Couples

by John Updike

  “Oh, sweet. Oh so sweet,” Georgene said. Piet dared peek and saw her rapt lids veined with broken purple and a small saliva bubble welling at one corner of her lips. He suffered a dizzying impression of waste. Though thudding, his heart went mournful. He bit her shoulder, smooth as an orange in sun, and traveled along a muffled parabola whose red warm walls she was and at whose end she also waited. Her face snapped sideways; drenched feathers pulled his tip; oh. So good a girl, to be there for him, no matter how he fumbled, to find her way by herself. In her strange space he leaped, and leaped again. She said, “Oh.”

  Lavender she lay in his shadow, the corners of her lips flecked. Politely Piet asked her, “Swing?”

  “Dollink. Dunt esk.”

  “I was sort of poor. I’m not used to this outdoor living.”

  Georgene shrugged under him. Her throat and shoulders were slick. A speck of black construction dust, granular tar from his hair, adhered to her cheek. “You were you. I love you. I love you inside me.”

  Piet wanted to weep, to drop fat tears onto her deflated breasts. “Did I feel big enough?”

  She laughed, displaying perfect teeth, a dentist’s wife. “No,” she said. “You felt shrimpy.” Seeing him ready, in his dilated suspended state, to believe it, she explained solemnly, “You hurt me, you know. I ache afterwards.”

  “Do I? Do you? How lovely. How lovely of you to say. But you should complain.”

  “It’s in a good cause. Now get off me. Go to Indian Hill.”

  Discarded beside her, he felt as weak and privileged as a child. Plucking needs agitated his fingers, his mouth. He asked at her side, “What did Freddy say about me that was mean?”

  “He said you were expensive and slow.”

  “Well. I suppose that could be true.”

  He began dressing. The birds’ chirping had become a clock’s ticking. Like butter on a bright sill her nakedness was going rancid. She lay as she must often lie, accepting the sun entirely. The bathing-suit boundaries were not distinct on her body, as on Angela’s. Her kitten-chin glutinous with jism. The plaid blanket had been rumpled and pulled from under her head, and some larch needles adhered to her hair, black mixed with gray. Because of this young turning of her hair she kept it feather-cut short.

  “Baby,” he said, to fill up the whispering silence surrounding his dressing, “I don’t care about Freddy. I don’t want the Whitmans’ job. Cut into these old houses you never know what you’ll find. Gallagher thinks we’ve wasted too much time restoring old heaps for our friends and the friends of our friends. He wants three new ranch houses on Indian Hill by fall. The war babies are growing up. That’s where the money is.”

  “Money,” she said. “You’re beginning to sound like the rest of them.”

  “Well,” he told her. “I can’t be a virgin forever. Corruption had to come even to me.”

  He was dressed. The cool air drew tight around his shoulders and he put on his apricot windbreaker. With the manners that rarely lapsed between them, she escorted him from her house. He admired and yet was slightly scandalized that she could walk so easily, naked, through doors, past her children’s toys, her husband’s books, down stairs, under a shelf of cleansing agents, into her polished kitchen, to the side door. This side of the house, where the firewood was stacked and a single great elm cast down a gentle net of shade, had about it something rural and mild unlike the barbaric bulk of the house. Here not a brick or stone walk but a path worn through grass, now muddy, led around the corner of the garage, where Piet had hidden his pick-up truck, a dusty olive Chevrolet on whose tailgate a child had written WASH ME. Georgene, barefoot, did not step down from the threshold but leaned silent and smiling in the open doorway, leaving framed in Piet’s mind a complex impression: of a domestic animal, of a fucked woman, of a mocking boy, of farewell.

  Next Sunday, a little past noon, when Foxy had just returned from church and with a sigh had dropped her veiled hat onto the gate-legged table where the telephone sat, it impudently rang. She knew the voice: Piet Hanema. She had been thinking of calling him all week and therefore was prepared, though they had never really spoken, to recognize his voice, more hesitant and respectful than that of the other local men, with a flattish blurred midwestern intonation. He asked to speak to Ken. She went into the kitchen and deliberately didn’t listen, because she wanted to.

