Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “That is your style, isn’t it? You take. You take, and bow, and leave.” Her face was in profile, one-eyed and prim, like the Jack of Diamonds. Sun-glisten salted her chin.

  “It was you,” he told her, having waited until a flurry of strokes and exclamations from the game concealed his voice, “who said we must be careful. Because of Janet’s letter, remember? I needed you that day and you shut me out.”

  “That was months ago. I said to be careful, not to call it off.”

  “I don’t like being told to be careful.”

  “No, of course you don’t, you don’t have to be. Angela knows damn well what you’re up to but prefers not to see it.”

  Angela, hearing her name, turned her head. Piet called to her, “Georgene’s admiring your style.” To Georgene he said, smiling as if chatting, “And what about you and yours? Did you ever confront him with the letter?”

  “Yes. Eventually.”

  “And what did the dear man say?”

  She turned her tennis racket between her knees and studied the strings. Rough and smooth. Rough, smooth. “I forget. He wriggled out of it somehow. He said it was a purely paternal thing, that he had been trying to help Janet get out of the Applesmith mess, and she was too neurotic, she had turned on him. It was pretty plausible, from the way her note was worded.”

  “And then in relief you went to bed with him.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “And it was splendid.”

  “Not bad.”

  “You each had seven orgasms and read Henry Miller to each other between times.”

  “You see it very clearly.”

  “Working from your many vivid descriptions.”

  “Piet. Stop being a bastard. I’m tired of being a bitch. Come see me. Just for coffee.”

  “Just for coffee is as bad as for screwing if we’re caught.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Here I am.”

  “You have somebody else, that’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Dollink,” he said, “you know me better than that.”

  “I can’t believe it’s that Whitman girl. She’s just too stiff and pretty-pretty for you. She’s not your type.”

  “You’re right. It’s not her. It’s Julia little-Smith.”

  “Foxy’s too tall for you, Piet. You make yourself ridiculous.”

  “Not only am I poor, I’m a midget. How did a high-class chick like you ever get mixed up with me?”

  Georgene contemplated him coldly. Beyond her green eyes and high-bridged nose, wire mesh of the tennis court; beyond, the slope of summer grass whitening where wind touched it. Waves. Lattices. Combine and recombine. Dissolution. She whispered. “I wonder. It must have been purely chemical.” The sadness of lust swept numbly up from below Piet’s belt. They had come together. Time and again. Larches, tarpaper. Her purple turban.

  A final point, and the game was over. Angela and John Ong, winners, walked to the sidelines shining with sweat. John spoke, and Piet didn’t understand what he was saying; the vowels, all flattened toward “a,” were strung together with clattering consonants. Piet, squinting upward, felt intelligence wildly straining toward him from behind that smooth golden mask. “He says he has no wind any more,” Bernadette said for him. She was broad in the shoulders and pelvis and her face had the breadth of a smile even when she was not smiling. Piet loved the Ongs: they let him use their tennis court, they never patronized him, their presence in Tarbox was as contingent as his own. John lit a cigarette and suffered a fit of dry coughing, and Piet was surprised that the coughs were intelligible. An elemental vocabulary among all men. The cough, the laugh, the sob, the scream, the fart, the sigh. Amen.

  John said, bent double by coughing, “Oo two now,” meaning the other two couples must play. The Ongs walked together toward their house, amid their trio of petitioning boys.

  The Hanemas faced the Thornes. Georgene had put on sunglasses; the rest of her face looked chiseled. The sun was high. Sheen skated on the green composition court. Angela served; her serves, though accurate, lacked pace and sat up pleasantly fat to hit. Georgene’s return, one of her determined firm forehands, streaked toward Piet as he crouched at the net; anger had hurried her stroke slightly and the ball whacked the net at the height of his groin and fell dead on her side.

  “Fifteen love,” Angela called, and prepared, on tiptoe, to serve again.

  Piet changed courts. Opposite him Freddy Thorne wore loud plaid shorts, a fairyish pink shirt, a duck bill hat for his bald head, fallen blue socks, and rubbery basketball sneakers that seemed too large. Freddy pointed his feet outward clownishly and hoisted his racket to his shoulder like a baseball bat. Angela, having laughed and lost rhythm, double-faulted.

