Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

“Oh Harold,” she cried, “if you could see your face,” and she was upon him, had rushed into his unprepared embrace so swiftly he had to pull Marcia’s letter free from being crumpled between them. The blue-bordered note fluttered to the cement floor. His senses were forced open, admitting the scouring odors of cement and Tide; along the far wall the sunburned lawn flooded the window with golden stitchwork, like a Wyeth. Janet’s chest and hips, pillows sodden with grief, pressed him against the enameled edge of the dryer; he was trapped at the confluence of cold tears and hot breath. He kissed her gaping mouth, the rutted powder of her cheeks, the shying trembling bulges of her shut eyes. Her body his height, they dragged each other down, into a heap of unwashed clothes, fluffy ends of shirtsleeves and pajama pants, the hard floor underneath them like a dank bone. Sobbing, she pulled up her sweater and orange-striped jersey and, in a moment of angry straining, uncoupled her bra, so her blue-white breasts came tumbling of their own loose weight, too big to hold, tumbled like laundry from the uplifted basket of herself, nipples buttons, veins seaweed green. He went under. Her cold nails contemplated the tensed sides of his sucking mouth, and sometimes a finger curiously searched out his tongue. Harold opened his eyes to see that the great window giving on the lawn was solidly golden; no child’s watching shadow cleft it; voices glinted from a safe distance, the dock. His face was half-pillowed in dirty clothes smelling mildly of his family, of Jonathan and Julia and Henrietta and Marcia. He was lying on ghosts that had innocently sweated. Janet’s touch fumbled at his fly and he found the insect teeth of the zipper snug along her side. Tszzzc: he tugged and the small neat startled sound awoke them.

  “No,” she said. “We can’t. Not here.”

  “One more kiss,” he begged.

  There was a wetness to her mouth, as her breasts overflowed his hands, whose horizon his tongue wished to swim to. She lifted away. “This is crazy.” She kneeled on the cement and harnessed her bosom in cups of black lace that reminded him of the doilies in his grandmother’s home in Tarrytown. It had been her side of the family that had known Teddy Roosevelt, who had taken Grandpa hunting. “The kids might barge in any second,” Janet said, pulling down her jersey. “Marcia might come back.”

  “Not if she and Frank are copulating out by the dump.”

  “You think they’d do it today?”

  “Why not?” Harold said. “Big reunion, she’s back from Maine with the horned monster. Avec le coucou. They’ve set us up for them to be gone for hours. Haircuts. Fair housing.”

  She adjusted her peach sweater so it again hung like a cape. Standing, she brushed the smudges on the knees of her slacks, from having kneeled. He remained sprawled on the laundry, and she studied him as if he were an acquisition that looks different in the home from in the store. She asked, “You really never suspected her until just now?”

  “No. I didn’t think she had the guts. When I married her she was a tight little mouse. My little girl is all growed up.”

  “You’re not shocked?”

  “I am desolated. But let’s talk about you.”

  She adjusted her clothes with thoughtful firmness. “That was an instinctive thing. Don’t count on me for anything.”

  “But I do. I adore you. Ta poitrine, elle est magnifique.”

  As if the compliment had adhered, she removed a piece of lint from her jersey. “They’re pretty saggy now. You should have known me when I was nineteen.”

  “They’re grand. Please come upstairs with me.” He felt it was correct, in asking her, to stand; and thus their moment of love was reduced to a flattened heap of laundry. Having surrendered all evidence, he was at her mercy.

  Janet said, “It’s impossible. The children.” Lamely her hands sketched multiple considerations.

  “Can’t we ever get together?”

  “What about Marcia and Frank?”

  “What about them? Are they hurting us? Can we give them, honestly, what they give each other?”

  “Harold, I’m not that cool. I have a very jealous moralistic nature. I want them to be punished.”

  “We’ll all be punished no matter how it goes. That’s a rule of life, people are punished. They’re punished for being good, they’re punished for being bad. A man in our office, been taking vitamin pills all his life, dropped dead in the elevator two weeks ago. He was surrounded by healthy drunks. People are even punished for doing nothing. Nuns get cancer of the uterus because they don’t screw. What are you doing to me? I thought you were offering me something.”

  “I was, I did, but—”

  “I accept.”

