Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  He said, “I hear you’re seeing a lot of the Constantines.”

  “They’re bores, Piet. Roger enjoys them, but they’re self-centered bores. After a while one minds their not having gone to college.”

  “Who does Roger enjoy most, Eddie or Carol?”

  “Don’t be wicked, Piet. I don’t mind it from these others, but I hate it from you. You’re not wicked, why pretend?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Carol can be fun,” Bea said, “but she’s so cold. Cold and crude. I think—this is terribly sad—I think she was honestly in love with Ben, terribly in love, and never let herself know it, and now she can’t admit it, it’s too undignified, and does the cruelest imitations of him.”

  “But Ben is so boring.”

  “Piet, I don’t think they noticed, they’re such bores themselves. Oh, it’s awful, everybody is so boring. Roger is so extremely boring.”

  “You think I wouldn’t be?”

  “Not for a while, sweet Piet. Not for a long while. But you don’t like short women, it’s so Napoleonic of you.”

  Piet laughed and gazed over Bea’s head. Where was Foxy? He searched the flickering room in vain. He felt that in her staying away she had achieved over him a moral ascendancy that completed the triumph, the royal disregard, of her giving birth to a son. Pity sucked at him; he felt abandoned, small. He asked Bea, “Where are the Gallaghers?”

  “Matt told Georgene they were going with their children to a special mass. She said he was polite over the phone but just barely.”

  “Matt is getting very independent. And the Ongs?”

  “John was too sick.”

  “How sick is he?”

  “Freddy says he’s dying,” Bea said, the curve of her cheek a Diana’s bow in candlelight. Dying. Before coming to the party Piet and his daughters had watched, on television, the casket being hauled from the plane amid the spotlights of the air field: a long gleam on the polished wood as sudden as a bullet, the imagined airless privacy within, the flooding lights without, the widow blanched amid rapid shadows, the eclipsing shoulders of military attachés. The casket had tipped, bumped. Bea said to Piet, “You haven’t asked where are the Whitmans.”

  “Oh, aren’t they here?”

  “Piet, you’re so obvious. I have no idea where they are, but you’ve been looking over my head all this time. It’s not very flattering.”

  “I was thinking I should get another drink.” To quench panic. The refrigerator. The stars.

  “Piet,” Bea said swiftly, softly, seeing he was pulling away. “I could love you, if you’d let me.”

  At the drinks table Carol was flirting simultaneously with Harold and Frank. “Frank,” she said loudly in a voice that did not quite dare call the party to attention, to make an occasion, “give us a Shakespeare quote. Nobody knows quite what to say.”

  “Good night, sweet prince?” Angela offered. It startled Piet to see her there, her fine oval skull and throat suspended in the hovering light, shadows fluctuating on her white shoulders, the scalloped neckline, the discreet parabola of pearls.

  Frank Appleby, red-eyed, considered and said, “Ambition’s debt is paid.”

  Carol asked, “Is that a quote?”

  “From Julius Caesar. What a dumb floozy.” He gave Carol a crunching shoulder hug that Piet feared would shatter her brittle blue sheath.

  “What about”—Harold little-Smith interrupted himself with a giggle—“For Oswald is an honorable man?” Enjoying the laughter of the others, he went on, “I really had to laugh, the news came in just as I was having dessert, gâteau avec des fraises, with three of my most Republican associates, including, Frank—this will amuse you—young Ed Foster, who as Frank knows thinks Bob Taft was turning pink at the end. Un peu de rose au fin. Naturally everybody’s first assumption, including the broadcasters, who are all liberals of course—”

  Carol interrupted, “Harold, are you really a conservative?”

  Janet spoke up. “Harold and Frank are different. Frank’s a Federalist; he honestly loves the Founding Fathers. Harold’s an ultramontane; with him it’s just a form of swank.”

  “Merci pour votre mots très incisifs. May I please continue? Well, naturally everybody assumed that a right-wing crackpot had done it. You remember at first there was a lot of melancholy fill-in about Dallas the Birchers’ paradise, et cetera; we were all very pious and tut-tutty.”