  “Fifteen all,” she called, and Piet faced Georgene again. A fluid treacherous game. Advantages so swiftly shifted. Love became hate. You give me my shape. Georgene, eyeless, braced for the serve, gauged it for her forehand, took back the racket, set her chin, stepped forward, and Piet, gripping his handle so hard it sweated, bit down on a shout for mercy.

  “Daddy. Am I pretty?”

  Piet’s jaw ached with a suppressed yawn. He had thought his job was done. He had watched Nancy brush her teeth and read with her for the twentieth time Where the Wild Things Are and recited with her, what they did more and more rarely, a goodnight prayer, a little litany of blessings into which Piet never knew whether or not to insert the names of his parents. He felt that they too, along with her maternal grandparents, should be remembered by the child; but their unalterable deadness disturbed her. So usually Jacobus and Marte Hanema went unblessed, and their unwatered ghosts in Heaven further withered. “Yes, Nancy, you are very pretty. When you grow up you will be as pretty as Mommy.”

  “Am I pretty now?”

  “Aren’t you being a silly? You are very pretty now.”

  “Are other girls pretty?”

  “What other girls?”

  “Martha and Julia.” Topless little females shrieking in the icy water of Tarbox Bay. Round limbs sugared with sand. Squatting in sunset glaze to dam the tide.

  Piet asked her, “What do you think?”

  “They’re ugly.”

  “They’re pretty in their way and you’re pretty in your way. Martha is pretty in a Thorne way and Julia is pretty in what way?”

  “Smith way.”

  “Right. And Catharine in what way?”

  “In an Applebay.”

  “In an Appleby way. And when Mrs. Whitman has her baby it will be pretty in a Whitman way.” It was wrong to use the innocent ears of a child, but it gave Piet pleasure to say Foxy’s name, to hold it in his mouth and feel his body suffused with remembrance of her. Angela, sensitive beyond her conscious understanding, showed irritation with his talk, so carefully casual, of the Whitmans, and the name had become subliminally forbidden in the house.

  Nancy understood the game now. Her round face gleeful in the pillow, she said, “And when Jackie Kenneny has her baby it will be pretty in a Kenneny way.”

  “Right. Now go to sleep, pretty Nancy, or you will be grumpy and lumpy in the morning.”

  But there was in this child, more than in her blunt Dutch-blooded sister Ruth, that thing female which does not let go. “But am I the prettiest?”

  “Baby, we just said, everybody is pretty in her own way and nobody wants them to change because then everybody would be alike. Like turnips.” He had left a martini-on-the-rocks beside his chair downstairs and the ice would be melting, spinning water into the jewel-clear gin.

  Nancy’s face was distorted by the effort not to cry. “But I’ll die,” she explained.

  He groped for her thought. “You think if you’re the prettiest God won’t let you die?”

  She wordlessly nodded. Her thumb had found its way to her mouth and her eyes darkened as if she were sucking from it ink.

  “But pretty people must die too,” Piet told her. “It wouldn’t be fair to let only ugly ones die. And nobody loo
ks ugly to people who love them.”

  “Like mommies and daddies,” she said, removing and replacing her thumb in an instant.

  “Right.”

  “And boy friends and girl friends.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I know your girl friend, Daddy.”

  “You do! Who?”

  “Mommy.”

  Piet laughed. “And who’s Mommy’s boy friend?” Symmetry.

  The child said, “Martha’s daddy.”

  “That awful man?”

  “He’s funny,” Nancy explained. “He says poo.”

  “You mean if I said poo I’d be funny too?”

  She laughed: the noise was pulled bubbling from deep near the door to the kingdom of sleep. “You said poo,” she said. “Shame on Daddy.”

  A silence fell between them. The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached to the height of Nancy’s window and, heartshaped, brushed her screen. Fear tapped, scraped. Piet did not dare leave. “Are you really worried about dying, baby?”

  Solemnly Nancy nodded. “Mommy says I’ll get to be an old, old lady, and then die.”

  “Isn’t that nice? When you’re a very old lady you can sit in your rocking chair and tell all your great-great-grandchildren how once you had a daddy who said poo.”

