Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Oh, Piet, how are you? When are you going back to Angela?”

  “Am I going back? She seems more herself without me.”

  “Oh, but at night it must be terrible for her.”

  “And how is it for you at night?”

  “Oh, the same. Nobody goes out to parties any more. All people talk about is their children.”

  “Would you—would you like to see me? Just for tea, some afternoon?”

  “Oh, sweet, I think not. Honestly. I think you have enough women to worry about.”

  “I don’t have any women.”

  “It’s good for you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not as bad as I would have thought. But what about us? I was in love with you, you know, before the roof fell in.”

  “You were lovely, so alive. But I think you idealized me. I’m much too lazy in bed for you. Anyway, sweet, all of a sudden, it’s rather touching, Roger needs me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You won’t tell anybody? Everybody’s sure you’re keeping a nest of girls down there.”

  “Everybody’s wrong. I only liked married women. They reminded me of my mother.”

  “Don’t be uppity. I’m trying to tell you about Roger. He lost a lot of money, one of his awful fairy investment friends in Boston, and he really came crying to me, I loved it.”

  “So because he’s bankrupt I can’t go to bed with you.”

  “Not bankrupt, you do idealize everything. But scared, so scared—oh, I must tell somebody, I’m bursting with it!—he’s agreed to adopt a child. We’ve already been to the agency once, and answered a lot of insulting questions about our private life. The odd thing is, white babies are scarce, they have so many more Negroes.”

  “This is what you’ve wanted? To adopt a child?”

  “Oh, for years. Ever since I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t Roger, you know, it was me that couldn’t. People poked fun of Roger but it was me. Oh, Piet, forgive me, I’m burdening you with this.”

  “No, it’s no burden.” Floating, he remembered how she floated, above the sound of children snowballing, as evening fell early, through levels of lavender.

  She was sobbing, barely audibly, her voice limp and moist, as her body had been. “It’s so rotten, though, that you need me and I must say no when before it was I who needed you, and you came finally.”

  “Finally. Bea, it’s great about the adoption, and Roger’s going to the poorhouse.”

  A laugh skidded through her tears. “I just can’t,” she said, “when I’ve been given what I’ve prayed for. The funny thing is, you helped. Roger was very frightened by you and Angela breaking up. He’s become very serious.”

  “He was always serious.”

  “Sweet Piet, tell me, I was never very real to you, was I? Isn’t it all right, not to? I’ve been dreading your call so, I thought it would come sooner.”

  “It should have come sooner,” he said, then hastened to add to reassure her with, “No, you were never very real,” and added finally, “Kiss.”

  “Kiss,” Bea faintly said. “Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss.”

  Sunday, bringing his daughters back from a trip to the Science Museum in Boston, Piet was saddened by the empty basketball court. This was the time of year when the young married men of Tarbox used to scrimmage. Whitman was gone, Saltz had moved, Constantine was flying jets to Lima and Rio, Thorne and little-Smith had always considered the game plebeian. Weeds were threading through a crack in the asphalt and the hoop, netless and aslant, needed to be secured with longer screws. Angela greeted them outdoors; she had been picking up winter-fallen twigs from the lawn, and sprinkling grass seed in the bare spots. Seeing the direction of his eyes, she said, “You should take that hoop down. Or would you like to invite your gentlemen friends to come play? I could tolerate it.”

  “I have no gentlemen friends, it turns out. They were all your friends. Anyway, it would be artificial and not comfortable, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Mightn’t Ruth ever want to use the hoop?”

  “She’s interested right now in being feminine. Maybe later, when they have teams at school; but in the meantime it looks hideous.”

  “You’re too exquisite,” he said.

  “How was your expedition? Artificial and not comfortable?”

  “No, it was fun. Nancy cried in the planetarium, when the machine made the stars whirl around, but for some reason she loved the Transparent Woman.”

  “It reminded her of me.” Angela said.

  Piet wondered if this bit of self-disclaiming wit was the prelude to readmitting him into their home. Sneakingly he hoped not. He felt the worst nights of solitude were behind him. In loneliness he was regaining something, an elemental sense of surprise at everything, that he had lost with childhood. Even his visits to Angela in their awkwardness had a freshness that was pleasant. She seemed, with her soft fumbling gestures and unaccountable intervals of distant repose, a timid solid creature formed from his loins and now learning to thrive alone. He asked her, “How have you been?”

