Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “So what does this do to us?”

  “I suppose nothing, except that we must be very careful.”

  “How careful is careful?”

  “Piet. I’m not going to tell you how much you mean to me. I’ve said that in ways a woman can’t fake. I just don’t think I could enjoy you today and I don’t want to waste you. Also it’s too near noon.”

  “Have you confronted Freddy with your discovery?” The man in the mirror had begun to squint, as his pang of fear relaxed into cunning.

  Georgene, growing franker, said, “I’m too chicken. He’ll tell Janet, then she’ll know I know, and until I have some plan of action I’d rather just know.”

  “I’m touched by how much Freddy means to you.”

  “Vell, honeybunch, he is my husband.”

  “Sure enough. You picked him, he’s all yours. Except I don’t see why I must be sacrificed because Freddy is naughty.”

  “Maybe he is because I am. Because we are. Anyway you sound as though you rather want to be sacrificed.”

  “Tell me when I can see you.”

  “Oh love, anytime, just not today. I’m not myself.”

  “Sweet Georgene, forgive me. I’m being very stupid and full of threatened egotism.”

  “I love your egotism. Oh hell. Come on over now if you want, she isn’t brought back from nursery school until twelve-thirty.”

  “No, of course not. I don’t want it unless you feel right about it. You feel guilty. You feel you’ve driven poor old God-fearing monogamous Freddy into the arms of this harlot.”

  “I like Janet. I think she’s quite funny and gutsy. I think Frank is impossible and she does quite well considering.”

  Piet liked Frank; he resisted the urge to quarrel. Every new assertion of Georgene’s, as she relaxed into the certainty that he would not come, advanced his anger. “Anyway,” he said, “I just heard the noon whistle blow. I don’t want Judy coming back from school saying, ‘Mommy, what’s that lump under the covers? It smells like Nancy’s daddy.’ ” Smells: the woods, the earth, the Negro’s skin, the planed pine of the garage, the whiskey on Bea Guerin’s breath.

  “Piet. Am I putting you off? I do want you.”

  “I know. Please don’t apologize. You’ve been a lovely mistress.”

  She ignored his tense. “When I found the note, the first thing I wanted to do was call you and—what? Cry on your shoulder. Crawl into bed beside you. It was Monday night, Freddy was at Lions’. Suddenly I was terrified. I was alone in a big ugly house with a piece of paper in my hand that wouldn’t go away.”

  “Don’t be terrified. You’re a lovely doubles partner and a fine wife for Freddy. Who else could stand him? If he lost you it would be the worst thing that’s happened to him since he flunked medical school.” Did she notice his unintended equation of her with dentistry—both practical, clean, simple, both a recourse? By this equation was Angela something difficult that he, Piet, had flunked? “Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t think either Freddy or Janet have it in them these days to give themselves much to anybody.”

  She said, “It’s so sad. You call to be reassured and end up by reassuring me. Oh my Lord. Bernadette’s VW is coming up the drive. Nursery school let out early. Is today a holiday?”

  “April twenty-third? The paper said Shakespeare’s birthday. He’s three hundred and ninety-nine years old.”

  “Piet. I must run. There’s a lot we haven’t said. Let’s see each other soon.”

  “Let’s,” Piet said, and her kiss ticked as he had halfway returned his receiver to the cradle. The man in the mirror was hunched, a shadow ready to spring, sunless daylight filtering into the room behind him. He looked, he thought, young, his crow’s feet and the puckering under his eyes smoothed into shadow. A fragment came to him of the first conversation he and Georgene had had as lovers. She had been so gay, so sporting, taking him upstairs to her bed that fresh September day, he could hardly believe he was her first lover. Reflected autumnal brilliance had invaded her house and infused with warmth her exotic furniture of bamboo and straw rosettes and batik and unbleached sailcloth. Gaudy Guatemalan pillows heaped against the kingsized headboard had surprised him. Here? In Freddy’s very bed?

  It’s my bed too. Would you rather use the floor?

  No, no. It’s luxurious. Whose books are all these?

  Freddy’s pornography, it’s disgusting. Please pay attention to me.

  I am, Jesus. But … shouldn’t we do something about not making a little baby?

  Sveetie. You’re so naieef. You mean Angela doesn’t take Enovid yet?

  You do? It works?