  All week she had been unable against Ken’s silent resistance to call the contractor, and now her hands trembled as if guiltily. She poured herself a glass of dry vermouth. Really, church was getting to be, as the weather grew finer, a sacrifice. Magnolia buds swollen by heat leaned in the space of air revealed by the tilted ventilation pane of commemorative stained glass, birds sang in the little late-Victorian cemetery between the church and the river, the sermon dragged, the pews cracked restlessly. Ken came back from the phone saying, “He asked me to play basketball at two o’clock at his place.”

  Basketball was the one sport Ken had ever cared about; he had played for Exeter and for his Harvard house, which he had told her as a confession, it had been so unfashionable to do. Foxy said, “How funny.”

  “Apparently he has a basket on his barn wall, with a little asphalt court. He said in the spring, between skiing and tennis, some of the men like to play. They need me to make six, for three on a side.”

  “Did you say you would?”

  “I thought you wanted to go for a walk on the beach.”

  “We can do that any time. I could walk by myself.”

  “Don’t be a martyr. What is that, dry vermouth?”

  “Yes. I developed a taste for it at the Guerins’.”

  “And then don’t forget we have Ned and Gretchen tonight.”

  “They won’t get here until after eight, you know how arrogant Cambridge people are. Call him back and tell him you’ll play, it’ll do you good.”

  Ken confessed, “Well, I left it that I might show up.”

  Foxy laughed, delighted at having been deceived. “Well if you told him yes why are you being so sneaky about it?”

  “I shouldn’t leave you here alone all afternoon.”

  Because you’re pregnant, the implication was. His oppressive concern betrayed him. They had gone childless too long; he feared this change and added weight. Foxy made herself light, showed herself gay. “Can’t I come along and watch? I thought this was a wives’ town.”

  Foxy was the only wife who came to basketball, and Angela Hanema came out of the house to keep her company. The day was agreeable for being outdoors; nothing in the other woman’s manner asked for an apology. The two together carried a bench, a weathered moist settee with a spindle-rung back, from beside the barn to a spot on the gravel driveway where simultaneously they could see the men play, have the sun on their faces, and keep an eye on the many children running and hiding in the big square yard and the lacy screen of budding woods beyond.

  Foxy asked, “Whose children are all these?”

  “Two are ours, two girls. You can see one of them standing by the birdbath sucking her thumb. That’s Nancy.”

  “Is thumb-sucking bad?” It was a question probably naïve, another mother wouldn’t have asked it, but Foxy was curious and felt she could hardly embarrass herself with Angela, who seemed so graceful and serenely humorous.

  “It’s not aesthetic,” she said. “She didn’t do it as an infant, it just started last winter. She’s worried about death. I don’t know where she gets it from. Piet insists on taking them to Sunday school and maybe they talk about it there.”

  “I suppose they feel they should.”

  “I suppose. The other children you see—the happy loud ones belong to our neighbors who run the dairy farm and the rest came with their proud daddies.”

  “I don’t know all the daddies. I see Harold—why is it little-Smith?”

  “It’s one of those jokes that nobody knows how to get rid of. There were some other Smiths in town once, but they’ve long left.”

  “And that big im
posing one is our real-estate man.”

  “Matt Gallagher. My husband’s partner. The bouncy one with red hair is my husband.”

  Foxy thought, how funny that he is. She said, “He was at the Applebys’ party for us.”

  “We all were. The one with the beard and grinning is Ben Saltz. S-a-l-t-z. I think it’s been shortened from something.”

  “He looks very diabolical,” Foxy said.

  “Not to me. I think the effect is supposed to be rakish but it comes out Amish. It’s to cover up pockmarks; when we first moved to town it was bushier but now he cuts it square. It’s misleading, because he’s a terribly kind, uxorious man. Irene is the moving spirit behind the League and the Fair Housing group and whatever else does good in town. Ben works in one of those plants along 128 that look as though they make ice cream.”

  “I thought that was a Chinaman.”

