Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Ken returned from the furnace and laughed at the traces of her hunger—the gouged butter, the clawed crumbs, the empty bowl.

  She said, “Yes, and it’s the cheap bread I feel starved for, not Pepperidge Farm. That old-fashioned rubbery kind with all the chemicals.”

  “Calcium propionate,” he said. “Our child will be an agglutinated monster.”

  “Did you mean it, I should call this Dutchman?”

  “Why not? See what he says. He must know the house, if his wife wanted it.”

  But she heard doubt in his even voice and changed the subject. “You know what bothered me about those people tonight?”

  “They were Republicans.”

  “Don’t be silly, I couldn’t care less. No what bothered me was they wanted us to love them. They weren’t lovable, but that’s what they wanted.”

  He laughed. Why should his laugh grate so? “Maybe that’s what you wanted,” he told her.

  They went to bed up a staircase scarred and crayoned by children they had never seen. Foxy assumed that, with the revival of her appetite, she would enjoy a great animal draught of sleep. Ken kissed her shoulder in token of the love they should not in this month make, turned his back, and quickly went still. His breathing was inaudible and he never moved. The stillness of his body established a tension she could not quite sink through, like a needle on the skin of water. Downstairs, Cotton’s heavy feet padding back and forth unsatisfied seemed to make the whole house tremble. The moon, so bright it had no face, was framed by the skylight and for an hour of insomnia burned in the center of her forehead like a jewel.

  Monday morning: in-and-out. A powdery blue sky the color of a hymnal. Sunshine broken into code by puffs and schooners of cumulus. The Thornes’ sunporch—the tarpaper deck-roof of their garage, sheltered from the wind by feathery tall larches, entered by sliding glass doors from the bedroom—cupped warmth. Every year Georgene had the start of a tan before anyone else. Today she looked already freckled, austere and forbidding in her health.

  She had spread her plaid blanket in the corner where she had tacked reflecting sheets of aluminum broiling foil to the balustrade. Piet took off his suède apricot windbreaker and sank down. The sun, tepid and breezy to a standing man, burned the skin of his broad face and dyed his retinas red. “Bliss,” he said.

  She resumed her place on the blanket and her forearm touched his: the touch felt like a fine grade of sandpaper with a little warm sting of friction left. She was in only underwear. He got up on his elbow and kissed her belly, flat and soft and hot, and remembered his mother’s ironing board and how she would have him lay his earaches on its comforting heat; he put his ear against Georgene’s belly and overheard a secret squirm of digestion. Still attentive to the sun, she fingered his hair and fumblingly measured his shoulders. She said, “You have too many clothes on.”

  His voice came out plucking and beggarly. “Baby, I don’t have time. I should be over on Indian Hill. We’re clearing out trees.” He listened for the rasp and spurt of his chain saws; the hill was a mile away.

  “Please stay a minute. Don’t come just to tease me.”

  “I can’t make love. I don’t tease. I came to say hello and that I missed you all weekend. We weren’t at the same parties. The Gallaghers had us over with the Ongs. Very dreary.”

  “We talked about you at the Guerins’ Saturday night. It made me feel quite lovesick.” She sat up and began to unbutton his shirt. Her lower lip bent in beneath her tongue. Angela made the same mouth doing up snowsuits. All women, so solemn in their small tasks, it tickled him, it moved him in a surge, seeing suddenly the whole world sliding forward on this female unsmilingness about things physical—unbuttoning, ironing, sunbathing, cooking, lovemaking. The world sewn together by such tasks. He let her fumble and kissed the gauzy sideburn, visible only in sun, in front of her ear. Even here a freckle had found itself. Seed. Among thorns. Fallen. She opened the wings of his shirt and tried to push the cloth back from his shoulders, an exertion bringing against him her bra modestly swollen and the tender wishbone blankness above. The angle of her neck seemed meek. He peeled his shirt off, and his undershirt: weightless as water spiders, reflected motes from the aluminum foil skated the white skin and amber hair of his chest.

