Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  The smokestacks and gasholders of South Boston yielded to the hickory woods of Nun’s Bay Road. He arrived home before dark. Daylight Saving had begun. Alone in the living room Cotton was curved asleep in the sling chair from Design Research. Ken called Foxy’s name. She answered faintly from the porch. Someone had torn away the boards that had sealed the French doors. She sat on a wicker chair, a tall gin drink in her hand, looking through rusted porch screens toward the sea. The sky was clearing after the brief rain. Dark-blue clouds thin as playing cards seen edgewise duplicated the line of the horizon. The lighthouse was tipped with an orange drop of final sun. He asked her, “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No, I’m warm. I’m fat.”

  He wanted to touch her, for luck, for safety, as when a child in Farmington after a long hide in the weeds shouts Free! and touches the home maple. Gazing in the dying light across the greening marsh, she had a tree’s packed stillness. Her blond hair and pink skin and brown eyes were all one shade in the darkness of the porch. With a motion almost swift, the light had died. Bending to kiss her, he found her skin strange; she was shivering. Her arms showed goosebumps. He begged her, “Come in the house.”

  “It’s so pretty. Isn’t this what we’re paying for?”

  He thought the expression strange. They had never given much thought to money. Advancement, distinction: these were the real things. As if having overheard his thoughts, she went on, “We all rather live under wraps, don’t we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn’t it?”

  “I’m going in to make a drink.” She followed him in and told him about her day. She had weeded and raked in the side yard. She had decided she wanted roses, white and red mixed, along the blind southern wall of the servants’ wing. The Plymouth agency had called and said her car—a secondhand station wagon they had bought for her, since without a vehicle she was virtually a prisoner at this end of the beach road—would be ready Thursday, with license plates and an inspection sticker. Ken had forgotten about this car, though obviously she needed it. In Cambridge they had done so long without any car at all. Just before lunchtime Irene Saltz, with tiny Jeremiah in a papooselike arrangement on her back, had dropped in on her way back from the beach. She was a conservationist and distressed that the winter storms had flattened a number of dunes. Any town but Tarbox would ages ago have put up fences and brush hedges to hold the sand. She asked Foxy to join the League of Women Voters and drank three cups of coffee. With such a monologuist for a husband, you probably have to develop another erotic outlet, but the trouble with people who have poured themselves into good works is they expect you to do the same, pour away, even if they have husbands as handsome, charming, and attentive as, dear, yourself … Ken sipped his drink and wondered what she was driving at. In the living-room light she looked pale, her ears and nostrils nipped pink. She was high on something.

  What else happened? Oh, yes, in the middle of her nap, and by the way she had gotten to volume two of Painter’s life of Proust, which looked to be much the duller, since Proust was no longer having his childhood, Carol Constantine had called, inviting them to a May Day party; it sounded rather orgiastic. And finally she had got up her nerve and called this man Hanema to come look at the house.

  “When will he come?”

  “Oh, he came.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Oh he said fifteen thousand, more or less. It depends on how much you want to do. He’d like to see us with a full basement but a crawl space with I think he said plastic film over the earth might do for the kitchen half. He prefers hot-water heat but says hot air would be cheaper since we can put the ducts right in the walls we’re going to have to build anyway. You’ll have to talk to him yourself. Everything seemed to depend on something else.”

  “What about the roof and the shingles?”

  “New roof. He thinks we can patch the shingles for now.”

  “Does this fifteen thousand include doing anything to those ugly upstairs dormers and that leaky skylight?”

  “We didn’t go upstairs. Of course he knows the house already. He thought the big issue was the basement. He was rather quaint and cute. He kept talking about babies crawling around on a nice warm floor and glancing at my tummy.”

  Ken felt a weight descend but persisted. “And the kitchen?”

  “He sees about four thousand there. He wants to knock out the pantry partition and have new everything except the sink. He agreed with me, the slate sink must be kept. But the plumbing should be done over top to bottom. And the wiring. Have some more bourbon, baby.”

  She took his glass and smoothly, like a sail pushed by wind, moved toward the kitchen. “Very weak,” he said, and, when she returned with the drink, said, “Well. But did you like him?”

  Foxy stood a moment, her pale mouth shaped as if to hum. “I can manage him. He seemed a little forlorn today. His daughter’s pet hamster was eaten by a neighbor’s cat.” Ken remembered Neusner’s tray of gutted mice and wondered how some men still could permit themselves so much sentiment.

  “You’re the one,” Ken said, “who’ll have to deal with him.”

  She again moved with that airy quickness, as if she had considered a possibility and dismissed it. “I don’t think he wants the job. He and your friend are building new houses for the population explosion.”

  “Gallagher’s not my friend especially. Did Hanema recommend any other contractor?”

  “I asked him to. He said there wasn’t anybody he’d trust us with offhand. He was very indecisive. He seemed to feel possessive about this house.”

  “His wife had wanted it.”

  “You keep saying that.” Her reactions had a quickness, her eyes a hard brightness, that was unusual; he felt an unseen factor operating, an unaccounted-for chemical. She had disliked Hanema: this guess, flattering to himself, inevitable in the light of himself, disposed him to the man, and he told her, “I think, why not put him to work? Exert your charm.”

  She was moving, swiftly, lightly, about the room, taking a kind of inventory perhaps, touching rough surfaces that soon would be smooth, saying goodbye to the ugly mementos, the fan-shaped shell collection, the dried sprigs of beach pea and woolly hudsonia, that had housed her for this while, this pregnant month. She changed the subject. “How was your day?”

  He confessed, “I feel bogged down.”

  She thought, You need another woman. She said, “It’s too much commuting.”

  “It’s too much mediocre mental grinding. On my part. I should have gone into law. That we can do. The old man has two flat feet for a brain, and everybody in Hartford thinks he’s nifty.” She laughed, and he looked up startled; his vocabulary became boyish when he thought of Hartford, and he was unconscious of it. He went on sadly, “I was thinking about Prichard today and it made me realize I don’t really have it. The flair. It all just looks like a bunch of details to me, which is the way it looks to every boob.”

  “Prichard’s an old man. You’re young. Old men have nothing serious to think about.” By “serious” she meant the shadow within herself, her child, the dark world of breeding.

  “Except death,” Ken said, a touching strange thing for him to say. She had pictured him as thinking no more about death than a watch does about running down. She had assumed he from birth had solved it and had worked out her own solution apart from him.

  Foxy said eagerly, “Oh no, when you’re young you think about that. So when you’re old you have nothing to do but be happy for each new day.” She drifted to where a scantling shelf horizontal between two studs held a single forgotten amber marble, striped with a swirl of honey-white. She held it in her pink oval palm and tried to see into its center and imagined God as a man so old each day makes Him absolutely happy. She wondered why she could not share God with Ken, it was so innocent, like this marble, meek and small but there. She didn’t ask him to believe
in more than this. But in his presence she became ashamed, felt guilty of duplicity.

  Ken looked up as if awaking. “Who took the boards off the porch doors?”

  “He did. Hanema.”

  “With his bare hands?”

  With your bare hands?

  Sure. Why not? Why haven’t you done this yourselves?

  We thought it served some purpose.

  It did, but winter’s over. Welcome to spring. Now. This should turn, with a little love. Ah, It does. Come on.

  Oh. I’ve hardly ever been on the porch. Are the screens still mendable?

  He had taken a loose piece of rusted screening and crumpled it and showed her the orange dust like pollen in his palm. New screens will be one of the least of your expenses. Alcoa makes nice big panels we can fit into runners along here. And here. Take them down in the fall. In summer this porch is the best room in the house. Grab the breeze.

  But it makes the living room so dark. I was thinking of having it torn away.

  Don’t tear away free space. You bought the view. Here’s where it is.

  Do you think we were silly? To buy it.

  Not at all. This could be a dandy house. You have the skeleton and the size. All it needs now is money.

  It was my husband who fell in love with it. I thought of us living nearer to Boston, in Lexington or Newton.

  You know—Instead of finishing, he had jogged up and down on the boards, where the line of the porch sagged, testing.

  Yes?

  Your porch sill is missing a support. Don’t hold any square dances out here.

  You started to say something.

  Not really.

  She had waited.

  I was going to say that your view makes me sad, because my wife loved it, and I didn’t have the courage to do what your husband has done, take this place on.

  Do you think courage is what it took? It may have been more a matter of self-esteem.

  Perhaps.

  Maybe it’s just not your kind of place.

  Thank you. I didn’t feel it was. I’m not a seaside type. I like to feel lots of land around me, in case of a flood.

  I suppose me too. I hate wet feet.

  But you’re happy here, aren’t you? Somebody told me you said you were. It’s none of my business, of course.

  He had seemed so courtly and embarrassed, so ready to put himself back into the hired-man role, that her tongue hastened to ease his presumption. Yes, I’m happy enough. I’m a little bored. But I like the town and I like the people I’ve met.

  You do?

  You say that with such surprise.

  Don’t mean to. I guess I’m past asking myself if I like them or not. They’re mine.

  And you’re theirs?

  In a way. Watch out. It can happen to you.

  No, Ken and I have always been independent. We’ve never gotten involved with people. I suppose we’re both rather cold.

  He had taken out a knife and, having turned his back on her, was prying. Your window sashes should all be replaced.

  Wouldn’t storm windows make that unnecessary?

  Some of these frames are too rotten to screw a storm sash into.

  I hope—

  You hope what?

  I was going to say, I hope we can have your wife down, you and your wife, when the house is fixed up. Already I’m frightened she won’t approve of what we do to it.

  He had laughed—his laugh came from deeper within him than the laugh of most men, was warmer, a bit disconcerting, more invading.

  She had tried to defend herself. I don’t know why I should be worried about your wife’s approval. She’s a lovely person.

  His laugh repeated. And your husband’s a lovely man.

  II.

  APPLESMITHS AND OTHER GAMES

  FOXY was both right and wrong about Janet. Janet had never actually slept with Freddy Thorne, though she and Freddy had held earnest discourse about it, and her affair with Harold little-Smith had proved to be unexpectedly difficult to untangle and end.

  The Applebys and little-Smiths had moved to Tarbox in the middle Fifties, unknown to each other, though both men worked in securities on State Street, Harold as a broker, Frank as a trust officer in a bank. Frank had gone to Harvard, Harold to Princeton. They belonged to that segment of their generation of the upper middle class which mildly rebelled against the confinement and discipline whereby wealth maintained its manners during the upheavals of depression and world war. Raised secure amid these national trials and introduced as adults into an indulgent economy, into a business atmosphere strangely blended of crisp youthful imagery and underlying depersonalization, of successful small-scale gambles carried out against a background of rampant diversification and the ultimate influence of a government whose taxes and commissions and appetite for armaments set limits everywhere, introduced into a nation whose leadership allowed a toothless moralism to dissemble a certain practiced cunning, into a culture where adolescent passions and homosexual philosophies were not quite yet triumphant, a climate still furtively hedonist, of a country still too overtly threatened from without to be ruthlessly self-abusive, a climate of time between, of standoff and day-by-day, wherein all generalizations, even negative ones, seemed unintelligent—to this new world the Applebys and little-Smiths brought a modest determination to be free, to be flexible and decent. Fenced off from their own parents by nursemaids and tutors and “help,” they would personally rear large intimate families; they changed diapers with their own hands, did their own housework and home repairs, gardened and shoveled snow with a sense of strengthened health. Chauffeured, as children, in black Packards and Chryslers, they drove second-hand cars in an assortment of candy colors. Exiled early to boarding schools, they resolved to use and improve the local public schools. Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games. They put behind them the stratified summer towns of their upbringings, with their restrictive distinctions, their tedious rounds of politeness, and settled the year round in unthought-of places, in pastoral mill towns like Tarbox, and tried to improvise here a fresh way of life. Duty and work yielded as ideals to truth and fun. Virtue was no longer sought in temple or market place but in the home—one’s own home, and then the homes of one’s friends.

  In their first years in Tarbox, the social life of the Smiths and Applebys was passed among older men and women. Neighboring aunts dutifully called and were politely received and, in the end, resolutely snubbed. “How dreary,” Marcia would say, “these horsey people are,” and as she and Janet became intimate they coined a term, the “big H,” to signify all those people, hopefully put behind them and yet so persistently attentive, who did all the right things, a skein of acquaintance and cousinship that extended from Quogue to Bar Harbor. Discovering each other at a horsey party, in Millbrook or Scituate, that each with a great show of wifely resignation had agreed to attend, Janet and Marcia would, by way of greeting, neigh at one another. Janet’s delicate nostrilly snort, accompanied by a hoofing motion of one foot, was very piquant; she was slimmer then. In truth, they rarely declined these invitations, though as they failed to return them their number slowly diminished. For among these mocked people, however nasal and wooden-headed, the Applebys and Smiths were given presence on the strength of their names and parents’ names; it was years before Tarbox provided them with a society as flattering and nutritious as the scorned “big H.”

  The Thornes and the Guerins were in Tarbox already, but there was something uncomfortable about both couples, something unexplained and embarrassed about the men—one a dentist, and the other seemingly not employed at all, though frequently in Boston. Both wives were shy; Bea did not drink so much then, and would sit quiet and tensely smiling for an entire evening. Wh
en Roger glared, she would freeze like a rabbit. Harold called them Barbe Bleue et Fatime. They all found Freddy Thorne’s smirking pretensions and coziness ridiculous. In those days he still had some hair—wavy fine flax grown long and combed across a bald spot. Georgene was plainly another well-trained, well-groomed filly from the Big H, Philadelphia branch. The couples entertained each other with infrequent stiff dinners, and exchanged maternity clothes—except that Bea was never pregnant.

  The people who did throw parties were a decade older and seemed rather coarse and blatant—Dan Mills, the bronzed, limping, and alcoholic owner of the abortive Tarbox boatyard; Eddie Warner, the supervisor of a Mather paint plant, a bullet-headed ex-athlete who could still at beery beach picnics float the ball a mile in the gull-gray dusk; Doc Allen; good old Ed Byrd; a few male teachers in the Tarbox schools, defensive plodders; and their wives, twitchy women full of vicarious sex and rock-and-roll lyrics, their children being adolescent. To Janet they seemed desperate people, ignorant and provincial and loud. Their rumored infidelities struck her as pathetic; their evident heavy drinking disgusted her. She herself had just produced a baby, Franklin, Jr.—eight pounds, six ounces. The skin of his temples exquisitely pulsed as he sucked her breasts, so that not only the hoarsely joshing voices and unsweet breaths but the imperfect complexions of the “boatyard crowd,” as she and Marcia had christened it, offended her; lepers should not insist on dancing. The boatyard crowd, a postwar squirearchy of combat veterans, locally employed and uncollegiate, knew that it was patronized by these younger cooler couples and suffered no regrets when they chose to form a separate set and to leave them alone with their liquor and bridge games and noisy reminiscences of Anzio and Guadalcanal.