Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  I was trying to figure out why they had quit.

  They explained it to me. Something about a male threader and a coupling.

  Plumbers are the banes of this business. Plumbers and masons.

  They’re a vanishing breed?

  Even vanishing they do slowly. You and Ken must be tired to death of living in the middle of a mess.

  Oh, Ken’s never here in the day and it’s fun for me, to have men bringing me presents all day long. Adams and Comeau and I sit around the coffee table talking about the good old days in Tarbox.

  What good old days?

  Apparently it’s always been a salty town. Look, would you like something to drink? I’ve woken up with a terrible thirst, I could make lemonade. That only needs cold water.

  I ought to get back to the office and give the plumbers a blast.

  They promised they’d be back so I’d have hot water. Do you mind if it’s pink?

  Pink lemonade? I prefer it. My mother used to make it. With strawberries.

  In the good old days, Adams and Comeau tell me, the trolley car ran along Divinity Street and all the drunks would pile out because this was the only un-dry town between Boston and Plymouth. Even in the middle of a blizzard this would happen.

  Funny about the trolley cars. How they came and went.

  They used to make me sick. That awful smell, and the motorman’s cigars.

  Speaking of messes, what about where your porch was? Do you see that as lawn, or a patio, or what?

  I’d love a grape arbor. Why is that funny?

  You’d lose all the light you’ve gained. You’d lose your view from those windows.

  The view bores me. The view is Ken’s thing. He’s always looking outward. Let me tell you about grape arbors.

  Tell me.

  When I was growing up one summer, the summer before Pearl Harbor, my parents wanted to get out of Bethesda and for a month we rented a brick house in Virginia with an enormous grape arbor over bricks where the ants made little hills. I must have been, what? ’41, seven. Forgive me, I’m not usually so talkative.

  I know.

  I remember the little offshoots of the vines had letters in them, formed letters, you know. She made an A with her fingers. I tried to make a complete collection. From A to Z.

  How far did you get?

  I think to D. I never could find a perfect E. You’d think in all those vines there would have been one.

  You should have skipped to F.

  I was superstitious and I thought I couldn’t. I inhibited myself all the time.

  Piet grimaced and considered. The lemonade needed sugar. It seems to be going out. Inhibition. In a way, I miss it.

  What a sad thing to say. Why? I don’t miss it at all. Ever since I got pregnant I’ve become a real slob. Look at me, in a bathrobe. I love it. Her lips, in her clear pink complexion, looked whitish, as if rubbed with a chapstick. Shall I tell you a secret?

  Better not. Tell me, what shade of white do you want your living-room woodwork? Flat white, glossy, ivory, or eggshell?

  My secret is really so innocent. For years I wanted to be pregnant, but also I was afraid of it. Not just losing my figure, which was too skinny to care about anyway, but my body being somehow an embarrassment to other people. For months I didn’t tell anybody except Bea Guerin.

  Who told everybody else.

  Yes, and I’m glad. Because it turns out not to matter. People just don’t care. I was so conceited to think that people would care. In fact they like you a little better if you look beat-up. If you look used.

  You don’t look very used to me.

  Or you to me.

  Do men get used? They just use.

  Oh, you’re so wrong. We use you all the time. It’s all we know how to do. But your saying that fits with your missing inhibition. You’re very Puritan. You’re quite hard on yourself. At first I thought you fell down stairs and did acrobatics to show off. But really you do it to hurt yourself. In the hope that you will. Now why are you laughing?

  Because you’re so clever.

  I’m not. Tell me about your childhood. Mine was dreary. My parents finally got a divorce. I was amazed.

  We had a greenhouse. My parents had Dutch accents I’ve worked quite hard not to inherit. They were both killed years ago in an automobile accident.

  Yes, of course. Freddy Thorne calls you our orphan.

  How much do you see of Freddy Thorne?

  No more than I must. He comes up to me at parties.

  He comes up to everybody at parties.

