Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Full confession waited until winter. Snow fell early in New Hampshire, and during Christmas vacation the Hanemas, the Applebys, the Thornes, the Gallaghers, and the little-Smiths went north to ski with their older children. The lodge bulletin board was tacked thick with pictures of itself in summer, of canoes and couples pitching quoits and porch rails draped with wet bathing suits. Now packed snow squeaked on the porch steps, a sign forbade ski boots in the dining hall, the dinner was pea soup and baked ham and deep-dish apple pie, the children afterwards thumped and raced in the long hall upstairs, between the girls’ bunk room and the boys’, and downstairs their parents basked by the fireplace in the afterglow of exercise. Whiskey hurried to replace the calories fresh air had burned from their bodies. Georgene methodically turned the pages of Ski. Freddy murmured on the sofa to Janet, who looked discontented. Frank played Concentration with his son and Jonathan little-Smith, and was losing, because he was concentrating upon a rotating inner discomfort, perhaps the ham, which had had a thick raisin sauce. Gaily rattling ice cubes, Harold was mixing a drink for Angela, whose fine complexion had acquired on the bitter slopes an unearthly glow, had reached an altitude beyond decay; she looked more twenty-two than thirty-four. Marcia was listening to Matt Gallagher explain the Vatican’s likely verdict, now that the ecumenical council was adjourned, on artificial birth control: “Nix. They won’t give us sex, but they may give us meat on Fridays.” Marcia nodded understandingly—having a lover deepened her understanding of everything, even of Matt Gallagher’s adherence to the letter of an unloving church—and glanced toward Terry. Terry, sitting cross-legged on the floor in black stretch pants, carefully picked through a chord sequence on her lute; it was a gourd-shaped, sumptuous instrument, whose eight strings produced a threadbare distant tone. Matt had bought it for her for Christmas, in line with the policy of conspicuous consumption that had led to the Mercedes, and perhaps with a more symbolic intent, for its blond lustre and inlaid elegance seemed sacramental, like their marriage. Piet lay beside her on the rug gazing at the taut cloth of her crotch. The seam had lost one stitch. Conscious of Georgene sulking at his back, he rolled over and did a bicycling exercise in air, wondering if with Catholics it was different, remembering his long-ago love for Terry, unconsummated, when he and Matt were newly partners. Whitney and Martha Thorne, Ruth Hanema, Tommy Gallagher with his Gainsborough fragility, and Julia Smith in raven pigtails watched a World War II movie starring Brian Donlevy. The channel, from Manchester, was weakly received. The game of Concentration broke up. Frank needed more bourbon to soothe his stomach. In twos and threes the children were led upstairs or out to the gas-heated cottages beneath the bone-white birches. A bridge game among strangers beside the fireplace broke up. Georgene Thorne, a tidy woman with feather-cut graying hair and a boyish Donatello profile, nodded while leafing through House & Garden and followed her children out to their cabin to sleep. Freddy blew her a smirking kiss. Walking down the squeaking path alone, she thought angrily of Piet—his flirting, his acrobatics—yet knew it was in the bargain, she had got what she wanted. Her breath was white in the black air. The unseen lake gave a groan and crack, freezing harder. The black birch twigs rattled. Harold and Marcia tried to organize word games—Botticelli, Ghosts—but everyone was too suffused with physical sensations to play. The television set, unwatched, excited itself with eleven-o’clock news about UN military action in the Katanga province of the Congo; and was switched off. Piet begged Terry Gallagher to give them a concert, and so she, watching as if from beyond her own will her white bewitched fingers assume each position on the frets, played the one melody she had mastered, “Greensleeves.” They tried to sing with her but had forgotten the words. Her head was tilted; her long black hair fell straight from one side. She finished; Matt, with a military swiftness, stood; and the Gallaghers went outdoors to their cabin. In the momentary opening of the door, all heard a snowplow scraping along the upper road. High in a dusty corner a cuckoo clock, late, sounded eleven. Angela, stately, her fair cheeks flaming, now stood, and Piet, muscled like a loose-skinned dog that loves to be scratched, followed her upstairs to their room. This left the Applesmiths and Freddy Thorne.