  “Is that French?” Carol asked.

  “But then, around two-thirty, when I’d got back to the office and the stuff on Oswald had begun to filter through, young Ed called up absolutely ecstatic and said, ‘Did you hear? It wasn’t one of ours, it was one of theirs!’ ” Perhaps because all those listening had experienced the same reversal of prejudice, there was less laughter than Harold had expected.

  Frank offered, “Ever since McCarthy cracked up, all the real wolves have been on the left.”

  Freddy said, “One thing I’m absolutely certain of, he wasn’t in it alone. There were too many shots. The whole fucking thing was too successful.”

  He was unanimously pooh-poohed. Janet said, “Freddy, you see conspiracies in everything.”

  “He thinks,” Angela stated, “we’re all a conspiracy to protect each other from death.”

  “To shut out the night, I think I said.”

  Piet was impressed that Freddy remembered anything of what he said. Shapelessness was growing bones. Feeding on calcium stolen from Piet’s own slack and aimless life. Lately Freddy had taken to staring at Piet too hard, meaningfully.

  “One conspiracy I’ll let you all in on is,” Harold little-Smith said, “when the market opens again, buy. Business was not happy with Kennedy, and it’s going to love Johnson. He’s just the kind of old bastard business is happy under.”

  Carol with her long bare back shivered. “That gross sad man. It was like the high-school shot putter accepting the class presidency, all humility and rotten grammar. Freddy, are you going to let us dance?”

  “Whatever my guests think is proper. I don’t know how to act, frankly. I’ve never had my President assassinated before. I was a baby when they did Lincoln in. Honest Abyface.”

  Ben Saltz overheard and came up to them. His face above his beard appeared to Piet shell-white, a grinning fragment from an exploded past. “And yet,” he informed Freddy, “this country since 1865 has an unenviable record for political violence. Four presidents, plus the attempts on Truman and both Roosevelts—as you know, Teddy was actually wounded, in his unsuccessful campaign in 1912—not to mention Huey Long. There isn’t a country west of the Balkans with any kind of the same record. The Prime Ministers of England go everywhere with a single bodyguard.”

  “We fought for the right to bear arms,” Frank said.

  Carol was saying, “Ben will dance with me, won’t you, Ben? Wouldn’t you like to dance with me?”

  His carved lion’s smile appeared, but his eyes remained dubious, frightened, human. Carol twitchily seized Harold’s arm and said, “If Ben’s scared to, Harold will, won’t you, Harold? Dance with me. After Janet’s been so mean about your elegant politics. Freddy, put on music.” She turned the chill pallor of her back on Piet.

  Ben too, in a trim tuxedo that looked rented, turned his back, and spoke to Angela. Piet heard his wife ask, “… like her teaching by now?”

  Ben’s voice, doleful and clear, responded, “… gratifying to me to see her using her mind after all these years, being at least to some extent intellectually challenged.”

  Georgene was standing in the middle of the room with the air of a hostess undecided between duties. Piet approached her and let her sip his drink. “Carol is terribly high,” he said.

  “Well, take her to bed. You know where it is.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. She’d scratch. But I wonder whose inspiration it was to have the Saltzes and Constantines together.”

  “Freddy’s, of course.”

  “But you made it stick. Freddy has a lo
t of ideas that you let wither.”

  Georgene’s righteous clubwoman’s temper flared. “Well really Piet, it’s too tedious, if people aren’t going to have their affairs in private.” We were different, she was saying, we were secret, and brave, and better than these corrupt couples. She went on aloud, roughly pushing her fingers through her graying hair, as if combing out larch needles, “I seem to be the only person I know left who has any sense of privacy.”

  “Oh. That’s an interesting remark.”

  “It’s not meant to be.”

  “Sweet Georgene, what are you doing with all this privacy, now that I’m not around?”

  “Oh,” she said, “men come and go. I can’t keep track of them all. They’ve worn a path through the woods.” She asked, “Do you care?”

