Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “I loved him,” Bea Guerin cried, in a flung voice whose woe seemed distant within it, a woe calling from an underworld, “I could never have voted for him, I really don’t believe in all those wishy-washy socialist things he wanted, I think people must be themselves even if it’s only to suffer, but I loved the way he held himself, and dressed, never wearing a hat or an overcoat, I mean.”

  “The terrible sadness,” Frank Appleby said, “of those strange wall eyes.”

  Marcia asked, “Were they really wall? I thought it was just he was always reading a Teleprompter.”

  Music translucently flooded the room. Doris Day, “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Freddy loved Doris Day. Freddy was all heart and as American as apple pie and Swapsies.

  “Freddy!” Carol cried. “You angel! Where’s Roger?” The Thornes’ rug of interwoven rush rosettes was rolled to the legs of the satin chaise longue, and Carol and Roger, she lithely, he stiffly, danced. “Oh,” she cried, “your hand is icy!”

  “From holding a drink,” he muttered, scowling, embarrassed, and on the bony stem of her naked back set his hand edgewise, curled in a limp half-fist like a sleeping child’s.

  The others watched uneasily. In moving to get his wife and himself a drink, Ken Whitman fastidiously skirted the bare floor and, waiting for Freddy to bring ice from the kitchen, talked softly with Janet. Ben Saltz moved to be beside Foxy. Her gestures expressed pleasure at seeing him again, after his long absence from parties; then, in response to words of his, she looked down at her flat soft stomach and obligingly, not displeased, enjoying in his Jewishness the ghost of Peter, blushed. Angela touched Piet’s arm and asked, “Shall we dance?”

  “Do you want to? It seems blasphemous, waltzing on the poor guy’s grave.”

  “It does, it is, but we must. It’s terrible taste, but we can’t let Roger and Carol do it alone. They’re getting too embarrassed.”

  She was familiar and thick and pliant in his arms; he had never learned proper steps and in the course of their marriage she had learned to follow his vague stridings lightly, as if they made a pattern, her thighs and pelvis gently cushioned against his. Their heights were equal. She rarely wore perfume, so her hair and skin released a scent unspecific but absolutely good, like water, or life, or existence itself, considered in contrast to the predominant vacuum between the stars.

  “Where,” he asked her, “are Irene and Eddie?”

  “In the kitchen talking about air pollution.”

  “They are the smuggest couple,” Piet said. “After all that fuss. I hope you take Irene’s injured confidences henceforth with a lick of salt.” He meant a saltlick, a large cake such as were mounted in the barnyards of Michigan dairy farms, but it came out sounding like a tiny amount, less than a grain.

  “Well Ben,” Angela said, “is talking to your ex-pregnant girl friend, so Irene had to go back to Eddie.”

  “That’s too complicated,” Piet said, trying to match his feet to the change of tempo as “Stars Fell on Alabama” became “Soft as the Starlight.”

  “And the other lady is surely ex-pregnant but she was never my girl friend.”

  “I was kidding. Don’t resist me like that. Relax. Glide.”

  “I hate this party, frankly. When can we go home?”

  “Piet, it’s the sort of party you love.”

  “I feel we’re insulting Kennedy.”

  “Not at all. Yesterday, he was just our President way down in Washington, and now he belongs to all of us. He’s right here. Don’t you feel him?”

  He looked into her blue eyes amazed. There was an enduring strangeness to Angela that continued through all disillusions to enchant him. Perceiving this, he resented his subtle bondage, and burned to tear Foxy from Ben, to trample on his bushy face with boots. Ineptly he stepped on Angela’s toe.

  Now Ken and Janet joined them on the dance floor, and Freddy and Irene. Above his black shoulder the twin circumflex of her perfect eyebrows seemed a lifted wingbeat. Her hair was parted precisely in the middle. Eddie Constantine came as if to capture her but at the last moment veered off and cut in to dance with Angela. Piet went and asked Georgene, standing gazing by the table of lightened bottles and dirtied glasses.

  In his arms she asked him, “Do you think it’s too early for the ham? We bought some salmon but no Catholics have come.”

  He accused her: “You and your noble privacy. Your husband just lowered the boom on me.”

  “Freddy? What on earth for?”

  “For having an affair with you.”

  “Don’t tease. Our times together were very precious, at least to me.”

  “Tease! He said you yourself told him everything. Postures, dates, phases of the moon.”

  “That’s such a lie. I’ve never admitted anything about us, though he’s tried to get me to often enough. It’s the way he works. I hope you didn’t admit anything.”

  “I didn’t, but it was sheer perversity. I assumed he had me cold.”