  The elderly young couple that ran the lodge came in from doing a mountain of dinner dishes and thriftily turned off all the lights but one and separated the fireplace logs so that the fire would die. Their smiles of good will as they faced their guests were wretchedly enfeebled by contempt. “Good night now.”

  “Good night.”

  “Night.”

  “Bonne nuit.”

  Yet for an hour more, in semidarkness and the growing cold, Freddy held forth, unable to let go of a beauty he had felt, of a goodness the couples created simply by assembling. “You’re all such beautiful women. Marcia, why do you laugh? Jesus Christ, every time I try to tell people something nice to their face they laugh. People hate love. It threatens them. It’s like tooth decay, it smells and it hurts. I’m the only man alive it doesn’t threaten, I wade right in with pick and mirror. I love you, all of you, men, women, neurotic children, crippled dogs, mangy cats, cockroaches. People are the only thing people have left since God packed up. By people I mean sex. Fucking. Hip, hip, hooray. Frank, do you believe in the difference between tragedy and comedy? Tell me, for fuck’s sweet sake. This is a serious question.”

  Frank said carefully, rumbling from the slumped position that seemed to ease his stomach, “I believe in it as a formal distinction Shakespeare believed in. I wouldn’t make anything absolute of it.”

  “Frankfurt, that is beautiful. That’s just where any medium intelligent man of the world would come down. That’s where you and I differ. Because I do. I believe there are tragic things and comic things. The trouble is, damn near everything, from the yellow stars on in to the yummy little saprophytes subdividing inside your mouth, are tragic. Now look at that fire our pennypinching hosts broke up to save a nickel. Tragic. Listen to the wind. Very tragic. OK, so what’s not tragic? In the western world there are only two comical things: the Christian church and naked women. We don’t have Lenin so that’s it. Everything else tells us we’re dead. Think about it; think about those two boobies bounding up and down. Makes you want to laugh, doesn’t it? Smile at least? Think of poor Marilyn Moronrow; her only good pictures were comedies, for Chrissake.”

  “And the Christian church?” Marcia asked, glancing sideways at Frank as if nervously to gauge his pain.

  “Christ, I’d love to believe it,” Freddy said. “Any of it. Just the littlest bit of it. Just one lousy barrel of water turned into wine. Just half a barrel. A quart. I’ll even settle for a pint.”

  “Go ahead,” Janet told him, lazily. “Believe it.”

  “I can’t. Marcia, stop checking on Frank. He’s hyperalgesic, he’ll live. Come on, this is a real gut talk. This is what people are for. The great game of truth. Take you and that fuzzy big-throated purply sweater; you’re terrific. You look like a tinted poodle, all nerves and toenails, a champeen, for Chrissake. If your grandfather hadn’t been the Bishop of East Egg you’d have made a terrific whore. Janet, you’re a funny case. Sometimes you have it, right up the alley, all ten pins, and other times you just miss. Something pruney happens around your mouth. Tonight, you’re really on. You’re sore as hell about some silly thing, maybe Harold’s snubbing you, maybe you have the red flag out, but you’re right there. You’re not always right there. Where would you rather be? Jesus, you’re in every drugstore, and people tell me it’s a hell of a good laxative, though I’ve never needed one myself, frankly.”

  “We’ve diversified,” Janet told him. “We do a lot with antibiotics now. Anyway it wasn’t a laxative, it was mineral oil.”

  “More power to it. You’ve lost some weight, that’s a shrewd move. For a while there you had something bunchy happening under your chin. You know, honey, you’re a fantastic piece—I say this as a disinterested party, girl to girl—and you don’t have to wear all those flashy clothes to prove anything. Just y
ou, fat or skinny, Janet Applesauce, that’s all we want for dessert; we love you, stop worrying. As I say, you’re all gorgeous women. It killed me tonight, it really tumefied me, seeing old Terry Tightcunt sitting there with her legs spread and her hair down jerking off that poor melon. Have you ever noticed her mouth? It’s enormous. Her tongue is as big as a bed. Every time I work on her molars I want to curl up in there and go to sleep.”

  “Freddy, you’re drunk,” Marcia said.

  “Let him alone, I like it,” Harold said. “Je l’aime. Freddy’s aria.”