  Piet pulled Georgene into the purple shadow his shoulders cast. Her flesh gentle in her underthings possessed a boyish boniness not like Angela’s elusive abundance. Touch Angela, she vanished. Touch Georgene, she was there. This simplicity at times made their love feel incestuous to Piet, a connection too direct. Her forbearance enlarged, he suspected, what was already weak and overextended in him. All love is a betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. A jealous God. She opened wide her mouth and drew his tongue into a shapeless wet space; fluttering melted into a forgetful encompassing; he felt lost and pulled back, alarmed. Her lips looked blurred and torn. The green of her eyes was deepened by his shadow. He asked her, “What was said?”

  Gazing beyond him, she groped. “The Whitmans were wondering—she’s with chi-yuld, by the way—the Whitmans were wondering if you should be the contractor for their house. Frank said you were awful, and Roger said you were great.”

  “Appleby talked me down? That son of a bitch, what have I done to him? I’ve never slept with Janet.”

  “Maybe it was Smitty, I forget. It was just one remark, a joke, really.”

  Her face was guarded in repose, her chin set and the corners of her mouth downdrawn, with such a studied sadness. The shadows of the larch boughs shuffled across them. He guessed it had been her husband and changed the subject. “That tall cool blonde with the pink face is pregnant?”

  “She told Bea in the kitchen. I must say, she did seem rude. Freddy was being a puppy dog for her and she froze over the soup. She’s from the South. Aren’t those women afraid of being raped?”

  “I watched her drive away from church a Sunday ago. She burned rubber. There’s something cooking in that lady.”

  “It’s called a fetus.” Her chin went firm, crinkled. She added, “I don’t think as a couple they’ll swing. Freddy thinks he’s a stick. I sat right across the table from her, and I must say, her big brown eyes never stopped moving. She didn’t miss a thing. It was insulting. Freddy was being his usual self and I could see her wondering what to make of me.”

  “None of us know what to make of you.”

  Pretending to be offended yet truly offended, Piet felt, by his interest in the Whitman woman, Georgene drew herself from his arms and stretched out again on the blanket. Giving the sun his turn: whore. The reflecting foil decorated her face with parabolic dabs and nebulae and spurts: solar jism. Piet jealously shucked his shoes and socks and trousers, leaving his underpants, Paisley drawers. He was a secret dandy. He lay down beside her and when she turned to face him reached around and undid her bra, explaining, “Twins,” meaning they should both be dressed alike, in only underpants.

  Her breasts were smaller than Angela’s, with sunken paler nipples, and, uncovered, seemed to cry for protection. He brought his chest against hers for covering and they lay together beneath the whispering trees, Hansel and Gretel abandoned. Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors. Piet stroked the uninterrupted curve of her back, his thumb tracing her spine from the knucklelike bones at the nape of her neck to the strangely prominent coccyx. Georgene had the good start of a tail. She was more bone than Angela. Her presence pressing against him seemed so natural and sisterly he failed to lift, whereas even Angela’s foot on his instep was enough, and he wondered, half-crushed beneath the span of sky and treetops and birdsong, which he truly loved.

  Before their affair, he had ignored Georgene. She had been hidden from him by his contempt for her husband. His, and Angela’s, dislike of Freddy Thorne had been immediate, though in their first years in Tarbox the Thornes as a coup
le had rather courted them. The Hanemas in response had been so rude as to refuse several invitations without an excuse or even a reply. They had not felt much in need of friends then. Piet, not yet consciously unhappy with Angela, had dimly dreamed of making love to other women, to Janet or to stately gypsy-haired Terry Gallagher, as one conjures up fantasies to induce sleep. But two summers ago the Ongs built their tennis court and they saw more of Georgene; and when, a summer ago, Piet’s dreams without his volition began to transpose themselves into reality, and unbeknownst to himself he had turned from Angela and become an open question, it was Georgene, in a passing touch at a party, in the apparently unplanned sharing of a car to and from tennis, who attempted an answer, who was there. She said she had been waiting for him for years.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “What else what?” Behind the sunstruck mask of her face her senses had been attending to his hand.

  “What else with you? How’s Whitney’s cold?”

  “Poor little Whit. He had a fever yesterday but I sent him off to school in case you decided to come.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “He’ll be all right. Everybody has a spring cold.”

  “You don’t.”

  She carried forward the note of contention. “Piet, what did you mean, a minute ago, when I told you Frank criticized you, you said you had never slept with Janet?”

  “I never have. It’s been years since I wanted to.”

  “But do you think—stop your hand for a second, you’re beginning just to tickle—that’s why Freddy doesn’t like you? I lied, you know. It was Freddy who told the Whitmans you were a bad contractor.”

  “Of course. The jerk.”

  “You shouldn’t hate him.”

  “It keeps me young.”

  “But do you think he does know, about us? Freddy.”

  Her curiosity insulted him; he wanted her to dismiss Freddy utterly. He said, “Not as a fact. But maybe by osmosis? Bea Guerin implied to me the other night that everybody knows.”

  “Did you admit it?”

  “Of course not. What’s the matter? Does he know?”

  Her face was hushed. A thin bit of light lay balanced across one eyelid, trembling; a stir of wind was rippling the sheets of foil, creating excited miniature thunder. She said carefully, “He tells me I must have somebody else because I don’t want him as much as I used to. He feels threatened. And if he had to write up a list of who it might be, I guess you’d be at the top. But for some reason he doesn’t draw the conclusion. Maybe he knows and thinks he’s saving it to use later.”

  This frightened him, altered the tone of his body. She felt this and opened her eyes; their Coke-bottle green was flecked with wilt. Her pupils in the sun were as small as the core of a pencil.

  He asked her, “Is it time to break off?”

  When challenged, Georgene, the daughter of a Philadelphia banker, would affect a playful immigrant accent, part shopgirl, part vamp. “Dunt be zilly, fella,” she said, and sharply inched upward and pressed her pelvis against his, so that through his cotton he felt her silk. She held him as if captive. Her smooth arms were strong; she could beat him at tennis, for a set. He wrestled against her hold and in the struggle her breasts were freed, swung bulbous above him, then spilled flat when, knees on thighs and hands on wrists, he pinned her on her back. Tarpaper. Her glistening skin gazed. Wounded by winning, he bowed his head and with suppliant lips took a nipple, faintly salt and sour, in. Suddenly she felt to be all circles, circles that could be parted to yield more circles. Birds chirped beyond the rainbow rim of the circular wet tangency holding him secure. Her hand, feathery, established another tangency, located his core. If her touch could be believed, his balls were all velvet, his phallus sheer silver.

  Politely he asked, “Do we have on too many clothes?”

  The politeness was real. Lacking marriage or any contract, they had evolved between them a code of mutual consideration. Their adultery was divided precisely in half. By daring to mention their breaking up, by rebuking her with this possibility, Piet had asked Georgene to cross the line. Now it was her turn to ask, and his to cross. She said, “What about those trees on Indian Hill?”

  “They can fall without me,” he said. The sun was baking a musty cidery smell from the drift of needles near his face, by the blanket’s edge. The tarpaper scintillated. Good quality: Ruberoid Rolled Roofing, mineralized, $4.25 a roll in 1960. He had laid this deck. He added, “I’m not sure you can.”

  “Oh I’m not so fallen,” Georgene said, and quickly sat up, and, kneeling, flauntingly stretched her arms to the corners of the sky. She possessed, this conscientious clubwoman and firm mother, a lovely unexpected gift. Her sexuality was guileless. As formed by the first years of her marriage with Freddy, it had the directness of eating, the ease of running. Her insides were innocent. She had never had an affair before and, though Piet did not understand the virtue she felt in him, he doubted that she would ever take another lover. She had no love of guilt. In the beginning, deciding upon adultery with her, Piet had prepared himself for terrible sensations of remorse, as a diver in midair anticipates the underwater rush and roar. Instead, the first time—it was September: apples in the kitchen, children off at school, except for Judy, who was asleep—Georgene led him lightly by one finger upstairs to her bed. They deftly undressed, she him, he her. When he worried about contraception, she laughed. Didn’t Angela use Enovid yet? Welcome, she said, to the post-pill paradise, a light-hearted blasphemy that immensely relieved him. With Angela the act of love had become overlaid with memories of his clumsiness and her failure to tolerate clumsiness, with the need for tact and her irritation with the pleadingness implicit in tact, her equal disdain of his pajama-clad courting and his naked rage, his helpless transparence and her opaque disenchantment. Georgene in twenty minutes stripped away these laminations of cross-purpose and showed him something primal. Now she kneeled under the sun and Piet rose to be with her and with extreme care, as if setting the wafery last cogwheels of a watch into place, kissed the glossy point of her left shoulder bone, and then of her right. She was double everywhere but in her mouths. All things double. Without duality, entropy. The universe God’s mirror.

