Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Just then a maid with slithery paper sandals and a downcast lilt I can hardly decipher as English came in. From the way she stared at Toby it might have been a full-grown naked man lying there. I don’t suppose too many tourist types bring babies. Maybe they think babies come to us in laundry baskets, all powdered and blue-eyed and ready to give orders.

  Peace again. The girl cuddled him at my urging and made the beds and pushed some dust here and there and left and he went back to sleep. Trouble is, his mother is sleepy too. Outside the street is incandescent but in here sun lies slatted like yellow crayon sticks on the gritty green floor—Piet, I think I’m going to love it here, once I stop hurting. On the ride from the airport in I wanted to share it with you—just the way they build their houses, corrugated iron and flattened olive oil cans and driftwood all held together by flowering bougainvillaea, and the softness of the air, stepping from the plane in San Juan, like a kiss after fucking—oh lover, forgive me, I am sleepy.

  After her restorative nap, the fair-haired young soon-to-be divorcee swiftly arose, and dressed, taking care not to abrade her sunburned forearms and thighs and (especially touchy) abdomen, and changed her youngling’s soiled unmentionables, and hurled herself into the blinding clatter of the tropical ville in a heroic (heroinic?) effort to find food. No counterpart of the Tarbox A & P or Lacetown IGA seems to exist—though I could buy bushels of duty-free Swiss watches and cameras. The restaurants not up on the hills attached to the forbidding swish hotels are either native hamburgeries with chili spilled all over the stools or else “gay” nightclubs that don’t open until six. At this time of year most of the non-Negroes seem to be fairies. Their voices are unmistakable and everywhere. I finally found a Hayes-Bickford type of cafeteria, with outrageous island prices, up the street near the open market, which meets my apparently demanding (sweet, I’m such an old maid!) sanitary standards, and gives me milk for Toby’s bottle in a reassuring waxpaper carton. Larry and Linda aren’t much help. They are refugees from New York, would-be actors, and I have the suspicion she rescued him from being gay. He keeps giving me his profile while she must think her front view is the best, because she keeps coming at me head on, her big brown bubs as scary as approaching headlights on a slick night. I was shocked to learn she’s five years younger than me and I could see her tongue make a little determined leap to put me on a first-name basis. They seem waifs, rather. They talk about New York all the time, how horrible it was etc., love-hate as Freddy Thorne would say, and are in a constant flap about their sleepy elusive unintelligible help. Though the evening meals Linda puts on are quite nice and light and French. American plan—they give you breakfast and supper, forage as best you can in between. $18 per diem.

  But it’s you, you I think about, and worry about, and wonder about. How grand we were, me as a call girl and you as a gangster in hiding. Did I depress you? You seemed so dazed the last morning, and pleased I was going, I cried all the way into B.U., and let Ken take me to lunch at the faculty club and cried some more, so the tables around us became quite solemn. I think he thought I was crying for him, which in a way I was, and I could see him fighting down a gentlemanly impulse to offer to call it all off and take me back. He has become so distinguished and courtly without me—his female students must adore him. He had bought a new spring suit, sharkskin, and seemed alarmed that I noticed, as if I were wooing him again or had caught him wooing someone else, when all the time you were flowery between my legs and I was neurotically anxious because we had left Toby in Ken’s lab with his technicians and I would go back up the elevator and find him dissected. Horrible! Untrue!! Ken was very cute with the baby, and weighed him in milligrams.

  Days have passed. My letter to you seemed to be going all wrong, chattery and too “fun” and breezy. Rereading I had to laugh at what I did to poor Linda’s lovely bosom—she and Larry are really a perfectly sweet phony fragile couple, trying to be parental and sisterly and brotherly all at once to me, rather careful and anxious with each other, almost studiously sensual, and so lazy basically. I wonder if ours was the last generation that will ever have “ambition.” These two seem so sure the world will never let them starve, and that life exists to be “enjoyed”—barbarous idea. But it is refreshing, after our awful Tarbox friends who talk only about themselves, to talk to people who care about art and the theater (they invariably call it, with innocent pomp, “the stage”) and international affairs, if that’s what they are. I’ve forgotten what else “affair” means. They think LBJ a boor but feel better under him than Kennedy because K. was too much like the rest of us semi-educated lovables of the post-Cold War and might have blown the whole game through some mistaken sense of flair. Like Lincoln, he lived to become a martyr, a memory. A martyr to what? To Marina Oswald’s sexual rejection of her husband. Forgive me, I am using my letter to you to argue with Larry in. But it made me sad, that he thought that somebody like us (if K. was) wasn’t fit to rule us, which is to say, we aren’t fit to rule ourselves, so bring on emperors, demigods, giant robots, what have you. Larry, incidentally, has let me know, during a merengo at the Plangent Cat, which is the place down the street, that his sexual ambivalence (AC or DC, he calls it) is definitely on the mend, but I declined, though he does dance wonderfully, to participate in the cure. He took the refusal as if his heart hadn’t been in it.

