Couples

by John Updike

  In his loneliness he detected companionship in the motion of waves, especially those distant waves lifting arms of spray along the bar, hailing him. The world was more Platonic than he had suspected. He found he missed friends less than friendship; what he felt, remembering Foxy, was a nostalgia for adultery itself—its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master.

  Sometimes, returning to the parking lot by way of the dunes, he saw the Whitmans’ house above its grassy slope, with its clay scars of excavation and its pale patches of reshingling. The house did not see him. Windows he had often gazed from, euphoric and apprehensive, glinted blank. Once, driving past it, the old Robinson house, he thought that it was fortunate he and Angela had not bought it, for it had proved to be an unlucky house; then realized that they had shared in its bad luck anyway. In his solitude he was growing absent-minded. He noticed a new woman downtown—that elastic proud gait announcing education, a spirit freed from the peasant shuffle, arms swinging, a sassy ass, trim ankles. Piet hurried along the other side of Charity Street to get a glimpse of her front and found, just before she turned into the savings bank, that the woman was Angela. She was wearing her hair down and a new blue cape that her parents had given her, as consolation.

  How strange she had been to be jealous of his dreams, to accuse him of dreaming too easily! Perhaps because each night he dosed himself with much gin, his dreams now were rarely memorable—clouded repetitive images of confusion and ill-fittingness, of building something that would not stay joined or erect. He was a little boy, in fact his own father, walking beside his father, in fact his own gandfather, a faceless man he had never met, one of hundreds of joiners who had migrated from Holland to work in the Grand Rapids furniture factories. His thumbs were hugely callused; the boy felt frightened, holding on. Or he was attending John Ong’s funeral, and suddenly the casket opened and John scuttled off, behind the altar, dusty as an insect, and cringing in shame. Such dreams Piet washed away along with the sour-hay taste in his mouth when, before dawn, he would awake, urinate, drink a glass of water, and vow to drink less gin tomorrow. Two dreams were more vivid. In one, he and a son, a child who was both Nancy and Ruth yet male, were walking in a snowstorm up from the baseball diamond near his first home. There was between the playground and his father’s lower greenhouses a thin grove of trees, horsechestnut and cherry, where the children would gather and climb in the late afternoon and from which, one Halloween, a stoning raid was launched upon the greenhouses that ended with an accounting in police court and fistfights for Piet all November. In the dream it was winter. A bitter wind blew through the spaced trunks and the path beneath the snow was ice, so that Piet had to take the arm of his child and hold him from slipping. Piet himself walked in the deeper snow beside the tightrope of ice; for if both fell at once it would be death. They reached the alley, crossed it, and there, at the foot of their yard beside the dark greenhouses, Piet’s grandmother was waiting for them, standing stooped and apprehensive in a cube of snowlessness. Invisible walls enclosed her. She wore only a cotton dress and her threadbare black sweater, unbuttoned. In the dream Piet wondered how long she had been waiting, and gave thanks to the Lord that they were safe, and anticipated joining her in that strange transparent arbor where he clearly saw green grass, blade by blade. Awake, he wondered that he had dreamed of his grandmother at all, for she had died when he was nine, of pneumonia, and he had felt no sorrow. She had known little English and, a compulsive housecleaner, had sought to bar Piet and Joop not only from the front parlor but from all the downstairs rooms save the kitchen.

  The second dream was static. He was standing beneath the stars trying to change their pattern by an effort of his will. Piet pressed himself upward as a clenched plea for the mingled constellations, the metallic mask of night, to alter position; they remained blazing and inflexible. He thought, I might strain my heart, and was awakened by a sharp pain in his chest.

  Foxy was back in town. The rumor flew from Marcia little-Smith, who had seen her driving Ken’s MG on the Nun’s Bay Road, to Harold to Frank to Janet to Bea and Terry in the A & P and from there to Carol and the Thornes, to join with the tributary glimpse Freddy had had of her from his office window as she emerged that afternoon from Cogswell’s Drug Store. The rumor branched out and began to meet itself in the phrase, “I know”; Terry, acting within, as she guessed at her duties, the office of confidante that Ken had thrust on the Gallaghers that dawn a month ago, phoned and gingerly told Angela, who took the news politely, as if it could hardly concern her. Perhaps it didn’t. The Hanemas had become opaque to the other couples, had betrayed the conspiracy of mutual comprehension. Only Piet, as the delta of gossip interlaced, remained dry; no one told him. But there was no need. He already knew. On Tuesday, in care of Gallagher & Hanema, he had received this letter from Washington:

  Dear Piet—

  I must come back to New England for a few days and will be in Tarbox April 24th, appropriating furniture. Would you like to meet and talk? Don’t be nervous—I have no claims to press.

  Love,

  F.

  After “press” the word “but” had been scratched out. They met first by accident, in the town parking lot, an irregular asphalt wilderness of pebbles and parked metal ringed by back entrances to the stores on Charity Street—the A & P, Poirier’s Liquor Mart, Beth’s Books and Cards, the Methodist Thrift Shop, even, via an alleyway sparkling with broken glass, the Tarbox Professional Apartments. He discovered himself unprepared for the sight of her—from a distance, the cadence of her, the dip of her tall body bending to put a shopping bag into her lowslung black car, the blond dab of her hair bundled, the sense of the tone of muscle across her abdomen, the vertiginous certainty that it was indeed among the world’s billions none other then she. His side hurt; his left palm tingled. He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made—the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. Her voice dimensional with familiar shadows. The unnumbered curves of her parted, breathing, talking, thinking lips: she was alive. Having lived with frozen fading bits of her, he was not prepared for her to be so alive, so continuous and witty.

  “Piet, you look touchingly awful.”

  “Unlike you.”

  “Why don’t you comb your hair any more?”

  “You even have a little tan.”

  “My stepfather has a swimming pool. It’s summer there.”

  “It’s been off and on here. The same old tease. I’ve been walking on the beach a lot.”

  “Why aren’t you living with Angela?”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  “She says. She told me over the phone. Before I wrote you I called your house; I was going to say my farewells to you both.”

  “She never told me you called.”

  “She probably didn’t think it was very important.”

  “A mysterious woman, my wife.”

  “She said I was to come and get you.”

  He laughed. “If she said that, why did you ask why wasn’t I living with her?”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “She doesn’t want me to.”

  “That’s only,” Foxy said, “half a reason.”

  With this observation their talk changed key; they became easier, more trivial, as if a decision had been put behind them. Piet asked her, “Where are you taking the groceries?”

  “They’re for me. I’m living in the house this weekend. Ken’s promised to stay in Cambridge.”

  “You and Ken aren’t going to be reconciled?”

  “He’s happy. He says he works evenings now and thinks he’s on to something significant. He’s back on starfish.”

  “And you?”

&nb
sp; She shrugged, a pale-haired schoolgirl looking for the answer broad enough to cover her ignorance. “I’m managing.”

  “Won’t it depress you living there alone? Or do you have the kid?”

  “I left Toby with Mother. They get along beautifully, they both think I’m untrustworthy, and adore cottage cheese.”

  He asked her simply, “What shall we do?” adding in explanation, “A pair of orphans.”

  He carried her bag of groceries up to his room, and they lived the weekend there. Saturday he helped her go through the empty house by the marsh, tagging the tables and chairs she wanted for herself. No one prevented them. The old town catered to their innocence. Foxy confessed to Piet that, foreseeing sleeping with him, she had brought her diaphragm and gone to Cogswell’s Drug Store for a new tub of vaginal jelly. As he felt himself under the balm of love grow boyish and wanton, she aged; his first impression of her smoothness and translucence was replaced by the goosebumped roughness of her buttocks, the gray unpleasantness of her shaved armpits, the backs of her knees, the thickness of her waist since she had had the baby. Her flat feet gave her walking movements, on the bare floor of Piet’s dirty oatmeal-walled room, a slouched awkwardness quite unlike the casually springy step with which Angela, her little toes not touching the floor, moved through the rectangular farmhouse with eggshell trim. Asleep, she snuffled, and restlessly crowded him toward the edge of the bed, and sometimes struggled against nightmares. The first morning she woke him with her hands on his penis, delicately tugging the foreskin, her face pinched and blanched by desire. She cried out that her being here with him was wrong, wrong, and fought his entrance of her; and then afterwards slyly asked if it had made it more exciting for him, her pretending to resist. She asked him abrupt questions, such as, Did he still consider himself a Christian? He said he didn’t know, he doubted it. Foxy said of herself that she did, though a Christian living in a state of sin; and defiantly, rather arrogantly and—his impression was—prissily, tossed and stroked back her hair, tangled damp from the pillow. She complained that she was hungry. Did he intend just to keep her here screwing until she starved? Her stomach growled.

  They ate in the Musquenomenee Luncheonette, sitting in a booth away from the window, through which they spied on Frank Appleby and little Frankie lugging bags of lime and peat moss from the hardware store into the Applebys’ old maroon Mercury coupe. They saw but were not seen, as if safe behind a one-way mirror. They discussed Angela and Ken and the abortion, never pausing on one topic long enough to exhaust it, even to explore it; the state of their being together precluded discussion, as if, in the end, everything was either too momentous or too trivial. Piet felt, even when they lay motionless together, that they were skimming, hastening through space, lightly interlocked, yet not essentially mingled. He slept badly beside her. She had difficulty coming with him. Despairing of her own climax, she would give herself to him in slavish postures, as if witnessing in her mouth or between her breasts the tripped unclotting thump of his ejaculation made it her own. She still wore the rings of her marriage and engagement, and, gazing down to where her hand was guiding him into her silken face, her cheek concave as her jaws were forced apart, he noticed the icy octagon of her diamond and suffered the realization that if they married he would not be able to buy her a diamond so big.

  She did not seem to be selling herself; rather, she was an easy and frank companion. After the uncomfortable episode of tagging the furniture (he was not tempted to touch her in this house they had often violated; her presence as she breezed from room to room felt ghostly, impervious; and already they had lost that prerogative of lovers which claims all places as theirs) she walked with him Saturday along the beach, along the public end, where they would not be likely to meet friends. She pointed to a spot where once she had written him a long letter that he had doubtless forgotten. He said he had not forgotten it, though in part he had. She suddenly told him that his callousness, his promiscuity, had this advantage for her; with him she could be as whorish as she wanted, that unlike most men he really didn’t judge. Piet answered that it was his Calvinism. Only God judged. Anyway he found her totally beautiful. Totally: bumps, pimples, flat feet, snuffles, and all. She laughed to hear herself so described, and the quality of her laugh told him she was vain, that underneath all fending disclaimers she thought of herself as flawless. Piet believed her, believed the claim of her barking laugh, a shout snatched away by the salt wind beside the spring sea, her claim that she was in truth perfect, and he hungered to be again alone with her long body in the stealthy shabby shelter of his room.

  Lazily she fellated him while he combed her lovely hair. Oh and lovely also her coral cunt, coral into burgundy, with its pansy-shaped M, or W, of fur: kissing her here, as she unfolded fom gateway into chamber, from chamber into universe, was a blind pleasure tasting of infinity until, he biting her, she clawed his back and came. Could break his neck. Forgotten him entirely. All raw self. Machine that makes salt at the bottom of the sea.

  Mouths, it came to Piet, are noble. They move in the brain’s court. We set our genitals mating down below like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another is sacred. I love thee, Elizabeth, thy petaled rankness, thy priceless casket of nothing lined with slippery buds. Thus on the Sunday morning, beneath the hanging clangor of bells.

  “Oh Piet,” Foxy sighed to him, “I’ve never felt so taken. No one has ever known me like this.”

  Short of sleep, haggard from a month of fighting panic, he smiled and tried to rise to her praise with praise of her, and fell asleep instead, his broad face feverish, as if still clamped between her thighs.

  Sunday afternoon was his time with the children; at Foxy’s suggestion the four of them went bowling at the candlepin alleys in North Mather. Ruth and Nancy were wide-eyed at the intrusion of Mrs. Whitman, but Foxy was innocently intent on bowling a good score for herself, and in showing the girls how to grasp the unwieldy ball and keep it out of the gutters. When it went in, Ruth said, “Merde.”

  Piet asked her, “Where did you learn that word?”

  “Jonathan little-Smith says it, to keep from swearing.”

  “Do you like Jonathan?”

  “He’s a fink,” Ruth said, as Angela had once said of Freddy Thorne, He’s a jerk.

  On the second string Piet bowled only 81 to Foxy’s 93. She was competition. The outing ended in ice-cream sodas at a newly reopened roadside ice-cream stand whose proprietor had returned, with a fisherman’s squint and a peeling forehead, from his annual five months in Florida. To Piet he said, putting his hand on Ruth’s head, “This one is like you, but this little number”—his brown hand splayed on Nancy’s blond head—“is your missus here all the way.”

  Foxy had planned to fly back to Washington late Sunday, but she stayed through the night. “Won’t Ken guess where you’ve been sleeping?”

  “Oh, let him. He doesn’t give a damn. He has grounds enough already, and anyway the settlement’s pretty much ironed out. Ken’s not stingy with money, thank God. I’ve got to admit, he’s the least neurotic man I ever met. He’s decided this, and he’s going to make it stick.”

  “You sound admiring.”

  “I always admired him. I just never wanted him.”

  “And me?”

  “Obviously. I want you. Why do you think I came all this way?”

  “To divide the furniture.”

  “Oh who cares about furniture? I don’t even know where I’m going to be living.”

  “Well, I suppose I am up for grabs.”

  “I’m not so sure. Angela may just be giving you a holiday.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t try to say anything. If you’re there, you’re there; if not, not. I must make myself free first. I’ll be away for a long time now, Piet. Six weeks, two months. Shall I never come back?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know yet. Ken’s father thinks it should be a western state, but a
friend of ours in Cambridge went to the Virgin Islands and that sounds like more fun than some desert ranch full of Connecticut menopause patients whose husband shacked up with the secretary.”

  “You’re really going to go through with it?”

  “Oh,” she said, touching his cheek in the dark curiously, as if testing the contour of a child’s face, or the glaze on a vase she had bought, “absolutely. I’m a ruined woman.”

  Later, in that timeless night distended by fatigue, demarcated only by a periodic rising of something within him yet not his, a surge from behind him that in blackness broke beneath him upon her strange forked whiteness, Foxy sighed, “It’s good to have enough, isn’t it? Really enough.”

  He said, “Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

  “That sounds like Freddy Thorne.”

  “My mentor and savior.”

  She hushed his lips with fingers fragrant of low tide. “Oh don’t. I can’t stand other people, even their names. Let’s pretend there’s only us. Don’t we make a world?”

  “Sure. I’m a ticklish question, and you’re the tickled answer.”

  “Oh sweet, I do ache.”

  “You think I don’t? Oooaaoh.”

  “Piet.”

  “Oooaauhooaa.”

  “Stop it. That’s a horrible noise.”

  “I can’t help it, love. I’m in the pit. One more fuck, and I’m ready to die. Suck me up. Ououiiiyaa. Ayaa.”

  Each groan felt to be emptying his chest, creating an inner hollowness answering the hollowness beneath the stars.

  She threatened him: “I’ll leave you.”

  “You can’t. Try it yourself. Groan. It feels great.”

  “No. You’re disciplining me. You’re under no obligation to marry me, I’m not so sure, even, I want to marry you.”