Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Had they been less uncongenial, Janet would hardly have made social overtures to the Saltzes and the Ongs, who moved to opposite ends of the town in 1957 and who at least were college graduates. John Ong, indeed, was supposedly very brilliant. He worked in Cambridge, mathematically deciphering matter, in a program underwritten by the government. He should have been fascinating but his English was impossible to understand. His wife, Bernadette, was a broad-shouldered half-Japanese from Baltimore, her father an immigrant Portugese. She was exotic and boistrous and warm and exhausting, as if she were trying to supply by herself enough gregariousness for two. The Saltzes were killingly earnest but Irene could be fun after the third martini, when she did imitations of all the selectmen and town officials her crusading spirit brought her up against. Ben had only one imitation, which he did unconsciously—a rabbi, with scruffy beard and bent stoop, hands clasped behind him, and an air of sorrowing endurance. But it was not until, in 1958, Hanema and Gallagher set up their office on Hope Street that the final ecology of the couples was established. With these two men, the Irishman and Dutchman, shaped together like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, began the round of sports—touch football, skiing, basketball, sailing, tennis, touch football again—that gave the couples an inexhaustible excuse for gathering: a calendrical wheel of unions to anticipate and remember, of excuses for unplanned parties. And the two new women, Terry and Angela, brought a style with them, an absent-minded amiability from which the other women were able to imitate the only tone, casual and amused, that could make bearable such a burden of hospitality and intermingling. In 1960 the Constantines moved into their sinister big house on the green; Carol painted, and Eddie flew. As a couple, they had an appealingly dangerous air. And now, in 1963, the Whitmans had moved into the old Robinson place.

  These years had seen the boatyard crowd go from decay to disintegration. Two couples had been divorced, the schoolteachers had failed to get tenure and had quit or been dismissed, poor alcoholic Danny Mills had lost his boatyard to the bank and gone to Florida without his wife, whose hard stringy legs had been so quick to master the newest dance step. The only remaining contact with the boatyard crowd was by phone, when one called to ask one of their teen-age daughters to babysit. Their existence, which might have been forgotten entirely, was memorialized by a strange vestige, irksome to Harold and Marcia, within the younger group of couples. There had been, in those first Tarbox years, another couple called Smith, a pair of big-headed, ruddy, humorless social pushers who had since moved to Newton but who were, for a year, present at the same parties the smaller Smiths were invited to. So the modifiers had been coined as a conversational convenience and had outlived the need for any distinction, and become part of Harold and Marcia, though by now few of their friends knew who the big-Smiths had been, or could envision their ponderous, flushed, doll-like faces, always eagerly nodding, like floats in a Shriners parade. It was an annual cause for hilarity when, with that inexorable plodding friendliness that had been their method of attack, the Smiths from faraway Newton Centre favored the Thornes, the Guerins, the Applebys, and their name-twins with a hectographed Christmas letter. In the salutation to Harold and Marcia they unfailingly put “little” in quotes—to our Tarbox doppelgängers the “little” Smiths.

  The affair among the Applesmiths began—gossip wrongly assumed that Janet initiated things—with Marcia noticing Frank’s hands. In turn the beauty of his hands had emerged from their former pudgy look by way of an ulcer diet brought on by the sharp market slump of April and May of 1962. This slump, which more affected Frank’s trusts (he had just been promoted from junior officer) than Harold’s brokerage business, and which furthermore caught Frank with thousands of his own in electronics and pharmaceuticals, brought the couples closer than usual that spring and summer. It became their custom, Sunday nights, after tennis, to eat together fried clams or lobster fetched in steaming paper bags from a restaurant in North Mather. One night, as they sat on cushions and chairs around the little-Smiths’ tesselated coffee table, Marcia became hypnotized by the shapely force with which Frank’s fingers, their tips greasily gleaming, manipulated onion rings. His diet had shorn a layer of fat from them, so the length of the fingers, with something especially sculptured about the knuckles and nail sheaths, was revealed as aristocratic; his thumbs were eloquent in every light. Along the fleecy wrists, through the cordlike tributary veins raised on the backs of his hands, down into the tips, a force flowed that could destroy and shape; pruning roses had given Frank’s hands little cuts that suggested the nicks a clammer or sculptor bears, and Marcia lifted her eyes to his face and found there, beneath the schoolboy plumpness, the same nicked, used, unconscious look of having done work, of belonging to an onflowing force whose pressure made his cheeks florid and his eyes bloodshot. He was a man. He had a battered look of having been swept forward past obstacles. After this revelation every motion of his altered Marcia’s insides with a slight turning, a purling in the flow within her. She was a woman. She sensed now in him a treasurable dreadfulness; and, when they rose to leave and Janet, eight months pregnant, lost her balance and took Frank’s quickly offered hand for support, Marcia, witnessing as if never before the swift sympathetic interaction of the couple, felt outraged: a theft had been brazenly executed before her eyes.

  Née Burnham, Marcia was the daughter of a doctor and the granddaughter of a bishop. Her detection of a masculine beauty in Frank Appleby at first took the form of an innocent glad lightness in the company of the other couple and a corresponding dreariness on weekends when they were not scheduled to see them—though she usually managed to call Janet and arrange for at least a drink together, or a sail with their boys in the Applebys’ catboat. Her possessive and probing fondness was hardly distinguishable from their old friendship, though at dances or at parties where they danced she did feel herself lifted by a willingness to come into Frank’s hands. He had never been a dancer, and Marcia, locked into his bumping shuffle, aware of her toes being stubbed and her cool lotioned hand vanishing in the damp adhesion of his grip and his boozy sighs accumulating on her bare neck like the patch of mist a child will breathe onto a windowpane, sometimes watched enviously her husband and Janet or Carol Constantine waltzing from corner to corner around the shadowy rim of the room whose bright dead center she and Frank statically occupied. Harold was an adroit, even flamboyant, dancer, and sometimes after a long set with Frank she would make him take her and whirl her around the floor to relieve the crick in her neck and the ache, from reaching too high, across her shoulder blades. But there was a solidity in Frank that Harold lacked. Harold had never suffered; he merely dodged. Harold read Barron’s or Ian Fleming on the commuting train; Frank read Shakespeare.

  What Marcia didn’t know was that she preceded Shakespeare: for Frank the market slump, the sleepless nights of indigestion, the birth of his second child, and his friend’s wife’s starry glances and strange meltingness were parts of one experience, an overture to middle age, a prelude to mortality, that he answered, in the manner of his father, an ardent amateur Sinologist, by dipping deep into the past, where peace reigned. When all aloud the wind doth blow/And coughing drowns the parson’s saw/And birds sit brooding in the snow … Those vanished coughs, melted snow, dead birds seemed sealed in amber, in something finer than amber, because movement could occur within it. I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak/Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him/To keep his anger still in motion: in Frank’s contemplation of such passion, perfectly preserved, forever safe, his stomach forgot itself. He was not a natural reader, couldn’t focus on two lines of Dante or Milton, disliked plays on the stage and novels, and found this soothing quality, of flux confined with all its colors, only in Shakespeare.

  “Everything is in him,” he told Marcia, flirtatiously, for he talked about Shakespeare with no one, especially not Janet, who took his reading as a rebuke of her, for not finishing college, but marrying him instead, “everything we can hope to have, and it all
ends badly.”

  Marcia asked, “Even the comedies?”

  “They end in marriage, and Shakespeare’s marriage was unhappy.”

  “I feel,” Marcia said, for she was a tight-wound nervous woman who had to have things clear, “you’re trying to tell me we would end badly.”

  “Us? You and me?”

  So he hadn’t meant at all to tell her his own marriage was unhappy. But she went on, “If we … started anything.”

  “Should we start something? I’ll buy that idea. Yes.” His large red head seemed to settle heavier on his shoulders as the notion sank in. “What about Harold and Janet? Should we consult them first? Let’s not and say we did.”

  He was so clumsy and ironical, she took offense. “Please forget whatever I said. It’s a female fault, to try and sexualize friendship. I want you only as a friend.”

  “Why? You have Janet as a friend. Please sexualize me. It sounds like a good process. With this sloppy market running, it’s probably the best investment left.” They were leaning in the summer heat against the maroon fender of the Applebys’ Mercury, after tennis, beside the Gallaghers’ rather fortresslike brick house on the back road to North Mather. Matt had got permission to use a neighbor’s court. Harold was inside the house, drinking; Janet was home nursing the baby. It had been a girl, whom they had named Catharine, after an aunt Frank remembered as a heap of dusty velvet, knobbed with blood-red garnets.

  Marcia said to him, but after laughing enjoyably, “You’re shocking, with your doubled responsibilities.”

  “Double, double, toil and trouble. Janet’s been a bitch for nine months plus. Let’s at least have lunch together in Boston. I need a vacation. How are your Tuesdays?”

  “Car-pool day.”

  “Oh. Wednesdays I usually have lunch with Harold at the Harvard Club. All he does is sniff. Shall I cancel him?”

  “No, no. Harold hates any change of routine. Let me see if I can get a sitter for Henrietta for Thursday. Please, Frank. Let’s understand each other. This is just to talk.”

  “Of course. I’ll tell you of men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”

  “Othello?”

  “Right.”

  “Frank, listen. I’ve become fixated on you, I know it’s absurd, and I’m asking for your help. As a friend.”

  “Pre- or post-sexualization?”

  “Please be serious. I’ve never been more serious. I’m fighting for my life. I know you don’t love me and I don’t think I love you but I need to talk. I need it so much”—and here, half artfully, she lowered her face to hide tears that were, after all, real—“I’m frightened.”

  “Dear Marcia. Don’t be.”

  They had lunch, and lunch often again, meeting at the corners of new glass buildings or in the doorways of flower shops, a toothy ruddy man with a soft air of having done well at school and a small dark efficient woman looking a little breathless, hunting hand in hand through the marine stenches of the waterfront and the jostling glare of Washington Street for the perfect obscure restaurant, with the corner table, and the fatherly bartender, and the absence of business acquaintances and college friends. They talked, touching toes, quickly brushing hands in admonishment or pity, talked about themselves, about their childhoods spent behind trimmed hedges, about Shakespeare and psychiatry, which Marcia’s lovely father had practiced, about Harold and Janet, who, as they obligingly continued to be deceived, were ever more tenderly considered, so that they became almost sacred in their ignorance, wonderful in their fallibility, so richly forgiven for their frigidity, demandingness, obtuseness, and vanity that the liaison between their spouses seemed a conspiracy to praise the absent. There was a cottage north of Boston—and thus extra safe and remote from their real lives—belonging to one of Frank’s aunts, who hid the key on a little sill behind one of the fieldstone foundation-pillars. To Frank as a child, groping for this key cached here had seemed a piratical adventure, the pillaging of a deep grotto powerfully smelling of earth and creosote and rodent dung. Now the key seemed pathetically accessible, and he wondered how many others, strangers to the family, had used these same bare mattresses, had borrowed these same rough army blankets from the cedar chest, and had afterwards carefully tipped their cigarette ashes into the cellophane sealer slipped from the pack. In the kitchen there had been a dead mouse in a trap. Dying, it had flipped, and lay belly up, dirty white, like a discarded swab in a doctor’s office. Frank and Marcia stole some sherry from the cupboard but had not disturbed the mouse. They were not here. The cottage was used only on weekends. From its security amid pines and pin oaks it overlooked the slender peninsula of Nahant. The seaside smell that leaked through the window sashes was more saline and rank that that of Tarbox Beach, where Janet and the children would be sunning. Marcia had felt to Frank strangely small, more athletic and manageable than Janet, without Janet’s troubled tolling resonance but with a pleasing pointed firmness that reminded him, in his passage into her body, of the little mistresses of the French court, of Japanese prostitutes that Harold had once drunkenly described, of slim smooth boys who had been Rosalind and Kate and Ophelia. There was in Marcia a nervous corruptibility he had never tasted before. Her thin shoulders sparkled in his red arms. Her face, relaxed, seemed, like an open lens, to be full of his face. “I love your hands,” she said.

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “I loved being in them. They’re huge.”

  “Only relatively,” he said, and regretted it, for he had brought Harold into bed with them.

  Knowing this, knowing they could never be alone, she asked, “Did I feel different than Janet?”

  “Yes.”

  “My breasts are so small.”

  “You have lovely breasts. Like a Greek statue. Venus always has little breasts. Janet’s—Janet’s are full of milk right now. It’s kind of a mess.”

  “What does it taste like?”

  “What? Janet’s milk?”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No, why not? Sweet. Too sweet, really.”

  “You’re such a gentle man,” Marcia said. “I’m not used to being loved so gently.” Thus she conveyed, weakening them as lovers but strengthening them as confidants, the suggestion to Frank that he had been too gentle, that Harold was rougher, more strenuous and satisfying with, no doubt, a bigger prick. As if hailing a dim stubby figure on a misted shore, Frank mournfully confronted the endomorph in himself. His demanding deep-socketed mistress, ectomorphic, lay relaxed at his side; their skins touched stickily along her length. The neural glitter of her intelligent face was stilled; a dangling earring rested diagonally forward from her ear lobe, parallel to the line of her cheekbone; the severe central parting of her black hair had been carried off by a kind of wind. Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker’s face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.

  Their affair went two months undetected. It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian. “Where have you been?” Janet asked Frank one Saturday.

  “At the dump.”

  “At the dump for two hours?”

  “Oh, I stopped at the drug store and talked to Buzz Kappiotis about the tax rate and the firemen’s four-per-cent increase.”

  “I thought Buzz was fishing in Maine.” Their cleaning lady was a neighbor.

  “I don’t mean Buzz, I mean Iggy Galanis, I must be losing my mind.”

  “I’ll say. You’re so twitchy in bed you give me insomnia.”

  “It’s my blue-eyed baby ulcers.”

  “I don’t see what you’re so nervous about lately. The market’s happy again, t
hey’ve reduced the margin rate. And how did your clothes get so rumpled?”

  He looked down at himself and saw a long black hair from Marcia’s head adhering to the fly of his corduroy pants. Glancing there, he felt the little limb behind the cloth as warm and used, softly stinging. Sun had streamed through the dusty windshield glass onto her skin. He pulled the hair off and said, “From handling the trash cans.”

  But an affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. In public Frank could scarcely contain his proud and protective feeling toward Marcia; the way at the end of an evening he held her coat for her and slipped it around her was as different from the way he would help Georgene Thorne as receiving the Host is from eating an hors d’oeuvre. All the empty pauses and gropings of this simple social action were luxuriously infused with magic: his fingers in adjusting her collar brushed the nape of her neck; her hands pressed her own lapels secure if they were his hands clasped upon her breasts; her eyes rolled Spanishly; and this innocent pantomime of robing was drenched in reminiscence of their nakedness. Their minds and mouths were committed to stability and deception while their bodies were urging eruption, violence, change. At last the little-Smiths, Harold prattling drunkenly, spilled from the lit porch into the night—a parting glance from Marcia, dark as a winter-killed rose—and the door was finally shut. Janet asked Frank, “Are you having an affair with Marcia?”

  “Now there’s a strange question.”

  “Never mind the question. What’s the answer?”

  “Obviously, no.”

  “You don’t sound convincing. Convince me. Please convince me.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have the time or the stomach for it. She’s not my type. She’s tiny and jittery and has no tits. Lastly, you’re my wife and you’re great. Rare Egyptian! Royal wench! The holy priests bless you when you are riggish. Let’s go to bed.”