  “Of course. You were wonderful for me.”

  “What happened then?”

  “It began to frighten me. I felt Freddy knew.”

  “What if he did? I was handling Freddy.”

  “Maybe I’m not being entirely honest.”

  “I know you’re not,” Georgene said, “you never are,” and, like a playing card being snapped, showed him her edge and dealt herself away. Let women in, Piet thought, and they never stop lecturing. Pedagogy since the apple. Be as gods.

  Roger Guerin came up to him. His brows were knit tight and he was wearing a frilled and pleated dress shirt, with ruby studs and a floppy bow tie in the newest fey fashion. He asked, “Put your golf clubs away yet?”

  Piet said, “There may be one more warm weekend.”

  Eddie Constantine came up to them crouching. “Hey Jesus,” he said, “have either of you looked down Marcia’s dress yet? She’s nose cones down to her navel.”

  “You’ve always known they were there,” Piet told him.

  “Believing isn’t seeing. God, we were in the kitchen talking about some cruddy thing, air pollution, and I kept looking down and they kept bobbling around, I got such a hard-on I had to dive in here to level off.”

  Roger laughed, too loudly out of his tiny mouth, like one who has learned about laughing late in life, and Piet realized he was standing here as an excuse, that the point of Eddie’s anecdote had been to amuse and excite Roger. My cock, he had been secretly saying, is big as a fuselage. Women, he had been saying, are dirt.

  “How about Janet?” Roger asked him. “Held by those two little shoestrings.”

  Eddie drew closer, still in his scuttling position, to the other man, stiff-standing. “It looks to me the way they’re squeezed she’s carrying a second backside, in case the first wears out.” The beauty of duality. A universe of twos. “Hey Roger, do you want to know what crazy Carol did the other night? We were … you know … in my lap … up … and what does the bitch do but swing her leg way the hell back and stick her foot in my mouth! It was great, I damn near puked. Get Bea to try it.”

  Piet moved off and gently, by standing expectant, detached Janet from the little-Smiths and Freddy Thorne. The glass in her hand held a few melted ice cubes; he touched it to take it from her. She did not resist, her head was bowed. In the hushed space walled by their bodies Piet asked, “How goes it, Jan-Jan? How’s your beautiful shrink?”

  “That bastard,” she said, without looking up, “that son of a bitch. He won’t tell me to stop seeing Harold.”

  “We all thought you’d stopped seeing Harold ages ago. Ever since your goodness and health regime.”

  Now she did look up. “You’re nice, Piet. Naïve but nice.”

  He asked her, “Why is it your psychiatrist’s job to tell you to stop seeing Harold?”

  “That’s what he says,” she said. “Because I love him, that’s why. He’s a fat old Kraut with a brace on one leg and I love him, he’s a total fink but I adore him, and if he gave even the simplest kind of a fart about me he’d tell me to stop sleeping with Harold. But he won’t. He doesn’t. The old re-tard.”

  “What does the man tell you?”

  “I’ve been going now five months and the only hint he’s ever dropped is that because of the pharmaceutical business every time I take a pill I’m having intercourse with my father, it’s his seed. I said to him, What am I supposed to do when I get a headache and need two aspirin, dial a prayer?”

  “Dear lovely Janet, don’t cry. Tell me instead, should Angela go? Ever since you started, she’s wanted to go. What’s my duty as a husband?”

  “Don’t let her. Get her a lover, send her to Yugoslavia, anything but this. God, it’s degrading. It’ll get her all mixed up and she’s so serene. She doesn’t know how neurotic she is.”

  “She’s beginning to. She tells me she feels too detached, as if she’s already dead.”

  “Mm, I know that feeling. Angela and I are somewhat alike.”

  “Yes, that’s what she says too. She says you both have big bosoms and it makes you both melancholy.”

  “Let Angela speak for herself. I’m not sure I like being somebody’s twin. Are you going to get me another bourbon or not?”