  Which brings us to you. Who are you? Are you weak? This theme, of your “weakness,” cropped up often in the mouths of our mutual friends, when we all lived together in a magic circle. But I think they meant to say rather that your strengths weren’t sufficiently used. Your virtues are obsolete. I can imagine you as somebody’s squire, maybe poor prim fanatic Matt’s, a splendid redheaded squire, resourceful, loyal, living off the land, repairing armor with old hairpins, kidding your way into castles and inns, making impossible ideals work but needing their impossibility to attach yourself to. Before I knew you long ago Bea Guerin described you to me as an old-fashioned man. In a sense if I were to go from Ken to you it would be a backwards step. Compared to Ken you are primitive. The future belongs to him or to chaos. But my life belongs to me now, and I must take a short view. I am not, for all my vague intellectual poking (about as vague as Freddy’s, and he knew it), good for much—but I know I could be your woman. As an ambition it is humble but explicit. Even if we never meet again I am glad to have felt useful, and used. Thank you.

  The question is, should I (or the next woman, or the next) subdue you to marriage? How much more generous it would be to let you wander, and suffer—there are so few wanderers left. We are almost all women now, homebodies and hoarders. You married Angela because your instinct told you she would not possess you. I would. To be mastered by your body I would tame you with my mind. Yet the subconscious spark in me that loves the race wants instead to give you freedom, freedom to rape and flee and to waste yourself, now that the art of building belongs entirely to accountants. Ever since you began to bounce up to my empty house in your dusty pick-up truck and after an hour rattle hastily away, I have felt in you, have loved in you, a genius for loneliness, for seeing yourself as something apart from the world. When you desire to be the world’s husband, what right do I have to make you my own?

  Toby is crying, and Linda is here. We are taking a picnic to Magens Bay.

  Night. The steel band down the street makes me want to go outdoors. What I wrote this afternoon please read understanding that its confusions are gropings toward truth. I am unafraid to seek the truth about us. With Ken I was always afraid. Of coming to the final coldness we shared.

  You would have loved it where we went. Coral sand is not like silica sand; it is white and porous and breathes, and takes deep sharp footprints. My feet look huge and sadly flat. The shells are tiny and various, baby’s fingernails for Carol. Remember that night? I was so jealous of Angela. Magens Bay has sea-grape bushes for shade. I am getting a tan. Linda has talked me into a bikini. We roof Toby’s basket with mosquito netting and he is turning caramel through it. I ha
ve learned to drive on the lefthand side of the road and am mastering my routines. The lawyers are dreadful. You would hate the process. Marriage is something done in the light, at noon, the champagne going flat in the sun, but divorce is done in the dark, where insects scuttle, in faraway places, by lugubrious lawyers. But at the end of the main street where it stops selling watches there is an old square Lutheran church smelling of cedar, with plaques in Danish, where I went Sunday. The congregation was plump colored ladies who sang even the hymns of rejoicing wailingly. The sermon, by a taut young white man, was very intellectual—over my head. I liked it. The Negroes are lovely, softer than the Washington ones I rather dreaded as a child, without that American hardness and shame. I even like the fairies—at least they have made a kind of settlement and aren’t tormenting some captive woman. The boats in the harbor are fascinating. Linda has rummaged up a baby carriage and I push Toby a half-mile each way along the quay. My father would tell me about boats and I find I still know a ketch from a yawl. I marvel at the hand-carved tackle on the old fishing boats from the more primitive islands. Not a bit of metal, and they hold together. The clouds are quick, translucent, as if Nature hardly intends them. When it rains in sunlight, they say, the Devil is beating his wife.

  Are you well? Are you there? If you have gone back to Angela, you may show this to her. Think of me fondly, without fear. Your fate need not be mine. I will write again, but not often. There are things to do even here. Linda has put me in charge of the morning help, for a reduction in fee, and has begun to confess to me her love life.

