by John Updike
They were at the Whitmans’. With the motor extinguished, Angela’s not answering alarmed him. Her voice when it came sounded miniature, dwindled, terminal. “You better take me home.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You must come in.” He justified his imperious tone: “I don’t have the guts to go in without you.”
Ken answered their ring. He wore a foulard and smoking jacket: the host. He shook Piet’s hand gravely, glancing at him from those shallow gray eyes as if taking a snapshot. He welcomed Angela with a solicitude bordering on flirtation. His man’s voice and shoulders filled comfortably spaces where Foxy alone had seemed adrift and forlorn. He took their coats, Angela’s blue second-best and Piet’s little apricot jacket, and ushered the couple down the rag-rugged hall; Angela stared all about her, fascinated by how the house that should have been hers had been renovated. She murmured to Piet, “Did you choose the wallpaper?” Foxy was in the living room, feeding the baby in her lap. Unable to rise or speak in greeting, she grinned. Lit up by her smile, her teary face seemed to Piet a net full of gems; lamplight flowed down her loose hair to the faceless bundle in her lap. The array of bottles on the coffee table glittered. They had been drinking. In the society of Tarbox there was no invitation more flattering than to share, like this, another couple’s intimacy, to partake in their humorous déshabille, their open quarrels and implicit griefs. It was hard for these couples this night to break from that informal spell and to confront each other as enemies. Angela took the old leather armchair, and Piet a rush-seat ladderback that Foxy’s mother, appalled by how bleak their house seemed, had sent from Maryland. Ken remained standing and tried to run the meeting in an academic manner. Piet’s itch was to clown, to seek the clown’s traditional invisibility. Angela and Foxy, their crossed legs glossy, fed into the room that nurturing graciousness of female witnessing without which no act since Adam’s naming of the beasts has been complete. Women are gentle fruitful presences whose interpolation among us diffuses guilt.
Ken asked them what they would like to drink. The smoking jacket a prop he must live up to. Outrage has no costume. Angela said, “Nothing.”
Piet asked for something with gin in it. Since tonic season hadn’t begun, perhaps some dry vermouth, about half and half, a European martini. Anything, just so it wasn’t whiskey. He described the smell of whiskey at the town meeting, and was disappointed when no one laughed. Irked, he asked, “Ken, what’s the first item on your agenda?”
Ken ignored him, asking Angela, “How much did you know of all this?”
“Ah,” Piet said. “An oral exam.”
Angela said, “I knew as much as you did. Nothing.”
“You must have guessed something.”
“I make a lot of guesses about Piet, but he’s very slippery.”
Piet said, “Agile, I would have said.”
Ken did not take his eyes from Angela. “But you’re in Tarbox all day; I’m away from seven to seven.”
Angela shifted her weight forward, so the leather cushion sighed. “What are you suggesting, Ken? That I’m deficient as a wife?”
Foxy said, “One of the things that makes Angela a good wife to Piet, better than I could ever be, is that she lets herself be blind.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Angela said, preoccupied with, what her shifting in the chair had purposed, pouring herself some brandy. It was five-star Cognac but the only glass was a Flintstone jelly tumbler. Foxy’s housekeeping had these lapses and loopholes. Admitted to her house late in the afternoon, Piet would see, through the blond rainbow of her embrace, breakfast dishes on the coffee table unwashed, and a book she had marked her place in with a dry bit of bacon. She claimed, when he pointed it out, that she had done it to amuse him; but he had also observed that her underwear was not always clean.
Unable to let Angela’s mild demur pass unchallenged, she sat upright, jarring the sleeping bundle in her lap, and argued, “I mean it as a compliment. I think it’s a beautiful trait. I could never be that way, the wise overlooking wife. I’m jealous by nature. It used to kill me, at parties, to see you come up with that possessive sweet smile and take Piet home to bed.”
Piet winced. The trick was not to make it too real for Ken. Change the subject. A mild man innocently seeking information, he asked the other man, “How did you find out?”
“Somebody told him,” Foxy interposed. “A woman. A jealous woman.”
“Georgene,” Piet said.
“Right,” Foxy said.
Ken said, “No, it was Marcia little-Smith. She happened to ask me the other day downtown what work was still being done on the house, that Piet’s truck was parked out front so often.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, that’s what the two of them cooked up to say,” Foxy told Piet, “Of course it was Georgene. I knew when she found us together last week she was going to do something vicious. She has no love in her life so she can’t stand other people having any.”
Piet disliked her slashing manner; he felt they owed the couple they had wronged a more chastened bearing. He accused her: “And then you told him everything.”
The gems in her face burst their net. “Yes. Yes. Once I got started I couldn’t stop. I’m sorry, for you, and then not. You’ve put me through hell, man.”
Angela smiled toward Ken, over brandy. “They’re fighting.”
He answered, “That’s their problem,” and Piet, hearing the unyielding tone, realized that Ken did not view the problem, as he did, as one equally shared, a four-sided encroachment and withdrawal. Ken’s effort, he saw, would be to absolve, to precipitate, himself.
Angela, frightened, with Piet, of the other couple’s rising hardness, inquired softly, her oval head tilted not quite toward Foxy, “Georgene found you together a week ago? Piet told me it was all over.”
Foxy said, “He lied to you, sweet.”
“I did not.” Piet’s face baked. “I came down here because you were miserable. We didn’t make love, we hardly made conversation. We agreed that the abortion ended what should have been ended long ago. Clearly.”
“Was it so clear?” Eyes downcast. Velvety mouth prim. He remembered that certain subtle slidiness of her lips. Her demeanor mixed surrender and defiance. Piet felt her fair body, seized by his eyes, as a plea not to be made to relive the humiliation of Peter.
Ken turned again on Angela. “How much do you know? Do you know the night of the Kennedy party they were necking in the upstairs bathroom? Do you know he was having both Georgene and Foxy for a while and that he has another woman now?”
“Who?”
Angela’s quick question took both Whitmans aback; they looked at each other for a signal. Piet saw no sign from Foxy. Ken pronounced to Angela’s face, “Bea.”
“Dear Bea,” Angela said, two fingertips circularly lingering on the brass stud second from the top along the outer edge of the left leather arm. Pain so aloofly suffered. The treachery of Lesbians. Dress in chitons and listen to poetry. Touch my arm. Hockey.
Piet interposed, “This is gossip. What evidence do you two have?”
“Never mind, Piet,” Angela said aside.
Ken resumed the instructor’s role; lamplight showed temples of professorial gray as he leaned over Angela. “You know about the abortion?” His face held a congestion his neat mouth wanted to vent. A pudgy studious boy who had been mocked at recess. Never tease, Piet, never tease.
Piet asked Foxy, “Why doesn’t he lay off my wife?”
Angela nodded yes and with a graceful wave added, to Ken, “It seems to me they did that as much for you as for themselves. A cynical woman would have had the child and raised it as yours.”
“Only if I were totally blind. I know what a Whitman looks like.”
“You can tell just by listening,” Piet said. “They begin to lecture at birth.”
Ken turned to him. “Among the actions I’m considering is bringing criminal charges against Thorne. You’d be an accessory.”
“For G
od’s sake, why?” Piet asked. “That was probably the most Christian thing Freddy Thorne ever did. He didn’t have to do it, he did it out of pity. Out of love, even.”
“Love of who?”
“His friends.” And Piet pronouncing this felt his heart vibrate with the nervousness of love, as if he and Freddy, the partition between them destroyed, at last comprehended each other with the fullness long desired, as almost had happened one night in the Constantines’ dank foyer. Hate and love both seek to know.
Ken said, and something strange, a nasty puffing, an adolescent sneer, was afflicting his upper lip, “He did it because he likes to meddle. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s been done, and I see no way back through it.”
Angela understood him first. She asked, “No way?”
Ken consented to her implication. “I’ve had it. To be technical: there are reactions that are reversible and those that aren’t. This feels irreversible to me. Simple infidelity could be gotten around, even a prolonged affair, but with my child in her belly—”
“Oh, don’t be so superstitious,” Foxy interrupted.