  I know that. You don’t have to tell me.

  Sorry. I don’t mean to tell you anything. I’m sure you know quite enough. I just want to get this job done for you so you and your baby can be comfortable this winter.

  Her lips, stunned a moment, froze, bloodless, measuring a space of air like calipers. She said, It’s not even July.

  Time flies, he said. It was not even July, and he had never touched her, except in the conventions of greeting and while dancing. In dancing, though at least his height, she had proved submissive to his lead, her arm weightless on his back, her hard belly softly bumping. He felt her now expectant, sitting composed in a careless bathrobe on a kitchen chair, aggressive even, unattractive, so full of the gassy waitingness and pallor of pregnancy.

  He said casually, Good lemonade, in the same moment as she sharply asked, Why do you go to church?

  Well, why do you?

  I asked first.

  The usual reasons. I’m a coward. I’m a conservative. Republican, religious. My parents’ ghosts are there, and my older girl sings in the choir. She’s so brave.

  I’m sorry you’re a Republican. My parents worshipped Roosevelt.

  Mine were offended because he was Dutch, they didn’t think the Dutch had any business trying to run the country. I think they thought power was sin. I don’t have any serious opinions. No, I do have one. I think America now is like an unloved child smothered in candy. Like a middle-aged wife whose husband brings home a present after every trip because he’s been unfaithful to her. When they were newly married he never had to give presents.

  Who is this husband?

  God. Obviously. God doesn’t love us any more. He loves Russia. He loves Uganda. We’re fat and full of pimples and always whining for more candy. We’ve fallen from grace.

  You think a lot about love, don’t you?

  More than other people?

  I think so.

  Actually, I never think about love. I’ve left that to your friend Freddy Thorne.

  Would you like to kiss me?

  Very much, yes.

  Why don’t you?

  It doesn’t seem right. I don’t have the nerve. You’re carrying another man’s child.

  Foxy impatiently stood, exclaiming, Ken’s frightened of my baby. I frighten him. I frighten you. Piet had risen from his chair and she stood beside him, asking in a voice as small as the distance between them, Aren’t we in our house? Aren’t you building this house for me?

  Before kissing her, yet after all alternatives had been closed to him, Piet saw her face to be perfectly steady and clean of feeling, like a candleflame motionless in a dying of wind, or a road straight without strategies, like the roads of his native state, or the canals of Holland, and his hands on her body beneath the loose robe found this same quality, a texture almost wooden yet alive and already his; so quickly familiar did her body feel that there was no question, no necessity, of his taking her that afternoon—as a husband and wife, embracing in the kitchen, will back off because they will soon have an entire night, when the children are asleep, and no mailman can knock.

  Outdoors again, amid the tracked clay, the splinters, the stacked bundles of raw shingles, the lilac stumps, Piet remembered how her hair, made more golden by the Tarbox sun, had been matted, a few damp strands, to her temple. She had averted her blushing face from his kiss as if to breathe, exhaling a sigh and gazing past his shoulder at a far corner of the unfinished
room. Her lips, visually thin, had felt wide and warm and slippery; the memory, outdoors, as if chemically transformed by contact with oxygen, drugged Piet with a penetrating dullness.

  His life with Angela suffered under a languor, a numbness that Georgene had never imposed. His blood brooded on Foxy; he dwelled endlessly upon the bits of her revealed to him—her delicate pubic fleece, her high-pitched coital cries, the prolonged and tender and unhoped-for meditations of her mouth upon his phallus. He became an obsessed inward housekeeper, a secret gardener.

  I didn’t know you’d be blond here too.

  What would I be? You’re red.

  But you’re so delicate. Transparent. Like the fuzz on a rose.

  She laughed. Well I’ve learned to live with it, and so must you.

  He lived dimly, groping, between those brilliant glimpses when they quickly slipped each other from their clothes and she lay down beside him, her stretched belly shining, and like a lens he opened, and like a blinded skier lost himself on the slopes of her presence. July was her fifth month; her condition forced upon their intercourse homely accommodations. Since bending was awkward, she would slide down in the bed to kiss him. Do you really like that?