  “He talks to Carol and Janet all the time; maybe one of them has made him think he knows something.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t? Are you sure you didn’t tell him some night before dropping off to sleep, figuring I was a lost cause anyway, and needing something to even some score with, like an affair he’d had with Carol.”

  “Carol? Do you know this?” He loved feeling her experience fear in his arms; there was a dissolution of the bodily knit indistinguishable from sexual willingness.

  “No. But he’s over there all the time, and Carol’s not too fussy. Not,” he added hastily, “that Freddy isn’t a gorgeous hunk of man.”

  She ignored his unkind parody of tact, asking instead, “And you? Are you a lost cause?”

  “Soft as the Starlight” became “It Must Have Been Moonglow.”

  “Well,” Piet said carefully, “more and more, as Freddy acts as if he knows.”

  “Oh, Freddy. He doesn’t want to know anything, he just wants people to think he knows everything. But if I’m not worth the trouble to you, there’s no use talking, is there, Piet?” With her quick athletic firmness she put her hands on his arms and pushed herself out of his embrace. “Only don’t come running to me the next time you need a little change of ass.” Watching her retreat, he realized that all these months, all through Foxy, he had been considering Georgene still his mistress.

  Foxy was across the room dancing with Frank Appleby. They moved together placidly, without reference to the beat, silver locked in lead’s grip. “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” became the song. Marcia was at hand and, slithery quick, she nestled against his damp shirtfront, asking, “Piet, what’s happened to you? You’re not funny like you used to be.”

  “I never was trying to be funny.”

  “You were too. You were so delighted to be with us, at the beach, skiing, anywhere. Now you’ve stopped caring. You think we’re ugly, silly people.”

  “Marcia, I love you. I bet you were class secretary in school.”

  “Is it your work? What are you doing now that it’s too cold to put up any more cozy little horrors on Indian Hill?”

  “We’ve been saved by the bell. Just the other week we got a big inside job on Divinity. They hauled off Gertrude Tarbox to a nursing home and the bank in New Bedford that held the mortgage is turning the house into offices. We’ve taken out three truckloads of National Geographics.” Telling Marcia this troubled him, for he had been working in this house all day, alone, operating a big sander on the floors of what had once been a chandeliered dining room. Lost in the hypnotic whine and snarl of the machine, fascinated by the disappearance of decades of dirt and paint, by this reversal into clean wood, he had been ignorant of the President’s assassination until Jazinski returned at three from a mysteriously long lunch hour. Deafened by the sander, Piet had let the bullet pass painlessly through him.

  Marcia asked irritably, “Why does anyone need office space in Tarbox?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised. There’s a crying shortag
e downtown. Insurance companies, chiropractors. AA wants to set up a branch here. This isn’t the idyllic retreat you moved to, Marcia. We’re sadly suburban. There’s going to be a big shopping center between here and Lacetown. Isn’t Frank on the committee to squeeze more train service out of the poor old New Haven, or the MBTA, or the Lionel Company, or somebody?”

  “Piet, when are you going to get away from Gallagher? Frank and Harold were talking at lunch in Boston to a man who knows the South Shore and he expects Gallagher to go bankrupt. The banks own him twice over and he keeps gambling. If the nuns hadn’t bailed him out last summer he couldn’t have met another payment.”

  “No, sweetie, you don’t understand. Matt can’t lose. We live in an expanding universe.” To quiet her, to quell her critical spirit, he dipped his hand to her buttocks; they were narrow and nipped-in like the responsive little wheels at the front of a tractor. At a guiding touch from him she brought her body closer, so close his lips shrank from the cold aura of her dangling earring. He murmured, “How is Frank, speaking of the MBTA?”

  “The same. Maybe worse. Simply going to bed doesn’t soothe him any more. He needs to get out from under that heavy neurotic bitch.”

  “Oh hell, we all need to get out from under.”

  “Not me. I need Harold. To hurt me. He’s beautifully cruel, don’t you think?”

  “Beautifully?”

  “And yet gallant, in an old-fashioned way. I’m his, but he respects my independence. I think we’re a very nice old-fashioned couple, don’t you?”

  “Antique. Victoria and Prince Albert. But let’s talk about me. Don’t I need to get out from under Angela?”

  “Oh Piet,” Marcia said impatiently, “without Angela, you’d die.”

  Struck empty by this, unable to answer, he sang with the gauze-voiced record into the curled cool shell of her ear, “Castles may tumble, that’s fate after all, life’s really funny that way.”