  “Oh God,” Frank said, “that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains.”

  Janet said, “Freddy, enough of us. Tell us about Angela and Georgene.”

  “Beautiful girls. Beautiful. I’m not kidding. You all knock Angela—”

  “We don’t,” Marcia protested.

  “You all knock that saint, but she has absolutely the most eloquent ass I’ve ever seen except on an ostrich.”

  “Giraffes have beautiful behinds,” Harold said.

  “Out of your class, I would think,” Frank told him.

  Harold turned, nose upturned, and said, “You hippopotamus. You ox.”

  Janet said, “Boys.”

  Freddy went on, “And didn’t she look lovely tonight? Angela.”

  Harold, who had a nasal bass voice of which he was proud, imitated the singing of an aria: “And didn’t she, di-hi-hidn’t she, look lovely, luh-hu-hovilee tonight. A-aaaaangela, lala!”

  Freddy appealed to the two women. “Tell me straight. You’re women. You have nice clear Lesbian eyes. Didn’t she look about twenty, a virginal twenty, those eyes full of sky, that fantastic skin all rosy, Jesus. I mean, you’re both beauties, I’m telling you straight, but she’s my ideal. I idolize her. I look at that ass and I think Heaven. Twenty miles of bluebirds and strawberry whip.”

  The two couples laughed in astonishment. Freddy blinked for orientation; the whiskey in his glass had magically replenished itself. Marcia said, “Freddy, and Georgene? You haven’t mentioned your wife.”

  “A healthy child,” Freddy said. “She cooks well, she plays tennis well. In bed”—he squinted estimatingly and wiggle-waggled his hand—“so-so. Comme ci comme ça. I like it to be long, to take forever, have a little wine, have some more wine, fool around, try it on backwards, you know, let it be a human thing. She comes too quick. She comes so she can get on with the housework. I gave her the Kama Sutra for Christmas and she wouldn’t even look at the pictures. The bitch won’t blow unless she’s really looped. What did the Bard say? To fuck is human; to be blown, divine.”

  Freddy, as usual, had gone beyond all bounds of order; the Smiths and Applebys made restless motions of escape. Janet stood and tossed the contents of her ashtray into the smoldering fireplace. Frank collected the cards scattered by Concentration. Harold rested his ankles on the sofa arm and elaborately feigned sleep. Only Marcia, twiddling one of her earrings, retained an appearance of interest.

  Freddy was staring at the far high corner of the lodge, where above the cuckoo clock hung a dusty mass of cobwebs with the spectral air of an inverted reflection in water. He said, “I’ve seen the light. You know why we’re all put here on earth?”

  From the depths of his spurious sleep, Harold asked, “Why?”

  “It just came to me. A vision. We’re all put here to humanize each other.”

  “Freddy, you’re so stupid,” Marcia said, “but you do care, don’t you? That is your charm. You care.”

  “We’re a subversive cell,” Freddy went on. “Like in the catacombs. Only they were trying to break out of hedonism. We’re trying to break back into it. It’s not easy.”

  Janet giggled and put her hand across Frank’s lips before they could pronounce, as they were going to, “Ripeness is all.”

  Then fatigue and defeat were among them unannounced. The room was cold. Silence stood sentry. Freddy rose sluggishly, said, “See you on the slopes,” and took himself outdoors to his cabin. The black lake beyond the chalky birches seemed an open mouth waiting for attention. The liquorish sweat of his chest froze into a carapace; his bare scalp contracted. He hastened along the squeaking path to Georgene, her forgiveness a dismissal.

  Still the two couples were slow to go upstairs. Freddy’s sad lewdness had stirred them. Marcia and Janet rotated, picking up glasses and aligning magazines, and sat down again. Frank cleared his throat; his eyes burned red. Harold crossed and recrossed his legs, dartlike in stretch pants, and said, as if on Frank’s behalf, “Freddy is very sick. Très malade.” Behind the fire screen the embers of the parted logs formed a constellation that seemed to be receding. The silence grew adhesive, impossible. Marcia pushed herself up from the sofa, and Janet, moving in her peach sweater and white slacks like a dancer intently gliding out of the wings toward her initial spring and pirouette, followed her to the stairs, and up. Both couples had rooms upstairs in the lodge. Frank and Harold listened below to the gush and shudder of activated plumbing, and switched off the remaining light. Again Frank cleared his throat, but said nothing.