  Of course it works, it’s wonderful. Welcome, Georgene said, to the post-pill paradise.

  Piet remembered, standing alone in his low-ceilinged living room, where the wallpaper mourned its slanting visitor the sun and the spare neat furniture reflected his and Angela’s curiously similar austerity of taste, how Georgene’s cheeks, freckled from a summer of sunbathing, had dryly creased as she made this joke. Her manner had been a feathery teasing minimizing his heart’s clangor, and always until now she had brought to their affair, like a dowry of virginal lace, this lightness, this guiltlessness. If she was now sullied and spoiled because of Freddy’s dabbling, where would he find supplied such absolution? That first time, had she bathed? No, it became her habit when he revealed he liked to kiss between her thighs. And had her easy calm gaiety been a manner she had contrived to suit some other crimp in his manner of bestowing love, perhaps an untoward seriousness that threatened her marriage? His praise had amused her; she had always responded that all women liked to make love, that all women were beautiful, like a toilet bowl, when you needed one. But by daylight he had discovered on her rapt Roman face an expression, of peace deeper than an infant’s sleep, that the darkness of night had never disclosed on the face of his wife. Furtive husbandly visitant, he had never known Angela as he had often known his lovely easy matter-of-fact morning lay. The line of her narrow high-bridged nose a double arabesque. Her white hairs belying her body’s youth. Her bony bit of a tail.

  Her receding hollowed the dull noon. Tipped shoots searched for wider light through sunless gray air. The salami he made lunch from was minced death. He went at last to his office. His telephone voice grew husky, defeated. Garage doors of the type needed were out of stock in Mather and were being ordered from Akron. The price of gravel had gone up two dollars a ton and a truckload could not be delivered before Friday. The urban renewal in Boston had sucked the area dry of carpenters and six phone calls turned up only two apprentices from a trade school twenty miles away. Spring building had begun and he had been slow. Gallagher’s silences, though his conversation was commiserating, breathed accusation.

  Piet had met Matt in the army, in Okinawa, in 1951. There, then, in that riverless flatland of barracks and sand, of beer in blank cans and listless Luchuan prostitutes, where the danger of death in battle was as unreal as the homeland whose commercial music twanged in the canteens, Piet was attracted by Matt’s choir-boy prankishness, his grooming, his black hair and eyes, his freedom from the weary vocabulary of dirt and disdain, his confident ability to sell. He had sold Piet on himself as a short cut to architecture and, both discharged, had brought him to New England, into this life. Piet’s loyalty was lately strained. He found Matt grown brittle, prim, quick to judge, Jesuitical in finance. He dreamed of corrupting whole hillsides, yet wished to keep himself immaculate. He secured his wife and only child behind a wall of Catholicism. In the little transparent world of couples whose intrigues had permeated and transformed Piet, Matt stood out as opaquely moral.

  When the phone on his desk rang, Piet feared it would be Georgene, seeking a reconciliation. He hated paining Matt with his duplicity; he thought of Matt with the same pain as he thought of his father, that ghost patiently circling in the luminous greenhouse gloom, silently expecting Piet to do right, to carry on.

  It was not Georgene but Angela. Nancy at nursery school ha
d burst out crying because of the hamster. The child suddenly saw with visionary certainty that its death had been her fault. Daddy said, she said. Her hysterics had been uncontrollable. Angela had carried her from the room and, since she was teaching, the class ended early. They did not go home. There was nothing to eat at home but ham. In hopes of distracting Nancy with syrup and ice cream, Angela had taken her to eat at the Pancake House in North Mather. Now the child, sucking her thumb and running a slight fever, had fallen asleep on the sofa.

  Piet said, “The kid sure knows how to get herself sympathy.”

  “But not from her own father, evidently. I didn’t call just to touch you with this, though as a matter of fact I do think you handled it stupidly. Stupidly or cruelly. I called to ask you to meet Ruth after school and drive to the pet shop in Lacetown for a new hamster. I think we should do it instantly.”

  Magic. The new hamster by sleight of hand would become the old one, the one moldering nose-down underneath the scilla. A religion of genteel pretense. The idea of a hamster persists, eternal. Plato. Piet was an Aristotelian. He said he couldn’t possibly do it this afternoon, he had a thousand things to do, the first quarter’s accounts to check, he was trying to move the houses on the hill, a million details, the construction trade was going to hell. He was heavily conscious of Gallagher listening. Softer-voiced, he added, “I wasted half the morning making a new cage. Did you notice it in the kitchen?”

  Angela said, “Oh is that what it is? We didn’t know what it was for. Why is it such a funny shape? Nancy thought it was a little prison you were going to put her in.”

  “Tell the kid I love her lots and to shape up. Good-bye.”

  The books showed less than the twenty per cent Gallagher liked to clear. Spiros Bros. had attached to their monthly statement a printed threat to stop the account; the balance owed was $1189.24. Gallagher liked to let bills run long, on the theory that money constantly diminished in value. The figures made a gray hazy net around Piet and to compound his claustrophobia the Whitman woman, who had come to basketball uninvited, phoned and asked him to come look at her house. He didn’t want the job, he didn’t like working for social acquaintances. But in his hopeless mood, to escape the phone and the accounts and Gallagher’s binding nearness, he got into the truck whose tailgate said WASH ME and drove down.

  The marshes opened up on his right, grand in the dying day. A strip of enameled blue along the horizon of the sea. Colored tiles along a bathtub. The first drops of a half-hearted rain, cold and dry, struck the backs of his hands as he climbed from the truck. The lilacs by the door of the Robinson place were further along than those of Piet’s own roadside hedge. More sun by the sea. More life. Tiny wine-colored cones that in weeks would be lavender panicles of bloom. Drenched. Dew. Salt. Breeze. Buttery daffodils trembled by his cuffs, by the bare board fence where they enjoyed reflected warmth. Piet lifted the aluminum latch, salt-corroded, and went in. Even under close clouds, the view was prodigal, a heart-hollowing carpeted span limited by the purity of dunes and ocean. He had been wrong, overcautious. It should be Angela’s.

  Ken Whitman’s field of special competence, after his early interest in echinoid metabolism, was photosynthesis; his doctoral thesis had concerned the 7-carbon sugar sedoheptulose, which occupies a momentary place within the immense chain of reactions whereby the five-sixths of the triosephosphate pool that does not form starch is returned to ribulose-5-phosphate. The process was elegant, and few men under forty were more at home than Ken upon the gigantic ladder, forged by light, that carbon dioxide descends to become carbohydrate. At present he was supervising two graduate students in research concerning the transport of glucose molecules through cell walls. By this point in his career Ken had grown impatient with the molecular politics of sugar and longed to approach the mysterious heart of CO2 fixation—chlorophyll’s transformation of visible light into chemical energy. But here, at this ultimate chamber, the lone reaction that counterbalances the vast expenditures of respiration, that reverses decomposition and death, Ken felt himself barred. Biophysics and electronics were in charge. The grana of stacked quantasomes were structured like the crystal lattices in transistors. Photons excited an electron flow in the cloud of particles present in chlorophyll. Though he had ideas—why chlorophyll? why not any number of equally complex compounds? was the atom of magnesium the clue?—he would have to put himself to school again and, at thirty-two, felt too old. He was wedded to the unglamorous carbon cycle while younger men were achieving fame and opulent grants in such fair fields as neurobiology, virology, and the wonderful new wilderness of nucleic acids. He had a wife, a coming child, a house in need of extensive repair. He had overreached. Life, whose graceful secrets he would have unlocked, pressed upon him clumsily.

  As if underwater he moved through the final hour of this heavy gray day. An irreversible, constricted future was brewing in the apparatus of his lab—the fantastic glass alphabet of flasks and retorts, the clamps and slides and tubes, the electromagnetic scales sensitive to the hundredth of a milligram, the dead experiments probably duplicated at Berkeley or across the river. Ken worked on the fourth floor of a monumental neo-Greek benefaction, sooty without and obsolete within, dated 1911. The hall window, whose sill held a dreggy Lily cup, overlooked Boston. Expressways capillariously fed the humped dense center of brick red where the State House dome presided, a gold nucleolus. Dusty excavations ravaged the nearer ground. In the quad directly below, female students in bright spring dresses—dyed trace elements—slid along the paths between polygons of chlorophyll. Ken looked with a weariness unconscious of weariness. There had been rain earlier. The same rain now was falling on Tarbox. The day was so dull the window was partly a mirror in which his handsomeness, that strange outrigger to his career, glanced back at him with a cocked eyebrow, a blurred mouth, and a glint of eye white. Ken shied from this ghost; for most of his life he had consciously avoided narcissism. As a child he had vowed to become a saint of science and his smooth face had developed as his enemy. He turned and walked to the other end of the hall; here, for lack of space, the liquid-scintillation counter, though it had cost the department fifteen thousand, a Packard Tri-Carb, was situated. At the moment it was working, ticking through a chain of isotopically labeled solutions, probably Neusner’s minced mice livers. A thick-necked sandy man over forty, Jewish only in the sleepy lids of his eyes, Neusner comported himself with the confidence of the energetically second-rate. His lectures were full of jokes and his papers were full of wishful reasoning. Yet he was liked, and had established forever the spatial configuration of one enzyme. Ken envied him and was not sorry to see, at four-thirty, his lab empty. Neusner was a concertgoer and winetaster and womanizer and mainstay of the faculty supper club; he traveled with the Cambridge political crowd and yesterday had confided to Ken in his hurried emphatic accents the latest Kennedy joke. One night about three a.m. Jackie hears Jack coming into the White House and she meets him on the stairs. His collar is all rumpled and there’s lipstick on his chin and she asks him, Where the hell have you been? and he tells her, I’ve been having a conference with Madame Nhu, and she says, Oh, and doesn’t think any more about it until the next week the same thing happens and this time he says he was sitting up late arguing ideology with Nina Khrushchev … A sallow graduate student was tidying up the deserted labs. A heap of gutted white mice lay like burst grapes on a tray. Pink-eyed cagefuls alertly awaited annihilation. Neusner loved computers and statistical theory and his papers were famous for the sheets of numbers that masked the fantasy of his conclusions. Next door old Prichard, the department’s prestigious ornament, was pottering with his newest plaything, the detection and analysis of a memory-substance secreted by the brain. Ken envied the old man his childlike lightness, his freedom to dart through forests of evidence after such a bluebird. Neusner, Prichard—they were both free in a way Ken wasn’t. Why? Everyone sensed it, the something wrong with Ken, so intelligent and handsome and careful and secure—the very series e
xpressed it, an unstable compound, unnatural. Prichard, a saint, tried to correct the condition, to give Ken of himself, sawing the air with his papery mottled hands, nodding his unsteady gaunt head, whose flat cheeks seemed rouged, spilling his delicate stammer: The thing of it, the thing of it is, Wh-Whitman, it’s just t-tinkering, you mustn’t s-s-suppose life, ah, owes us anything, we just g-get what we can out of the b-bitch, eh? Next to his lab, his narrow office was a hodgepodge encrusted with clippings, cartoons, snapshots of other people’s children and grandchildren, with honorary degrees, gilded citations, mounted butterflies and framed tombstone tracings and other such detritus of the old man’s countless hobbies. Ken halted at the door of this living scrapbook wistfully, wanting a moment of encouragement, wondering why such a sanctified cell would never be his. The old man was unmarried. In his youth there had been a scandal, a wife who had left him; Ken doubted the story, for how could any woman leave so good a man?

  Inspiration came to him: Prichard’s virtues might be a product of being left, a metabolic reduction necessary to growth, a fruitful fractionation. Inspiration died: he looked within himself and encountered a surface bafflingly smooth. On Prichard’s cluttered desk today’s newspaper declared, ERHARD CERTAIN TO SUCCEED ADENAUER.

  Morris Stein was waiting for him with a problem, an enzyme that couldn’t be crystallized. Then it was after five. He drove home expertly, a shade arrogantly, knifing along the Southeastern Expressway like a man who has solved this formula often, changing lanes as it suited him, Prichard and Neusner and Stein revolving in his head while automobiles of differing makes spun and shuffled, passed and were passed, outside his speeding windows. He wondered about the people in Tarbox, how Hanema could drive that filthy clanking pick-up truck everywhere and the Applebys stick with that old maroon Mercury when they had the money. He wondered why Prichard had never won the Nobel and deduced that his research was like his hobbies, darting this way and that, more enthusiasm than rigor. He thought of photosynthesis and it appeared to him there was a tedious deep flirtatiousness in nature that withheld her secrets while the church burned astronomers and children died of leukemia. That she yielded by whim, wantonly, to those who courted her offhand, with a careless ardor he, Ken, lacked. The b-b-bitch.