  She mistook his mood and flattened her body more sinuously against his. Her fingertips found the small hairs at the back of his neck, her pelvis lifted an inch. This a woman twice spoken for: he glanced around the room for rescue. Ken was still dancing with Janet. His temples looked gray as they circled near a candle. Freddy had replaced Eddie with Angela.Eddie and Irene had gone to stand against the wall, talking. Frank Appleby was making himself another drink. Foxy had fled. Doris Day’s song became “Moonglow.” Harold, catching Piet’s eyes, came over, dug his fingers into Marcia’s sleeping arm so cruelly her olive skin leaped white between his nails, and said, “Now on the idiot box they’re talking about giving him an eternal flame. Une flamme éternelle. For Christ’s sake, he wasn’t the Unknown Soldier, he was a cleverly manufactured politician who happened to catch a nobody’s bullet. Chérie, es-tu ivre?”

  Marcia said huskily, having slept against Piet’s body, now awoken, “Yes.”

  “Then come with me. Pardonnez-nous, Piet.”

  “Gladly. I’ll go catch a bullet.” Piet made his fourth martini, silvery. Foxy. Was she in the woods? Where was Ben? Not among the men dancing. Like a moth to flame was she to Jews. Abram over Lot. Ben’s fingers, deft from miniaturizing, gliding down the tawny long insides of her stocking-topped thighs to fumble in the nigger-lipped pale fur there. Her clitoris welling through a milky film slowly, ruby rosy, watchsprings in a pansy shape. All shadowy smiling distances, Foxy would stretch and guide. Ben leonine, in the concealing shade of a Thorne-owned bush. Beyond these black windows she had opened to another lover.

  Piet turned in pain from the window and it seemed that the couples were gliding on the polished top of Kennedy’s casket. An island of light in a mourning nation. “Close Your Eyes.”

  “Cuhlozzz yur eyeszz”: the velvet voice from Hollywood whispered an inch inside Piet’s ear. The olive egg in his martini had been abandoned by its mother high and dry. His cankers hurt, especially the one his tongue had to stretch to reach, low and left on the front gum, at the root of his lip. A maze of membranes, never could have evolved from algae unassisted. God gave us a boost. He felt he shouldn’t have another drink. No supper, empty stomach. Marcia’s slithering had stirred him. Half-mast, subsided, lumpy. His kidneys signaled: the sweetness pealing of a silent bell: relieve me. The Thornes’ bathroom. There Georgene would wash herself before and after. Said his jizz ran down her leg, too much of it, should screw Angela more. Hexagonal little floor tiles, robin’s-egg toilet paper, posh purple towels. Welcome to the post-pill … Sashaying from the shower nude, her pussy of a ferny freshness. The grateful lumpiness following love. Well done, thou good and faithful. Turning up the familiar stairs, his black foot firm on the swaying treads, he glanced into the dark side room, where a few obscure heads were watching a weary flickering rerun of the casket’s removal from the belly of the airplane. Ben was there, bent forward, his profile silvered as in Sunday-school oleographs, facing Sinai. Roger and Carol, sharing a hassock. Frank sucked a cigar whose smoke was charged with the dartings of light as casket became widow, widow became Johnson, Johnson became commentator. Ghouls. Foxy must be in the kitchen. The paneled bathroom door was closed. Tactfully he tapped. Her musical voice called, “Just a min-ute.”

  Piet said, “It’s me,” and pushed. The door gave. She was sitting on the toilet in her uplifted silver gown, startled, a patch of blue paper like a wisp of sky in her hand. The pressure of the oval seat widened her garter-rigged and pallid thighs; she was perched forward; her toes but not her heels touched the hexagonal tiles of the floor. “I love you” was pulled from him like a tooth. The mirror above the basin threw him back at himself. His flat taut face looked flushed and astonished, his mouth agape, his black tie askew.

  Foxy said in a whisper reverberant in the bright tiled space, “You’re mad to be in here.” Then with incongruous deliberation she patted herself, let the paper drop into the oval of water below, and, half-turning on the seat, depressed the silver handle. Sluggishly the toilet flushed: Georgene used to complain about the low water pressure on the hill. Foxy rose from the vortex and smoothed her gown downward. Facing him, she seemed tall, faintly challenging and hostile, her closed lips strangely bleached by pale pink lipstick, newly chic. He made sure the door behind them was shut, and moved past her to urinate standing. With a pang, initially reluctant, his golden arc occurred. “God,” he said, “it’s a relief to see you alone. When the hell can we meet?”

  She spoke hurriedly, above his splashing. “I wasn’t sure you wanted to. You’ve been very distant.”

  “Ever since you’ve had the baby I’ve been frightened to death of you. I assumed it was the end of us.”

  “That’s not true. Unless you want it to be true.”

  “The fact is, all fall I’ve been frightened of everything. Death, my work, Gallagher, my children, the stars. It’s been hideous.” A concluding spurt, somewhat rhetorical, and a dismissive drying shake. He tucked himself in. “My whole life seems just a long falling.”

  “But it’s not. You have a good life. Your lovely family, your nice square house, me if you want me. We can’t talk here. Call me Monday. I’m alone again.”

  He flushed, but the water closet had not filled. “Wait. Please. Let me see your breasts.”

  “They’re all milky.”

  “I know. Just for a moment. Please. I do need it.”

  They listened for steps on the stairs; there were none. Music below, and the television monologue. Her mouth opened and her tongue, red as sturgeon, touched her upper lip as she reached behind her to undo snaps. Her gown and bra peeled down in a piece. Fruit.

  “Oh. God.”

  She blushed in answer. “I feel so gross.”

  “So veiny and full. So hard at the tops, here.”

  “Don’t get them started. I must go home in an hour.”

  “And nurse.”

  “Yes. What funny sad lines you’re getting here, and here. Don’t frown, Piet. And gray hairs. They’re new.”

  “Nurse me.”

  “Oh darlin
g. No.”

  “Nurse me.”

  She covered one breast, alarmed, but he had knelt, and his broad mouth fastened on the other. The thick slow flow was at first suck sickeningly sweet. The bright bathroom light burned on his eyelids and seemed to dye his insides a deep flowing rose, down to the pained points of his knees on the icy tile. Foxy’s hand lightly cupped the curve of the back of his skull and now guided him closer into the flood of her, now warned by touching his ear that he was giving her pain. He opened his eyes; the nipple of her other breast jutted cherry-red between ivory fingers curled in protection; he closed his eyes. Pulses of stolen food scoured his tongue, his gums; she toyed with his hair, he caressed her clothed buttocks. She was near drowning him in rose.

  Knocks struck rocklike at the unlocked door inches behind them. Harsh light flooded him. He saw Foxy’s free hand, ringed, grope and cup the sympathetic lactation of the breast jutting unmouthed. She called out, as musically as before, “One moment, please.”

  Angela’s lucid polite voice answered, “Oops, sorry, Foxy. Take your time.”

  “All ri-ight,” Foxy sang back, giving Piet a frantic look of interrogation. Her bare breasts giant circles. A Christian slave stripped to be tortured.

  His body thundered with fear. His hands were jerking like puppets on strings but his brain took perspective from the well-lit room in which he was trapped. There was no other door. The shower curtain was translucent glass, two sliding panels; his shape would show. There was a little window. Its sill came up to his chest. Realizing the raising of the sash would make noise, he motioned Foxy to flush the toilet. As she bent to touch the silver handle the shape of her breasts changed, hanging forward, long-tipped udders dripping cloudy drops. He undid the brass catch and shoved up the sash as the water closet again, feebly, drained. Setting one black dancing slipper on the lip of the tub, he hoisted himself into the black square of air headfirst. Trees on this side of the house, elms, but none near enough to grasp. His hands could touch only vertical wood and freezing air pricked by stars. Too late he knew he should have gone feet first; he must drop. This the shady rural side of the house. Soft grass. The toilet had quieted and left no noise to cover the sounds of his scrambling as he changed position. Foxy thought to turn both faucets on full. By logic she must next open the door to Angela. Piet backed out of the window. Foxy was standing by the roaring faucets staring at him and mopping herself with a purple washcloth and resecuring the bodice of her silver gown. He imagined she smiled. No time to think about it. He stood on the slick tub lip and got a leg through the little window and doing a kind of handstand on the radiator cover maneuvered the other leg through also. Button. Caught. Ah. There. He slid out on his chest and dangled his weight by his hands along Thorne’s undulate shingles. Loose nails, might catch on a nostril, tear his face like a fish being reamed. Air dangled under his shoes. Ten feet. Eleven, twelve. Old houses, high ceilings. Something feathery brushed his fingers gripping the sill inside the bathroom. Foxy begging him not to dare it? Angela saying it was all right, she knew? Too late. Fall. No apologies. Pushing off lightly from the wall with his slippers and trying to coil himself loosely against the shock, he let go. Falling was first a hum, then concussion: a harpstring in reverse. His heels hit the frost-baked turf; he took a somersault backwards and worried about grass stains on his tuxedo before he thought to praise God for breaking no bones. Above him, a pink face vanished and a golden window whispered shut. They were safe. He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging.