Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “… and we lift our hearts in petition for those who have died, who in the ripening of time have pierced the beyond …” Piet bent his thought toward the hope of his parents’ immortality, saw them dim and small among clouds, in their workaday greenhouse clothes, and realized that if they were preserved it was as strangers to him, blind to him, more than an ocean removed from the earthly concerns of which he had—infant, child, boy, and beginning man—been but one. Kijk, daar is je vader. Pas op, Piet, die hond bijt. Naa kum, it makes colder out. Be polite, and don’t go with girls you’d be ashamed to marry. From the odd fact of their deaths his praying mind flicked to the odd certainty of his own, which the white well-joined wood and the lucent tall window beside him airily seemed to deny.

  Piet had been raised in a sterner church, the Dutch Reformed, amid varnished oak and dour stained glass where shepherds were paralyzed in webs of lead. He had joined this sister church, a milder daughter of Calvin, as a compromise with Angela, who believed nothing. Piet wondered what barred him from the ranks of those many blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed. His nerve had cracked when his parents died. To break with a faith requires a moment of courage, and courage is a kind of margin within us, and after his parents’ swift death Piet had no margin. He lived tight against his skin, and his flattish face wore a look of tension. Also, his European sense of order insisted that he place his children in Christendom. Now his daughter Ruth, with his own flat alert face and her mother’s stately unconscious body, sang in the children’s choir. At the sight of her submissively moving her lips his blood shouted Lord and his death leaned above him like a perfectly clear plate of glass.

  The children’s choir’s singing, an unsteady theft of melody while the organ went on tiptoe, ceased. In silence the ushers continued their collection of rustles and coughs. Attendance was high today, Palm Sunday. Piet held his face forward, smiling, so that his daughter would see him when, as he foresaw, she searched the congregation. She saw him and smiled, blushed and studied her robed knees. Whereas with Nancy his manhood had the power to frighten, with Ruth it could merely embarrass. The ushers marched up the scarlet carpet, out of step. Crossing a bridge. Vibration. The minister extended his angel-wing arms wide to receive them. The golden plates were stacked. The hymn: “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” Amid Yankees trying to sing like slaves, Piet nearly wept, knowing the Dutch Reformed would never have stooped to this Christian attempt. “Sinner, do you love your Jesus?” Abolitionism. Children of light. “Every rung goes higher, higher …” Two of the four ushers sidled into the pew in front of Piet and one of them had satyr’s ears, the holes tamped with wiry hair. The back of his neck crisscrossed, pock-marked by time. Minutes. Meteors. Bombarding us. The sermon commenced.

  Reverend Horace Pedrick was a skeletal ignorant man of sixty. His delusions centered about money. He had never himself had enough. A poor boy from a Maine fishing family, he had entered the ministry after two business bankruptcies brought about by his extreme caution and fear of poverty. Too timid and old to acquire a city church, worn out with five-year-stints in skimping New England towns, he imagined his flock to be composed of “practical men,” businessmen whose operations had the scope and harshness of natural processes. In the pulpit, his white hair standing erect as the water on it dried, he held himself braced against imagined mockery, and his sermons, with contortions that now and then bent his body double, sought to transpose the desiccated forms of Christianity into financial terms. “The man Jesus”—one of his favorite phrases—“the man Jesus does not ask us to play a long shot. He does not come to us and say, ‘Here is a stock for speculation. Buy at eight-and-one-eighth, and in the Promised Land you can sell at one hundred.’ No, he offers us present security, four-and-a-half per cent compounded every quarter! Now I realize I am speaking to hard-headed men, businessmen whose decisions are far-ranging in the unsentimental world beyond this sanctuary …”

  Piet wondered if the hair sprouting from the ears in front of him were trimmed. A cut-bush look: an electric razor, quickly. He fingered his own nostrils and the tickling itch spidered through him; he fought a sneeze. He studied the golden altar cross and wondered if Freddy Thorne were right in saying that Jesus was crucified on an X-shaped cross which the church had to falsify because of the immodesty of the position. Christ had a groin. Not much made of His virginity: mentioned in the Bible at all? Not likely, Arab boys by the age of twelve, a rural culture, sodomy, part of nature, easy access, Egyptian lotus. Coupling in Africa right in the fields as they work: a sip of water. Funny how fucking clears a woman’s gaze. Christ’s groin Arab but the lucent air vaulted by the ceiling of this church His gaze. Piet feared Freddy Thorne, his hyena appetite for dirty truths. Feared him yet had placed himself in bondage to him, had given him a hostage, spread X-shaped, red cleft wet. Freddy’s wise glint. The head with cross-etched wrinkles on the back of its barbered neck under Piet’s gaze rotated and the ear orifice became a round brown eye. In Pedrick’s sermon the palms spread across Jesus’s path had become greenbacks and the theft of the colt a troubled disquisition on property rights. Pedrick struggled and was not reconciled. How blithe was God, how carefree: this unexpected implication encouraged Piet to live. “And so, gentlemen, there is something above money, believe it or not: a power which treats wealth lightly, which accepts an expensive bottle of ointment and scorns the cost, which dares to overturn the counting tables of respectable bankers and businessmen like yourselves. May we be granted today the light to welcome this power with hosannahs into our hearts. Amen.”

  They sang “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates” and sat for prayer. Prayer and masturbation had so long been mingled in Piet’s habits that in hearing the benediction he pictured his mistress naked, a reflected sun pooled between her breasts, her prim chin set, her slightly bulging green eyes gazing, cleared. Erotic warmth infused Piet’s greetings as he edged down the aisle, through a china-shop clutter of nodding old ladies, into the narthex redolent of damp paper, past Pedrick’s clinging horny handshake, into the open.

  At the door Piet was given a palm frond by a combed child in corduroy shorts.

  Waiting for his daughter to emerge, he leaned by a warm white pillar, the frond in his left hand, a Lark in the right. Outside the sanctuary, the day was surpassingly sentimental: a thin scent of ashes and sap, lacy shadows, leafless trees, the clapboarded houses around the rocky green basking chalkily. The metal pavilion, painted green, sharpened the gay look of a stage set. The sky enamel-blue, layer on layer. Overhead, held motionless against the breeze, its feet tucked up like parallel staples, a gull hung outlined by a black that thickened at the wingtips. Each pebble, tuft, heelmark, and erosion gully in the mud by the church porch had been assigned its precise noon shadow. Piet had been raised to abhor hard soil but in a decade he had grown to love this land. Each acre was a vantage. Gallagher liked to say they didn’t sell houses, they sold views. As he gazed downhill toward the business district, whose apex was formed where Divinity Street met Charity Street at Cogswell’s Drug Store and made a right-angled turn up the hill, Piet’s vision was touched by a piece of white that by some unconscious chime compelled focus. Who? He knew he knew. The figure, moving with averted veiled head, moved with a bride’s floating stiffness. The color white was strange this early in the year, when nothing had budded but the silver maples. Perhaps like Piet she came from a part of the country where spring arrives earlier. She carried a black hymnal in a long glove and the pink of her face was high in tone, as if she were blushing. He knew. The new woman. Whitman. Evidently she was an Episcopalian. St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, unsteepled fieldstone, sat lower down the hill. Walking swiftly, Mrs. Whitman walked to a black MG parked at the foot of the green, far from her church. Perhaps like Piet she habitually came late. A subtle scorn. Thinking herself unseen, she entered her car with violent grace, hitching her skirt and sinking backwards into the seat and slamming the door in one motion. The punky sound of the slam carried to Piet a mome
nt after the vivid sight. The distant motor revved. The MG’s weight surged onto its outside tires and she rounded the island of rocks downhill from the green and headed out of town toward her house on the marshes. The women Piet knew mostly drove station wagons. Angela drove a Peugeot. He tipped back his head to view again the zenith. The motionless gull was gone. The blue fire above, layer on layer of swallowed starlight, was halved by a dissolving jet trail. He closed his eyes and imagined sap rising in blurred deltas about him. A wash of ashes. A chalky warmth. A nice bridal taste. Shyly, fearing to wake him, his elder daughter’s touch came into the palm of his hanging hand, the hand holding the frond welcoming Jesus to Jerusalem.

  After what seemed to Foxy far too long a cocktail time, while the men discussed their stocks and their skiing and the new proposal to revive the dead train service by means of a town contract with the MBTA, and Ken who drove to B.U. in his MG sat looking fastidious and bored, with an ankle on his knee, pondering the intricacies of his shoelaces as if a code could be construed there, Bea Guerin as hostess hesitantly invited them to dinner: “Dinner. Please come. Bring your drinks if you like, but there’s wine.” The Guerins lived in an old saltbox on Prudence Street, the timbers and main fireplace dating at least from 1680. The house had been so expensively and minutely restored it had for Foxy the apprehensive rawness of a new home; Foxy empathized with childless couples who conspire to baby the furniture.

  Rising and setting down their drinks, the company moved to the dining room through a low varnished hallway where on a mock cobbler’s bench their coats and hats huddled like a heap of the uninvited. It was Foxy’s impression that this set of couples—the Guerins, the Applebys, the Smiths, whom everybody called the little-Smiths, and the Thornes—comprised the “nicer” half of the little society that was seeking to enclose her and Ken. To put herself at ease she had drunk far too much. Under the mechanical urging of her inflexibly frowning host she had accepted two martinis and then, with such stupid false girlishness, a third; feeling a squirm of nausea, she had gone to the kitchen seeking a dilution of vermouth and had whispered her secret to her hostess, a drunken girlish thing to do that would have outraged Ken, yet the kind of thing she felt was desired of her in this company. In a breathy rush Bea Guerin had said, laying a quick tremulous hand on Foxy’s forearm, How wonderful of you. Though up to this moment Bea had seemed vulnerable to Foxy, defensively whimsical and tipsy, wearing a slightly too naked red velvet Empire dress with a floppy bow below the bosom that Foxy would have immediately snipped, she became now the distinctly older woman, expertly slapping the martini down the sink, retaining the lemon peel with a finger, replacing the gin with dry vermouth. Don’t even pretend to drink if you don’t want to. The oven is funny, we had it put in a fireplace and the wind down the chimney keeps blowing out the pilot light, that’s why the lamb isn’t doing and everything is so late. It appealed to Foxy that Bea, though Roger was so rich his money was a kind of joke to the others, so rich he apparently barely pretended to work and went in to Boston mostly to have lunch and play squash, was her own cook, and so indifferent at it. Janet Appleby had told her that one of the things they and their friends loved about Tarbox was that there were no country clubs or servants; it’s so much more luxurious to live simply. Bea opened the oven door and gingerly peeked in and shut it in a kind of playful fright. The flesh of her upper arm bore a purplish oval blue that might have been a bruise. When she laughed an endearing gap showed between her front teeth. My dear, you’re wonderful, I’m so envious. So envious. Now the touch of her hand was wet, from handling the drink. Foxy left the kitchen feeling still unsettled.

  April was her second month of pregnancy and she had hoped the primordial queasiness would ebb. It offended her, these sensations of demur and rebuke from within. She had long wanted to be pregnant and, having resented her husband’s prudent postponement, his endless education, now wondered, at the age of twenty-eight, if the body of a younger woman would have felt less strain. She had imagined it would be like a flower’s unresisted swelling, a crocus pushing through snow.

  Candlelight rendered unsteady a long table covered by an embroidered cloth. Foxy held herself at attention; her stomach had lifted as if she were in flight above this steaming miniature city of china and goblets and silver flickering with orange points. Namecards in a neat round hand had been arranged. Roger Guerin seated her with a faintly excessive firmness and precision. She wanted to be handled driftingly and felt instead that a long time ago, in an incident that was admittedly not her fault but for which she was nevertheless held to account, she had offended Roger and made his touch hostile. The cloud of the consommé’s warmth enveloped her face and revived her poise. In the liquid a slice of lemon lay at fetal peace. Foxy waited instinctively for grace. Instead there was the tacit refusal that has evolved, a brief bump of silence they all held their breaths through. Then Bea’s serene spoon tapped into the soup, the spell was broken, dinner began.

  Roger on her right asked Foxy, “Your new house, the Robinson place. Are you happy in it?” Swarthy, his fingernails long and buffed, her host seemed older than his age; his dark knitting eyebrows made constant demands upon the rest of his face. His mouth was the smallest man’s mouth she had ever seen, a snail’s foot of a mouth.

  She answered, “Quite. It’s been primitive, and probably very good for us.”

  The man on her left, the bald dentist Thorne, said, “Primitive? Explain what you mean.”

  The soup was good, clear yet strong, with a garnish of parsley and a distant horizon of sherry: she wanted to enjoy it, it was lately so rare that she enjoyed food. She said, “I mean primitive. It’s an old summer house. It’s cold. We’ve bought some electric heaters for our bedroom and the kitchen but all they really do is roast your ankles. You should see us hop around in the morning; it’s like a folk dance. I’m so glad we have no children at this point.” The table had fallen silent, listening. She had said more than she had intended. Blushing, she bent her face to the shallow amber depths where the lemon slice like an embryo swayed.

  “I understand,” Freddy Thorne persisted, “the word ‘primitive.’ I meant explain why you thought it was good for you.”

  “Oh, I think any hardship is good for the character. Don’t you?”

  “Define ‘character.’ ”

  “Define ‘define.’ ” She had construed his Socratic nagging as a ploy, a method he had developed with women, to lead them out. After each utterance, there was a fishy inward motion of his lips as if to demonstrate how to take the bait. No teeth showed in his mouth. It waited, a fraction open, for her to come into it. As a mouth, it was neither male nor female, and not quite infantile. His nose was insignificant. His eyes were lost behind concave spectacle lenses that brimmed with tremulous candlelight. His hair once might have been brown, or sandy, but had become a colorless fuzz, an encircling shadow, above his ears; like all bald heads his had a shine that seemed boastful. So repulsive, Freddy assumed the easy intrusiveness of a very attractive man.

  Overhearing her rebuff, the man across the table, Smith, said, “Give it to him, girl,” adding as if to clarify: “Donnez lelui.” It was evidently a habit, a linguistic tic.

  Roger Guerin broke in. Foxy sensed his desire, in this presuming group, to administer a minimal code of manners. He asked her, “Have you hired a contractor yet?”

  “No. The only one we know at all is the man who’s the partner of the man who sold us the place. Pi-et …?”

  “Piet Hanema,” the Smith woman called from beyond Freddy Thorne, leaning forward so she could be seen. She was a petite tense brunette with a severe central parting and mobile earrings whose flicker communicated across her face. “Rhymes with sweet.”

  “With indiscreet,” Freddy Thorne said.

  Foxy asked, “You all know him?”

  The entire table fully laughed.

  “He’s the biggest neurotic in town,” Freddy Thorne explained. “He’s an orphan because of a car accident ten years or so
ago and he goes around pinching everybody’s fanny because he’s still arrested. For God’s sake, don’t hire him. He’ll take forever and charge you a fortune. Or rather his shyster partner Gallagher will.”

  “Freddy,” said his wife, who sat across from Foxy. She was a healthy-looking short woman with a firm freckled chin and narrow Donatello nose.

  “Freddy, I don’t think you’re being quite fair,” Frank Appleby called from the end of the table, beyond Marcia little-Smith. His large teeth and gums were bared when he talked, and there was a salival spray that sparkled in candlelight. His head was florid and his eyes often bloodshot. He had big well-shaped hands. Foxy liked him, reading an intended kindness into his jokes. “I thought at the last town meeting that the fire chief was voted the most neurotic. If you had another candidate you should have spoken up.” Frank explained to Foxy, “His name is Buzz Kappiotis and he’s one of these local Greeks whose uncles own the town. His wife runs the Supreme Laundry and she’s pretty supreme herself, she’s even fatter than Janet.” His wife stuck out her tongue at him. “He has a pathological fear of exceeding the speed limit and screams whenever the ladder truck goes around a corner.”

  Harold little-Smith, whose uptilted nose showed a shiny double inquisitive tip, said, “Also he’s afraid of heights, heat, water, and dogs. L’eau et les chiens.”

  Appleby continued, “The only way you can get your house insured in this town is to give Liberty Mutual even odds.”

  Little-Smith added, “Whenever the alarm goes off, the kids in town all rush to the spot with marshmallows and popcorn.”