Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Like a rebuked child Foxy entered the living room; its human brightness seemed savage. The darkened rooms upstairs, rooms of pinned-up maps and scattered toy tracks, of silently sleeping children and docile plumbing fixtures, had been a better world. She thought of her bedroom and the moon that shared her insomnia. The blank pillow beside Ken’s head was her. Here, Ken and Terry Gallagher were gone. Frank Appleby was asleep, his feet in sandals cocked up on the Saltzes’ fake-colonial coffee table, his mouth ajar and raggedly snoring. Foxy also heard whispering in the kitchen and counted Eddie Constantine and Irene missing. The six survivors, four of them women, looked weary and forbearing and she realized she should have gone home with Ken. The game was exhausted, they were merely being polite, to make her feel loved and part of them. She must quickly guess and go.

  “What—what kind of ocean am I?” Foxy wasn’t sure if the rules forbad using associations others had used, and she wanted to be creative, sensitive, unique. On the nubbly sofa next to his wife, Piet Hanema gazed down into his glass.

  “What kind of ocean?” Carol echoed. “How odd. Choppy, I guess.”

  “Sometimes choppy,” Marcia said. “Sometimes very still and tranced. Sometimes even a big wave.”

  “Untracked,” Piet said.

  “Untracked?”

  “Ships go back and forth across you and leave no trace. You accept them all. They don’t impress you.”

  “A piece of ocean,” Ben said, grinning, “with a mermaid in it.”

  Carol said, “No direct hints.”

  Suddenly immersed in timidity, Foxy asked, “Angela? Any ocean?”

  “Not an ocean,” Angela said. “A sad little pond.”

  “Sad?”

  “Kind of scummy,” Georgene said: a startling flat insult, but everyone, especially the men, laughed, agreeing.

  “Well. What time of day?”

  “Two in the morning.”

  “Eleven a.m., with rumpled sheets.”

  “Any time. All day.”

  Again, this unkind laughter. A slow blush caked Foxy’s face. She wanted to like this person she was, in spite of them.

  Angela tried to rescue her. “I see this person around nine at night, going out, into the city lights, kind of happy and brainless.”

  “Or maybe even,” Marcia added, “at four-thirty in the afternoon, walking in a park, without a hat, smiling at the old men and the squirrels and the babies.”

  “And the bobbies,” Piet said.

  Carol sang, “We’re getting too spe-ci-fic,” and glanced toward the whispering kitchen with that abrupt head turn ballerinas use in pirouettes.

  English, Piet’s implication was. Queen Elizabeth, scummy? Virginia Woolf? The Waves. But those rumpled sheets. Perhaps an effeminate seedy man. Cecil Beaton. Alec Guinness, Piet’s saying back and forth across an ocean, an actor’s parts. But a scummy pond? How stupid she was being. Afraid to guess wrong, self-conscious, stuck. The furnishings of the Saltzes’ living room pressed in upon her emptiness: velvety dark easy chairs wearing doilies on their forearms, maple magazine racks of Scientific American and Newsweek and Look, inquisitive bridge lamps leaning over the chairs’ left shoulders, Van Gogh sunning on the walls, wedding pictures frozen on the top of an upright piano with yellow teeth, an evil-footed coat rack and speckled oblong mirror in the dark foyer, narrow stairs plunging upward perilously, children climbing each night in a fight with fear. Her mother’s Delaware second cousins had lived in such houses, built narrow to the street and lined with hydrangea bushes where a child could urinate or hide from her third cousins. The Jews have inherited the middle class—nobody else wants it. “What social class?” Foxy asked.

  “Too direct,” Carol said.

  “Lower,” Georgene said.

  “Middle lower,” Piet said. “Some airs and graces.”

  “Transcending all classes,” Angela told her. “Lower than low, higher than high.”

  “You sound,” Ben Saltz said to Angela with a pedantic mannered twinkle, “like a Gnostic devotee.”

  “What a nosty suggestion,” Marcia said.

  “Oh, I don’t understand how we know about this person, she seems so common!” Foxy cried.

  “She has hidden talents,” Piet said.

  “He or she,” Carol corrected.

  Foxy asked, “What bird am I?”

  “Of paradise,” Angela said.

  “Sparrow.”

  “Soiled dove.”

  “Soiled dove is good.”

  “I envision,” Piet said, “a rather tall bird, with a shimmer on its breast. A cockatoo?”

  “You’re a cowbird,” Georgene told Foxy.

  Piet turned on Georgene. “How unfair!”

  Georgene shrugged. “Using other people’s nests.”

  It was like, Foxy felt, being naked and not knowing it, like being dead on the autopsy table and yet overhearing the remarks, the cold ribaldry. She wanted to be with Ken, to take the wakening presence within her and flee; she had sinned. “What figure am I in the Bible? I know you’re going to say Delilah.”

  “No,” Piet said, “you’re too hard on yourself. Maybe you’re Hagar.”

  “No,” Ben said, “she’s Abishag. Abishag was the girl who they brought in to David, when he was dying, to give him some heat. Vecham leadoni hamelekh, in the Hebrew.”

  “And what happened?” Marcia asked.

  “Vehamelekh loh yada-ah. The king knew her not.”

  “Ben,” Marcia said, “I think it’s marvelous, the way you can rattle it off. Hebrew.”

  “I studied it for ten years. We were conservative.”

  “Even those little skullcaps?”

  “Yarmulkes.” His grin was leonine, thrilling, his teeth brilliant within his beard. “Summers I was sent to Camp Ramah.”

  Foxy asked, “Georgene?”

  “I don’t know the Bible. I would have said Delilah. Or Magdalen, except that seems presumptuous.”

  “I see her as one of those Jerusalemites who never got into the Bible,” Angela said. “She just couldn’t be bothered. She was flirting with a Roman soldier when the Cross went by.”

  “What a terrible woman,” Foxy said. “A scummy pond, a cowbird.”

  “You’ve been listening only to Georgene,” Piet said. “Georgene’s being moralistic tonight.”

  “You don’t like her either. Angela and Ben are the only ones who like her.” Saying this made Foxy jealous, for she did not want Ben and Angela to be linked, she vaguely wanted Ben—not the real Ben, but the echoes he evoked—to be her own Jew.

  The whispering from the kitchen had ceased.

  “This is going on too long,” Carol said, and stood up, stiff from long sitting, her throat and wrists stringy, tense. She did not quite dare go into the kitchen; she took a step toward the open doorway and sharply called, “Come help us, you two. She’s stuck.”

  “I quit,” Foxy said. “Who am I? I’m sure I’ve never heard of myself.”

  “You have, you have,” Piet urged; he wanted her to do well, he was embarrassed for her.

  “I’m some dreary little starlet and I never notice their names.”

  “At the moment,” Piet told her, “you’re a star.”

  “At the moment. Julie Andrews. Liz Taylor.”

  “No. You’re on the wrong track.”

  “Phooey,” Foxy said. “I was so proud of those. They’re both English. I’m not Dame May Whitty?”

  “You’re being silly,” Carol told her.

  “Think big,” Piet said. “Think world.”

  Ben said, “Ask some more questions.”

  They were all prompting, hissing at the balky child in the Christmas recitation. Georgene’s hard eyes were plainly pleased. Marcia said, “Ask Frank what Shakespeare play you are. I’ll wake him up.” Marcia glided to where Frank lay deflated and sunk in the corner of the fat sofa and, wifely, whispered into his ear until his lids parted and his eyes, open, stared sorely ahead. Foxy felt his eyes, in mid-dream, gaze thro
ugh her.

  “Frank, help,” she said. “What Shakespearian play am I?”

  “Troilus,” he said, and his eyes closed.

  “I’ve never read it,” Foxy said.

  “I think you’re the sonnets,” Marcia said.

  “In Russian and English en face,” Piet said, and everybody, everybody, laughed.

  “Oh, you’re all too clever,” Foxy told them. “I’m totally lost now. I was working on Princess Margaret.” Their laughter renewed itself; she said, “I hate you all. I want to go home. I want to give up.”

  “Don’t give up,” Piet said. “I know you know it. You’re trying too hard.”

  Ben asked her, “What’s the opposite of a princess?”

  “A ragpicker. Oh. A flowergirl. Eliza Doolittle. But I thought you couldn’t use fictional people.”

  “You can’t. You’re not Eliza,” Georgene told her. “What’s the opposite of a virgin?”

