Couples

by John Updike

  “I suppose she’s been reading him.”

  “To please you. To get at me somehow.”

  “How does that get at you?”

  “She knows I never read.”

  “But you find books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

  “Ha ha. That busy little bitch, she keeps telling me she has a secret.”

  “She says this?”

  “Her eyes say it. And her bottom. I used to think of her as so stringy and intellectual, but she’s been doing a ton of hip-waggling lately.”

  “Maybe she’s having an affair with Freddy Thorne.”

  “Take that expression off your face.”

  “What expression?”

  “That amused look. Take it off! Take it off, Frank! I hate it!” And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.

  Harold little-Smith could not immediately identify the woman who called him at his office one morning. He and Janet rarely talked on the telephone; it was Marcia and Janet, or Marcia and Frank, who arranged the many things—the tennis and sailing, the Friday-night plays and Saturday-night concerts—that the two couples had done together this summer. The woman’s voice said, “I’ve been in town all morning shopping, the damn stores have nothing, and I’m hungry and cross and wondered if you’d like to split a lunch with me. Not fried clams, thank you.” Just in time, he recognized Janet.

  “Janet, really? It’s a lovely idea, but this is the day I usually have lunch with Frank. Why don’t the three of us have lunch together?”

  “That’s not the idea, Harold. Couldn’t you call Frank and cancel it? Think of some good excuse. Tell him you have a girl friend. Don’t be afraid of Frank, Harold.”

  “Who said I was?”

  “Well, then. Please. I know it seems funny and pushy, but I must talk to you, and this was the only way I could think of. I knew Wednesday is your day with Frank and that you would be free otherwise.”

  Still Harold hesitated. He enjoyed a certain freedom of speech and thought because his life, from childhood up, had been outwardly orderly and obedient. Life was a kind of marathon you could run as you please as long as you touched all the checkpoints; his weekly lunch with Frank was one of the checkpoints. They discussed stocks and bonds and hardly ever spoke of their domestic life together in Tarbox.

  Janet prompted, “You won’t have to pay for my lunch, just have it with me.”

  This stung him; he considered himself something of a dandy, an old-fashioned elegant. Last spring, in St. Louis, he had given a girl two hundred dollars to spend the night with him. He told Janet the Ritz, upstairs, at one o’clock, and hung up.

  It was strange she should have told him not to be afraid of Frank because it was she Harold had always been afraid of. Any vulgarity that could not be paid off and dismissed intimidated him. Meeting the Applebys the first time, he had wondered why Frank had married such a common girl—fine in bed, no doubt, but why marry her? Though she was from a respectable family (her father owned a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm in Buffalo, and her maiden name was on drugstore shelves across the country) Janet was one of the few women of Harold’s social acquaintance who could have been, without any change in physical style, a waitress or a girl in a five and ten (in fact she had worked two summers behind a counter, selling men’s jewelry, at Flint & Kent) or a dancehall hostess. She would some day, some day soon, be fat. Already there was a crease at the front of her ankles, and the flesh of her upper arms was loose, and her hips had a girdled hardness. Not that Harold did not find her attractive. He did, and this went with his fright. Her beauty seemed a gift she would abuse, like a boy with a gun, or squander, like a fool with a fortune. She struck him as a bad investor who would buy high and sell after the drop and take everybody she could down with her. So he walked, up Milk, through the thick of Boston’s large codger population, along Tremont, through the Common and the Public Garden, in a pinching mood of caution. The sidewalk was so hot it stung through the soles of his thin black Italianate shoes; yet scraps of velour and highlights of satiny white skin skated through his head, and it was somewhat romantic of him not to have taken a cab. Of the four Applesmiths, Harold was sexually the most experienced. He possessed that trivial air, trivial yet assured and complacent, that women feel free to experiment with, and before his marriage he had slept with enough to lose the exact count. After marriage (he had been old: twenty-six) there had been business trips, and call girls, generally doughy and sullen, with whiskeyish breaths and terrible voices; but he had never betrayed Marcia with a social equal.

  After her second martini, Janet said, “Harold, it’s about Marcia and Frank.”

  “They seem very amiable lately.”

  “I should hope so. I know they’re seeing each other.”

  “You know? You have evidence? Evidence?”

  “I don’t need evidence, I know. There’s a tone about them. He’s always bringing her up, casually. ‘Did Marcia seem irritable to you tonight?’ ‘What did you think, dear, of Marcia’s dress?’ What the fuck do I care about Marcia’s dress?”

  “But you have no evidence? There’s been no confession from Frank? He hasn’t asked to leave you?”

  “Why should he want to leave me? He’s happy. He’s milking two cows.”

  “Janet, you don’t put things very gracefully.”

  “I don’t feel graceful about it. You evidently do. Evidently you’re used to your wife sleeping around.”

  “I am not. The fact is, I don’t believe this. I think there is an attraction between Frank and Marcia, yes. It’s natural enough, considering how much we see each other. For that matter, there’s an attraction between you and me. Toi et moi.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Oh, come on. You know what you are. You know how you look to men. I’d love to go to bed with you.”

  “You don’t put things that gracefully yourself.”

  “Of course, we won’t. We’re married now and we’ve had our flings, our escapades romantiques. We have others beside ourselves to think about.”

  “Well it’s the others I’m trying to talk about, Marcia and Frank. You keep talking about you and me going to bed. They are going to bed. What are you going to do about it, Harold?”

  “Bring me some evidence, and I’ll confront her with it.”

  “What kind of evidence do you expect? Dirty pictures? A notarized diaphragm?”

  Ringlets of vibration, fine as watch springs, oscillated on the surface of his Gibson as he laughed; there was an unexpected poetry in the woman, face to face across a table for two, the cloth and the softness of her stirred forward by a passionate worry. Through the windows the trees of the Public Garden were hushed cascades, the great copper beech a glittering fall of lava. Janet said, “All right. How is Marcia in bed for you lately? Less or more?”

  How common, really, this was; it smacked of midwifery, of witchery, of womanish cures and auguries, of stolen hairpins and menstrual napkins. The waiter, a gray man polished and bent by service like a spoon, came and Harold ordered without consulting Janet potage à la reine, quiche Lorraine, salad, a light dry Chablis. “You’re putting me on a diet,” she said.

  He told her, “In answer to your question. I think more.”

  “See? She’s aroused. She’s full of it. Screwing.”

  He laughed; his Gibson glass was empty and no watchsprings materialized. “Come off it, Janet. You expected me to say less, didn’t you?”

  “Has it been less?”

  “No, I was honest. She’s been quite loving lately. Your thesis is that women are polygamous; the more they have the more they want?”

  “I don’t know, Har
old. I’ve never been unfaithful to Frank, isn’t that funny? But I would think, as a woman—”

  As a woman: this plump soft phrase out of her mouth gave him the pleasure he felt when, after a party, drunkenly showering, to hear Marcia feign shock he would fasten her bra to his skinny wet chest.

  “—that she would feel guilty toward you, and wants to prove to herself that this isn’t taking away from her marriage, that she has enough for both; and that furthermore she wants to tell you about it, this wonderful thing about herself, about the whole business. I know that Frank has out of the blue started doing things that I never taught him.”

  The thin wedge of a headache entered Harold’s right temple. He reflexively reached for his empty glass, uncertain if Marcia had changed or not, for of those conversations of tranced bodies there is little distinct to recall, only the companionable slow ascent to moon-blanched plateaus where pantomimes of eating and killing and dying are enacted, both sides taking all parts. He found Marcia kittenish, then tigerish, then curiously abstract and cool and mechanical, and finally, afterwards, very grateful and tender and talkative and sticky.

  Janet smiled, tipping a little from her glass into his. “Poor Harold,” she said. “He hates indiscreet conversations. It’s too female, it threatens him. But you know,” she went on, having realized he would be good to experiment with, “I can’t talk to other women comfortably. I could only have said these things to a man.” She stated this with an air of having produced a touching confession for him, but he found it presumptuous and offensive. He thought women should properly talk with women, and men with men, and that communication between the sexes should be a courtly and dangerous game, with understood rules, mostly financial, and strict time limits. Ninety minutes was usually quite enough, and this lunch lasted longer than that.

  They agreed to have lunch again, next week, to compare notes. Harold went home to a house more transparent; its privacy had been surrendered. While the Applebys lived in town, on a secluded lane on the far side of the Musquenomenee, in an ample white house of nondescript style whose interior comfort was essentially borrowed or inherited, the little-Smiths had built their own, and designed it in every detail, a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Dürer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lipatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming; the tinge of green in the vermouth was intensified by the leafy green, green upon green, ivy and alder and hemlock and holly, crowding through their walls of sliding plate glass. Outdoors on the sparkling lawn, sparkling in the lowering light as the sun slowly approached the distant radar station—exquisite silver disc, always fidgeting—Jonathan, in bathing trunks and a candy-striped shirt, would be playing catch with Julia or some children of neighboring summer people, tossing a chewed sponge ball, a little pitted moon, back and forth through the revolving liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler. Henrietta, as neat and alert in feature as Marcia herself, in her duckling nightie, bathed, would run toward Harold barefoot through the cerulean rug to be lifted and hugged and twirled, and Marcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat, and the ball would fall short and lie crescented by sunlight, soaking, while the children noiselessly argued which would retrieve it and get drenched, and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box.

  He detected small change in Marcia. They had met one summer on Long Island and married the next, and things, more or less, had turned out as charmingly as had been predicted.

