Couples

by John Updike

  So it was she, when the music stopped, who said, “I’m sleepy and dizzy. Who’s going to take me to bed?” Frank in the center of the room made no move, and Harold stayed at her side.

  To make space for themselves the two couples had to rearrange the children. Catharine Appleby, her heavy flushed head lolling, was moved into bed with dainty six-year-old Julia Smith; and the door to Jonathan’s room (he had fallen asleep with the light on and The Unwanted Visitor face down on the blanket) was closed, so no noise from the master bedroom would wake him. The two white sofas were pushed together to make a second bed. It seemed very strange to Janet, as strange as a visit to Sikkim or high Peru, to journey forth, between three and four that morning, toward their own home; to bundle their two oblivious children in borrowed blankets and carry them across the little-Smith’s stone-hard lawn to their two dark cars; to hiss farewells and exchange last caresses through clothes that upon resumption felt like fake and stiff and makeshift costumes; to drive behind Frank’s steady taillights through a threadbare landscape patched with pieces of dry half-melted snow; to enter a deserted house carrying children like thieves with sacks of booty; to fall asleep beside an unfamiliar gross man who was also her husband; to feel the semen of another man still moist between her thighs; to awaken and find it morning and the strangeness banished with no traces save a congested evasive something in Frank’s grateful eyes and a painful jarring, perhaps inaccurate overlay printing, in the colors of the Sunday comics section.

  This pattern, of quarrel and reunion, of revulsion and surrender, was repeated three or four times that winter, while airplanes collided in Turkey, and coups transpired in Iraq and Togo, and earthquakes in Libya, and a stampede in the Canary Islands, and in Ecuador a chapel collapsed, killing a hundred twenty girls and nuns. Janet had taken to reading the newspaper, as if this smudgy peek into other lives might show her the way out of her own. Why was she not content? The other three were, and there was little in her religious background—feebly Presbyterian; her father, though a generous pledger, had been rather too rich to go to church, like a man who would have embarrassed his servants by appearing at their party—to account for her inconvenient sense of evil. She suspected that Marcia and Harold and Frank, having completed college, knew secrets, and used her. She felt her flesh prized by them. She was their sullen treasure. Once, serving them scrambled eggs in her home after midnight, wearing a bathrobe over a nightie (she had gone to bed with a headache and a temper and had come back downstairs again after an hour of listening to their three-cornered laughter), Janet had leaned over the kitchen table with the frying pan and Frank had stroked her from one side and Harold from the other and Marcia, watching, had smiled. She had become their pet, their topic. They could not understand her claustrophobia and indignation, and discussed her “problem” with her as if it might lie anywhere but with them, the three of them.

  “Did you ever see,” Harold asked, as they sat around the round grease-stained leather table, “your parents making love?”

  “Never. The nearest thing to it, some Sunday mornings the door to their bedroom would be locked.”

  “Dear Janet,” Marcia said. “Poor dear Janet. Tiptoeing in her Sunday-school dress down that long silent hall and pushing, pushing at that locked door.”

  “Shit,” Janet said. “I never pushed at anything. Speak for yourself.”

  “Dear me,” Marcia said. “I suppose that should hurt.”

  “Bad girl, Janet,” Harold said. “You pushed me into the laundry.”

  “Because you looked so miserable.” Janet tried not to cry, which she knew would encourage them.

  “Let Jan-Jan alone,” Frank said. “She’s a lovely broad and the mother of my heirs.”

  “There’s Frank,” Marcia said to her husband, “giving himself heirs again.” Their intimacy had forced upon each a rôle, and Marcia had taken it upon herself to be dry and witty, when in fact, Janet knew, she was earnest and conscientious, with humorless keen emotions. Janet looked at her and saw a nervous child innocently malicious.

  “You don’t have to defend Janet to me,” Harold told Frank. “I love her.”

  “You desire her,” Marcia corrected. “You’ve cathected in her direction.”

  Harold continued, shinily drunk, his twin-tipped nose glinting, “She is the loveliest goddam p—”

  “Piece,” Marcia completed, and scrabbled in her bent pack of Newports for a cigarette.

  “Pièce de non-résistance I’ve ever had,” Harold finished. He added, “Out of wedlock.”

  “The horn, the horn, the lusty horn,” Frank said, “is not a thing to laugh to scorn,” and Janet saw that the conversation was depressing him also.