  “Korean. That’s John Ong. He’s not here. The only things he plays are chess and very poor tennis. His chess is quite good, though, Freddy Thorne tells me. He’s a nuclear physicist who works in MIT. At MIT? Actually, I think he works under MIT, in a huge underground workshop you need a password to get into.”

  Foxy asked, “With a cyclotron?”

  Angela said, “I forget your husband’s a scientist too. I have no idea. Neither he nor Ben can ever talk about their work because it’s all for the government. It makes everybody else feel terribly excluded. I think a little tiny switch in something that missed the moon was Ben’s idea. He miniaturizes. He once showed us some radios that were like fingernails.”

  “At the party, I tried to talk to—who, Ong?—you all have such funny names.”

  “But aren’t all names funny until you get used to them? Think of Shakespeare and Churchill. Think of Pillsbury.”

  “Anyway I tried to talk and couldn’t understand a word.”

  “I know. His consonants are not what you expect. He was some kind of booty in the Korean War; I can’t believe he defected, he doesn’t seem to have that kind of opinion. He was very big with them I guess; for a while he taught at Johns Hopkins and met Bernadette in Baltimore. If they ever dropped an H-bomb on Tarbox it would be because of him. Like the Watertown arsenal. But you’re right. He’s not sexy.”

  Her tone implied a disdain of sex mixed with the equanimous recognition that others might choose to steer by it. Studying the other woman’s lips, pale in the sunlight, composed around the premeditation of a smile, Foxy felt as if she, Foxy, were looking up toward a luxurious detached realm where observations and impressions drifted nodding by one another like strolling aristocrats. Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. Foxy, though by more than an inch the taller, felt beneath Angela, as a student, at once sheltered and challenged. Discovering herself blushing, she hastily asked, “Who’s the quick one with the ghostly eyes?”

  “I guess they are ghostly. I’ve always thought of them as steely but that’s wrong. His name is Eddie Constantine. He’s an airline pilot. They just moved a year or so ago into a grim big house on the green. The tall teen-ager who looks like the Apollo Belvedere is a neighbor’s boy he brought along in case there weren’t six. Piet didn’t know if your husband would come or not.”

  “Oh. Ken has made the sides uneven?”

  “Not at all, they’re delighted to have another player. Basketball isn’t very popular, you can’t do it with women. He’s very good. Your husband.”

  Foxy watched. The neighbor boy, graceful even ill at ease, was standing aside while the six grown men panted and heaved, ducked and dribbled. They looked clumsy, crowded on the little piece of asphalt whose edges fell off into mud softened and stamped by sneaker footprints. Ken and Gallagher were the tallest and she saw Ken, whose movements had a certain nice economy she had not seen displayed for years, lift the ball to the level of his forehead and push it off. It swirled around the rim and flew away, missing. This pleased her: why? He had looked so confident, his whole nicely poised body had expressed the confidence, that it would go in. Constantine seized the rebound and dribbled down low, protecting the ball with an outward elbow. Foxy felt he had been raised in a city. His eyes in their ghostly transparence suggested photographic paper now silver, now black, now clear, depending upon in what they were dipped. His sharp features flushed, little-Smith kept slapping his feet as if to create confusion. He had none of the instinctive moves and Foxy wondered why he played. Saltz, whom she was prepared to adore, moved on the fringes cautiously, stooped and smiling as if to admit he was in a boys’ game. His backside was broad and instead of sneakers he wore black laced shoes, such as peek from beneath a priest’s robe. As she watched, Hanema, abruptly fierce, stole the ball from Constantine, braving his elbow, pushed past Ken in a way that must be illegal, hipped and hopped and shot. When the ball went in he jumped for a joke on Gallagher’s back. The Irishman, his jaws so wide his face was pentagonal, sheepishly carried his partner on a jog once around the asphalt.

  “Discontinuous,” Saltz was protesting.

  “And you fouled the new guy,” Constantine said. “You are an unscrupulous bastard.”

  Their voices were adolescently shrill. “All right crybabies, I won’t play,” Hanema said, and waved the waiting boy into his place. “Shall I call Thorne to come and make four on a side?”