  “I felt sorry for you, I don’t know what it was. Harold, it’s too corrupt. What do we do? Tell them and make a schedule of swap nights?”

  “You do de-romanticize. Why tell them anything? Let’s get something to tell first. Let’s see each other and see how it goes. Aren’t you curious? You’ve made me want you, you know; it was you who chased me through all those hot Boston streets in your sexy summer dresses. Janet, don’t you want me at all for myself? Am I only a way of getting back at Frank?” He glided the back of his hand down the slope of her left breast, then of the right. From the change in the set of her face he saw that this was the way. Touch her, keep touching her. Her breasts are saggy and want to be touched. Don’t give her time to doubt, she hates what she knows and doesn’t want the time. Don’t pause.

  She spoke slowly, testing the roof of her mouth with the tip of her tongue and fingering each button on the way down his shirt. “Frank,” she told him, “is going to New York the first part of next week.”

  “Quelle coïncidence! Also next week Marcia was talking about going to Symphony Tuesday night and doing Junior League good deeds Wednesday morning and maybe spending the night in town. I think she should be encouraged to, don’t you? Poor saint, that long hour in and out.”

  Janet gazed over his shoulder; her mouth, whose long out-turned upper lip was such a piquant mismatch with her brief plump lower, tightened sadly. “Has it really come to that? They spend whole nights together?”

  “Don’t bridle,” he said, telling himself, Don’t pause. “It’s a luxury, to fall asleep beside the beloved. Un luxe. Don’t begrudge them.” He continued stroking.

  “You know,” Janet said, “I like Marcia. She’s always cheerful, always has something to say; she’s often got me out of the dumps. What I think I must mind is not Frank so much—we haven’t been that great in bed for years, poor guy, let him run—as that she would do this to me.”

  “Did you hear what I said about Tuesday night?”

  “I heard.”

  “Which of us should get the babysitter?”

  So that fall Harold and Janet slept together without Frank and Marcia’s knowing. Harold at first found his mistress to be slow; his climax, unmanageably urged by the visual wealth of her, was always premature. Not until their sixth time together, an hour stolen in the Applebys’ guest room, beneath a shelf of Chinese-temple paraphernalia and scrolls inherited from Frank’s father, did Janet come, pulling in her momentous turning Harold virtually loose from his roots, so that he laughed at the end in relief at having survived, having felt himself to be, for a perilous instant, nothing but a single thunderous heartbeat lost in her. He loved looking at her, her nude unity of so many shades of cream and pink and lilac, the soles of her feet yellow and her veins seaweed-green and her belly alabaster. He found an unexpected modesty and elusiveness in her, which nourished his affection, for he enjoyed the role of teacher, of connoisseur. It pleased him to sit beside her and study her body until, weary of cringing, she accepted his gaze serenely as an artist’s model. He was instructing her, he felt, in her beauty, which she had grown to disparage, though her bluntness and forwardness had clearly once assumed it, her beauty of fifteen years ago, when she had been the age of his St. Louis mulatto. Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, mor
e beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.

  The autumn of 1962, the two couples were ecstatically, scandalously close. Frank and Marcia were delighted to be thrown together so often without seeking it. Janet and Harold in private joked about the now transparent stratagems of the other two lovers. These jokes began to leak out into their four-sided conversations. To the Sunday-night ritual of fetched-in food had been added weekday parties, drinks prolonged into scrambled dinners, arranged on the pretext of driving the children (Frankie Jr. and Jonathan detested each other; Catharine was too much of a baby to respond to Julia’s and Henrietta’s clumsy mothering) back and forth to each other’s houses. While the women cooked and fussed and preened around them, Frank and Harold with bottomless boozy searchingness would discuss Shakespeare, history, music, the bitchy market, monopolies, the tacit merger of business and government, the ubiquity of the federal government, Kennedy’s fumblings with Cuba and steel, the similarity of JFK’s background to their own, the differences, their pasts, their fathers, their resentment and eventual appreciation and final love of their fathers, their dislike and dread of their mothers, sex, their view of the world as a place where foolish work must be done to support fleeting pleasures. “Ripeness is all,” Frank would sometimes say when silence would at last unfold its wings above the four spinning heads intoxicated by an intensity of friendship not known since childhood.

  Or Janet would say, knowing they expected something outrageous from her, “I don’t see what’s so very wrong about incest. Why does everybody have a tabu about it? I often wanted to sleep with my brother and I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded with me. We used to take baths together and I’d watch him get a hard on. He did something on my belly I thought was urination. Now he runs my father’s antibiotic labs in Buffalo, and we can’t.”

  “Sweetheart,” Harold said to her, leaning forward above the round leather coffee table in the Applebys’ lantern-hung living room, “that’s the reason. That’s why it’s so tabu. Because everybody wants to do it. Except me. I had three sisters, and two of them would have stood there criticizing. Trois sœurs est trop beaucoup.”

  Marcia sat up sharply, sensing a cause, and said, “I was just reading that the Ptolemies, you know, those pharaoh types, married brothers and sisters right and left and there were no pinheads produced. So I think all this fear of inbreeding is Puritanism.” Her earrings scintillated.

  “Cats do it,” Frank said. “Sibling cats are always fucking.”

  “But are fucking cats,” Janet asked, “always sibling?”

  “I once talked,” Harold said, determined to quarrel with Marcia, “to a banker who did a lot of financing for the Amish around Lancaster P-A, and he told me they’re tiny. Très, très petits. They get smaller every generation. There’s inbreeding for you, Marcia. They’re no bigger than you are.”

  “She’s a nice size,” Frank said.

  Marcia said to Janet, “I agree with you. I have a dreamy younger brother, he played the oboe and was a pacifist, and it would be so nice to be married to him and not have to explain all the time why you are the way you are, somebody who knew all the family jokes and would be sensitive to your phases. Not like these two clods.”

  “Vice versa,” Harold persisted, “do you know why Americans are getting bigger at such a phenomenal rate? Nutrition doesn’t explain it. Exogamy. People marry outside the village. They fly clear across the continent, to Denver, to St. Louis, to marry.”

  Marcia asked, “Why on earth St. Louis? Denver I can see.”

  Harold continued, flushing at his slip (neither of the women knew of the mulatto, but Frank did), “The genes are fresh. It’s cross-fertilization. So the advice ‘Love thy neighbor’ is terrible advice, biologically. Like so much of that Man’s advice.”

  “He said love, He didn’t say lay your neighbor,” Janet said.

  “I want my dreamy brother,” Marcia said, pouring herself some more bourbon and twitteringly pretending to cry.

  “Ripeness is all,” Frank said, after a silence.

  Or else they would sit around the rectangular tesselated coffee table in the little-Smiths’ living room with its concealed rheostated lighting and watch Harold, bare-handed, gesticulating, conduct sides of Wagner’s Tristan, or Mozart’s Magic Flute, or Britten’s War Requiem. Frank Appleby liked only baroque music and would sit stupefied, his eyeballs reddening and his aching belly protruding, while Harold, whirling like a Japanese traffic cop, plucked the ting of a triangle from the rear of the orchestra or with giant motions of embrace signaled in heaving oceans of strings. Janet hypnotically watched Harold do this and Marcia watched Janet curiously. What could she be seeing in this manic performance? How could a woman who nightly shared Frank’s bed be even faintly amused by Harold’s pathetic wish-fulfillment? One night, when the Applebys had gone, she asked Harold, “Are you sleeping with Janet?”

  “Why? Are you sleeping with Frank?”

  “Of course not.”

  “In that case, I’m not sleeping with Janet.”

  She tried a new tack. “Aren’t you awfully tired of the Applebys? What ever happened to our other friends?”

  “The big-Smiths moved to Newton.”

  “They were never our friends. I mean the Thornes and the Guerins and the Saltzes and the Gallaghers and the Hanemas. You know what Georgene told me the other day? She said Matt has had a nibble on the Robinson place, that Angela had wanted. A couple from Cambridge.”

  “How does Georgene come by all her information? She’s become a real expert on the Hanemas. Un spécialiste vrai.”

  “Don’t you think Freddy and Angela are fond of each other?”

  “Tu es comique,” Harold said. “Angela will be the last lady in town to fall. Next to yourself, of course.”

  “You think Georgene has Piet?”

  “Well. She has a very indulgent smile on her face when she looks at him.”