  Love it.

  Is there a taste?

  A good taste. Salty and strong. A bit of something bitter, like lemon.

  I’m afraid of abusing you.

  Don’t be. Do.

  She never came. However gladly she greeted him, and with however much skill he turned her body on the lathe of the light, shaping her with his hands and tongue, finally they skidded separate ways. Come in me.

  Are you ready?

  I want you in me.

  He felt her inner music stall. Her cunt was young, snug. A kind of exasperation swept him forward toward the edge, and as she whimpered he ejaculated, and sighing she receded. But in her forgiving him and his forgiving her, in her blaming herself and his disagreeing, in their accepting the blame together, their love had exercise and grew larger. Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above him. She apologized, I’m sorry. I can’t quite forget that it’s you.

  Who should I be?

  Nobody. Just a man. I think of your personality and it throws me off the track.

  Does this happen with Ken?

  No. Sometimes I come first. We’ve known each other so long we’re rather detached, and just use each other. Anyway, as I guess I’ve told you, we don’t make much love since I’ve gotten big.

  That seems strange. You’re lovely this way. Your skin is glossy, even your shape seems right. I can’t imagine making love to you with a flat tummy. It wouldn’t be you. You’d lack grandeur.

  Ken is strange. He wants sex to stay in a compartment. He married me, and that solved the problem, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted me to have a baby. We had enough money, it was just his selfishness. I was never his wife, I was his once-a-week whore for all those years.

  I’m jealous.

  Don’t be. Piet, don’t feel bad about my not coming. I feel love too much with you, is the problem.

  You’re kind, but I honestly fear I’m second-rate at this. Like my skiing and my golf. I began too late.

  Horrible man. I hate you when you fish for compliments. As all the ladies must tell you, you’re incredible. You’re incredibly affectionate.

  Any man you took to bed with all his clothes off would be affectionate.

  No. At least, I’ve only known three men, and the other two weren’t especially.

  Not the Jew? She had told him about the Jew.

  He laughed at me. Sometimes he hurt me. But then I had been a virgin and probably he couldn’t help hurting me. Probably he wouldn’t hurt me now.

  Do you want him now?

  I have him now. Is that awful to say? I have him in you, and you besides. It’s better. He was perverse, Piet.

  But you’re perverse too.

  Her brown eyes childishly widened. How? You mean—her fingertips touched her lips, then his penis—that? But why is that perverse? Don’t you like it?

  I love it. It binds us so close, though, I’m frightened.

  Are you? I’m glad. I was afraid only I was. Piet. What will the world do to us?

  Is it God or the world you care about?

  You think of them as different? I think of them as the same.

  Maybe that’s what I mean when I say you’re perverse. Her face so close to his seemed a paradigm, a pattern of all the female faces that had ever been close to him. Her blank brow, her breathing might have belonged to Angela; then Foxy turned her head on the pillow so her pink face took the light from above, the cold blue light of the sky, and was clearly not Angela, was the Whitman woman, the young adulteress.

  She was frightened, brazen, timid, wanton, appalled by herself, unrepentant. Adultery lit her from within, like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent. That she had courted him; that she was simultaneously proud and careless of her pregnancy; that she would sleep with him; that her father had been an inflexible family-proud minor navy deskman; that her mother had married a laundromat entrepreneur; that by both birth and marriage she was above him in the social scale; that she would take his blood-stuffed prick into the floral surfaces of her mouth; that there had been a Jew she had refound in him; that her mind in the midst of love’s throes could be as dry and straight-seeking as a man’s; that her fabric was delicate and fragile and burned with another life; that she was his slave; that he was her hired man; that she was frightened—compared to these shifting and luminous transparencies, Angela was a lump, a barrier, a boarded door. Her ignorance of the affair, though all the other couples guessed it, was the core of her maddening opacity. She did not share what had become the central issue of their lives. She was maimed, mute; and in the eggshell-painted rooms of their graceful colonial house she blundered and rasped against Piet’s taut nerves. He was so full of Foxy, so pregnant with her body and body scents and her cries and remorses and retreats and fragrant returnings, so full of their love, that his mind felt like thin ice. He begged Angela to guess, and her refusal seemed willful, and his gratitude to her for permitting herself to be deceived turned, as his secret churned in sealed darkness, to a rage that would burst forth irrationally. “Wake up!”