  Angela said, “I think Foxy should give up if she wants to.”

  “She’s too close to give up,” Carol said.

  Irene Saltz, smoothing back her hair, returned to the living room. Her black eyebrows were shapely as wingbeats. She told Carol, “Eddie said to tell you he’s gone home. He has to fly tomorrow and went out through the kitchen door.”

  “Typical,” Carol said, and brightened. Her spine as she sat on the floor became again a flower stem, slender, erect. She begged Foxy, “Try one more impression.”

  With a surrendering sigh, Foxy asked, “What flower?”

  The answers were elaborate, since they wanted her now to guess, to know.

  “A tiger lily,” Carol said, “transplanted from a village garden to a city street.”

  “Why would anyone bother to do that?” Georgene asked. “I see something coarse but showy. A poppy.”

  “But Ho Chi Minh was a poppy,” Piet told her.

  “Yes. There may be an affinity,” Georgene said, and turned on him those slightly bulging indignant eyes which, with her cultivated tan and graying hair, belonged to the caustic middle-aged woman she would become. Foxy remembered Georgene’s silence during the candlelit dinner at the Guerins, a secretive and contented silence which had seemed, that uncomfortable night, to share, to be of the same chemical nature as, Foxy’s pregnancy. Since then this woman had aged unkindly.

  Irene said, “I don’t know who it is.” When Carol whispered the name into her ear, she snapped: “Eglantine.”

  “In Japan,” Angela said, “after our bombs, wasn’t there a flower that came out of nowhere and flourished in the radioactive area? I see this person like that, as turning our modern poison into a kind of sweetness.”

  Foxy said gratefully, “Angela, that’s nice. I don’t feel so badly now about being this person.”

  “Devil’s paintbrush,” Marcia said. “Or something hothousy.”

  “You know how sometimes,” Ben Saltz said, “in weeding around the house, you come to a plant, such as Queen Anne’s lace or those spindly wild asters, that is obviously a weed but you don’t have the heart to pull because for the time being it’s very ornamental?”

  Angela said, “We’re all like that.”

  Georgene said, “Speak for yourself, dollink.”

  “A geranium that’s moved from sill to sill to catch the sun,” Piet said. “A hyacinth that’s sold in a plastic pot. Sometimes a Lady Palmerston rose. Foxy, have you ever noticed, in a greenhouse, how they put cut carnations in a bucket of ink to dye them? That’s how they make those green ones for St. Patrick’s Day. I think you’re a yellow carnation they made drink purple ink, so you’re this incredible black, and people keep touching you, thinking you must be artificial, and are amazed that you’re an actual flower. As you die, you’ll bleed back to yellow again.” His flat taut-featured face became this much-touched flower fading.

  Carol said, “There’s a carefree toughness we’re not suggesting.”

  “Let’s do books,” Marcia said, impatient. “Moll Flanders, by Ian Fleming.”

  “Phineas Finn,” Angela said, “abridged for Playboy.”

  “Little Red Riding Hood,” Ben said, “by the Marquis de Sade.”

  “Stop,” Foxy begged. “I give up. I’m very stupid. Angela. Tell me.”

  “You’re Christine Keeler,” Piet told her.

  In the silence, Foxy’s stomach growled.

  “That … tart? I am? Oh. I’m so sorry.” Without willing it, without wanting it, not knowing at what instant she passed, averting her head, into tears, Foxy began in fatigue and confusion to cry; and it was clear to all of them, except Angela and Ben, that as they had suspected she was seeing Piet.

  III.

  THIN ICE

  AS IN SLEEP we need to dream, so while waking we need to touch and talk, to be touched and talked to. Foxy?

  Yes, Piet? Their simple names had a magic, the magic of a caress that searches out the something monstrous and tender in the genitals of another.

  Do you think we’re wrong?

  Wrong? The concept seemed to swim toward her out of another cosmos of consideration. I don’t know. I don’t think so.

  How good of you!

  Not to think so?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Don’t ever think so. Make it right for me. Hey. I dreamed about you last night. I never have before. It’s funny, the people you dream about. It’s a club with the stupidest rules. I’m always dreaming about Freddy Thorne and I can’t stand him.

  What did I do in your dream? Was I erotic?

