Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Somehow,” Janet said, “it’s her. She’ll have this on me now.”

  “Marcia? No more than you have on her.”

  “But she completed college and I didn’t.”

  He laughed in surprise. “I see. She completed college, therefore she knows more about erotic technique than you, therefore she’s getting more out of Frank than you could get out of me. Right now she’s doing the Fish Bite, followed by the astraddle position as recommended by the Bryn Mawr hygiene department.”

  Janet put her arms back beneath the covers and sniffed. “That’s not it at all. But it seems to be what you think.”

  He supposed that, in his irritation at her lack of ardor, he had hopelessly offended her. All lost, he sighed through his nose.

  After a pause she asked him, in the diffident voice of a salesgirl faced with an indecisive customer, “Why don’t you get under the covers?”

  So he did then travel through a palace of cloth and sliding stairways toward the casket of perfume that she spilled upon him from a dozen angles, all radiant. The radiator by the washstand purred in its seven parallel throats. She was, Janet, opaque, pale, powdery, heavy, sweet, cuffing, motherly; she roughly bid him rest with his narrow face between her breasts, his tongue outthrust like a paralyzed lizard’s.

  While for Frank, a space away, Marcia was transparent, gliding, elusive, one with the shadows of the room; he enlarged, enlarged until she vanished quite and the darkness was solid with himself, then receded, admitting her silvery breathless voice saying lightly, “How lovely. Oh. Fuck. How lovely. Fuck. Fuck.”

  Between the couples, in Room 10, Piet and Angela Hanema slept back to back, oblivious, Piet dreaming of mortised tenons unpleasantly confused with the interlocking leap and slide and dipped shoulder of a ski lesson he had had that afternoon, Angela dreaming of nothing, skippingly, of children without names, of snow falling in a mountainous place where she knew she had never been, of a great lion-legged table supporting an empty but perfect blue vase of mei ping form—dreams when she awoke she would not remember.

  Harold would not forget the cool grandeur of Janet that night, or the crescent of light on her fat shoulders above him, or the graciousness of her submission to the long work of his second climax. Fatigue, and the distracting question posed by their open privacy, made him uncharacteristically slow. She lay beneath him with the passiveness of the slaughtered, her throat elongated, her shoulders in shadow.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m taking forever.”

  “It’s all right. I like it.”

  “Shall I stop?”

  “Oh no. No.”

  The mournful tranquillity of her voice so moved him he attained the edge, fell from suspense, and released her from bondage. She turned and slept. As if he and she were on a seesaw, her dead weight lifted him into insomnia. The snow beyond the window was insistently brilliant, a piece of overexposed film. The pillow supporting her tangled hair seemed a second snow. Each time Harold closed his eyes he saw again the mountainside, the stunted ice-burdened pines at the top beside the lift shed, the troughs of ice, the slewing powder, the moguls packed by many turnings; and felt tense effort twitch his legs. His shins ached. Music, translucent sheets of it as in Debussy, was trying to break through to him, in the gaps between her breaths. He turned and fitted his body to hers. With a child’s voice she sighed, “Oh no, lover, not again.”

  Dozing, he woke toward dawn. A footstep snapped in the hall. Marcia. His forsaken wife, abused and near madness, was seeking him. Janet’s unfamiliar corpulence curled unconscious beside him, making him sweat. Like a spy unsticking an envelope, he removed himself carefully from her bed. The fabric of the night itself was showing fragility, crumbling into the brown particles of distinct visual detail—dashes of dirt embedded in the floorcracks, his own narrow feet chafed across the instep by his ski boots, Janet’s silk glove liners drying on the radiator like tiny octupi, a jar of hand lotion on her bare pine bureau cupping moonglow. Of the clothes he had entered this room in, he took time to put only his pants and sweater back on. The hall creaked again, nearer this door. He lightly pulled it open, his face a mask of tenderness.

  There was Frank, coming from the lavatory, bug-eyed and mottled beneath the all-night bulb. At the sight of Harold his eyes underwent a painful metamorphosis, becoming evasive and yet defiant and yet ashamed and defenseless in sickness.

  Harold whispered, “What’s up?”

  “Stomach. Too much booze.”

  “Et ma femme? Dort-elle?”

  “Like a rock. How about Jan-Jan?”

  “La même.”

  Frank pondered, revolving his condition through his mind. “It’s like a ball of tar in there I can’t break up. I finally threw up. It feels better. Maybe I’m nervous.”

  “Do you want to go back to your own room?”

  “I suppose we should. The kids will soon be up and might come in.”

  “Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels, et cetera.”

  “Thanks. See you on the slopes.”

  “Oui. See you on the slopes.” Harold tried to think of the French for “slopes,” couldn’t, and laughed as if an irony had been belatedly uncloaked.

  Janet had been stirred awake by Harold’s leaving and the whispering in the hall and knew it was Frank returning to her bed, though she feigned sleep. Perhaps in this moment began her irritated certainty of being wronged. Janet was a woman in whom early beauty had bred high expectations. Their disappointment brought with it a soured idealism, an idealism capable only of finding the world faulty. She decided that with Harold’s acquiescence in the end of deception she had been betrayed. Marcia had entered adultery freely whereas Janet had thrown herself upon Harold to assuage their despair. A cynical ménage cheated her of such justification. Each liaison with Harold had been an installment of vengeance; a pattern of justice was being traced in the dark. But her affair had proved to be not a revenge but a convenience, and Janet’s idealism asked of life more than a rectangular administration of reassurance and sex. Deeper than her moral reservations lurked the suspicion that Marcia was more sensual than she, better in bed. Janet did not see why she should submit to two inadequate and annoying men so that Marcia could respectably be a nymphomaniac. The woman, whom Janet had always considered dry and dowdy, was really diabolical, and it irked Janet to know that, in the likely event of a scandal, she would get all the sympathy, and Janet all the blame.

  The inadequacy and annoyingness of the men emerged as soon as Janet made resistance. They were sitting, the weekend after their swap, in the Applebys’ living room, with its round leather coffee table and its shelves of inherited uniform sets: red Balzac, ochre Scott, D’Annunzio in gold-stamped white calfskin, Mann in the black Knopf editions, green Shaw by Dodd, Mead. This wall of books, never touched, absorbed their smoke and conversation. Snow, the first storm to visit Tarbox that winter, was sealing them in. Frank had made a hot rum punch and they were drunk. He said at midnight, “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “No,” Janet said.

  “I don’t mean with me,” Frank explained. “You can have him.”

  “I find both of you distinctly resistible.”

  “Janet!” Harold said, not so surprised, since she had slept with him Wednesday and afterwards told him her feelings.

  “I think it’s too corrupt,” she said. “Don’t you, Marcia?”

  Marcia pinched her left earring, as if it had chimed. “Not if we all respect each other.”

  “I’m sorry,” Janet said. “I can’t respect any of you. I especially can’t respect a woman who has to have so many men.”

  “Only two,” Frank protested.

  “I’m sorry, Marcia. I honestly think you should put yourself in the hands of a doctor.”

  “That’ll make three men,” Harold said. He was inwardly betting that Janet’s resistance was a kind of mist that seemed solid from a distance but proved negotiable as you moved into it: like golf in the fog.

 
“You’re suggesting I should be fixed?” Marcia asked.

  “I don’t mean a physical doctor, I mean a therapist. An analyst. Frank has told me everything about your affair and I think the way you went after him was scarcely normal. I’m not speaking as the injured wife, I’d say the same if it was any man. In fact it probably could have been any man.”

  “Darling Janet,” Marcia said, “I love your concern. But I didn’t go after Frank. We came together because you were making him miserable. You were giving him an ulcer.”

  “His stomach has gotten ten times worse in these last months.”

  “So, I imagine, have you. From Harold’s description of your strip-tease in the laundry room I’m amazed to discover you’re so fastidious.”

  Janet turned to Harold. “You told her?”

  He shrugged and touched his left earlobe. “She told me everything. I didn’t want her to feel guilty.”

  Janet began to cry, stonily, without any concessive motions of her arms or hands.

  Marcia lit a cigarette and stared at the other woman dry-eyed. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I wouldn’t take Frank if you begged me. Tonight or any night. I want you to have him until you’ve ground him down to nothing. I’ve been keeping him afloat for half a year and frankly I’m tired to death of it. The last thing I expect is thanks from you.”

  Janet said nothing and both men pleaded for her.

  “It was the bear market gave me the ulcer,” Frank said, “not anything Jan-Jan did.”

  “She’s nice in bed,” Harold told his wife. “Belle en lit.”

  Marcia told Frank, “Fuck her, then. Take her upstairs and fuck her and don’t come creeping to me with your third-rate Shakespeare bits. I’m sick to tears of these big dumb women that don’t do a damn thing except let the world lick their lovely derrières. Divorce me,” she said to Harold. “Divorce me and marry her if she has such hot tits. Let me not to the blah blah blah admit impediments, isn’t that it, Frank? This is the end. You, me, the whole rotten works.” She stood, gauging the dismay in the faces suddenly beneath her.

  “Marcia,” Harold said. “Stop bullying Janet with your foul language.”

  “She’s not bullying me,” Janet said. “I agree with her.”

  “I’ll heat up the punch,” Frank said. “Or would anybody like a beer?”

  “Frank, you’re a prince,” Harold said. “But if we’re not going to bed I really could use the sleep. We have one of the Mills girls babysitting and she’s having midyears at B.U.”

  Frank said, “That Exeter friend of mine who’s buying the Robinson place teaches at B.U.”

  “I hear he’s handsome,” Janet said.

  Marcia, feeling her scene slide away from her, said, “I can’t stand any of you and I hate this dreary house.” She went to the front hall for her coat, which was mousy and old. Harold followed, knowing that she had brought a diaphragm in her purse and wondering if now she would use it at home. But the little-Smiths had waited too long to leave and both the Applebys, first Frank and then Janet too, had to wade through the snow and push Harold’s Porsche to get it started down the driveway. The taillights slithered back and forth insolently in escaping and Janet said, “I hope that’s the last we ever see of them. They’re little and, I know they can’t help it, they’re poisonous. Isn’t it a lovely night, Frank? I don’t think I’ve noticed the weather once since we got involved with those people.” In the spaces between the trees, dimly lit by their distant porchlight, flakes were hurrying to touch them, lightly, lightly, dying as they did. But in the hot front hall, as she bent over to tug off her galoshes, Frank patted her and she straightened, fierce, and said to him, “Don’t you dare touch me. It’s her you want. You go to her. Just go. Go.”

  Janet wished powerfully not to be frigid. All her informal education, from Disney’s Snow White to last week’s Life, had taught her to place the highest value on love. Nothing but a kiss undid the wicked apple. We move from birth to death amid a crowd of others and the name of the parade is love. However unideal it was, she dreaded being left behind. Hence she could not stop flirting, could not stop reaching out, though something distrustful within her, a bitterness like a residue from her father’s medicinal factory, had to be circumvented by each motion of her heart. Liquor aided the maneuver.

  For some weeks the Applebys and little-Smiths stayed apart. Marcia and Janet each let it be known there had been a fight. The other couples tactfully did not invite them to parties together. When Harold phoned Janet she said, “I’m sorry, Harold, I loved being with you, person to person, man and woman, you really know how to make a woman feel it. But I think doing it with couples is terribly messy, and I’ll have to hang up the next time you call. Think of the children if of nobody else.” When Frank called Marcia, she said, “I do want to be with you, Frank, just with you, anywhere. I want it worse than any man can imagine. But I’m not, simply not, going to give Janet any more ammunition. If I felt you loved me that would be one thing; but I realized that night in the lodge when you left my bed how committed you still are to her, and I must think now about protecting myself. She’d destroy me if she could. I don’t mean to be melodramatic; that’s her style, not mine. I’m not saying good-bye to you. When you and she get yourselves straightened out, I’d adore to see you again. You’re the love of my life, unfortunately.” Frank could not escape the impression that she was asking him to get a divorce. Meanwhile, our advisory capacity in Vietnam was beginning to stink and the market was frightened, frightened yet excited by the chance of expanding war. Basically business was uneasy with Kennedy; there was something unconvincing about him.

  One January Saturday all the Tarbox couples went into Boston for dinner at the Athens Olympia and to see a hockey game: Bruins vs. Red Wings. Both the little-Smiths and Applebys declined to go, under the mistaken impression that the other couple was going. This left them alone in Tarbox together, and it naturally followed that since Jonathan and Frank Jr. had Saturday ski lessons together at the hill in East Mather, under the radar station, the fathers arrange for Frank Sr. to bring them both back at four-thirty; and that, once at the little-Smiths, he accept the offer of a drink, and then another, and then at six, egged on by the giggling little-Smiths, he call Janet at home with the suggestion that she get a sitter and pick up some pizza and come on down. For much of what they took to be morality proved to be merely consciousness of the other couples watching them.