  Harold went on with Janet, “Were your first experiences with boys under bushes interesting or disagreeable? Intéressant ou désagréable?”

  “Buffalo boys didn’t take me under bushes,” Janet said. “I was too fat and rich.”

  Marcia said, “We were never really rich. Just respectable. I thought of my father as a holy man.”

  “Saint Couch,” Harold said, and then repronounced it, “San’ Coosh!”

  “I thought of mine,” Janet said, growing interested, beginning to hope they could teach her something, “as a kind of pushover. I thought my mother pushed him around. She had been very beautiful and never bothered to watch her weight and even after she got quite large still thought of herself as beautiful. She called me her ugly duckling. She used to say to me, ‘I can’t understand you. Your father’s such a handsome man.’ ”

  “You should tell it to a psychiatrist,” Marcia said, unintended sympathy lighting up her face.

  “No need, with us here,” Harold said. “Pas de besoin, avec nous ici. Clearly she was never allowed to work through homosexual mother-love into normal heterosexuality. Our first love-object is the mother’s breast. Our first gifts to the beloved are turds, a baby’s turds. Her father manufactures laxatives. Oh Janet, it’s so obvious why you won’t sleep with us.”

  “She sleeps with me,” Frank said.

  “Don’t brag,” Marcia said, and her plain warm caring, beneath the dryness, improved Frank’s value in Janet’s eyes. She saw him, across the small round raft crowded with empty glasses and decanters, as a fellow survivor, scorched by the sun and crazed by drinking salt water.

  “Why must you ruin everything?” he suddenly called to her. “Can’t you understand, we all love you?”

  “I don’t like messy games,” Janet said.

  “As a child,” Harold asked, “did they let you play in the buffalo mud or did you have an anal nanny?”

  “Anal nanny,” Marcia said. “It sounds like a musical comedy.”

  “What’s the harm?” Frank asked Janet, and his boozy dishevelment, his blood-red eyes and ponderous head rather frightened her, though she had lulled him to sleep, her Minotaur, for ten years’ worth of nights. He shouted to all of them, “Let’s do it! Let’s do it all in the same room! Tup my white ewe, I want to see her whinny!”

  Harold sighed daintily through his nose. “See,” he told Janet. “You’ve driven your husband mad with your frigidity. I’m getting a headache.”

  “Let’s humanize each other,” Frank pleaded.

  Marcia turned on him, possessive of his mind. “Frank, don’t quote Freddy Thorne. I’d think you’d have more intellectual self-respect.”

  Yet it was Freddy Thorne who sensed the trouble, and who tried to turn it to his own advantage. “I hear there’s a snake in Applesmithsville,” he said to Janet.

  “Where’s that?” They were in her house, at the April party given to welcome the Whitmans to town. Janet was distracted by her duties as hostess; she imagined that people and couples needed her everywhere. Piet Hanema was lying all over the stairs and down came Foxy Whitman from the bathroom, with him looking up her skirt. She must take Foxy aside and explain about Piet.

  “Oh,” Freddy answered, demanding her attention, “here and there, everywhere. All the world is Apples
mithsville.” In the corner, by the wall of uniform sets, John Ong, his ageless face strained and courteous, was listening to Ben Saltz painstakingly jabber; Janet thought that a woman should go over and interpose herself, but with this alternative she turned herself a little closer into Freddy Thorne’s murmur. Why does his mouth, she wondered, if he’s himself such a dentist, look so toothless? “They’re feasting off you, Jan-Jan,” he told her. “You’re serving two studs and Marcia’s in the saddle.”

  “Spare me your vulgar fantasies, Freddy,” Janet said, imitating Marcia. “Contrary to what seems to be the popular impression, Harold and I have never slept together. The possibility has been mentioned; but we decided it would be too messy.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Freddy told her. “The way you look me right in the eye handing out this crap is beautiful. Something you don’t realize about yourself, you really have it. Not like these other cunts. Marcia doesn’t have it, she’s trying to jiggle herself into having it. Bea’s trying to drink herself into it. Angela’s trying to rise above it. You’re right there. Do me a favor though and don’t fib to jolly old Freddy.”

  Janet laughed; his words were like the candyish mouthwash by his porcelain dental chair—unswallowable but delicious. She asked, “And Georgene? Does she have it?”

  “She’s OK in a tennis dress, don’t knock the kid. She fucks and she can cook, so what the hell. I’m not proposing marriage.”

  “Freddy, don’t make me hurt your feelings.”

  “You want out, right?”

  “In a way, in a way not. I’m, what’s the word, not ambidextrous?”

  “Ambivalent. Androgynous. Androdextrorogerogynous.”

  “We have fun with the Smiths, just sitting and talking, neither Frank or I have ever had really close friends before. You can’t imagine just friendship, can you?”

  He patted his bright bald head and in sudden exultation vigorously rubbed it. “Between you and me, yes. It’s what a fish feels for the fish he’s eating. You want out, I can get you out. Have a little affair with me and that circus you’re supporting will pack up and leave town. You can be your own girl again.”

  “How little is little?”

  “Oh”—his hands did one squeeze of an invisible accordion—“as much as suits. No tickee, no washee. If it doesn’t take, it doesn’t take. No deposit on the bottle, Myrtle.”

  “Why do you propose this? You aren’t very fond of me. It’s Angela you want.”

  “A, I don’t, and B, I am, and C, I like to help people. I think you’re about to panic and I hate to see it. You’re too schnapps for that. You wear clothes too well. Terrific dress you have on, by the way. Are you pregnant?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s an Empire line.”

  “Now wouldn’t it be awful to get knocked up and not know which was the father? Hey. Are you on the pills?”

  “Freddy, I’m beginning to hate this conversation.”

  “Okey-doke-doke. Let it simmer. As Khrushchev said when he put the missiles on Cuba, nothing ventured, nothing gainski. I’m there if you think you can use me.”

  “Thank you, Freddy. You’re a nice man.” Janet’s conscience pricked her; she added, “Yes.”

  “Yes how?”

  “Yes, in answer to your question, I am on the pills. Marcia isn’t yet. She’s afraid of cancer.”

  Freddy smirked and made a ring with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re golden,” he told her. “You’re the last of the golden girls.” He put the ring to his mouth and fluttered his tongue through it.

  Janet considered his offer seriously. As she picked her way through the tangle of her party it seemed not so implausible. Freddy would know his way around a woman. Marcia and Frank and Harold would be horrified. Harold’s vanity would be unforgivably piqued. Love ousts love. These things happen. Piet was making out with poor little Bea Guerin. Frank was grotesquely Twisting (his digestion!) opposite Carol Constantine. Eddie on the sofa was demonstrating with his circling hands to Bernadette Ong the holding pattern of air traffic over LaGuardia and Idlewild, and why the turboprops and private planes were brought down sooner than the pure jets, the beautiful new 707s and DC-8s, and why with every new type of commercial aircraft several hundred passengers will die through pilot error, and why the starlings and gulls at Logan are a special menace; and finally he brought his narrow curly-haired head down safely onto her silk shoulder and appeared to sleep. The guests of honor felt out of it. Foxy queasy, the Whitmans left early. When everyone had left except the little-Smiths, and they were sitting around the table having the dregs of the liqueurs, Janet asked Marcia, “Did Freddy Thorne seem attractive to you tonight?”

  Marcia laughed; the glitter of her earrings clashed on the surface of her face. “Heavens, no. He asked me if I was happy in Applesmithsville.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I was very frosty. He went away. Poor Georgene.”

  “He asked me, too. In fact”—Janet was not sure if this was a tactic, but the Benedictine made it seem one—“he offered to have an affair with me.”

  “He really is a fantastic oaf,” Frank said. Brandy was the worst thing for him, and he was on his third glass.

  Harold swirled his Grand Marnier thoughtfully. “Why are you telling us this?”

  “I don’t know. I was so surprised at myself, that it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Since he’s lost all of his hair, he’s rather handsome, in a sinister way.”

  “In a mealy-mouthed way,” Marcia said. She sipped anisette.

  “Janet, you disgust me,” Harold said. “How can you unload this merde on three people who adore you?”

  “I half-adore her,” Marcia said.

  “Two point five people who adore you,” Harold said. “Deux point cinq.”