  “You mean like Janet has when she looks at you?”

  “Tu es trop comique. She’s twice my size.”

  “Oh, you have big—”

  “Parts?”

  “Ideas of yourself, I was going to say.”

  The other couples began to call them the Applesmiths. Angela Hanema, who never dreamed, dreamed she went to the Applebys’ house carrying a cake. On the front porch, with its six-sided stained-glass welcoming light, she realized she couldn’t get in the front door because the house was full of wedding invitations. Marcia little-Smith came around the side of the house, in shorts and swinging a red croquet mallet, and said, “It’s all right, my dear, we’re going to be very happy.” Then they were all, a crowd of them, walking along a country path, in some ways the path down to the dock, Angela still carrying the cake on upraised palms before her, and she said to Frank Appleby, “But can you get the insurance policies straightened out?” which was strange, because in waking life Angela never gave a thought to insurance. With a gargantuan wink he assured her, “I’m floating a bond issue,” and that was all she could remember, except that both sides of the path were heavily banked with violets, hyacinth, and little blue lilies. She had coffee with Georgene the next morning after nursery school, and, feeling uneasy with Georgene lately, in nervousness told her the dream. Georgene told Bea and Irene, while Piet, who had heard the dream at breakfast, was telling Matt Gallagher at the office. So Bernadette Ong heard the dream from two directions, from Irene at a Fair Housing executive meeting and from Terry Gallagher after a rehearsal of the Tarbox-North Mather-Lacetown Choral Society; the thirsty singers commonly went back to the Ongs’ afterwards for a beer.

  But it was Bea, Bea whose malice was inseparable from her flirtatiousness, in turn inseparable from her sterility and her tipsiness, Bea who told Marcia. Marcia was puzzled and not amused. She did not for a moment believe that Ja
net and Harold were sleeping together. She did not think Harold was up to it; a certain awe of Janet, as of all big women, had been heightened by falling in love with this woman’s husband. She had not suspected that from outside the couples might appear equal in complicity. She was shocked, frightened. She told Harold; he laughed. They told the Applebys together, and it was Janet who laughed, Frank who showed annoyance. “Why can’t people mind their own dirty business?”

  “Instead of our dirty business?” Harold said gaily, the double tip of his nose lifted, Marcia thought, like a bee’s behind.

  “Our language!” she said, nettled.

  “Come on, mon petit chou,” he said to her, “Angela can’t help what she dreams. She’s the most sublimated woman we know. Bea can’t help it that she had to tease you with it. Her husband beats her, she can’t have children, she has to make her mark somehow.”

  Janet was in a lazy mood. “She must ask to be beaten,” she said. “She picked Roger so he must have been what she wanted.”

  “But that’s true of all of us,” Harold said. “Tout le monde. We get what we unconsciously want.”

  Marcia protested, “But they must think we do everything, which seems to me so sick of them, that they can’t imagine simple friendship.”

  “It is hard to imagine,” Harold said, wondering if to smile would be too much. They were all on the verge. He looked at Janet, sleepily leaning with a cigarette in the Applebys’ yellow wing chair, her silk blouse veined by its shimmer and her skirt negligently exposing her stocking-tops and fasteners and bland known flesh, and thought how easy, how right, it would be to take her upstairs now, while these other two cleared away the glasses and went to their own bed.

  Frank said, “They’re starved. Their marriages have gone stale and anything that tickles their nose they think is champagne. We enjoy relaxing with each other and mustn’t let them make us self-conscious about it.” He cleared his throat to quote. “The mutable, rank-scented many.”

  This speech conjured a malicious night all about them. Marcia’s eyes, watching Frank, were dark, dark like stars too dense to let light escape, and she felt her being as a pit formed to receive this blood-slow soft-handed man whose own speech, more and more as she was his mistress, was acquiring Shakespearian color and dignity. Tickles their nose is champagne. He had called them back from the verge. The little-Smiths left at one-thirty and drove through the town whose burning lights, bared in November, seemed to be gossiping about them. From their bedroom window the marsh, rutted and tufted along the ebbed canals, appeared a surface of the moon and the onlooking moon an earth entire in space. Restless, apologetic, they made love, while miles away across the leafless town the other couple, also naked, mirrored them.