  In the upstairs hall, with its row of sleeping doors, Harold felt his arm touched. He had been expecting it. Frank whispered, mortified and hoarse, “Do you think we have the right rooms?”

  Harold quickly said, “We’re in nine, you’re in eleven.”

  “I mean, do you think you and I should switch?”

  From the elevation of his superior knowledge, Harold was tempted to pity this clumsy man groveling in lust. Daintily he considered, and proposed: “Shouldn’t the ladies be consulted? I doubt if they’ll concur.”

  A single bulb burned in the hallway and by this all-night light Frank’s forward-thrust head looked loaded to bursting as he tried not to blurt. He wetly whispered, “It’ll be all right. Janet’s often said she’s attracted to you. Take her. My blessing. What the hell. Let copulation thrive.”

  Harold feigned arch bemusement. “And Marcia? Does she want you?”

  The other man nodded miserably, hastily. “It’ll be all right.”

  The doors each of Rooms 9 and 11 were open a crack.

  Harold remembered Janet’s naked arms swinging moist along the gritty mica-starred streets of summer Boston, and could not resist tormenting his rival a moment longer. “Uh—do you and Janet work this”—he rotated his hands so the fingers and thumb reversed positions in air—“often?”

  “Never. Never before. Come on, yes or no. Don’t make a production of it. I’m sleepy and my stomach hurts.”

  In Frank’s inflection there was a rising note of the bigger man whom Harold feared. There was also this, that from his desk at the bank Frank had thrown Harold, as broker, a wealth of commissions. The deposit of secrets Harold held in his head felt tenuous, no longer negotiable. Frank’s big horned head was down. The two doors waited ajar. Behind one lay Marcia, with whom stretched side by side he shared every weary night; behind the other, Janet, whose body was a casket of perfume. He saw that the deceit he had worked with her would now lose all value. But there is always a time to sell; the trick of the market is to know when. Janet waited like a stack of certain profit. He carefully shrugged. “Why not? Pourquoi non? I’d love to. But be gentle.” This last was strange to add, but here in the fragile wallboard and linoleum hall he had felt, as Frank’s lifted head released a blast of muggy breath, the man’s rank heaviness. Harold feared that his nervous lithe wife could not support such a burden; then remembered that she had sought it many times. The sight of Frank—his donkeyish outcurved teeth, his eyeballs packed with red fuses—became an affront; Harold turned to the door of Room 11, and touched it, and it swung open as if the darkness were expectant.

  The latch clicked. A light from beyond the snow-heaped porch roof broke along the walls confusedly. Janet sat up in bed and her words, monosyllabic, seemed matches struck in a perilous inner space. “You. Why? Why now? Harold, it’s wrong!”

  He groped to the bed and sat on the edge and disc
overed she was wearing a sweater over her nightgown. “It was your husband’s idea. I merely gave in. They’ll think this is our first time.”

  “But now they’ll know. They’ll watch us. Don’t you see? You should have acted shocked and said you wouldn’t dream of any such thing. Frank knows when he’s drunk, he wouldn’t have minded. I’m sure it’s what he expected. Oh God, Harold.” She huddled tight against him sexlessly. His arms encircled her rounded back, sweatered like an invalid’s.

  “But I wanted you, Janet.”

  “But you can have me anytime.”

  “No, not anytime. When else could I be with you all night?”

  “But how can you enjoy it, with those two a door away?”

  “They’re not hurting me. I like them both. Let them have what happiness they can.”

  “I can’t stand it. I’m not as cool as you are, Harold. I’m going right in there and break it up.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t take that bossy tone. Don’t try to be my father. I’m all agitated.”

  “Just lie in my arms. We don’t have to make love. Just lie in my arms and go to sleep.”

  “Don’t you feel it? It’s so wrong. Now we’re really corrupt. All of us.”

  He lay down beside her, on top of the covers. The snow at the window had brightened. “Do you think it matters,” he asked, “on the moon?”