  I am your

  Foxy

  P.S.: Larry says that man is the sexiest of the animals and the only one that foresees death. I should make a riddle of this. P.P.S.: At the Plangent Cat down the street I have danced now with Negroes, greatly daring for a Southern girl—the last one who touched me was the nurse in the dentist’s office. They are a very silky people, and very innocently assume I want to sleep with them. How sad to instinctively believe your body is worth something. After weeks of chastity I remember lovemaking as an exploration of a sadness so deep people must go in pairs, one cannot go alone. P.P.P.S.: I seem unable to let this letter go. A bad sign?

  John Ong died the same day that France proposed another conference to restore peace to Laos, and Communist China agreed to loan fifteen million dollars to Kenya. Piet was surprised by the length of the obituary in the Globe: born in P’yongyang, political refugee, asylum in 1951, co-discoverer in 1957, with a Finn, of an elementary particle whose life is measured in millionths of a second, list of faculty positions, scientific societies, survived by wife and three sons, Tarbox, Mass. Private services. No flowers. Their friend. Piet walked through the day lightened, excited by this erasure, by John’s hidden greatness, imagining the humming of telephone wires among the couples he and John had once known. The same covey of long-haired boys gathered on Cogswell’s corner after three, the same blue sky showed through the charred skeleton of the burnt church, topped by an untouched gold rooster.

  That same week, on an errand of business, trying to locate Jazinski, who seemed now to hold all of Gallagher’s plans and intentions in his head, Piet went to the boy’s house, an expanded ranch on Elmcrest Drive, and saw Leon’s new golf bag in the garage. Not only were the clubs gleaming new Hogans but the handle of each was socketed in one of those white plastic tubes that were the latest refinement in fussy equipment: pale cannons squarely aimed upward. The bag, black and many-pocketed, was tagged with the ticket of a new thirty-six-hole club, in South Mather, that Piet had never played on. Piet, who played with an originally odd-numbered set filled in with randomly purchased irons whose disparate weights and grips he had come to know like friends, recognized that he must yield to the force expressed by this aspiring bag, mounted on a cart the wheels of which were spoked like the wheels of a sports car. When Leon’s pretty wife, her black hair bobbed and sprayed, answered the side door, he read his doom again in her snug cherry slacks, her free-hanging Op-pattern blouse, the bold and equalizing smile that greeted her husband’s employer, qualified by something too steady in the eyes, by a curious repressing thoughtful gesture with the tip of her tongue, as if she had often heard Piet unfavorably discussed. Behind her (she did not invite him in; his reputation?) her kitchen, paneled with imitation walnut and hung with copper pâté molds, seemed the snug galley of a ship on its way to warmer waters.

  And before May was out Gallagher called Piet in for a serious talk. Matt asked if Piet thought Leon was ready to supervise construction, and Piet answered that he was. Matt asked if Piet didn’t feel that over the last year their ends—sales and building—had begun to pull in opposite directions, and Piet responded that he was proud of how promptly the first three houses on Indian Hill had sold. Matt admitted this, but confessed that instead of these half-ass semi-custom-type houses he wanted to go into larger tracts—there was one beyond Lacetown he was bidding for, low clear land swampy only in the spring—and try prefab units, which would be, frankly, a waste of Piet’s talents. Personally, he thought Piet’s real forte was restoration, and with Tarbox full of old wrecks he would like to see Piet go into business for himself, buying cheap, fixing up, and selling high. Piet thanked him for the idea but said he saw himself more as a squire than a knight. Matt laughed uneasily, hearing another voice or mind emerge from Piet’s disturbingly vacant presence. By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. In consideration for his half of their tangible assets—including a few sticks of office furniture, an inventory of light equipment and carpentry tools and the pick-up truck, a sheaf of mortgages held on faith, and a firm name that sounded like a vaudeville team (here Matt laughed scornfully, as if they had always been a joke)—he offered Piet five thousand, which to be honest was goddam generous. Piet, rebellious as always when confronted with pat solutions, suggested twenty, and settled for seven. He had not imagined himself getting anything, having forfeited, he felt, by his weekend with Foxy, all his rights. To placate his guilt he satisfied himself that Gallagher, who knew the value of their parcels better than he, would have gone higher than seven. They shook on it. The points of Gallagher’s jaw flinched. He said earnestly, sellingly, that he wanted Piet to understand that this had nothing to do with Piet’s personal difficulties, that he and Terry still believed that he and Angela would be reconciled. Piet was touched by this deceitful assurance for, though Matt had come to relish hard dealing, his conception of himself did not permit him, usually, to lie.