  She said, “You’re in my sun.”

  “It’s too soon to have a tan.” Politely: “Would you like to go inside?”

  The sliding glass door led off the sun deck through a playroom into their big bedroom, a room adorned with Chinese lanterns and African masks and carved animal horns from several countries. Their house, a gambrel-roof late-Victorian, with gingerbread eaves and brackets, scrolling lightning rods, undulate shingling, zinc spouting, and a roof of rose slates in graduated ranks, was furnished in a style of cheerful bastardy—hulking black Spanish chests, Chippendale highboys veneered in contrasting fruitwoods flaking bit by bit, nondescript slab-and-tube modern, souvenir-shop colonial, Hitchcock chairs with missing rungs, art nouveau rockers, Japanese prints, giant corduroy pillows, Philippine carpets woven of rush rosettes. Unbreakable as a brothel, it was a good house for a party. Through his illicit morning visits Piet came to know these rooms in another light, as rooms children lived in and left littered with breakfast crumbs as they fled down the driveway to the school bus, the Globe still spread open to the funnies on the floor. Gradually the furniture—the antic lamps, the staring masks—learned to greet him, the sometimes man of the house. Proprietorially he would lie on the Thornes!’ king-size double bed, his bare toes not touching the footboard, while Georgene had her preparatory shower. Curiously he would finger and skim through Thorne’s bedside shelf—Henry Miller in tattered Paris editions, Sigmund Freud in Modern Library, Our Lady of the Flowers and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure fresh from Grove Press, inspirational psychology by the Menningers, a dove-gray handbook on hypnosis, Psychopathia Sexualis in textbook format, a delicately tinted and stiff-paged album smuggled from Kyoto, the poems of Sappho as published by Peter Pauper, the unexpurgated Arabian
Nights in two boxed volumes, works by Theodor Reik and Wilhelm Reich, various tawdry paperbacks. Then Georgene would come in steaming from the bathroom, a purple towel turbaned around her head.

  She surprised him by answering, “Let’s make it outdoors for a change.”

  Piet felt he was still being chastised. “Won’t we embarrass God?”

  “Haven’t you heard, God’s a woman? Nothing embarrasses Her.” She pulled the elastic of his underpants toward her, eased it down and around. Her gaze became complacent. A cloud passingly blotted the sun. Sensing and fearing a witness, Piet looked upward and was awed as if by something inexplicable by the unperturbed onward motion of the fleet of bluebellied clouds, ships with a single destination. The little eclipsing cloud burned gold in its tendrilous masts and stern. A cannon discharge of iridescence, and it passed. Passed on safely above him. Sun was renewed in bold shafts on the cracked April earth, the sodden autumnal leaves, the new shoots coral in the birches and mustard on the larch boughs, the dropped needles drying, the tarpaper, their discarded clothes. Between the frilled holes her underpants wore a tender honey stain. Between her breasts the sweat was scintillant and salt. He encircled her, fingered and licked her willing slipping tips, the pip within the slit, wisps. Sun and spittle set a cloudy froth on her pubic hair: Piet pictured a kitten learning to drink milk from a saucer. He hurried, seeking her forgiveness, for his love of her, on the verge of discharge, had taken a shadow, had become regretful, foregone. He parted her straight thighs and took her with the simplicity she allowed. A lip of resistance, then an easeful deepness, a slipping by steps. His widening entry slowly startled her eyes. For fear of finding her surrendered face plain, he closed his lids. The whispering of boughs filtered upon them. Distant saws rasped. The breeze teased his squeezing buttocks; he was bothered by hearing birds behind him, Thorne’s hired choir, spying.