  “I don’t know,” Janet said. “I guess I want to be talked out of it. I don’t see why you men look so offended. It might bring Georgene in and don’t we need some new blood? It seems to me we’ve said everything we have to say about sixty times. We know all about Frank’s ulcer and Frank’s father who avoided getting an ulcer by learning all about China and how Shakespeare doesn’t work as well as China, maybe he’s more acid; I do advise Maalox. We know all about what saints her father and grandfather the bishop were from Marcia, and how she hated Long Island and loves it up here away from all those dreary clubby types who kept playing badminton with martini olives. We know all about Harold’s prostitutes, and the little colored girl in St. Louis, and how neither of us are quite as good …”

  “Any funny business with Freddy,” Frank said, bloating with menace, “and it’s get thee to a nunnery. I’ll divorce you.”

  “But then,” Janet told him, “I’d have to drag all of us out into the open, and we’d look so funny in the newspapers. Things are so hard to explain that are perfectly obvious to friends.”

  “It’s obvious to me,” Freddy Thorne said to her the following weekend, when they were alone in the kitchen late at a dinner party given by the Guerins, “you never were in love with Harold, you went after him to even the score with Marcia.” In the intervening week she had had a dental appointment, and in the gaps of prophylaxis he had wheedled from her her version of the full story.

  “Freddy, how can you judge?” She helped herself to a piece of cream-cheese-laden celery left over from the hors d’oeuvres. “How can you hope to get inside people’s lives this way? Harold when he and I are alone is something you can’t imagine. He can be irresistible.”

  “We all can,” was the answer. “Resistibility is a direct function of the female decision to resist or not to.” He seemed to be sweating behind the thick eyeglasses that kept misplacing his eyes. Freddy had trouble seeing. He had recently installed a new drill with a water-spray attachment, and during her appointment his glasses had often needed to be wiped.

  “Freddy,” she told him, “I don’t like being pried and poked at. You must make a woman your friend first.”

  “I’ve been your friend since you moved
to town.” He stroked her arm, left bare by the black-lace blouse. Candlelight shuddered in the other room, where the others were chattering. “On second thought,” Freddy murmured on, “I think you took Harold on not to hurt the other two but to oblige them, to win their affection. For a magnificent piece who’s also rich, you’re damn unsure of yourself.”

  “For a near-sighted boob who’s also a dentist, you’re damn sure of yourself. Speaking of which, stop trying to make the Whitman girl. She’s pregnant.”

  “Praise be. More men to man America’s submarines. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s a swinger. Women with that superheated skin are usually fantastic in the sack. Their hearts beat harder.”

  “You’re such a bastard,” said Janet, whose skin, though strikingly pale, was rather grainy and opaque.

  Freddy was right, she later reflected, in that obligingness had become a part of it; they had reached, the Applesmiths, the boundary of a condition wherein their needs were merged, and a general courtesy replaced individual desire. The women would sleep with the men out of pity, and each would permit the other her man out of an attenuated and hopeless graciousness. Already a ramifying tact and crossweave of concern were giving their homes an unhealthy hospital air. Frank and Harold had become paralyzed by the habit of lust; she and Marcia, between blow-ups, were as guarded and considerate with one another as two defaced patients in an accident ward.

  In the following week she had a porcelain filling replaced, and Freddy called her on the phone every noon, always inviting her to sleep with him. But he never named a place where they could go, never suggested a definite time; and it dawned upon her that he had no serious physical intention: the verbal intimacy of gossip satisfied him. Meanwhile Harold, begging her to resume with him, had gone to the trouble of acquiring the key to a Beacon Street bachelors’ apartment that was empty all day. Curious as to how bachelors live, she went there with him the Friday before the Sunday when Piet broke Freddy’s little finger. At a glance she gathered that the inhabitants were homosexuals. The furnishings too beautifully harmonized; bent wicker and orange velvet prevailed. One of the men painted, or, rather, did collages juxtaposing magazine advertisements and war headlines, deodorized nudes with nacreous armpits and bombed peasants flecked with blood, green stamps and Robert McNamara and enraptured models in striated girdles, comic-strip cannons pasted at the crotch. It was quite ugly and malicious, yet the room was impossible to shock and the magnolias on the south of Beacon were about to flower. Harold was polite, timid, fatherly, reminiscent, touching. She allowed him to slide her from her clothes and, rising quickly, came with him and then, after a cigarette and wine, let him come again, let him gather himself into his groin and hurl himself painlessly into the dilated middle amplitudes of herself. Trembling as if whipped, he licked her eyelids and sucked her toes, one by one. The sensation felt hysterically funny. The next day, Saturday, she wrote Freddy a letter: