Couples

by John Updike

  “You don’t think we Episcopalians have these ways.”

  “Dear good Elizabeth.” Her mother’s hand reached tentatively to touch hers, and their wedding rings lightly clashed, gold to gold. “I must confess I’ve stopped thinking of myself as anything. Roth scorns it all, of course. It was mostly a navy thing with your father.”

  “Does he still go to church?”

  “I’ve never thought to ask him, and now it’s been years since I’ve seen him. He’s in San Diego, I may never see him again. Think of that.”

  Foxy refused to think of it. Carefully she asked, “Is it true, what everybody said, they almost got divorced?”

  “The Kennedys. We don’t see many government people, but yes, you do hear that sort of thing. Not divorced, of course; they’d have to buy an annulment, I suppose from Cardinal Spellman. Of course, with his back, he’s not as active as apparently he was.” Mrs. Roth rested her elbows on the table edge and wearily smoothed the skin beneath her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  Foxy said, “I’m curious about divorce.” In turning her head to mute this admission she read the banner headline of the newspaper left neatly folded at Ken’s empty place: DIEM OVERTHROWN. Diem. Dies, diei, diei, diem. “I wonder sometimes if Ken and I shouldn’t get one.”

  The planet turned while Foxy waited to hear which woman would respond, her mother or Mrs. Roth. “Seriously?” Which was it?

  Foxy sought cover. “Not very,” she said very lightly. “The thought comes and goes. Since coming out here I have too much time to myself. Once the baby arrives I’ll be all right.”

  “Well I wonder,” her mother said. “But if you’re not happy why didn’t you end things when there was no one else involved? You lived alone with Ken how many years was it?

  Seven?”

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t happy till I moved here. Oh mother, it’s such a mess—so sad. He’s everything I could want but we don’t make contact.”

  “Oh, child. Cry, yes. I’m so sorry.”

  “He’s so good, Mother, he’s so goddam good. He doesn’t see me, he doesn’t know me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. I’ve been seeing another man and Ken doesn’t have a clue. A clue.”

  “What other man?” Mrs. Roth asked sharply. “Truly seeing?”

  “It doesn’t matter what other man. A man. Oh, God, yes, seeing to sleep with.”

  “The child is his?”

  “No, Mother, the child is Ken’s.”

  This admission was the worst; as Foxy sobbed into crumpled whiteness, sobbed toward her own lap beyond the pinkness of her fingers supporting her face, she saw that this was the worst, that had the child been Piet’s there would be a rationale, she would not be so purely beyond the pale.

  “Well,” the other woman at last found tongue to say, “it must stop.”

  Foxy felt the power of tears; behind the silver shield of them she advanced against her mother, refusing her an easy victory, demanding to be rescued. “But if I could stop I wouldn’t have started. It was so wrong in the first place. It wasn’t his idea it was mine. What I’m most afraid of isn’t hurting Ken it’s hurting him, of using his love for me to make him marry me.”

  “The man, I take it, is married also?”

  “Of course he is, we’re all married out here.”

  “Has he expressed a wish to marry you?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s not possible.”

  “Well, my advice is certainly to break it off. But I’d be the last person to say that divorce is always catastrophic.”

  “Oh, but it would be. He loves his wife.”

  “He says this?”

  “He loves us both. He loves us all. I don’t want to be the bitch who took advantage of him.”

  “Such elevated morality. In my day it was the woman who was taken advantage of. If it’s the man I think it is, he’ll land on his feet.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “The contractor. The tall Irishman, I forget his name, who danced with you last night.”

  “Matt Gallagher?” Foxy laughed. “He’s a good dancer but, Mother, he’s just like Ken, only not as bright.”

  Connie blushed, hearing in her daughter’s laugh how wrong her guess had been. She said, weakly, “He’s the only one tall enough for you,” and then, stronger, having found the right line, “Sweetheart, I don’t want to know who the man is. If I knew the man, I’d be obliged to tell Ken. I’d rather know what dissatisfies you. To me, Ken seems perfect.”

  “I know he seems that to you. You’ve made that clear.”

  “And he adores you. Is it the sex?”

  “The sex is all right.”

  “You have climaxes?”

  “Mother. Of course.”

  “Don’t be so short. I didn’t begin to enjoy my body until I was past thirty.”

  “Well I must say I don’t much enjoy my body in this condition. I can’t bend in the middle and my legs hurt.” She abruptly stood and swept back and forth carrying plates and cups, making her mother call to her on the fly.

  “How can this other man have continued with you when you are carrying this child?”

  Foxy shrugged. “He never knew me when I wasn’t carrying this child. It didn’t seem to matter that much. He’s very tender about it. His wife has stopped having children. She believes in overpopulation.”

  “Oh, Liz, he sounds so unstable to me. You have such unfortunate taste.”

  “You ask me about Ken. I think what’s wrong with him is that I didn’t choose him. You chose him. Daddy chose him. Radcliffe and Harvard chose him. All the world agreed he was right for me, and that’s why he’s not. Nobody knew me. Nobody cared. I was just something to be bundled up and got out of the way so you and Daddy could have your wonderful divorce.” The accusation was so grave she sat down at the table again. Beneath her crowded heart there was an unaccustomed burning.

  Her mother massaged the moist red spaces below her eyes, and answered huskily, “Is that how it looked to you? It wasn’t that way, we didn’t think, but I’m so sorry, Liz, so sorry. We both loved you so, you had always been so brave for us, all those dull years your bright voice, your prettiness, we were terrified over what you were doing to yourself with Peter.”

  “But, Mother”—their hands on the table avoided touching, remembering the grotesque click of wedding rings—“I knew that. I knew Peter. I knew it would end of itself, you shouldn’t have stepped in. I lost all dignity. This other man and I. I know it will end. He’ll leave me. He’ll move on. Don’t tell Ken about it. Please.”

  “I never thought to tell Ken. He wouldn’t know what to do with it; he might panic. You know, Liz, I’m not totally a garish old fool. I can see Ken’s limits. He’s like your father, he needs a form for everything. But within the rules, I think he’s remarkable. He’s worth treasuring.”

  “He is, I do treasure him. It’s just so devastating, to have a husband whose job is to probe the secrets of life, and to feel yourself dying beside him, and he doesn’t know it or seem to care.”

  “He cares, I’m sure.”

  “He cares about his equipment and I’m part of it.”

  Mrs. Roth came to attention again. “You honestly believe,” she said, “that you and this other man can end it? It hasn’t gone too far?”

  The breakfast debris on the table, orange rinds and eggshells and newspaper, seemed to Foxy to epitomize the contents of the world. Small wonder the child was reluctant to emerge. Its weight within her—the fetus had dropped over a week ago, and its movements, once a faint fluttering, had grown tumultuous—felt leaden, panicked, betrayed. Foxy answered her mother. “It may be ended already. We’ve hardly talked since you came. We haven’t—been together really, for five weeks.”

  Mrs. Roth’s fingertips crept up her face and now stroked, as if treasuringly, the shape of her eyeballs beneath shut lids. “Dear Libby,” she said, not looking. “What I most remember from that terrible Bethesd
a house was the radio dial glowing, and your lovely flaxen hair, that I combed, and combed.”

  “Gone, Mother, gone,” Foxy airily stated, rising and startling in the small of her back an untypical, musical phrase of pain.

  Just ten now, still stocky yet dawningly comely, Ruth was given to placid self-communings in her room, which she kept extremely neat. For her birthday Piet had given her a full-length mirror, a doorway to vanity, a father’s doting and perhaps intrusive gift. He had grown shy, wary of intruding on her. When he ventured into Ruth’s room, he glanced at the mirror to detect signs of its use and surprised his own sharp reflection, looking pouchy and thievish. Surrounded by her mirror, by the splashy flowers of the wallpaper she had chosen herself, by collections, each to its shelf, of books, seashells, bottlecaps, and the foreign dolls sent to her by Angela’s parents from the harbors of their winter cruises, by a turquoise-oceaned map of the world and a green-and-white Tarbox High football banner, by Scotch-taped Brownie snapshots she had taken herself of her parents arm-in-arm, of the hamster who had died, of the lilac hedge in bloom, of her friends at the beach but none of her sister—so surrounded, Ruth would sit at the fold-down desk Piet had built for her and do her homework, or make entries in her laconic diary of weather and excursions, or maintain her scrapbook of figures carefully scissored from Life and the National Geographic, an assortment including Sophia Loren, Queen Elizabeth II of England, a Russian spacedog, a huge stone Pharaoh threatened with immersion by the Aswan Dam, a naked Nigerian bride, a Pakistani mother bewailing the death of her child by earthquake, Jacqueline Kennedy, a vocal group called the Beatles.

  On days like this Monday when Piet returned home before Angela, he felt his daughter busy above him; she was bused back from school by four. The silence behind her closed door, broken when she rearranged objects or crooned to herself hymns learned at choir, intimidated him; he had scrubbed her diapers and warmed her bottles and now his only function was to safeguard her privacy, to make himself unobtrusive. He reread the newspaper and considered replacing the rotten boards of his own barn and instead made himself an early gin-and-Bitter-Lemon. Now that the tavern addition was completed, and christened with a formal banquet attended by all three selectman and fire chief Kappiotis, who fell asleep, there was not enough for Piet to do. Gallagher had sold the estate in Lacetown to the nuns, but a Watertown firm whose director’s brother was a priest had been awarded the fat reconstruction contract. They were told the bids had been considered blind; all Gallagher’s charm with the sisters had been wasted. They were down to a single job, converting the old Tarbox house on Divinity into offices and apartments suitable for rental. Old Gertrude Tarbox, having constructed for herself a paradise of hoarded paper and tin, was in September carted off to a nursing home, at the command of cousins living in Palo Alto, through the agency of a New Bedford bank. Piet’s job—replacing clapboards, removing partitions, sanding floors, dressing up ratty surfaces with decorator panels of vinyl surfaced to counterfeit wood—was scarcely enough to occupy Adams and Comeau and Jazinski, who, being employees paid by the hour, were entitled to work first. So Piet was often idle. He drank deep of the sweetened gin and tried not to think of Foxy; since she had hidden behind her mother she was in his mind like a canker that memory’s tongue kept touching. The summer seemed dreamlike and distant. She had vanished—the slam of a car door after church. He missed the thrift of a double life, the defiant conservation. Faithful, he was going to waste. Attenuated hours spread lifeless around him. He drank to kill time.

  Angela came home brimful of Irene. “You know what that woman has done? She’s gotten a paying job at the Lacetown Academy for Girls, starting next Monday, today a week, which means I have to do the whole kindergarten by myself.”

  “Tell her you can’t do it.”

  “Who said I can’t? If I can’t go to a psychiatrist at least I can run a dozen children by myself, without Irene’s kibbutzy theories getting in my way.”

  “You want to do it.”

  “What’s so surprising about that? I don’t want to very much. I don’t think children this small are my meat really, but I do want to see how teaching after all these years strikes me. I mean, wouldn’t you like it if I could bring home a little money?”

  “You’re afraid I can’t support you.”

  Angela bent and rubbed her cheek against his temple softly, yet hastily, the brush of a wing about to fly. “Of course you can. But I’m a person too. My children are growing up.” She whispered: “Nancy goes all morning without sucking her thumb, unless something happens to remind her.” She whispered because she had brought the child home, and Nancy was on the stairs, wondering if she dared go bother Ruth.

  “What else did Irene say? You’ve been gone forever. Has Ben found a job yet?”

  “No, I’m not even sure he’s looking. But she was full of news. She keeps a beady black eye on the Constantines across the way and says they’ve taken up with the Guerins. Roger and Bea are over there every night, and what Irene thinks, you have to hear it from her to get the humor of it, is that the attraction is between the like halves of the couples.” She drew a box in air with her fingers to explain. “Carol and Bea are attracted to each other, and Roger and Eddie.”

  “Well does she think they’re putting this attraction into practice? I’m having another drink. Would you like one?”

  “Bourbon, not gin. Piet, summer’s over. She doesn’t quite dare say so. But she thinks Carol is capable of anything physically and Bea does have this very passive streak. She’s always been a kind of a woman’s woman, in a way; she flirts with women, and gives them little pats.”

  “But it must be a huge step,” Piet said, though knowing that heterosexually it was not so, “between that kind of current and taking off your clothes and doing the stuff.”

  Angela took her musky gold drink from his hand; as she sipped her eyes went bluer, gazing toward scenes she had been told of. “But,” she said, “we’re none of us getting younger and if it’s something you’ve always wanted aren’t the inhibitions less and less? Things keep getting less sacred.”

  Piet said, pouring lucid gin for himself, “Roger is homosexual, sure, but his charm has always been his refusal to admit it. Except in his manner to women, which is either rude or excessively polite.”

  “I think there’s a difference,” Angela said, “between being homosexual and being angry at females. Has Roger ever, on the golf course say, made a pass at you?”

  “No. But he is very comfortable, and can’t stand being stuck behind a female foursome. But I think Eddie’s the mystery. How can Irene accuse her lover of a few months ago of being a working fairy?”

  “Well, for one thing, she didn’t exactly, and for another she is quite hurt and bitter. When I sort of asked her this, all she’d say was that Eddie could be very persuasive. I don’t know what it meant, but she said it three or four times.”

  Piet asked her, “Where does your friend Freddy Thorne fit in this new arrangement?”

  “Oh, well Freddy’s the one who brought them together; the Guerins and Constantines had almost nothing to do with each other until Freddy. I guess he’s over there pretty much, stirring the brew.”

  “Poor Georgene.”

  Angela asked, alert, her upper lip lifted, her wet teeth aglint, “Why poor Georgene?”

  “On general principles. Married to that evil jerk.”

  “You can’t really think he’s evil. He just loves a mess. Anyway, Georgene’s been very frosty to me ever since school started. Once Irene goes, it wouldn’t surprise me if Georgene stopped doing her day.”

  “What else did Irene have on her teeming mind?”

  “Let me remember. John Ong is apparently sick. Something with his chest; the doctors have told him to quit smoking and he won’t. He can’t.”

  “My Lord. Cancer?”

  “Nobody knows. Of course, he’s older than any of us, it just hasn’t showed, because he’s Asiatic.”

  “Is he in the h
ospital?”

  “Not yet. And, oh yes, of course. This will please you. Foxy Whitman has had her baby.”

  The air compressed; a sense of suffocation was followed by a carefree falling independent of space. Piet asked, “When?”

  “Sometime this weekend. I think on Sunday. You saw her Friday night at the little-Smiths’. Maybe dancing with Matt Gallagher brought it on. He’s awfully bouncy.”

  “Why hasn’t anybody told us before?”

  “Piet, you’re taking it so personally. You’re not exactly the next of kin. I am surprised that Matt didn’t mention it at work. Terry must have heard, if she’s Foxy’s best friend.”

  “Matt and I don’t communicate much at work these days. He’s sulking because we lost the nunnery. But that’s very nice. She had gotten enormous. Boy or girl?”

  “Boy. Seven pounds something. Should we send flowers? I like Foxy, but we don’t seem quite at the flower-sending stage.”

  “Oh, send her some. Loosen up. You can’t take them with you, Angel. Flowers don’t grow in Heaven, they only spring from dung.”

  Angela grimaced, puzzled by his hostile patter, and left the kitchen, calling, “Ru-uth! Come down and be sociable. Nancy wants to play Fish.”

  Alone, Piet tried to grasp the happiness distinct yet unsteady within him. She was safe. The child had been a boy. Foxy’s luck had held. He wanted to be very close to her, to creep into the antiseptic white room where she lay, deflated and pink, invisibly bleeding, breathing in unconsciousness, her pale mouth askew, her hair adrift. He saw hothouse flowers—lush gladiolas, display dahlias, beribboned hyacinths fragrant of greenhouse earth packed tight by mossy thumbs, red cut roses leaning heavy-headed and coolly rank. He glimpsed the glass of water standing stale-beaded beyond her blurred face, and the cartoon cards of congratulation, and a candy bar concealed half-eaten in an enameled drawer. And in a chamber beyond this possessive daydreaming waited the realization that, in giving birth without notifying him, she had been guilty of an affront and in that guilt promised him freedom. Once, uncoming, she had masturbated against his thigh squeezed between hers. Is this too awful for you?