  “Busy enough. I’ve had to reacquaint myself with my parents. My mother says that for ten years I snubbed them. I hadn’t thought so, but maybe she’s right.”

  “And the girls? They miss me less?”

  “A little less. It’s worst when something breaks and I can’t fix it. Ruth was very cross with me the other day and told me I was stupid to lose their Daddy for them by being so pushy in bed. I guess Jonathan or Frankie at school had told her I was bad in bed, and she thought it must mean I didn’t give you enough room. Oh, we had a jolly discussion after that. Woman to woman.”

  “The poor saint. Two poor saints.”

  “You look better.”

  “I’m adjusting. Everybody lets me alone, which in a way is a mercy, since I don’t have to play politics. The only people I talk to all day some days are Adams and Comeau; we’re doing some cabinets for a new couple toward Lacetown.”

  “I thought you were on Indian Hill.”

  “Jazinski and Gallagher seem to be managing that. They’re working straight from canned plans that don’t fit the slope at all.”

  “Oh. They had me over, with some North Mather people I hated. Money sort of people. Horsey.”

  “Matt’s on the move.”

  “Terry seemed very bored.”

  “She’ll be bored from here on in. And you? Bored? Happy? Fighting off propositions from our gentlemen friends?”

  “A few feelers.” Angela admitted. “But nothing serious. It’s a different kettle of fish, a separated woman. It’s scarier for them.”

  “You do think of us as separated?”

  Rather than answer him, she looked over his shoulder, toward the corner of woods where scilla was blooming and where he had buried Ruth’s hamster and where the girls, in a burst of relief at being released from the confinement of their father’s embarrassingly rattly and unwashed pick-up truck, had, still in their Sunday expedition clothes, sought their climbing tree, a low-branching apple stunted among maples. Angela’s face was recalled to animation by remembered good news. “Oh Piet, I must tell you. The strangest nicest thing. I’ve begun to have dreams. Dreams I can remember. It hasn’t happened to me for years.”

  “What kind of dreams?”

  “Oh, nothing very exciting yet. I’m in an elevator, and press the button, and nothing happens. So I think, not at all worried, ‘I must be on the right floor already.’ Or, maybe it’s part of the same dream, I’m in a department store, trying to buy Nancy a fur hood, so she can go skiing in it. I know exactly the size, and the kind of lining, and go from counter to counter, and they offer me mittens, earmuffs, galoshes, everything I don’t want, but I remain very serene and polite, because I know they have them somewhere, because I bought one for Ruth there.”

  “What sweet dreams.”

  “Yes, they’re very shy and ordinary. He doesn’t agree, or disagree, but my idea is my subconscious tried to die, and
now it’s daring to come back and express things I want. Not for myself yet, but for others.”

  “He. You’re having dreams for him. Like a child going wee-wee for her daddy.”

  She retreated, as he desired, into the enchanted stillness that, in this square yard, this tidy manless house, he liked to visit. “You’re such a bully,” she told him. “Such a jealous bully. You always dreamed so easily, lying beside you inhibited me, I’m sure.”

  “Couldn’t we have shared them?”

  “No, you do it alone. I’m discovering you do everything alone. You know when I used to feel most alone? When we were making love.” The quality of the silence that followed demanded she soften this. She asked, “Have you heard from Foxy?”

  “Nothing. Not even a postcard of the Washington Monument.” His lawn, he saw, beside the well and barn, had been killed in patches where the ice had lingered. Hard winter. The polar cap growing again. The hairy mammoths will be back. “It’s kind of a relief,” he told Angela.

  The girls returned from the woods, their spring coats smirched with bark. “Go now,” Nancy said to Piet.

  Ruth slapped at her sister. “Nancy! That is not very nice.”

  “I think she’s trying to help,” Angela explained. “She’s telling Daddy it’s all right to go now.”

  “Mommy,” Nancy told her, her plump hand whirling with her dizzy upgazing, “the stars went round and round and round.”

  “And the baby cried,” Ruth said.

  Nancy studied, as if seeking her coördinates, and then sprang at her sister, pummeling Ruth’s chest. “Liar! Liar!”