  Nobody answered; play had already resumed. Hanema draped a sweater around his neck and came and stood above the watching pair of women. Foxy could not study his face, a circular purple shadow against the sun. A male scent, sweat, flowed from him. His grainy courtly voice asked his wife, “Shall I call Thorne or do you want to? He’s your friend.”

  Angela answered, “It’s rude to call him this late, he’ll wonder why you didn’t call him sooner.” Her voice, lifted toward the man, sounded diminished to Foxy, frightened.

  He said, “You can’t be rude to Thorne. If rudeness bothered him he’d have left town long ago. Anyway everybody knows on Sundays he has a five-martini lunch and couldn’t have come earlier.”

  “Call him then,” Angela said. “And say hello to Foxy.”

  “Pardon me. How are you, Mrs. Whitman?”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Hanema.” She was determined not to be frightened also, and felt that she was not.

  Sun rimmed his skull with rainbow filaments. He remained an upright shadow in front of her, emanating heat, but his voice altered, checked by something in hers. “It’s very endearing,” he said, and repeated, “endearing of you to come and be an audience. We need an audience.” And his sudden explosion of energy, his bumping of Ken, his leap to Gallagher’s back, were lit in retrospect by the fact of her watching. He had done it for her to see.

  “You all seem very energetic,” Foxy said. “I’m impressed.”

  He asked her, “Would you like to play?”

  “I think not,” she answered, wondering if he knew that she was pregnant, remembering him looking up her skirt, and guessing that he did. He would make it his business to know.

  “In that case I better call Thorne,” he said, and went into his house.

  Angela, her casual manner restored, told Foxy, “Women sometimes do play. Janet and Georgene are actually not too bad. At least they look to me as if they know what they’re doing.”

  Foxy said, “Field hockey is my only game.”

  “What position did you play? I was center halfback.”

  “You played? I was right inner, usually. Sometimes wing.”

  “It’s a lovely game,” Angela said. “It was the one time in my life when I enjoyed being aggressive. It’s what men must have a lot of the time.” There was a flow and an authority in the drifting way she spoke that led Foxy to agree, to nod eagerly, as the sun drifted lower into a salmon overcast. Keeping their pale faces lifted to the pale light, they talked, these two, of hockey (“What I liked about halfback,” Angela said, “was you were both offensive and defensive and yet nobody could blame you for anything.”); of sports in general (“It’s so good,�
� Foxy said, “to see Ken playing at anything. I think being with students all the time makes you unnecessarily old. I felt ancient in Cambridge.”); of Ken’s profession (“He never talks to me about his work any more,” Foxy said. “It used to be starfish and that was sort of fun, we went to Woods Hole one summer; but now it’s more to do with chlorophyll and all the breakthroughs recently have been in other fields, DNA and whatnot.”); of Piet’s house (“He likes it,” Angela said, “because everything is square. I loved the house you have now. So many things could be done with it, and the way it floats above the marsh! Piet was worried about mosquitoes. Here we have these terrible horseflies from the dairy. He’s from inland, you know. I think the sea intimidates him. He likes to skate but isn’t much of a swimmer. He thinks the sea is wasteful. I think I prefer things to be somewhat formless. Piet likes them finished.”); and of the children who now and then emerged from the woods and brought them a wound, a complaint, a gift:

  “Why, Franklin, thank you! What do you think it can be?”

  “A coughball,” the boy said. “From an owl or a hawk.” The boy was eight or nine, intelligent but slow to form, and thin-skinned. The coughball lay in Angela’s hand, smaller than a golf ball, a tidy dry accretion visibly holding small curved bones.

  “It’s beautiful in its way,” Angela said. “What would you like me to do with it?”

  “Keep it for me until they take me home. Don’t let Ruthie have it. She says it’s hers because it’s her woods but I want to start a collection and I saw it first even though she did pick it up.” Making this long statement brought the child close to tears.

  Angela said, “Frankie, go tell Ruth to come see me.” He blinked and turned and ran.

  Foxy said, “Isn’t that Frankie Appleby? But Frank himself isn’t here.”

  “Harold brought him. He’s friends with their Jonathan.”