“—and then this monstrous performance with Thorne …”
Angela asked him, “How can you judge? As Piet says, in context, it was the most merciful thing.”
Piet told him, “She wrote me long letters, all summer, saying how much she loved you.” But even as he pleaded he knew it was no use, and took satisfaction in this knowledge, for he was loyal to the God Who mercifully excuses us from pleading, Who nails His joists of judgment down firm, and roofs the universe with order.
As Ken spoke, still standing above them like a tutor, his voice took on an adolescent hesitancy. “Let me try again. It’s clear I don’t count for much with any of you. But this has been quite a night for me, and I want to have my say.”
“Hear, hear,” Piet said. He waited happily to be crushed, and dismissed.
“In a sense,” Ken went on, “I feel quite grateful and benevolent, because as a scientist I supposedly seek the truth, and tonight I’ve gotten it, and I want to be worthy of it. I don’t want to shy from it.”
Piet poured more gin for himself. Foxy blinked and jostled the baby; Angela sipped brandy and remained on the edge of the huge leather chair.
“In chemistry,” Ken told them, “molecules have bonds; some compounds have strong bonds, and some have weaker ones, and though now with atomic valences we can explain why, originally it was all pragmatic. Now listening to my wife tonight, not only what she said, the astonishingly cold-blooded deceptions, but the joyful fullness with which she spilled it all out, I had to conclude we don’t have much of a bond. We should, I think. We come from the same kind of people, we’re both intelligent, we can stick to a plan, she stuck with me through a lot of what she tells me now were pretty dreary years. She told me, Piet, she had forgotten what love was until you came along. Don’t say anything. Maybe I’m incapable of love. I’ve always assumed I loved her, felt what you’re supposed to feel. I wanted her to have my child, when we had room for it, I gave her this house—”
Foxy interrupted, “You gave yourself this house.”
Piet said, “Foxy.”
Ken’s hands, long-fingered and younger than his body, had been groping into diagrams on a plane in front of him; now they dropped rebuked to his sides. He turned to Piet and said, “See. No bond. Apparently you and she have it. More power to you.”
“Less power to them, I would think,” Angela interposed.
Ken looked at her surprised. He had thought he had been clear. “I’m divorcing her.”
“You’re not.”
“Is he?”
Angela had spoken to Ken, then Piet to Foxy. She nodded, gems returning to her pink face, burning, eclipsing the attempted gaze of recognition, the confession of hopelessness, toward Piet. He was reminded of Nancy in the instant of equilibrium as she coped with the certain knowledge that she was going to cry, before her face toppled, broke like a vase, exposing the ululant tongue arched in agony on the floor of her mouth.
“If you divorce her, I’ll have to marry her.” Piet felt the sentence had escaped from him rather than been uttered. Was it a threat, a complaint, a promise?
Dryly Foxy said, “That’s the most gracious proposal I’ve ever heard.” But she had named it: a proposal.
“Oh, my God, my God,” Angela cried. “I feel sick, sick.”
“Stop saying things twice,” Piet told her.
“He doesn’t love her, he doesn’t,” Angela told Ken. “He’s been trying to ditch her ever since summer.”
Ken told Piet, “I don’t know what you should do. I just know what I should do.”
Piet pleaded, “You can’t divorce her for something that’s over. Look at her. She’s repentant. She’s confessed. That’s your child she’s holding. Take her away, beat her, leave Tarbox, go back to Cambridge with her, anything. But no reasonable man—”
Ken said, “I am nothing if not reasonable. I have legal grounds six times over.”
“Stop being a lawyer’s son for a second. Try to be human. The law is dead.”
“The point of it is,” Ken said, sitting down at last, “she’s not repentant.”
“Of course she is,” Piet said. “Look at her. Ask her.”
Ken asked gently, as if waking her from sleep, “Fox, are you? Repentant?”
She studied him with bold brown eyes and said, “I’ll wash your feet and drink the water every night.”
Ken turned to Piet, his experiment successful. “See? She mocks me.”
Foxy stood tall, placed the infant on her shoulder, and rapidly drummed its back. “I can’t stand this,” she announced, “being treated as a thing. Excuse me, Angela. I’m truly sorry for your grief, but these men. All this competitive self-pity.” She paused by the doorway to retrieve a blanket from a chair, and in the motion of her stooping, in the silence of her leaving, Tobias burped.
At the little salutary hiccup, so portentously audible, Angela’s shoulders jerked with laughter. She had hidden her face in her hands. Now she revealed it, as if, her own acolyte, she were reverently unfolding the side wings of a triptych. It was a face, Piet saw, lost to self-consciousness, an arrangement of apertures willing, like a sea anemone, to be fed by whatever washed over it. “I want to go home,” she told Ken. “I’m tired, I want a bath. Is everything settled? You’re going to divorce Foxy, and Piet’s going to divorce me. Do you want to marry me, Ken?”
He responded with a gallantry that confirmed Piet in his suspicion, from infancy on, that the world was populated by people bigger and wiser, more graceful and less greedy, than he. Ken said, “You tempt me. I wish we had met years ago.”
“Years ago,” Angela said, “we would have been too busy being good children.” She asked Piet, “How shall we do? Do you want to move out tonight?”
Piet told her, “Don’t dramatize. Nothing is settled. I think we all need to get some daylight on this.”
Ken asked, “Then you’re already backing out on your offer?”
“What offer?”
Ken said, “Piet, there is something you should know about us, you and me, that for some reason, modern manners I suppose, I don’t seem able to express, and that I don’t think this discussion has made clear to you, from the way you’re sitting there smiling. I hate your guts.” It sounded false; he amended it, “I hate what you’ve done to me, what you’ve done to Foxy.”
Piet thought Angela would defend him, at least vaguely protest; but her silence glided by.
Ken went on, “In less than a year you, you and this sick town, have torn apart everything my wife and I had put together in seven years. Behind all this playfulness you like to destroy. You love it. The Red-haired Avenger. You’re enjoying this; you’ve enjoyed that girl’s pain.”
Bored with being chastised, Piet rebelled. He stood to tell Ken, “She’s your wife, keep her in your bed. You had lost her before you began. A man with any self-respect wouldn’t have married her on th
e rebound like you did. Don’t blame me if flowers didn’t grow in this”—at the mouth of the hall, following Angela out, he turned and with whirling arms indicated to Ken his house, the Cambridge furniture, the empty bassinet, mirroring windows, the sum of married years—“test tube.” Pleased with his rebuttal, he waited to hear Angela agree but she had already slammed the screen door. Outside, in sudden moist air, he stepped sideways into the pruned lilacs and was stabbed beneath an eye, and wondered if he were drunk, and thus so elated.
The car hurtled through mist. Angela asked, “Was she that much better in bed than me?”
Piet answered, “She was different. She did some things you don’t do, I think she values men higher than you do. She’s more insecure, I’d say, than you, and probably somewhat masculine. Physically, there’s more of you everywhere; she’s tight and her responsiveness isn’t as fully developed. She’s young, as you once said.”
The completeness of his answer, as if nothing else had convinced her that he had truly known the other woman, outraged Angela; she shrieked, and kneeled on the rubber car floor, and flailed her arms and head in the knobbed and metal-edged space, and tried to smother her own cries in the dusty car upholstery. He braked the Peugeot to a stop and walked around its ticking hood to her side and opened her door. As he pulled her out she felt disjointed, floppy as a drunk or a puppet. “Inhale,” he said. The beach road dipped here, low to the marsh, and the mist was thick, suffused with a salinity that smelled eternal. Angela recovered her composure, apologized, tore up some wands of spring grass and pressed them against her eyelids. A pair of headlights slowly trundled toward them in the fog and halted.
A car door opened. Harold little-Smith’s penetratingly tipped voice called, “All right there?”
“We’re fine, thanks. Just enjoying the sea breeze.”
“Oh, Piet. It’s you. Who’s that with you?”