  Meanwhile, across the town, Bea Guerin delighted in her adopted baby, its violet toenails, its fearless froggy stare. It was a colored child. “Roger and I have integrated Tarbox!” Bea exclaimed breathlessly over the phone to Carol. “You know we’re the last crusaders in the world, it’s just that we couldn’t bear to wait!” Bernadette Ong awoke to widowhood as if the entire side on which she had been sleeping were torn open, a mouth the length of her, where her church’s balm burned like salt; she had respected John’s desire to be buried without religion, and was bathed in a recurrent guilt whose scalding was confused with the plucking questioning hands of her children. “Daddy’s gone away. To a place we can’t imagine. Yes, they’ll speak his language there. Yes, the Pope knows where it is. You’ll see him at the end of your lives. Yes, he’ll know you, no matter how old you’ve grown.” She had been beside the bed when he died. One moment, there was faint breathing; his mouth was human in shape. The next, it was a black hole—black and deep. The vast difference haunted her, gave the glitter of the mass a holocaustal brilliance. Marcia little-Smith received a shock; having twice invited the Reinhardts to dinner parties and been twice declined, she went to visit Deb Reinhardt, a thin-lipped Vassar graduate with ironed hair, who told her that she and Al, though they quite liked Harold and Marcia in themselves, did not wish to get involved with their friends, with that whole—and here her language slipped unforgivably—“crummy crowd.” So the Reinhardts, and the young sociologist who had been elected town moderator, and a charmingly ye
t unaffectedly bohemian children’s book illustrator who had moved from Bleecker Street, and the new Unitarian minister in Tarbox, and their uniformly tranquil wives, formed a distinct social set, that made its own clothes, and held play readings, and kept sex in its place, and experimented with LSD, and espoused liberal causes more militantly than even Irene Saltz. Indignantly the Applesmiths christened them “the Shakers.”

  Georgene Thorne suffered a brief vision. Heartsick over Piet’s collapse, and her final loss of him, and her own rôle in bringing it about, she had turned to her children, and as the weekend weather softened took Whitney and Martha and Judy on long undesired expeditions to museums in the city and wildlife sanctuaries well inland and unfamiliar beaches far down the coast. At one beach she was walking in from the parking area with her children when the laughter of a couple knee-deep in the icy ocean struck her as half familiar. The man was old and bearded and goatish, with knotted yellow legs, skimpy European-style bathing trunks, and a barrel chest coated in gray fur; coarsely hooting, rapacious, he was splashing seawater at a shrieking tall slender woman with tossing dark hair, girlish in a black bikini, Terry Gallagher. The man must be her lute teacher’s husband, the potter. Georgene steered her children down the beach past some eclipsing rocks and never breathed a word of this glimpse to anyone, not even to Freddy, not even to Janet Appleby, who, in the course of their confidential outpourings following the discovery of Janet’s note to Freddy, had become her closest friend.

  Janet too had her secrets. One Saturday afternoon late in May, driving home from the little-Smiths’, she noticed Ken’s MG parked in the Whitmans’ driveway, and impulsively stopped. She walked around the nursery wing, where Foxy’s roses were budding, and found Ken at the front of the house, burning brush. In the light off the flooding marsh his hair was white. At first she talked in pleasantries, but he sensed in her, because he had always liked her, a nervous stalled fullness unbalanced by the beauty of the day. She moved the conversation toward his state of mind, to the loneliness she presumed was his and, unstated beyond that, the shame; and then she offered, not in so many words but with sufficient clarity, to sleep with him, now, in the empty house. After consideration, and with equal tact and clarity, he declined. It was the best possible outcome. “I’ve been burned, you see; I can’t be hurt,” had been the basis of her offer; and his refusal was phrased to enhance rather than diminish her notion of her worth: “I think we both need time to generate more self-respect.” There was an island of brambles, hawthorn and alder, in the marsh too small to support even a shack, and as they watched, a cloud of starlings migrating north passingly settled here; even before the last birds of the flock alighted, the leaders lifted and fled. So their encounter, amid the quickening and the grass-smoke and the insect-hum and the tidewater overflowing its rectilinear channels, was sufficient consummation, an exercise for each of freedom. The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. Janet and Ken were improved for having stood, above the glorious greening marsh, in this scale, fit to live in such an expanding light. Their faces seemed each to each great planetary surfaces of skin and tension, overflowing dazzlingly at the eyes and mouths. She lowered her gaze; wind unsmoothed his hair. Her offer had been instructive for him; his refusal for her. For years they treasured these minutes out of all proportion to their circumspection.