  Ruth bit her lower lip and expertly knocked Nancy loose with a sideways swerve of her fist. “Baby cried,” she repeated, “Hurting Daddy’s feelings, making him take us out early.”

  Nancy sobbed against her mother’s legs. Her face where Piet would never be again. Convolute cranny, hair and air, ambrosial chalice where seed can cling. “I’m sure it was very exciting,” Angela said. “And that’s why everybody is tired and cranky. Let’s go in and have supper.” She looked up, her eyes strained by the effort of refusing to do what was easy and instinctive and ask Piet in too.

  Bernadette Ong bumped into Piet on the street, by the door of the book store, which sold mostly magazines. He was entering to buy Life and she was leaving with a copy of Scientific American. Her body brushing his felt flat, hard, yet deprived of its force; she was sallow, and the Oriental fold of upper-lid skin had sagged so that no lashes showed. She and Piet stood beneath the book-store awning; the April day around them was a refraction of apical summer, the first hot day, beach weather at last, when the high-school students shove down the crusty stiff tops of their convertibles and roar to the dunes in caravans. Above downtown Tarbox the Greek temple on its hill of red rocks was limestone white and the gold rooster blazed in an oven of blueness. Bernadette had thrown off her coat. The fine chain of a crucifix glinted in the neck of a dirty silk blouse. Descending into death, she had grown dingy, like a miner.

  He asked her, immediately, guiltily, how John was, and she said, “About as well as we can expect, I guess.” From her tone, her expectations had sunk low. “They keep him under drugs and he doesn’t talk much English. He used to ask me why nobody visited him but that’s stopped now.”

  “I’m so sorry, I thought of visiting him, but I’ve had my own troubles. I suppose you’ve heard Angela and I are separated.”

  “No, I hadn’t heard. That’s terrible.” She pronounced it “tarrible”; all vowels tended in her flat wide mouth toward “a.” Whan do I gat my duty dance? “You’re the last couple I would have thought. John, as you’ve probably guessed, was always half in love with Angela.”

  Piet had never guessed any such thing. Impulsively he offered, “Why don’t I visit him now? I have the time, and aren’t you on your way back to the hospital?”

  The Tarbox Veterans’ Memorial hospital was two miles from the center of town, on the inland side. Built of swarthy clinker bricks, with a rosy new maternity wing that did not quite harmonize, it sat on a knoll between disused railroad tracks and an outlay of greenhouses (Hendrick Vos & Sons—Flowers, Bulbs, and Shrubs). Behind the hospital was a fine formal garden where no one, neither patients nor nurses, ever walked. The French windows of John Ong’s room opened to a view of trimmed privet and a pink crabapple and a green-rusted copper birdbath shaped like a scallop shell, empty of water. Wind loosened petals from the crabapple, and billowed the white drapes at the window, and made the coarse transparent sides of the oxygen tent beside the bed abruptly buckle and snap. John was emaciated and, but for the hectic flushed spots, no larger than half dollars, on each cheekbone, colorless. So thin, he looked taller than Piet had remembered him. He spoke with difficulty, as if from a diminished pocket of air high in his chest, near the base of his throat. Only unaltered was the quick smile with which he masked imperfect comprehension. “Harya Pee? Wam weller mame waller pray terrace, heh?” Bernadette plangently translated: “He says how are you Piet? He says warm weather makes him want to play tennis.”

  “Soon you’ll be out there,” Piet said, and tossed up and served an imaginary ball.

  “Is emerybonny?”

  “He asks how is everybody?”

  “Fine. Not bad. It’s been a long winter.”

  “Hanjerer? Kiddies? Feddy’s powwow?”

  “Angela wants to come see you,” Piet said, too loud, calling as if to a receding car. “Freddy Thorne’s powwow has been pretty quiet lately. No big parties. Our children are getting too big.”