  While Piet was at the drink table, Freddy Thorne sidled up to him and said, “Could we talk a moment? Alone.”

  “Freddy, how exciting! Just little old me and big old you?”

  “Notice I’m not smiling.”

  “But I can see your skull smiling through, behind those poodgy lips.”

  “How much have you had to drink?”

  “Never ask an Irishman that question at a wake. Eh cup quaffed fer sorree’s sake isn’t eh cup at all. Stop standing there looking portentous. I have to take Janet her drink. I think I’m falling in love with Janet.”

  But by his return with the drink, Janet was deep in conversation with Harold, and Piet let himself be led to a corner by Freddy, the corner behind the unstrung harpframe.

  “Piet,” Freddy said, biting the word short. “I’ll give you this cold turkey. I know about you and Georgene.”

  “Cold turkey? I thought that was how dope addicts broke the habit. Or am I thinking of the day after Thanksgiving?”

  “I told you that night at the Constantines’ to lay off. Remember?”

  “Was that the night you were Chiang Kai-shek?”

  “And just now I see you and she having a cozy-type talk in the middle of the room. Righty-right?”

  “I don’t care what they say at the State Department, I think we should let you invade. Unleash Freddy Thorne, I’m always saying, as our many mutual friends will testify.”

  Freddy said nothing. Piet found the lack of any answer a frightening void. He asked, “How do you think you know this?” When again no answer came, he asked, “What do you think you know?”

  “She told me herself. You and she were lovers.”

  “Georgene?”

  “Well, did she lie?”

  “She might have, to get back at you for something else. Or you might be lying to me. When is this supposed to have happened?”

  “Don’t play games. You know when.”

  “All right. I confess. It happened last summer. We were tennis partners. I lost my head, her pretty white dress and freckles and all, I flung her right down on the service line and we conceded the set six-love. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” His mouth felt very dry, though his third martini was light in his hand: empty, flown, the olive a tame green egg.

  Freddy tried, with some success, to gather himself into a menacing mass, a squinting cloud, his narrow hairless skull majestic. When he frowned, forked wrinkles spread back on his pate. “I’m going to hurt you,” he told Piet, and stalked toward the kitchen, for more ice.

  Angela, seeing Piet shaken, left Ben lecturing to air and came to her husband and asked, “What were you and Freddy saying? You’re pale as a ghost.”

  “He was telling me I must have my teeth straightened. Ow. My mouth hurts.”

  “You won’t tell me. Was it about me?”

  “Angel, you’ve got it. He asked me for the honor of your hand. He said he’s been in love with you for years.”


  “Oh, he always says that.”

  “He does?”

  “It’s his way of bugging me.”

  “But you like it. I can tell by your face that you like hearing crap like that.”

  “Why not? Why are you so mean about Freddy? What has he ever done to you?”

  “He threatens my primitive faith,” Piet told his wife.

  Foxy came into the room with Ken. She wore a strapless silver gown. Her breasts were milk-proud. There was a slow luminous preening of her upper body as she turned, searching for Piet in the mad shadows. The Whitmans’ entrance at the front door had disturbed the air of the house, for the candle-flames now underwent a struggle and the furniture and walls seemed to stagger and billow. She had come for him. She had abandoned her house and warm baby on this tragic night solely to seek him out, to save him from harm amid this foul crowd. He heard her explain to Georgene, “We had the sitter all lined up and thought we’d come for a little while just to make it worthwhile for her—she’s Doc Allen’s daughter and we don’t want to discourage her when we’re just beginning, we’ve never needed sitters before. Then after she came we sat around for the longest while unable to tear ourselves away from the television.”

  “What’s happening now?” Roger’s deep voice inquired.

  “Oh,” Foxy said, “mostly old film clips. What are really heartbreaking are the press conferences. He was so quick and sassy and, I don’t know, attentive. He somehow brought back the fun in being an American.” Piet saw that as she spoke she held close to her husband’s arm, sheltering. Ken stood erect and pale in impeccable black. His studs were onyx.