  She had been sitting reading a book in lamplight, and blinked. Her eyes, lifted from the bright page, could not see him. “I am awake.”

  “You’re not. You’re drifting through life in a trance. Don’t you feel what’s happening to us?”

  “I feel you getting meaner every day.”

  Bruised moths bumped and clung to the lampshade above her shoulder. “I’m upset,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “About everything. About that pinchy-mouthed gouger Gallagher. About the crappy ranch houses on the hill. About Jazinski: he thinks I’m a drunk. About the Whitman job. I’m losing my shirt for the bastard and he isn’t even grateful.”

  “I thought you enjoyed it, tripping down there every day to visit the little princess.”

  He laughed gratefully. “Is that what you think of her?”

  “I think she’s young. I also think she’s arrogant. I think she’ll be mellowed eventually, I think having a baby will do her good. I don’t think she needs your paternal attentions especially.”

  “Why do you think my attentions are paternal?”

  “Whatever they are. Can I go back to my book? I don’t find Foxy Whitman or this conversation that interesting.”

  “God, you are smug. You are so fantastically above it all you stink.”

  “Listen, I promise I’ll make love to you tonight, just let me get to the end of this chapter.”

  “Finish the fucking book for all I care. Stuff it. Give yourself a real literary thrill.”

  She heard the appeal in his violence and tried to lift her head, but the hooked print h
eld her gaze. Absent-mindedly she asked, “Can’t you relax ten minutes? I have five more pages.”

  He jumped to his feet, strode two steps to the mirror above the telephone, strode back. “I need to go out. I need a party. I wonder what the Applesmiths are doing. Or the Saltines.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock. Please hush.”

  “I’m dying. I’m a thirty-four-year-old fly-by-night contractor. I have no sons, my wife snubs me, my employees despise me, my friends are all my wife’s friends, I’m an orphan, a pariah.”

  “You’re a caged animal.”

  “Yes.” He took an aggressive stance, presenting himself before her with fists on hips, a bouncy close-set red-haired man whose rolled-up shirtsleeves revealed forearms dipped in freckles. “But Angel, who made the cage, huh? Who? Who?”

  He meant her to fling him open and discover his secret, to be awed and enchanted by it, to decipher and nurture with him its intricate life. But, enclosed in the alternative world—a world exotic yet strict, mixing a lover’s shamelessness and a father’s compassion—arising from her lap, she did not respond. The book was an old college text, little appreciated at the time, stained by girlish annotations and translucent blots of the oil she and her roommates had used under their sunlamp, the Modern Library edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.

  Janet Appleby had confessed to Angela on the beach that she was seeing a psychiatrist. Angela explained it to Piet: “It’s just twice a week, for therapy, as opposed to real analysis. Frank’s all for it, though it was her idea. She described coming home about three a.m. from the little-Smiths after a terrible scene with Marcia and suddenly knowing that she needed help, help from somebody who isn’t a friend or a lover or has any reason to care about her at all. She’s only been a few times but already she’s convinced she doesn’t know why she does what she does. She never loved Harold, so why did she go to bed with him? She told herself it was because she felt sorry for him but he didn’t feel sorry for himself especially so who was she kidding? And why now, even though they’ve all stopped sleeping with each other, or at least she and Harold have, can’t they stay away from the other couple every weekend? She says now they’ve somehow acquired the Thornes, too, especially Freddy—”