’ve bought all the booze,” Freddy protested.

  Foxy went out into Freddy’s tiny front yard, which held a crabapple tree skeletal and spidery without leaves. The post office flag was already at half-mast. Divinity Street was so silent she heard an electric sander working well down the block. Through the plate-glass windows of the pizza shop and the Tarbox Star and the shoe-repair haven that was also a bookie joint, she saw shadows huddled around radios. She thought of the little blond radio’s embarrassed fall from its empyrean of bland music, of the receptionist’s navy-blue eyes lacquered by tears, of Freddy’s stupid refusal to mourn, mistaken and contemptible, yet—what was better in herself? She tried to picture the dead man, this young man almost of her generation, with whom she could have slept. A distant husband had died and his death less left an emptiness than revealed one already there. Where grief should have dwelt there was a reflex tenderness, a personal cringing. At Cogswell’s corner she glanced up toward the Congregational Church and her heart, blind lamb, beat faster. The Plymouth was parked by the rocks; she must hurry to the baby. Striding uphill through the spotty blowing sunlight, Foxy imagined her son’s avid toothless mouth. Her left breast eagerly ached. She tested the right side of her mouth and found it still numb. Would her lopsided smile frighten him? Then it seemed to her that the cocky pouchy-eyed corpse had been Piet and the floor of her stomach fell and the town around her gripped guilt in its dirty white gables and tried to rise, to become a prayer.

  The Thornes decided to have their party after all. In the late afternoon, after Oswald had been apprehended and Johnson sworn in, and the engines of national perpetuity had demonstrated their strength, Georgene called all the houses of the invited and explained that the food and liquor had been purchased, that the guests had bought their dresses and had their tuxedos cleaned, that she and Freddy would feel lonely tonight and the children would be so disappointed, that on this terrible day she saw nothing wrong in the couples who knew each other feeling terrible together. In a way, Georgene explained to Angela, it would be a wake, an Irish wake, and a formal dinner-dance was very fitting for the dead man, who had had such style. Do come. Please. Freddy will be very hurt, you know how vulnerable he is.

  The fashion that fall was for deep décolletage; Piet, arriving at nine, was overwhelmed by bared breasts. He had been reluctant to come. His superstitious nature had groped for some religious observance, some ceremony of acknowledgment to gallant dead Kennedy, though he was a Republican. He knew Freddy would be bla
sphemous. Further, he felt unwell: his tongue and gums had developed a rash of cankers, and since Foxy had become inaccessible Angela had also ceased to make love to him, and his tuxedo was old, a hand-me-down from his father-in-law, and unfashionably wide-lapelled, and the black shoulders showed his dandruff. Entering the Thornes’ living room he saw naked shoulders and flaringly bared bosoms floating through the candlelight, haunting the African masks, the gaudy toss pillows, the wickerwork hassocks and strap-hinged Spanish chests and faded wing chairs. Logs burned in the fieldstone fireplace. The bar table of linen and glasses and bottles formed an undulant field of reflected fire. Janet Appleby wore an acid-green gown whose shoelace straps seemed unequal to the weight squeezed to a sharp dark cleavage like the vertical crease of a frowning brow. Marcia little-Smith, in a braless orange bodice, displayed, as she reached forward, earrings shuddering, to tap a cigarette into a copper ashtray each dent of which was crescental in the candlelight, conical tits hanging in shadow like tubular roots loose in water. Georgene wore white, two filmy breadths of cloth crossed to form an athletic and Attic binder, her breasts flattened boyishly, as if she were on her back. Carol Constantine had stitched herself a blue silk sheath severely narrow at the ankles and chastely high in front but scooped in the back down to her sacral vertebrae. Irene Saltz—for the Saltzes had come, partly renewed confidence brought on by Irene’s job, partly impish insistence on Freddy’s part—had put on a simple cocktail dress of black velvet; its oval neckline inverted the two startled arcs of her eyebrows as she jealously, anxiously surveyed the room for the whereabouts of Ben and Carol and Eddie. Piet was touched by her. Like him, she felt it was wrong to have come. She had lost weight. Humiliation flattered her.

  Bea Guerin drifted toward him with uplifted face; her bosom, sprinkled with sweat, was held forward in a stiff scarlet carapace like two soft sugared buns being offered warm in the metal vessel of their baking. “Oh Piet,” she said, “isn’t it awful, that we’re all here, that we couldn’t stay away, couldn’t stay home and mourn decently?” With lowered lids he fumbled out a concurrence, hungering for the breasts that had risen to such a roundness their upper rims made a dimpled angle with Bea’s chest-wall. Why don’t you want to fuck me? Her lifted upper lip revealed the little gap between her front teeth; she laid a trembling hand on his arm, for balance, or as a warning. You’re surrounded by unkind people. Embarrassed, he sipped his martini, and the cankers lining his mouth burned.