  The desired laugh rose toward the surface of the child’s shadowed face, and without a sound submerged. She was gazing into the horror he had conjured up. “I don’t want to be an old lady! I don’t want to be big!”

  “But already you’re bigger than you were. Once you were no bigger than my two hands. You don’t want to be that small again. You couldn’t talk or walk or anything.”

  “I do too, Daddy. Go away, send Mommy.”

  “Nancy, listen. You won’t die. That little thing inside you that says ‘Nancy’ won’t ever ever die. God never lets anybody die; he lifts them up and takes them into Heaven. That old thing they put in the ground isn’t you at all.”

  “I want Mommy!”

  Piet, sickened, saw that Angela, in her simplicity, had made this doctrine of hope, the only hope, strange and frightful to the child. “Mommy’s doing the dishes downstairs.”

  “I want her.”

  “She’ll come and give you a kiss when you’re fast asleep.”

  “I want her now.”

  “And you don’t want Daddy?”

  “No.”

  Sometimes in these warm pale nights, as the air cooled and the cars on the road beyond the lilac hedge swished toward Nun’s Bay trailing a phosphorescence of radio music, Angela would turn to Piet while he lay willing to yield himself to fatigue. It seemed crucial that he make no motion of desire toward her; then, speaking no word, as if a visitant from space had usurped his wife’s body, Angela would press herself against him and with curved fingers curiously trace his sides and spine. Unspeaking also, lest the spell break, he would dare mirror her caress, discovering her nightgown, usually an opaque and entangling obstacle, transparent, rotten, sliding and falling from her flesh like deteriorated burial cloth from a body resurrected in its strength. She showed behind and between her legs a wealth of listening curves and damps. She tugged her gown to her throat and the bones of her fingers confided a glimmering breast to his mouth, shaped by an ah of apprehension; when with insistent symmetry she rolled onto her back to have him use the other, his hand discovered her mons Veneris swollen high, her whole fair floating flesh dilated outward toward a deity, an anyoneness, it was Piet’s fortune to have localized, to have seized captive in his own dark form. The woman’s beauty caressed the skin of his eyes; his shaggy head sank toward the ancient alleyway where, foul proud queen, she frothed most. His tongue searched her sour labia until it found them sweet. She pulled his hair, Come up. “Come inside me?” He realized, amazed, he who had entered Foxy Whitman the afternoon before, that there was no cunt like Angela’s, none so liquorish and replete. He lost himself to the hilt unresisted. The keenness of her chemistry made him whimper. Always the problem with their sex had been that he found her too rich to manipulate. She touched his matted chest, wait, and touched her own self, and, mixed with her fluttering fingers, coming like a comet’s dribble, he waited until her hand flew to his buttocks and, urging him to kill her, she gasped and absolved herself from tension.

  He said, “My dear wife. What a nice surprise.”

  She shrugged, flat on her back on the sweated sheet, her bare shoulders polished by starlight. “I get hot too. Just like your other women.”

  “I have no other women.” He stroked and smoothed the outflowing corona of her hair. “Your cunt is heavenly.”

  Angela motioned him off and rolled away to sleep; it was their custom since the start of their marriage to sleep nude after making love. “I’m sure,” she said, “we’re all alike down there.”

  “That’s not true,” Piet told her, “not true at all.” She ignored his confession.

  He had been shy and circumspect with Foxy and had not wanted to desire her. He would spend most of each day on Indian Hill with the three ranch houses, which rose in quick frames from the concrete foundations: an alphabet of two-by-fours, N and T and M and H, interlocked footings and girders and joists and flooring and studs and plates and sills. Piet, hammer in hand, liked to feel the bite taken into gravity. The upright weight-bearing was a thing his eye would see, and a house never looked as pretty again to him as it did in the framing, before bastard materials and bastard crafts eclipsed honest carpentry, and work was replaced by delays and finagling with subcontractors—electricians like weasels, grubby plumbers, obdurate motionless masons.