  Very chaste. It was in a department store, with a huge skylight overhead. You were a salesgirl. I stopped in front of your counter, without knowing what I wanted.

  A salesgirl, am I? She had this mode, of contentious teasing, to vent a touchy pride. And what do you suppose I am selling?

  It wasn’t that atmosphere at all. You were very prim and distant and noncommittal, the way you can be; even though I couldn’t say anything, you bent down behind the counter, out of sight, as if to find something, and I woke up with a killing erection.

  Sometimes insomniac that summer, Piet, lying in bed beside sleeping Angela, would lift his hand and study its shape stamped black on the window of light-blue panes framed by cruciform mullions. His hand seemed one lifted out of the water in the instant before the final sinking. Angela’s heedless slow breathing seemed a tide on the skin of the depths to which he could sink. He missed the squeaking, like glints of light, of the hamster’s wheel. He had been shy and circumspect with Foxy, a hired man in her house, and had not intended to desire her. But she had moved with him through the redesign of this old wreck, outdoors to indoors, detail to detail, with a flirting breezy eagerness that had oddly confounded him with the naked wood, where she touched it.

  Here there could be shelves.

  Or cabinets.

  Don’t you like open shelves better? Doors are so self-righteous. Then they stick or stop shutting.

  They make magnetic catches now that are pretty foolproof. Open shelves are a temptation. You have a cat, you’re going to have children. You need spaces you can close. I have two old finish carpenters whose cabinets can be quite handsome.

  Did they come from Finland together?

  One “n” finish. Their names are Adams and Comeau.

  And you want to make work for them.

  Piet was taken aback; this woman seemed, as she moved this way and that in her antique kitchen, in her tapping billowing maternity smock, lighter than other women, quicker in exploring him, as if he appeared before her not as himself but as another, whom she had once known well, and still directed some emotion toward. He told her guardedly, They care, I like them to do work for people who care.

  She turned and held up her arms to the view as if to an ikon and turned again and said urgently, I want open shelves, and open doorways, and everything open to the sea and the sea air. I’ve lived my whole life in clever little rooms that were always saving space, and swept from her narrow kitchen with her lemon-colored smock swinging coolly abou
t her, the high fair color of her face burning. Piet saw she was going to be trouble.

  Georgene asked him, “Why have you taken the job? You told me you had to build ranch houses.”

  They were beside the Ongs’ tennis court on Sunday morning. Piet had given up church so that Angela could accept a challenge teasingly given by Freddy Thorne. Piet missed that hour of seated mulling and standing song. Also his head was pinched in tightened icy bands of last night’s gin. The challenge, delivered loudly by Freddy at the Constantines’ last night, had been for Angela to play him at singles; but then this morning Bernadette was already returning with her three sons from early mass, so the Ongs had to be invited to play, on their own court. The court had been carved from a sloping field adjoining their newly built house. The exotic and expensive house, all flat eaves and flagstones and suspended stairways, designed by an architect John knew in Cambridge, an associate of I. M. Pei, was a puzzling reminder, for the self-important young couples of Tarbox, of John Ong’s incongruous prestige. John himself, a small bony butternut-colored man, in love with everything American from bubble chambers to filtered cigarettes, was a tennis enthusiast without aptitude; he invariably played in freshly pressed whites, complete to the wrist band, and a green eyeshade. His dainty popping strokes, accompanied by himself with a running comment of encouraging cries and disappointed coos, were rudely smashed away by his Occidental friends. Bernadette, however, was a walloper. She and Freddy, who stood comically flatfooted and served patball like a child, opposed John and Angela, whose game was graceful and well schooled and even, except at the net, where she had no sense of kill. Piet and Georgene, watching, talked. They spoke at what seemed normal pitch but took care not to be overheard.

  He answered her, “Ranch houses are so boring. They all look alike.”

  There was in Georgene a store of clubwomanly indignation. “So do teeth,” she said. “Teeth all look alike. Stocks and bonds all look alike. Every man works with things that look alike; what’s so special about you? What makes you such a playboy? You don’t even have any money.”

  Ever since childhood, being scolded had given Piet cerebral cramps; that the world was capable at any point of its immense surface of not loving him seemed a mathematical paradox it was torture to contemplate. He said, “The rest of you have money for me.”