  Janet called back in ten minutes saying she couldn’t find a sitter; the hockey expedition had taken them all. Harold got on the phone and told her to bring Catharine with her and they would put her to sleep on the cot in Henrietta’s room.

  Holding the bulky baby in one arm and a steaming paper bag in the other, Janet arrived at seven-thirty. She wore a knee-length mink coat, a coat she had owned since early marriage but that, pretentious and even comical in Tarbox, usually hung idle in a mothproofed bag. Beneath the coat, she was wonderfully dressed: in a poppy-orange silk blouse and blue jeans shrunk and splotch-bleached like a teen-ager’s and white calf-length boots she pulled off to reveal bare feet. Seeing her pose thus clothed in his long living room (on the shaggy cerulean rug her toes were rosy from the cold, the insteps and sides of her feet lilac white, her heels and the joints of her toes dusted with pollen), Harold felt his entire frame relax and sweeten. Even Marcia was moved, to think her husband had once possessed such a splendid mistress. Frank stepped toward her solicitously, as if toward an invalid, or a genie that might disappear.

  From seven to eight they drank. Between eight and nine they put the children to bed. Franklin Jr., secretly afraid he would wet the sheets, refused to sleep in the same bed with scornful Jonathan. They gave him instead the cot in Henrietta’s room. This left Catharine Appleby, her cheeks as red as permeated wineskins, to go into the great high square sacred marital bed, on top of a rubber sheet. Janet lay down and crooned to the baby while Marcia put the cooled-off pizzas in the oven. Harold read Frankie Junior a Little Golden Book
entitled Minerals, while Frank watched Jonathan contemptuously settle himself under the covers with a Junior Detective Novel entitled The Unwanted Visitor. From nine to ten the grown-ups ate, from ten to eleven they talked, from eleven to midnight they danced. Harold put an old Ella record on their hi-fi and to the tunes of “These Foolish Things” and “You’re the Top” and “I’ve Been Around the World” the pair of couples rotated, Harold and Janet sliding smoothly around the edges, Frank and Marcia holding to the center of the de-rugged floor. The sliding glass doors giving on the view of the marsh doubled their images, so that a symmetrical party seemed in progress, the two linked couples approaching and withdrawing from two others like blots on a folded paper, or like visitors to a violet aquarium who, seeing no fish, move closer to the glass and discover the watery shadows of women and men.

  Marcia, almost motionless, watched Harold’s hand confidently cup Janet’s derrière as he waltzed her from corner to corner; Janet, whirling, glimpsed Marcia bending closer into Frank’s static embrace as he rumbled at her ear. His face was glossy, suffused with drink. The hand of his not on her back was tucked in between her chin and his chest and Janet knew, while Harold’s thighs slithered on her thighs, that a single finger of Frank’s was hypnotically stroking the base of Marcia’s throat, down to the tops of her breasts. It was a trick he had, one of the few. She whirled, and the hand of Frank’s not at her throat was unzipping the back of Marcia’s dowdy black dress. Then from another angle Janet saw held between Marcia’s lips like a cigarette the slitted drag of cruelty that came to her face, Janet had noticed, whenever she was very tired or very much at ease. To Marcia, Janet’s eyes staring from across the room seemed immense, so dilated they contained the room in their circle of vision as a metal lawn ball contains, distorted and compressed, an entire neighborhood. Frank’s delicate hand uncoupled her bra snaps; his single finger slipped further down her breasts. Her body slightly dissolved. She felt herself grow. “I’ve flown around the world in a plane,” Ella, purple spirit, sang, “I’ve settled rev-o-lutions in Spain.” Janet, dizzy from being whirled, felt tipped back by an insistent pressure, knoblike and zippered, amid a lizardly slithering, and thought it sad that Harold should appear a fool before these cruel two other people when she, alone with him, in an ideal seclusion, could have forgiven so well his conceited probing and insinuations of skin. As her image of herself expanded, milk and pollen and poppies, up to the parallel redwood boards of the ceiling inset with small round flush lights rheostated dim, it seemed to Janet that mothering had always been her specialty.