  It was the wrong thing to say; there was nothing to say. As the visit grew stilted, John Ong’s eyes dulled. His hands, insectlike, their bones on the outside, fiddled on the magazine Bernadette had brought him. Once, he coughed, on and on, an interminable uprooting of a growth with roots too deep. Piet turned his head away, and a robin had come to the lip of the dry birdbath. It became clear that John was drugged; his welcome had been a strenuous leap out of hazed tranquillity. For a moment intelligence would be present in his wasted face like an eager carnivorous power; then he would subside into an inner murmuring, and twice spoke in Korean. He looked toward Bernadette for translation but she shrugged and winked toward Piet. “I only know a few phrases. Sometimes he thinks I’m his sister.” Piet rose to leave, but she sharply begged, “Don’t go.” So he sat fifteen more minutes while Bernadette kept clicking something in her lap and John, forgetting his guest, leafed backwards through Scientific American, impatiently skimming, seeking something not there. Rubber-heeled nurses paced the hall. Doctors could be heard loudly flirting. Portentous baskets and pots of flowers crowded the floor by the radiator, and Piet wondered from whom. McNamara. Rusk. The afternoon’s first cloud darkened the crabapple, and as if held pinned by the touch of light a scatter of petals exploded toward the ground. The room began to lose warmth. When Piet stood the second time to break away, and took the other man’s strengthless fingers into his, and said too loudly, too jokingly, “See you on the tennis court,” the drug-dilated eyes, eyes that had verified the chaos of particles on the floor of matter, lifted, and dragged Piet down into omniscience; he saw, plunging, how plausible it was to die, how death, far from invading earth like a meteor, occurs on the same plane as birth and marriage and the arrival of the daily mail.

  Bernadette walked him down the waxed hall to the hospital entrance. Outdoors, a breeze dragged a piece of her hair across her eye and a sun-shaped spot on the greenhouses below them glared. Her cross glinted. He felt a sexual stir emanate from her flat-breasted body, her wide shoulders and hips; she had been too long torn from support. She moved inches closer, as if to ask a question, and the nail-bitten fingers rising to tuck back the iridescent black strand whose windblown touch had made her blink seemed to gesture in weak apology for her willingness to live. Her smile was a grimace. Piet told her, “There are miracles.”

  “He rejects them,” she said, as simply as if his assertion, so surprising to himself, had merely confirmed for he
r the existence of the pills she administered daily. A rosary had been clicking.

  The adventure of visiting the dying man served to show Piet how much time he had, how free he was to use it. He took long walks on the beach. In this prismatic April the great Bay was never twice the same. Some days, at high tide, under a white sun, muscular waves bluer than tungsten steel pounded the sand into spongy cliffs and hauled driftwood and wrack deep into the dunes where tide-change left skyey isolated pools. Low tide exposed smooth acres that mirrored the mauves and salmons and the momentary green of sunset. At times the sea was steeply purple, stained; at others, under a close warm rain sky, the no-color of dirty wash; choppy rows hurried in from the horizon to be delivered and disposed of in the lick and slide at the shore. Piet stooped to pick up angel wings, razor-clam shells, sand dollars with their infallibly etched star and the considerate airhole for an inhabiting creature Piet could not picture. Wood flecks smoothed like creek pebbles, iron spikes mummified in the orange froth of oxidation, powerfully sunk horsehoe prints, the four-tined traces of racing dog paws, the shallow impress of human couples that had vanished (the female foot bare, with toes and a tender isthmus linking heel and forepad; the male mechanically shod in the waffle intaglio of sneaker soles and apparently dragging a stick), the wandering mollusk trails dim as the contours of a photograph overdeveloped in the pan of the tide, the perfect circle a blade of beach grass complacently draws around itself—nothing was too ordinary for Piet to notice. The beach felt dreamlike, always renewed in its strangeness. One day, late in an overcast afternoon, with lateral flecks of silver high in the west above the nimbus scud, he emerged from his truck in the empty parking lot and heard a steady musical roaring. Yet approaching the sea he saw it calm as a lake, a sullen muddy green. The tide was very low, and walking on the unscarred ribs of its recent retreat Piet percieved—diagnosed, as if the sustained roaring were a symptom within him—that violent waves were breaking on the sand bar a half mile away and, though little of their motion survived, their blended sound traveled to him upon the tranced water as if upon the taut skin of a drum. This effect, contrived with energies that could power cities, was his alone to witness; the great syllable around him seemed his own note, sustained since his birth, elicited from him now, and given to the air. The air that day was warm, and smelled of ashes.