  They had both been in their mid-twenties and were considered by their contemporaries a bit intellectual and cool. They discovered each other to be sensual, but allowed this coolness to characterize their marriage. They never quarreled in public, rarely in private; each expected the other to see clearly into the mechanism of their union and to make without comment the allowances and adjustments needed. He excused his occasional call girls as hygienic; he took them as he took, behind the closed bathroom door, without complaint to Marcia, aspirins to relieve his headaches. He could believe that Marcia might be unfaithful to him, but as some kind of service to himself, to save him trouble, to accommodate him with new subtlety. He had married her after most of her friends had married. He had removed her from that crass monied Middle Atlantic society where she had seemed stilted and fragile. He trusted her to be always his. Smiling, she lifted the martini; the gin and her earrings trembled. He sipped; the coolness was delicious.

  Without looking it, they were slightly older than most of their friends in Tarbox; Harold was thirty-eight, Marcia was thirty-six.

  She did seem, lately, more inventive and solicitous. A ramshackle boardwalk, in need of repair every spring, had come with their land, with the old summer cottage they had torn down. It led out to a small tidal creek too narrow for most powerboats; here, at high tide, between banks tall with reeds, in water warmer than the sea off the beach, they and their friends and their friends’ children could swim. At night, now, this summer, when the tide was right, and the children were asleep, Marcia had taken to inviting him, Harold alone, for a swim before bed, without bathing suits. So they would walk down in moonlight through poison ivy and cut-back sumac, treading warily, and out the often-patched boardwalk, its slats of varied wood like the keys of a gigantic piano, and on the splintery soft dock take off their clothes and stand, husband and wife, naked together, gooseflesh rising, for an instant of nerve-gathering before plunging from the expectant summer air into the flat black water alive with reeds. Beside him her flitting breasts, arching arms, upturned face gashed by black licks of her hair bubbled through the blanched foam and slopping clammy slick. The water’s million filaments sucked from his nerve ends the flecks of city filth. Our first love, our love of the elements, restored to him his youngest self. Sometimes, at high tide, like a laboring Cyclopean elephant a powerboat would come crowding up the channel with its searchlight and they would squat like aborigines under the dock in the root-riddled mud until the boat passed. And they would dry each other, Harold and Marcia, she toweling even his fumbly dripping genitals, thinking how innocently part of him they seemed, and not a harsh jutting second life parasitic upon him. As she ran ahead up the boardwalk, clutching her clothes to her breasts, her buttocks would be dancy in the steady moon. If in bed they made love, with salty bodies and damp hair, she praised his ardor—“so fierce”—and expertness—“oh, you know me so well”—as if a standard of comparison, someone gentle and clumsy, had appeared. And she would blurt “I love you” with a new emphasis, as if the “you” were darkened by the shadow of an unspoken “nevertheless.”

  At their next lunch Janet had nothing to offer but complaints about Marcia’s constantly calling up and suggesting they do things together, as couples—sail, swim, play tennis, go to meetings. She was ev
en trying to get her interested in the Tarbox Fair Housing Committee, which Irene Saltz and Bernadette Ong were organizing. “I said to her, ‘But there isn’t a single Negro in town,’ and she said, ‘That’s the point. We’re culturally deprived, our children don’t know what a Negro looks like,’ and I said, ‘Don’t they watch television?’ and then I said, getting really mad, ‘It seems to me awfully hard on the Negro, to bring him out here just so your children can look at him. Why don’t they instead look at the Ongs on a dark day?’ I shouldn’t have said that, I think Bernadette’s great; but there’s something basically snotty about this committee. It’s all because other towns have one. Like a drum-and-bugle corps.”

  Janet seemed old to Harold, though she was years younger than he, old and double-chinned and querulous, vexing herself with what he knew to be Marcia’s simple gregariousness, her innocent need to be doing. He changed the subject. “What were you and Piet talking about so earnestly at the Thornes’ party?”

  Her valentine mouth, its lipstick flaking, frowned. “He was telling me his wife doesn’t give him shit. He tells every woman.”

  “He’s never told Marcia.”

  “She’s never told you. Piet’s been aching to break out for a long time and I don’t know what’s holding him back. Georgene’s right there waiting.”

  It was fascinating, seeing his friends through a whole new set of windows. “And Freddy Thorne?” he asked delicately. He had long wondered if Janet had slept with Freddy.

  Janet said, “Freddy’s my friend. He understands women.”

  “And that’s all you choose to say.”

  “That’s all I have to say. We’ve never gone to bed, I’m fond of Freddy, he’s harmless. Why are you men so mean to him?”

  “Because you women are so nice to him.”

  Amused to discover himself jealous, Harold studied his fingers, which he set parallel to the table silver, and asked, “Do you think the Hanemas will get a divorce?” He liked Angela, one of the few women in town who could speak his language. He loved her upward-searching diffidence, her motherly presiding above their summer-evening gatherings. Everyone rather loved Angela.