  So, many days, it was not until three or four o’clock that he rattled down the beach road to the Robinson place. The worst problem, the lack of a basement, had been solved first. The servants’ wing, four skimpy dormered bedrooms and a defunct kitchenette, had been torn down, enabling a backhoe to dig a hole ten feet deep to the edge of the kitchen, in two days. Four college boys with hand shovels had taken a week to dig under the length of the kitchen and hallway area and break through to the existing furnace hole beneath the living room. For a few days, while concrete was poured and spread (the operation coincided with an early-June heat wave; the scene in the cave beneath the house, boys stripped to the waist and ankle-deep in sludge, was infernal), half of Foxy’s home rested on a few cedar posts and Lally columns footed on cinder block. Then, above the basement where the wing had been, Piet built a modified annex of one story, two rooms one of which could be a nursery and one a playroom, with a screened-in sunporch overlooking the marsh, connected to the kitchen by a passageway where gardening tools could be kept. Before June’s end Foxy had ordered six rose bushes from Vos & Sons’ greenhouses, and had had them set along the butt end of the new wing, and was trying with Bovung and peat moss to nurse them to health in a clayey earth still littered with splinters and scarred by tractor-tire tracks.

  In five July days, a roofer’s crew stripped the lumpy leaky accumulation of shingles and hammered down a flat snug roof.

  The old sagging porch was torn away. Light flooded the living room, whose walls, as the hot-air ducts from the new furnace were installed, were covered with wire lath and plastered by an old Czech from Lacetown, with his crippled nephew: the last plasterers south of Mather. These major renovations, substantially completed by August, cost Ken Whitman eleven thousand dollars, of which only twenty-eight hundred came to Piet’s firm, and only a few hundred adhered as profit. The rest went for material, for rough labor, for the skilled labor of Adams and Comeau, to the heating contractor, the concrete supplier, the plumbing subcontractor. Kitchen improvement—new appliances, additional plumbing, cabinets, linoleum—came to another three thousand, and Piet, pitying Whitman (who never asked for pity, who comprehended the necessities and expenses with a series of remote nods, as the house at each transformation became less his and more Foxy’s), held his own charges close to cost. As everyone, especially Gallagher, had foreseen, the job was a loser.

 
But it gave Piet pleasure to see Foxy, pregnant, reading a letter beside a wall of virgin plaster, her shadow subtly golden. And he wanted her to be pleased by his work. Each change he wrought established more firmly an essential propriety. At night, and in the long daytime hours when he was not yet with her, he envisioned her as protected and claimed by sentinels he had posted: steel columns standing slim and strong in the basement, plaster surfaces of a staring blankness, alert doors cleverly planed to hang lightly in old frames slumped from plumb, a resecured skylight, now of double thickness and freshly flashed, above her sleeping head. He saw her as always sleeping when he was not there, her long body latent, ripening in unconsciousness. Sometimes, when he came in midafternoon, she would be having a nap. The sea sparkled dark in the twisting channels. Lacetown lighthouse trembled in the distance and heat. High summer’s hay smell lay thick upon the slope, full of goldenrod and field mice, down to the marsh. Beside the doorway there were lilac stumps. No workmen’s cars were parked in the driveway, only her secondhand Plymouth station wagon, hymnal blue.

  He lifted the aluminum gate latch. He examined the unfinished framing of the annex, noted two misnailed and split pieces of cross-bridging between joists, walked around the front of the house where the porch had been and an unconcluded rubble of mud and hardened concrete splotches and dusty hundredweight paper bags and scraps of polyethylene film and insulation wool now was, and, continuing, tapped on the side door, a door that seemed to press outward with the silence it contained. Within, something made the house slightly tremble. It was Cotton, the Whitmans’ heavy-footed caramel tom. Piet entered, and the cat, bowing and stretching and purring in anticipation of being picked up, greeted him amid the holy odor of shavings.

  Foxy was above him. With a stealth meant to wake her slowly, Piet moved through the unfinished rooms, testing joints with his pocket knife, opening and shutting cabinet doors that closed with a delicate magnetic suck. Above him, a footstep heavier than a cat’s sounded. Furiously Piet focused on the details of the copper plumbing installed beneath the old slate sink, suspended in mid-connection, where the plumbers had left it, open like a cry. She was beside him, wearing a loosely tied bathrobe over a slip, her face blurred by sleep, her blond hair moist on the pillowed side of her head. They said they’d be back.